The press and propaganda—and evil

The New Neo Posted on by

Found yesterday in the comments section of the Wall Street Journal:

“Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.” – Joseph Goebbels

Goebbels, of course, was a genius. An evil genius, but a genius nonetheless. Here are some more of his observations. When you read them, you’ll see why I consider them so apropos these days:

“It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise.”

“That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result. It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.”

And of course there’s the quote more universally known:

“If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. ”

In addition to these statements about the craft and use of propaganda, which was Goebbels’ field of special expertise, he had this to say about Nazi Germany. It shows remarkable and chilling prescience:

“If the day should ever come when we must go, if some day we are compelled to leave the scene of history, we will slam the door so hard that the universe will shake and mankind will stand back in stupefaction.”

Indeed.

Long-time readers may remember that many years ago I wrote a 2-part series of posts about Goebbels’ wife Magda (here and here). As part of my research, I read a biography of Magda that also had quite a bit to say about her husband. Here’s an excerpt describing Goebbels and his motivation. If you don’t know much about the man, it may surprise you, because it’s somewhat counter-intuitive:

As far as one could tell, Goebbels had no beliefs at all. People still living [the book was written in 1980], who were part of his immediate circle or his household, agree absolutely about this. To him all human existence was nothing but chaos. He considered himself one of the very few intellects capable of surveying it and mastering it.

In the post, I added:

In fact, it may be that Goebbels didn’t even particularly hate Jews, at least no more than he hated the entire human race. His interest was in power, self-promotion, and persuasion, and he was a rare genius at all three, willing to do literally anything to further those causes. A short and unattractive man with a crippled leg, he””like Hitler””was a mesmerizing speaker.

Unlike most of the other Nazi leaders, Goebbels was a highly educated man with a doctorate in philosophy and literature—and in those days, a doctorate from a German university was nothing to sneeze. He almost certainly was a sociopath, however. Virtually any photo of the man conveys an ice-cold visage that emanates almost pure evil.

And evil—well, I’ll repeat a section of a post of mine on that subject:

But one of the most fundamental errors people make when judging evil is to think we understand it, when we don’t. The fact that Hitler [or Goebbels, for that matter] was most definitely a human being leads us to think that if we knew enough facts about him, we could explain the etiology of his evil…

The other fundamental error people make when judging evil is thinking it is less evil than it actually is, and more amenable to persuasion, argument, or kindness. Because those who do evil are human, we think they are subject to the same fears and doubts, loves and anxieties, concerns and scruples, as the rest of us. Perhaps when they were children they were, although in the cases of sociopaths and psychopaths the notion is that they were born lacking something we tend to call a conscience. At any rate, by the time we know about them, something quite unusual seems to be going on in their psyches.

I think of the example of Stalin who said, on hearing that his son had tried to commit suicide but had only managed to shoot himself in the stomach and live, “He can’t even shoot straight.”

People such as Stalin or Hitler or Ahmadinejad or Saddam Hussein are about power. That is the coin of their realm, and power is their mother tongue, even though they can learn to speak secondary languages in order to give the appearance of reasonableness. Do not forget that it is a facade, and do not believe that you know them.

Waiting for the “monster” storm

The New Neo Posted on by

Last night, I was about to go to bed when my cellphone made an alarm sound.

It was not the same as the noise it makes when I set the alarm to wake me up in the morning. This was a sound I’d never heard before, a significantly more alarming alarm.

When I checked, I saw there was a message from the National Weather Service that a blizzard was coming. It told me not to travel, and to listen to the radio.

Is it the government sending these messages, the cell phone company, or what? Who has taken it on themselves to use this method to warn people of what they already probably know, which is that a “monster” storm is hitting New England?

I say “hitting” as though it’s already happening, which I suppose it is. There’s some light snow outside the window even as I type these words, and the wind is starting to pick up, although it’s not too bad yet.

Wind. That’s what I’m most concerned about. Where I live, the power goes out when someone breathes heavily. I fully expect to lose it some time today or tomorrow, and I hate hate hate when that happens.

Wish us all luck. If the blog goes silent for a day or two, you’ll know why.

George W. Bush, painter

The New Neo Posted on by

They’re being mocked—of course!—by those who can’t stand him. And they were obtained illegally by a hacker and published in the press, continuing in the tradition of violating the privacy of hated Republicans and protecting almost everything about Obama that he doesn’t want you to know. But some unfinished paintings by former president George W. Bush are surprisingly good, in my opinion.

