I blame it on the Neanderthals

The New Neo Posted on by

Hey Jean!
You have more Neanderthal DNA than 34% of other customers. You inherited a small amount of DNA from your Neanderthal ancestors. Out of the 7,462 variants we tested, we found 229 variants in your DNA that trace back to the Neanderthals.

All together, your Neanderthal ancestry accounts for less than ~2 percent of your DNA.

Now for the specifics:

You have one variant associated with experiencing more itchy mosquito bites.

I can well believe it.

You have one variant associated with generally not feeling angry when hungry (hangry).

I am the soul of patience even when hungry. But many of the men in my life (plus my mother) have been subject to hangriness.

You have one variant associated with having a worse sense of direction.

I wouldn’t doubt it.

You have two variants associated with being a better sprinter than distance runner.

I’m not great at either, but it’s probably true that I’m better at sprinting.

You have one variant associated with being less likely to prefer salty foods over sweet.

I plead guilty to having a sweet tooth.

But absolutely no on this:

You have one variant associated with being more likely to prefer dark chocolate over milk chocolate.

I can’t eat chocolate at all. Ever since my forties it’s given me migraines, even a small bit of it, and about twenty years ago I finally acknowledged I can’t have any without fairly nasty repercussions. But back when I loved chocolate and could eat it, I preferred milk chocolate over dark.

Teaching Zinn: Part I

The New Neo Posted on by

This post and a planned Part II are mostly based on a draft I wrote in March of 2013. That’s nearly ten years ago – how time does fly! I’ve mentioned before that I have a lot of old drafts hanging around. I can’t remember why I never polished the Zinn one up and published it, but I guess seemingly more pressing things always intervened. There are a lot of pressing things at the moment, too, but this topic is perennially relevant. So here it is.

I thought of it again when commenter “huxley” wrote this comment the other day:

However, it seemed to me I was taught [in school] to idolize America above all else without question and it kinda went into the BS hopper of stuff I was supposed to nod along to, like the perfection of the Catholic Church or the indisputable evil of marijuana.

I felt like adults, near and far, were constantly lying to me, and I couldn’t figure it out beyond I would have to figure it out for myself.

In a later comment, huxley added this:

I take Campbell’s point that myths of some sort, including Santa Claus, are part of the human experience because whatever the Truth may be, it’s probably bigger than us poor humans can handle, especially as children. We need some way to grow big enough to assimilate more truth.

I complain that I felt lied to when I was young, including all that Yankee-Doodle-Dandy stuff, that it seemed adults told me more for their benefit than mine.

Yet I agree with neo, that it’s important to have some reverence for one’s country, especially a country as great as America.

I’m not sure how to handle reverence and warts at the same time. The solution today is to forget reverence and get into the warts.

But emphasizing the warts is another set of lies told to benefit a different set of adults.

Which brings us to one of the ways they’re being lied to: by reading the works of Howard Zinn without much challenge, and/or by having teachers who were schooled in the words of Zinn and accepted his basic assertions as truth.

There have been books written about Zinn’s propaganda and the errors it contains, but I doubt those books reach more than a small fraction of those who have swallowed Zinn’s work hook line and sinker. Even a periodical like The New Republic has offered criticism (relatively mild, I might add) of Zinn’s history revisionism, probably to little avail:

Yet when it comes to Zinn’s demand for history to be judged for its political utility, Duberman is finally too indulgent. He can never bring himself to say that the fatal flaw of Zinn’s historical work is the shallowness, indeed the fallaciousness, of his critique of scholarly detachment. Zinn rests satisfied with what strikes him as the scandalous revelation that claims of objectivity often mask ideological predilections. Imagine! And on the basis of this sophomoric insight, he renounces the ideals of objectivity and empirical responsibility, and makes the dubious leap to the notion that a historian need only lay his ideological cards on the table and tell whatever history he chooses. He aligns himself with the famous line from the British historian James Anthony Froude, who asked rhetorically if history “was like a child’s box of letters, with which we can spell any word we please. We have only to pick out such letters as we want, arrange them as we like, and say nothing about those which do not suit our purpose.” Froude made this observation in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Note also how the author of that TNY piece, David Greenberg, mentions his own initial attraction to Zinn’s work in terms much like huxley’s. It’s probably a very common reaction and accounts for much of Zinn’s popularity:

As a faculty brat in those years [the 1980s], I was doubly enamored of Zinn after a classmate gave me A People’s History of the United States, his now-famous victims’-eye panorama of the American experience. In my adolescent rebelliousness, I thrilled to Zinn’s deflation of what he presented as the myths of standard-issue history. Do you know that the Declaration of Independence charged King George with fomenting slave rebellions and attacks from “merciless Indian Savages”? That James Polk started a war with Mexico as a pretext for annexing California? That Eugene Debs was jailed for calling World War I a war of conquest and plunder? Perhaps you do, if you are moderately well-read in American history. And if you are very well-read, you also know that these statements themselves are problematic simplifications. But like most sixteen-year-olds, I didn’t know any of this. Mischievously—subversively—A People’s History whispered that everything I had learned in school was a sugar-coated fairy tale, if not a deliberate lie. Now I knew.

The idea of being in on a subversive and secret truth is part of the huge draw Zinn’s work has for teenagers – and for many adults his work retains that attraction. What’s more, the activist left has been promoting Zinn’s work for many many decades. They are organized and dedicated; here’s a website devoted to the endeavor. Zinn was probably a Communist and certainly a far-leftist, and his lifework, in David Horowitz’s summary, was this: “All Zinn’s writing was directed to one end: to indict his own country as an evil state and soften his countrymen up for the kill.”

I think we can safely say that Zinn has been wildly successful in achieving that goal. Probably even more important than teaching children the work of Zinn himself is teaching it without a critique of his points, and especially teaching it to the teachers who will teach those younger people, teachers who are themselves converts to the Zinn cause.

[NOTE: My intention in Part II is to go into some of the details of many teachers’ dedication to teaching the work of Zinn as the truth of American history.]

Putin orders fuller mobilization; many Russian men flee if they can

The New Neo Posted on by

Putin is planning the tried-and-true Russian tactic of throwing a lot of its male citizens into the fray and overwhelming the enemy by numbers. One problem, though, is that – unlike, for example, the Nazi invasion of WWII, when Russia was fighting a defensive war that was obviously a struggle for its own existence against an aggressive and implacable foe – this time it’s Russia that is the aggressor, although Putin’s rhetoric says otherwise.

Putin has tried to minimize his action in Ukraine by never calling it a war. But now he wants Russia on an obvious war footing, and it’s not going over so well:

Putin declared on Wednesday that 300,000 reservists would be drafted, as Moscow seeks to replenish depleted forces after a successful counter-offensive from Kyiv this month. The move is set to change the scope of Russia’s invasion from an offensive fought largely by volunteers to one that embroils a larger swath of its population.

The announcement unleashed a scramble for some Russians, with social media chatter on platforms like Telegram exploding with people frantically trying to figure out how to get seats in vehicles headed to the borders, with some even discussing going on bicycle.

Long lines of traffic formed at land border crossings into several countries, according to video footage. Images on Kazakh media websites appeared to show vehicles backed up near the Russia-Kazakhstan border. In one, posted by Kazakh media outlet Tengri News, a person can be heard saying their vehicle has been “at a standstill for 10 hours” in Russia’s Saratov region, as they try to make their way to Kazakhstan.

“Endless cars. Everyone is running. Everyone is on the run from Russia,” the person in the video can be heard saying. CNN cannot independently verify the videos.

