Snowstorm and intermittent connection problems

The New Neo Posted on by

Where I live, mid-March is still winter. Yes, tiny green shoots that will someday become daylilies have been poking up in the sunniest spots. But snow and ice storms can still happen for at least another month, and today there’s a snowstorm with wind.

It’s quite lovely and swirly out there, but I was having connectivity problems earlier, although the power hadn’t gone out.

Yet.

Last night I got about six text messages from the power company, all of them saying the power might go out and they’ll be working hard to fix it. Nothing like a little anticipatory self-congratulation. It often goes off in storms because of trees coming down or other weather-related events, and one terrible time many years ago it was out for five miserable days when the temperature fell below zero.

So I’m posting this while I still can, and hoping that this time all the warning will prove to have just been alarmist.

Talking on the phone: what is it with people these days?

The New Neo Posted on by

I continue to have somewhat surreal experiences with people who answer the phones these days. And I’m not talking about people who live in Bangladesh or wherever many seem to reside, I’m talking about right here in this country. For example, just now I got a call from an Ear Nose and Throat office in response to a referral, and the woman – who sounded rather young – was clearly a native speaker.

No appointments are available for the next two months; that’s become standard and even six months or more is not unusual. Are there doctor shortages these days? More sick people? Hard to say, but waiting periods have gotten longer.

But that’s not what I want to focus on; it’s the strangeness of the rest of our little talk. She asked me what time of day I prefer, and I answered “afternoons.” She proceeded to offer me an 11:30 AM time that was on a day when I’ll be otherwise occupied, and so I asked for a different day – and she gave me another appointment at 11:30 AM on another day. I mentioned again that I’d said I prefer an afternoon appointment, and she asked what I meant by “afternoon.”

That was the beginning of the surreal part.

I tried to keep the sarcasm out of my voice when I answered that “afternoon” means after noon, and that 11:30 AM is before noon. She then managed to come up with an appointment at 1:45 PM, and added that it would be with Dr. B.

And yet my referral had been for Dr. A, who also had come highly recommended by a friend. Bait and switch?

I told the woman on the phone that I thought the referral had been for Dr. A, and she answered, “She only comes into our office on Fridays.” Which prompted me to ask if there was another office Dr. A frequented. Lo and behold – yes, there was, in a town ten miles away. I told her I was more than willing to go there instead, and she answered that I hadn’t made that clear until now.

“I didn’t know Dr. A had another office until now,” I answered, a fact that seemed self-evident. It was the scheduler who’d known all about the two offices – including knowing that the original referral was for Dr. A – and hadn’t informed me.

Apparently she handled the scheduling for both offices, and easily found an appointment there for me around the same time of day except on a Thursday. The wait was still two months, but there were more choices in that office and so it was easier. And yet she hadn’t thought to mention at the outset that I had a choice between the two very-nearby offices.

It seems as though so many communications that should be – and used to be – easy and straightforward have become convoluted and cryptic. Why?

The magic SVB bailout that’s not a bailout

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the way it works, children:

President Biden on Monday stressed that Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) will not get a government bailout after regulators seized the assets of the failed bank.

“No losses will be — and this is an important for point — no losses will be borne by the taxpayers. Let me repeat that, no losses will be borne by the taxpayers. Instead, the money will come from the fees that banks pay into the Deposit Insurance Fund,” Biden said in remarks at the White House on the banking system.

In other words, Congress isn’t allocating special funds for this. But it’s a bailout nonetheless, applying not only to insured deposits but to uninsured ones. What’s more, this is how that latter group will be paid:

The decision creates bad incentives for financial institutions and their customers.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is supposed to guarantee money at insured banks up to $250,000 per depositor, per bank, in each account ownership category.* In this case, however, it will fully protect all depositors with no limit…

The joint statement says, “No losses associated with the resolution of Silicon Valley Bank will be borne by the taxpayer.”

But this is misleading. For one thing, banks are themselves taxpayers. And in situations like this, the many institutions who act responsibly must bear the burden of bank fees in order to inoculate less responsible actors. Besides, these fees assessed on banks don’t exist in a vacuum that only burdens big businesses; banks pass on the costs of regulatory compliance to customers in a number of ways. So the idea that the government’s bailout funds come from some sort of magical pool of consequence-free money is silly.

