The worst of both worlds: the war on opioid abuse becomes the war on pain patients

The New Neo Posted on by

The opioid abuse (and overdose) epidemic isn’t fueled by chronic pain patients. Most of the abuse problem involves the use of illicit drugs by addicts, and then to a lesser extent the selling of drugs left over from short-term prescriptions to deal with acute pain. There are also patients who fake pain in order to obtain drugs.

Many people who truly suffer from chronic pain of a serious type often need to be on opiates in order to have any quality of life at all.

The government is trying to deal with and control opioid abuse, but somewhere along the line the message got garbled and some chronic pain patients have been the ones to suffer, while the abuse statistics continue to climb in the rest of the population.

It’s the worst of both worlds:

Political leaders and government officials often failed to note the bulk — at least 60 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — of the overdose epidemic was caused by illicit drugs, not prescription painkillers.

And when officials did address the portion of deaths due to prescriptions, advocates of safe opioid use argue, they often lumped together pain patients and people with addiction who illegally obtained someone else’s prescribed opioids. That made for a perfect storm, which formed the basis for a slew of hardline state and federal policies, including a Trump administration vow to slash prescriptions by 30 percent over the next three years.

Either in response to the CDC guidelines or as proactive measure to deal with the opioid crisis on their own, at least 33 states have enacted some type of legislation related to prescription limits, according to the National Conference of State Legislators. Health care providers and pain patients who have Medicare prescription plans are bracing for January, when the federal insurance program will give its insurers and pharmacists the authority to reject prescriptions that deviate from CDC recommended dosage.

“The CDC guidelines were geared to primary care doctors, but they have been hijacked and weaponized as an excuse for draconian legislation,” said Michael Schatman, a clinical psychologist and director of research and development at Boston Pain Care, a multi-disciplinary pain clinic, and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Pain Research. “Illicit opioids, not prescription opioids, are driving overdose deaths.”

The article describes some chronic pain patients who are committing suicide as a result of doctors cutting back even now in anticipation of later cutbacks. It’s a sad and terrible situation.

I was a chronic pain patient for close to 13 years, beginning in my early 40s. For much of that time my pain was fairly severe and sometimes very severe, and it was neuropathic pain, a type that’s particularly difficult to control even with narcotics (I’ve written about it here and here). I wouldn’t wish that degree of chronic pain on a dog or my worst enemy.

I never took narcotics, but that was because I was literally terrified of them, plus I was told that opioids wouldn’t even help with my condition. This was a long time ago, and perhaps the medical point of view on that has changed in the intervening years, but I remember one of the first doctors who treated me saying to me, “Nothing will touch this pain, not even morphine.” That made me understand why people with chronic pain sometimes kill themselves.

But it’s been my impression that a lot of people who’ve never faced chronic pain do not understand the phenomenon at all. They imagine a type of pain that’s not as severe as chronic pain can be. But perhaps more importantly, they imagine a type of pain that’s time-limited and that improves on a daily or weekly basis. The thing that distinguishes chronic pain is the fact that it does not improve and the patient sees no end in sight, which saps the two basic ingredients patients require to carry on: energy and hope.

What states have passed these laws limiting chronic pain patients to the CDC prescribing guidelines? How strict are these laws? How many insurance companies will deny drug coverage if a patient exceeds those guidelines? This could be a real disaster for people who are already suffering more than enough.

Claas Relotius: the journalist as con man and “storyteller”

The New Neo Posted on by

The con goes deep with this one:

An award-winning German journalist who was recently found to have fabricated parts of stories may be facing more trouble.

Claas Relotius, 33, is facing new accusations that he solicited donations for orphans of the war in Syria, donations that he ultimately pocketed, reported CBS.

The money he collected was for children he’d profiled, but at least one of them was apparently a figment of his creative imagination. It’s not clear how much money he raised, and it’s not certain he took the money although it’s suspected and will be further investigated. He also wrote other stories about the imaginary orphan and his attempts to bring the children to Germany for adoption, and these tales were also untrue.

Nothing about this surprises me, because a con man is a con man. It’s also unsurprising that there are so many liars in journalism; Relotius is hardly alone in this. After all, a “higher truth” is superior to the mere factual truth, especially when you’re intent on saving the world.