Well, not everyone. But plenty of people. And not every nearby country is willing to take them:

The Czech Republic will not issue humanitarian visas to Russian citizens fleeing mobilisation orders, Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky said on Thursday…

His stance was in line with that of fellow European Union members Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, which border Russia, who said on Wednesday that they would not offer refuge to any Russians fleeing Moscow’s mobilisation of troops…

Finland said on Thursday it was considering barring most Russians from entering the country as traffic across the border from its eastern neighbour “intensified” following Putin’s mobilisation order.

And in Russia itself, over 700 protesters have been “detained.”

Men from the provinces are being mobilized first:

In Buryatia, a mostly rural region wrapped around the southern shore of Lake Baikal, the mobilisation has seen some men drafted regardless of their age, military record or medical history, according to interviews with local residents, rights activists and even statements by local officials.

Buryat rights activists suspect that the burden of the mobilisation – and the war itself – is falling on poor, ethnic minority regions to avoid triggering popular anger in the capital Moscow, which is 6,000 km (3,700 miles) away.

I have long avoided prognostications on the Ukraine war except to say that it will almost certainly go on for a long time and that it has potentially dangerous and wide-reaching consequences, some of which are already coming to pass (Europe’s energy and economic crisis, for example). I will add that this move of Putin’s certainly doesn’t reduce those dangerous possibilities, and it is most likely to increase the human cost. There is no dearth of people willing to say what it all means, but they disagree with each other and I think they are mostly just blowing smoke.

However, here’s an example that seems to be describing some rather obvious truths of the situation at the moment:

Even if the Kremlin manages to add several hundred thousand people to the roster of the armed forces, the Army would have to house and train them, a mammoth effort. In the best-case scenario, that will take months, by which time it may be too late to affect the trajectory of the war—not least because these new draftees will not be particularly motivated or trained in advanced modern weaponry. “If they had announced mobilization in March, by now they could have had, let’s say, fifty thousand new troops prepared—but they didn’t do that,” the person told me.

When describing varying levels of support for the war in Russia, the political philosopher Greg Yudin splits the country into three groups: “dissenters,” “radicals,” and “laymen.” That is to say, those who openly oppose the war, those who cheer it on, and those who do their best not to pay attention, respectively. As Yudin argues, the laymen represent the majority of Russians, who have tried to maintain their private lives while avoiding the entire topic of Ukraine and the war. “It is obviously deplorable but the upside of it is that these people are completely unwilling to participate in war actively in any way,” Yudin tweeted, in mid-September. Putin’s strategy had been to muddle through the war, offering the laymen life as usual in Russia’s big cities, and the radicals a historic battle against Nazis and a Western machine hellbent on destroying Russia.

Mobilization, though, will put the illusions of the laymen under pressure, if it doesn’t blow them apart entirely. But, as Yudin told me, that will be a process that happens over time, and it is likely to take place on a personal rather than collective level. In other words, expect individual discontent, perhaps even sabotage, but not yet a revolution.

That’s the price of minimizing the war. It had the advantage of keeping the Russian population quiescent and mostly acquiescent. A large mobilization means that it will be very very difficult, if not impossible, to sustain that reassuring narrative.

I don’t know what it would take to make Putin give up this campaign, and I don’t think he will unless there’s a way to save face. I can’t even imagine what that way would be. He is in too deep and his rhetoric has described this war as a fight for Russia’s existence. Does he actually believe that? I certainly don’t know; perhaps. But one thing of which I’m pretty sure is that Putin sees it as a fight for his own political existence, and that’s a fight he’s determined to win.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Down the Dow goes.

(2) The “Officer Sicknick was bludgeoned to death” lie persists. That persistence is the point of the propaganda in the first place.

(3) Kurt Schlichter ♥ DeSantis.

(4) “Martha’s Vineyard Takes Revenge on DeSantis By Shipping Him 50 Karens”. Yes, it’s the Bee.

(5) When is a fetal heartbeat not a fetal heartbeat? When the Democrats say it isn’t.

