Love-gone-bad songs

The New Neo Posted on by

If you look at the topic broadly, probably more than half of popular songs are about heartbreak or love gone bad. But I was thinking about a particular sort of heartbreak – the lover who was never sincere, the one who was always fooling you right from the start, and you were the fool. I can think of three such songs that remind me of each other although they’re quite different musically:

The lyrics tell you right at the beginning:

Here the disillusionment takes a tiny bit longer. I love the biting quality Thompson puts into his voice:

And of course there are the Bee Gees, kings of the broken heart. They’re not quite as bitter, but still – when the singer wakes up, she’s gone, and he didn’t see it coming and doesn’t have a clue why. Maybe you can tell him:

This isn’t exactly about the same theme. But hey, I love it, and it’s close enough:

Back to the Bee Gees – as songwriters, anyway. The great Dionne Warwick here:

So, why did the LA Times and the WaPo decide not to endorse anyone this year for the presidency?

The New Neo Posted on by

The easy answer would be: they hate Trump and his deplorable supporters, but they’re too embarrassed to endorse Kamala Harris because she’s performed so poorly.

Of course, that didn’t stop them from endorsing Joe Biden in 2020 or carrying water for him right up to the point of his disastrous debate in June with Trump. Nor has it stopped them from continuing to cover the news – including, of course, the presidential race – with their usual leftwing bias. So, why not an endorsement of Harris?

I don’t think it’s because they fear Trump retaliation if he’s elected. They probably realize that (a) he wouldn’t really be doing much to hurt them because in general his past threats have been just bluster, or (b) Trump already has plenty of motivation to do whatever he might be doing to them if he became president, and a Harris endorsement would hardly add anything to it.

So, what is it? The WaPo says it’s “returning to its roots” of non-endorsement prior to 1976. That’s nearly fifty years of endorsements, though. One would think that, since Trump is Hitler, the WaPo picked a funny time to end the endorsement practice. It really does seem a slap in the face to Harris, the only person who might have been reasonably expecting a WaPo endorsement for president this year.

Typical of other papers is this article in the leftist Guardian, in that they all seem to mention that owners Patrick Soon-Shiong (LA) and Jeff Bezos (Post) are billionaires. Well, yes, but they previously were billionaires who owned papers that endorsed Democrats for president. The Guardian writer, Margaret Sullinvan, opines:

All of this may look like nonpartisan neutrality, or be intended to, but it’s far from that. For one thing, it’s a shameful smackdown of both papers’ reporting and opinion-writing staffs who have done important work exposing Trump’s dangers for many years.

It’s also a strong statement of preference. The papers’ leaders have made it clear that they either want Trump (who is, after all, a boon to large personal fortunes) or that they don’t wish to risk the ex-president’s wrath and retribution if he wins. If the latter was a factor, it’s based on a shortsighted judgment, since Trump has been a hazard to press rights and would only be emboldened in a second term.

When Sullivan uses the term “press rights,” I believe it’s actually a code for “the right of the press to lie about Republicans and to suppress any news unfavorable to the left or deemed disinformation by the left.” Any actual free speech advocate, especially involving social media, is a great danger to the left.

However, there is a kernel of truth in the “Trump is a hazard to press rights” accusation, and that is that in 2022 Trump did advocate jail time in order to pressure reporters to reveal sources in cases of perhaps criminal leaks, such as the leak of the Dobbs draft long before the decision was officially issued. But reporters’ privileges to protect sources are not absolute; read this for a discussion of the legal issues. And quite a few reporters have indeed been jailed for refusing to reveal sources; one you might recall was Judith Miller. And I can’t find a record of any reporters actually jailed by Trump for anything during his administration.

More about the WaPo‘s decision [emphasis mine]:

Colleagues were said to be “shocked” and uniformly negative. Editor-at-large Robert Kagan, who has been highly critical of Trump as autocratic, told NPR he had resigned from the editorial board as a consequence.

Former Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron, who led the newsroom to acclaim during Trump’s presidency, denounced the decision starkly.

“This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty,” Baron said in a statement to NPR. “Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidate The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos (and other media owners). History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”

“Democracy dies in darkness” – I guess Baron really took that slogan to heart. But it’s been quite a long time since the WaPo was “famed for courage,” and it’s interesting that that “courage” was demonstrated by the paper’s role in taking down a previous Republican president, Richard Nixon.

