Customer “help” is getting worse

The New Neo Posted on by

In recent years it often feels that it’s not even worth it to try to get help for most products or websites. The instructions can be so arcane and convoluted that it seems that they were designed by programmers talking to other programmers. Everything is complex, and simple operations aren’t even covered. The “chats” are manned (a misnomer) by AI bots, and when you are bumped up to supposedly human level it’s hardly any better.

Last night I had a frustrating forty-five minute back-and-forth with a website, trying to get a very simple and basic question answered. It was no go, although they bumped me up to two levels of human interaction. Not only did no one know the answer, but they couldn’t even understand the question. Language barrier? Stupidity? Being told to stick to the manual and never go outside it? All of the above? None of the above?

I finally gave up and went to another site that offered a similar service. There were glitches there, too. I spent about four nearly-fruitless hours in this endeavor, and that’s not unusual.

Have you had the same experience?

Kevin McCarthy has opened a formal impeachment inquiry against Biden

The New Neo Posted on by

The news:

The speaker said House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., will lead the inquiry in coordination with House Oversight Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Ways & Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo.

McCarthy spoke for only roughly three minutes and did not take questions from reporters. ,,,

He listed allegations of “abuse of power, obstruction and corruption” made against Biden by several GOP-led committees who have been investigating the president.

“Through our investigations, we have found that President Biden did lie to the American people about his own knowledge of his family’s foreign business dealings. Eyewitnesses have testified that the president joined on multiple phone calls and had multiple interactions, dinners resulted in cars and millions of dollars into his sons and his son’s business partners,” McCarthy said.

“We know that bank records show that nearly $20 million in payments were directed to the Biden family members and associates through various Shell companies.

I strongly believe that Biden is guilty of old-fashioned corruption. These are not manufactured charges based on novel legal theories. But of course, there is no chance that Biden will be convicted in the Senate. Instead, the goal of these hearings will be to get the facts in front of the American people. But that endeavor will be hampered by the MSM, which will frame the whole thing as “Republicans pounce on poor innocent old good guy Joe and his lovable-but-flawed-and-now-reformed son.”

The only thing that would get the MSM and the Democrats to admit Joe’s corruption would be if they decided they wanted to be rid of him and they can’t figure out another way to do it. But I do not predict that will happen.

New York City versus airbnb

The New Neo Posted on by

Airbnb may be pretty much finished in New York City:

New rules governing short-term stays book via Airbnb, Vrbo and similar platforms in New York City could have broader consequences for the vacation rental industry, just as it faces headwinds from some travelers who are once again favoring traditional hotels over residential-style listings.

Why it matters: The change — which Airbnb has called a “de facto ban” — is one of the most significant moves a major city has made in recent years to curtail short-term rentals, coming after New Orleans issued new restrictions of its own in March.

A lot of cities might end up doing the same thing as New York, which is basically to limit airbnb-type listings of under thirty days to properties in which the owner is present, the number of guests is limited to two, and the guests have access to the whole property. Only a small percentage of listings are of that type.

I wonder if this is being done to protect the hotel industry; that certainly is the argument of the pro-airbnb folks. But I am also under the impression that there are so many airbnb properties in a city like New York that it’s making it harder for bona fide residents to rent an apartment, and probably driving up prices as well.

One of the many problems is that hotel rooms in general, and particularly in a city like New York, have become exorbitant in recent years. That’s my perception, when a basic room costs at least $350 a night.

Will the limitations on airbnbs discourage tourism? No one seems to know. Probably many of you don’t much care about New York, but this sort of thing could spread to many many cities.

Are Biden’s handlers guilty of elder abuse?

The New Neo Posted on by

Even back during the 2020 campaign, I heard the claim that Biden’s handlers – and also Jill Biden – were guilty of elder abuse in having him run for president and cooperating with it and facilitating it. I noticed today a commenter here (“Brooklyn Boy”) making the very same point: “His handlers are guilty of elder abuse.”

And surely, if it was true in 2020, it’s even more true now, because unlike fine wine, Joe Biden has not improved with age.

But I disagreed with the “elder abuse” premise in 2020, and I disagree with it now. I suppose your opinion on the matter depends on how you evaluate Biden’s cognitive state at the moment. I have long used phases like “cognitively challenged” for Biden, whom I see as having many cognitive deficits but as still being cogniscent of what’s going on around him and possessed of what is commonly known as “agency.”