Redefining crime to deny reality

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s a sad fact that in the US there are differences in the rates of violent crime commission and victimization according to race. Race is hardly the only factor influencing criminality, though; there’s also poverty, fatherlessness, education level, and of course sex (male) and age (late teens or young adult) But race is another independent variable.

I happen to think the reasons are socio-cultural rather than genetic. But it really doesn’t matter for the purposes of this post, and I’m not going to solve or even discuss that issue now. What I do want to remark on is the reaction to the fact of these racial disparities, and one reaction that is getting more and more common nowadays is to redefine offenses and recalibrate the law’s response to them in order to minimize or even erase those racial disparities. I don’t think this does the black victims of crime any favors at all, but it’s the type of ritual those in power like to perform as a gesture of virtue-signaling.

As part of this trend, Illinois has passed a law entitled the Safe-T Act, banning automatic bail-setting in the entire state for offenses except the most dangerous, and implementing certain other changes including how trespassing is handled. These changes are due to go into effect the first of January. Here’s a brief description:

“It’s opening the door for the anti-police activist community and the attorneys that represent them that are anti-police,” retired Chicago Police Department Chief of Detectives Eugene Roy told Fox News Digital about the Safety Accountability and Fairness Equity Today Act (Safe-T Act), which is set to be enacted in January 2023 after being pushed through the Democrat-controlled Illinois legislature in the final hours of a lame-duck session and signed by the state’s Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

Roy took issue with several aspects of the bill beyond the one eliminating cash bail, including one that eliminates the requirement that officers accused of misconduct be told the identity of their accuser as well as the identity of the official who is investigating them.

“The problem that nobody sees or turns a blind eye to is the effect on morale, recruiting and retention,” Roy said. “Anybody can just make a complaint against an officer…

Napolitano [alderman of Chicago’s 41st ward] added that police he has spoken with oppose the Safe-T Act and say it will make it even harder for them to do their jobs.

“They don’t even want to, they’re almost wasting pen ink writing paperwork or typing because states attorneys are downgrading charges, judges are throwing charges out. This is pure nonsense for anyone to support the Safe-T Act.”

Illinois, specifically the city of Chicago, has been struck by skyrocketing crime since 2020, and at the same time arrests are dropping to historic lows due in part to sweeping changes being made to how police are allowed to pursue criminals and to prosecutors having a tighter grip on approving felony charges…

“Under the new law, entire categories of crimes such as aggravated battery, robbery, burglary, hate crimes, aggravated DUI, vehicular homicide, drug induced homicides, all drug offenses, including delivering fentanyl and trafficking cases, are not eligible for distinction, no matter the severity of the crime or the defendant’s risk to a specific person or the community unless prosecutors prove by convincing evidence that a person has a high likelihood of flight to avoid prosecution,” Smith [manager of the Supreme Court and Appellate Advocacy Program in the Heritage Foundation’s Meese Center] said. “When you read that list, that’s shocking.”

The article also states the 100 out of 102 elected county state’s attorneys in Illinois are against the bill. That’s nearly 100%.

There’s also been a flurry of articles from the left purporting to “debunk” what they label right-wing lies or propaganda about the bill. Here’s a link to one of them. See if you think this is a debunking of the statements on the right:

People accused of those charges [such as second-degree murder, arson, and burglary] can still be held pretrial if a judge determines that they are a flight risk, if they are in violation of their parole or probation, or if they are already on pretrial release for a previous charge.

I haven’t seen anyone claim it would be impossible to detain people by setting bail for those offenses, just that it would become very difficult to do so because the new presumption would be for no bail and the exceptions (flight risk, etc.) would have to be affirmatively proven. So the “debunking” is the debunking of a strawman, as far as I can tell

Concerning trespassing, the article says the following:

CLAIM: The SAFE-T Act prohibits police officers from arresting someone for trespassing.

FACT: The SAFE-T Act does require police officers to ticket people accused of low-level offenses, including criminal trespass to property, unless they pose an obvious threat to themselves or the community. That means police officers still have the discretion to arrest someone if they determine that they threaten public safety.