And just plain surprising. Why? These, unlike his portrait of First Dog Barney, show an unconventional painterly perspective of some sophistication, unusual in a new painter (which Bush is). The criticism (his perspective is wrong! how jejune, to paint bathroom scenes!) is absurd: ever since some time in the early 20th century, art has often played with perspective, and scenes at the toilette have been a standard theme in art for centuries.

Here they are—and remember, they’re unfinished:

BushShower

BushTub

All members of Congress look alike to me

The New Neo Posted on by

Not really. But man, some of them do look alike, don’t they?

Here are some Congressional candidates for the unrelated look-alike project we discussed yesterday.

Republicans Reps Pat Meehan and Mike Kelly (both from Pennsylvania!):

MeehanKelly

Republican Reps Tom Graves (Georgia) and Kevin Yoder (Kansas):

gravesYoder

Democrat Reps Elijah Cummings (Maryland) and John Lewis (Georgia):

House Oversight Committee Holds Hearing To Consider Contempt Of Congress Report For Attorney General Holder

Note that each lookalike pair features duos from the same party (and that’s true for all the photos in the article). Apparently, no Democrat looks a lot like any Republican. And some say there’s no difference between the two parties!

[Hat tip: Althouse.]

Panetta: no one to blame for Benghazi

The New Neo Posted on by

Shocking.

But we are not the least bit shocked any more, are we?

Maybe ambassadors should start hiring their own security.

And speaking of shocking, I have to say that I have retained the capacity to be shocked by this:

Under questioning from Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) Panetta says that President Obama knew “generally” what US military assets were deployed in the region, but did not ask for specifics. He left the strategy, according to Panetta, “up to us,” meaning himself and military leadership. Panetta says that after the initial briefing, which took place at about 5 pm Washington time, he had no further communications at all with President Obama that night. The president never even called to ask how the attack was progressing. No one from the White House ever called later that night, according to Panetta, to inquire about the attack. President Obama went to bed that night not even knowing whether the Americans under assault had survived the attack.

I wrote “shocked,” but that’s probably an overstatement. Let’s just say that, as little as I have come to expect of President Obama, this is even less than I expected.

In a comment the other day on the blog, “southpaw” wrote:

Kerry, Hagel, and Paul would be a formidable trio in advancing US incompetence in foreign policy. Under their leadership, there’d be virtually no end to what the USA can’t do.

Substitute “Panetta” for “Paul” and you’ve got Obama’s second term foreign policy. “No end to what the US can’t do!”—put it on a bumper sticker, and call it a day.

[ADDENDUM: Oh, and now we know about that 3 AM call. No need to answer it—it was never made.

Notice that all this information is coming out three months after the election, and so the almost-inevitable question is: would Obama have been defeated if the American public had learned it before November? Sadly, I think the answer is “no.” ]

Unrelated lookalikes

The New Neo Posted on by

Ever meet someone who looks almost exactly like someone else you know? It happens to me every now and then. Once, for example, I was at a wedding, and the groom looked startlingly like my own son, so much so that I almost felt I should jump up and sit in the front row as mother of the groom.

Sometimes, of course, it’s two celebrities, and then I get a chance to do one of those “separated at birth” features. Sometimes it’s someone telling me that I’m the one who looks very familiar. When that happens, most of the time I’m wary of seeing a photo of that person I supposedly resemble–what if they’re awful-looking?

In life, you seldom get a chance to compare the two unrelated supposed dopplegangers side by side. But that’s what Francois Brunelle has done with his project to document unrelated lookalikes. The photographs are here, and it turns out that most of the time, when you get the two people next to each other, you find out that although the resemblance is quite uncanny the differences are profound (although subtle) as well.

Some of these people look more like each there than others, but it’s all pretty amazing nonetheless. Here’s a typical one of Brunelle’s photos. The effect is enhanced by having the women dress alike and style their hair the same, but if you look at their faces and imagine them being different weights from each other, and dressed and coiffed differently, the resemblance would become somewhat weaker because their faces (especially the eyes) really are not so extraordinarily similar:

lookalike1

Here’s a duo that has a somewhat stronger real resemblance, with facial features that show a quite stunning similarity:

lookalike2

And yet if you look very very closely, the differences are strong enough that I doubt a person who already knew one would ever be fooled by the other.

