The New Neo

Airline loses dog

Posted on November 13, 2014 by neoNovember 13, 2014

Ramano says that Delta Airlines lost his dog on a flight from Los Angeles to Tampa on Oct. 31. More than a week later, his dog is still missing, and he is stuck in Tampa waiting for news.

“To me it sounds like they don’t care,” Ramano told 10 News. “They sound like they lost a piece of baggage. No. He’s family. He’s like my best friend. He’s another part of our family.”

Well, yes. I used to fly cross-country every summer when we’d visit my in-laws and take the family pet, a wonderful cockerpoo. I would have been devastated had he been lost, but he weathered the trips quite nicely. When he got older we didn’t take him anymore because he was too frail, but till then he was a big part of our summer vacations.

But not so fast in your ire at Delta. The story isn’t quite what you think:

According to Delta, the dog chewed through the crate in the cargo section of the plane and ran across the tarmac. Delta said that LAX workers tried and are still trying to find Ty.

Sounds as though the airline didn’t so much lose the dog as the dog lost the airline.

Ramano thinks the airline is just telling a shaggy-dog story. I tend to believe them in this case, although who knows? Unless they have a surveillance camera of the area, I don’t think we’ll ever find out. Even if Ty shows up one day, he probably won’t be telling any tales.

Obamnasty

Posted on November 13, 2014 by neoOctober 1, 2015

When Obama announces his new amnesty plan, I propose it should be given the name “Obamanasty.”

Here are some details, according to leaks:

The plan calls for expanding deferred action for illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children — but also for the parents of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents.

The latter could allow upwards of 4.5 million illegal immigrant adults with U.S.-born children to stay, according to estimates…

Another portion that is sure to cause consternation among anti-“amnesty” lawmakers is a plan to expand deferred action for young people…This is estimated to make nearly 300,000 illegal immigrants eligible.

Then there are some financial incentives to sweeten the deal:

DHS also is planning to “promote” the new naturalization process by giving a 50 percent discount on the first 10,000 applicants who come forward, with the exception of those who have income levels above 200 percent of the poverty level.

Tech jobs though a State Department immigrant visa program would offer another half-million immigrants a path to citizenship. This would include their spouses as well.

I’ve never heard of that visa program before—what are these tech jobs? Why are they being offered to immigrants? Do they involve jobs for which there supposedly aren’t enough qualified Americans to fill the positions? [See “NOTE” below for answers]

What’s more—and I’m sure this will make them feel really, really good about all of it:

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers also would see a pay raise in order to “increase morale” within the ICE workforce.

The National Review has a suggestion for the Republicans’ next move in this chess game:

But Congress still has the power of the purse. While it cannot stop Obama’s passive abuse of discretion (his exempting the vast majority of illegal aliens from immigration enforcement, for instance), it can use that power to prevent active abuses, like the provision of work permits, Social Security cards, and driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, which would be politically irreversible.

This is why the message of today’s editorial rejecting a long-term budget deal made in the lame duck is so important. Harry Reid will obviously not agree to any funding riders prohibiting Obama from issuing work permits to illegal aliens. Also, the Republican leadership has already said it’s not going to engineer another government shutdown. But in the next Congress, the House could pull out the Homeland Security budget (rather than fold it into an omnibus funding bill for the whole government) and attach the rider just to that, so when Obama vetoes it, only DHS will be subject to a “shutdown.” The reason for the quotation marks is that it won’t be much of a shutdown since law-enforcement components continue to function as “essential personnel,” including the Border Patrol, the Secret Service, the Coast Guard, ICE, and the TSA. In fact, the chief component of DHS that actually would be idled by a budget battle would be US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the very bureau that would have to implement Obama’s lawless amnesty.

This creates a Catch 22 for Obama, if only the GOP has the wit to exploit it ”” if he signs a DHS budget with the rider prohibiting his amnesty, then it doesn’t happen (though he would still be able to implement certain other parts of his lawless plan). But if he vetoes it, the agency that he needs to process the amnesty is furloughed, so the amnesty still doesn’t happen.

But all this depends on Congress approving a short-term spending bill (a Continuing Resolution or CR) now ”” one that would keep spending at the current (absurdly high) levels for the next two or three months, so the new GOP-run Congress can have a free hand. If spending were locked in till September 30 (the end of the fiscal year) the opportunity to halt the amnesty will be lost..

The NY Times offers a good example of the liberal approach to the immigration-reform-by-executive-decree story: Obama the magnanimous is relieving the angst of these suffering families; angry Republicans are against; there is no question that this is a completely legal move on Obama’s part. And nary a whisper of the word “illegal” for the immigrants; it’s “undocumented” all the way.

[NOTE: I am pretty sure that the visa program involved, although not named in the articles, is H-1B, described in detail here. Jump to the section on criticisms of the program and you’ll get a good idea of what may be going on. The summary version: employers allege shortages that probably don’t exist in order to get cheaper labor, there’s a great deal of fraud involved in the applications, and lots lots more.]

