Carly Fiorina wears well

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve come to the conclusion that Carly Fiorina is the sort of person where the more you hear, the more you like. Her manner is exceptionally composed, unruffled. She criticizes without undue polemics, and yet she manages to be hard-hitting. She doesn’t flinch from questions, and although her answers are careful and measured they don’t come across as the usual self-serving, mendacious, political claptrap.

In short, I think she will be getting more attention as time goes on—and not just because the fact that she’s a women makes her an excellent counter to Hillary Clinton.

Want to go gray?

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s a vogue for it among young women, apparently.

The process is simplicity itself. All you have to do is:

Lesson #1: Start with healthy hair and scalp.

…It turns out that you need to have a healthy head of hair before bleaching or stripping your hair. “If we bleach your split ends, they will fall off,” Javier told me matter-of-factly…

Lesson #2: Don’t wash your hair at least five days before your appointment.

When you are going platinum you want as much natural oil in your scalp as possible…So I tied my hair up in a greasy ponytail for a week. “Use dry shampoo sparingly and only if you have to,” Javier advised me.

Lesson #3: The darker and coarser your hair, the longer it takes to go platinum.

Before you can gloss your hair gray or silver, you have to go platinum. This is a time- and chemical-intensive process where your colorist slowly strips the dark pigments from your hair until you look like Goldilocks. I arrived at Sally Hershberger Downtown at 9 a.m. and I didn’t leave until 9 p.m. We started bleaching my hair the moment I arrived at the salon, but we didn’t finish the bleaching until about 5 p.m. The chemicals burn and itch a bit on your scalp, which is why you need a healthy scalp to begin with. By the time your hair is blonde, it will be noticeably drier and potentially of a different texture than you’re used to…

Lesson #4: You need to gloss every two weeks.

Once you’ve processed your hair blonde, you need to gloss your gray, and re-gloss every two weeks because while your hair is permanently removed of pigment (until it regrows), your pigment gloss will eventually wash off. ..

Lesson #5: It’s high-maintenance and it’s not cheap.

I was always a fan of dollar store shampoos and conditioner. I didn’t care because everyone liked my long voluminous hair regardless. Now that my hair has become more fragile and prone to breakage after bleaching, I have to follow the following rules:

A) Wash hair once a week using products formulated especially for color-treated hair…

B) Be gentle with your hair.
When you’re lathering up in the shower, you need to gently massage your scalp. Always air dry your hair when possible. “Treat your hair like a newborn baby,” Javier says. “It’s really fragile…

C) Use a leave-in conditioner to lock in color…

D) Gently rub oil into your ends.

OR—

You can just wait a few decades and save yourself the hassle. I can assure you that sooner or later, if you live long enough, it will happen.

By the way, the effect achieved by the lengthy and difficult process described in the quote is not anything like real gray hair, although I suppose the women doing this don’t want “real” gray hair. I once mentioned to a friend of mine that gray hair isn’t gray, it’s a mixture of depigmented (white) hairs and whatever your natural color might be in the hairs that still retain their pigment. Slowly, over time, the color mix of the hair lightens as a larger percentage of the hairs become white. She was flabbergasted; she had thought that hair went gray in some uniform way—that grey was a stage each hair passed through on its way to white.

[NOTE: Some photos here of the results of the gray-dying process on the young.]

Yes, the seemingly-white can be black

The New Neo Posted on by

At least, people who have (as Rachel Dolezal falsely claimed to have) at least one biological parent who is black can actually look unequivocally white. It shows you how strange the topic of racial affiliation is, and how there’s quite a bit of crossover in phenotype.

Does a white-looking person with a black biological parent identify solely as white on the basis of phenotype? Or does cultural identity play a role? Why do we even care, or do we—or should we?