Jay Rosen, a more old-fashioned journalist, doesn’t seem to get it:

I think it’s pretty obvious how it came to be so accepted that journalists should be telling “stories” and that these stories have a moral and a political aim. It coincides with the greater use of the word “journalists” to describe what used to be known as “reporters.” It also (as I wrote Monday) has to do with the relative youth of today’s journalists and their lack of apprenticeship in the salt mines of straight reporting of mundane stories. Instead, they tend to be the product of journalism schools.

And then, of course, there’s the fact that the vast majority of today’s journalists are liberals or leftists. That’s the atmosphere in which young journalists are steeped. There’s also the influence of post-modernism and its teaching that truth is relative and that the narrative is all.

The phenomenon of “stories” taking the place of truth is multiply-determined.

Merry Christmas to all! (another golden oldie from the blog archives)

The New Neo Posted on by

holiday-cheer-christmas-tree.gif

On Christmas Day—blog?
I’d rather have grog,
Or maybe eggnog,
Then go walk the dog.
Or watch a Yule Log,
And eat like a hog,
Then go for a jog.
Blogging’s a bog.
My mind’s in a fog,
Or maybe agog
From much dialogue.
I’ll return to the slog
Tomorrow, and blog.

[NOTE: On the words “the dog,” that’s a picture of the dog we had when my son was little.]

And all through the house…

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post. Merry Night-Before-Christmas and Merry Christmas!]

…a creature was stirring.

Last night was Christmas Eve. I was expecting a visit from my son, who was flying in as a rare treat. I had tidied up, and was putting on the finishing touches while waiting for him to arrive from the airport. As I was poised at the top of the staircase on my way down from the second floor, I saw a movement on one of the lower steps.

A dark shape. A small dark shape—very still, and then in motion again. With tiny little ears, and a long tail.

A mouse. Very much stirring.

I let out a shriek, like in the cartoons. Yes, I know that mice do not hurt people. But yes, they give me the willies when they startle me and scurry around—like—mice. The few times when this has happened before, they’ve always sought the little opening from whence they’d come and scurried away, hardly ever to be seen again.

But this mouse seemed to be lost and disoriented. Maybe because it was almost midnight on Christmas Eve, and no creature was supposed to be stirring. In the midst of my unreasonable fear was a sort of amusement. What was it doing here, this evening of all evenings?

The mouse was still on the staircase landing, and although I assumed that somehow it had managed to climb the three stairs to where it was, it appeared to be perplexed about how to get up or down from there. I watched it from what I considered a safe distance at the top of the stairs, and I could see it moving back and forth, back and forth, first towards the wall and then towards the edge of the step, but it could not seem to get the courage to make a break for it.

What did I do? I called my son and asked how far away he was. Forty-five minutes. And then I settled in, not for a long winter’s nap but for a long viewing from a good vantage point to monitor the mouse’s position till he arrived. For the moment, the mouse seemed quite well-contained on the stairs, but I didn’t trust that—and sure enough, slowly but surely, with many fits and starts, it managed to get back down those three stairs to the ground floor.

Now, it turns out that watching a mouse is actually sort of interesting. This one darted from stair-bottom to hall to bathroom to bedroom and back again (my place is built upside-down, with the bedroom and bathroom downstairs and living room and kitchen upstairs). I had a special horror of the mouse being in the bedroom—so after its one foray into the bedroom for five minutes and then out again, I slammed the bedroom door shut and placed a thick towel to block the crack at the bottom. The towel seemed to act as an effective barrier, like a small mountain range, and the mouse didn’t venture into that room again.

But back and forth it went—along the wall in the hall, into the bathroom, up a few stairs and then back down them again. I noticed that it seemed to get smarter and smarter; each time it climbed the stairs it was better at it, until it seemed as though it had been doing this all its little life.

And then by trial and error it found the molding along the side of the stairs, which then acted as a sort of ramp by which the mouse could easily climb all the way to the top. This filled me with dread. I was conceding the downstairs for now, but the upstairs was my territory! But what to do? That molding-ramp made it so easy; the mouse was coming up in a determined sort of way, till I could look into its beady little eyes and it could look into mine. I let out another involuntary yelp, stamping my feet and clapping my hands, trying to make enough noise to frighten it off.