The man was never sharp or wise, so that’s not the issue. He was never a truth-teller. Nor was he possessed of solid political principles, whatever they might have been, left or middle-of-the-road. He was a great vice president for Obama because he was a policy chameleon, willing to go along with whatever Obama wanted, which was to move ever leftward. It was just fine with Biden, whose overwhelming motive has always been his own personal ambition. Becoming VP in his golden years was a dream come true, although it was a dream he thought he’d fulfill much much earlier in life.

And becoming president was even more of a dream fulfilled for Biden. He has willed it for his entire adult life, and he has achieved it. And he still has will, despite his cognitive limitations which are hardly absolute. Being president is exactly what he wants and has always wanted, and he would crawl over the proverbial broken glass to do it again in 2024. If his party wishes to remove him, it will take some doing.

Nor is Biden particularly embarrassed by his current state. He was always sort of goony, given to strange and/or shady statements and claims, many of them made up. He had no shame then and none now.

No; the only people being abused in this deal are those of us who didn’t vote for him.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) The absolute and imperial monarch of New Mexico, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, has taken to heart the idea that in crisis is opportunity. But she’s getting some pushback, even from a few on the left:

Emergency orders issued by New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham suspending the right to carry firearms in public in and around Albuquerque are getting pushback from gun rights groups and some law enforcement officials and elected leaders.

Citing the recent shooting deaths of three children, including an 11-year-old boy gunned down outside a minor league baseball park last week, Grisham issued a 30-day ban on open and concealed carrying of firearms in her state’s largest city and surrounding areas in Bernalillo County. The decree came a day after Lujan Grisham declared gun violence a statewide public health emergency, saying “the rate of gun deaths in New Mexico increased 43% from 2009 to 2018.” …

“Gun violence is an epidemic in America, and I’m done letting it be an epidemic anywhere in my state. Enough is enough,” Lujan Grisham said.

Well, that settles it, right?

Governor Grisham’s order is already the target of four lawsuits.

(2) A North Dakota man has been sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for manslaughter, to which he had pleaded guilty. Reading the article, it’s difficult to get a sense of what really happened. But the lightness of the sentence seems wrong on the face of it, according to the facts as I understand them.

It’s a good thing he didn’t do what this J6 defendant who got 7 1/4 years did: talk about taking the Capitol and wear a gun but never use or even brandish it, never enter the Capitol, and never assault anyone.

(3) Nancy Pelosi is running again. She says it’s so she can raise money for the Democrats, something at which she’s excelled in the past. Pelosi is presently 83 and would be 84 1/2 by the time of the 2024 election and 86 at the end of the term, a relative spring chicken in these days of geriatric politicians. I think she harbors visions of being Speaker one more time.

(4) And speaking of spring chickens – Joe Biden is spending 9/11 in Alaska.

(5) Musk’s “X” (formerly Twitter) is suing California:

The lawsuit, filed in Sacramento federal court, alleges a new California law violates the company’s First Amendment rights because “it compels companies like X Corp. to engage in speech against their will” and “interferes with the constitutionally-protected editorial judgments” of the company.

It says it does so by “pressuring companies such as X Corp. to remove, demonetize, or deprioritize constitutionally-protected speech that the State deems undesirable or harmful,” and “places an unjustified and undue burden” on social media companies like X.

On the 22nd anniversary of 9/11

The New Neo Posted on by

It doesn’t seem possible that so many years have passed. And yet in a way, 9/11 seems like ancient history, or a bad dream. Or both.

There are college graduates who were not born when 9/11 happened. To an entire generation, 9/11 is part of the background noise of their lives, something that was always there. They cannot imagine the shock of that day for those of us who are older.

We should bow our heads and remember those who were foully murdered on 9/11, many of them young people themselves who would now be middle-aged or old but never got the chance. The NY Times has written many abominable things before and since 9/11, but its “Portraits of Grief” sketches of the victims are wonderfully done and remain heartbreaking.

One of the many terrible legacies of that day is the surveillance state, enabled by the War on Terror’s Patriot Act and now used against us all, particularly on the right. But I believe that would have happened anyway, because the computer age and other advances in technology have made that type of spying on the average citizen all too tempting and all too possible.

But would the left have gained such ascendance without 9/11? I think the answer is “yes.” Recall that on 9/11 the left was fully ready with its “blame America” stance. The Gramscian march was already well advanced, too.

And would Obama have been elected in 2008 without 9/11? I think so; his appeal was about a host of other things, including the (utterly betrayed) promise of racial healing, the financial crisis, and his own carefully-crafted persona.