Trump and Rogan, sitting and schmoozing

The New Neo Posted on by

I listened to all three hours of Trump’s interview with Joe Rogan out of curiosity. As is my habit when listening to a podcast or the like, I was double-tasking, mainly doing chores while wearing a wireless headset, and I increased the audio speed for much of it.

But I didn’t really need three hours of a Rogan interview to be familiar with Trump’s personality. He’s been doing talk show interviews since the 1980s (or earlier?) back when he was slim and handsome. And then he had his own hit TV show for years later on. Trump’s got the gift of gab (if you like him) or is a master BS-er (if you don’t).

Rogan has an enormously popular podcast which I hear is especially appealing to youngish males. I’m clearly not a member of that demographic, but I’ve seen a few excerpts from his show over the years, and I know the format. It’s tailor-made for Trump, who’s ordinarily quite relaxed on camera especially if there’s a friendly interviewer. Trump has a sense of humor as well. Those things were on display during yesterday’s interview, and I think he probably gained some voters from it – people who didn’t see a moment of the Hitler they’ve repeatedly been told he’s channeling.

The basic messages Trump conveyed in the interview were these:

I have stamina – therefore those who say I’m going gaga are lying through their teeth.
I’m likeable – unlike a certain candidate whose initials are KH.
I’m able to think and talk at the same time – unlike a certain candidate whose initials are KH.
I’m actually able to answer questions – unlike a certain candidate whose initials are KH – and although I ramble at times, it’s purposeful and I know exactly what I’m doing.

Here’s the video. I noticed just now, as I went there for the embed code, that it’s got about 16 million views. That’s in less than 24 hours and on YouTube, a subsidiary venue for Rogan (Spotify is where most people watch his show):

Kamala Harris, on the other hand, went the star-studded route and got the Beyonce nomination. Harris’ entire campaign is focused on appealing to women, of course, although apparently some watchers were mighty upset yesterday that Beyonce didn’t sing a note although a short concert had apparently been hinted at and certainly was expected. There were even boos from the crowd. Certainly not the look Harris was aiming for.

Harris isn’t planning a Rogan interview. It’s obvious that she wouldn’t do well in such a venue, or that she’s actually frightened of it. Then again, maybe it would have helped her to do something like it, if she could relax enough to be herself. It’s a big “if,” of course. But I’d be curious to see what that self might be. Is there no there there? Is that self something equally off-putting as what we’ve seen so far of Harris, or worse?

Then again, maybe Harris will win anyway, for all the usual reasons: demographics, “rigging,” press help, identity politics and wokeism, actual fraud, who knows?

Critical Legal Studies: the radical assault on truth in American law was already apparent many decades ago

The New Neo Posted on by

I became interested in Critical Legal Studies long ago, in the 1980s. I had been to law school in the 1970s, so it didn’t affect my own legal education. To the best of my recollection, although my law school had conservative and leftist professors, their politics never entered the classroom. There, it was strictly legal reasoning, and a meritocracy.

Critical Legal Studies changed all that and was alarming right from the start. Twenty years or so ago, I bought a book about it called Beyond All Reason: The Radical Assault on Truth in American Law. It had been published in 1997. Here’s an excerpt, which proves how long ago it was possible to see the writing on the wall for those who were looking. And by the way, co-authors Daniel A. Farber and Suzanna Sherry were liberals rather than conservatives. But they were alarmed nevertheless and wrote this:

We can now summarize the fundamental tenets of the new radical multiculturalism. If the modern era begins with the European Enlightenment, the postmodern era that captivates the radical multiculturalists begins with its rejection. According to the new radicals, the Enlightenment-inspired ideas that have previously structured our world, especially the legal and academic parts of it, are a fraud perpetrated and perpetuated by white males to consolidate their own power. Those who disagree are not only blind but bigoted. The Enlightenment’s goal of an objective and reasoned basis for knowledge, merit, truth, justice, and the like is an impossibility: “objectivity” in the sense of standards of judgment that transcend individual perspectives, does not exist. Reason is just another code word for the views of the privileged. The Enlightenment itself merely replaced one socially constructed view of reality with another, mistaking power for knowledge. There is naught but power.

They saw all of that back then.

