Hillary Clinton supports the fight

The New Neo Posted on by

Glad you cleared that up, Hillary [hat tip: Ace]:

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s vague statements on minimum wage confused MSNBC’s Morning Joe host Mika Brzezinski on Monday morning.

“Hillary Clinton did not say she specifically supports $15 an hour minimum wage,” said co-host Willie Geist. “She supports those workers’ fight to get the fifteen dollars.”

“What? I don’t get it,” Brzezinski said.

I cannot help but be reminded of one of my favorite Monty Python bits, from “Life of Brian”:

“Here, I’ve got an idea: Suppose you agree that he can’t actually have babies without having a womb (which is nobody’s fault, not even the Romans’), but that he can have the right to have babies.”

“Good idea, Judith—we shall fight the oppressors for your right to have babies, brother (sister)!”

Turkey deals Erdogan a setback, Kurds gain

The New Neo Posted on by

I can’t say I have my finger on the pulse of Turkish politics, but it appears to me that this could be good news:

Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan, has suffered his biggest setback in 13 years of amassing power as voters denied his ruling party a parliamentary majority for the first time since 2002 and gave the country’s large Kurdish minority its biggest voice ever in national politics.

The election result on Sunday, with almost all votes counted, appeared to wreck ErdoÄŸan’s ambition of rewriting the constitution to establish himself as an all-powerful executive president. ErdoÄŸan’s governing Justice and Development party, or AKP, won the election comfortably for the fourth time in a row, with around 41% of the vote, but that represented a steep fall in support from 49% in 2011, throwing the government of the country into great uncertainty.

Sounds as though Erdogan was going to take the next step towards solidifying his control, and the voters pulled back (while they were still able to). However, his party is still the strongest one in the country.

…[The results] meant it was unlikely that the AKP [Erdogan’s party] would be able to form a majority government, forcing it to negotiate a coalition, probably with extreme nationalists, or to call a fresh election if no parliamentary majority can be secured within six weeks.

The new party, the HDP or Peoples’ Democratic party, largely representing the Kurds but also encompassing leftwing liberals, surpassed the steep 10% threshold for entering parliament to take more than 12% of the vote and around 80 seats in the 550-strong chamber.

Since I had no idea what “leftwing liberals” means in the Turkish political climate, I looked it up to get a general picture. It certainly appears to be more “leftwing” than “liberal”—which some of you may think is a distinction without a difference, but my point is that in Turkey right now we appear to be seeing the old dichotomy of religious fundamentalist statists vs. anti-capitalist socialist statists:

The HDP is a democratic socialist party that adheres to anti-capitalism and aspires to end religious, gender and racial discrimination. The party has a 50% quota for women and a 10% quota for the LGBT community when fielding candidates. The party is also environmentalist, opposing the introduction of nuclear power in Turkey and also speaking out strongly in favour of the Gezi Park protests in 2013 that began as an environmentalist demonstration. It is said to resonate with liberal, middle-class Turks. Despite their anti-nationalist stance, the party has been perceived by some to be a Kurdish nationalist party due to their affiliation with the Democratic Regions Party and their support for minority rights…

The HDP was described by its founding chairpersons as a party that aims to eliminate the exploitation of labour and to fundamentally re-establish a democracy in which honourable and humanitarian individuals can live together as equal citizens. It was further described as a party aiming to bring about fundamental change to the existing Capitalist system though uniting a wide range of left-wing opposition movements…

Concerns were raised that the inclusion of the Kurdish nationalist HDK member Peace and Democracy Party in the HDP would raise allegations that the HDP was also a mainly Kurdish orientated party. However, é–nen claimed that the HDP’s key goal was to establish a different perspective of viewing the Turkish political scene and moving away from the existing ‘Kurdish versus Turkish’ dichotomy that had become institutionally entrenched within Turkish political perceptions.

It sounds as though it’s not time to break out the champagne.

Jailbreak: cherchez la femme

The New Neo Posted on by

Why, what a surprise:

A female prison worker was interrogated Sunday as a possible accomplice in the Hollywood-style escape of two killers from an upstate penitentiary, sources told The Post.

“It’s an employee being questioned,’’ a high-level source said, adding that the worker, who is not a guard, had already been yanked from her post.

Sources said the worker may have been wooed by one of the escaped cons, Richard Matt, 48, an infamous lady killer.