A good example of what I’m talking about is Eartha Kitt and her biological daughter and granddaughter:

eartha

Here’s another—actress/dancer Victoria Rowell and her biological daughter and son (her daughter’s father was white and her son’s father was black; Victoria herself is mixed-race):

"Annie" Opening Night to Benefit CASA of Los Angeles - Arrivals

There are many many more examples that show the vagaries of heredity and race. But if you’re inclined to mock the Spokane NAACP for being so gullible as to accept Dolezal as a bona fide black person, it’s instructive to remember the people pictured above. How do they identify themselves? Biracial? They in fact do have one black parent.

The most intriguing examples of racial phenotypes being tricky (particularly regarding skin color) are fraternal twins where one of the pair looks black and one white. There are a number of twins featured on YouTube that fit that description—for example, these sets:

Biology shows how arbitrary many of our racial classifications can be. There are clusters of traits that vary across the globe in different combinations to create the shorthand categories known as race. As we move about more and more, and the gene pool becomes more mixed, the categories will become more fluid.

By the way—we have the heritage of Alexander Pushkin, father of Russian literature:

Ossip Abramovich Gannibal’s father, Pushkin’s great-grandfather, was Abram Petrovich Gannibal (1696”“1781), an African page kidnapped and brought to Russia as a gift for Peter the Great. Abram wrote in a letter to Empress Elizabeth, Peter the Great’s daughter, that Gannibal was from the town of “Lagon”. Largely on the basis of a mythical biography by Gannibal’s son-in-law Rotkirkh, some historians concluded from this that Gannibal was born in a part of what was then the Abyssinian Empire. Vladimir Nabokov, when researching Eugene Onegin, cast serious doubt on this origin theory. Later research by the scholars Dieudonné Gnammankou and Hugh Barnes eventually conclusively established that Gannibal was instead born in Central Africa, in an area bordering Lake Chad in modern-day Cameroon. After education in France as a military engineer, Gannibal became governor of Reval and eventually Général en Chef (the third most senior army rank) in charge of the building of sea forts and canals in Russia.

That black ancestry is a lot more distant than a parent, but it’s still interesting; I learned about it in college, long ago. Here’s a portrait of Pushkin:

pushkin

On the subject of the fast-track trade bill…

The New Neo Posted on by

… otherwise known as Obamatrade, I trust Jeff Sessions far more than I would trust Ryan. Sessions claims:

If, as promoters amazingly suggest, the President had more powers without fast-track, he would veto it. The authority granted in “Trade Promotion Authority” is authority transferred from Congress to the Executive and, ultimately, to international bureaucrats. The entire purpose of fast-track is for Congress to surrender its power to the Executive for six years.

Not a good idea at all.

If Obama is so hot for the bill to pass, it is difficult indeed to believe it would be one that limits his powers rather than expands them, although that’s what Ryan would have you believe.

Sessions explains the bill’s impact:

Finally, it must be observed that this is not a “free trade” deal. It is, as Daniel DiMicco explained, a ”˜unilateral trade disarmament’ and ”˜the enablement of foreign mercantilism,’ whereby we open our markets to new foreign imports and they keep their non-tariff barriers that close their markets to ours. President Obama refuses to answer questions about the impact on unemployment, wage stagnation, and trade deficits. He refuses because the answer is all three will get worse.

Although the House voted the bill down decisively yesterday, the fight’s not over. Apparently the plan is to bring it up for another vote next week. But I’m not sure there are enough twistable arms to get this bill to pass. Its rejection was strongly bipartisan, although for different reasons for each party.

It reminds me a little bit of the Enabling Act in Germany in 1933—not in degree, because the Enabling Act had an enormously broad sweep compared to the narrow one of the trade bill. But the upshot of the trade bill would be that Congress itself would be voting to give Obama more power.

To extend the somewhat-strained analogy, McConnell would be acting in the role of Ludwig Kaas, the head of the Centre Party and an opponent of Hitler who in 1933 nevertheless acquiesced in the Enabling Act and helped it to pass.

