Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Now Musk says he’s going through with the Twitter deal:

The saga of Elon Musk’s effort to buy Twitter took another twist today when Elon threw in the towel and agreed to proceed with the purchase under the original terms, which amount to around $44 billion. With a trial on Twitter’s effort to force Musk to proceed with the transaction scheduled for later this month, Musk’s retreat could be a tactical gambit. But my guess is that he has decided that he might as well proceed with the deal, for the reason that made him to want to buy the company in the first place: his commitment to free speech.

Musk is an interesting and unusual man.

(2) One thing you can say about Kanye West: he speaks his mind and isn’t afraid of the left. For example:

One day after wearing a “White Lives Matter” shirt with Daily Wire host Candace Owens in Paris, Kanye West declared the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement “over.”

West and Owens shocked social media when the duo donned the “White Lives Matter” shirts, each of which also included a picture of the Pope’s face on the front, while flanked by models in matching tops.

“Everyone knows that Black Lives Matter was a scam,” West said on Instagram, where he has nearly 18 millions followers. “Now it’s over, you’re welcome.”

“Everybody knows”? Hardly. But West is making an effort to get a lot more people to know, and his “White Lives Matter” T-shirt gambit was part of the PR game.

(3) The left is salivating over the Herschel Walker abortion payment allegations. The situation – as well as the timing – reminds me of so many previous incidents, including the Roy Moore fracas. In this case, one of the aims is to get conservative Republicans to shy away from voting for Walker because of his alleged hypocrisy on abortion.

More here.

(4) More from Tony Bobulinski:

…Tony Bobulinski was the business partner of Hunter Biden and his uncle, Jim Biden, the president’s brother, as they attempted to put together deals with foreign actors. That partnership broke up, and Bobulinski has become a whistleblower. But his efforts to interest the FBI in multiple Biden family felonies, including against him, have come to naught.

Last night, in a second sit-down interview with Tucker Carlson, Bobulinski laid out stunning details on how the FBI deep-sixed any public revelations, much less indictments, based on what Bobulinski says are thousands of pages of proof, including emails, text messages, recorded phone calls, and actual business documents. Despite having possession of abundant evidence, the FBI sat on the investigation through the 2020 election, thereby depriving the public of information that almost certainly would have swayed enough votes to change the outcome and re-elect Donald Trump.

We already knew that, but apparently Bobulinski has offered more details.

(5) This attack is not only awful, it’s bizarre. But green bodysuits are one way to defeat constant surveillance and elude the authorities – although these days, getting caught isn’t what it used to be.

Cui bono?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m going to air a pet peeve of mine. It’s the commonplace use of the concept of cui bono to determine who did something. First, the definition:

…a principle that probable responsibility for an act or event lies with one having something to gain…

[Example of use:] One of the most important questions in an investigation is about establishing motive, summed up by the Latin phrase cui bono, or Who benefits?

The question can be useful – for example, in criminal cases in which someone is murdered and there’s a life insurance beneficiary who becomes a person of interest. But if you were on a jury, I would hope you’d require a lot more evidence than that. And yet I constantly see people rushing to judgment on political issues, using the cui bono principle.

Actually, non-actors and non-perpetrators benefit all the time, which makes the principle a highly highly unreliable guide to establishing guilt. It raises interesting questions, but that’s about it. Cui bono makes me grind my teeth, but I have a lot of tooth-grinding to do because it’s almost constantly used to explain events for which the perpetrators are unknown and remain unknown.

I expect a fair amount of disagreement on this.

OPEC isn’t making nice with the Biden forces

The New Neo Posted on by

CNN 2.0 reports:

The Biden administration launched a full-scale pressure campaign in a last-ditch effort to dissuade Middle Eastern allies from dramatically cutting oil production, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

But that effort appears to have failed, following Wednesday’s crucial meeting of OPEC+, the international cartel of oil producers that, as expected, announced a significant cut to output in an effort to raise oil prices. That in turn will likely cause US gasoline prices to rise at a precarious time for the Biden administration, just five weeks before the midterm elections.

Among other things, maybe Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates aren’t all that keen on helping the Biden administration?

