It’s that time again – National Candy Corn Day

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This post is a slightly-edited repeat of a post from 2008.]

No, I didn’t make it up. It really is National Candy Corn Day, the day “the nation celebrates its favorite vegetable.”

No doubt all of my readers, being unusually well-informed people, were already aware of that. But did you know it is estimated that in this country thirty-five million pounds of the classic treat (invented in the 1880s) are sold every year? And by the way, my original post from thirteen years ago had the number at twenty million, according to the same Wiki link, so the number has nearly doubled in the meantime.

I personally might be responsible for approximately a ton of that if I gave in to my worst impulses. However, I keep my addiction in tightly-controlled check.

It is part of my penance to confess here that I really love the dreadful stuff and always have, and I’m far from alone (although my impression is that candy corn is one of those things a person either loves or hates). Once I even went to a Halloween party dressed as a piece of candy corn, and believe me I was already a grownup.

Apparently I am not the only adult who has dressed up as candy corn on Halloween. And no, I didn’t look like this—more’s the pity (although to be technical, isn’t she dressed as two pieces of candy corn, the body and the hat?):

candycorncostume.gif

I heard on Fox News (can’t give a link here because I was unable to find the information online) that candy corn is the Halloween treat most often stolen by parents from their kids’ Halloween stash. I believe this to be undeniably true. It is a guilty, shameful secret for most, but I am glad this is finally seeing the light of day.

There are various gourmet variations on candy corn, and I’ve sampled quite a few in my day. A helpful reader sent me some information about this Brach product for example, which includes:

Green Beans, Roasted Turkey, Cranberry Sauce, Stuffing, Apple Pie and Coffee. (Fans of Ginger Glazed Carrots, which were part of last year’s batch, should note that flavor is gone.)

I had tried the earlier version, and it was terrible. This sounds even worse. It’s the good old Brach’s original that I continue to crave.

And here’s a burning question: do you eat your candy corn in sections? And, if so, do you consider the top to be the yellow part or the white part? I’ve always seen the little white triangle as the “foot” of the candy corn, but I learned when I designed my costume years ago that most people see it the other way. For those who might be inclined to disagree with me, I offer the following exhibit from the realm of science; the kernel grows with the tip – corresponding to the white part of the candy – down, embedded in the cob:

corn-components.jpg

January 6th has legs

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve noticed many times that virtually all the liberals I know – even those who are having a few doubts and questions about what’s been going on under the Biden administration – are still firmly convinced that January 6th represents a terrible and dangerous insurrection and that if I don’t agree I’m some sort of QAnon-influenced conspiracy theorist. To me, this represents the remarkable and continued power of the press and the left to set a narrative that becomes firmly entrenched in people’s minds and is remarkably recalcitrant to change.

How to counter this? I’ve actually been told by a few people that if I sent them some written material on it they’ll read it, presumably with an open mind. I think that it’s easy to think one’s mind is open, but hard to execute. And one big problem for me is what to send them, because “TL;DR” (too long; didn’t read) is an ever-present problem.

For a couple of weeks I’ve been amassing links from which to choose. There are close to fifty now, and obviously I have to winnow that down to just a couple. But which ones? It’s not really a topic that lends itself to summary approach, if one wants to even have a chance of reaching a person on the other side. There are so many misconceptions to break down, lies to counter, and omissions to fill in.

And then there’s the trump card (forgive the expression) of discounting the messenger: “Well, it’s just [fill in the blank] who says that, and we all know that person is a liar.” No, we don’t, but that’s what they often think is the case, and it’s hard to get past that assumption. That’s why someone like Turley or Dershowitz or Greenwald, as non-conservatives, can be so helpful, although after just a few occasions of siding with the right they are likewise discredited by many.

So although I welcome the news that Tucker Carlson is offering this, I have my doubts that it could reach the unconvinced – who often think Carlson is some sort of KKK wizard:

Fox News host and the current cable news king Tucker Carlson announced that after much research and investigation, he’s releasing a multi-part series about the January 6 riots that cuts through a lot of the media posturing and speculation and gets down to the facts.

