ISIS: a bunch of…

The New Neo Posted on by

…entrepreneurial ghouls:

Middlemen with ties to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) have turned to a grim new method of trying to secure funds in recent days. With the group having failed to strike deals to ransom the U.S. hostages in its custody ”” instead beheading three of them since July ”” its intermediaries are now trying to negotiate the sale of the body of at least one of the men it killed.

Vile, but not really new. Palestinian terrorists have been trading Israeli bodies for live prisoners for a long time. And here is an exchange that featured the sides reversed. In general, though, I’m not aware of any Palesinian/Israeli body exchanges that involved money.

No wonder Jackie wanted Rolling Stone to take her out of the story before it was published

The New Neo Posted on by

After reading this article in the WaPo, we can safely say that it now appears likely that UVA’s Jackie didn’t just lie about whether she was raped at a fraternity. She appears to have lied about almost everything connected with whatever did or did not happen during some sort of incident that may or may not have occurred, and about the immediate aftermath.

Other than that, a very believable narrator.

Or maybe it was reporter Erdely who is responsible for some of the lies. At this point, we can be forgiven if we have trouble sorting it out.

According to Erdely, Jackie told three friends of the sexual assault shortly after it supposedly happened, and they suggested she keep mum. But the friends say that the story she told that night was not about a rape by nine men, but about being forced to give a group of five men oral sex.

Erdely not only did not try very hard to interview the alleged rapists, she also never interviewed Jackie’s three confidantes, and claimed that one of them refused to allow her an interview. But funny thing, now they are talking to the WaPo, and they’re telling a very different story:

The [Erdely] account alleged that the students worried about the effect it might have on their social status, how it might reflect on Jackie during the rest of her collegiate career, and how they suggested not reporting it. It set up the article’s theme: That U-Va. has a culture that is indifferent to rape.

“It didn’t happen that way at all,” Andy [one of Jackie’s three friends] said.

Instead, the friends remember being shocked. Though they did not notice any blood or visible injuries, they said they immediately urged Jackie to speak to police and insisted that they find her help. Instead, they said, Jackie declined and asked to be taken back to her dorm room. They went with her ”” two of them said they spent the night ”” seeking to comfort Jackie in what appeared to be a moment of extreme turmoil.

The students also expressed suspicions about Jackie’s allegations from that night. They said the name she provided as that of her date did not match anyone at the university, and U-Va. officials confirmed to The Post that no one by that name has attended the school.

And photographs that were texted to one of the friends showing her date that night actually were pictures depicting one of Jackie’s high school classmates in Northern Virginia. That man, now a junior at a university in another state, confirmed that the photographs are of him and said he barely knew Jackie and hasn’t been to Charlottesville for at least six years.

The friends said they never were contacted or interviewed by the pop culture magazine’s reporters or editors. Though vilified in the article as coldly indifferent to Jackie’s ordeal, the students said they cared deeply about their friend’s well-being and safety. Randall said that they made every effort to help Jackie that night.

“She had very clearly just experienced a horrific trauma,” Randall said. “I had never seen anybody acting like she was on that night before and I really hope I never have to again. … If she was acting on the night of Sept. 28, 2012, then she deserves an Oscar.”

The Rolling Stone article also said that Randall declined to be interviewed, “citing his loyalty to his own frat.” He told The Post that he never was contacted by Rolling Stone and would have agreed to an interview…

You really, really, really have to read the whole thing, because that’s just the small stuff; it actually gets worse from there. But the summary version of the rest is that the mysterious date that started the entire chain of events, “Drew” or whatever his name might have been given as, seems most likely to have been a fantasy person constructed by Jackie with the possible motivation of making “Randall” (one of the three student friends of Jackie) jealous. The photos she supplied of this Drew guy were of the aforementioned high school classmate. My guess (and believe me, this is just a speculation) is that that’s how the whole sorry mess began, as a way to make Randall more interested in dating her, and she later added on the assault story in order to make him feel sorry for her.