It’s “silly” in terms of logic. But it’s not “silly” in terms of propaganda. In fact, the idea that many economic actions Democrats promote that seem kind and compassionate – such as, for example, a rise in the minimum wage, or an extension of mortgages to buyers who are bad credit risks and can’t really afford them – have no bad economic consequences that are passed on to everyone else is often a winning message come election day. Biden may or may not be either stupid enough or senile enough to believe his own message, but most Democrat pundits and politicians are probably well aware of its falsity. And they count on the ignorance of many voters.

This action regarding SVB exacerbates the moral hazard aspects of previous bailouts. What’s more, as the article goes on to add, “it’s also likely to spur more rules and regulations that could further burden all banks and their customers.” To the Democrats, that a feature, not a bug. The article also goes on to detail how the failure happened and why; it’s worth reading. In conclusion:

In the end, “the culprit” in SVB’s collapse “wasn’t the kind of exotic derivatives and risk-taking that doomed banks in the 2008 financial crisis. Rather, it was a mismatch between deposits and assets—the building blocks of the vanilla business of commercial banking,” the Journal writers explain. “The episode has exposed a new set of vulnerabilities for the financial system. Bankers that grew up in the easy-money era following the 2008 crisis failed to ready themselves for rates to rise again. And when rates went up, they forgot the playbook.”

Galina Ulanova in “Romeo and Juliet”

The New Neo Posted on by

Take a look. No one could run like Ulanova, and no one even comes close now. Same for her bourrées, which are those quick and tiny steps all on pointe that make it seem as though the dancer is skimming the ground (they occur many times in this brief clip, such as at 0:56 and 1:35):

Ulanova evinces the utter concentration that reminds me a bit of New York City Ballet’s Suzanne Farrell, who danced as though she was absorbed in an inner world and as though no one else was looking. Their body types and faces are very different, but they share that extremely rare quality.

Ulanova is one of the greatest ballet actresses ever – as was Plisetskaya, about whom I’ve written many times. But Plisetkaya was fiery and sexy, flamboyant and supercharged, and Ulanova was light and magical. They were both among the greatest, perhaps even the greatest, female ballet dancers the world has ever known. And if they convey so much on old videos, just imagine what seeing them in person and three dimensions was like.

There’s usually someone in the YouTube comments who criticizes their technique – by which the commenter means that they don’t get their legs so high, don’t have excessively and perfectly arched feet, and that sort of thing. I could not care less and in fact I see the lines made by their less extreme and less elastic bodies as far far more beautiful than those of the modern-day ballet contortionists.

Because of the acting skills and musicality of both Plisetskaya and Ulanova, we care about their dancing in a deeper sense than we get from watching gymnastics. Ulanova in particular had an unusual body that was nothing like that of most ballet dancers and not as conventionally beautiful, but she willed it to do her bidding. Her face was not especially beautiful either; in fact, she was rather plain. It didn’t matter, and perhaps she even used that to her advantage, because nothing distracted from her dancing, as great beauty sometimes does. Her face was protean, everywoman, which meant that she blended into her roles and became her roles. Her art was more naturalistic in a way that concealed the artifice and revealed the essential human within.

And by the way, Ulanova is about forty years old in that video. At 43, she was featured in this movie of the complete ballet. Watch the scene where the fourteen-year-old Juliet is romping like a child with her nurse, then becomes more solemn when her mother enters, and has a dawning realization that she is becoming a woman and leaving childhood behind. Because it’s a movie, there are closeups, and of course her face isn’t that of a girl thirty years younger. But her movements convey youth perfectly, and on a stage the illusion was astounding:

Why did I vote for Democrats all those years?

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “OBloodyHell” opines, in the Naomi Wolf thread:

I do not believe you were truly “liberal” beforehand, Neo. I suspect you always had a part of your mind filled with doubt, conscious and unconscious of certain inconsistencies.

Depends what you mean by truly liberal. I certainly behaved that way in terms of my voting record. From my very first vote at 21 right up until the year 2004, when I was what a lot of people might consider old, I voted only for Democrats. What’s more, I couldn’t imagine voting for a Republican, and I couldn’t imagine ever voting for a Republican in the future. Somewhere between the fall of 2001 and the fall of 2004 that changed, but it was quite a difficult transition that involved – among other things – the shock of admitting to myself that I would be voting Republican.