Without 9/11, however, the Afghanistan War would not have happened, a war whose consequences – thanks in particular to Joe Biden – have been bad and whatever good it accomplished undone. The attacks of 9/11 were not the reason for the Iraq War – unlike the Afghan War. But I submit that without 9/11 the Iraq War would not have happened, either.

On a personal note, 9/11 was the catalyst for a several-years-long process of reading and thinking that led to a political change on my part. The change was only of political affiliation, however. Nothing basic about my point of view changed, and the change wasn’t about terrorism or 9/11 itself. I simply became more interested in learning the facts about history and politics as well as the MSM coverage of those things, and in the course of that activity I discovered to my surprise that I no longer could support the Democratic Party. And so in a very real way 9/11 began a long process that led to my starting this blog in the fall of 2004.

RIP to all the victims and heroes of 9/11. And may their families, and the survivors, be comforted. And may the republic somehow manage to reverse the terrible course it’s been on lately.

[NOTE: Here’s my personal account of 9/11.]

ADDENDUM: There are many many videos available about 9/11. Here are just a few short ones:

The Letter

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve always been very fond of the 1967 hit “The Letter” by the Box Tops. I had a long-distance boyfriend at the time, about to be drafted and sent to Vietnam, and the song had particular resonance. But it was also just a catchy, catchy song. I never thought that later popular versions, such as the one by Joe Cocker, could hold a candle to it. Your mileage may differ, but I loved and still love the bouncy carnival-type instrumentation of the original, the beat, and the roar of the airplane at the end. Here’s the original:

Here’s Joe Cocker:

And this is so funny; apparently some sort of TV appearance where the Box Tops were required to lip-sync, and they’re not even pretending. Lead singer Alex Chilton was 16 years old here but looks (and more importantly sounds) older to me:

As with so many songs of that early era in rock, “The Letter” has an interesting backstory – interesting to me, at least:

Wayne Carson wrote “The Letter”, built on an opening line suggested by his father: “Give me a ticket for an aeroplane”. Carson included the song on a demo tape he gave to Chips Moman, owner of American Sound Studio in Memphis, Tennessee. When studio associate Dan Penn was looking for an opportunity to produce more, Moman suggested a local group, the DeVilles, who had a new lead singer, sixteen-year-old Alex Chilton. … Penn gave the group Carson’s demo tape for some songs to work up. With little or no rehearsal, the group arrived at American Sound to record “The Letter”. Chilton recalled:

“We set up and started running the tune down … [Dan] adjusted a few things on the organ sound, told the drummer not to do anything at all except the basic rhythm that was called for. No rolls, no nothin’. The bass player was playing pretty hot stuff, so he didn’t mess with what the bass player was doing.”

Penn added: “The guitar player had the lick right—we copied Wayne’s demo. Then I asked the keyboard player to play an ‘I’m a Believer’ type of thing.” Chilton sang the vocal live while the group was performing; Penn noted: “I coached him [Chilton] a little … told him to say ‘aer-o-plane,’ told him to get a little gruff, and I didn’t have to say anything else to him, he was hookin ’em, a natural singer.”He later explained, “[Chilton] picked it up exactly as I had in mind, maybe even better. I hadn’t even paid any attention to how good he sang because I was busy trying to put the band together … I had a bunch of greenhorns who’d never cut a record, including me”.

About thirty takes were required for the basic track. Then Penn had Mike Leech prepare a string and horn arrangement to give it a fuller sound. Leech recalled: “My very first string arrangement was ‘The Letter’, and the only reason I did that was because I knew how to write music notation … Nobody else in the group did or I’m sure someone else would have gotten the call.” Penn also overdubbed the sound of an airplane taking off to the track from a special effects record that had been checked out from the local library.

“Checked out from the local library.” I love these stories – there are so many of them in early rock and pop music. I recall finding out about how hard it was to get sound effects back then compared to today, and how creative people had to be, in connection with the Bee Gees hit song “Tragedy”:

By the way, Wayne Carson, writer of the song “The Letter,” was the child of two professional musicians. Here’s another great story:

In the mid 1960s he returned to Springfield, where he began working with music publisher and promoter Si Siman. Together they pitched songs for years, without success until Siman’s friend and producer Chet Atkins took a liking to a tune called “Somebody Like Me” and wanted to have Eddy Arnold record it. Carson was taken aback when he got a call from Arnold, one of the most successful country acts of all time. “Eddie said, ‘Wayne, I love the song, but it needs another verse’,” Carson recalled. “So I said, ‘Well, the third verse goes like this’ and I just wrote it right there over the phone.” The song became his first number one hit in late 1966 and spent four weeks on top of the country charts.

