Happy Father’s Day!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This a slightly edited version of a previous post of mine.]

It’s Father’s Day. A sort of poor stepchild to Mother’s Day, although fathers themselves are hardly that. They are central to a family.

Just ask the people who never had one, or who had a difficult relationship with theirs. Or ask the people who were nurtured in the strength of a father’s love and guidance.

Of course, the complex world being what it is, and people and families being what they are, it’s the rare father-child relationship that’s entirely conflict-free. But for the vast majority, love is almost always present, even though at times it can be hard to express or to perceive. It can take a child a very long time to see it or feel it; but that’s part of what growing up is all about. And “growing up” can go on even in adulthood, or old age.

Father’s Day—or Mother’s Day, for that matter—can wash over us in a wave of treacly sentimentality. But the truth of the matter is often stranger, deeper, and more touching. Sometimes the words of love catch in the throat before they’re spoken. But they can still be sensed. Sometimes a loving father is lost through distance or misunderstanding, and then regained.

There’s an extraordinary poem by Robert Hayden that depicts one of these uneasy father-child connections—the shrouded feelings, both paternal and filial, that can come to be seen in the fullness of time as the love that was always, always there. I offer it on this Father’s Day to all of you.

THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house.

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

They see you when you’re sleeping, they know when you’re awake

The New Neo Posted on by

Assuming this is true, I’ll also assume I’ll have more to say about it anon:

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls, a participant said.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed on Thursday that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”

But it’s more likely that Nadler misunderstood what the briefing was getting at (see the “update” here):

Here’s [Nadler’s] new statement to BuzzFeed:

“I am pleased that the administration has reiterated that, as I have always believed, the NSA cannot listen to the content of Americans’ phone calls without a specific warrant.”

Read the transcript of his exchange with Mueller to see where he erred. The NSA told him that they could get “specific information” about a suspicious phone number without a FISA warrant. Nadler somehow took that to mean that they could tap that phone number and listen in. As Kevin Drum and Julian Sanchez noted last night, though, “specific information” may simply have meant metadata and phone records for the number, not the actual contents of phone calls. To actually tap a line, they need FISA approval. That’s what Mueller was trying to tell him.

So as Emily Litella would say: “Never mind.”

But I think we should continue to mind, because if a vast apparatus with vast powers is assembled, there is every reason to believe it will be used, and that some day those who are just itching to abuse it will find a way to abuse it. And if that apparatus is secret, there would be all the more ability to do so under cover of that secrecy. It all rests on trust, and we have come to distrust our government more and more as time goes on.

On the other hand, all intelligence operations are secret. That’s their very nature. And so all are subject to abuse; that’s one of the most frightening things about them. And until the day comes when the lion lies down with the lamb (a day I can’t see ever coming) we need intelligence.

It’s a conundrum. But as I’ve said before, the advantages of this particular program don’t seem worth the dangers. Life contains dangers; enemies are out to get us. How much protection do we demand, how much liberty and privacy are we willing to give up to get it, and is that sacrifice even worth it because the protection we get is so imperfect and perhaps even inadequate?

In addition, banning these programs wouldn’t necessarily end them. What technology allows, people will probably find a way to accomplish, either legally through the NSA or illegally through some more clandestine means. Unless we all go off the grid simultaneously, I don’t see that electronic spying will ever stop (and even then, there probably would be other ways for people to get into our business). And I’m not just talking about the federal government, either.

Big politically correct Brother

The New Neo Posted on by

Mark Steyn; read it.

Along the way he points out that he wrote back in November of 2001:

The bigger you make the government, the more you entrust to it, the more powers you give it to nose around the citizenry’s bank accounts, and phone calls, and e-mails, and favorite Internet porn sites, the more you’ll enfeeble it with the siren song of the soft target. The Mounties will no longer get their man, they’ll get you instead. Frankly, it’s a lot easier.

Give that man the prescience award.

George Wallace, Republican

The New Neo Posted on by

…Not.

And so, Chris Hayes of MSNBC was right to apologize after referring to Wallace as a Republican. He said his statement had been “a “stupid, inexcusable, historically illiterate mistake.”

