Dental interlude: I’m a little late posting today…

The New Neo Posted on by

…because I spent part of the morning and early afternoon at the dentist’s.

This was my third visit in ten days. I had had an old crown replaced because it was trapping food and causing decay. The permanent crown arrived, I had it fitted, and it just wasn’t right. I kept biting my tongue, over and over and over. So I returned to the dentist, who shaved the crown down a bit (isn’t this fascinating?) and I went home.

But although the problem had improved as a result, it persisted. So back I went today, and because he’d squeezed me into the schedule I had to wait quite a while. He shaved it down some more, and I started to leave. But then, as I was walking out the door, my exploratory tongue encountered a tiny little rough spot on the tooth, a spot I knew my tongue would not be able to resist engaging now and then just to see if it’s still there.

What is it about the exquisite sensitivity of the mouth to any change? A tiny strawberry seed caught in some molar’s indentation can feel like Everest; a little spot of roughness can be perceived as rough sandpaper.

So back I went, and now I think it’s basically okay.

When I got home I had some lunch and noticed, to my shock, that a slight bite imbalance that had made it somewhat uncomfortable to chew on that side for about the last 15 years now seems to be much much better. Serendipity!

I’m really not a dental wimp, although I might sound like it. I’ve had more than the average amount of dental work because of a host of congenital dental anomalies too numerous and tedious to mention. Let’s just say that my mouth is a demo of various dental techniques, and over the years I may have personally financed a few dentists’ vehicles.

Now, back to work.

When your spouse changes—big time

The New Neo Posted on by

When we get married we promise to stick by the spouse for better or for worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health. We marry a particular person for certain reasons—looks, personality, kindness, intelligence, a host of things that we aren’t even necessarily able to list but that go to the heart of the reasons we chose this particular person over others.

And yet we always know—and those vows reflect—the notion that change is part of life and life can be very unpredictable. We can look at the mothers and fathers and grandparents of our spouses to help us imagine the future, but we don’t really know whether our husband or wife will become fat, or disabled, or bald, or depressed, or angry, or have an affair, or suddenly want to live in the country after being a city person, or a host of other possibilities both small and large.

But in the olden days, those vows didn’t include “for man or woman,” because sex (or gender, take your pick on the term) was considered immutable. That’s not true today. Whatever you think of how basic the change is, there’s no question that one can change one’s outsides and take hormones to effect a powerful transformation that could and probably would be very disturbing to most spouses having to deal with it.

Here’s a story of one such modern-day dilemma. I can’t find the original article being described, so I’ll just go with the writer’s report on it, but I think it’s important to remember that although the article is about a couple that was originally lesbian, this sort of thing also happens in relationships that are originally heterosexual (look no further than Caitlyn Jenner’s ex-wife Kris Kardashian, who resolved a similar dilemma by getting a divorce):

I recently read a first-person account by a woman who had been a “proud lesbian” until her partner up and decided she was actually a man. This woman expected to be a Professional Gay Woman for life with all the dual rights and privileges to which she was entitled, and suddenly she finds herself married to a regular old garden-variety MAN like the rest of us non-special heterosexual women.

Not only that, but since it’s verboten to suggest that the transgender person hadn’t ALWAYS been a man, this woman had been with a man all along, thus jeopardizing her status as a lesbian, proud or not. That’s gotta rock your world…

To the woman’s credit, I guess, she tells us that this man is still the same dear partner he had always been and she is going to stay with him. Whatever

That may seem ridiculous or humorous. But to the person it happens to—man or woman, straight or gay—it’s absolutely no laughing matter. It tests the limits of what sort of change a person can endure in a mate.

Trump, college admissions, and racial discrimination

The New Neo Posted on by

One problem—and it’s a big one—with anything the right tries to do is that it can easily be spun as unfair and mean. The left is very practiced in doing this, and the tactic is responsible to no small degree for the left’s success.

The same for this news:

If a report in the NY Times is accurate, the Trump administration is getting ready to take on the most precious of liberal dogmas, the institutionalized racial discrimination in college admissions, aka affirmative action.

The Times reaches the conclusion that affirmative action will be under attack, even though the documents it has obtained for its reporting don’t actually say that.