The thorn in Gruber’s side

Posted on November 13, 2014 by neoNovember 13, 2014

I wondered who had found those videos of Gruber, and someone has covered that story, too. It’s a great one:

Rich Weinstein is not a reporter. He does not have a blog. Until this week, the fortysomething’s five-year old Twitter account had a follower count in the low double digits…

Weinstein dates his accidental citizen journalism back to the end of 2013 and the first run of insurance cancellations or policy changes. He was among the people who got a letter informing him that his old policy did not meet ACA standards.

“When Obama said ‘If you like your plan, you can keep your plan, period’””frankly, I believed him,” says Weinstein. “He very often speaks with qualifiers. When he said ‘period,’ there were no qualifiers. You can understand that when I lost my own plan, and the replacement cost twice as much, I wasn’t happy. So I’m watching the news, and at that time I was thinking: Hey, the administration was not telling people the truth, and the media was doing nothing!”

So Weinstein, new plan in hand, started watching the news. “These people were showing up on the shows, calling themselves architects of the law,” he recalls. “I saw David Cutler, Zeke Emanuel, Jonathan Gruber, people like that. I wondered if these guys had some type of paper trail. So I looked into what Dr. Cutler had said and written, and it was generally all about cost control. After I finished with Cutler, I went to Dr. Gruber. I assume I went through every video, every radio interview, every podcast. Every everything.”

There’s a guy after my own heart: he does his research. I’m pretty patient, and I’ll follow a trail pretty far, but I doubt I’d have the persistence (and the tolerance for crushing boredom) that Weinstein has shown.

Doesn’t this story have a wonderful hubris/nemesis quality? As in definition #3 of the word “nemesis” here, Weinstein becomes the “agent…of retribution or punishment” for Gruber, and in some way (perhaps) of Obama, too, by exposing what Gruber said. And all because he got angry at being lied to.

The networks appear to be mostly ignoring this and/or minimizing/excusing it, as is their wont. But today the WaPo saw fit to cover it with some thoroughness, albeit from an initial angry-Republicans-out-to-get-Obamacare angle. The news must be reaching enough people that Obama felt the need to issue a disclaimer, which basically says what Gruber said is “not true” and that Gruber really didn’t have much to do with Obamacare anyway. Obama also reminded us that he heard very few of Reverend Wright’s sermons, and we can keep our doctors.

Revisiting the second debate: Crowley and Obama vs. Romney

Posted on November 12, 2014 by neoNovember 12, 2014

Commenter “Daniel in Brookline” writes about that seminal second debate of 2012, where Candy Crowley intervened to back up Obama’s claim that he had called the Benghazi attack “terrorism” in his Rose Garden speech the day after the attack had occurred:

I blame Romney for hesitating, and then being a gentleman, when it mattered most.

That debate was THE time for him to look the President of the United States right in the eye and tell him, in whatever diplomatic phraseology he could muster, that this simply was not the truth. He should then have let Candy Crowley have it, in a Reaganesque “I paid for this microphone!” manner.

He should have told her that she can either fact-check the debate or moderate it; pick one and stick with it. Or he could have told her ”” “Okay, Candy, you have chosen to stop moderating this debate and offer facts and figures. So let’s have them. Roll the tape of the speech, right now. The President and I will wait.”

He did neither, and the country is the worse off for it.

Obama gambled that Romney was too much of a gentleman to stare a sitting President right in the eye and call him a liar, on nationwide TV. Unfortunately, Obama was right.

I have since wondered ”” if Romney caved during that confrontation, would he not also have caved when negotiating with, say, the Iranians, or the Russians, or the Chinese? But perhaps not. Romney was speaking to the President of the United States ”” an office he respects highly, I’m sure ”” and perhaps Romney was not prepared to treat him as an enemy in bare-knuckled combat.

We don’t know, we will never know. What we do know is that CBS News had its thumb firmly on the scales that night, and made no secret of it. (And, quite frankly, Romney should have expected that. Remember the protests that Candy Crowley would not be a balanced moderator, and remember how all those protests were brushed aside before the debate? I do.)

I agree with Daniel to a certain degree; I would have liked to have seen more of a challenge of the sort he mentioned. But at the time it would have been a very odd thing to do—almost impossible, for reasons I am about to describe.

I have a very different take on what happened internally with Romney during that debate. I agree that he’s a gentleman, and I agree he should have expected foul play to occur at her hands. But her actions were so unusual, even considering MSM bias, that I think he was caught off-guard by several factors, and furthermore I think almost anyone would have been. I strongly believe that he hesitated for a different (and very good) reason than his innate gentlemanly nature.

