The FBI whistleblowers and the Hunter Biden laptop coverup

The New Neo Posted on by

I remember, when the Hunter Biden laptop first came out shortly before the 2020 election, that I had a moment of thinking it might become a big scandal – which it deserved to be. But almost immediately the news was suppressed and discredited, and the media cooperated, and I thought of course. I knew they had to protect the Bidens at all costs, and if one cost was their integrity, well then, they really had no integrity left by that time anyway.

I also recall hearing that the FBI had received the laptop from the store’s proprietor much earlier (turns out it was in December of 2019), and had supposedly been investigating it. It didn’t surprise me, either, that not only had the investigation gone absolutely nowhere, but that in this case there were no leaks to the public – and in fact the reports that did get out later about the FBI investigation said it concerned whether the laptop’s contents were Russian disinformation. The reason for all of this seemed the same: the FBI was determined to protect Joe and his family.

Therefore this news is utterly unsurprising:

Several FBI whistleblowers say that the agency’s probe into Hunter Biden was internally sabotaged during the 2020 election in order to derail the investigation, after agents wrongfully deemed verified evidence as “disinformation” to ignore.

According to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), agents investigating Hunter “opened an assessment which was used by an FBI headquarters team to improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease,” adding that his office received “a significant number of protected communications from highly credible whistleblowers” regarding the investigation.

It’s a bit late and a dollar short for all this whistleblowing, isn’t it? Not that it would have mattered at the time, because all of social media as well as almost all of the MSM (with the exception of a few outlets on the right such as The NY Post) had resolved to shut the scandal down, too, and they would have also shut down news of the FBI shutdown if it had come to them.

From the Washington Examiner:

FBI supervisory intelligence agent Brian Auten opened in August 2020 the assessment that was later used by the agency, according to the disclosures. One of the whistleblowers claimed the FBI assistant special agent in charge of the Washington field office, Timothy Thibault, shut down a line of inquiry into Hunter Biden in October 2020 despite some of the details being known to be true at the time.

A whistleblower also said Thibault “ordered closed” an “avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting,” according to Grassley, even though “all of the reporting was either verified or verifiable via criminal search warrants.” The senator said Thibault “ordered the matter closed without providing a valid reason as required” and that FBI officials “subsequently attempted to improperly mark the matter in FBI systems so that it could not be opened in the future,” according to the disclosures…

The new information comes after Auten was involved in the Trump-Russia investigation, including interviewing Igor Danchenko, the alleged main source for British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s dossier in 2017. Congressional sources confirmed to the Washington Examiner that Auten is the “Supervisory Intel Agent” from DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s 2019 report on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuse.

By the way, if you look at the Wiki page for “Hunter Biden laptop controversy” and read the first paragraph of the introductory part – a summary that probably constitutes what many people seeking general information would look at and go no further – you could easily still get the idea that the laptop information is bogus and/or suspect. Here’s some of the copy there [the remarks in brackets are mine]:

The Hunter Biden laptop controversy involves a laptop computer that was allegedly [“allegedly”?] dropped off at a repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware, by an unidentified person [the owner has a receipt with the signature “Hunter Biden” that has been authenticated] in April 2019 and never collected. The New York Post published a story stating the allegation three weeks before the 2020 United States presidential election, and president Donald Trump seized [“Republicans seize!!” is always the big story] on it in an attempt to engineer [“engineer” indicates something contrived; this was certainly real] an “October surprise”. The laptop was of unclear origin [not in the least; it is “disinformation” to say so, and the disinformation was designed to protect the Bidens] and contained emails obtained by Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and other materials relating to Hunter Biden, some of which were later confirmed as authentic [many have been confirmed as authentic and not one of them has been confirmed as inauthentic]. The discovery of the laptop spurred speculation as to whether it supported what became the Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory, which falsely [there is no indication the “conspiracy” theory is false, and quite a bit that it is true] alleged that the then vice president Joe Biden acted corruptly in Ukraine to protect his son from a corruption investigation by Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin [what’s more, that’s not the only type of corruption alleged about Joe Biden in Ukraine; there are allegations that he was on the take as well, through Hunter’s reimbursement].