The Enabling Act is famous for being the mechanism by which the Reichstag effectively voted itself out of power and out of relevance. Hitler wouldn’t have needed it if he’d had a strong enough majority in the legislature, but his party had been unable to obtain it through the previous election despite tons of intimidation by the Nazis towards the opposition and the populace. So he decided to finesse the public by cobbling together enough of a coalition to give him powers that would make it unnecessary for him to worry about how the Reichstag would vote thereafter. One coalition, one time, and his troubles were over. A combination of threats, arrests (of the Communists, for example), physical intimidation, and lying promises did the trick. Kaas (who was a priest) was lied to, although it’s not clear whether he believed Hitler’s promises or just didn’t see any alternatives to succumbing:

Later that month, from 15 March, [Kass] was the main advocate supporting the Hitler administration’s Enabling Act in return for certain constitutional and, allegedly ecclesiastic guarantees. Hitler responded positively via Papen. On 21 and 22 March the Centre leadership negotiated with Hitler on the conditions and reached an agreement. A letter, in which Hitler would confirm the agreement in writing, was promised by the government but never delivered.

Kaas – as much as the other party leaders – was aware of the doubtful nature of any guarantees, and, when the Centre fraction assembled on 23 March to decide on their vote, he still advised his fellow party members to support the bill, given the “precarious state of the fraction”, saying: “On the one hand we must preserve our soul, but on the other hand a rejection of the Enabling Act would result in unpleasant consequences for fraction and party. What is left is only to guard us against the worst. Were a two-thirds majority not obtained, the government’s plans would be carried through by other means. The President has acquiesced in the Enabling Act. From the DNVP no attempt of relieving the situation is to be expected.”

A considerable group of parliamentarians however opposed the chairman’s course, among whom were the former Chancellors, his nemesis Heinrich Bré¼ning and Joseph Wirth and former minister Adam Stegerwald. The opponents also argued in regard to Catholic social teaching that ruled out participating in an act of revolution. The proponents however argued that a “national revolution” had already occurred with Hitler’s appointment and the presidential decree suspending basic rights, and that the Enabling Act would contain revolutionary force and move the government back to a legal order. Both groupings were not unaffected by Hitler’s self-portrayal as a moderate seeking co-operation, as given on the Day of Potsdam of 21 March, as against the more revolutionary SA led by Ernst Ré¶hm.

In the end the majority of Centre parliamentarians supported Kaas’s proposal. Bré¼ning and his followers agreed to respect party discipline by also voting in favour of the bill.

On 23 March, the Reichstag assembled at midday under turbulent circumstances. Some SA men served as guards, while others crowded outside the building, both to intimidate any opposing views. Hitler’s speech, which emphasised the importance of Christianity to the German culture, was aimed particularly at assuaging the Centre Party’s sensibilities and almost verbatim incorporated Kaas’s requested guarantees. Kaas gave a speech, voicing the Centre’s support for the bill amid “concerns put aside”, while Bré¼ning notably remained silent.

If you look at Hitler’s speech before the vote, it will probably send a shiver of dread down your spine for its duplicitous and soothing message to those of a religious bent. Also, in Orwellian fashion, the Act was actually called (in German, of course), “Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich.”

Only one person, the leftist Otto Wels, spoke against it. What happened next was telling:

After [Wels’] speech ended, Hitler took to the podium once more, working himself into a rage and dropping the mask of pacifism. In his final appeal to parliamentarians, he asked them to “sanction that which we could have taken anyway.”

Doesn’t that say it all?

The OPM security breach: how bad could it be?

The New Neo Posted on by

Bad.

It turns out that the breach of OPM security was much worse than previously reported. There are a bunch of good posts on the topic at Ace’s (see this, this, and this for some details).

For example, it wasn’t discovered for a long time:

The massive hack into federal systems announced last week was far deeper and potentially more problematic than publicly acknowledged, with hackers believed to be from China moving through government databases undetected for more than a year, sources briefed on the matter told ABC News.

“If [only] they knew the full extent of it,” one U.S. official said about those affected by the intrusion into the Office of Personnel Management’s information systems.

If only.