I looked and sounded completely and utterly ridiculous.

And yet it was effective; the little thing stopped in its tracks, then turned and went back downstairs again, to my great relief. Then a few minutes later it came up the ramp-molding again, and I re-enacted the same stupid pantomime I had before. The mouse kept coming—up up up, light and fleet of foot, relentless and implacable. I actually thought of throwing something at it to head it off—perhaps my shoe, like Clara in “The Nutcracker.” But oh, for a platoon of tin soldiers like hers! (I’ve cued up this video to start at the right spot, although it’s mistitled because these are not meant to be rats, they’re mice):

But alas, we were alone, just the two of us, mousie and me. And I didn’t really want to hurt it, which I thought might happen if I threw my shoe, so I reached for a pillow—and at that moment I heard the key turn in the lock and my son walked in.

I’m always happy to see him, but perhaps never so happy as this time, as I stood at the top of the stairs in a semi-crouch, clutching a small pillow and making silly-yet-hopefully-scary noises at a mouse that was climbing a molding-ramp on the edge of the staircase.

My son managed to keep his disdain under control long enough to catch the mouse in a plastic container and escort it outside to be released, but not before we took a photo though the plastic. Yes, the mouse is cute. But no, I don’t want him in my house, not on Christmas Eve or any other time.

Mouse 2

Mouse 1

The youthful fabulists: Stephen Glass vs. Claas Relotius

The New Neo Posted on by

Perhaps you’ve heard of German journalist Claas Relotius. He wrote for the German periodical Der Spiegel and and had won “numerous awards such as CNN’s Journalist of the Year and Germany’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize.” I guess you’d say he qualified for the adjective “renowned.”

Well, now he’s renowned for another reason—he’s been revealed as a fabulist on the order of Stephen Glass, who wrote fake stories for The New Republic and was finally exposed and disgraced, but not until after he’d been hailed as a journalistic wunderkind. That was about twenty years ago, and although there are similarities in their stories and methods, there are differences that reflect how far journalism has fallen in those intervening twenty years.

For example, although Glass made up many articles out of the whole cloth, he was aware of TNR’s fairly rigorous fact-checking of the time and created an elaborate back-story for each article to fool the fact-checkers:

[Glass] got away with his mind games because of the remarkable industry he applied to the production of the false backup materials which he methodically used to deceive legions of editors and fact checkers. Glass created fake letterheads, memos, faxes, and phone numbers; he presented fake handwritten notes, fake typed notes from imaginary events written with intentional misspellings, fake diagrams of who sat where at meetings that never transpired, fake voice mails from fake sources. He even inserted fake mistakes into his fake stories so fact checkers would catch them and feel as if they were doing their jobs. He wasn’t, obviously, too lazy to report. He apparently wanted to present something better, more colorful and provocative, than mere truth offered.

It all worked because of his skill at creating incredibly complex scenes and also because of that accommodating personality [of Glass’s].

That’s a tremendous amount of effort expended by Glass. But Relotius didn’t have to work that hard to fool his magazine. Fact-checking of the type that had existed at TNR back in the 90s, when Glass was operating, could be thwarted for a significant amount of time—as Glass’s successful capers proved—but it was difficult to do. For Relotius, however, evading the “world’s largest fact-checking organization” run by Der Spiegel was a relative piece of cake.

How could that be? Well, largest doesn’t equal best. As the WSJ points out:

In response to questions from The Wall Street Journal, Ms. Anderson [one of the authors of a piece that exposed Relotius] wrote in an email that none of the people she spoke with in Fergus Falls referenced in the Der Spiegel article were approached for fact-checking by the magazine.

In an article Wednesday, Der Spiegel wrote that Mr. Relotius “distorts reality” in the article about Fergus Falls. A spokesman for the magazine said that Der Spiegel’s fact-checking process “does not include contacting any subjects of articles,” adding that the department reviews each story sentence by sentence for accuracy and plausibility, followed by a review between the department and the story’s author.