Just now I did a search for stories on Grassley and the whistleblowers’ allegations about the FBI quashing the laptop story, and aside from news outlets on the right such as the NY Post, Fox, and the Washington Examiner, so far I could only find one regular liberal/left MSM outlet mentioning it. That is CBS News, and it doesn’t surprise me that the story is by Catherine Herridge, a good reporter who used to be at Fox.

The Biden administration says a recession by any other name would smell as sweet

The New Neo Posted on by

The Biden administration continues the Obama administration’s emphasis on labeling, as though calling something by a different name would fool people into actually seeing it differently. Why do they do this? The main reason is that they believe in the power of words to shape perceptions.

And this is true to a certain extent, particularly for those on their side. For example, how many Democrats now call illegal immigrants (or, to be more retro, illegal aliens), “undocumented migrants” or something of the sort, and believe they should have full rights? Quite a few.

So when is a recession not a recession? When the administration decides it’s not:

What is a recession? While some maintain that two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP constitute a recession, that is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle. Instead, both official determinations of recessions and economists’ assessment of economic activity are based on a holistic look at the data—including the labor market, consumer and business spending, industrial production, and incomes. Based on these data, it is unlikely that the decline in GDP in the first quarter of this year—even if followed by another GDP decline in the second quarter—indicates a recession.

First of all, I don’t think most people care what it’s called – they know what they know, and a poor economy is one of those in-your-face realities that it’s harder for government to lie about, although they can certainly try. Call it macaroni, call it whatever you want – it still stinks.

And then there’s this:

NOTE: The title of this post comes, as you probably know, from the balcony scene in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”, one of my favorite plays. Juliet doesn’t know Romeo is listening, and she’s musing on the fact that she’s fallen in love with the scion of her family’s hated enemy:

Jul. ’Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself though, not a Montague.
What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O! be some other name:
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name;
And for that name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself.
Rom. I take thee at thy word.
Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptiz’d;
Henceforth I never will be Romeo.

Whitmer vetoes bill to help pregnancy clinics

The New Neo Posted on by

Governor Whitmer of Michigan vetoes adoption and pregnancy help passed by the Republican legislature of her state:

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer recently vetoed $20 million in anti-abortion line items in the state’s budget meant to support expecting mothers and adoption campaigns, ripping pro-life pregnancy centers often targeted since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last month as “fake health clinics.”

Whitmer, a Democrat, signed the final piece of a $76 billion state budget for the 2023 fiscal year into law Wednesday, centering on investments in the economy, workforce, public health and public safety.

But she scrapped about $20 million using her line-item veto for funding for pro-life causes set aside by Republicans, who control both chambers of Michigan’s state legislature.

Her vetoes included $10 million for a marketing program promoting adoption over abortion, $3 million for organizations that promote “childbirth and alternatives to abortion,” and $100,000 designated for the legal defense of a ban on gender reassignment surgeries or therapies while people are in state prisons.

Remember when abortion supporters said they wanted it to be “safe, legal, and rare“? Gone, gone, gone:

But over the years, abortion rights advocates have pushed back against the phrase. “Safe, legal, and rare” implies that getting an abortion is something that “you should be apologetic for,” reproductive justice activist Renee Bracey Sherman told Vox. “It places the blame on the person who’s had an abortion, as if they just did something wrong to need one, rather than addressing the systemic issue as to why someone might not be able to have access to consistent health care or contraception.”

So abortion became not just legal but something that was perfectly fine, nothing to regret. And note that the quote wants you to assume that people get pregnant without wanting to because they just don’t have access to contraception – which is widely available just about everywhere and is supported by Medicaid.

And since Dobbs, pro-abortion politicians – with Elizabeth Warren leading the pack – have been labeling pregnancy-counseling clinics as “fake” and have now declared war on them. Are we still supposed to call such people “pro-choice“?:

But abortion supporters reveal how shallow their “pro-choice” ideology is when they oppose helping pregnant mothers make, or even learn about, any choice other than abortion. The most recent example is on display in Congress, where four Democrats are targeting pregnancy resource centers, purporting to “prohibit disinformation in the advertising of abortion services.”

“With Roe gone, it’s more important than ever to crack down on so-called ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ that mislead and deceive patients seeking abortion care,” said Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, promoting her bill. “We need to crack down on the deceptive practices these centers use to prevent people from getting abortion care, and I’ve got a bill to do just that,” she added.