And it wasn’t the government that finally made the discovery of the breach, although we’d been led to believe that was the case. Apparently, it was actually discovered by accident by a private company:

According to a Wall Street Journal report, the breach was indeed discovered in April. But according to sources who spoke to the WS”s Damian Paletta and Siobhan Hughes, it was in fact discovered during a sales demonstration of a network forensics software package called CyFIR by its developer, CyTech Services. “CyTech, trying to show OPM how its cybersecurity product worked, ran a diagnostics study on OPM’s network and discovered malware was embedded on the network,” Paletta and Hughes reported.

Even the most elementary precautions had not been followed.

“We believe that Social Security numbers were not encrypted, a cybersecurity failure that is absolutely indefensible and outrageous,” Cox said in the letter. The [government employees’] union called the breach “an abysmal failure on the part of the agency to guard data that has been entrusted to it by the federal workforce.”…

Cox complained in the letter that “very little substantive information has been shared with us, despite the fact that we represent more than 670,000 federal employees in departments and agencies throughout the executive branch.”…

Mike Rogers, the former chairman of the House intelligence committee, said last week that Chinese intelligence agencies have for some time been seeking to assemble a database of information about Americans. Those personal details can be used for blackmail, or also to shape bogus emails designed to appear legitimate while injecting spyware on the networks of government agencies or businesses Chinese hackers are trying to penetrate.

U.S. intelligence officials say China, like the U.S., spies for national security advantage. Unlike the U.S., they say, China also engages in large-scale theft of corporate secrets for the benefit of state-sponsored enterprises that compete with Western companies. Nearly every major U.S. company has been hacked from China, they say.

More here:

The OPM had no IT security staff until 2013, and it showed. The agency was harshly criticized for its lax security in an inspector general’s report released last November that cited its lack of encryption and the agency’s failure to track its equipment. Investigators found that the OPM failed to maintain an inventory list of all of its servers and databases and didn’t even know all the systems that were connected to its networks. The agency also failed to use multi-factor authentication for workers accessing the systems remotely from home or on the road.

Sort of reminds me of the Obamacare website debacle, only worse.

Remember when companies and governments somehow managed to be run without the aid of computers? When spies had to either enter the facilities, or worm their way into them, or use blackmail (or sex) on someone who worked there to get the information, and the amount of data was limited by how much they could carry? Those were the days, my friend.

Passing for black

The New Neo Posted on by

Years ago, it used to be pretty common for light-skinned blacks to try to “pass” for white. When black people faced a tremendous amount of prejudice it made a certain amount of sense to do so, although I would assume it was not an easy decision.

Fast forward to now, and we have the case of Rachel Dolezal, president of the Spokane, Washington, chapter of the NAACP, who has a different approach. She’s apparently been falsely claiming to be black.

Well, why not? This opened doors for her that might have been more difficult to budge had she presented herself as a garden-variety white-bread white-privilege type. It’s not unheard of for people to falsely (or sometimes mistakenly) claim a certain status or identity in order to get some special consideration (Elizabeth Warren, are you listening?). There’s everything from fake racial claims to fake illnesses (Munchausen’s syndrome) to fake children’s illnesses (Munchausen’s by proxy) to fake disability claims to fake professional credentials, and on and on and on.

Apparently it’s not so hard to do if a person is sufficiently determined. Dolezal appears to have availed herself of a perm and some makeup or spray tan, and voila:

dolezal

White people are allowed to join the NAACP (especially in Spokane, Washington, where there aren’t all that many black people to begin with). They are even allowed to hold office in it, and sometimes they do. But deception is a no-no. However, that’s not the worst of Dolezal’s probable deceptions. She appears to be quite the fabricator, and although her level of detail isn’t in the Stephen Glass-ish range, she’s pretty creative and prolific:

To get the whole story, read this article, but here are some excerpts:

Dolezal, a multi-media artist, professor of Africana studies at Eastern Washington University and former instructor at North Idaho College in Coeur d’Alene, has reportedly made similar ethnicity claims to local media outlets. In recent years, she has portrayed herself physically, and on social media platforms, as a woman of black African-American heritage.