That could be wrong. Maybe it’s “Randall” who’s lying, but since his story seems to be corroborated by the others (at least as far as I can tell; it’s a bit unclear), I’d bet on his veracity over Jackie’s (or Erdely’s).

There’s more, lots more, but you get the idea. It’s becoming more and more apparent that Jackie is most likely a fabulist, perhaps with some pre-existing mental/emotional problems, and that it’s time for Erdely and the editors at Rolling Stone to choose another profession. However, I wonder whether there will be any repercussions for any of this.

Why did Feinstein release the report now?

The New Neo Posted on by

In my earlier post about the release of the Senate’s Intelligence Committee’s report on harsh interrogation practices under the Bush administration, I characterized the report as a partisan attempt to return to the good old days of Bush-bashing, when Democrats were riding high. But it’s a bit puzzling that it was Senator Dianne Feinstein—who is a partisan Democrat who sometimes actually seems to show regard for the security of the US and to be a hawk on terrorists (at least, a hawk compared to most other Democrats)—who ordered that release over the request of the current administration’s John Kerry.

So, why now? Feinstein’s answer is here, and the gist of it is that it was the Democrat’s last chance:

Timing, for Feinstein was a big factor. “I realize the Senate changes leadership in January, and so the likelihood of the report coming out next year was slim and none, so we had a limited opportunity after five and a half years of work to get this out,” she said. She conceded that the safety situation abroad was “difficult,” but, she continued, “It’s going to remain difficult.”…

There are many critics of Feinstein who point out that what is covered in the torture report is in the past, that President Obama ended the practices portrayed within it early in his administration. Feinstein’s great hope in publicizing the report now, at the last possible moment that she can, is that the harsh light it shines on the CIA’s practices in the early years after the 9/11 attacks will help ensure that those practices remain in the past. Cordes asked her whether it was fair to revisit what was done, given that the techniques used are different now.

“Read the report,” Feinstein said, “and you tell me if you think this is how you want the country to behave.”

Which is not an answer to the question, is it? At least, not a direct one.

It’s pretty clear what happened here. After the Republicans refused to work on a Democrat-controlled report that Republicans perceived from the start would be a predetermined hit job on the previous administration and the CIA (for example, the Democrats declined to follow the usual standards and did not interview the parties involved—sort of like Rolling Stone, if you think about it), the Democrats worked long and hard to write this. Realizing that in just one month they would no longer control the Senate committees they’ve been in charge of since 2007, it was now or never to dump the report on the public and the world.

Feinstein has a more personal reason to want revenge on the CIA:

A turning point for Ms. Feinstein [in her decision about whether to release the report] came in March with the disclosure that C.I.A. workers had infiltrated the computers used by Senate Intelligence Committee staff members to write the report. The C.I.A. also had made a criminal referral to the Justice Department of some of the committee staff members, accusing them of improperly gaining access to secret agency material.

Incensed at what she saw as a breach of the separation of powers and an effort to intimidate her staff, Ms. Feinstein went public on the Senate floor and exposed the rift between the agency and the Senate. John O. Brennan, the director of the C.I.A., was forced to apologize to the Senate for his agency’s conduct, and no inquiry was pursued against the staff members.

The fact that these practices are in the past considerably weakens Feinstein’s case for release of the report. Note also that this secret CIA monitoring of committee members (which was clearly wrong) was done under the aegis of the Obama administration, not Bush, and it was directed towards Democrats, not Republicans. Feinstein only seems concerned about violations of the separation of powers when it directly involves a violation of her powers, not the other myriad ways in which Obama has crossed that line.