But it was a lot more. This was no random tongue-slip. It might not have been excusable, but it is most definitely explainable, because the left and many liberals have been engaged in historic revisionism for a long time with the purpose of branding the Republican Party as the racist one, and to obliterate the actual history of the Democratic Party.
Why should it be any surprise that their efforts have borne fruit? The surprise isn’t that Hayes said it; the surprise is that many people noticed and that he actually corrected it, because his “mistake” has become more common as time goes on and the propaganda campaign has worked its magic on the population.

I don’t ordinarily watch MSNBC; I’m not that much of a glutton for punishment. But even before I looked Hayes up on Wiki to see how old he was, I figured he had to be young. Sure enough: 34 years old. Of course, there are people that age who know something about history, but I don’t think such knowledge is very common.

You might think that a journalist whose specialty is politics and who has a gig on MSNBC might know something about history, or at the very least political history. But if you thought that you might be wrong. Hayes’ apology is ambiguous about whether his error was a mere slip of the tongue or a lack of the relevant factual knowledge in the first place (“I should have caught it”), but I cast my vote for “lack of the relevant factual knowledge in the first place.”

There’s a third possibility, of course: purposeful “error” for the sake of propaganda, knowing it will probably go unnoticed because most people are ignorant of history, and that it will feed into their wealth of misinformation and further demonize the Republican Party. This is an excellent possibility, but since Hayes’ resume is singularly devoid of anything that smacks of knowledge or training in history (he is a writer who majored in philosophy at Brown, a university which, to the best of my recollection, has no generally required courses), my strongest guess is that he knows rather little about it and has swallowed the propaganda whole himself. But here he is, shaping the minds of many.

[NOTE: For those are interested in history—journalistic history, that is—please read this discussion of ground zero of the “Republicans are racist” meme, the famous Lee Atwater interview.]

Zombie emails the NSA with a polite request

The New Neo Posted on by

Funny stuff here:

Dear NSA,

…If you have any pull with the American Psychiatric Association, could you please recommend to them that the psychological state formerly known as “paranoia” should be no longer defined as a mental illness? Asylums all across the country are filled with people whose only neurosis is the vague feeling that they are being spied on or followed by unseen powerful enemies. But now we know that everyone is being spied on every time they pick up the phone, buy something, use the Internet, or walk around in public ”” so it turns out that these “paranoid” patients aren’t delusional after all…

PS ”” Tell the IRS that the best times for for my upcoming audit are Tuesdays and Thursdays, but unannounced visits from the EPA, FBI, OSHA or ATF would be more convenient on Monday afternoons or Wednesday mornings. And, needless to say, you can eavesdrop any ol’ time.

Read the whole thing.

Lately I, too, have been thinking about the need to redefine paranoia. The old joke—“You’re not paranoid if they really ARE out to get you” applies.

However, it turns out that the American Psychiatric Association is way ahead of zombie and me, because it seems that the drafters of the DSM-V (the diagnostic manual that represents the very latest in mental health classifications), which just came out on May 18, 2013 and superceded the DMS IV-TR (2000), had already made a valiant attempt to eliminate the relevant category, known as “paranoid personality disorder.” The draft version of the DSM-V (unveiled in 2010) that eliminated the disorder created such a hue and cry among practitioners that when the DSM-V was finally published in 2013 the APA reinstated the diagnosis along with various other character disorders that had been slated for removal along with it.

One of them was narcissistic personality disorder, sometimes suggested as the proper label for our president and many other politicians. But lo and behold, it’s back too.

It was a mystery to many 2010 reviewers as to why the APA was trying to throw out these diagnostic categories that had stood the test of time. For example:

“[The DSM-V drafters] have little appreciation for the damage they could be doing,” [Dr. John Gunderson told the New York Times. …]

“It’s draconian,” he said of the decision, “and the first of its kind, I think, that half of a group of disorders are eliminated by committee.”