The next chapter of the book is entitled “Transforming the Law.” It begins with the idea that these movements in the humanities departments of universities were as yet still limited to the universities, which may have been the case in the 1990s but certainly is no longer true, as graduates of such courses have taken the helm in many professions such as journalism. The authors were correct in stating that when the movement spread to law schools, it became far more influential in the immediate sense.

The rest of the chapter is extraordinarily insightful although hard to summarize, but it describes how the Critical Legal Studies proponents teach that law is about power and so reason has little to no place in it and is merely a convenient facade for power plays. For example, here’s a description of the work of Derrick Bell, the first black law professor to get tenure at Harvard and a very influential voice in the movement:

As Derrick Bell puts it, law is “not a formal mechanism for determining outcomes in a neutral fashion – as traditional legal scholars maintain – but rather a ramshackle ad hoc affair whose ill-fitting joints are soldered together by suspect rhetorical gestures, leaps of illogic, and special pleading tricked up as general rules, all in the service of a decidedly partisan agenda that wants to wrap itself in the mantle and majesty of law.” Specifically, Bell argues that although courts proclaim a veneer of high principle, judges rule in favor of black interests only when the interests of whites are thereby served; the ultimate agenda is white self-interest.

This idea of Bell’s and of Critical Legal Studies in general – that law is a sham and only about power – is an excuse for subsequently making it a sham in pursuit of power, as we see today with lawfare. After all, if law is inherently only about power and always was, why not play the game better and boldly use it to empower your team? Of course, you may sometimes have to pretend to fairness and logic for a while, to fool the plebeians. But the left seems to have given up on objectivity and fairness as a goal for which to strive when dealing with one’s political opponents. People such as Alan Dershowitz, a liberal who still believes in those goals – however imperfectly realized – of legal objectivity and fairness to both sides, are considered dinosaurs at best and traitors at worst to the leftist cause, and have been treated as such by the left in recent years.

These trends in law are the result of close to forty years of careful nurturance, and that has borne very ripe fruit. And no, of course law was never anywhere near perfect, but objectivity and fairness were goals towards which most law professors taught their students to respect and strive, and it was often achieved. There are still some professors of that type around, but they are getting more and more rare, and that is no accident.

Oh, and by the way, Kamala Harris is best buddies with the owner of The Atlantic, Laurene Powell Jobs

The New Neo Posted on by

Laurene Powell Jobs, the very deep-pocketed owner of The Atlantic, is an extremely close friend of Kamala Harris and a big supporter.

Surely that had nothing to do with the Atlantic’s publication of a poorly-sourced hit piece on Trump by Jeffrey Goldberg two weeks before Election Day. The allegations in the article have been denied by almost everyone involved except for Goldberg’s anonymous sources and the Trump-hater John Kelly.

Here’s some of the history of Powell Jobs and Harris:

Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs, has been friends with the Democratic presidential nominee for years. In fact, these two powerful women are so close Harris has referred to Powell Jobs as part of her family.

In 2017, then-vice president Joe Biden swore in Harris as a U.S. senator, and right after the ceremony they posed for a photo in the Capitol with her family. Then she asked Biden to take a picture with her “extended family,” according to a report from The New York Times. Powell Jobs—one of the richest women in the world—was quick to jump in.

Powell Jobs and Harris have been friends for two decades, and she’s also made other “quiet” donations amounting to millions of dollars to an organization backing Harris, three people briefed on the gifts told The New York Times. Powell Jobs also allegedly played a “key role” in helping usher Biden out of the race, making room for Harris to step up.

There’s a great deal more at the link, but you get the idea.

Everything you never wanted to know about Kamala Harris

The New Neo Posted on by

I watched parts of a video of Tucker Carlson interviewing attorney Harmeet Dhillon about Kamala Harris’ early days as a prosecutor and DA in San Francisco, and then AG in California. Dhillon knew her back then. The video is very long and I didn’t watch the whole thing, although I plan to do so. But it’s the most comprehensive look I’ve seen at Harris’ history prior to holding office at the national level.

Here it is:

In Dhillon’s opinion Harris was primarily interested in advancing her own career, which was helped along by a combination of ingratiating herself with powerful men in San Francisco’s Democrat machine politics and checking the favored identity boxes. If you think about it, that’s pretty much how she got to her present position, as well.