Romney had done his homework on Obama, and he was probably fairly sure that Obama had not referred to the perpetrators in Benghazi as “terrorists” in that speech. However, lacking a transcript of the speech in front of him, and the time it would have taken to check it out properly enough to be 100% certain, and given Crowley’s remarkable, outrageous intervention, which was so unprecedented, quick, bold, and sure in its assertion, it seemed very highly possible that she had access to some sort of transcript and that she was certain of what she was saying. This introduced some doubt in Romney’s mind as to whether he had his own facts correct, and that doubt was a reasonable one under the circumstances.

I am speculating, of course. But even when I first saw the debate, this was my very strong perception of events.

Romney immediately sensed he was being drawn into a trap. He had done his research and his aides had briefed him, but if he asserted that he was absolutely right and Crowley (waving her papers around, being prompted by Obama to get the transcript) was wrong, and then Romney turned out be wrong, it would be such a gaffe it could sink his presidency bid. So since he could not fact-check himself in real time and be absolutely certain, he chose not to press the point as hard as we would have wished. That was not a failure of nerve, it was an on-the-spot calculation based on the audacity of Crowley’s actions, which he had no way to know were not based on what Obama had actually said.

But why didn’t he call Crowley out simply for intervening at all? I believe it was because he calculated (and rightly so) that the Democrats and the press would have had a field day (especially if he was factually wrong about what Obama had said, but even if he was right) on him for his War on Women. Browbeating the woman, Crowley, and an upstanding member of the press at that! Hindsight is 20/20, but at the time such a calculation on Romney’s part made perfect sense. He was in a bind, where no approach seemed right, because no approach WAS right.

So let’s look at what Romney really did and said, instead of relying on memory.

The first thing to note is that Obama’s statement about saying he had called the Benghazi killings an act of terror in his Rose Garden speech was a response to a question from Crowley. Interestingly enough, it comes rather quickly in response to her question, and she also has set up the parameters by saying at the outset that she will be asking something of Obama but that Romney will only be allowed to answer very briefly. This is all consistent with the theory that the entire episode may have been a pre-arranged set-up between the Obama forces and Crowley, although it certainly doesn’t prove it. It does, however, set up Romney’s expectation that he won’t be allowed much of a response and that he needs to be quick, which I believe colors the entire exchange [emphasis mine in the following; my interpolations and speculations as to what’s actually going on are placed in brackets]:

CROWLEY: Because we’re — we’re closing in, I want to still get a lot of people in. I want to ask you something, Mr. President, and then have the governor just quickly.

Your secretary of state, as I’m sure you know, has said that she takes full responsibility for the attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi. Does the buck stop with your secretary of state as far as what went on here?

OBAMA: Secretary Clinton has done an extraordinary job. But she works for me. I’m the president and I’m always responsible, and that’s why nobody’s more interested in finding out exactly what happened than I do.

I stood in the Rose Garden and I told the American people in the world that we are going to find out exactly what happened. That this was an act of terror and I also said that we’re going to hunt down those who committed this crime.

And then a few days later, I was there greeting the caskets coming into Andrews Air Force Base and grieving with the families.

And the suggestion that anybody in my team, whether the Secretary of State, our U.N. Ambassador, anybody on my team would play politics or mislead when we’ve lost four of our own, governor, is offensive. That’s not what we do. That’s not what I do as president, that’s not what I do as Commander in Chief.

CROWLEY: Governor, if you want to…

ROMNEY: Yes, I — I…

CROWLEY: … quickly to this please. [she interrupts Romney to re-emphasize that he will not be allowed to say much, so that he feels rushed and pressed to begin with]

ROMNEY: I — I think interesting the president just said something which — which is that on the day after the attack he went into the Rose Garden and said that this was an act of terror. [Romney is feeling his way into this, because he is astounded at the audacity of Obama’s lie—and although you might say one should expect lies from Obama, to lie about something so easily proven, and something Obama hadn’t yet lied about prior to this debate, was something I don’t think Romney would have been able to predict despite being aware of Obama’s propensity to lie]

OBAMA: That’s what I said. [Obama is very calm here, not rattled at all—which is odd under the circumstances. Does he know Crowley will play his trump card?]

ROMNEY: You said in the Rose Garden the day after the attack, it was an act of terror.

It was not a spontaneous demonstration, is that what you’re saying? [he repeats it and clarifies just to make sure that’s what Obama is asserting; now he thinks he’s trapped Obama in the lie]

OBAMA: Please proceed governor. [just as before, Obama is very calm here, not rattled at all; he doesn’t even bother to answer “yes, that’s what I’m saying.” Again, is he aware that Crowley will intervene and is eager to get there? Or is he just weirdly calm? Or is he playing for time?]

ROMNEY: I want to make sure we get that for the record because it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror. [making sure again; he again thinks Obama is now trapped in the lie]

OBAMA: Get the transcript. [Obama starts playing the trump card. Who is he talking to? Romney or Crowley, or both? Again, this is a very odd thing to say under the circumstances, and indicates the possibility that he already knows Crowley will back him up.]