So what appears to matter these days to Spiegel is whether the story is credible (remember that word?) rather than whether it’s true. Another thing that sometimes matters is whether the story suits the editors’ political purposes (anti-Trump, for example). “Too good to fact-check” seems to have really been a practice at Der Spiegel.

Relotius is 33 years old and has been writing for Der Spiegel since 2011, when he was around 26. That’s very young, and is similar to Glass who was even younger (23 when he started writing for TNR and 26 when he was fired).

I don’t think their youth is a coincidence, either (and you can add Jayson Blair, a rising star for the NY Times who was fired for the same offenses at the ripe old age of 27, having started there at the age of 23). Years ago, writers of those ages would have been relegated to learning their craft by covering town council meetings and building dedications. But now they are pushed into the limelight, bask in it, and are willing to lie to get more of it.

[NOTE: Relotius also may have set up a charity scam.]

More on the Syria and Afghan pullout: the questions to ask

The New Neo Posted on by

After the announcement of the Syria and Afghanistan pullout, some Trump-defenders have emerged. One is Rand Paul, who says:

I think the burden is really on Mattis and others who want perpetual war to explain why if there is no military solution we’re sending more troops. I think the onus is really on them to explain themselves…

I don’t think we have enough money to be paying to build and rebuild and build and rebuild Afghanistan. The President is right and I think the people agree with him. Let’s rebuild America. Let’s spend that money here at home…

The President [Obama] promised when we went into Syria, our goal was to wipe out ISIS. We took ninety-nine percent of the land, they’re on the run, can the people who live there not do anything? We spent trillions of dollars arming the entire Middle East, arming Afghan army, can they not do anything? Do we have to do everything? We defeated ISIS. But now you have the– the hawks in the administration and throughout Congress saying, “Oh, now we have to wait until Russia and Iran leave Syria.” Well, that was never our goal and it’s never going to happen. So those people are advocating for perpetual war…

They’re going to fight each other until the end of time. It’s all of them. It’s– it’s a inter-complicated mess that has to do with Sunni extremism versus Shia extremism, and also some other various battles in between. But if we wait until there’s potent– no potential for anybody fighting each other when we leave, we will be there forever.

A similar theme was sounded by Andrew Sullivan:

After 17 years, we’ve gotten nowhere, like every single occupier before us. But for that reason, we have to stay. These commanders have been singing this tune year after year for 17 years of occupation, and secretaries of Defense have kept agreeing with them. Trump gave them one last surge of troops — violating his own campaign promise — and we got nowhere one more time. It is getting close to insane.

Neoconservatism, it seems, never dies. It just mutates constantly to find new ways to intervene, to perpetuate forever wars, to send more young Americans to die in countries that don’t want them amid populations that try to kill them. If you want the most recent proof of that, look at Yemen, where the Saudi policy of mass civilian deaths in a Sunni war on Shiites is backed by American arms and U.S. It’s also backed by American troops on the ground — in a secret war conducted by Green Berets that was concealed from Congress. There is no conceivable threat to the U.S. from the Houthi rebels in Yemen; and there was no prior congressional approval. Did you even know we had ground troops deployed there?

There’s a great deal of food for thought there, both from Paul and from Sullivan. To tackle it in depth would require a book—and probably a lot of information I’m not privy to—but let me just take the obvious things that occur to me.

There are different criteria for going into a country and for staying in a country. Sometimes one administration decides to send troops for a certain purpose, and another administration (sometimes with a very different outlook on foreign affairs and on military intervention) comes into power. Does the mission continue? How to decide such a thing? Do we want our foreign policy to seesaw wildly based on whim? Are there any objective criteria that would transcend the vagaries of shifting politics? If so, what would such criteria be?

And what if the situation changes? It’s often referred to as “mission creep,” but what about the “creep” that occurs in the situation we might face? What is a cost-effective intervention both in terms of money and in terms of American lives and limbs sacrificed? How much is too much? Is it a question of money? Is it a question of number of troops? Is it a question of casualties? Is it a question of time?