I obviously haven’t seen it, but my guess is that it’s pretty good. That link goes on to give examples of many of the attacks that have already been mounted against it. That’s no surprise, because getting the word out in a relatively short and relatively easy-to-understand way would be one of the biggest threats the left could face right now. So of course it must be quashed even before people have a chance to see it, so they won’t think to waste their time on something that’s already been “debunked” and is issued by the evil lying Carlson.

If a Republican tweets in the forest, can anybody hear it?

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “JimNorCal” writes, about the Biden administration’s planned payments of $450 thousand per person to illegal immigrants who were subjected to the family separation policy:

Do you hear angry responses from the Repub Party? Me neither.

My question is: did you look?

I encounter this sort of assertion time and again about Republicans being silent on various issues, so I don’t mean to single out JimNorCal; it’s a common observation. And yet very often when I check I find that plenty of Republicans have in fact issued angry responses about the topic in question, whatever it may be.

The thing is, how does the news get out? Is the MSM covering those responses? Where would we read or hear about them? Don’t expect CNN or the NY Times to mention them, except now and then in the tried-and-true “Republicans pounce” fashion if they think they can make the responses sound cruel and/or outrageous.

And of course not all Republicans are responding to any one issue, and some don’t respond much at all. Some probably don’t care. Some do cover a lot of things, but they can’t talk about everything. They have to pick and choose because time and energy is limited, and the Biden administration (and the left in general) perpetrates so many horrors a day that it’s pretty much impossible to keep up. Playing whack-a-mole isn’t all that productive. And besides Republicans in Congress are somewhat limited to rhetoric. They don’t have the votes or the power to stop these things at the moment.

Whether they often stop them when they do have majorities is another question entirely, but in recent years even when they’ve controlled Congress they haven’t controlled it by much of a margin, and so the more conservative among them can be stopped by the “mavericks.”

Regarding the issue at hand, though – the $450 thousand dollars per person award to illegal immigrants suing because they underwent family separation during the Trump years – it only took me a moment to find Ted Cruz’s Twitter feed:

And Tom Cotton’s:

As well as John Cornyn and Chuck Grassley:

And Rick Scott and Dan Crenshaw:

Also Marsha Blackburn:

And Lindsey Graham:

I’ll stop there because I think I’ve made my point. I checked a few other senators (it would take me a day to check every Republican in Congress) who didn’t mention it, but for the most part those particular people don’t seem to be heavy twitter users anyway. For all I know, some of them may have something about it on their websites; I didn’t check that either.

But the larger picture – and perhaps this is what the commenter was really trying to get at – is that there’s rarely an effective response in terms of action, and that’s very very frustrating.

But what can Republicans in Congress do about this particular issue? They don’t have a Congressional majority, and this is the DOJ making the settlements, anyway, rather than Congress being involved. It doesn’t seem like a case where SCOTUS could step in, either.

Maybe you’d like them to yell LOUDER. That would be good, and possibly would affect public opinion, as well. But how would we hear them – except for the small numbers who follow them on Twitter (I certainly don’t)? Would the MSM cover their yells? Only if the press could frame their statements as “hear the mean angry Republicans who would do awful things to you and to all innocent and defenseless people if they had the chance.”

Politicians can’t force the media to cover them. That’s one of the reasons Trump’s tweets were sometimes effective; they were so anger-provoking for the MSM that they couldn’t resist covering them and that could actually work to Trump’s advantage because his point was spread throughout the land that way.

That’s probably the main reason they took him off Twitter and kept him off.

In summary, although the GOP has its flaws and then some, the media and social media gatekeepers are no small problem for Republicans. It’s not just the lies and the nasty coverage. Sometimes it’s the lack of coverage that’s just as important.

Come to the US illegally, strike it rich

The New Neo Posted on by

This news should be impossible to believe. But unfortunately, we know it’s very possible:

The Biden administration is in talks to offer immigrant families that were separated during the Trump administration around $450,000 a person in compensation, according to people familiar with the matter, as several agencies work to resolve lawsuits filed on behalf of parents and children who say the government subjected them to lasting psychological trauma.

The U.S. Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services are considering payments that could amount to close to $1 million a family, though the final numbers could shift, the people familiar with the matter said. Most of the families that crossed the border illegally from Mexico to seek asylum in the U.S. included one parent and one child, the people said. Many families would likely get smaller payouts, depending on their circumstances, the people said.