The act doesn’t make it absolutely impossible to make such an arrest. It just makes it very difficult and unlikely. The new normal will be to not arrest a person for trespassing, even criminal trespass, unless some sort of extra-special dangerousness can be proven. The entire balance is shifted in favor of non-arrest.

At Ace’s, I found a quote from this article by Suzi Weiss (whom I believe may be Bari Weiss’s sister, although I’m not sure) that I think encapsulates the reasoning behind a great deal of this. Here she’s quoting a young activist leftist in Park Slope, Brooklyn:

“Crime is an abstract term that means nothing in a lot of ways,” said Sky. “The construct of crime has been so socially constructed to target black and poor people.”

Remember that old saying from Irving Kristol [not Bill; Irving, his father] about being “mugged by reality”? In the following quote, what he meant by “neoconservative” was the old meaning of the word – that is, someone who used to be a liberal but became conservative:

A neoconservative is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality. A neoliberal is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality but has refused to press charges.

Or who wants to redefine reality.

Guaranteed income programs are moving right along

The New Neo Posted on by

This isn’t going to be the definitive post on guaranteed income programs. I’m hoping to write one at some point, but that point isn’t now.

But this development is certainly of interest:

Communities throughout the U.S. are experimenting with social programs that give a “guaranteed income” to some residents with few or no strings attached…

Most of the programs are funded by taxpayer dollars and are generally described as “universal basic income” and “guaranteed income,” which share many characteristics but differ slightly. Universal basic income programs are generally open to everyone in the community. Guaranteed income programs target a specific sector of the population, often lower-income individuals.

A 2019 study by the University of California-Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy used three features for its definition of Universal Basic Income. It provides “sufficiently generous” cash benefits without other earnings; it doesn’t phase out or phases out slowly as earnings increase; and it’s available to a large percentage of the population rather than just targeting a specific group, such as single mothers.

Ann Arbor, “Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Shreveport (La.), Durham (N.C.), Gainesville (Fla.) and the state of Georgia have all announced Universal Basic Income types of programs in 2022.”

The article really doesn’t emphasize the huge difference between these programs and other welfare programs, although it mentions it. The difference is the “few or no strings attached” element. When government welfare programs were first instituted, there were many strings attached and part of the reason – or perhaps even the main reason – was that such programs were considered moral hazards without them. Therefore, although it was known that the administrative costs to monitor them would be substantial, they were considered desirable and even necessary.

Now? Not so much.

One of the ways in which advocates of guaranteed income programs attempt to justify them is that technology is making the worker obsolete, and so such programs will be increasingly necessary. This is what the much-quoted (and I believe poorly-understood) “useless people” statement of Harari was all about. This is part of his 2020 speech on the subject:

In Davos we hear so much about the enormous promises of technology – and these promises are certainly real. But technology might also disrupt human society and the very meaning of human life in numerous ways, ranging from the creation of a global useless class to the rise of data colonialism and of digital dictatorships.

Automation will soon eliminate millions upon millions of jobs, and while new jobs will certainly be created, it is unclear whether people will be able to learn the necessary new skills fast enough…And people will have to do it not just once but again and again throughout their lives, because the automation revolution will not be a single watershed event following which the job market will settle down, into a new equilibrium. Rather, it will be a cascade of ever bigger disruptions, because AI is nowhere near its full potential.

…Whereas in the past human had to struggle against exploitation, in the twenty-first century the really big struggle will be against irrelevance. And it is much worse to be irrelevant than exploited.

Those who fail in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a new “useless class” – people who are useless not from the viewpoint of their friends and family, but useless from the viewpoint of the economic and political system. And this useless class will be separated by an ever-growing gap from the ever more powerful elite.

To me, this reads like a warning, not approval. He continued:

If you know enough biology and have enough computing power and data, you can hack my body and my brain and my life, and you can understand me better than I understand myself…And you can do that not just to me, but to everyone.