Perhaps the part of the video that interested me the most, though, was Dhillon’s opinion on what’s been going on with Harris lately in terms of her problems answering questions. One good thing Dhillon says about Harris is that the Kamala Harris she knew back then was smart, articulate, and highly confident. Dhillon says she doesn’t even recognize the Harris of today as that same person, she seems to have changed so much. Dhillon has no idea what happened to Harris to cause the change; drink, drugs, a blow to the head, something entirely different? But whatever the cause, there’s been a big switch, and not for the better.

Dhillon adds that some people who did opposition research on Kamala back in those days found that as a prosecutor she had tried eight cases in Alameda and two in San Francisco. They couldn’t find a record of any more than that, although it’s possible they missed some. I include this because people here were wondering a while back about how many cases Harris has actually prosecuted.

You can also see some discussion of the issue of “what happened to Kamala?” in this tweet and the responses to it.

This journalist never met another one who supported Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

Talk about living in echo chambers.

See this:

Jay Caspian Kang, a staff writer for The New Yorker, ascribed media bias not to a conspiracy among journalists, but to the fact that the overwhelming majority of journalists are left-leaning.

Kang wrote a piece for The New Yorker, “How Biased Is the Media, Really?” in response to a recent Gallup poll showing that Americans’ trust in mass media remains not only historically low, but consistently abysmal for the third year in a row.

He responded by addressing multiple common critiques from Americans on both sides of the political spectrum, including the accusation that “Every news organization that feigns objectivity is actually heavily slanted toward the left. Not only that; the media is actively working with the Democrats to defeat Donald Trump.”

“The most obvious explanation for this impression is that the press corps is mostly made up of liberals,” he wrote in the piece, adding that “At prestige outlets—many of which do don the armor of impartiality—the imbalance skews a lot further to the left than what many outsiders might imagine.”

Actually, no. We imagine it quite well, I can assure you.

Kang adds:

I have mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: in the course of a fifteen-year career that has included stints at radio shows, print outlets, digital media and television, I have yet to meet a Trump supporter at work.

He attributes this, strangely enough, not to selection for political uniformity but to demographics: they’re all urban, college-educated, upper middle class. Guess what, though? Although such groups are indeed overwhelmingly Democrats and left-leaning or leftists, there are plenty of people who fit that description who could be hired but are not hired and never will be hired. Or they’re forced out, like Bari Weiss.

It would be easy to meet a Trump-supporting journalist, though, if Kang actually wanted to do so. He could toddle on over to a conservative publication and suggest going out to lunch to talk. Or, find a great conservative writer on Substack. Or drop me a line.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

Mostly Nazi stuff, but not totally Nazi stuff.

(1) And speaking of Nazis and Hitler, here’s a take on how today’s Democrats resemble the Nazis.

(2) And here’s some of the lengthy history of Democrats calling Republican candidates Nazis.

(3) Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff (who is Jewish), says that Trump is anti-Semitic. Emhoff must be totally objective about that, right? It’s an absurd line of attack, but I’m sure some Trump-haters buy it and it fits right in with the current “Nazi” theme that’s so popular.

(4) Remember Maricopa County? Well, they’re announcing in advance that it will probably take 10-13 days to get election results there. So very reassuring! Who wouldn’t trust them?

(5) Democratic fundraisers were aware of Biden’s cognitive decline at least a year before he was forced out.

CNN Town Hall: Kamala answers the classic job interview question, and also says Trump is a fascist

The New Neo Posted on by

It was always good for a laugh – remember? The classic comedy answer to the classic job interview question of “What would you say is your greatest weakness?” was something like “I’m just too conscientious” or “I work too hard” or “I’m a perfectionist.”

So here was Kamala during yesterday’s CNN “Town Hall” with Anderson Cooper:

One voter asked Harris about her weaknesses and what she would do to overcome them as president. She went on to describe “a weakness that some would consider a strength.” She said she understood the importance of “having a team of very smart people around me that bring to my decision making process different perspectives,” which was somewhat unusual given Harris’s notorious reputation as a difficult and dysfunctional boss who burns through employees at a rapid pace. Another weakness Harris cited was her insistence on studying too hard. “I’m kind of a nerd sometimes, and some might call that a weakness, especially if you’re, you know, in an interview or, just, kind of, you know, being asked a certain question and, just, you’re expected to have the right answer right away, but that’s how I, that’s how I work,” she explained.