But Biden and company say “trust us!”:

The administration has made it clear to OPEC+ for months, the senior US official said, that the US is willing to buy OPEC’s oil to replenish the SPR. The idea has been to convey to OPEC+ that the US “won’t leave them hanging dry” if they invest money in production, the official said, and therefore, that prices won’t collapse if global demand decreases.

I don’t know why anyone would trust this administration’s promise not to leave them “hanging dry.” Or any promise at all, actually.

The SPR stands for Strategic Petroleum Reserves, which Biden depleted in order to temporarily lower the price of gas and score political points.

Professor fired for making organic chemistry course too difficult

The New Neo Posted on by

Back when I was in school, I remember that organic chemistry was always considered a very difficult course by those of us who weren’t science whizzes. I was good at science, but college chemistry was something from which I shied away.

Little did we know that we could have gone this route instead:

Professor Maitland Jones Jr. has been teaching organic chemistry for years at Princeton and then New York University.

This past spring, several of his students launched a petition claiming that his course was too hard. NYU ended up firing him, which the students didn’t even demand.

Not that it would have worked that way when I was in college. If anyone were to be shown the door in a case like that, it would probably have been the students.

More on Jones and the complaining students:

In 2007, [Jones] semi-retired and began teaching organic chemistry at New York University on an adjunct basis…

…[A]ccording to Jones, the students weren’t putting in enough effort—and had become disengaged, anxious, and indolent as a result of the pandemic.

“They weren’t coming to class, that’s for sure,” said Jones. “They weren’t watching the videos, and they weren’t able to answer the questions.”…

Organic chemistry is the bane of medical students everywhere, precisely because it is such a hard class. But many doctors would argue that that’s the point: The class is designed to act as an effective gatekeeper, preventing underqualified students from entering the field of medicine…

…82 of Jones’ 350 students [that’s 23%] signed the petition last spring; it alleged that too many of them were failing and that this was unacceptable. The students cited emotional and mental health complaints to make the case that Jones ought to make the class less difficult…

…[T]hroughout the pandemic, Jones made a number of accommodations for struggling students. He reduced the difficulty of his exams, but students were still failing them.

“Students were misreading exam questions at an astonishing rate,” said Jones…

…Jones is a lion in the field of organic chemistry, publishing 225 papers in his 40-year career. He literally wrote the textbook, “Organic Chemistry,” which weighs in at 1,300 pages.

“[Jones] learned to teach during a time when the goal was to teach at a very high and rigorous level,” Paramjit Arora, a professor of chemistry at NYU and former colleague of Jones told The Times.

Those days are gone.

These students are, for the most part, desirous of becoming scientists and doctors, or they almost certainly wouldn’t be taking organic chemistry in the first place. But meritocracy has been sacrificed to ideology, and nothing is allowed to disturb the equanimity of students who otherwise wish to be treated as adults.

Spambot of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

Hitting the nail upon the top:

Unquestionably believe that which you stated. Your favorite justification seemed to be on the internet the easiest thing to be aware of. I say to you, I definitely get irked while people consider worries that they just don’t know about. You managed to hit the nail upon the top and defined out the whole thing without having side effect.

The AMA wants not only censorship but DOJ investigation of those who would publicize what’s going on with the treatment of children who believe themselves to be transgender

The New Neo Posted on by

It seems that the AMA wants Garland to prosecute speech that they believe is thoughtcrime of a dangerous sort:

Social media has been doing this already, but the AMA wants the DOJ involved.

This is just another step in the criminalization of dissenting speech, and it’s been going on for a long time.

Ace has a post about this latest AMA move, and points out that only 17% of doctors belong to it. The organization has been on the activist left for a long time, and so this request is unsurprising.

Rufo spells it out, as quoted by Ace:

The morality of this situation is blindingly clear:

* Threatening hospitals is wrong.
* Censoring journalists is wrong.
* Criminalizing political opposition is wrong.

The four stages of radical gender surgeries for minors:

1. It’s not happening.
2. It’s good that it’s happening.
3. It’s empowering when we say it’s happening, but disinformation when you say it’s happening.
4. The F.B.I. should put you in prison for quoting us saying it’s happening.