So, is the mystery now solved? Could it be—could it be?—that the APA has got a few thumb drives and spies of its own, and already knew what was going to come down with the IRS and NSA scandals? Were they merely planning ahead? And while they were at it, did they decide to try eliminating a major slur on the president by taking away NPD as well?

Inquiring minds want to know.

[NOTE: By the way, I wonder whether any of you have ever read Operators and Things: The inner life of a schizophrenic? It’s a wonderful book first published in 1958. It made a deep impression on me when I read it some years later at the age of twelve, and has been recently re-released (there’s also a free online version here).

No one seems to know who author Barbara O’Brien was. It’s a pseudonym, and she claims it’s a true story. Whether it is, or whether she’s a brilliant but little-known fiction writer, the book was described thusly in a review in the LA Times quoted on Amazon, “”O’Brien has produced a work of brilliance and power, evoking a combination of Kafka and Joyce, with a touch of Orwell.”

It doesn’t remind me of Joyce. But Kafka and Orwell? Definitely. And if you read it you might agree that it has some relevance to the subject matter of this post.]

It’s…

The New Neo Posted on by

…the mistrust, stupid.

As usual, Richard Fernandez gets to the heart of the matter. And the heart of the matter is trust, or lack thereof.

We don’t trust this administration. But even if we did, it’s always a bad idea to put too much power into the hands of government, and surrender too much liberty to it, because even if we do trust today’s leaders, we may very well not trust tomorrow’s.

[NOTE: Here’s another Fernandez article that’s well worth reading.]

What can we learn from this nasty high-profile divorce?

The New Neo Posted on by

The Hamms’ divorce makes “The War of the Roses” look like a love fest.

Lessons, anyone?

(1) For the rich and especially the mega-rich: pre-nups are your friend.

(2) If he/she will cheat with you, he/she is likely to cheat on you.

(3) Don’t marry a lawyer.

(4) When love turns to hate, watch out.

There are probably others, but no doubt you can provide them. I predict that some of you will say that one of them might be “Don’t get married.” Others would say (and I’d agree with them wholeheartedly) “Be very careful who you marry” (okay, maybe I’d say “whom,” but you get the idea).

Others might add, “Make divorce a lot harder,” but I’ve already expressed my opinion on that (see this, this, and this, for example) and I don’t think that clock will be turned back.

A further observation: sometimes people marry people who later become incredibly, relentlessly, and creatively vindictive. I’ve seen it happen time and again; luckily, not to me. I don’t pretend to have a representative sample that will stand up to statistical analysis, but in my tiny personal grouping—off the top of my head I count four glaring examples, although I know quite a few lesser ones—the ratio of female to male perpetrators was 3:1. And infidelity by the other spouse was not the issue in any of these particular divorces, so that didn’t account for the virulence of the battle.

Here’s my question about Syria

The New Neo Posted on by

Who are the rebels?

My strong suspicion is that there are few good guys here. It was the same question I asked about Egypt and Libya. In both places there were some “good guy” elements mixed among the Islamicist fanatics, although I suspected the latter would be the ones to end up with the power, just as they had long ago in Iran. And that seems to be the way it’s trending, although news from both countries has died down for the moment.

In Syria I also have grave doubts about the makeup of the “rebels”—a word I have come to hate and distrust. And, as in Iraq, if we aren’t committed to overseeing the aftermath of a rebellion (which we most assuredly are not), we should be careful of the forces we unleash.

However, in Syria there is a huge difference from Egypt, and that is that the current regime in Syria may be almost as bad and as unfriendly to us as anything that could replace it. In Egypt the situation was markedly different; although Mubarak was a tyrant, he was by no means high on the scale of tyranny in the region, and he was a fairly valuable ally. And yet Obama threw him under—yes, the bus. Qaddafi occupied a position in between Mubarak and Assad, in terms of both extent of his tyranny and his alliance with the US (in recent years, anyway, when Qaddafi had demonstrated a slight mellowing compared to the olden days).

As for the Syrian rebels, well, it’s a mixed bag, and I can only hope we can tell the players without a score card and are encouraging the ones who at least aren’t obviously affiliated with al Qaeda or executing teenagers for blasphemy (read the link and you’ll see what I’m referring to).