“He has a way with the ladies,” the source said…

Authorities said Matt and David Sweat, 34, escaped late Friday or early Saturday, by using power tools from one of several construction sites at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, 20 miles from the Canadian border.

This fits a certain pattern of recent jailbreaks, although at least in this case it wasn’t a guard alleged to have helped. Here’s an earlier incident of a female guard helping a prisoner escape, and here’s another one.

I wrote a lengthy piece two years ago about prison guards of the opposite sex ([particularly women in men’s prisons, since they are more common) and why the practice makes for some vulnerabilities. The inmates are often con artists as well as cons, and you know what con artists can do. In a previous case, a convict by the name of Murphy had quite a little racket going:

Documents detailing the state investigation into Murphy’s liaisons show he persuaded at least five Montana female prison employees to break the rules over several years. He even convinced his therapist to have sex with him, and was able to arrange one-on-one meetings with her even though prison officials knew of his past history with female workers”¦

Read the whole thing. You may find that the solution isn’t quite as simple as you might hope.

Beauteous Acadia

The New Neo Posted on by

I was there this weekend:

Acadia2015 011

Acadia2015 019

Unfortunately, when I came home last night I suddenly realized I am coming down with a cold.

I hate, hate, hate colds.

Michael Slager indicted for the killing of Walter Scott

The New Neo Posted on by

This was the case that virtually no one was defending: that of a policeman who killed a fleeing suspect by shooting him in the back. Now the South Carolina policeman (who is no longer with the force), Michael Slager, has been indicted by a grand jury for murder.

This is one of the cases in which a trial is probably the right way to go. Although Slager has a defense argument, the killing appeared egregious and unnecessary:

The 33-year-old Slager, who has been jailed since his arrest, faces 30 years to life in prison if convicted. Wilson said the death penalty does not seem to apply because there were no aggravating circumstances such as robbery or kidnapping as required under state law…

Slager told authorities he initially tried to stun Scott with his Taser, but it didn’t work, and that as both men scuffled over the stun gun, he fired his handgun at Scott in self-defense. The video shows the men briefly scuffling over what appears to be a Taser before Scott runs away and the officer begins firing at Scott’s back.

Another video, from the officer’s dashboard camera, shows Scott bolting from his car after Slager pulled him over and checked his identification. Slager then chased him down.

Family members have speculated that Scott may have tried to flee because he was fearful of returning to jail over about $18,000 he owed in late child-support payments.

Why didn’t Slager chase him down again? After all, he’d successfully done so once. Was he tired? What made him think this was worth shooting a suspect in the back? Yes, there was a chance that Scott might have been a dangerous criminal, but police can’t be shooting all fleeing suspects on the off chance that they are extremely dangerous.

Fleeing is always stupid (unless you are facing the death penalty for some other crime, in which case I suppose it makes sense to risk it), as is trying to wrest a taser away from an officer. But it is certainly not an infallible indication of extreme dangerousness, nor does it appear that Slager ever felt threatened physically by Scott in anything like the manner that Darren Wilson did when attacked by Michael Brown.

There’s also no indication that this case had anything to do with race, although of course it will be made to be about race and has been made to be about race. As far as I can see, it’s actually about whether there was an aggressive over-reaction by a cop. The video shows that a good case can be made that the answer is “yes.”

Men en pointe: please do not try this at home

The New Neo Posted on by

I remain fascinated with the dancing of Georgian men. That’s “Georgia” as in here:

Georgia

In Georgian folk dance tradition it’s the men rather than the women who sometimes dance on their toes, or en pointe as we like to say in the Frenchified ballet world. But it’s a a very different pointe technique then the one used by the female ballet dancer (always female, except for parody). The ballet dancer balances on the very tips of her toes, and the strength of the foot is developed in its arch, which forms a lovely curve that should have no breaks in it:

pointeballet

pointeballetxray

Male feet tend to be less flexible, even in dancers, although there are certainly exceptions to the rule. The Georgian dancers aren’t trying for that elegant ballet line. They are into a different effect—one of stabbing the ground, almost clawing at it with the forefoot bent and the weight on the knuckle of the toe, a broken and harsh line instead of a seamless elegant one:

georgiamanpointe

The point of Georgian men’s pointe work (sorry; couldn’t resist) is to convey daring as well as skill; to show that the man is afraid of nothing. Don’t believe me? Take a look at this, and pay special attention when you get to minute 2:17:

Speaking of dance as a show of daring-do, this next clip is so scary I’m not sure I’d even want to be in the audience for it. Here’s a description of the type of dance it is:

Khevsuruli (ხევსურული) ”“ This mountain dance is probably the best representative of the Georgian spirit. It unites love, courage, and respect for women, toughness, competition, skill, beauty, and colorfulness into one amazing performance. The dance starts out with a flirting couple. Unexpectedly, another young men appears, also seeking the hand of the woman. A conflict breaks out and soon turns into a vigorous fighting between the two men and their supporters. The quarrel is stopped temporarily by the woman’s veil. Traditionally, when a woman throws her head veil between two men, all disagreements and fighting halts. However, as soon as the woman leaves the scene, the fighting continues even more vigorously…At the end, a woman (or women) comes in and stops the fighting with her veil once again…As a characteristic of Georgian dances, Khevsuruli is also very technical and requires intense practice and utmost skill in order to perform the dance without hurting anyone.

Indeed (the real action begins at around minute 4:50 so you can skip ahead to that, but I left the whole video as is in case you want to see the entire dance intact):

Jenner and Penner

The New Neo Posted on by

Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner refers to his/her state as “the new normal,” but transgenderism is actually quite unusual in the statistical sense, and it’s a poorly understood phenomenon as well. Some people think transgendered people are mentally disturbed, and some think they are just people trapped in the wrong body who need a body correction. But either way, it’s a phenomenon that’s neither average nor unremarkable.

I’ve written before about my view on the phenomenon of transgendered people, but I’ll recap here:

You know, I’ve got nothing against transgendered people. Based on the fairly extensive research I’ve read, both pro and con, I think the evidence indicates that transgenderism is a real issue that causes real suffering for a relatively small percentage of the population, and that for many of those it is probably something they were born with, perhaps having to do with hormonal glitches affecting fetal brain development in utero.

But I don’t think that’s always the case. I don’t think transgendered people represent a unitary phenomenon at all. Some seem to make an excellent adjustment, with or without surgery, but some are acting out rather serious problems, and the problems are hardly limited to gender dysphoria. But what percentage of the whole each group represents I don’t know; I don’t think experts know, either.

Sexual reassignment surgery is a big, big step, one that Jenner hasn’t taken yet and one that many transgendered people never take—some because of lack of money, but some because they don’t want it.

A number of people writing about Jenner have brought up the story of Mike Penner. Not only did Penner’s last name rhyme with Jenner’s, but there were certain other parallels: a life in sports (although Penner was a sports writer for the LA Times rather than a star athlete), a marriage that ended in divorce, a great deal of publicity, and even a Vanity Fair photo shoot as part of the process of coming out. But Penner’s tale, although happy at the beginning of his coming-out, went sour pretty quickly, and he ended up changing his mind about sex assignment surgery and ultimately going into a deep depression and committing suicide.

Note that I use the pronoun “he” for Penner. That’s because, some time after deciding against the surgery, he also stopped taking female hormones and asked friends to call him “Mike” again.

Penner’s end was tragic but I’m not sure how much it tells as about any other transgendered people but him, although it is certainly a warning that some transgendered people may have very serious problems that are not being properly addressed, and that all is not necessarily sweetness and light once they achieve what they believe to be their dream. One of the many catalysts for Penner’s suicide was apparently the loss of his wife, whom he had somehow believed would consent to remain in a relationship with him, and about whom a friend heard him say with deep regret, “I had the perfect life with Lisa, and I threw it all away.”

One thing that seems undeniable is that transgendered people are at very high risk for suicide attempts and for completed suicides, and this appears to be true whether they have sexual assignment surgery or not:

A whopping 41% of people who are transgender or gender-nonconforming have attempted suicide sometime in their lives, nearly nine times the national average, according to a sweeping survey released three years ago…

Nearly two-thirds of respondents who were the victims of domestic violence at the hands of a family member had attempted suicide, the study also showed. Suicide attempts were less common among transgender and gender-nonconforming people who said their family ties had remained strong after they came out…

Being “out” as transgender was also tied to steeper risk, the study showed: People who tell everyone that they are transgender or gender-nonconforming, or who said that other people could always or usually tell that they were transgender, were more likely to have attempted suicide.