The argument made by the AMA, as well as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association who joined them in the letter, is the same one made by so many people who ask for censorship and even the prosecution of speech (here’s a link to the AMA’s letter in more easily readable form). If you read it, you can see how it starts with something reasonable – the prosecution of actual attacks on health providers, and the investigation of actual threats to attack – and segues seamlessly into complaints that they are afraid and have had to increase security and that demonstrations and “harassment” (which are protected activities) have been the cause, and that the DOJ must get involved [emphasis added]:

The attacks are rooted in an intentional campaign of disinformation, where a few high-profile users on social media share false and misleading information targeting individual physicians and hospitals, resulting in a rapid escalation of threats, harassment, and disruption of care across multiple jurisdictions. Our organizations have called on technology companies to do more to prevent this practice on digital platforms, and we now urge your office to take swift action to investigate and prosecute allorganizations, individuals, and entities responsible.

“Responsible” for what? What “attacks”? The words “attack” or “attacks” are used five times in what is actually not that long a letter, but not a single actual attack of the non-verbal sort is cited. Have there been any? I really don’t know, but I will assume that if anyone has been physically attacked the letter would have cited such an incident. What is mentioned instead are threats, verbal attacks and demonstrations, as well as doxxing. These have been the favored tools of the left, and are approaches that they heartily defend when it involves the left against the right. Nor does the letter even cite an example of the “disinformation” they say is rampant, but if it resembles what the Twitter user “Libs of Tik Tok” was deplatformed for (you can follow some of that story at this link), it probably is mostly not disinformation at all.

Here’s the paragraph in the AMA letter that immediately precedes that paragraph I quoted that starts “The attacks are rooted in an intentional campaign of disinformation…”. This seems to be what the word “attacks” refers to:

From Boston to Akron to Nashville to Seattle, children’s hospitals, academic health systems, and physicians are being targeted and threatened for providing evidence-based health care. These attacks have not only made it difficult and dangerous for institutions and practices to provide this care, they have also disrupted many other services to families seeking care. In one hospital, a new mother was prevented from being with her preterm infant because the hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit was on lockdown due to a bomb threat. Children’s hospitals across the nation have substantially increased security in addition to working with local and federal law enforcement, both on their main hospital campuses as well as across their ambulatory delivery sites, in order to ensure the safety of patients, families, and medical staff who work there. In addition, some providers have needed 24/7 security. Children’s hospitals and their medical staffs continue to face increased threats via social media – including to their personal accounts. Coupled with harassing emails, phone calls, and protestors at health care sites, there is elevated and justifiable fear among families, patients, and staff.

Criminal threats already come under laws governing death threats, but protests and angry emails should be fine. If protestors block the entrance of a hospital, some localities have laws against it (see this as well as this). Nor do I see any reference in the AMA letter to protestors actually blocking a hospital entrance, just to a case in which a bomb threat caused a temporary lockdown at one hospital.

There is an intentional blurring of the lines between physical attacks, protests that block entrances, death threats – all mostly illegal already – and milder threats, doxxing, nasty emails and phone calls, and the right to use speech to publicize the policies of hospitals regarding their treatment of transgender minors. The letter is a call to FBI harassment of anyone who does any of those latter things, including journalists such as Rufo. This is similar to the earlier letter from the NSBA (see these posts) asking the DOJ to prosecute protesting parents as dangerous threats. It’s just another step down a tyrannical path that the left has been on since it seized power.

[NOTE: At the height of the Floyd protests of 2020, Republicans introduced this bill to create a new federal crime:

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) joined Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) today in introducing the “Stop Blocking Hospitals Act,” a bill making it a federal crime to obstruct any ambulance, fire department vehicle, law enforcement vehicle, or other emergency vehicles or personnel from responding to an emergency. Penalties for such obstruction would include imprisonment of one to five years, a fine, or both.

I haven’t seen anything that indicates it passed.]

RIP Loretta Lynn

The New Neo Posted on by

Country singer Loretta Lynn has died at 90:

Just about all the obituaries have the words “coal miner’s daughter” in the headline or prominent in the body of the text, and that’s my impulse, too. Not only was it the title of a famous biopic about Lynn and a song she wrote, but it was a defining truth about her origins and the identity that mattered to her even after becoming rich and famous.