“The Letter” wasn’t a country song, but I suppose it could have been one if recorded in that style. Carson was also a co-writer on the following big hit, a song I like a great deal but which I never would have linked with “The Letter.” The song was recorded by many people, including Elvis, but I’m very fond of this version:

Number of missing in Lahaina now stands at 66

The New Neo Posted on by

This new number is a huge improvement over the thousand-plus people originally thought to have perished, or even the four hundred or so that constituted the revised number:

One month after the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century leveled the historic town of Lahaina, Hawaii Gov. Josh Green said Friday that the number of missing has dropped to 66, the confirmed death toll remains at 115 and authorities will soon escort residents on visits to their property. …

With about half the deceased still unidentified, Green said he expected there to be significant overlap between the names on the missing list and remains that have already been recovered. Therefore, he said, he did not expect the death toll to rise considerably.

That’s the history of what happened in Paradise, by the way. Although the Paradise death toll was never thought to be as high as initially thought in Lahaina, it was nevertheless much higher for a while than the final Paradise toll turned out to be. Any death toll is sad, and both fires were horrific, but lower death tolls are certainly relative good news.

Trump as martyr

The New Neo Posted on by

In a post I wrote about three weeks ago, I mentioned that Trump might be becoming a martyr in the eyes of voters on the right. I certainly perceive him that way, and have for some time – not in the religious sense but in the more general sense of, “a person who suffers very much or is killed because of their religious or political beliefs, and is often admired because of it.”

It can be dangerous to make someone into a martyr. However, that person’s enemies can weigh all their options and believe that martyrdom is better than either letting the person live or continuing to let the person function freely. The Ayatollah Khomeini is a pretty good example; in this post I wrote about how in 1963 he was under a death sentence but his life was spared by the Shah’s government because they didn’t want to make him a martyr and therefore even more powerful. Of course, we know what ended up happening – and one of the first people Khomeini had executed was the general who had successfully argued years earlier for sparing Khomeini’s life.

I am not for a single moment suggesting that Trump is some sort of Khomeini and the left the Shah. What I’m trying to say, however, is that when there’s a figure that a political group sees as the enemy, there is the dilemma of how to counter that person and the movement represented by those who support the person, and there are many different ways to handle it.

When Trump was running for office back in 2016, the Democrats handled it by ridicule and scorn; they mostly imagined him to be a ludicrous figure who wouldn’t win. Their horror when he did win was a good part of the reason why they spent the next four years in so-called “resistance” activities, including trying to frame him over and over and over, as well as impeaching him on exaggerated grounds. It didn’t work, but through propaganda, “rigging,” “fortifying,” and perhaps outright fraud, they managed to defeat him in 2020.

But that wasn’t enough – no, not nearly enough. They are determined to destroy him one way or the other. In that post from three weeks ago I described various possible scenarios, but the point is that they want him gone and the lawfare against him is a big part of it so far.

But have they considered the possibility that the Shah had to consider with Khomeini, martyrdom? Trump certainly has considered it. Back in June he told a religious group the following [my emphasis]:

Speaking at the Faith and Freedom Coalition gala in Washington DC on Saturday night, Trump slammed the two indictments he is currently facing as he looks to reclaim the White House in 2024.

He said he considers each new indictment against him a “badge of honor.”

“I’m being indicted for you and I believe that ‘you’ is more than 200 million people who love our country,” the former president said to applause. “This is a continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time.”

There is a subtle – or perhaps not-so-subtle – echo there of Christian belief. But it’s certainly true that he is being indicted to give warning to his supporters, who are at least half the nation. And the similar persecution (through Draconian sentences) of the J6 defendants bears this out.

Trump’s June declaration to the faith group was no one-off. Yesterday he repeated the claim [emphasis mine]:

Former President Donald Trump told supporters at a campaign rally for the 2024 election in Rapid City, South Dakota, on Friday that he considers the various criminal indictments against him to be a “badge of honor.”

“Every time the radical left Democrats, Marxists, communists, and fascists indict me, I consider it a great badge of honor,” Trump said. “And I’m being indicted for you. I am being indicted for you. I’m not too thrilled about that. But that’s part of the job description, isn’t it?”

“Martyr” seems to have become part of Trump’s job description. He’s well aware of it. Will this perception affect anyone other than those who already support him? I’m speaking not about those on the left, or those who already hate his guts. I’m speaking about those in the middle who aren’t sure. Such people must still exist, right?