A system that understands us better than we understand ourselves can predict our feelings and decisions, can manipulate our feelings and decisions, and can ultimately make decisions for us.

Now in the past, many governments and tyrants wanted to do it, but nobody understood biology well enough and nobody had enough computing power and data to hack millions of people.

He then goes on to warn about Stalin types arising, but follows that by making it clear that it wouldn’t take a Stalin to do it and that it’s already happening to a certain extent:

So even in supposedly free countries, humans are likely to lose control over our own lives and also lose the ability to understand public policy.

He then segues into a suggestion for a solution that I see as a pernicious non-solution: globalism rather than nationalism. Dream on, Hariri.

When I hear about guaranteed incomes, Kipling’s poem “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” immediately comes to mind. The poem never fails to give me a shiver – actually, shiver after shiver after shiver – whenever I read it. Each stanza is well worth pondering, but it’s the sixth, seventh, and especially the final one that are especially relevant here [emphasis mine]:

…On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”…

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Yesterday the 11th Circuit ruled against Trump concerning the documents marked “classified”

The New Neo Posted on by

Trump lost in the 11th Circuit yesterday. Here’s Jonathan Turley describing the ruling:

On Wednesday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit narrowed the order of U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon by allowing the Justice Department to regain access to the roughly 100 classified documents seized among roughly 11,000 documents at Mar-a-Lago. It was not unexpected. As previously discussed, this was the “smart move” by the Justice Department to first seek access to this small group of documents with classified markings, the strongest of its arguments against the order. In the meantime, former President Donald Trump gave a full hour-long interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity, a risky decision in a case with potential criminal charges. In the interview, Trump suggested that he could declassify any or all documents “with a thought.” It is a position likely to further alienate both the Special Master and the appellate court, which have already expressed frustration with the lack of support offered for declassification claims…

Judge Cannon’s order on the classified documents was the most controversial element of her appointment. The former president’s failure to support his declassification claims only magnified the problem with that part of the order. However, the court also noted that “even if we assumed that Plaintiff did declassify some or all of the documents, that would not explain why he has a personal interest in them.”

There you have an example of one of Trump’s weaknesses – did he or did he not formally declassify the documents? Can he prove it? Does he need to do so? And what did he really say to Hannity about “with a thought”? The longer statement can be found here.

Back to Turley:

While the government must show a knowing violation (as opposed to classified status), the Trump team has repeatedly declined to produce evidence of such a written or oral order, including any declaration from Trump or staff on such a decision.

Trump aide Kash Patel has said that Trump made a sweeping declassification of documents over social media. That certainly is a novel argument – I don’t think such a thing has been legally adjudicated before. In fact, I don’t think the procedure for a president’s declassifying documents has ever been made completely clear:

Yes, the president can declassify documents while in office, but there isn’t a set protocol they have to follow…

Though there aren’t specific protocols that the president must follow to declassify a document, federal courts have ruled that they will “refuse to recognize what they consider to be an inference of declassification,” McClanahan said.

So it seems that courts have previously ruled – and the 11th Circuit followed this precedent yesterday – that they want to see evidence of a protocol that has never been codified or set down. If Trump followed any protocol, it certainly wasn’t the usual one.

Turley adds:

…the panel emphasized that “We stress the limited nature of our review: this matter comes to us on a motion for a partial stay pending appeal. We cannot (and do not) decide the merits of this case.” The Justice Department could elect to take the win and let Dearie proceed with his review (while litigating control or possession before the lower court). Conversely, it could take this strong language as an indication that the panel could be skeptical of the very appointment [of the Special Master] itself.