That area of the world is, quite frankly, a mess no matter how you look at it. I suppose it’s within the realm of remote possibility that any “rebels” who might defeat Assad and take over the country will be better their predecessor, but I really wouldn’t bet a dime on it.

Is the US singing this song?:

NSA phone records: unconstitutional, or just a bad idea, or what?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve seen a lot of chatter around the blogosphere about the NSA phone records program that goes like this: “Those who argue that it’s constitutional are in favor of it.” But the two do not necessarily go together.

I don’t usually quote Barack Obama approvingly, but he hit the proverbial nail on the head last Friday when he said of the NSA phone records program:

We’ve got congressional oversight and judicial oversight. And if people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress and don’t trust federal judges to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution, due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.

Well, we absolutely do have some problems here, because an increasing number of people do not trust those government institutions, and they have pretty good reasons for seeing it that way.

But that’s a separate issue from the question of whether NSA was “abiding by the Constitution” when it collected and stored the data if it limited access to it in the ways it says it did. And that’s a separate question from whether it did follow those limits. Which is in turn a separate question from whether, even if it did follow those limits and was abiding by the Constitution, the program is something we want, and how vulnerable to abuse it might be.

Now, you may think the Constitution is a relatively easy read. Absolutely clear, written in plain English for anyone to see and understand. And you may also think that the reason lawyers and judges and SCOTUS justices go on and on and on about it as though it’s so complex is because they have a political agenda, and/or like to twist things and make them seem obscure, and/or can’t see the forest for the trees.

But it’s really not all that simple, and the entire structure of the appeals court system culminating in the Supreme Court isn’t there just to enrich the coffers of lawyers.

Take something as concise as the Fourth Amendment. It reads:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Short and sweet and oh so important, and written way back in a time when in order to seize stuff you had to physically go into a home and seize actual stuff (or actual people). Of course, there was a back story, too, about how and why the amendment was written and included in the Bill of Rights, and what the words in it meant at that time because of that history. And there’s also a sequel which includes many court decisions about how the amendment could and should be applied in the present day, when all sorts of methods unforeseen by the Founders have come along and given government new and creative ways to search and to seize.

Saying something is constitutional because it does not violate the Fourth Amendment is not the same as saying it’s not a bad practice, or that you like it, or that it shouldn’t be outlawed. Something can be bad, unlikable, and worthy of outlawing and still be completely constitutional, in which case the remedy for it would be to ban it, or to ban those parts of it that make it objectionable. Saying something is constitutional because it does not violate the Fourth Amendment is not the same as saying it’s not easily subject to abuse, overreach, and corruption, and therefore not potentially dangerous.

Which brings us to the fact that the NSA’s accessing phone call records (who, when, where) that are already the property of a phone company—invasive and dangerous though this might feel—is not unconstitutional, at least as the legal system has ruled so far. Of course, if the NSA rules setting up the program read that the agency could dip into content without a warrant as required by the Fourth Amendment, that would be different, and clearly unconstitutional. Or, if the agency was actually doing this even though the rules didn’t allow it, that would mean they were operating illegally. But at this point we’ve seen nothing to prove that either was the case.

Perhaps a test case on the NSA program could ultimately reach the Supreme Court and cause it to rule anew, and SCOTUS might reinterpret the Fourth Amendment in such a way as to declare the program unconstitutional even the way it’s written. Stranger things have happened. But understand what lawyer Andy McCarthy is saying when he writes, with characteristic clarity:

…[H]ow it is “clear” that a phone record, owned and possessed by a telephone service provider (not the customer), qualifies as the person, house, paper, or effect of the customer, such that the government’s acquisition of it violates the Fourth Amendment[?] The federal courts have consistently, emphatically rejected this implausible suggestion, holding that government’s collection of phone records does not even implicate the Fourth Amendment, much less violate it…

[T]he animating idea behind the original Fourth Amendment is protection of personal property. The Constitution was not deemed to be violated absent some form of government trespass…[E]ven this new Fourth Amendment [with its “reasonable expectation of privacy”] that progressives have erected on the remains of the original one has never protected third-party business records. That, in particular, includes “metadata” ”” customer telephone activity (not the content of conversations, but numbers dialed, time and duration of calls, etc.), records of which are maintained by service providers.