However, her parents, Ruthanne and Larry Dolezal, who are both white and live in the Troy/Libby area in Montana, told The Press their daughter is not African-American. They backed up the claim with a copy of their daughter’s birth certificate and photos. The images show a younger, pale, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Dolezal who looks much different than the woman with caramel-colored skin now leading the Spokane NAACP and helping review claims of police misconduct in that city.

“Rachel is very good at using her artistic skills to transform herself,” Ruthanne said in a recent telephone interview…

n a February issue of the Easterner, EWU’s student-run newspaper, Dolezal reportedly told a reporter that the man who raised her with her mother is her stepfather. In January, a photo of Dolezal and a black man appeared on the Spokane NAACP’s Facebook page with the message: “President Dolezal’s father announced today that he will be coming to town for January 19th ribbon-cutting ceremony for the NAACP office … and is expected to speak at the 7 p.m. MLK tribute membership meeting.”

But the man in the photo is not her father. The person in the photo is Albert Wilkerson – a black man who lived in North Idaho and volunteered at the Human Rights Education Institute several years ago when Dolezal was in charge of the organization’s education programs. A similar picture was posted on Dolezal’s personal Facebook page in December, with a comment made from Dolezal’s account on the social media platform: “L-R: Me, my oldest son Izaiah, and my Dad.”

Dolezal’s mother said she has never met Albert Wilkerson and Rachel does not have a stepfather. She said her daughter’s father is Larry Dolezal, a former Lincoln County Commissioner in Montana. Ruthanne and Larry just celebrated their 41st wedding anniversary on Monday, she said.

“Anybody who lives in the town of Troy or Libby knows that Larry is her father,” Ruthanne said.

Wilkerson, who has since moved away from the area, could not be reached for comment.

Dolezal’s birth certificate filed in Lincoln County, Montana in 1977 states that Ruthanne is her mother and Lawrence Albert Dolezal is her father.

Ruthanne also clarified that Izaiah, who Dolezal often says is her son, is actually Dolezal’s adopted brother. Between 1993 and 1995, Ruthanne and Larry adopted four black infants: Ezra, Izaiah, Zachariah and Esther.

The story is pretty Byzantine, but it also involves a great many allegations by Dolezal of hate crimes against her, mainly involving nooses placed on her property and that sort of thing—that for various reasons are now considered to be highly suspect allegations.

Dolezal is, of course, denying that she’s done anything wrong. But she has a funny way of doing so:

KREM 2 asked to address the public sentiment that she misrepresented her race.

“I can understand that. And like I said, it’s more important to me to clarify that to the black community, and with my executive board, than it really is for me to explain it to a community that I quite frankly don’t think understands the definitions of race and ethnicity,” said Dolezal.

Her parent’s explanation for her behavior seems as good as any, at least in the psychological sense:

Ruthanne and Larry Dolezal said their daughter has always identified with the African American culture and had black siblings who were adopted. They said she went to school in Mississippi and was part of a primarily African American community.

The Dolezal’s said Rachel married and later divorced a black man. They said after the divorce in 2004 Rachel began identifying differently. She started claiming to be partially African American and the daughter of bi-racial parents. They said they have noticed her change in physical appearance but do not know how she did so.

“Rachel has wanted to be somebody she’s not. She’s chosen not to just be herself but to represent herself as an African American woman or a biracial person. And that’s simply not true,” said Ruthanne Dolezal.

The Dolezal’s said they do not have a problem with Rachel advocating for a civil rights group for African Americans, rather that she is being deceptive about it.

Rachel’s parents said she distanced herself from them and has not talked to them recently…

Rachel said she does not consider her biological parents her real parents.

That’s the psychological part, which I believe is true. But there’s also a practical part: getting perks (jobs, appointments, attention) that she otherwise wouldn’t have had access to.

Quite a few people have made analogies to the Bruce/Kaitlin Jenner transformation. After all, both are cases of a person feeling and/or thinking that he/she is something he/she is not, or at least was not at birth.