Under Warren’s bill, charities could be fined $100,000 or “50 percent of the revenues earned by the ultimate parent entity” of the charity for violating the act’s “prohibition on disinformation” related to abortion. But the legislation itself does not define prohibited speech. Warren’s bill directs the Federal Trade Commission to “promulgate rules to prohibit a person from advertising with the use of misleading statements related to the provision of abortion services.” Warren’s bill would thus turn the Federal Trade Commission into a national abortion disinformation board. Perhaps the task of determining what counts as a prohibited “misleading” statement would fall to the recently unemployed Nina Jankowicz for the remainder of the Biden administration…

Warren also signed on to a letter in which members of Congress tried to pressure Google into suppressing search results for such centers — which was followed by a similar letter from the office of New York attorney general Letitia James.

Warren is in a true-blue state, Massachusetts, so she thinks she can go as far as she wants with this. And maybe she can. But Whitmer is in Michigan, which has a Republican-controlled legislature. Plus, Whitmer is up for re-election in November. But she must think this move shores up her base support, plus I don’t think she’s worried about her Republican opponents, since the strongest ones were knocked out by legal challenges to their petition signatures. I wrote about that in this post (which reminds me; I still haven’t gotten around to Part II because so many other things intervened and crowded it out).

If you look at the polls of each of the remaining GOP candidates against Whitmer, you’ll see that she’s doing very well, although of course it’s early because no actual GOP nominee has yet been chosen. The person who was her strongest potential GOP opponent, James Craig, has been disqualified for the aforementioned petition signature problems, but is going to run as a write-in candidate.

I think Whitmer feels very very confident.

Canada: Trudeau’s war on farmers is moving right along

The New Neo Posted on by

The war on farmers spreads to Canada:

In his latest bid to amass greater control of Canadian society, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is set to move forward with his government’s plan to reduce nitrogen emissions by limiting fertilizer use among Canadian farmers.

The revelation came following a Friday meeting between Trudeau and Canadian provincial ministers, where the prime minister unexpectedly announced his decision to cap fertilizer emissions by unilaterally targeting the country’s agricultural sector.

“Fertilizer emissions reduction was not even a topic on the agenda of the annual meeting of Federal-Provincial-Territorial ministers of agriculture,” a joint Alberta-Saskatchewan government press release reads. “Provinces pushed the federal government to discuss this important topic, but were disappointed to learn that the target is already set. The commitment to future consultations are only to determine how to meet the target that Prime Minister Trudeau and Minister Bibeau have already unilaterally imposed on this industry, not to consult on what is achievable or attainable.”

That’s because they’re not interested in what’s achievable and attainable.

Please see my previous post on how this campaign is going for The Netherlands and Sri Lanka.

Some more background on what Trudeau is doing:

The Trudeau government wants a 30% reduction in emissions, but farming experts say that reducing nitrous oxide emissions can’t be done without reducing fertilizer use, which will hurt their ability to stay in the farming business. Farmers also say this will result in less food being produced by Canada and will lead to food shortages at a time when there are already global food shortages.

In 2021, the agriculture and agri-food system employed 2.1 million people, provided 1 in 9 jobs in Canada, generated $134.9 billion (around 6.8%) of Canada’s gross domestic product, according to the Canadian government.

“The world is looking for Canada to increase production and be a solution to global food shortages. The Federal government needs to display that they understand this,” said Alberta Agriculture Minister Nate Horner. “They owe it to our producers.”

“We’re really concerned with this arbitrary goal,” said Saskatchewan Minister of Agriculture David Marit. “The Trudeau government has apparently moved on from their attack on the oil and gas industry and set their sights on Saskatchewan farmers.”

Otherwise known as kulaks.

The left ♥ January 6th

The New Neo Posted on by

And not just the left – regular old Democrats who aren’t on the left but are shaped and molded by it love it, too.

Many of my acquaintances have avidly watched the January 6th hearings, and what they seem to get out of them is reinforcement for a host of beliefs that they already share. It’s a bonding experience; I’ve been at gatherings where people don’t so much talk about the content of the hearings as about the fact that they wouldn’t miss them for the world and aren’t they great? I haven’t entered into the conversation because I’m quite aware that changing minds would be almost impossible at this point – the edifice of belief has been built so strongly that it seems impregnable.