Cooper followed up to ask Harris what mistakes she had made and what she learned from them. Harris’s response was inscrutable but seemed to imply that she wished she had studied harder to avoid getting tricked by nefarious reporters. “In my role as vice president, I mean, I probably worked very hard at making sure that I am well-versed on issues and, um, I think is very important, it’s a mistake not to be well-versed on an issue and be compelled to answer a question,” she said. One of Harris’s (many) disgruntled former staffers told the Washington Post in 2021 that Harris was not “somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work” and often blamed staff for her lack of preparedness.

The woman is comedy gold. But all was not fun and games, oh no. There was anti-fascist work to be done. The very first question out of cooperative Cooper Anderson’s mouth – referencing the charges by General Kelly that Trump repeatedly praised Hitler, and her own contentions that Trump is unstable – was whether she can say something more to seal the deal for herself and convince those who like Trump not to vote for him. Harris answered that yes, Trump is “increasingly unstable and unfit to serve.”

Wow, Kamala, that’ll do it!

It’s quite clear that this is a memorized bit as she goes on to say that “the people who worked for Trump” – listing a few – “have all called him unfit and dangerous.” She then goes on to highlight Kelly’s remarks without explaining that Kelly and Trump were very much at loggerheads when Kelly worked for Trump and that Kelly was forced out because of it and has hated him ever since. She adds that “one has to think about” why someone who “is not political” is saying this to the American people now, two weeks from the election.

Why, indeed. What a mystery! A guy who’s hated Trump for six or seven years, and has been the source of several previous high-profile attacks on him similar to the present one – why on earth would he say this in October, of all times? Is there anyone on earth who still would be puzzled by this phenomenon? Kamala’s not, because she answers: “And frankly, I just think [Kelly’s] putting out a 911 call to the American people.”

Kamala is fond of intensifiers like that: “frankly.” It’s usually a tell from a person that he or she is not speaking frankly, just as “to be honest” means a lie is coming up and “let me make it clear” (which is a Harris favorite) means you’re about to hear something very cloudy.

And all Kamala is doing, too, is just alerting the American people before it’s too late. What a heroine!

She goes on, “Understand what could happen if Donald Trump were back in the White House.”

I’ll bite: inflation goes down? Peace in the Middle East? There are quite a few possibilities there.

Harris then adds that this time there won’t be people like Kelly there “to hold him [Trump] back.” She goes on to state that Trump “said he would be a dictator on day one” (another of Harris’ favorite truncated Trump quotes; the “dictator” part was a joke spoofing his critics, and referred only to two executive orders, one on the border and one on drilling, that he would issue his first day in office). “The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has said that he was ‘a fascist to the core.'” Now, who might have said that? Why, you guessed it: Mark Milley.

Harris then advises undecided voters to go online and listen to Kelly talk about Trump. And then Anderson asks her point-blank, “Do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?” I bet you can’t guess what Harris’ answer might be: “Yes, I do.” And then immediately again, for emphasis: “Yes, I do.” Harris then goes into a paean to the generals, who obviously have no political bias and should be trusted (!). Then, just for good measure, she repeats Kelly’s “suckers and losers” accusation towards Trump from 2020, another charge only Kelly has reported and which everyone else involved has denied. Do you sense a pattern here?

Harris talks about how Liz and Dick Cheney have endorsed her – a fact that I can’t quite imagine many undecided voters will find compelling. Also, other Trump-hating establishment Republicans have supported her – who would have thunk it! What a bunch of selfless patriots.

She goes on in that vein, throwing in a few more truncated Trump quotes. If you watch the video, you might agree with me that it’s a fascinating performance in a very icky way. Not only is it an over-the-top smear disguised as an unselfish warning, but Kamala simply doesn’t have a knack for acting. Her faux concern about the prospect of Trump the fascist “standing behind the seal of the president of the United States!” – something she repeats for emphasis, as though she is sickened by the idea that this fascist will defile the sacred emblem – is something to behold.

I have seen many politicians in my life. But I’ve never seen anyone as obviously false as Kamala Harris. And although politicians lie a lot, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a campaign so totally and utterly based on lies.