It’s true, for people who look physically as though they could be either white or black, that a racial identity really is to a certain extent a constructed identity, a matter of self-identification. In the biological sense, race is a cluster of traits (such as dark skin) which exist on a continuum within a race with no definite dividing line, and also exist across races—for example, there are Caucasians with far darker skin than many American blacks.

But someone such as Dolezal, who was born to white parents and is genetically white but is clearly trying to give the impression that she is black in more than the “constructed narrative” sense, has apparently been perpetrating a deception. The analogy to Jenner, who is not being deceptive and who acknowledges having been born biologically (and genetically) male, breaks down.

[NOTE: One thing I wonder is how Dolezal thought she could keep this secret forever. Did she think her parents would never speak up? Or did she think they would not be believed if they did?]

Obama and HUD: you can run, but you can’t hide

The New Neo Posted on by

Obama wants to end neighborhoods of privilege, under some sort of “disparate impact” rule (sound familiar?) combined with an executive order that bypasses Congress (also sound familiar?).

The goal is “diversity”, and here’s the way it would work:

A final Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) rule due out this month is aimed at ending decades of deep-rooted segregation around the country.

The regulations would use grant money as an incentive for communities to build affordable housing in more affluent areas while also taking steps to upgrade poorer areas with better schools, parks, libraries, grocery stores and transportation routes as part of a gentrification of those communities…

This is something resembling the ill-fated school busing policies in Boston during the 1970s, although in that case part of the deal was that not only were black kids bused into mostly-white schools, but white kids (from poor communities—not the rich white kids, who were spared) were also bused into mostly-black schools. I wrote at length about the ensuing havoc created in both communities here.

This would be social engineering at its very finest. And it involves (among other things) the pretense that the only reason a person would want to live in a rich, protected community would be racial prejudice—rather than the fact that such communities are safer, have better schools, and more law-abiding people.

And forget about liberty—what’s that?

The way the camel got its nose inside the tent is through HUD. The directive would apply to communities that get HUD funds, which is a lot of communities (about 1250):

HUD says it is obligated to take the action under the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prohibited direct and intentional housing discrimination, such as a real estate agent not showing a home in a wealthy neighborhood to a black family or a bank not providing a loan based on someone’s race.

The agency is also looking to root out more subtle forms of discrimination that take shape in local government policies that unintentionally harm minority communities, known as “disparate impact.”…

To qualify for certain funds under the regulations, cities would be required to examine patterns of segregation in neighborhoods and develop plans to address it. Those that don’t could see the funds they use to improve blighted neighborhoods disappear, critics of the rule say…

Critics of the rule say it would allow HUD to assert authority over local zoning laws. The agency could dictate what types of homes are built where and who can live in those homes, said Gosar, who believes local communities should make those decisions for themselves rather than relying on the federal government.

If enacted, the rule could depress property values as cheaper homes crop up in wealthy neighborhoods and raise taxes, Gosar warned.

It could also tilt the balance of political power as more minorities are funneled into Republican-leaning neighborhoods, he suggested.

All of this—all—is a feature, not a bug, in the eyes of the Obama administration. It’s part of the fundamental transformation of America.

One would think most Americans would be against this. But how many Americans even know about it? How much coverage is this getting from the MSM? I’m not seeing it; the only articles I see are from the right.

Republicans in the House have not been idle on this:

Republicans are trying to block the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule. Before passing HUD’s funding bill this week, the GOP-led House approved Gosar’s amendment prohibiting the agency from following through with the rule.

What if HUD decides to defy it and follows through with the rule anyway? What could be done to stop them, I wonder, and will it be done?

[NOTE: Much more here.

By the way, this is been in the works for years, somewhat under the radar. See this.

I bet after Obama leaves the White House, though, he’d be living in a neighborhood that’s unaffected by it.]

How the Jeb Bush campaign went astray

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s a loooong article in the WaPo about how Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign has failed to ignite much enthusiasm, and why that might be so. It focuses on errors of strategy and tactics, and the decisions made around those things

But the real explanation, IMHO, is much much simpler: Bush is an unappealing candidate.