Of course they don’t actually say that, but that won’t stop the Times or its tut-tutting readers. Republicans bad, Democrats good, white people the worst of all. Various tweets are offered that are indicative of this, such as:

Trump is exactly the white supremacist he showed himself to be during the campaign. Now our tax dollars will defend white rights. Hideous.

The woman who wrote that tweet appears from her photo to be white, and says she is a civil rights lawyer. And yet to her the mere thought that our tax dollars could defend the rights of white people as well as others is “hideous.” Do whites even have rights in her eyes and the eyes of SJWs like her, who have been macerated in the juice of “whites bad, minorities good” ever since they entered school and perhaps before?

So, what did the DOJ actually say it was intending to do?:

The [DOJ] document, an internal announcement to the civil rights division, seeks current lawyers interested in working for a new project on “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.”

The Times characterizes this as a plan for “investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants.” Oh, really? I don’t see the word “white” in that DOJ document at all. Perhaps the Times is ignorant (after all, it’s just the Times) of the fact that for quite a while it’s been predominantly Asians who’ve been suing, alleging that they’ve been discriminated against in favor of other minorities.

In the old fools vs. knaves controversy, I vote for “knaves” in the case of the Times. I suspect they know full well that Asians are the new Jews in the college world—i.e. a group that does a lot better in academia and therefore would dominate if academic merit was the sole criterion used. And yet this fact—that it’s especially a non-white minority (Asians) that is being discriminated against, not just white people (who are fast becoming a minority in numbers, by the way) is discarded by the Times in favor of saying the goal is to protect “white applicants.” The only mention of the word “Asian” in the entire Times article is a passing mention in a quote from one of the defenders of the Trump action.

The Times minimization of the Asian nature of the people who are being discriminated against, and the highlighting of “white people,” is of course a form of propaganda to appeal to people (such as that white civil rights lawyer whose tweet I quoted) who consider white people unworthy of any protection. But in the larger sense, it doesn’t really matter to the merits of the thing whether it’s white people or Asians—discrimination is discrimination is discrimination (or should be, anyway). Has that become a minority point of view?

[NOTE: If you want to see some of the posts I’ve written previously on affirmative action, please see this, this, and this.

See also this and this for the anti-Jewish history of the favoring of “diversity” over strict academic merit in college student admissions.]

Here comes (or goes) the sun

The New Neo Posted on by

Trump the evildoer:

Democrat lawmakers and climate change scientists warn that Trump’s disastrous environmental policies will culminate in the destruction of the Sun on August 21, 2017.

Since taking office, Donald Trump has been rolling back Obama-era policies that curbed climate change on the pretense of liberating business owners from unnecessary job-killing regulations. However we now know that President Obama’s environmental regulations were the only thing keeping the world from being plunged into total darkness.

“Less than a year ago, none of us could imagine a President Trump …,” Nobel laureate Al Gore said while on a tour promoting his new movie An Inconvenient Squeal. “… Now imagine a world without a Sun!”

That’s satire, of course. But satire and reality come closer and closer together these days.

In the real world rather than the satirical one, the Boston Globe had a different and almost equally bizarre take on the coming solar eclipse:

The path of ideal viewing spots for this month’s highly-anticipated total solar eclipse cuts overwhelmingly through places that voted for President Trump in November.

There are about 240 counties roughly along the central path of the eclipse, a 70-mile-wide trail extending across the country where people will be able to see a total eclipse, meaning the sun will appear completely obscured by the moon.

And about 92 percent of those counties swung in Trump’s favor, while fewer than two dozen counties voted for his opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Trump won many of those counties by a wide margin, securing an average of 71 percent of the vote in counties he won along the path. Clinton, by comparison, got only about 56 percent of the vote in counties she won along the eclipse path.

The article has been widely mocked. But when I read it, I suspected it was written with a somewhat tongue-in-cheek mentality.

That’s what I prefer to think, anyway.

[NOTE: Hmmm, this is the second day in a row I’ve used riffs on Beatles songs to title posts. This probably has no significance whatsoever.