Here’s one more of the same variety as the last one. These guys come about as close as you can come without actually being identical twins:

lookalike3

On the deeply flawed CBO scoring of Obamacare, and what it means

The New Neo Posted on by

Read this and get angry about Obamacare all over again. Remember how it had to receive a good report from the CBO in order to be passed? Well, here’s how the smoke and mirrors worked:

In sum, the scorekeeping baseline used to show a positive fiscal effect for the ACA reflects neither actual law nor historical practice. This hypothetical scenario, involving as it does perpetual overrides of Social Security and Medicare financing restrictions, would be untenably expensive. Yet it was only in comparison with this extreme and extra-legal scenario that the ACA was found to slightly reduce projected federal deficits. In comparison with actual prior law, the legislation greatly worsened the fiscal outlook…

The savings provisions of the ACA are insufficient to both finance an extension of Medicare solvency and to fund a massive new health entitlement. So even if the law’s savings provisions all worked as originally envisioned, the ACA would still add at least $340 billion to federal deficits over its first ten years. Even this outcome would require that lawmakers allow many of its provisions to inflict a steadily higher toll on taxpayers, providers, and beneficiaries over time. If instead Congress re-indexes these provisions in keeping with historical precedent, the deficit increase under this more pessimistic scenario would be over $500 billion in the first decade alone.

And then there’s the SCOTUS decision on the states and Medicare. In all the brouhaha about the individual mandate, the other portion of the SCOTUS decision didn’t get as much press, but it matters, and its effects are somewhat unknown at this point:

he CBO subsequently reassessed the ACA in light of the Supreme Court ruling. Previously CBO had assumed full state participation in the Medicaid expansion, increasing program enrollment by 17 million by 2022. After the Court’s decision, CBO lowered this estimate by roughly one-third, meaning that 6 million potentially eligible individuals would not be covered under Medicaid. CBO’s updated financial evaluation was better in some respects, worse in others:

””CBO projected that of the 6 million no longer expected to be covered under Medicaid, 3 million would remain uninsured altogether. This would reduce projected federal expenditures.

””CBO projected that the other 3 million would instead be insured under the ACA’s new health insurance exchanges. This would increase costs because the federal government is expected to pay more to cover these individuals under the exchanges than it would have through Medicaid.

There’s much, much more at the link.

On Obama and drone attacks on American citizens

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s the hypocrisy, stupid.

But hypocrisy has always been one of Obama’s most salient characteristics. It’s certainly not a rare commodity in politicians, but Bookworm is absolutely right that he combines self-sanctifying egocentric moral preening with the most blatant hypocrisy—a combination which is in itself deeply hypocritical.

Even a few on the left may be starting to notice there’s some sort of contradiction here. I doubt they will become all that vocal, though. They wouldn’t want to bite the hand that feeds them.

Roger Simon resigning as PJ’s CEO

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s somewhat in the nature of inside baseball, but Roger L. Simon is announcing his retirement, come February 14 of this year, as CEO of Pajamas Media. Nothing will change at PJ to the outside eye, although it will change for Roger, who’s going to devote himself more to his original pursuits of writing screenplays and novels.

I wish him the best. His resignation takes me back in happy memory to the blogophere’s heady beginnings and heyday, and my own entry into it, when Roger’s blog was instrumental in giving me the notion that there were a lot of political changers out there, left to right (Roger himself is a mega-changer), who were eager to talk about this strange transformation they’d undergone. If not for participating in those discussions in the comments section of Roger’s original blog, I probably never would have become a blogger myself.

Then there were the exciting blogger get-togethers that PJ and Roger hosted way back in 2005 and 2006. It was incredible fun to meet so many other bloggers, and to experience firsthand how much bloggers can talk. Get a hundred of them together in a room and the din is almost deafening. If you want to say something, don’t wait your turn or it will never come.

So I want to give a heartfelt thanks to Roger for all of that and more, and wish him the best of luck in his future endeavors.

Quick…

The New Neo Posted on by

…who painted this picture?

Barney

It’s a portrait of Barney, the Scottish Terrier who used to be First Dog back when George W. Bush was president, and who died Friday at the age of 12 of lymphoma.

Note that “43” in the lower right hand corner, where a painter’s signature might be. That’s a clue.