That link is to a story that appeared in the Wall Street Journal, an outfit not usually given to wild flights of fancy. Will this actually end up happening? Quite possibly. Will most Americans even hear about it? I doubt it – but if it does happen, I hope all Americans hear about it. There would be few things designed to make all sane Americans realize the deeply misplaced priorities (and that’s putting it kindly) of the current administration.

…[I]n a “complicated [and] complex piece of litigation,” 940 legal claims have been filed by families who say they were “forcefully broken up” after crossing into the United States from Mexico. The families filing the claims say their children were traumatized and suffered from a range of ailments — including “anxiety” and a “fear of strangers” — all apparently justifying the average claim of $3.4 million payout per family.

The Biden administration has been in talks designed to reach an agreement on the claims, although some involved are having troubling stomaching the fact that the payouts amount to more than the victims of 9/11 received.

How about the trauma the children suffered from uprooting them and subjecting them to the long trek to this country? And do you recall why the separations occurred (one reason being the possibility of child trafficking)?

Among other things, settling these suits at this level of payment – or really, any level of payment – will encourage more and more and more of them.

The US government has an enormous amount of legal resources and money to defend these suits if it wishes to do so. Clearly, it doesn’t wish to. My guess is that this is a fish the Biden administration is throwing to its extreme left flank (the administration has nothing but left flanks, but there are degrees of leftness), a group that hasn’t been too happy with the administration’s progress lately on the radical bills that are stalled in Congress.

The Biden administration doesn’t seem to care much about offending moderate Democrats – if indeed any such people remain. It certainly isn’t reluctant to offend Independents. It must have tremendous confidence either that future elections are in the bag for Democrats no matter what, or that any electoral setbacks will be temporary in the new America it is engaged in designing.

Peter Hitchens on changing one’s mind

The New Neo Posted on by

You may recall Christopher Hitchens, who died in 2011. His slightly younger brother Peter Hitchens – equally sardonic and intelligent – appears in this video. Both brothers were leftists in their youth and both became more conservative later on, but Peter went much further to the right and also embraced Christianity whereas Christopher remained a committed atheist.

Here Peter is being questioned in 2016 about his own change process, and he has some interesting things to say:

A lot of you are probably familiar with that phenomenon. I certainly am.

However, Hitchens goes on to add this:

Is that the case? Did “everybody” prior to the 20th century become conservative as they grew older? Of course not. There are plenty of radical writers of the 1800s, for example, who remained radical. And what of the garden variety radical back then – well, who knows? I don’t think there were any surveys.

What’s more, how uncommon is it for radicals to become more conservative as they grow older, even today? Not all that uncommon; after all, a lot of readers here would count themselves in that group. There are a significant number of such people in public life, as well.

So I’m not at all sure there’s been any marked change in the proportion of radical leftists who became more conservative as they got older in, for example, the 19th Century as compared to now.

But perhaps Hitchens is limiting his point to people who not only become more conservative as they get older but who also were once atheists and become devout Christians, as well. Granted, that is obviously going to be a smaller group than those who merely become more conservative over time. But is it really all that small compared to in the past?

I have no idea, and I don’t think Hitchens does, either.

Can there be “consensual sex” between 15-year-olds?

The New Neo Posted on by

Now we have learned – from the ever-helpful WaPo – that the 15-year-old girl raped by the “boy in a skirt” in Virginia had previously had some sort of consensual sex with him on two occasions.

There are many huge issues connected with this story: the school board’s coverup, the use by the Biden administration of the father’s resultant rage to spark labeling upset parents as domestic terrorists, and the biased way the MSM has handled the story (including the disclosure of the previous “consensual sex,” which seems to blame the girl), to name just a few. But in this post I’m going to take up a separate issue than the rape, which is the more general one of “consensual sex” between 15-year-olds.

What is sexual “consent” for 15-year-olds? They are considered to be under the age of consent, and if that distinction is to mean anything – and I think it should – then neither is capable of consent in the legal sense. Nor were these two previous “consensual” acts statutory rape, because neither of the two had reached the age where that law would be applicable.