Let me add that, when I went to the movies this past weekend, I saw a coming attraction for Al Gore’s new film. At first I wondered what a political ad was doing in the theater, and then I realized what I was actually watching.]

Facial recognition systems at the railway station?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a little tidbit:

German authorities have launched a six-month test of automatic facial recognition technology at a Berlin railway station, which the country’s top security official says could be used to improve security in the future.

More than 200 people volunteered to have their names and two photos stored for the project at Suedkreuz station, where three cameras film an entrance and an escalator.

I don’t know what you thought when you read that, but I know what I thought: it’s a good thing the Nazis didn’t have access to something like that.

I understand the need for security, I truly do. But at what price? And yet I think this is the direction in which we’re headed whether we like it or not.

Also, see this.

When I was young, we used to have a lot of discussions about which was more likely to come true in the future: Orwell’s or Huxley’s dystopian fantasies. Now I’m thinking we may be headed towards some hybrid of the two.

I read the news today, oh boy

The New Neo Posted on by

And I think I’m going to ignore it.

I may succumb later, though; you never know.

But sometimes these days, when I look at news aggregator sites like memeorandum or this, for example), or here.

But every now and then I take a break from adding my voice to the news and news-digesting clamor.

Which doesn’t mean I’m going to shut up; not even today.

Today I had a bunch of chores and errands to do, and (as often seems the case) they took about three times longer than my estimates of how long they’d take. It also seems sometimes that every chore or task completed has a little task prologue and then a post-task echo that goes along with it.

For example, yesterday I bought new tires. Simple, right? Just order them, have them installed, and get out your credit card. But that leaves out the 15 or more hours I spent obsessively researching tires and the people who install them, determined not to just follow my usual lackadaisical method and get whatever the guy at the nearest tire place suggests. Well, fifteen hours of internet reading later, I picked a variety of all-season tire that’s supposed to be especially good in snow, a very salient characteristic as far as I’m concerned. When I told the guy at the tire place that’s what I wanted (I’d already checked to make sure they had it, and I knew the price), he tactfully told me that some customers had been a bit disappointed in that tire because it’s quite noisy.

Now, that was something I hadn’t really thought about. He suggested a different one that was actually a trifle less expensive, and said that it had all the characteristics I was looking for. So I caved, and that’s the tire I got.

Then last night I was out driving and I noticed that my automatic car lock (you know, that thingee on the key that you press) wasn’t working too well. Did the tire guy inadvertently do something that made it less functional? Is that even possible? Do I need to get it fixed?

Not to mention my brand new cell phone that today suddenly started taking stealth photos like some sort of spy camera. No, it wasn’t on a timer, but every time I took a picture it would then go on to take another and another and another at about 15-second intervals, until I changed the screen.

Why? Why? Do I now have to take it to the cellphone place?

I’ll not bore you with the rest of my day so far, or you may end up getting ennui, too.

Scaramucci, we hardly knew ya

The New Neo Posted on by

And what we knew, most of us didn’t like.

It turns out that Trump—or John Kelly, or some combination of the two—didn’t like him much either, because after about 10 days as communications director, Scaramucci is out on his ear:

Scaramucci was expected to announce his new communications team Monday afternoon, but he was instead informed of the decision to remove him that morning in Kelly’s office. Scaramucci was not present when senior staff were told of the change, a White House official said. Another senior aide said the move came after discussions over the weekend. There was “no way” Scaramucci could work with Kelly, the senior aide said.

I would certainly have liked to have been the proverbial fly on the wall for that little discussion, or series of discussions. I wonder if Scaramucci knows where any of the bodies are buried, and plans to take revenge.

It also occurs to me that Scaramucci may have been brought in temporarily, for a specific task—to drive out Sean Spicer and Reince Priebus—and that when those things were accomplished, the plan was that it would be time to oust him. That’s pretty Machiavellian, but it’s certainly a possibility.

Scaramucci has had a run of bad luck recently. In addition to this firing, his second wife filed for divorce after only three years of marriage (which starts looking like a long time compared to his tenure at the White House), and even the Harvard Law School directory has offed him (by mistake, apparently). To top it all off, his estranged wife just gave birth one week ago, which would ordinarily be considered good news for him but could be bittersweet coming in the middle of a divorce.