[NOTE: I don’t know if it’s also true of painting them, but black dogs are notoriously difficult to photograph well.]

Women guards in male prisons: a recipe for trouble

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s more than one surprising fact in this story, but the most surprising one was not the behavior of the cop killer and the prison guard he impregnated through consensual sex, it’s the fact that female guards are standard in male prisons.

Perhaps you already knew this, and perhaps I should have known it already, too—because, now that I think of it, it shouldn’t have been a surprise for a number of reasons both PC and economic. But I must say I had no idea this was the case, and it’s an extremely disturbing situation (as is the presence of male guards in female prisons).

And yet it’s been going on for decades (see this article, for example). Aside from the obvious PC reasons for it, the less-obvious economic ones are that there are a lot more male prisoners than female, and it’s hard to find enough male guards willing to do the job of guarding them, so females are hired.

With obvious, predictable consequences. Some of it is due to coercion and fear, some to psychological instability, some to proximity and opportunism, some to sociopathy—and maybe somewhere, somehow, some tiny amount of it may be due to what the participants, at least, refer to as love.

The guard offenders are more likely to be women than men—perhaps because there are more female guards in male prisons than male guards in female prisons (mostly because of the aforementioned large disparity between the sexes in the prison population itself):

A Justice Department study shows that cases like Murphy’s are common: Female staff are more often implicated than their male counterparts in prison sexual misconduct. While many cases could be considered consensual, incarceration experts and female prison guards say the problem is much more complicated.

In some cases, the women reported that they couldn’t say no to the inmate out of fear, or were afraid to go to a co-worker out of shame at what had happened. One small mistake often led to something else.

Experts say there is a culture of silence in the prisons that makes it difficult for female guards to come forward with problems before they spin out of control.

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

Martin Horn, now a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said female workers who have sex with inmates are often treated less harshly by officials than male worker who do the same.

“As long as we have a double standard we are going to see these kind of behaviors,” Horn said. “It is a very slippery slope we go down if we say we are not going to hold female officers to the same standard.”

A 2007 U.S. Department of Justice study analyzing the prevalence of sexual assault in state and federal prisons found that 58 percent of staff perpetrators of sexual misconduct were female.

It seems to me that our culture has gone utterly mad. Why would anyone think this was an okay idea?

Yes, yes, I know the answer. As I said before, some of it is PC gender politics, and some of it economics. Somehow, though, in the olden days (in other words, when I was a kid), I believe there were enough male prison guards to take care of the male population. Why is that no longer true? Is it that the prison population has grown so very large relative to the population as a whole? Is it that it has become more out-of-control and difficult in terms of behavior, and the job of guard therefore more onerous? Is the pay proportionately worse than it used to be? Are there more people who consider the job beneath them?

Here’s an article about the training of prison guards that sheds at least a little light on some of these questions. Although it’s almost a decade old, it may still be apropos:

The ACA is trying to address the problem. It has developed its own Internet-based curriculum that leads to certification for corrections officers. But the program, which is less than a year old, so far has only reached about 800 people out of a workforce of more than 750,000. And it’s unclear how much of a dent it can make in a system where state and local authorities operate their own training academies and zealously defend their control over training. This monopoly might not be a bad thing, but state and local governments in many cases have scrimped on training–especially during recent years of fiscal stress. In Maryland, where officers don’t even have to meet a physical fitness requirement, “just the cost of giving each corrections officer a physical would be more than you could get out of the legislature,” says William Sondervan, a former corrections commissioner for Maryland who now serves as director for professional development at ACA.

Such penny-pinching may be self defeating if it undercuts corrections officers’ prospects of success in their jobs. In fact, turnover has become a major problem in the corrections business, averaging over 16 percent a year nationwide and ranging as high as 41 percent (in Louisiana), according to a survey by Workforce Associates Inc. In addition, 72 percent of correctional administrators report having difficulty recruiting officers and 64 percent say they have problems retaining those they have hired. With baby boom retirements looming, some 490,000 corrections positions will become available in this decade, while the pool of 25- to 44-year-olds from which corrections officers are drawn will shrink by more than 4 million people.

Part of the recruitment and retention problems stem from inadequate compensation…

There’s much, much more.

There doesn’t seem to be a problem of inadequate compensation in the state of California, though. Au contraire.