The DOJ has of course already seen all the documents. Whether it presses forward depends, in my opinion, on whether it thinks it needs to use the other documents to get Trump, or whether the ones marked “classified” will be enough. In addition, Trump might appeal yesterday’s decision to SCOTUS. One avenue – that of having the full 11th Circuit decide en banc – doesn’t seem to be in the cards, according to Turley. He doesn’t explain why, but perhaps it is because two of the judges on the 3-judge panel who ruled yesterday were appointed by Trump but were not onboard with the Trump argument in the case, so it might seem a near-certainty that the full panel would be agreeing and ruling against Trump.

I happen to agree with this commenter at Legal Insurrection:

This really might be okay if it weren’t for two things.

The plaintiff were an ordinary citizen instead of the former president.

The justice department had demonstrated fairness and equal application of the law.

Neither of those are true, therefore this is an atrocious ruling enabling continued abuse of a political enemy. Particularly in light of the Letitia James monstrosity that got laid out today.

Lastly, this leaves in place a regime where no court can intercede or question the validity of quote unquote National security, therefore the intelligence apparatus has absolute power which results in absolute corruption.

That’s where we are and we’ve got a trump judge on board with this. It’s really looks like it was written by the department of Injustice.

There’s also this:

FBI whistleblower suspended

The New Neo Posted on by

Miranda Devine of the NY Post reports:

Bombshell allegations by FBI Special Agent Steve Friend contained in a whistleblower complaint filed late Wednesday with the Department of Justice inspector general reveal a politicized Washington, DC, FBI field office cooking the books to exaggerate the threat of domestic terrorism, and ­using an “overzealous” January 6 ­investigation to harass conservative Americans and violate their constitutional rights.

Friend, 37, a respected 12-year veteran of the FBI and a SWAT team member, was suspended Monday, stripped of his gun and badge, and escorted out of the FBI field office in Daytona Beach, Fla., after complaining to his supervisors about the violations.
He was declared absent without leave last month for refusing to participate in SWAT raids that he believed violated FBI policy and were a use of excessive force against Jan. 6 ­subjects accused of misdemeanor ­offenses…

“I have an oath to uphold the Constitution,” he told supervisors when he asserted his conscientious objection to joining an Aug. 24 raid on a J6 subject in the Jacksonville, Fla., area. “I have a moral objection and want to be considered a conscientious objector.”

Friend, who did not vote for Donald Trump in the 2020 election, said he told his immediate boss twice that he believed the raid, and the investigative process leading up to it, violated FBI policy and the subject’s right under the Sixth Amendment to a fair trial and Eighth Amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment.

Here are some of Friend’s allegations about the FBI’s abuses:

–FBI domestic terrorism cases are being opened on innocent American citizens who were nowhere near the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, based on anonymous tips to an FBI hotline or from Facebook spying on their messages. These tips are turned into investigative tools called “guardians,” after the FBI software that collates them.
–The FBI has post-facto designated a grassy area outside the Capitol as a restricted zone, when it was not restricted on Jan. 6, 2021, in order to widen the net of prosecutions.
–The FBI intends to prosecute everyone even peripherally associated with J6 and another wave of J6 subjects are about to be referred to the FBI’s Daytona Beach resident agency “for investigation and arrest.”
–The Jacksonville area was “inundated” with “guardian” notifications and FBI agents were dispatched to conduct surveillance and knock on people’s doors, including people who had not been in Washington, DC, on Jan. 6, 2021, or who had been to the Trump rally that day but did not go ­inside the Capitol.

Whistleblower laws protect whistleblowers from retaliation, but apparently the laws protecting FBI workers are insufficient. I’m not sure whether this statute from 2016 is the one still controlling, but I think it is. About seven weeks ago, however, Senators Grassley and Durbin introduced this bill:

Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) have introduced bipartisan legislation to further protect whistleblowers at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from retaliation. The FBI Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act would allow FBI employees to appeal retaliation claims to the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) – a board already utilized by several other federal law enforcement agencies to ensure whistleblowers have the right to a fair, third-party hearing.