I think that way too many people are ignoring the complexity of these matters and the extreme difficulty of coming up with answers. We prefer simple black or white solutions, and there aren’t any. The truth is that Islam is involved in a centuries-old civil war, but that war has also involved us directly when it spills over into terrorist activity by Muslims, activity which is somewhat connected to that civil war and somewhat independent of it.

There’s much much more to the complexity of the thing—including all the larger geopolitical ramifications (i.e. Russian involvement)—but that’s a little sample of what I mean.

When Andrew Sullivan writes about our troops on the ground in Yemen—the Green Berets that are engaged in a “secret war”—he includes a link to this NY Times article. How many of his readers will click on that link and read what the article says? Well, I did, and I discovered this:

…[L]ate last year, a team of about a dozen Green Berets arrived on Saudi Arabia’s border with Yemen, in a continuing escalation of America’s secret wars.

With virtually no public discussion or debate, the Army commandos are helping locate and destroy caches of ballistic missiles and launch sites that Houthi rebels in Yemen are using to attack Riyadh and other Saudi cities…

There is no indication that the American commandos have crossed into Yemen as part of the secretive mission.

But sending American ground forces to the border is a marked escalation of Western assistance to target Houthi fighters who are deep in Yemen…

A half-dozen officials — from the United States military, the Trump administration, and European and Arab nations — said the American commandos are training Saudi ground troops to secure their border. They also are working closely with American intelligence analysts in Najran, a city in southern Saudi Arabia that has been repeatedly attacked with rockets, to help locate Houthi missile sites within Yemen.

More at the link, but the main thrust of the article is that there are a dozen of these troops, their activities are designed to help the Saudis and hurt Iran, they are on the border and not in Yemen itself, and that the general policy (possibly minus the troops) was actually started under Obama and escalated ever-so-slightly under Trump. I can’t get my tonsils in an uproar about such a mission, which seems extremely limited in terms of mission creep and to be at least possibly cost-effective in limiting Iran somewhat (and by the way, Sullivan is very misleading when he says of Yemen that we have “troops deployed there”).

Sullivan adds that “I simply do not believe that the West has the knowledge, the will, or the ability to shape the extremely complicated and endlessly vicious politics of the Middle East.” I can’t argue with that; I don’t believe that we have that knowledge either.

But there’s a little matter of degree. Because we cannot “shape” the politics of the Middle East doesn’t mean we should have nothing to do with it and that refraining utterly from any action there would be better. The questions I’ve asked earlier in this post are the ones we should be asking, and trying to answer.

Sullivan adds “what’s astonishing this time is how the Democrats and much of the liberal Establishment now supports an unending occupation of yet another Middle Eastern country.” Nope, it’s not the least bit “astonishing.” It’s utterly predictable. If a great many Democrats are dedicated to the idea that whatever Trump does is bad and whatever he doesn’t do is good, their pro-intervention attitude makes perfect sense. If Obama had suggested such a pullout it would have been just fine with the Democrats, but since it’s Trump it’s terrible.

What’s needed is an objective analysis of the situation and the actions and alternatives to those actions, irrespective of party or who is president. Ha! Dream on, you say. And I’m afraid you’d be correct in saying that.

Lebkuchen recipe for Christmas

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Regulars here may remember that most years I put up a family Christmas recipe. And here it is again.]

This recipe was brought over from Germany sometime in the mid-1800s, and was my favorite of all the wonderful treats cooked by my great-aunt Flora, a baker of rare gifts. She and my great-uncle were not only exceptionally wonderful people, but to my childish and wondering eyes they looked very much like Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus.

The name of the treat is lebkuchen, but it’s quite a different one from the traditional recipe, which I don’t much care for. This is sweet and dense, can be made ahead, and keeps very well when stored in tins.

Flora’s Lebkuchen:

(preheat the oven to 375 degrees)

1 pound dark brown sugar
4 eggs
2 cups flour
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
4 oz. chopped dates
1 cup raisins
1 tsp. orange juice
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. almond extract
1 tsp. lemon juice

Sift the dry ingredients together (flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon).

Beat the eggs and brown sugar together with a rotary beater till the mixture forms the ribbon. Add the orange juice, lemon juice, and extracts to it.

Add the dry mixture to it, a little at a time, stirring.