The study didn’t say whether these rates decreased after sex-reassignment surgery. That’s because such statistics are hard to come by. But they are not necessarily encouraging:

[A] review warns that the results of many gender reassignment studies are unsound because researchers lost track of more than half of the participants. For example, in a five-year study of 727 post-operative transsexuals published last year, 495 people dropped out for unknown reasons. Dr Hyde said the high drop out rate could reflect high levels of dissatisfaction or even suicide among post-operative transsexuals. He called for the causes of their deaths to be tracked to provide more evidence.

Dr Hyde said: “The bottom line is that although it’s clear that some people do well with gender reassignment surgery, the available research does little to reassure about how many patients do badly and, if so, how badly.”…

Research from the US and Holland suggests that up to a fifth of patients regret changing sex. A 1998 review by the Research and Development Directorate of the NHS Executive found attempted suicide rates of up to 18% noted in some medical studies of gender reassignment.

It is a sobering development in the transgender world, too, that Johns Hopkins—the hospital that pioneered sex reassignment surgery in the US—has ceased doing the surgery because doctors there found the results to be unrewarding on average:

We at Johns Hopkins University””which in the 1960s was the first American medical center to venture into “sex-reassignment surgery”””launched a study in the 1970s comparing the outcomes of transgendered people who had the surgery with the outcomes of those who did not. Most of the surgically treated patients described themselves as “satisfied” by the results, but their subsequent psycho-social adjustments were no better than those who didn’t have the surgery. And so at Hopkins we stopped doing sex-reassignment surgery, since producing a “satisfied” but still troubled patient seemed an inadequate reason for surgically amputating normal organs.

It now appears that our long-ago decision was a wise one. A 2011 study at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden produced the most illuminating results yet regarding the transgendered, evidence that should give advocates pause. The long-term study””up to 30 years””followed 324 people who had sex-reassignment surgery. The study revealed that beginning about 10 years after having the surgery, the transgendered began to experience increasing mental difficulties. Most shockingly, their suicide mortality rose almost 20-fold above the comparable nontransgender population.

The question, however, is whether it rose about the comparable transgender population that didn’t have surgery.

I do know that some transgendered people are extremely happy with their surgery and remain so. The problem is that medical science can’t seem to differentiate all that well, ahead of time, between those whom the surgery helps, those it does not, and those it ultimately harms. Another problem is that the intense politicization of the entire issue has made it hard for scientists to study it and publish findings with anything like the objectivity it deserves.

[NOTE: And this is just a horrendous, tragic story. It also indicates that Belgium has embarked on a very bad path.]

Hillary Clinton has great name recognition, but…

The New Neo Posted on by

…what is she being recognized for?

I think Megan McArdle may be onto something when she writes:

By allowing Clinton to take the lion’s share of the fundraising dollars and the media attention, the party has left itself without a plausible alternative candidate. That seemed dandy as long as she was easily trouncing Republicans in polls. But those polls were always going to narrow, because the early polls were basically measuring whether people recognized the candidate’s name, not whether they were going to vote for her more than a year hence. As the GOP race sorts out, and the front-runners achieve more public awareness, you’re going to see our highly partisan electorate lock into much narrower margins.

Moreover, Clinton will have less room to improve her margins than whoever the Republican is.

I think it matters a great deal which candidate the Republicans nominate, and how effectively the MSM and Democrats can cast that person as a villain. It that person is successfully demonized, many people would then go with the villain they know, Hillary.

D-Day: 71 years

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: The following is a repeat of a post from the 65th anniversary of D-day. I have added a small amount of new commentary to update.]

Today is the 71th anniversary of D-Day, the Normandy landings in WWII. Here’s a video with a few grainy clips of the Allies wading ashore:

I wonder how many people under forty, either here or in Europe, now know or care what happened there. The dog barks and the caravan moves on, and all that.

The world we now live in seems so vastly different, including the relationship between the US and western Europe. But make no mistake about it; if threatened in a way that finally gets their attention, Europeans would be counting on us again. And I have little doubt that our armed forces would be up to the task; the question is whether our government would. In the years that have passed since I first wrote this post, I have gotten to the point where I have little doubt that our government would not be up to the task, and I’m beginning to doubt whether our armed forces would, either, because of the way it’s been hamstrung under Obama.