It starts with the long-held idea that Republicans in general are awful. Then, from the moment of Trump’s candidacy – and helped along by his admittedly abrasive and brash personality, which rubs them the wrong way in some deep sense – he’s been labeled and presented as an ignorant, bigoted, bullying, democracy-destroying wannabee dictator. January 6th and all the media coverage of it just solidifies all those notions, and they are further reinforced by peer agreement.

Remember the very beginning? Commenter “Ira M. Siegel” asked yesterday “what evidence has there ever been that Trump has ever been bigoted?” and I answered:

The “bigoted” charge was initially based on two things, as far as I can remember. The first was a statement he made in his very first speech when he announced his candidacy. It had to do with illegal immigration from Mexico and rapists. I wrote something about it here, although that post isn’t really about Trump. The second thing was his statement about banning entry to people from Muslim countries.

That was Trump the candidate. Then as president he made the “fine people” statement about Charlottesville, which was widely misconstrued by the Democrats and used to paint him as a racist supporter of white supremacists. See this.

It was important to hammer home this idea that Trump was a racist – also “lawless” and reckless and even stupid. That America was doing very well under his watch was not acknowledged. When Trump challenged the results of the 2020 election, whatever the merits of that challenge, it fed strongly into this pre-existing and well-entrenched narrative that he wanted to usurp power and had no respect for the law. That’s why just about every MSM article about his claims of fraud in the 2020 election included the word “baseless” to modify the word “claims” or “charges.” It was important to hammer home the idea that his accusations were ridiculous and any person with a brain knew it, of course.

That’s why January 6th was made to order for the propagandists. Whether you think it was fortuitous for them or whether they subtly encouraged it (by not having proper security for the Capitol that day) or even helped plan it (entrapment by FBI and other agents), it was their most powerful tool and they knew it. That’s why they can’t let it go and are even escalating it, frightened that Trump might run again in 2024 but also somewhat eager for him to run, because they think they have a lot of tools for fighting him.

Do the January 6th hearings convince anyone who isn’t already convinced? I tend to think not; I tend to think it is a case of preaching to the choir of believers. I’ve read that Liz Cheney is at least considering a run for president in 2024, although she’s being coy about it. But whether or not she does, here is noble Liz on her current focus:

…I’m fighting hard, no matter what happens on Aug. 16 [the day of the Wyoming primary where she faces a Trump-endorsed Republican challenger for her seat in Congress], I’m going to wake up on Aug. 17, and continue to fight hard to ensure Trump is never anywhere close to the Oval Office ever again.

It’s nice to have a calling, isn’t it? Captain Ahab chasing the Great Orange Whale. And this has earned her a great deal of respect from some Democrats I know, although it almost certainly will not be earning her another term in Congress from Wyoming or the presidency in 2024. But she’ll be offered some good gigs from the left and will land on her feet to continue the pursuit.

NOTE: Speaking of January 6th, Julie Kelly has been doing good reporting on it from the start, and she has some tweets about a new documentary:

I haven’t seen it, so I can’t say what I think of it except that it sounds interesting.

Odette’s escape: woman or swan?

The New Neo Posted on by

I know that’s the burning question you’ve all been asking yourselves for years: was “Swan Lake’s” swan queen Odette a swan, or was she a woman? Did Prince Siegfried actually have an interspecies romance?

And I’m here to answer: Odette was a woman under a spell. The spell turned her into a swan by day and a woman (a “maiden”) at night. So Siegfried first spies her in swan form flying in the sky and is about to shoot her with a crossbow, when to his amazement she alights as a woman. An attractive woman, at that – but a woman who retains some of her swan nature.

That’s why the choreography so beautifully merges the woman with the swan. Odette manages to be primarily woman but she conjures up the swan at all moments. What’s more, she conveys an intense conflict between wanting to take flight, to escape, to get away (from both her spell and at first from the Prince as well), and wanting to trust him and to love and be loved.

As with many ballets of this era, the plot features the Prince betraying her trust and then regaining it, although with tragic consequences. It’s the “white” acts of the ballet – the swan parts, Acts II and IV – that give the ballet its well-deserved fame. Most productions today use a version of the brilliant and innovative Lev Ivanov’s 1895 choreography, with its wonderful patterns of the flock of swan-maidens, conjuring up the same themes of flight, trust, and distrust.

