Wandering bluetooths

The New Neo Posted on by

I want to get one thing straight at the outset: the plural of “bluetooth” is “bluetooths,” not “blueteeth.”

And don’t be misled by all those nitpicky claims (this, for example) that there is no plural of “bluetooth” because it’s an adjective modifying “headset” or “speaker” or “connective device” or the like. Yes, it is. But that’s not the way people use the word – they say “bluetooth” to mean the thing itself. And so I have arbitrarily chosen “bluetooths” as my plural, because “blueteeth” sounds too much like – well, like blue teeth.

I have a great many bluetooths. That’s because I have an arm disability that means that holding a phone up to my ear for any longer than a minute or so can spark various kinds of pain. And, since I like to talk on the phone for lengthy periods – at least, with certain people – I have an assortment of the finest bluetooths in the land, about four of them.

But one is my very favorite. It has best sound, both outgoing and incoming, and a near-perfect fit in my ear. Therein lies another idiosyncrasy – my ear is quite small and over-the-ear devices don’t work, although full headsets do. So with a small bluetooth I have to use the in-ear sorts with the rubber tips, and it’s necessary to have the tips that come in several sizes because I need a small size.

Have I succeeded in boring you sufficiently yet? And I haven’t even come to the meat of the post – which is that bluetooths are very easy to lose and once lost they are hard to find. Most are black or white; maybe I should get one in shocking pink, but I haven’t seen any.

However, all bluetooths are small, and they lack those gizmos that make it possible to call them and have them beep back. So when they’re lost in some crevice or other – and many of these crevices seem to lie in wait in my purses – they sometimes stay lost for quite a while.

I had a whole stable of my favorite type, but over the years, one by one they’ve bitten the dust. One even committed suicide by having its “on/off” switch break in a way that made it non-repairable.

And you probably can guess the rest – which is that now they’ve stopped making that model, and a lot of people online say that its supposed replacement is much much worse. I can buy ones from China for a song that are supposedly new and purport to be the type I’m looking for, but I don’t believe they’re new at all, and in the US people are selling used ones (ugh – a used earpiece!) for many hundreds of dollars.

I don’t even necessarily want to find one of the old ones, and that’s why I haven’t named what brand and model it is. I recently lost my last one and found it again, so the need isn’t all that pressing at the moment. But for the future I’d actually like to break my dependence on this type and would prefer to branch out to something new and readily available – readily available, that is, until they stop making that one, too.

[NOTE: It occurs to me that maybe I should start a new blog category called something like, “me and my war with gadgets, or gadgets’ war with me.”]

Suddenly Sowell (plus a ruling in the Virginia school rape case)

The New Neo Posted on by

Thomas Sowell is 91 years old, with a long record of accomplishment that includes the publication of many books that demonstrate an unusually brilliant clarity of thought and graceful yet economical expression of that thought.

A few years ago he announced his retirement. But for Sowell, retirement apparently isn’t what it is for the rest of us. At the ago of 90 he put out a book called Charter Schools and Their Enemies, and did quite a few interviews as well to promote the book.

Now the issues involving education and the left and how they are playing out in Virginia have brought him out of retirement again to write this essay. This quote tells you why:

This is one battle in a much bigger war, and the stakes are far higher than the governorship of Virginia or the Democrats and Republicans. The stakes are the future of this nation.

I assume everyone here is familiar with Sowell. But just in case not everyone is, I’ll add that he’s a black man who was raised partly in the South of the 1930s and partly in Harlem of the 1940s, became an economist who graduated from and taught at several elite institutions, and was a left-to-right political “changer” from way back.

I will add a personal note, which is that for me Sowell was highly influential in the development of my own thinking. By the time I encountered his books I had already undergone my own personal political change and had formulated my own ideas on these matters, but Sowell gave far more organization and logic to these ideas, as well as adding many of his own, all the while citing an enormous amount of research to back it up.

More from Sowell on the present situation:

When school propaganda teaches black kids to hate white people, that is a danger to all Americans of every race. Anyone at all familiar with the history of group-identity politics in other countries knows that it has often ended up producing sickening atrocities that have torn whole societies apart…

There is a point of no return in America…And we may be nearing it, or perhaps past it.