A short summary of her beginnings:

Lynn was born Loretta Webb in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky on April 14, 1932. She was the eldest daughter and second child [of eight, one of whom was singer Crystal Gayle] born to Clara Marie “Clary” (née Ramey; May 5, 1912 – November 24, 1981) and Melvin Theodore “Ted” Webb (June 6, 1906 – February 22, 1959). Ted was a coal miner and subsistence farmer…

Loretta’s father died at the age of 52 of black lung disease a few years after he relocated to Wabash, Indiana, with his wife and younger children…

On January 10, 1948, 15-year-old Loretta Webb married Oliver Vanetta “Doolittle” Lynn (August 27, 1926 – August 22, 1996), better known as “Doolittle”, “Doo”, or “Mooney”. They had met only a month earlier. The Lynns left Kentucky and moved to the logging community of Custer, Washington, when Loretta was seven months pregnant with the first of their six children. The happiness and heartache of her early years of marriage would help to inspire Lynn’s songwriting. In 1953, Doolittle bought her a $17 Harmony guitar (equivalent to $172 in 2021). She taught herself to play the instrument, and over the following three years, she worked to improve her guitar playing. With Doolittle’s encouragement, she started her own band, Loretta and the Trailblazers, with her brother Jay Lee playing lead guitar.

Much much more at the link.

Update on the war in Ukraine

The New Neo Posted on by

I offer my usual caveat on linking to this post with recent news on Russia’s war effort in Ukraine. The fog of war is always operative, so each person will probably take this differently. But I think it’s fairly clear that Russia is having major problems at the moment. I also think it’s likely that the war will go on for a long time to come.

Here’s an excerpt:

When asked to explain Russia’s apparent collapse in northern Donetsk/eastern Luhansk, Hauer tweeted, “They ran out of men – an issue long predicted and now very acutely felt.”

I’m starting to give more credence to Kyiv’s KIA claims against Russian forces. Before September, claims of 30,000-40,000 Russian dead seemed wild. More conservative estimates — like from the Dupuy Institute — were around 9,000-10,000. If Hauer is right, Russian losses must be at least double Dupuy’s estimate.

At this time, Russia is still trying to plug the gaps with freshly mobilized “mobiks.” Theses men are older, less fit, and barely trained. Russia doesn’t have a reserve system like ours, with National Guard and Army Reserve units staffed with people who work and drill together somewhat regularly. All they have is a list of men who put in a year or two as draftees sometime in the last 30 years — and local “recruiters” don’t always stick to the list.

These mobiks are getting sent to the front against UA troops who are now combat veterans…

The New York Times reported two weeks ago that Putin, apparently frustrated with his generals, has “thrust himself more directly into strategic planning for the war in Ukraine in recent weeks.”

If that last paragraph is true – and although it’s the NY Times reporting it, that doesn’t mean it’s not true – it’s not a good sign for Russia. I also wonder, as the author of that piece – Stephen Green – does, whether Putin will resort to nukes.

Jonathan Haidt set to resign from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology

The New Neo Posted on by

I already had quite a bit of respect for Jonathan Haidt. He’s a moderate who tends more to the liberal end of things, but his work on political belief systems is very important and for the most part very fair. I’ve written about him several times previously.

My respect has only increased due to this action he recently took to repudiate the woke academy:

Last week the New York University (NYU) psychology professor announced that he would resign at the end of the year from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, his primary professional association, because of a newly adopted requirement that everybody presenting research at the group’s conferences explain how their submission advances “equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals.” It was the sort of litmus test against which he has warned, and which he sees as corroding institutions of higher learning.

“Telos means ‘the end, goal, or purpose for which an act is done, or at which a profession or institution aims,'” he wrote in a Sept. 20 piece published on the website of Heterodox Academy, an organization he cofounded that promotes viewpoint diversity on college campuses, and republished by the Chronicle of Higher Education. “The telos of a knife is to cut, the telos of medicine is to heal, and the telos of a university is truth.”