One of my favorite parts is when Odette is transformed by the spell-caster magician Von Rothbart from woman to swan, right before our eyes. Here’s a clip of that moment with Natalia Makarova in the 1970s:

Here’s the fabulous Maya Plisetskaya in 1957 (I have quite a few quarrels with the way it’s filmed, but beggars can’t be choosers):

And this next one has the worst choreography for that transformation moment I’ve ever seen. Odette’s amazing change is completely upstaged by some strange interplay between Von Rothbart and Siegfried, as though it’s the Prince who’s undergoing the spell. And then it looks as though Von Rothbart and Siegfried are thinking of having their own little tete a tete. Von Rothbart as sorcerer is often costumed in a way that’s over-the-top and bordering on the ridiculous, but this version goes much too far in the other direction. He should look powerful and supernatural, not like a guy about to drink absinthe at a bar.

And this video features a transformation somewhere in between. Odette’s face changes a moment before the music cues her and becomes hard and almost calculating, which seems a bit weird. She’s not as convincing in her movements as an actual swan, either, although it’s not bad. The choreographic problem is that it’s much harder to pull the attempted transformation off while facing the audience. Most of the other Odettes have their backs to us, and there’s a reason for that: it helps not to see their faces; the transformation is easier to pull off when we don’t. And watching their backs emphasizes the use of the arms and the animal nature of their new forms:

Here’s Gillian Murphy in a different passage, one that features the jumps called entrechats, coupled with Odette’s swanlike arms showing the desperate need to escape as well as Odette’s dual nature:

Here’s Makarova again, performing the same passage:

But I think that Susan Jaffe, who is not as well known as the other two, actually expresses that same moment better. Her feet dig down while her arms struggle up, and there’s a constant tension between the two, as though she’s going to rend herself into two parts, the human and the bird:

Gillian Murphy also does a section I call “the leans” with an amazing move I’ve never seen before. It’s a port de bras (an arm movement) and it’s really her partner who makes the biggest difference. Usually this moment is very touching; it’s when Odette and the Prince are first falling in love and she’s coming to trust him because he treats her so lovingly and tenderly. Ordinarily the arm motion is merely that she’s got her arms up and extended (her swannish wingish but also humanish arms) and the Prince gently takes each arm down and wraps both of her arms around her torso, and then rocks her softly as she leans back into him in a gesture of trust. But with Murphy in this clip there is an added dimension – all done, of course, without words – by which we perceive that in that gesture he’s also saying, “No, don’t be a swan, don’t fly away, don’t struggle; put down your wings and I’ll free you from the spell and love you and you won’t have to have this tormented dual nature anymore. Rest a while.”

Watch and see if you see it too. The moment that particular sequence starts is at 5:58 (and then it happens a second time, but a little less slowly):

“Swan Lake” is very old and it has a theme that seems preposterous. But performed brilliantly, it transcends all of that and you see that it’s not just about swans and princes and magic spells, but something much deeper.

Pete Seeger has a stamp

The New Neo Posted on by

I was raised on The Weavers, the folk-singing singing group of which Seeger was an important member – that, plus Tom Lehrer, Flanders and Swann, Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Mikado” and “HMS Pinafore”, and every Broadway musical from the mid-1940s to somewhere in the 1960s, as well as classical music through ballet class (I provided the rock and roll myself through the radio). One of the benefits (?) is that I still know just about every word of the songs involved, and that includes those of Pete Seeger, whose lilting voice I can hear in my brain’s imagination even as I write these words.

In my 2014 post when Seeger died, I observed:

My feelings about Seeger are mixed, to say the least. First, the bad: he was an activist Communist, and even a Stalinist back in the day. Let’s not whitewash that…

Liberal? Progressive? Supporting Communism to make the world a better place? Those are euphemisms, I’m afraid. And although his “time in the Communist Party” did end some time in the 50s, his time of sympathy with the Communist Party went on.

And here’s a previous post about his voice:

We had a shaky old record player on which I’d play the scratchy Weavers records that featured Seeger’s unique voice and vibrant banjo. I loved those old songs, but I especially loved Seeger’s voice.

Why? It wasn’t pretty, nor was it exceptionally musical. There are many ordinary people who can make far more beautiful sounds, although I’m most definitely not one of them. But Seeger had what I’ve noticed is a prerequisite for great voices: a unique and utterly identifying timbre, much like a fingerprint, and instantly recognizable as that person and no one else.