Low-income minority students, especially, cannot afford the luxury of having their time wasted on ideological propaganda in the schools, when they are not getting a decent education in mathematics or the English language.

When they graduate, and go on to higher education that could prepare them for professional careers, hating white people is not likely to do them nearly as much good as knowing math and English.

This may be a new issue to some people, but such irresponsible indoctrination has been going on for decades. Back in 1993, my book “Inside American Education” had a long chapter titled “Classroom Brainwashing.”

Anyone who reads the school propagandists’ own words quoted there can find that a sickening experience as well.

Parents who protest the arrogant abuse of a captive audience of children are performing an important public service. They deserve something better than having the Biden administration’s Attorney General threatening them.

Sowell probably wrote the article before Obama got into the act with his own remarks on the subject, or Sowell might have added that the parents who protest also deserve something better than having ex-president Obama insulting them.

In related news, I wouldn’t sit on a hot stove till Obama retracts his statements about “phony trumped-up culture wars” and “fake outrage” on the right against school boards, but he really ought to in the light of yesterday’s judicial ruling:

Ruling on a the case that has seized national attention and reinvigorated debate over parental rights in public education, a Virginia juvenile court judge concluded Monday that a transgender teenager sexually assaulted a female student in a Loudoun County high school in May.

Chief Judge Pamela L. Brooks found there was sufficient evidence to determine the individual guilty of sexual assault.

The decision comes after the Daily Wire spoke to the victim’s father, who said the male student forcibly sodomized his ninth-grade daughter in a school bathroom while wearing a skirt. When the father attempted to describe and protest the incident at a local school-board meeting, he was arrested for disorderly conduct, allowing the sexual abuse to stay underground for months.

After the assault, the perpetrator was transferred to another school where he allegedly assaulted a second female student in early October.

In the interim, the Loudoun County School Board passed a sweeping gender-inclusivity policy allowing students to use restrooms and locker rooms, as well as compete in sports, according to their gender identity rather than biological sex.

The alleged gender fluidity of the perpetrator was not raised during the hearing, according to the New York Times, although court documents confirm the offender was wearing a skirt when the assault took place. In court, the 15-year-old girl testified that she engaged in consensual sexual activity with the defendant two different times in a girls’ bathroom at Stone Bridge High School but on a subsequent occasion was violently coerced into performing sexual acts.

In this case it’s the crime and the coverup, and part of the attempted coverup – the arrest of the protesting father – ended up exposing the extent of the rot.

[NOTE: I have no idea how the Virginia election will go. But one thing I can say is that, if I were a Democrat running for office, I’d think twice before asking Obama to speak on my behalf.]

School boards or parents?

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “MBunge” writes:

I saw a poll in Virginia that found something like 70% of Democrats believe schools boards should have more say about children’s education than parents… Does anyone really think 70% of Virginia Democrats believe that?

Do Virginia Democrats with children actually think school boards know better than they do? Do even childless Virginia Democrats actually think school boards know better than they do? If those school boards suddenly mandated a GOP-friendly curriculum, would Virginia Democrats simply nod, smile, and go along?

To elaborate on that – I think that at least 70% of Virginia Democrats do believe that at this moment.

There are several reasons. The first is that their party leaders have told them recently to believe it. The second is that there is indeed a current tendency for Democrats to believe that “experts” know better, and in this case the school boards would supposedly be the experts.

But the third and probably most important is – as MBunge implies – that they realize that school boards lean to the left, and that the people opposing them tend (or reportedly tend) to be on the right. Therefore many Democrats would be likely to believe that school boards are implementing the correct policies – that is, ones with which they agree – and that the boards’decisions are being fought by troglodytes on the right who should not be allowed to control anything.

Do most people follow what actually is being done by school boards in terms of the policies they are promoting and defending? I doubt it, although lately with all the brouhaha around school boards I think that more people are starting to follow these developments more closely than before. But one of the biggest reasons school boards and teachers’ unions and schools of education have been able to turn the schooling of so many children into leftist indoctrination is that they have been counting on the busyness and inattention of many parents and voters.