Add the raisins, dates, and walnuts.

Grease and flour two 9X9 cake pans. Put batter in pans and bake for about 25 minutes (or a little less; test the cake with a cake tester to see if it’s done). You don’t want it to get too dark and dry on the edges, but the middle can’t still be wet when tested.

Meanwhile, make the frosting.

Melt about 6 Tbs. of unsalted butter and add 2 Tbs. hot milk, and 1 Tbs. almond extract. Add enough confectioner’s sugar to make a frosting of spreading consistency (the recipe says “2 cups,” but I’ve always noticed that’s not exactly correct). You can make even more frosting if you like a lot of frosting.

Let cake cool to at least lukewarm, and spread generously with the frosting. Then cut into small pieces and store (or eat!).

Enjoy!

To life—and to cultural appropriation

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m in New York for Christmas, and the other evening I went to see a production of “Fiddler on the Roof”—in Yiddish.

No, I don’t speak Yiddish, except for the usual 100 words of insult that have somehow crept into the English vernacular. And I’ve seen “Fiddler” many times, including the original with Zero Mostel long ago.

But, as this review (and all the others the production has received) indicates, you don’t have to know Yiddish or be Jewish to appreciate this remarkable production:

If you know Yiddish, it is, without question, a must-see. And if you have any hesitation about attending a three-hour show in a language you don’t speak, let me assuage your concerns immediately. You don’t have to be of any particular linguistic base, ethnicity, or religious affiliation to comprehend the beauty and significance of this work or to be touched by the characters and their story; you just have to be human. So, whatever your background, do yourself a favor and go (I’m of Scottish and Dutch Protestant descent, and I was thoroughly enthralled, impressed, and delighted with this rendition of one of my all-time favorites)!…

From the ensemble’s exuberant folk dances and solemn ceremonies that punctuate the story to the revealing conversations and unforgettable songs that strike a balance between humor and pathos (“the happiness and tears” of “Sunrise, Sunset”) – all delivered in the genuine style and actual language (including some bits of Russian dancing and dialogue) that the characters would have used – everything is this production bespeaks accuracy and authenticity. The intimate space of the theater and the earthy artistic design also serve to reinforce the immediacy and sincerity of the narrative…

The production provides written translation on each side of the stage, much like with an opera, and although that makes for certain problems with attention because the viewer must read the titles and watch the action almost simultaneously, the rewards are great.

I noticed that the jokes fell a bit flatter than they do in English, probably because of the time lag. But that was more than made up in the greater depth of feeling and seriousness conveyed by the unfunny parts of the play, which were emphasized and deepened in this particular production. Was it the acting that made the difference? Or did the fact that the performance was in another tongue—a slightly familiar one, but still different—make it seem more like an opera than a musical comedy? Was it all of the above?

Whatever the reasons, after a few moments there was an uncanny impression that we were watching the original inhabitants of the original shtetl, rather than actors on a New York stage. Eerie.

The 1964 musical “Fiddler on the Roof” was originally based on Sholem Aleichem’s (Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich, raised in a shtetl) stories of shtetl life, published in Yiddish. The English-language Broadway musical changed those stories somewhat for the American audience (and later, the world, because “Fiddler” has gone all around the world), and the English was translated into many many other languages. But the only time it had been performed in Yiddish previously—the language of Sholem Aleichem’s stories and the language the protagonists would have actually spoken in real life—was in an Israeli production in 1965.

Until now. The New York version I saw uses that same 1965 translation, which incorporates more of Aleichem’s original phrases into the lyrics:

Neither the show’s director, Joel Grey, nor all but three of its 26-member cast knew much Yiddish when they started. The scripts are in English, the dialogue and song lyrics spelled out phonetically…

“We worked first in English,” Grey tells The Post. “And if that went well, we’d add the Yiddish.” He says that both he and the cast received daily training from the dialect experts at the museum.

They do an extraordinary job.