Seeger’s voice had an uplifting quality mixed with something indefinable, something between a lilt and a sob. Although the lilt always dominated, the sob was always present as well, much like the complexity of a fine wine with a hint of many flavors to give it a special richness and depth.

Seeger played a mean banjo, too.

Which brings us to the new Seeger stamp:

The forever stamp, which features a color-tinted, black-and-white photograph taken in the early 1960s showing Seeger in profile singing and playing his five-string banjo, went on sale at post offices nationwide, according to a US Postal Service spokesperson.

A special ceremony was planned for the evening in Newport, Rhode Island, the site of the Newport Folk Festival, where Seeger was a performer and for a time a member of the board.

“It is an honor to see a photo of my father I’d taken some 60 years ago become this wonderful forever stamp,” his son, Dan Seeger, said in a statement…

Seeger joins a long list of musical performers to appear on a US postage stamp, including Elvis Presley, Thelonious Monk, Ray Charles and Frank Sinatra.

Speaking of failed attempts at apologies for having been wrong – and my previous post today was about exactly that – Seeger issued an apology, too, and it was in line with the ones I discussed earlier today in that Seeger’s was an apology that showed that he persisted in his errors. From his Wiki page (the quote is from a memoir Seeger wrote in 1993):

At any rate, today I’ll apologize for a number of things, such as thinking that Stalin was merely a “hard driver” and not a “supremely cruel misleader.”

Okay. But he immediately follows it up with this:

I guess anyone who calls himself a Christian should be prepared to apologize for the Inquisition, the burning of heretics by Protestants, the slaughter of Jews and Muslims by Crusaders. White people in the U.S.A. ought to apologize for stealing land from Native Americans and enslaving blacks. Europeans could apologize for worldwide conquests, Mongolians for Genghis Khan. And supporters of Roosevelt could apologize for his support of Somoza, of Southern White Democrats, of Franco Spain, for putting Japanese Americans in concentration camps. Who should my granddaughter Moraya apologize to? She’s part African, part European, part Chinese, part Japanese, part Native American. Let’s look ahead.

These were his equivalences? His apology for personally supporting someone doing evil – and obviously doing evil – in Seeger’s own lifetime? That’s analogous to today’s Christians apologizing for things that happened hundreds to almost a thousand years ago, or white people apologizing for something that happened hundreds of years ago (in most cases committed by people who were not the ancestors of those “white people” today)? Extremely false analogy.

If anything, according to the “logic” of his own rhetoric, it was Seeger who should be doing the apologizing for having been the blue-blooded descendant of colonialists:

His family, which Seeger called “enormously Christian, in the Puritan, Calvinist New England tradition,” traced its genealogy back over 200 years. A paternal ancestor, Karl Ludwig Seeger, a doctor from Württemberg, Germany, had emigrated to America during the American Revolution and married into the old New England family of Parsons in the 1780s.

Seeger’s life and family were quite fascinating, by the way – at least to me. His father was a well-known academic musicologist, “a key founder of the academic discipline of ethnomusicology.” Seeger’s parents and then his father and stepmother (both women were musicians) took him around as a child and teenager to various venues featuring indigenous folk music, and that’s how he was exposed to what later became his life’s work.

Quintessential Seeger:

Bret Stephens and Paul Krugman of The NY Times give a double master class in how to admit to being wrong while remaining deeply, deeply wrong

The New Neo Posted on by

On the one hand, I applaud Krugman and Stephens for admitting they were wrong about something. It’s not easy to do and many many people never do it no matter how many times they’re wrong and no matter how public the venue in which they were wrong.

On the other hand, it’s possible – and not at all rare – to admit you’re wrong about something and at the same time be wrong about what you were wrong about, while at the same time making excuses and compounding the error[s] by committing more errors. That’s what Krugman and Stephens have done.

Not only has Krugman been wrong repeatedly about a large variety of predictions, but although he says he was wrong to have missed the seriousness of the coming inflation, he says it’s all just so much more complex than the rest of us can know:

But what, exactly, did I get wrong? Both the initial debate and the way things have played out were more complicated than I suspect most people realize…

What we had…was an argument about magnitudes [of inflation]…Those of us on Team Relaxed argued, however, that the structure of the plan would lead to a much smaller surge in G.D.P. than the headline number would suggest. A big piece of the plan was one-time checks to taxpayers, which we argued would be largely saved rather than spent; another big piece was aid to state and local governments, which we thought would be spent only gradually, over several years.