Very few Republicans, and no conservatives (otherwise known as “the base”) think much of him. They don’t like his attitude about immigration. They don’t like the fact that he’s another Bush, and they are sick of Bushes.

Jeb also comes across as energyless. I’ve watched him speak a few times, and he’s a big snooze.

So, why would anyone (other than some financial backers who have a long association with the Bush family and think it’s in their interest to support Jeb) be interested in furthering his candidacy? There’s a huge slate of candidates this year—most of whom are conservative, articulate, young, and full of energy. Nearly all of them (or maybe all of them) seem better than Bush.

The only way Bush wins the nomination is if the sheer number of opponents splits the conservative vote into many little pieces. Even then, I don’t see how he’d get enough votes to win outright, and we’d probably end up with a brokered convention. As time goes on, I think some of the weaker candidates will end up dropping out, and this will help. I really wish it would be Bush who would drop out, but it appears he has enough money to keep going for a long time.

The Germanwings co-pilot and patient privacy laws

The New Neo Posted on by

It seems that several doctors seen by Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz before his suicidal/homicidal crash felt that he should be grounded, but their hands were tied by strict doctor/patient privacy laws in Germany:

…[Lubitz] had seen seven doctors within the month before the March 24 crash, including three appointments with a psychiatrist.

Robin says that some of the doctors felt Lubitz was psychologically unstable, and some felt he was unfit to fly, but “unfortunately that information was not reported because of medical secrecy requirements.”

In Germany, doctors risk prison if they disclose information about their patients to anyone unless there is evidence they intend to commit a serious crime or harm themselves.

I understand the problem here, because we don’t want to make it so that pilots are afraid to go for help when they need it, out of fear they’d lose their jobs. On the other hand, the situation as reported above is absurd. An unstable pilot (or bus driver, for that matter, or anyone whose job involves carrying a lot of passengers and being responsible for their safety) does not have to talk about wanting to commit a specific crime or to kill him/herself to be extremely dangerous to the health and the lives of enormous numbers of people. The threshhold for reporting that unfitness and instability should be less than the standard for others.

In addition, prison as a penalty for doctors reporting without enough evidence has a tremendously chilling effect on the likelihood of doing so, leading almost inevitably to preventable tragedies like the one that occurred for Lubitz’s passengers and their families.

Obama does not ♥ Israel

The New Neo Posted on by

John Podhoretz describes a new book written by Michael Oren:

It’s called “Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide,” and I’m not sure that in the annals of diplomatic history there’s ever been anything quite like this astonishing account of Oren’s four years (2009-2013) as Israel’s ambassador in Washington…

It’s not that there’s lots of breaking news in “Ally” that will startle people. Rather, it makes news on almost every page with its incredibly detailed account of the root hostility of the Obama administration toward the Jewish state.

What makes the details especially credible is that Oren is no flame-breathing Israeli right-winger but very much (and at times distressingly) an Establishment creature and one, moreover, who makes it clear he drank the Obama hope-and-change Kool-Aid in 2008. (Indeed, he now serves in Israel’s Knesset not as a member of Bibi Netanyahu’s Likud but of the new centrist Kulanu party.)

So, it seems the Oren started out as an admirer of Obama, but soon learned how mistaken he was. I wonder why he ever thought Obama wasn’t hostile to Israel; was it just Obama’s pro-Israel rhetoric, and didn’t Oren look any deeper into Obama’s past? I suppose I’ll have to read Oren’s book to find the answer.

Here’s more about the Obama administration’s treatment of Israel and of Oren:

Example: The Palestinian Authority made moves toward seeking a declaration of statehood at the United Nations in 2011, which would’ve triggered a law shutting down their US mission and suspending all aid to the PA and to UN agencies that recognized Palestine.