And as far as “around the world to great acclaim” goes, I think the video I’m about to post here explains itself. It’s not in English or Yiddish; it’s the song from Fiddler called “To Life,” performed by a Japanese company in Japanese. The musical was hugely popular in Japan when it went there:

As Jeremy Dauber notes in his book The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem, Fiddler eventually became “a free-floating symbol, an Everylens for talking about universal challenges to tradition.” With that univeralism in mind, Fiddler has played everywhere, from Moscow to Warsaw to Budapest. But the story would seem more logically connected to those places, which have a historical Jewish connection—even for non-Jewish residents—that Japan lacks. And yet, as Barbara Isenberg writes in her book Tradition!: The Highly Improbable, Ultimately Triumphant Broadway-to-Hollywood Story of Fiddler on the Roof, the World’s Most Beloved Musical: “As Fiddler on the Roof traveled the world, few countries were so welcoming as Japan.”…

The show is about tradition, father-daughter(s) relationships,” Koji Aoshika, vice president of MTI Asia, which licenses the show, told me by email. “Japan was the same. You had to follow what the father said—arranged marriage, for instance. So, the story of a Jewish father losing power in the family life and girls starting to make their own decisions resonates…

So maybe Fiddler resonates in Tokyo not only because it’s a family drama about fathers and daughters, or a universal tale about modernity, but because Japanese history does, in fact, include a chapter about dislocation from a sepia-toned “old world” and an uncertain journey to a “new world” where the traditional rules no longer applied. Tevye and his daughters had to leave Anatevka and even move across an ocean to find their new world. The Japanese stayed put, but the new world came to them just as surely, with the same uncertain mix of hope and fear.

On watching this video, it also strikes me that the actors are having themselves a ball, and that includes the dancers who seem to have the flavor of the movements just right:

[NOTE: The Yiddish version is playing here until December 30, and is then moving to this theater.]

Sweden’s two worlds

The New Neo Posted on by

We’ve heard a lot about Germany and its immigration woes, but of all the countries of Europe that are having trouble with their unassimilated newcomers, Sweden just might lead the way:

While much attention was focused on Germany during the 2015 refugee crisis, in which more than a million migrants from the Middle East and Africa entered the continent at the behest of Angela Merkel, the country that admitted the most migrants per capita was Sweden. In one year alone, the northern European nation of 10 million added nearly 2 percent to its population. Most of those arrivals were young men. Tens of thousands more have continued to arrive since then…

…Rosengård, Seved, and Nydala, [are] immigrant neighborhoods in the southern city of Malmö and among the 23 “especially vulnerable” areas across Sweden. At times, ambulances and fire trucks will enter only with police protection. Desperate police have appealed to imams and clan leaders for help when they cannot contain the violence…

The on-the-ground reality I witnessed in some parts of Sweden stood in stark contrast to the egalitarian utopia I had been sold by American progressives. How did Sweden, on the whole a prosperous and peaceful nation, also develop parallel, segregated societies afflicted by criminality and violence? The starkest reminder of this reality are the numerous grenade explosions and gun murders that have become a regular occurrence across some sections of society. In fact, Sweden’s homicide rate is now above the Western European average…

University West sociologist Göran Adamson blames, in addition to poor ur­ban planning, Sweden’s state-sponsored multiculturalism for financing separatism through various ethno-religious institutions…

Sweden’s institutionalization of multiculturalism began in 1975, when a parliament led by Social Democrat Olof Palme rejected assimilation in favor of policies that encouraged minorities to keep their separate identities. “Of course, if you say these things [critically] in Sweden, you’ll be ferociously attacked by social workers and the dominating left-wing academia for being inhumane,” Adamson says.

Sounds familiar, although somewhat more extreme than what’s been happening elsewhere in Europe—and to a certain extent in the US, although America has never embraced multiculturalism to the same degree and has at least retained a small residue of devotion to assimilation.

Multiculturalism was thought to be a way to respect other cultures, and I suppose it is, but its dangers are obvious if those cultures are not compatible with (or are in fact openly hostile to) that of the host country. This is a fact that is often ignored by those who are dedicated to multiculturalism.