He goes on in that vein for a while, and adds that a lot of the metrics he and his fellows on “Team Relaxed” were using happened just as they had envisioned. And yet somehow inflation got much worse than they had thought – why? Here’s his explanation for that:

Much, although not all, of the inflation surge seems to reflect disruptions associated with the pandemic. Fear of infection and changes in the way we live caused big shifts in the mix of spending: People spent less money on services and more on goods, leading to shortages of shipping containers, overstressed port capacity, and so on.

Now, we can’t expect someone like an economist to have thought of such things, can we?

Then he goes into other signs that the economy got “overheated” – but even that shouldn’t have led to all this inflation. Next:

So something was wrong with my model of inflation — again, a model shared by many others, including those who were right to worry in early 2021. I know it sounds lame to say that Team Inflation was right for the wrong reasons, but it’s also arguably true.

Yes Paul, it does sound lame. And what does “arguably true” mean – that a person can mount some sort of argument that it’s true?

And of course both Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s lockdown of major cities have added a whole new level of disruption.

Of course.

Krugman calls all of this a “lesson in humility.” I don’t think Krugman is capable of such a thing in any deep or meaningful way. One thing Krugman has entirely left out – something I think was operating hugely and still is – is Krugman’s own politics coupled with wishful thinking. I can almost guarantee that had Trump been president under the same circumstances, Krugman would not have been on “Team Relaxed” about inflation.

What’s more, isn’t there something else that Krugman has left out? Something rather obvious? Could it possibly have been this?

American Petroleum Institute (API) CEO Mike Sommers ripped the White House energy strategy, accusing it of sending mixed signals to domestic industry…

“This administration’s misguided policy agenda — shifting away from domestic oil and natural gas — has compounded inflationary pressures and added headwinds to companies’ daily efforts to meet growing energy needs while reducing emissions,” Sommers told reporters Thursday…

The Consumer Price Index, which the Department of Labor uses to measure inflation, surged 9.1% year-over-year in June, according to a report released Wednesday. Energy prices, including gasoline, natural gas, electricity and fuel oil, alone increased 41.6% over the last 12 months…

“One of the key concerns that we have are the continued mixed messages that we’re getting from this administration,” Sommers said. “On one hand, they’re asking for more supply, but on the other hand, continuing to talk about how this industry needs to go away within a very short period of time.”

Sommers is speaking on behalf of the petroleum industry, of course, so he’s not what you’d call an unbiased source. But it seems rather obvious to me that he’s correct (some more background can be found here). Yet I don’t hear a whisper about this factor in Krugman’s column. Why doesn’t he even address it? Because it would mean he’d have to not only admit he was wrong, but that Biden has been wrong as well.

And then there’s the Times’ resident “conservative,” Bret Stephens. He says he was wrong about Trump supporters. Not Trump himself, mind you, but his supporters, and that some of the things Stephens wrote – such as this one, in his first column about Trump – were counterproductive: “If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.”

You can summarize Stephens’ July 21st column this way: he says he shouldn’t have called Trump supporters stupid losers even though they are stupid losers. But they’re losers who have been wronged by the Democrats and Obama and so there was a reason they were willing to support an insurrectionist bigot like Trump and didn’t realize – unlike Stephens, who realized and still realizes – how absolutely terrible Trump was and is. But by putting them down, he alienated them and thereby lost his chance to persuade them to change their minds about Trump and see as Stephens does. He should have empathized with them more.

Here’s an excerpt:

…[Stephens says he wrote] dozens of columns denouncing Trump as a unique threat to American life, democratic ideals and the world itself. I regret almost nothing of what I said about the man and his close minions. But the broad swipe at his voters caricatured them and blinkered me.

It also probably did more to help than hinder Trump’s candidacy.

I don’t think Stephens has that kind of clout with anyone, but he continues:

When I looked at Trump, I saw a bigoted blowhard making one ignorant argument after another. What Trump’s supporters saw was a candidate whose entire being was a proudly raised middle finger at a self-satisfied elite that had produced a failing status quo.