They are also counting, of course, on Democratic politicians backing them up – McAuliffe of Virginia being a good example when he said that parents shouldn’t tell school boards what to teach. They are also counting on the MSM defending school boards and arguing in their favor.

Those same parents might change their minds despite all of that if some school board decision comes to hurt them or their children very personally. Perhaps, anyway. But unless and until that were to happen, I think they will believe what they’re told to believe.

If you’re a parent and you think you should have much of a say in your children’s public education curriculum…

The New Neo Posted on by

…well, think again:

Let’s hear from “scholar of education history and policy” Jack Schneider and education podcaster Jennifer Berkshire, who you may remember from her passionate argument against “parents’ rights”. This is good stuff, people:

“Yet what’s actually radical here is the assertion of parental powers that have never previously existed. This is not to say that parents should have no influence over how their children are taught. But common law and case law in the United States have long supported the idea that education should prepare young people to think for themselves, even if that runs counter to the wishes of parents. In the words of legal scholar Jeff Shulman, ‘This effort may well divide child from parent, not because socialist educators want to indoctrinate children, but because learning to think for oneself is what children do.’”

You see, you’re wrong to think they’re indoctrinating children in leftist thought. It couldn’t be further from the truth. They’re just teaching them to think, to have an open mind, and those troglodyte parents who want to stop them are the ones who would like to end all exposure to ideas other than their own narrow views.

It’s beautifully Orwellian, isn’t it?

Puts me in mind of something Allan Bloom wrote over thirty years ago in his magnum opus The Closing of the American Mind:

Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being. This intention is more or less explicit, more or less a result of reflection,; but even the neutral subject, like reading and writing and arithmetic, take their place in a vision of the educated person…Over the history of our republic, there have obviously been changes of opinion as to what kind of man is best for our regime…A powerful attachment to the letter and spirit of the Declaration of Independence gently conveyed, appealing to each man’s reason, was the goal of the education of democratic man…

But openness…eventually won out over natural rights, partly through a theoretical critique, partly because of a political rebellion against nature’s last constraints. Civic education turned away from concentrating on the Founding to concentrating on openness based on history and social science. There was even a general tendency to debunk the Founding, to prove the beginnings were flawed in order to license a greater openness to the new. What began in Charles Beard’s Marxism and Carl Becker’s historicism became routine. We are used to hearing the Founders being charged with being racists, murderers of Indians, representatives of class interests. I asked my first history professor in the university, a very famous scholar, whether the picture he gave us of George Washington did not have the effect of making us despise our regime. “Not at all,” he said, “it doesn’t depend on individuals but on our having good democratic values.” To which I rejoined, “But you just showed us that Washington was only using those values to further the class interests of the Virginia squirearchy.” He got angry, and that was the end of it. He was comforted by a gentle assurance that the values of democracy are part of the movement of history and did not require his elucidation or defense. He could carry on his historical studies with the moral certitude that they would lead to greater openness and hence more democracy. The lessons of fascism and the vulnerability of democracy, which we had all just experienced, had no effect on him.

Bloom went to university in the mid-1940s, so the trends were already well under way back then.

January 6th agent provocateur?

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “Griffin.”]

Questions abound. The following is an excerpt from Thomas Massie’s exchange with AG Garland:

Rep. Massie: As far as we can determine, the individual who was saying he’ll probably go to jail, he’ll probably be arrested, but they need to go into the Capitol the next day, is then directing people into the Capitol the next day, is then the next day directing people to the Capitol. And as far as we can find. You said this is one of the most sweeping in history. Have you seen that video, or those frames from that video?

AG Garland: So as I said at the outset, one of the norms of the Justice Department is to not comment on pending investigations, and particularly not to comment on particular scenes or particular individuals.

Rep. Massie: I was hoping today to give you an opportunity to put to rest the concerns that people have that there were federal agents or assets of the federal government present on January 5 and January 6. Can you tell us, without talking about particular incidents or particular videos, how many agents or assets of the federal government were present on January 6, whether they agitated to go into the Capitol, and if any of them did?