CROWLEY: It — it — it — he did in fact, sir. [Crowley has been playing with some papers in front of her ever since this sequence began, although she had barely looked at her papers prior to that, and at the moment she makes this statement she waves those papers in the air, giving the impression she’s holding the transcript, although she is not (see this)] So let me — let me call it an act of terror… [she backs Obama up]

OBAMA: Can you say that a little louder, Candy? [it’s not good enough for Obama; he wants to make sure she says it again, and louder, and so he prompts her]

CROWLEY: He — he did call it an act of terror. [she obeys Obama and repeats it] It did as well take — it did as well take two weeks or so for the whole idea there being a riot out there about this tape to come out. You are correct about that. [she feels what she has just done is so blatant that she has to throw Romney a small fish]

ROMNEY: This — the administration — the administration indicated this was a reaction to a video and was a spontaneous reaction. [Romney is shocked, and wonders what in the transcript they could possibly be referring to. But he doesn’t have the transcript, nor do they, so he cannot say. He is trying to regroup and collect his thoughts at this unexpected development. Should he insist Obama said nothing of the sort, when Romney is pretty sure but not 100% sure? Romney thinks that’s another trap, and he doesn’t want to make an error if he’s wrong, so he goes to a related but slightly different issue, based on the fish Crowley has just thrown him]

CROWLEY: It did. [she agrees, thus reinforcing Romney’s tendency to go in this direction rather than back in the other direction. She’s telling Romney he made a mistake about the Rose Garden speech (which he actually did not do), but that he’s on solid ground here]

ROMNEY: It took them a long time to say this was a terrorist act by a terrorist group. And to suggest — am I incorrect in that regard, on Sunday, the — your secretary — [he’s pretty sure he’s right here, and he’s trying to get her to confirm it, she’s blocked his other approach, he figures this one is the better bet and might work to convey the same message he was trying to convey before]

OBAMA: Candy? [Obama is warning Crowley. He interrupts Romney to remind her that she’d better interrupt Romney herself before he goes any further with this more winning argument]

ROMNEY: Excuse me. The ambassador of the United Nations went on the Sunday television shows and spoke about how — [Romney tries to get Crowley to ignore Obama, and he continues on with his argument, which he senses would be the stronger of the two at this point, since Obama is eager for him to stop]

OBAMA: Candy, I’m — [Obama is warning her again—she better shut Romney up]

ROMNEY: — this was a spontaneous — [Romney keeps going, trying to overtalk them]

CROWLEY: Mr. President, let me —

OBAMA: I’m happy to have a longer conversation —

CROWLEY: I know you —

OBAMA: — about foreign policy.

CROWLEY: Absolutely. But I want to — I want to move you on and also — [Here Crowley does Obama’s bidding and stops Romney, understanding that Obama really wouldn’t be happy to have a longer conversation about foreign policy.]

OBAMA: OK. I’m happy to do that, too. [the truth, no doubt]

CROWLEY: — the transcripts and — [this is a very curious moment which I’ve thought about but don’t quite understand. It goes with the start of Crowley’s sentence, which was “I want to move you on and also…”—also the transcripts? What about the transcripts? We’ll never know]

OBAMA: I just want to make sure that —

CROWLEY: — figure out what we — [inscrutable. Who’s “we”? She and Obama? She and Obama and Romney?]

OBAMA: — all of these wonderful folks are going to have a chance to get some of their questions answered.

CROWLEY: Because what I — what I want to do, Mr. President, stand there a second, because I want to introduce you to Nina Gonzalez, who brought up a question that we hear a lot, both over the Internet and from this crowd. [she asks Obama a question that changes the subject and ends the sequence]

QUESTION: President Obama, during the Democratic National Convention in 2008, you stated you wanted to keep AK-47s out of the hands of criminals. What has your administration done or planned to do to limit the availability of assault weapons?…

That was fun, wasn’t it?

Romney actually tries pretty hard, under extremely difficult circumstances, to evaluate what’s happening on the fly and to get some winning arguments in, too. He is clearly handicapped by his slight uncertainty about what’s in every word of the transcript, and their seeming certainty about it. He doesn’t know they’re bluffing, but under the circumstances, he senses that calling their bluff would be unwise. Bold, but unwise.

Nor would it have worked, because the MSM fact-checking machine, which should have blared forth headlines the next day saying that Romney was right, Obama wrong, and Crowley out of line, did nothing of the sort. Had Romney been more aggressive, the MSM would have also added how Romney falsely accused poor Candy Crowley, intrepid woman journalist just trying to do her job.

That’s not to say that no human on earth could have pulled this one out of the fire. But it was not just Romney’s status as a gentleman that did him in, it was the fact that he actually cares about facts, and wanted to get it right. Short of memorizing the transcript and quoting it verbatim and then analyzing it, what could he do? And the other part was that attacking Crowley would have been perceived very negatively, as well. The only plus is that it might have appealed to the Republican base, where Romney was somewhat weak. But he was focused on trying to get his substantive message across, and thought he was close to doing so.