“The Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP)—recently asked me to violate my quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth,” he added. “I was going to attend the annual conference in Atlanta next February to present some research with colleagues on a new and improved version of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. I was surprised to learn about a new rule: In order to present research at the conference, all social psychologists are now required to submit a statement explaining ‘whether and how this submission advances the equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals of SPSP.'”

Such diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements have proliferated at universities and in academic societies, he notes, even though “most academic work has nothing to do with diversity, so these mandatory statements force many academics to betray their quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth by spinning, twisting, or otherwise inventing some tenuous connection to diversity.”…

“So I’m going to resign from SPSP at the end of this year, when my membership dues run out, if the policy on mandatory statements stays in place for future conventions,” he concludes.

I was quite moved when I read the words “the telos of a university is truth.” Why? Because I think that, for most universities, that used to be the case but no longer is. Or rather, the truth they now seek is a “greater” truth, a sort of lefist “my truth” rather than the truth as best it can be ascertained. This is one of the biggest failings of our age, and Haidt is correct to call it out.

I don’t fool myself that his voice will make a particle of difference to academia or the huge majority of present-day academics, though. I don’t know whether he himself thinks it will matter, but his actions are a case of “live not by lies,” and I applaud him for it.

He adds an excellent point about this being in part a generational conflict:

“I have gotten about a dozen supportive emails from other social psychologists, and no real criticism beyond a few psychologists on Twitter who, perhaps shaped by Twitter, go to great lengths to assume the worst about me and my motives for writing the essay,” Haidt told me by email. “I have the sense that there is a large generational split. Psychologists and academics who are older than me (I’m 58) seem uniformly supportive: they are all on the left, and the left used to be creeped out by loyalty oaths, whether administered by the McCarthyite right or the Soviet left. But young people on the left seem to be very comfortable requiring such pledges.”

Almost all psychologists are on the left, but the older ones are more the old-fashioned type who got into the habit of championing free speech when they felt it was their speech that was being suppressed. Some of them have adopted it a general principle. I wonder, however, how many of those academics who have emailed Haidt (only a dozen?) would be willing to go public with their support.

How can Fetterman be leading in the polls?

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “huxley” points out the strangeness of John Fetterman, the Democratic candidate for the Senate from Pennsylvania, and asks a question:

Then there’s this Fetterman character running for the US Senate in Pennsylvania who looks and dresses like a tattooed reboot of Lex Luthor, Superman’s arch-nemesis in DC Comics.

Fetterman has had a stroke, which seems to have left him with a large mysterious lump on his neck (usually concealed by his hoodie) and damaged his brain. When asked how he was doing in an interview, he responded bizarrely..

Yet Fetterman has been leading in the polls over his Republican opponent. The race has tightened, but this Fetterman could shortly become a new member of the US Senate.

How does this happen?

It’s an excellent question, and I’ll take a stab at an answer.

The first possibility is that the polls are wrong and that Dr. Oz, Fetterman’s Republican opponent, is actually ahead. But there’s an excellent chance that’s not the case, so let’s put that one aside.

Next, there’s probably a solid core of Pennsylvania voters – perhaps a quarter or a third, although that’s just a guess – who are hard leftists and cultural warriors who love both Fetterman’s look and his politics.

Then we have the sizable portion of the electorate who are what used to be called “yellow dog Democrats,” people who would vote for a yellow dog if it had the label “Democrat” next to it.

We also have low information voters who are not paying attention, and some of them are reliable Democrat voters as well. In addition, Fetterman has taken a leaf out of the Joe Biden campaign book in 2020, and to a certain extent has kept a rather low profile with the help of an enabling MSM. For example, there has been no debate, and Fetterman has only agreed to one debate (as opposed the usual two in Pennsylvania) late in the game (October 25, after considerable early voting will have occurred) with special accommodations:

He has done just a handful of media interviews and no press conferences since the stroke and has used closed-captioning in video interviews with reporters.

Lastly, Fetterman’s opponent Dr. Oz isn’t a traditional conservative and many people on the right aren’t enthusiastic about him.

The combination of all those factors could account for Fetterman’s lead in the polls.