{NOTE: The article also mentions that the problem with immigrants in Sweden is not necessarily just with those who practice Islam:

Although Sweden’s jihadist problem intersects with immigration, evidence doesn’t support the myopic focus on Muslims in immigration discourses, according to Stockholm School of Economics researcher Tino Sanandaji. “Among migrants from the Middle East” to Sweden, most “are not Muslim but instead are Christian, atheist, agnostic, and members of other religious minorities,” he tells me. Sanandaji, a Kurdish immigrant from Iran who has written a best-selling book on Swedish immigration, says that people often confuse Middle Eastern culture with Islam. His research, he says, indicates that second-generation immigrant gangs are influenced more by gangster-rap subculture than by any religion.

There are probably many contributors to the situation, but the combination of Muslim immigrants, Middle Eastern culture as a whole, and modern trends such as gangster-rap has a lot of toxic potential.]

Caroline Glick on Trump’s Syria pullout

The New Neo Posted on by

Pros and cons. There are quite a few of each, so I suggest you read the whole thing.

It ends this way:

Time will tell whether Trump’s decision to remove U.S. forces from Syria was a prelude to disaster for U.S. allies and a boon for America’s enemies, or whether the opposite is the case. But what is clear enough is that move is not entirely negative.

Is John Roberts the new Anthony Kennedy—and if so, why?

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s a lot of talk that John Roberts is taking up where Anthony Kennedy left off, as the new “swing” justice. This is based not just on the memory of his role in the Obamacare tax vs. penalty brouhaha, but on a decision reached yesterday. As William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection writes:

Roberts…saw fit to make a public pronouncement after Trump criticized a San Francisco federal judge for a decision enjoining Trump’s new policy on processing asylum claims, which held that people who illegally crossed the border could not apply for asylum…

The injunction against the new asylum rules was upheld by the 9th Circuit, and the government sought an emergency stay. In a 5-4 Order released [Friday], the Court rejected the stay, with Roberts joining the four liberal justices…

In other words, while awaiting a ruling on the merits, a San Francisco judge had earlier enjoined the federal government from changing previous policy on asylum. When Trump criticized the San Francisco judge as being an “Obama judge,” Roberts—in a public statement unusual for a sitting SCOTUS justice—criticized Trump and stated that there’s no such thing as “Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” and that judges are “an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”

Translation: don’t you dare imply that judges are political; we are above all that!

Then yesterday, by refusing to stop the San Francisco judge’s injunction, Roberts became the swing vote when the same issue came to the Supreme Court. He voted with the liberals in allowing the previous injunction to remain in effect.

This was not any sort of decision on the merits; it was merely a decision not to reverse the San Francisco judge’s decision, pending a later ruling on the merits of the asylum question. It was also a defense of that judge as being a member of that “group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right.” Perhaps, to Roberts’ way of thinking, had Roberts voted to reverse the decision of that San Francisco judge, it would have lent support to the idea that the San Francisco judge had been motivated by “Obama judge” partisanship to make an incorrect ruling.

It may be that, when the asylum question is heard on the merits, Roberts will end up voting with the conservatives and uphold Trump’s position. Perhaps. But I believe that in the meantime Roberts was deeply offended by Trump’s criticism of the judiciary, even though I think Trump was absolutely correct in that criticism.

I believe that there are at least three more things operating with Roberts in handing down this decision. The first is that most people, especially ambitious people—and that includes SCOTUS justices—are attracted to power. Power is enticing, and increasing one’s own power is always tempting. So what could be more powerful for Roberts than becoming a swing justice? It would mean that a great many huge and important cases would turn on what Roberts thinks.

Secondly, Roberts was nominated by George Bush. What better way for Roberts to prove that he’s no “Bush judge” than to vote with the liberals? So that’s another motivation to do what he did yesterday.

Thirdly, I’ve noticed a tendency in Roberts—long before Trump became president—to vote in the way that is least likely to upset the status quo apple cart. For example, in the case of Obamacare, Roberts found a “creative” way to avoid a bold overturning of a bill that had been passed by Congress. In yesterday’s injunction case, the path of least resistance was to let the injunction stand rather than to overrule it. But when the case about asylum actually reaches SCOTUS, Roberts could go either way—he might rule with Trump in order to uphold an executive order already issued, or he might rule against Trump in order to support the implementation of the pre-existing (pre-Trump) policy on how asylum is handled.