I really think this debate was the first time Romney realized, at a deep gut level, how the MSM would stop at nothing in their determination to make him lose. I don’t think for a moment that any of this would have carried over into his negotiations with a foreign leader, which are not televised. But I don’t think we’ll ever get a chance to find out, because I don’t think Romney is running again. Nor do I want him to, although I admire his integrity and insight very much. I think we have plenty of other good candidates, and I like Romney in the role of senior statesman/advisor.

Sessions on the Republican Senate’s immigration plans

Posted on November 12, 2014 by neoNovember 12, 2014

If Jeff Sessions has anything to say about it, the Republicans will not be caving on this:

The US and China: wishin’ and hopin’

Posted on November 12, 2014 by neoNovember 12, 2014

The US and China have signed an emissions agreement that, as far as I can tell, is a lot of hot air.

It’s about what each would really like to do—actually, what they’d like their successors to do:

Today, the Presidents of the United States and China announced their respective post-2020 actions on climate change, recognizing that these actions are part of the longer range effort to transition to low-carbon economies, mindful of the global temperature goal of 2â„ƒ. The United States intends to achieve an economy-wide target of reducing its emissions by 26%-28% below its 2005 level in 2025 and to make best efforts to reduce its emissions by 28%. China intends to achieve the peaking of CO2 emissions around 2030 and to make best efforts to peak early and intends to increase the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption to around 20% by 2030. Both sides intend to continue to work to increase ambition over time.

…The United States and China hope that by announcing these targets now, they can inject momentum into the global climate negotiations and inspire other countries to join in coming forward with ambitious actions as soon as possible, preferably by the first quarter of 2015. The two Presidents resolved to work closely together over the next year to address major impediments to reaching a successful global climate agreement in Paris.

What would they like to do? Obama wants to cut US emissions, China wants to keep going till 2030. And this just might be my favorite phrase: “Both sides intend to continue to work to increase ambition over time.”

Well, some people are very impressed:

“This is, in my view, the most important bilateral climate announcement ever,” said David Sandalow, formerly a top environmental official at the White House and the Energy Department. “It sends the signal the two largest emitters in the world are working together to address this problem.”

It certainly sends a signal that they’re willing to pay lip service to it. Still not sure exactly what China is even paying lip service to here, but maybe that’s just because I’m a “stupid American,” as Jonathan Gruber would say.

But I’m not so stupid that I don’t know that Obama already wanted to do this in the US, and that he has long planned to do it through—you guessed it!—executive action:

The coming rollout includes a Dec. 1 proposal by EPA to tighten limits on smog-causing ozone, which business groups say could be the costliest federal regulation of all time; a final rule Dec. 19 for clamping down on disposal of power plants’ toxic coal ash; the Jan. 1 start date for a long-debated rule prohibiting states from polluting the air of their downwind neighbors; and a Jan. 8 deadline for issuing a final rule restricting greenhouse gas emissions from future power plants. That last rule is a centerpiece of Obama’s most ambitious environmental effort, the big plan for combating climate change that he announced at Georgetown University in June 2013.

…And on top of all that, the administration is expected in the coming weeks to pledge millions of dollars ”” and possibly billions ”” to help poor countries deal with the effects of climate change…

The kicker for Republicans eager to stomp* all over the president’s agenda: Congress has little immediate recourse..

The word from the Hill “is that McConnell really is interested in trying to show that Republicans can get things done, so I think they’re going to try to come up with some narrow bills where the President could sign,” Holmstead said.

Among other possibilities, Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) hopes to bring up legislation that would shift authority away from EPA on regulating coal ash ponds. Given the agency’s previous reluctance to deal with coal ash at all, the White House might not fight him too hard…

Former Sen. Tim Wirth, a Democrat who served as the Clinton administration’s top international climate negotiator, thinks Obama will push through his main agenda regardless of what Republicans come up with.

“He’ll just do what he’s going to do anyway,” Wirth said.

Indeed.

Most of these regulations were carefully postponed till after the 2012 and 2014 elections, for obvious reasons.

[ * NOTE: The use of the word “stomp” there is rather typical of the way the MSM writes these days about Republicans. It expresses the idea of stopping or destroying something, of course, but it also conjures up the vision of a child having a temper tantrum, or an angry person out-of-control in a fit of rage. It also makes it personal: they are “eager” to “stomp all over” the President’s agenda. They’re not just against these policies and also outraged at the president’s by-passing Congress; no, that wouldn’t convey enough vindictive petulance.]

Veterans Day, Armistice Day

Posted on November 11, 2014 by neoNovember 11, 2014

Yes, indeed, I am that old—old enough to just barely remember when Veterans Day was called Armistice Day. The change in names occurred in 1954, when I was very small, in order to accommodate World War II and its veterans.