But back to the D-day landings. About thirty-five years ago I visited Omaha Beach, site of the worst of the carnage. A quieter place than that beach and those huge cemeteries, with their lines of crosses set down as though with a ruler, you never did see.

omahacemetery.jpg

But the scene was quite different back in 1944. The D-day invasion marked the beginning of the end for the Germans.

The weather was a huge factor, and the Allied commanders had to make the decision knowing that the forecast for the day was iffy and the window of opportunity small. For reasons of visibility and navigation (maximum amount of moonlight and deepest water), the invasion needed to occur during a time of full moon and spring tides, and all the invasion forces had already been assembled and were at the ready. To postpone would have been hugely expensive and frustrating, but to go ahead in bad weather would have been suicidal.

This is how bad the weather looked, how difficult the decision was, and how much we owe to the meteorologists, who:

…were challenged to accurately predict a highly unstable and severe weather pattern. As [Eisenhower] indicated in the message to Marshall, “The weather yesterday which was [the] original date selected was impossible all along the target coast.” Eisenhower therefore was forced to make his decision to proceed with a June 6 invasion in the predawn blackness of June 5, while horizontal sheets of rain and gale force winds shuddered through the tent camp.

The initially bad weather ended up being an advantage in other ways, because the Germans were not expecting the invasion to occur yet for that reason:

Some [German] troops stood down, and many senior officers were away for the weekend. General Erwin Rommel, for example, took a few days’ leave to celebrate his wife’s birthday, while dozens of division, regimental, and battalion commanders were away from their posts at war games.

In addition, there was Hitler’s personality and his reluctance to give autonomy to his military commanders:

Hitler reserved to himself the authority to move the divisions in OKW Reserve, or commit them to action. On 6 June, many Panzer division commanders were unable to move because Hitler had not given the necessary authorization, and his staff refused to wake him upon news of the invasion.

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This didn’t mean that the beaches were not heavily fortified and manned, especially Omaha:

[The Germans] had large bunkers, sometimes intricate concrete ones containing machine guns and high caliber weapons. Their defense also integrated the cliffs and hills overlooking the beach. The defenses were all built and honed over a four year period.

The number of Allied casualties was enormous. Reading about it today makes one appreciate anew what these men faced, and how courageously they pressed on despite enormous difficulties. This is just a small sampler of what occurred on Omaha Beach at the outset; there was much more to come:

Despite these preparations, very little went according to plan. Ten landing craft were lost before they even reached the beach, swamped by the rough seas. Several other craft stayed afloat only because their passengers quickly bailed water with their helmets. Seasickness was also prevalent among the troops waiting offshore. On the 16th RCT front, the landing boats found themselves passing struggling men in life preservers, and on rafts, survivors of the DD tanks which had sunk. Navigation of the assault craft was made more difficult by the smoke and mist obscuring the landmarks they were to use in guiding themselves in, while a heavy current pushed them continually eastward.

As the boats approached within a few hundred yards of the shore, they came under increasingly heavy fire from automatic weapons and artillery. The force discovered only then the ineffectiveness of the pre-landing bombardment. Delayed by the weather, and attempting to avoid the landing craft as they ran in, the bombers had laid their ordnance too far inland, having no real effect on the coastal defenses.

These obstacles and unforeseen circumstances were extraordinarily costly in terms of the human sacrifice that occurred that day. Note that I use the word “obstacles and unforeseen circumstances” rather than “mistakes.” Today, if the same things had occurred (particularly if while under the aegis of the Bush W. Bush administration), they would be labeled unforgivable errors rather than the inevitable difficulties inherent in waging war, in which no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

Another historical footnote is the following passage from Eisenhower’s message to the Allied Expeditionary Forces: You are about to embark upon the great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. It’s another sign of how times have changed; the word “crusade” has become verboten.

In his pocket, Eisenhower also kept another statement, one to activate in case the invasion failed. It read:

Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.

The note was written in pencil on a simple piece of paper, and is housed in a special vault at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library & Museum in Abilene, Kansas, a bit of thought-provoking fodder for an alternate history that never occurred—fortunately for all of us.

Krauthammer…

The New Neo Posted on by

…on how the requirement for keeping electronic health records is driving doctors away from the practice of medicine.

I’ve heard this complaint myself from doctors I know. Ah, but bureaucrats know best in our brave new world.