Other than that, not much happening in Scaramucci’s life.

His story reminds me a bit of those fairy tales about genies and wishes—you know, the ones with the moral “be careful what you wish for.” Sacramucci may have wished to be a mover and shaker in the White House under Trump, but perhaps he forgot to add that he wanted to hold the position longer than 10 days before he was the one shaken and moved.

I’m happy to see him leave that position, though. His short tenure appeared to be a disaster in a job for which he had neither aptitude nor skills. His sole function (other than the aforementioned push out the door for Spicer and Priebus) may have been to make Trump looks sober and controlled and tactful in contrast.

Movies: the Dunkirk din

The New Neo Posted on by

I thought “Dunkirk” was the sort of movie that would be good to see in one of those RPX movie theaters. But I took the precaution of taking some earplugs along with me to protect my sensitive ears.

I was tremendously glad I did. One of the first things I noticed about the movie was the assaultive, hideous sound, which even the earplugs couldn’t dull enough for me. I felt the need to push them in deeper with my fingers and kept covering my ears, too. And even then, the blasting percussive bass made the seats vibrate so forcefully that it almost felt as though those Spitfires were flying right over us.

I assume that was the point. Unfortunately, it seemed to be almost the only point of the movie, which concentratee on giving the audience the feeling that we are participants in Dunkirk, The Video Game.

The film is a real blockbuster and has been widely and highly praised. But I had so many quarrels with it that I left the theater almost angry.

Let me start with the good stuff. The dogfights in the air—which make up a large portion of the film—were an astounding piece of filmmaking. I don’t really mean the fight portions, which were a bit muddled and hard to follow, but the flight part, the swooping and the chase and the wide expanse of sky and sea. The big screen really came into its own there, and it was truly spectacular. Reportedly those scenes were filmed with IMAX cameras – attached to the fighter planes using specially-made snorkel lenses – in the back and the front of each plane.

The technical aspects of those portions of the film were so impressive that I found myself wondering how it was done even as I watched, which could have distracted from my following the story except that there was really very little story from which to be distracted. If you already know the basics of what happened at Dunkirk, the film doesn’t give you much more: men were trapped there, some were killed there, and hundreds of thousands were successfully evacuated by sea. And the film concentrates on the first two parts and gives the third part rather short shrift.

Characters? You barely learn who they are. They don’t say much, and what they say is almost unintelligible. There’s almost zero historical context given for the entire thing, either. I kept wondering what young people, many of whom might not know what Dunkirk was, would be likely to take from this movie: that there were guys standing on a beach in a war, many died in harrowing ways, there was a lot of noise, and many were ultimately rescued.

And the music—ah, the music! It’s a very special part of the experience, a pile-driving discordant cacophony that augments the sound effects until you wonder which is more aurally disturbing, the sound of the bombing or the sound of the music. Yes, I know this is supposed to be “immersive,” but I found it took away from the plot and made it all about the movie rather than Dunkirk itself.

Have I forgotten anything? Yes—many of the actors look so much alike that unless you know who they are already (and I didn’t) you can’t tell most of them apart.

And then there is the movie within the movie—another, far more conventional movie that follows the doings of a small boat manned by three civilians who end up picking up various survivors. This boat is captained by actor Mark Rylance, whose performance features an old-fashioned approach to conveying some actual nuances of character (gasp!). But to do that he had to be given the opportunity—the time, and some lines of dialogue, and some peace and quiet in which to deilver them. It’s not the fault of many of the other actors that they weren’t given those opportunities.

“Dunkirk” cuts back and forth in time among several stories it follows—with the effect of making the viewer maximally confused, as far as I can see. But it also cuts and forth between the two widely different acting and directing styles, creating another discordance.

In preparation for seeing the movie I skimmed quite a few reviews and the vast majority were raves. Well, this review’s not among them. After I came back home and read some more, I did find one reviewer who disagreed with the others and whose opinion resembled mine: David Cox, writing in—of all places—the Guardian. His review is entitled, “Bloodless, boring and empty: Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk left me cold.”

Preach it, brother, preach it.