ADDENDUM: Here’s Feinstein being asked a tough question by Wolf Blitzer:

The Nazis were socialists…

The New Neo Posted on by

…but they continue to be labeled right-wing by leftists with an agenda who would like to disavow them and tell the right “bounces off me and sticks to you.” Daniel Hannan attempts to correct the record:

On 16 June 1941, as Hitler readied his forces for Operation Barbarossa, Josef Goebbels looked forward to the new order that the Nazis would impose on a conquered Russia…[In] the place of debased, Jewish Bolshevism, the Wehrmacht would deliver “der echte Sozialismus”: real socialism.

Goebbels never doubted that he was a socialist. He understood Nazism to be a better and more plausible form of socialism than that propagated by Lenin. Instead of spreading itself across different nations, it would operate within the unit of the Volk.

So total is the cultural victory of the modern Left that the merely to recount this fact is jarring. But few at the time would have found it especially contentious.

Read the whole thing, and send it to your leftist friends if you want them to stop talking to you.

The Senate report on the CIA’s harsh treatment of terrorist prisoners under Bush

The New Neo Posted on by

There is little question that the Senate Intelligence Committee’s release of a report on harsh interrogation techniques during the Bush era is politically motivated. One way to tell is that Bob Kerrey, Vietnam vet and ex-Senator and governor of Nebraska and Democrat, is harshly critical of the process that led to the report. Read the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt from the beginning:

I regret having to write a piece that is critical of the Democratic members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Most of them are former colleagues and friends. I hope they will remain friends after reading this…

I do not need to read the report to know that the Democratic staff alone wrote it. The Republicans checked out early when they determined that their counterparts started out with the premise that the CIA was guilty and then worked to prove it.

When Congress created the intelligence committees in the 1970’s, the purpose was for people’s representatives to stand above the fray and render balanced judgments about this most sensitive aspect of national security. This committee departed from that high road and slipped into the same partisan mode that marks most of what happens on Capitol Hill these days.

I have written many times about the dilemma presented by harsh interrogation techniques that segue from uncomfortable to actual torture, where to draw the line, and whether they are effective (see this for one of my earliest pieces on the subject, and for more you can do a search for the word “torture” on this blog). Ever since the so-called War on Terror began in earnest, post 9/11, this debate has been ongoing.

So why this report, and why now? My hunch is that the goal is to take us back to the wonderful days when Bush was president and particularly the last couple of years of his second term, when it was a Bush-bashing festival every single day, and Democrats cast themselves as the principled heroes. It’s the same partisan fight over something that should be above partisanship. Haven’t we walked this same road before—many times before?:

This investigation marks a new low for congressional oversight of intelligence because of its naked partisanship and refusal to consider all relevant evidence. The report was written entirely by the committee’s Democratic staff. The investigation included no interviews ”” it is based only on a review of documents. Because the report lacks Republican co-authors or interviews of people who ran the enhanced-interrogation program, it has no credibility and amounts to a five-year, $50 million Democrat cherry-picking exercise to investigate the Bush administration.

This didn’t have to happen. There are congressional Republicans who have problems with the enhanced-interrogation program and wanted an honest, bipartisan assessment of it. This is why all but one Republican member of the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to approve the probe in March 2009. However, all of the committee’s GOP members withdrew their support six months later when it became clear that this inquiry would be a witch hunt against the Bush administration and the CIA and not a balanced, bipartisan investigation.

And what will this report tell us that we don’t already know? New details about enhanced-interrogation techniques and Democratic objections to them won’t be news. According to press leaks about the report, it will claim the program was poorly run and that CIA personnel exceeded their legal authority in running the program and lied about it to Congress and the White House. Such charges are hard to take seriously, because CIA officers accused in the report of improper and illegal activities were not interviewed by the committee’s staff investigators. Most of them were not even allowed to read the report ”” that privilege was limited to former CIA directors and deputy directors, and they were forced to sign non-disclosure agreements by the committee before they were given access to it.

Here’s a roundup of quotes about the report, to give you an idea what’s being said by many sources.