To give such third-party business records constitutional status…the judges [would have] to invent a newer, more expansive Fourth Amendment.

Simply put: content is protected, records are not.

[NOTE: Snowden has, of course, made a lot of other allegations about NSA than that they simply kept the phone log records. But so far he’s provided no proof of these claims. He has said, for example, that he was able to access anyone’s email content as long as he had a personal email address for him/her, which would certainly be a very clear violation of the Fourth Amendment. But is he telling the truth? Not according to experts, who say it’s impossible that he could have accomplished what he claims he did.

So the jury, as they say, is still out on that.

And please read this from Ace.]

[NOTE II: Part II of the post I wrote yesterday on distrust and security will be coming very soon, but not today.]

Literary changers: E. E. Cummings

The New Neo Posted on by

Another changer heard from, this time poet E. E. Cummings (and yes, he capitalized his name, although not his poetry):

In 1931 Cummings traveled to the Soviet Union. Like many other writers and artists of the time, he was hopeful that the communist revolution had created a better society. After a short time in the country, however, it became clear to Cummings that the Soviet Union was a dictatorship in which the individual was severely regimented by the state. His diary of the visit, in which he bitterly attacked the Soviet regime for its dehumanizing policies, was published in 1933 as Eimi, the Greek word for “I am.” In it, he described the Soviet Union as an “uncircus of noncreatures.” Lenin’s tomb, in which the late dictator’s preserved body is on display, especially revolted Cummings and inspired him to create the most impassioned writing in the book. “The style which Cummings began in poetry,” Bishop wrote, “reaches its most complete development in the prose of Eimi. Indeed, one might almost say that, without knowing it, Cummings had been acquiring a certain skill over the years, in order that, when occasion arose, he might set down in words the full horror of Lenin’s tomb.” In tracing the course of his thirty-five day trip through the Soviet Union, Cummings made frequent allusion to Dante’s Inferno and its story of a descent into Hell, equating the two journeys. It is only after crossing back into Europe at book’s end that “it is once more possible for [Cummings] to assume the full responsibility of being a man…,” Bishop wrote. “Now he knows there is but one freedom…, the freedom of the will, responsive and responsible, and that from it all other freedoms take their course.” Kidder called Eimi “a report of the grim inhumanities of the Soviet system, of repression, apathy, priggishness, kitsch, and enervating suspicion.” For some time after publication of Eimi, Kidder reported, Cummings had a difficult time getting his poetry published. The overwhelmingly left-wing publishers of the time refused to accept his work. Cummings had to resort to self-publishing several volumes of his work during the later 1930s.

I’ve heard stories like this before—especially the refusal to publish anyone who disagreed with the Party line. The same thing happened to Will Durant (see this), who wrote about his experience:

I had written”¦several articles about our trip [to the USSR]. My literary agent, the genial and enterprising George Bye, tried to dispose of these to Harper’s Magazine and The Atlantic Monthly; both of these rejected them on the ground that they would alienate too many readers; for Russia, in our Depression years, seemed to millions of Americans the last best hope of men”¦The articles [I wrote] frankly called the Soviet system a dictatorship over the proletariat, and described without glamour or prejudice””but perhaps with insufficient knowledge and understanding””the achievements and failures of Communist Russia in economics, morals, manners, religion, and government. I was warned, by a well-informed editor at Simon and Schuster, that the printing of these discourses in book form would further alienate the literary fraternity, and especially the reviewers, who were sympathetic with Russia”¦

For whatever reason, Cummings and Durant had minds that were open to what they saw in the Soviet Union, and they were able to perceive it. Way too many others were either genuinely fooled by the Potemkin village they were presented, or pretended to be because they wanted the Communist dream to be true and could not or would not give it up.

And they wished to silence those who differed.