I was blind to this. Though I had spent the years of Barack Obama’s presidency denouncing his policies, my objections were more abstract than personal. I belonged to a social class that my friend Peggy Noonan called “the protected.” My family lived in a safe and pleasant…

Trump’s appeal, according to Noonan, was largely to people she called “the unprotected.” Their neighborhoods weren’t so safe and pleasant. Their schools weren’t so excellent. Their livelihoods weren’t so secure. Their experience of America was often one of cultural and economic decline, sometimes felt in the most personal of ways.

It was an experience compounded by the insult of being treated as losers and racists —clinging, in Obama’s notorious 2008 phrase, to “guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”

No wonder they were angry.

Anger can take dumb or dangerous turns, and with Trump they often took both.

So these angry losers – losers compared to people like Bret Stephens, society’s winners – were also stupid to back Trump, but because of their anger it was understandable. That’s what Stephens failed to understand.

It’s really quite something, isn’t it? How condescending someone can be while thinking he or she is being understanding, all the while understanding very little about the actual Trump versus the Trump monster the left created and someone like Stephens agreed with because Trump was obviously so very “appalling”?

The following is probably the most interesting passage in the entire essay, one in which Stephens comes close to saying something true but doesn’t quite make it:

I could have thought a little harder about the fact that, in my dripping condescension toward his supporters, I was also confirming their suspicions about people like me — people who talked a good game about the virtues of empathy but practice it only selectively; people unscathed by the country’s problems yet unembarrassed to propound solutions.

Unfortunately, he follows it up with this:

“I also could have given Trump voters more credit for nuance.”

Nuance? What he means by that – in the next paragraph – is that a lot of people didn’t think much of Trump personally but liked the way he had of “defying deeply flawed conventional pieties.” How about that they liked Trump’s proposed policies, most of which seemed sane as opposed to insane?

Here’s the way it ends:

A final question for myself: Would I be wrong to lambaste Trump’s current supporters, the ones who want him back in the White House despite his refusal to accept his electoral defeat and the historic outrage of Jan. 6?

Morally speaking, no. It’s one thing to take a gamble on a candidate who promises a break with business as usual. It’s another to do that with an ex-president with a record of trying to break the Republic itself.

But I would also approach these voters in a much different spirit than I did the last time. “A drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall,” noted Abraham Lincoln early in his political career. “If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.” Words to live by, particularly for those of us in the business of persuasion.

So despite the extreme contrast of the state of the US under Trump and what has happened to this country during the Biden administration, Stephens still clings (and not at all bitterly or regretfully) to his deeply-held belief that Trump was awful, and he cites January 6 as the prime example although I’m sure he could come up with others. He must still be in that very very protected class if he still doesn’t get that Trump was enormously better for this country and even the world than Biden has been, and if anyone has been trying to “break the Republic” it has been the left.

Stephens is completely unable to see that. But this time around, he proposes that he won’t show it. Instead, he’ll try to trap those Trump-supporting flies with honey, by convincing them that he’s their friend – the better to do his job of persuading them.

I’m here to tell Stephens – not that he’s listening to me – that he has no hope of persuading a single Trump supporter of anything whatsoever excerpt his own cluelessness and arrogance. And I doubt he convinces anyone on the left of anything, either.

Even though Stephens considers himself to be in the persuasion business, he doesn’t even seem to realize that he’s basically in the “preaching to the choir” business as well as the “token conservative in a leftist outfit” business. Of course, in his failure to persuade he is hardly alone. Persuasion of someone with a different point of view is actually extremely difficult and quite rare, because – as Stephens and Krugman so aptly demonstrate though their own examples – a mind is a difficult thing to change.

Speaking of the two-tiered system of justice…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and we’ve indeed been speaking of it lately, over and over and over –

Steve Bannon has been convicted by a Washington DC jury of contempt of Congress. It’s the first such conviction since 1974, when Attorney General Richard Kleindienst and Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy were convicted. Kleindienst’s Wiki page notes that he was “one of very few people in modern U.S. history to be convicted of contempt of Congress.”

One of those people in modern history to be convicted of contempt of Congress was not Eric Holder. Another was not Lois Lerner.

The Washington DC courts are the Democrats’ not-so-secret weapon:

Bannon’s sentence could include 30 days to a year in jail per misdemeanor charge.

I could spend time going into a sampler of the legal details of the case. But you can find some of them at those two links I’ve provided. At this point, I think the only legal detail that actually mattered in this case – from subpoena to prosecution to conviction – was which side of the political fray Bannon is on.