Teaching English in North Korea

The New Neo Posted on by

This article by Suki Kim is an excerpt from her book Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea’s Elite, based on her experience teaching English in North Korea. From a review of the book in the Chicago Tribune:

Remarkable”¦A deeply unsettling book, offering a rare and disturbing inside glimpse into the strangeness, brutality and claustrophobia of North Korea”¦ Kim’s book is full of small observations that vividly evoke the paranoia and loneliness of a nation living in fear and in thrall to its ‘Great Leaders’”¦Her portraits of her students are tender and heartbreaking, highlighting the enormity of what is at stake.”

Even the small essay conveys much the same picture. It’s a depressing read, but a good description of the totality of mind control in North Korea and the way it stunts the people there.

That, of course, is the goal of the North Korean government. By completely controlling the information that comes in, the rulers are able to fashion a world in which Korea is superior to every nation on earth. We already knew that is what they try to make people think, but the essay manages to describe how it effects young people’s thought processes and makes other ideas almost literally unthinkable. It even keeps the students from understanding the basic concepts behind writing an essay, where one must prove a thesis by marshaling facts.

Read it and weep for the captive minds of North Korea, whose government has managed to realize some of the goals so well described by George Orwell when he wrote about Newspeak in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four:

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.

Obamacare cost-saving, and Gruber: it’s lies all the way down

The New Neo Posted on by

Let’s not forget good old Obamacare. The administration hasn’t, and the lies keep coming:

On Dec. 3, federal actuaries released data showing that health spending inched up only 3.6 percent in 2013.

Marilyn Tavenner, the head of Medicare and Medicaid, boasted that it’s “evidence that our efforts to reform the health-care-delivery system are working.” Sorry, not true.

That 3.6 percent figure is an improvement only by a hair.

The real slowing of health care spending started way back in 2009, in the wake of the Great Recession, long before ObamaCare even passed. Health spending slowed to a comfortable 3.8 percent rise that year, and stayed at that slow pace in 2010.

Not that the president acknowledged that health spending was growing at the slowest rate in a half-century.

To pass his health bill, he needed a crisis. So he and then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius repeatedly lied, warning that costs were “skyrocketing,” spending was “spiraling” out of control and health needs would gobble up ever more GDP unless Congress quickly passed the Affordable Care Act…

On Dec. 2, Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell announced “demonstrable progress” in making hospital care safer.

Her report claims that some 50,000 fewer patients died from bed sores, infections, medication errors, falls and other mishaps from 2010 to 2013, largely due to new payment incentives and a patient safety program in ObamaCare.

That happy claim was repeated verbatim by many media outlets.

Not so fast, say patient safety experts who actually read the report…

There’s another much more subtle lie inherent in the administration’s claims, which is the assumption that if an effect follows an event, the effect is caused by that event. That sort of “lie” is hardly limited to the Obama administration or Obamacare, of course. It’s a common problem with a great deal of social science and medical research—actually, just about any research in the soft rather than hard sciences.

In other, related news, Jonathan Gruber is testifying before Congress today. He is in the unenviable position of having to say he lied about lying but is now telling the truth about his lies about lying. However, Gruber also managed to do what most people cannot or will not do, which is to avoid hedging and qualifying in his apology:

I sincerely apologize both for conjecturing with a tone of expertise and for doing so in such a disparaging fashion. It is never appropriate to try to make oneself seem more important or smarter by demeaning others. I know better. I knew better. I am embarrassed, and I am sorry.

In Gruber’s closing paragraph he tries to say “It’s me, not Obamacare!” He is willing to fall on his sword for the greater good:

I behaved badly, and I will have to live with that, but my own inexcusable arrogance is not a flaw in the Affordable Care
Act.

No, it’s not. But the ACA has its own flaws galore, much greater than Gruber’s. Its proponents had their own inexcusable arrogance, lies, and parliamentary shenanigans, and Obamacare has its own terrible consequences.