Of course, for most of those years, Democrats were far more centrist than they have since become. I never was a leftist, and perhaps that’s what OBloody really means. But I was certainly a “liberal” as most people thought of it back then: was in favor of unions, welfare, civil rights, free speech, and more government in general. Of course I had some doubts, and I didn’t completely toe the line, but I don’t think that was unusual among Democrat voters in those days. For me, some points of contention that I can recall were that I never was in favor of affirmative action, nor was I keen on bilingual education or dropping programs for the gifted. I didn’t think the US was an evil empire, but most liberals of the time didn’t think so either; that was a leftist belief.

Did I think conservatives were selfish, greedy, and bigoted? Maybe; I’m a little foggier on that. Plus, I’m pretty sure I didn’t know any – at least not among the people with whom I habitually spoke. However, I almost never talked politics with people, so I wouldn’t have been able to say for sure. And that was fine with me. My experience of political discussions among those who disagreed with each other was that they were nasty, bitter, and solved nothing. And political discussions among those who did agree with each other were boring. So why bother?

I got my news from the NY Times and the Boston Globe, plus the New Yorker, and believed they gave their readers fair representations of the truth. But in general, politics itself bored me. I knew it mattered, and I paid attention to it – especially to the big stories – but it never grabbed me in the sense that I wanted to know more than my usual sources were giving me.

As I’ve described in great detail in my “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series, it took an unusual combination of factors to change all of that. My son was in college and I was separated from my husband and decided not to have the papers delivered anymore; my arm injury made it difficult to deal with disposing of piles of papers. So I had more free time than before, and with computers it was easier to read all sorts of newspapers, magazines, and even those new inventions called blogs. Link led to link, and before I knew it I was reading not only my old “liberal” sources but sources on the right, too.

Thing is, I didn’t realize they were on the right. I just knew they had unfamiliar names, but they made more sense than the Times and the Globe did. By the time I realized the sources I liked best were on the right, I couldn’t deny that they were more reliable and more logical, for the most part. That caused a lot of soul-searching, more research, and the rest is neo history.

If that particular unusual set of circumstances hadn’t happened to me – the divorce, the computer, the free time, and let’s not forget the initial jump-start of 9/11 – would I have had a political change? I think that by now I would have, but much more recently and mostly because of the extreme leftism of the Democratic Party in recent years.

But I don’t think I was all that atypical of a certain subset of “liberals’ during the last half of the 20th Century. Even now, my sense is that most of my Democrat friends are a combination of busy with other things, informed by leftist propaganda, and living in a social environment in which they know few people on the right. Add to that the fact that people on the right have been further demonized by that propaganda, and you have yourself the recipe for the perceptions of a large portion of today’s Democrat voters.

The speedy failure of Silicon Valley Bank

The New Neo Posted on by

For this story I’m going to suggest you go to this post at Legal Insurrection and follow the internal links there as well. An excerpt:

Within a 48-hour period, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) went from being the “Bank of Venture-Backed Tech Startups” to making history as the second biggest bank collapse in U.S. history.

Now the feds have shuttered the bank…

What happened? It appears the root cause of this bank collapse stems from federal requirements to begin with. After the last financial crisis of 2008, regulators required banks to hold more capital. So, banks opted to hold Treasuries and Mortgage Securities and apparently treated them as if they had no risk.

However, it turns out pumping billions of dollars into the economy in the name of “science” and “equity” actually had consequences.

The whole thing apparently played out in 48 hours:

The company’s downward spiral began late Wednesday, when it surprised investors with news that it needed to raise $2.25 billion to shore up its balance sheet. What followed was the rapid collapse of a highly-respected bank that had grown alongside its technology clients…

The roots of SVB’s collapse stem from dislocations spurred by higher rates [set by the Fed to stem inflation]. As startup clients withdrew deposits to keep their companies afloat in a chilly environment for IPOs and private fundraising, SVB found itself short on capital. It had been forced to sell all of its available-for-sale bonds at a $1.8 billion loss, the bank said late Wednesday.

The sudden need for fresh capital, coming on the heels of the collapse of crypto-focused Silvergate bank, sparked another wave of deposit withdrawals Thursday as VCs instructed their portfolio companies to move funds, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The concern: a bank run at SVB could pose an existential threat to startups who couldn’t tap their deposits.

An old-fashioned bank run, this time involving venture capitalists?

US IQs drop across all age groups – or do they?