By the way, it wasn’t just my delicate little ears that had trouble with the overwhelming sound:

It might be the loudest movie I’ve ever seen. I don’t mean like a gun shot here or an explosion there, I mean sustained loud noises for minutes at a time. For large sections of the movie the soundtrack and the effects merge in this cacophony of noise and it becomes difficult to differentiate between any of the sounds. On a number of occasions it actually distracted me from what was taking place on screen. If you have trouble with prolonged loud noises you might consider waiting to see this until you can control the volume.

And this:

Just finished watching Dunkirk IMAX 70mm at Metreon 16 in SF. Loved the movie but holyshit, this was definitely the loudest movie i’ve ever heard, and probably the loudest thing i’ve ever experienced. There are periods of sustained loud sound lasting 3-5 minutes at a time, and not just an instance or ‘bang’. I calibrate my sound setup to 75-85 db, this must have been 100-110 db. In every sense of the word, it was deafening and uncomfortable. I get immersion and all but yeah this was too much for me… prior i’ve never found a movie or concert/club was too loud, a first for me.

So i really recommend bringing ear plugs just in case you experience immense discomfort like i did… wish i knew before hand.

And the person who wrote that liked the movie.

By the way, actual veterans of Dunkirk had this to say about the sound:

Branagh said that about 30 veterans – now in their 90s – came to the U.K. premiere of the film last week, and when he asked them what they thought of it afterward, they said, “The film was louder than the battle!” They explained that on the actual beach, because that stretch of land is so large, the noise of the bombs drifted away on the air.

I didn’t feel comfortable taking my earplugs out until I was in the lobby of the theater.

[ADDENDUM: About people’s different reports on the loudness of the sound when they saw the movie—as I noted in the first sentence of the post, I went to an RPX theater to see it. That’s not quite IMAX, but it’s not a regular theater either. It’s got a much bigger screen than the usual, although smaller than IMAX. There are supposedly more speakers than in a regular theater, but the sound isn’t quite as over-the-top as IMAX.

I have a feeling I would have had trouble with the sound for “Dunkirk” in any theater, even a regular one, but I’m sure not going to go back and watch the movie again in a regular theater just to find out.]

Dickinson on the Mass Pike

The New Neo Posted on by

I stopped to eat my sandwich at a rest stop on the western Massachusetts Turnpike one recent weekend.

It was a lovely day and the Berkshires a fine place for my little picnic, although I didn’t have time to leave the Pike for an even more scenic vista than what was available at the rest stop. When I got to the picnic table, this is the surprise that greeted me:

The letters were huge. Here’s the text of the poem:

Opinion is a flitting thing,
But Truth, outlasts the Sun””
If then we cannot own them both””
Possess the oldest one””

Not a bad thing to be reminded of, for bloggers and pundits and all of us.

The accompanying picnic bench looked like this:

Dickinson lived her life in Amherst, Massachusetts, which is about 30 miles north of today’s Massachusetts Turnpike and considerably to the east of where I was (I don’t remember the name of the rest stop, alas). What Emily might have thought of this particular picnic table and bench in this particular setting I cannot quite imagine, but perhaps she would have liked them more than one might think. After all, she’s the person who penned the following poem:

This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me,–
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.
Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!

A blog is a sort of letter to the world, too. But with the internet it’s easier to get at least a small part of the world to write back. That means you, folks.

The law and Charlie Gard: parental rights in the UK vs. the US

The New Neo Posted on by

As expected, the announcement has come of Charlie Gard’s death:

Charlie Gard, the baby whose fate was the subject of a protracted court battle and made headlines around the world, has died, his parents have said…

They abandoned their legal battle on Monday, saying it was too late to save him. On Thursday, he was transferred to an unspecified hospice and he died on Friday, a week before he would have turned one, after having his life support systems withdrawn.

In a statement, Charlie’s mother, Connie Yates, said: “Our beautiful little boy has gone. We are so proud of you, Charlie.”

This sad and troubling case has drawn attention in the US as well, raising questions and concerns about what might happen in a similar case here. Some analogies have been made to the well-known US case of Terry Schiavo, but there were very important differences in the fact situation there that makes Schiavo a poor analogy. That case involved a battle between the husband and parents of the adult Schiavo over what her expressed wishes about end-of-life care had been. In contrast, Charlie Gard is an infant, and his case pitted his parents’ wishes against the opinions of the hospital and doctors.