[NOTE: By the way, for what it’s worth, when I first heard about Gruber—which was in connection with his highly-praised prediction a year ago that only 3% of Americans will be impacted negatively by Obamacare—I wrote an article for PJ that pointed out Gruber’s partisanship and non-objectivity, plus the fact that he had had to admit there were quite a few flaws in the reasoning behind the models for which he was so well-known. In it, I quoted an Avik Roy article that features a statement Gruber himself had made:

Most importantly, Gruber has admitted that his model has a catastrophic flaw: it can’t model the impact of Obamacare’s requirement that insurers take all comers regardless of pre-existing conditions. Here’s what he said to the State of Colorado:

“It is important to recognize some limitations in our modeling of prices. In particular, given publicly available data we cannot incorporate the effects of the ban on pre-existing conditions exclusions. This ban will cause a rise in premiums as insurers are forced to cover conditions that they had previously excluded. In addition, there are new premium taxes on insurers that will raise premium rates”¦Overall, we cannot predict the net impacts of these factors on premiums without more analysis.”

It’s precisely this aspect of the law that non-partisan analysts have pointed to as a reason why Obamacare will drive up premiums.

Why did anyone ever listen to Gruber? Because he was telling them what they wanted to hear. To use a model that omits the fact that Obamacare required the coverage of people with pre-existing conditions, and to act as though this will have no effect on premiums, is not just incompetent, but shockingly so, as anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of insurance and math could have easily seen.]

[NOTE II: Any attacks on Gruber from the left would be following the same playbook Gruber himself is following: It’s Gruber, not Obamacare! Gruber’s the villain!]

Another great article by a political changer

The New Neo Posted on by

This changer article by Danusha V. Goska is very hard-hitting and well worth reading.

And here’s a companion piece of sorts:

As the political project that exists to vindicate the axiom that all sorts of government program X’s can solve an endless list of social problem Y’s, liberalism is always at risk of descending into prescriptive bullshit. Liberal compassion lends itself to bullshit by subordinating the putative concern with efficacy to the dominant but unannounced imperative of moral validation and exhibitionism. I, the empathizer, am interested in the sufferer for love of myself, Rousseau contended. Accordingly, an ineffectual program may serve the compassionate purposes of its designers and defenders as well as or better than a successful one.

. . .

Conservative critiques of liberalism sometimes concede that liberals’ aspirations are laudable before insisting that the means liberals favor are insufficiently practical and at least potentially destructive. The way liberal compassion lends itself to liberal bullshit, however, argues for a less forgiving interpretation. Liberals’ ideals make them more culpable, not less, for the fact that government programs set up to do good don’t reliably accomplish good. Doing good is often harder than do-gooders realize, but doing good is also more about the doing and the doer than it is about the good. Too often, as a result, liberals are content to treat gestures as the functional equivalent of deeds, and intentions as adequate substitutes for achievements.

Thomas Sowell wrote an entire book about this, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy

[NOTE: One thing that Goska’s article reminded me of is that Hillary Clinton is very vulnerable on the whole “how rape victims are treated” issue that’s gotten so much press lately:

Hillary served as the attorney to a 41-year-old, one of two men accused of raping a 12-year-old girl. The girl, a virgin before the assault, was in a coma for five days afterward. She was injured so badly she was told she’d never have children. In 2014, she is 52 years old, and she has never had children, nor has she married. She reports that she was afraid of men after the rape.

A taped interview with Clinton has recently emerged; on it Clinton makes clear that she thought her client was guilty, and she chuckles when reporting that she was able to set him free. In a recent interview, the victim said that Hillary Clinton “took me through Hell” and “lied like a dog.”

That may come up again if Hillary runs in 2016.]

Eric Garner’s widow speaks out

The New Neo Posted on by

I think that under the circumstances she’s being quite reasonable, too.

Esaw Garner knows her husband was a petty criminal and doesn’t argue otherwise. What’s more, I give her points for saying this:

I feel like ”” I don’t even feel like it’s a black and white thing, honestly, you know, in my opinion. I really don’t feel like it’s a black and white thing.