In response, Deputy Secretary of State Tom Nides called Oren into his fancy Foggy Bottom office and screamed at him: “You don’t want the f”Š-”Š-”Š-”Šing UN to collapse because of your f”Š-”Š-”Š-”Šing conflict with the Palestinians, and you don’t want the f”Š-”Š-”Š-”Šing Palestinian Authority to fall apart either.”

Class act.

More:

Oren also writes about bizarrely petty offenses. In 2010, Obama left Israel off a list of countries he mentioned as having helped in the wake of the Haiti earthquake when it was the first nation in the world to dispatch relief teams and get them to the disaster sites ”” because the president was angry about something having to do with the peace process.

But Obama specializes in “bizarrely petty offenses.” Why would anyone be surprised at this?

Lastly, we have:

Throughout his tenure, Oren believed he was uniquely well-equipped to explain Israel to Americans and America to the Israelis. But how to explain a president who recently said that the Israel he admires is the Israel of kibbutzim and Golda Meir ”” a ludicrously rosy and unrealistic image of the Jewish state on par with wanting to look like Disneyland’s Main Street USA?

But if Obama’s statement is true, it’s really no mystery at all. Obama is first and foremost a man of the left. The left used to love Israel during its early years, when Israel was a leftist country founded by leftists, and the kibbutzim were part of that movement. Meir herself was a leftist through and through:

In 1913 she returned to North Division High, graduating in 1915. While there, she became an active member of Young Poale Zion, which later became Habonim, the Labor Zionist youth movement. She spoke at public meetings, embraced Socialist Zionism and hosted visitors from Palestine…

n 1913 she had begun dating Morris Meyerson. She was a committed Labor Zionist and he was a dedicated socialist. Together, they left their jobs to join a kibbutz in Palestine in 1921…

In the British Mandate of Palestine, Meir and Meyerson joined a kibbutz. Their first application to kibbutz Merhavia in the Jezreel Valley was rejected, but later on they were accepted. Her duties included picking almonds, planting trees, working in the chicken coops, and running the kitchen. Recognizing her leadership abilities, the kibbutz chose her as its representative to the Histadrut, the General Federation of Labour…

In 1934, when Meir returned from the United States, she joined the Executive Committee of the Histadrut and she moved up the ranks to become the head of its Political Department. This appointment was important training for her future role in Israeli leadership…

Meir was a member of the Mapai Party, “a left-wing political party…[that] was the dominant force in Israeli politics until its merger into the modern-day Israeli Labor Party in 1968.” The party presided over an establishment of a welfare state in Israel, and Meir was instrumental in the task.

That is the Israel that Obama liked, if he liked any Israel at all.

Baltimore prosecutor Mosby ordered increased policing in the area where Freddie Gray was apprehended

The New Neo Posted on by

The plot thickens with Mosby:

Roughly three weeks before Baltimore police officers arrested Gray for possession of an illegal knife Mosby herself was strongly advocating for substantially increased policing in the very neighborhood where Gray would be taken into custody, according to a report by the Baltimore Sun.

Lt. Kenneth Butler, a shift commander for more than a decade, and a representative for an advocacy group for women and minority officers, is quoted in the Sun report as saying that he had never before seen such orders come from the state’s attorney’s office. Further, he expressed no uncertainty about what the consequences would be: “Once you’re given an order, you have to carry it out. It’s just that simple.” And in terms of the tactics that would necessarily be involved? ” They want increased productivity, whether it be car stops, field interviews, arrests ”” that’s what they mean by measurables. You have to use whatever tools you have ”” whether it be bike officers, cameras, foot officers, whatever you have ”” to abate that problem. So you’re going to have to be aggressive.”

The original source of the order is Mosby herself, according to emails unearthed by the defense counsel that were sent to the six police officers criminally charged in Gray’s death.

So the six cops were following orders from Mosby herself, and they were warned that they would need to produce “daily measurables” to document their performance in carrying out the orders.

Mosby should be recused, for that and a host of other reasons.

And I bet at this point she’s wishing she’d followed Hillary Clinton’s lead and used her own private email address and her own server.