The New Neo Posted on by

While trying to read this rather dense piece of social science research, I came across this portion quite a ways into it:

…[I]t should also be recognized that the SAPA Project relies on participants finding or seeking out the survey; meaning members of the population do not have an equal probability of being recruited into the survey (Condon, 2018). Thus, selection bias has likely been introduced into the sample due to those voluntarily taking the survey being non-representative of the target population (Lohr, 2010). This significantly differs from previous Flynn effect studies that relied on systematic norming data collected by proprietary licensed measures using probability sampling or population-based conscript data where participation was required…

Beyond inconsistencies in demographics across the sample, another factor that could be accounting for lower scores for more recent participants could be due to a decline in motivation. As the SAPA Project is advertised as a personality survey, individuals seeking out the SAPA Project may not be fully engaged with items not measuring temperament at the capacity as they are with more typically considered personality items.

There’s more, but you get the idea. And the idea is: why bother? So much social science research is garbage in garbage out, some of it built into the nature of such research with human subjects.

So perhaps I’ll just close with this:

Naomi Wolf apologizes to conservatives

The New Neo Posted on by

In this substack essay by Naomi Wolf, she apologizes to conservatives and Trump-supporters for having believed the Democrat/MSM January 6th narrative. In it, she makes some historical points:

Massing peacefully at the Capitol and other public buildings, is part of our rights and inheritance as citizens, and this use of our First Amendment right to assemble has a long history. Indeed, the public has traditionally has the right peacefully to enter the Capitol — to obtain passes to events, galley seats and to witness the proceedings in other ways.

The Capitol is not a sealed space exclusively for legislators, but it is one that is supposed to welcome the public in an orderly way…

The violence of Jan 6 and its subsequent service as a talking point by the Democrats’ leadership, risks its use also to justify the closing off of our public buildings from US citizens altogether.

This would be convenient for tyrants of any party.

But my question is: why did she believe the narrative the left was pushing in the first place? I seem to remember she’s big on doubting the government’s COVID line, so I would think she’d be highly sensitized to the idea that there are a lot of lies floating around told by those with something to be gained by doing so, and therefore to look on these things with a somewhat jaundiced eye.

But that wasn’t her attitude towards January 6th reporting from the left. She utterly accepted it. Why? Was it because this particular story fed into her pre-existing presumptions about the right and Trump supporters in general?:

Leaving aside the release of the additional Jan 6 footage and how it may or may not change our view of US history —- I must say that I am sorry for believing the dominant legacy-media “narrative” pretty completely from the time it was rolled out, without asking questions.

Jan 6 has become, as the DNC intended it to become, after the fact, a “third rail”; a shorthand used to dismiss or criminalize an entire population and political point of view.

Peaceful Republicans and conservatives as a whole have been demonized by the story told by Democrats in leadership of what happened that day.

So a half of the country has been tarred by association, and is now in many quarters presumed to be chaotic berserkers, anti-democratic rabble, and violent upstarts, whose sole goal is the murder of our democracy.

Republicans, conservatives, I am sorry.

I also believed wholesale so much else that has since turned out not to be as I was told it was by NPR, MSNBC and The New York Times.

I believed that stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop were Russian propaganda…

I believed this all — til it was debunked.

I believed that President Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia — until that assertion was dropped…

I believed that Pres Trump was a Russian asset, because the legacy media I read, said so…

I believed in the entire Steele dossier, until I didn’t, because it all fell apart.

There’s more in that vein. Note that all those things happened prior to January 6th, at least everything but the Hunter laptop debunking. So why did she still believe in January 6th as a deadly insurrection? Why has she been Charlie Brown to Lucy and the football?

My answer: a mind is a difficult thing to change. Most people are resistant to change despite evidence. It takes some sort of critical mass of a certain type of evidence, and even then the majority of people will probably continue to resist it.

I think the following may actually be the most interesting thing Wolf writes in the entire piece:

I don’t like President Trump (Do I not? Who knows? I have been lied to about him so much for so long, I can‘t tell whether my instinctive aversion is simply the habituated residue of years of being on the receiving end of lies).

It is especially unusual for a person on the left (where Wolf still positions herself) to be able to admit that maybe she was wrong even about Trump.

I am sorry I believed so much nonsense.

Though it is no doubt too little, too late —

Would that she could spread her new attitude around to enough people, so it wouldn’t be too late. But it is excruciatingly difficult to do what she’s doing – or beginning to do.