“With transparency comes accountability, and it’s clear both are sorely needed at the FBI. From my years of working with whistleblowers, I know the number one concern among those who decide to come forward is retaliation, which could destroy their careers. Our whistleblower protection enhancement bill takes a commonsense approach to fixing this problem, utilizing an effective system that’s already in place for other law enforcement agencies. I appreciate Chairman Durbin for joining me on this important effort,” Grassley said.

“Whistleblowers bravely step forward to report when agencies like the FBI are skirting accountability. But if we want to ensure that whistleblowers can come forward, we must shield them from retaliation. My legislation with Ranking Member Grassley, the FBI Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, will improve protections for those who report wrongdoing at the FBI and, in turn, increase transparency and accountability within our government,” Durbin said.

Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, was able to get this provision included in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which passed the House earlier this month.

It’s interesting to me that Democrats Dubin and Speier are onboard with this. Do they think that FBI whistleblowers might some day be on the left, reporting on abuses by the right? I think they probably do believe that could happen.

From that description of the proposed Enhancement Bill:

[The proposed bill] Maintains the FBI’s internal adjudication process for all initial claims but grants employees the ability to appeal determinations or adverse actions to the MSPB.

Prevents the FBI from using delay tactics to punish whistleblowers by introducing a kick-out provision. After 180 days, if the FBI has not made a final determination or corrective action order, employees can take their case directly to the MSPB.

Increases accountability at the FBI and guarantees that FBI whistleblowers are afforded the same protections that nearly every other federal law enforcement agency in the country enjoys.

Why was the carve-out established for the FBI in the first place, I wonder? It seems to have something to do with Congress’ intention to protect intelligence agencies in general. That’s the same sort of argument the DOJ is using in trying to stop the appointment of a Special Master in the Trump MAL search case.

The Gramscian march: student ignorance of basic elements of US government

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s depressing but not the least surprising to learn that our students are abysmally ignorant of civics, so ignorant that few could pass a basic citizenship test. A political science professor at Suffolk Community College in New York administered one, and this was the result:

On the first day of class, I give my students a citizenship exam asking very basic questions about our founding and our system of governance. Some of the questions include:

Who is the Speaker of the House?
Which branch of government has the power to declare war?
Who is considered the father of the Constitution?
How many Supreme Court Justices are there?
What safeguard is in place to prevent one branch of government from becoming much more powerful than the other branches?
All of the following are guaranteed rights under the First Amendment, except?

The overwhelming majority of students fail the exam. After twelve years of administering this exam, only 348 students have passed out of 2,176. A shameful indictment of our K-12 education system.

Even worse, the passing rate has dropped compared to when I first began giving the exam and has been stagnant over the last five years.

I actually think most students would fail a test even easier than that one. And I think most adults would fail that one as well.

I didn’t read the Constitution in grammar or high school, and yet I was taught many of its elements in civics class (not in history class). But only the most basic ones, such as the Bill of Rights. And I don’t think the 10th Amendment was emphasized at all, for example; I seem to recall that the concept of “states’ rights” was mainly associated with Southern states trying to perpetuate segregation, and therefore was labeled bad. The general principle behind federalism and the limitation of the powers of the federal government got lost in the shuffle – and perhaps even back then the loss was intentional.

Nevertheless, what I think is also very important is that we were taught to revere the US rather than to hate it. We were taught there had been problems in this country – slavery being an obvious one – but that the general thrust of our purpose and history had been and still was a good one.

We were taught that there were certain overarching principles that were almost sacred and without which that “goodness” would fall away. Freedom of speech was a major one; the rule of law and equality under the law was another. That latter principle was why the civil rights movements was so important and why something like lynching was such a a terrible terrible thing. We were taught that it was not okay to cut a great road though the law to get after the devil, as in “A Man For All Seasons” – although without reference to the play about More.

Very little of that seems to be operating in education today, and hasn’t for a long time.

[NOTE: See almost any post of mine about Allan Bloom for more context on how long this has been going on.]