Since then, the original name has largely fallen out of use—although it remains, like a vestigial organ, in the timing of the holiday, November 11th, which commemorates the day the WWI armistice was signed (eleventh hour, eleventh day, eleventh month).

I’m also old enough–and had a teacher ancient enough—to have been forced to memorize that old chestnut “In Flanders Fields” in fifth grade—although without being given any historical context for it, I think at the time I assumed it was about World War II, since as far as I knew that was the only real war.

You can find the story of the poem here . It was written by a Canadian doctor who served in the European theater (there is no separate URL for the discussion of the poem, but you should click on the “John McCrae´s Poppies in Flander’s Fields” link on the left sidebar). It’s not great poetry by any means, but it was great propaganda to encourage America’s entry into what was known at the time as the Great War.

The poem’s first line “In Flanders fields the poppies blow” introduces that famous flower that later became the symbol of Armistice—and later, Veterans—Day. Why the poppy?

Wild poppies flower when other plants in their direct neighbourhood are dead. Their seeds can lie on the ground for years and years, but only when there are no more competing flowers or shrubs in the vicinity (for instance when someone firmly roots up the ground), these seeds will sprout.

There was enough rooted up soil on the battlefield of the Western Front; in fact the whole front consisted of churned up soil. So in May 1915, when McCrae wrote his poem, around him bloodred poppies blossomed like no one had ever seen before.

But in this poem the poppy plays one more role. The poppy is known as a symbol of sleep. The last line We shall not sleep, though poppies grow / In Flanders fields might point to this fact. Some kinds of poppies are used to derive opium from, from which morphine is made. Morphine is one of the strongest painkillers and was often used to put a wounded soldier to sleep. Sometimes medical doctors used it in a higher dose to put the incurable wounded out of their misery.

Now a day to honor those who have served in our wars, Veterans Day has an interesting history in its original Armistice Day incarnation. It was actually established as a day dedicated to world peace, back in the early post-WWI year of 1926, when it was still possible to believe that WWI had been the war fought to end all wars.

The original proclamation establishing Armistice Day as a holiday read as follows:

Whereas the 11th of November 1918, marked the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed, and

Whereas it is fitting that the recurring anniversary of this date should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations; and

Whereas the legislatures of twenty-seven of our States have already declared November 11 to be a legal holiday: Therefore be it Resolved by the Senate (the House of Representatives concurring), that the President of the United States is requested to issue a proclamation calling upon the officials to display the flag of the United States on all Government buildings on November 11 and inviting the people of the United States to observe the day in schools and churches, or other suitable places, with appropriate ceremonies of friendly relations with all other peoples.

After the carnage of World War II, of course, the earlier hope that peaceful relations among nations would not be severed had long been extinguished. By the time I was a young child, a weary nation sought to honor those who had fought in all of its wars in order to secure the peace that followed—even if each peace was only a temporary one.

And isn’t an armistice a strange (although understandable) sort of hybrid, after all; a decision to lay down arms without anything really having been resolved? Think about the recent wars that have ended through armistice: WWI, which segued almost inexorably into WWII; the 1948 war following the partition of Palestine; the Korean War; and the Gulf War. All of these conflicts exploded again into violence—or have continually threatened to—ever since.

So this Veterans/Armistice Day, let’s join in saluting and honoring those who have fought for our country. The hope that some day war will not be necessary is a laudable one—and those who fight wars hold it, too. But that day has clearly not yet arrived—and, realistically but sadly, most likely it never will.

[This is a slightly edited reprint of a post originally published on Veterans Day 2005.]

A look at Valerie Jarrett

Posted on November 11, 2014 by neoNovember 11, 2014

From a lengthy article by Noam Scheiber in The New Republic:

While aboard Air Force One at the end of the 2012 campaign, Jarrett turned to Obama and told him, “Mr. President, I don’t understand how you’re not getting eighty-five percent of the vote.” The other Obama aides in the cabin looked around in disbelief before concluding that she’d been earnest.

Jarrett worships Obama without a smidgeon of a sense irony or balance. In that, the two are well-matched, which may account for some of their closeness. It dovetails nicely with her 2008 statement:

I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is. ”¦ He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability ”” the extraordinary, uncanny ability ”” to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. ”¦ So, what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. ”¦ He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do

The TNR piece presents both Obama and Jarrett as alike not only in their high opinions of Obama, but as similar in other ways: drunk with power, and personally petty and vengeful.

(The article doesn’t go into it, but I can guess the identity of the little birdie who whispered in obama’s ear to write that letter to Ahmadinejad.)