These days, however, “consensual” sexual activity at that age is not at all unusual. Even when I was in school some underage children were sexually active, but it’s very much more common nowadays. There are almost certainly many reasons why today’s children are so sexualized, but the upshot is that sex is almost expected of them in terms of peer and cultural pressures.

I’ve written about this before. An excerpt:

Feminists, of course, are actually at least partly responsible for the problem, telling girls it’s liberating to sleep around, which helps lead to the skewing of teenage sexual behavior more to the adolescent male ideal—with a vast vast assist from the internet.

It’s a mess, and the hookup culture among teens that I wrote about here is arriving at earlier and earlier ages, and fueled by the visual stimuli of easily-available porn on computers. Individual teens can resist it if they are very strong, but the pull and pressures to give in to it (whatever a girl or a boy might secretly wish to do or not do) is incredibly powerful. It’s one thing to know that holding off from easy sex at a very young age will protect you and help you in the end. It’s another to actually have the strength to do so.

This has been going on for many years, and oral sex in particular is now commonly expected and normed for this age group. Often “consensual” doesn’t mean what one might think it means, either, because even if there is no overt rape the sex can be exploitative and norm-pressured. This affects both sexes, and although sometimes there is obvious psychological pressure from one or the other in the pair, sometimes it’s just the pressure that comes from the atmosphere and peer expectations surrounding both.

Of course, there was plenty of sexual pressure in my day. But certainly not as much, and it was far more interpersonal rather than all around us in the culture. For example, a lot of girls were pressured into their first sexual experience by the tried and true “if you loved me you would do it” or “you must be frigid if you don’t want to” or “I’ll break up with you if you don’t.” In addition, by the age of fifteen, boys and girls both have sexual urges, and that’s always operating. But in the olden days society at least frowned on such sexual encounters very overtly, and there were rules about what could be seen on TV or in the movies or in music (the internet didn’t exist). That’s no longer the case, and we are seeing the results in the early sexualization of our children.

[NOTE: In this post I didn’t write about the role of the schools in encouraging sex, but they have a role, too. We hear about books in school libraries containing pornography, for example. Astounding.]

Judge issues interesting ruling in proceedings prior to Rittenhouse trial

The New Neo Posted on by

The trial of Kyle Rittenhouse is about to begin on November 1, but in a related hearing the judge has ruled as follows:

On Monday, Schroeder reiterated his reportedly long-held policy against allowing the word “victim” in his criminal trials until there is a conviction. He said the word is “loaded” with prejudgment.

Therefore prosecutors will not be allowed to use that term to refer to the three men shot by Rittenhouse (no one disputes that he shot them; the question is whether his actions were justified by self-defense).

The defense team will be allowed, however, to refer to the men shot as looters or rioters or arsonists:

The three men Kyle Rittenhouse shot during a protest against police brutality in Wisconsin can be labeled rioters, looters or arsonists if the teenager’s defense team has evidence to support the characterizations…

Binger, the prosecutor, argued that the words “rioters,” “looters” and “arsonists” are “loaded, if not more loaded,” than “victim.”

At the link there’s a photo of Rittenhouse in the courtroom. Until now I’d only seen the photos of him that night in Kenosha, and I hadn’t realized what a baby face he has (well, after all, he’s 18 now and was 17 when he shot the men – but he looks really young to me).

That NBC article I linked doesn’t do a good job of explaining why a judge might make this differentiation between what class of terms are allowed for the people Rittenhouse shot. I looked in a few more articles but didn’t find any good explanations there, either, so I’ll just offer my own sense about the basis for the decision. I think it’s that the presumption of innocence for the defendant, Rittenhouse, precludes labeling these men as “victims” because it seems to pre-judge the very question the trial is supposed to resolve: whether their actions constituted the sort of provocation that would justify Rittenhouse shooting in self-defense.

However, the three men either were rioters and/or looters and/or arsonists or they were not, and they are not the defendants. Of course, the defense attorneys can’t just accuse them of anything they want. But they can present evidence of what the men were doing that night if relevant and if those activities fit the definition of the terms “rioters,” “looters,” or “arsonists.” The three men don’t have the same protections defendant Rittenhouse does (and only one is alive, although that isn’t the basis on which the ruling was made).

That’s the answer I’d give on a law exam, anyway.