Mrs. Garner would have liked to have seen Officer Pantaleo have a day in court, and in that sentiment she is hardly alone, nor is it limited to partisans. It does seem at least arguable that undue force was exerted, considering the pettiness of the offense and the lack of violent resistance on the part of Garner. According to his widow, she had tried to prevent this from happening but failed, and it’s hard not to be sympathetic with her plight:

Eric Garner is seen at the beginning of the video frustrated, complaining that police are always hassling him. He’d been previously arrested for selling loose, untaxed cigarettes.

“They knew him by name. They harassed us. They said things to us. We would go shopping. You know, they ”” hi, cigarette man. Hey, cigarette man and wife. You know, stuff like that,” Esaw said.

“I would just say, I would just keep walking, don’t say anything, don’t respond, you know, don’t give them a reason to do anything to you. And he just felt like ”” but they keep harassing me. And I say, just ignore them, Eric. He said, how much can I ignore them? I would say, just stay away from the block. You know? Just find something else to do.”

Would that he had.

Chris Hughes: crafting a sustainable non-apology

The New Neo Posted on by

In the larger scheme of things, the TNR flap I wrote about Saturday is minor, although it’s part of a more major trend towards intellectually shallow, market-driven, youth-oriented, agenda-based, media.

But I just couldn’t resist fisking this piece of apologia sans apology by Chris Hughes, the youthful owner of TNR who has managed to deeply offend nearly its entire staff, not only by his vision for the future of the magazine, but by the duplicitous and underhanded way in which he treated the editors he was firing.

Beginning with its title, “Crafting a Sustainable New Republic,” which is a model of Newspeak (“crafting” and “sustainable” being the buzzwords du jour), Hughes’ piece is emblematic of how to “craft” a self-serving pile of verbiage that carefully avoids saying anything honest.

Hughes wants to redo the magazine. Fine. But he acts as though what occurred there under his watch somehow just happened through mysterious and inevitable forces of modernization and progress:

Last week, about a dozen members of the editorial staff of the New Republic walked out in protest over new leadership. By their account, this was a clash of cultures : Silicon Valley versus tradition, and everyone must choose a side. I believe this dangerously oversimplifies a debate many journalistic institutions are having today. They were colleagues whom I personally liked and respected, so I was sad to see them go and regret much of how it happened. But the New Republic is too important an institution to accept their departures as its end.

Hughes is the passive observer of their mysterious departure rather than its catalyst. They “walked out in protest over new leadership,” and who was that new leader? A person could read that entire paragraph and not know it was Hughes himself. And although Hughes says it was a dozen members of the editorial staff who left, Hughes is minimizing here because the exodus actually was much larger than that, involving “the resignation of 19 full-time staffers and 31 contributing editors.” That’s 31 out of a total of 38 contributing editors listed, by the way.

Maybe Hughes has as much trouble counting as he reportedly has in dealing with people. It wasn’t just the “Silicon Valley versus tradition” battle that made them all resign; that characterization of Hughes’ “dangerously oversimplifies” what happened, including this:

While the clash was portrayed by Vidra [and Hughes] as new media versus old media, staffers critical of the moves noted that digital talent also quit.

But really, the best example of Hughes’ mealy-mouthed way of referring to what he did and the editors’ reaction to it is this:

I was sad to see them go and regret much of how it happened.

No Hughes action and editor reaction there, just Hughes’ grief (and crocodile tears). What Hughes regrets, no doubt, is that he’s been fingered by the staff as the reason they left, including his heavy-handed, tone-deaf, and insulting way of treating his fellow human beings.

I’ll leave the matter at that, because I’ve probably wasted way too much time on it already. But weasel words masquerading as earnest sincerity raise my hackles. Unfortunately, they are becoming more and more frequent as time goes on.