The piece also describes how, slowly but surely, Obama replaced the few independent thinkers who were his early advisors, those with a substantial amount of expertise and a reputation of their own (for example, Larry Summers and Rahm Emmanuel) with what the author calls “ciphers.” For example, “Obama’s top economic adviser is [now] Jeff Zients, a former management consultant and Jarrett pal who had no experience in government before joining the administration.” This was probably done not just for the obvious reason that Obama wants no one with enough moxie and expertise to challenge him. It’s also probably because Jarrett wants no one with enough moxie and expertise to challenge her. The narcissist and his adoring worshipper are flip sides of the same coin— hubristic, petty, ignoranct, isolated, stubborn, intolerant of criticism, secretive, defensive, maximally political, and remarkably adept at offending almost every person with whom they deal. And Scheiber’s descriptions of the meetings that Jarrett was in charge of, with gay activists before Obama made his big gay marriage announcement, describes the ghastly way the gay activists were treated.

Jarrett is his most trusted person on earth, despite (or probably because of) all of this:

According to a former high-level aide, there is no longer a daily meeting between the president and his top advisers. Under the old system, if the president waved off one adviser’s objection to his preferred plan of action, another could step in to vouch for the objection’s merit. The advice Obama gets now, though, comes more regularly through one-off interactions with the likes of Jarrett and Denis McDonough, who don’t have anyone else to back them up. In the second term, observes the former aide, “Maybe the president says, more often than in the past, ”˜We’re doing it.’”

The result is that Obama has become even more persuaded of his righteousness as the years have gone on. His belief that he can win over opponents is unshaken.

The whole piece by Sheiber seems split and confused. He describes horrible dysfunction, two terrible people making bad decisions and treating people like dirt. But he detests the Republicans who would thwart them, and thinks that, if anything, Obama and Jarrett are insufficiently to the left. And Scheiber ends this way:

It’s no surprise that Barack Obama and Valerie Jarrett would govern as reasonable people. It’s who they are. The tragedy is that we live in surpassingly unreasonable times.

Oh, the pretzel knots into which Scheiber must tie himself. Two and two equals five.

[NOTE: The TNR article on Jarrett seems to be part of an orchestrated and coordinated press campaign against her by Obama supporters to get him to fire her. Ha! Dream on.

Jarrett is the new designated fall guy (gal) to explain what went so terribly wrong with the Lightworker. But she has been an integral part of Obama’s political success. She’s been with him from the early days of his political career, advising and assisting in a myriad of ways. I believe he is very dependent on her psychologically, and she on him.]

Jonathan Gruber, man of the people, explains the passage of Obamacare

Posted on November 11, 2014 by neoNovember 11, 2014

The way I see it, this video of Jonathan Gruber merely exposes the so-called Obamacare architect admitting what everybody who’s been paying any real attention already knew: the intentional duplicity with which the law was passed on the part of the Democrats. The only surprise is how open Gruber is about it.

He must have thought he was among friends, and I suppose he probably was. Or maybe he just thought everybody already knew what he was saying, anyway. And if they didn’t, they should have:

Here’s the text of what he said:

This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that. In terms of risk rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in ”“ you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed”¦ Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical for the thing to pass….Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.

Gruber had been painted by the MSM as a neutral expert of some sort, but he’s always been very very partisan. Some people seem to think Gruber is describing his own strategy for framing and passing the bill, but I read it more as his description of the general Democratic strategy. What Gruber specialized in was making pseudo-scientific predictions about how wonderful Obamacare would be for people, and then having to backtrack:

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.

In the video, Gruber describes pretty accurately what liberals did and how they lied in order to make Obamacare seem much more attractive that it actually is. But he did make one glaring error.:

Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical for the thing to pass

Aside from Gruber’s condescension here about those stupid proles, he’s just plain wrong about what happened. The peons are actually smarter than he thinks: they never bought that steaming pile of manure. The people have been against this from the start, and nothing has changed in that regard.

Obamacare was not passed by referendum, it was passed by House and Senate. The people tried desperately to make their wishes known, but the Democratic representatives who were in the majority at the time refused to listen. Their leadership whipped them into line, and although a few were “allowed” to vote against, Pelosi and Reid made sure it wouldn’t be enough of them to actually derail the bill. Why did they allow some to vote against Obamacare? Because they knew just how very unpopular it was, and how those who voted for it in districts where it was unpopular were very much at risk of not being returned to Congress in the next election.

And that’s exactly how it went. 2010 was a protest election that returned the House to Republican hands. What were the people protesting? Why, Obamacare.

So who’s stupid, Gruber?

Guccifer, the hacker

Posted on November 11, 2014 by neoNovember 11, 2014

This is a disturbing and yet somehow entertaining article about Guccifer, the Romanian email hacker who’s in jail for hacking into the email accounts of the rich and famous.

Why did he do it? His motive doesn’t seem to have been money; he didn’t get any. Maybe he did it just because he could.