A better analogy to the Charlie Gard case is that of Jahi McMath, involving a minor child and a dispute between Jahi’s family and her hospital and doctors over the definition of brain death and when life support should end. However, the McMath case was settled by an agreement between the child’s family and the hospital in which the family was allowed to take her from the hospital and continue life support.

If the Charlie Gard case had occurred in the US, however, the legal emphasis differs . In the UK, disputes between parents and doctors are brought to court under an objective best interests of the child standard. But in the United States, in similar cases the best interests “tend to be resolved in favor of parental rights,” according to Dr. John D. Lantos, director of Bioethics Center at Children’s Mercy Kansas City. And, when courts do overrule parents’ wishes in the US, they usually do so to order care over parental objections rather than the opposite.

The different legal standard in the UK was further described by Claire Fenton-Glynn, legal scholar at the University of Cambridge:

“English law…does not see parents as having the ‘right’ to make decisions on behalf of their children. The concept is called parental responsibility: That is, the parent has a responsibility to make decisions, to look after the child,” she said. “Parenthood doesn’t give them rights; parenthood gives them responsibilities.”

And lawyer and ethicist Seema Shah describes the differences between American and British law this way:

Legally, though, US courts are following the same best-interest standard as the UK, but the way it works here, at least in practice, is that “courts are deferring to parents,” Shah said.

American courts recognize that parents have values and that parents understand their children, even if this does not give parents rights to do whatever they want, Shah explained.

Still, from state to state, “there’s a lot of variability in practice,” she said.

So it seems fairly likely that, had the Gard case occurred in the US at this point, the court would have been more likely to have found for the parents. How long that will remain true is more difficult to say.

The White House reality show

The New Neo Posted on by

It occurs to me that Trump has brought “The Apprentice” to the White House. I’m a bit handicapped in making the analogy because I never watched the show, but I’ve seen small clips from it, and the description fits, too:

…The show depicts contestants from around the country with various professional backgrounds in an elimination-style competition to become an apprentice to a businessman…

The show depicted a group of 15”“18 businessmen and -women competing in an elimination competition for a one-year, US$250,000 job to run one of real estate magnate Donald Trump’s companies…

…The show led Trump to become known for his fateful catch phrase “You’re Fired!”.

Trump’s executive style seems to be to pit a bunch of competitive people against each other, watch the fur fly, eliminate the ones he considers didn’t measure up, and see which ones remain standing. I’m sure there’s always been a lot of competition and jockeying for position in previous White Houses as well; after all, people don’t reach those sort of positions without being competitive and having skills to negotiate power struggles. But this tendency seems excessive in the Trump White House, and some of the personalities seem particularly aggressive (Scaramucci, do you hear me?)

Who’s going to be the last man standing? The hope is that new chief of staff John Kelly will bring order into chaos. [*see below] After all, he’s a military guy who was in the Marines for 45 years:

“He knows how to do this: with common sense and good leadership,” said Kelly’s longtime friend, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer frank opinions. “He won’t suffer idiots and fools.”

Good luck with that, chief of staff Kelly.

When I read this earlier today from Susan Wright at RedState, it resonated with me (at least partially):

I believe, and the events bear it out, that Trump is using his staff for personal amusement, playing them against each other, giving them the opportunity to prove who is “most loyal” and he’s surrounding himself with the kind of cutthroats and lackeys who will do just that.

I said “partially”; the part I don’t agree with is that Trump’s motive is “personal amusement.” This is indeed a game of sorts (although not quite of Thrones—I hope), but it’s not being played merely for yuks. This is Trump’s idea of how to test people’s mettle.

[NOTE: *I wrote the title and the first five paragraphs of this post before I read the WaPo article I linked to in the sixth paragraph. When I read it I was surprised to see a similar analogy to the one I’d made:

As Kelly moves to the West Wing, he’ll likely move quickly to confront the “reality television show that runs on a raucous mix of drama, machismo and suspicion,” as The Post’s White House team characterized it Thursday.

Hmm.]