One would think he was some sort of computer mastermind. But no, not at all. He merely was a genius and/or incredible persistent at learning and/or guessing the answers to security questions (“security questions” became an Orwellian phrase when Guccifer was involved):

The hacker who signed off as Guccifer (pronounced GUCCI-fer) ”” a nom de guerre coined, he said, to combine “the style of Gucci and the light of Lucifer” ”” turned out to be Marcel-Lehel Lazar, a jobless 43-year-old former taxi driver. He had no expertise in computers, no fancy equipment, only a clunky NEC desktop and a Samsung cellphone, and no special skills beyond what he had picked up on the web…

Instead of burrowing into his victims’ email accounts using computer worms and other hacking tools, the prosecutor said, Mr. Lazar trawled the web for information about his targets and then simply guessed the right answers to security questions. “He is just a poor Romanian guy who wanted to be famous,” said the prosecutor, who leads a cybercrime team in Romania’s organized crime unit.

I guess “infamous” will do just as well. Although, come to think of it, he’s still not exactly a household word.

What was that again about gay marriage and religious freedom?

Posted on November 10, 2014 by neoNovember 10, 2014

Ah, yes:

The Giffords, who own the bucolic Liberty Ridge Farm in upstate New York, were ordered to pay a total of $13,000 ”” a $10,000 fine to the state and another $1,500 to each member of a lesbian couple to compensate them for “mental anguish.’’ All because the Giffords, devout Christians, refused to hold a same-sex wedding ceremony on the property on which they live, work and have raised a daughter, 17, and a son, 21.

“This is scary,’’ Cynthia Gifford said. “It’s scary for all Americans.” Fifteen years ago, Cynthia, 54, and Robert Gifford, 55, opened to the public their farm in upstate Schaghticoke, near Albany, where they’ve lived for 25 years. They host an annual, family-friendly fall festival, which ends Tuesday, offering such countrified fare as a corn maze and pig-racing shows.

In summer, wedding ceremonies and receptions also are held on the farm. But once already-booked nuptials take place, the Giffords will no longer schedule new ceremonies. Only receptions ”” including same-sex ones ”” will go on.

Oh, and by the way, the lesbian couple who sued the Giffords may have known what was going to happen, because they recorded their initial conversation with the Giffords. During the call:

Gifford said she told [caller Melisa Erwin], politely, that she would not book a same-sex wedding ceremony at the farm.

She didn’t know it at the time, but the woman’s then-fianceé, Jennifer McCarthy, recorded the conversation. The pair then filed a formal complaint with the state Division of Human Rights. And this past August, an administrative law judge from The Bronx, Migdalia Pares, decreed that the farm was a “public accommodation’’ and ordered the penalties, after ruling that the Giffords had violated state law by discriminating against the two women…

They were devastated when they heard that Liberty Ridge Farm would not take their business because of who they are,’’ the ladies’ lawyer, Mariko Hirose of the New York Civil Liberties Union, told me.

No doubt they were surprised, as well, right? They just happened to choose the Giffords, and they just happened to record the call.

First Amendment rights seem to stop at the door of the right of gay couples to marry, as most critics of the latter recognized early on would happen. Now it’s playing out as expected.

[NOTE: By the way, New York is a “one-party consent” wiretapping state, which makes the plaintiffs’ action lawful in recording the conversation without the Giffords’ knowledge (I’m assuming the Giffords were unaware, although the article doesn’t address that issue).]

Ebola treatment: this is so inside the box it’s outside the box

Posted on November 10, 2014 by neoNovember 10, 2014

Could an older technique yield an effective ebola treatment?

And will researchers take the suggestion and try to develop it, instead of a more conventional vaccine?:

The proposal builds on the use of “convalescent serum,” or survivors’ blood, which has been given to at least four U.S. Ebola patients who then recovered from the virus. It is based on an approach called passive immunization, which has been used since the 19th century to treat diseases such as diphtheria but has been largely surpassed by vaccination.

The scientists propose using new genetic and other technologies to find hundreds or thousands of different Ebola antibodies, determine their genetic recipe, grow them in commercial quantities and combine them into a single treatment analogous to the multi-drug cocktails that treat HIV-AIDS.

That contrasts with current drug development, which focuses on finding one molecule, or a small number, to defeat the Ebola virus that has killed nearly 5,000 people in West Africa and infected thousands more since March.

[NOTE: Among the three Nobel laureates joining in the call for passive immunization to treat ebola is James Watson, he of double-helix fame. I was stunned to learn that he is still around, and to discover that he’s only eighty-six, at that. I knew he’d been young when he and Crick had won the Prize for their discovery of the structure of DNA, but actually he was thirty-four, which isn’t so terribly young in science. Seems like so much time has passed that he should be about a hundred, though.

By the way, Watson and Crick had actually presented the structure in a paper published in 1953, when Watson would have been twenty-five. Young, but still not so terribly young in science, and his associates Crick and Wilkins were older, twelve years and twelve years respectively (associate Rosalind Franklin was eight years older, but she died before the Prize was awarded, so she was never considered for the honor).]