AG Garland: So I’m not going to violate this norm of, uh, of, of, of, the rule of law.

[Looks down and away]

I’m not going to comment on an investigation that’s ongoing.

The Revolver article goes on to say:

After months of research, Revolver’s investigative reporting team can now reveal that Ray Epps [the man actually being referred to in that exchange between Massie and Garland] appears to be among the primary orchestrators of the very first breach of the Capitol’s police barricades at 12:50pm on January 6. Epps appears to have led the “breach team” that committed the very first illegal acts on that fateful day. What’s more, Epps and his “breach team” did all their dirty work with 10 minutes still remaining in President Trump’s National Mall speech, and with the vast majority of Trump supporters still 30 minutes away from the Capitol.

Secondly, Revolver also determined, and will prove below, that the the FBI stealthily removed Ray Epps from its Capitol Violence Most Wanted List on July 1, just one day after Revolver exposed the inexplicable and puzzlesome FBI protection of known Epps associate and Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes. July 1 was also just one day after separate New York Times report amplified a glaring, falsifiable lie about Epps’s role in the events of January 6.

Lastly, Ray Epps appears to have worked alongside several individuals — many of them suspiciously unindicted — to carry out a breach of the police barricades that induced a subsequent flood of unsuspecting MAGA protesters to unwittingly trespass on Capitol restricted grounds and place themselves in legal jeopardy.

Much much more at the link.

The Democrats want to tax unrealized capital gains…

The New Neo Posted on by

…but only for those selfish, greedy billionaires, who of course don’t deserve their money – or, in this case, their potential money.

Right? Right? Just like the original income tax proposal, this is only for the very very very rich.

The Biden administration isn’t through trying to mess with people, and sometimes succeeding. So now we have this:

President Biden’s $2 trillion spending package continues to stall as senior Democrats are hoping to finalize a proposal on a new annual tax on billionaires’ unrealized capital gains, Democratic leadership has indicated.

“We probably will have a wealth tax,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) confirmed Sunday on CNN.

The proposal, which is being reviewed by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), would impose an annual tax on unrealized capital gains on liquid assets held by billionaires, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said.

“I wouldn’t call that a wealth tax, but it would help get at capital gains, which are an extraordinarily large part of the incomes of the wealthiest individuals and right now escape taxation until they’re realized,” Yellen said on CNN.

The proposal would likely only affect less than 1,000 of the nation’s wealthiest citizens, according to the Wall Street Journal.

A few wild guesses here: (1) Whatever level of rich person this proposed tax would reach, it would stop short of affecting the very very rich Nancy Pelosi (2) It wouldn’t stay at 1000 billionaires (2) the billionaires would mostly manage to evade it in one way or another, but the insane precedent of government taking unrealized assets would be set.

And don’t you just love Yellen’s reformulation of the idea of unrealized gains, which are now merely gains that have “escaped taxation until they’re realized.” See, those gains are escaping the clutches of the IRA by being just on paper, and we can’t have that, can we?

Do Manchin and Sinema think this is just peachy keen? And what about all the other Democrat members of Congress who hold themselves out to be moderates at election time in order to appeal to more moderate voters in states that aren’t true blue, and who nevertheless vote “yes” on all the leftist bills the Democrats propose? What do they think?

You can do almost anything you want to billionaires because so many people have the notion that so much money in one person’s (or entity’s) hands is “obscene” (a word I sometimes see used). But the bell will toll for thee, and doing something to just a few billionaires doesn’t make it right. But it makes it something that most people won’t care about, because after all – billionaires.

It is Senator Wyden and the Senate Finance Committee who have been “looking at this.” In fact, they’ve been “looking at it” – and salivating – for quite a long time, although none of the current articles I’ve read mention it. But I wrote a post on the subject in April of 2019, when Democrats were proposing something related but slightly different.

At the time I wrote that post, the proposal’s details were hard to discover, and I was guessing at some of them. The post is long, and I suggest looking at it. But the most important thing to remember is that Democrats have been planning this sort of thing for a long time, and not just for billionaires, either.

For example (from an article written in March of 2020):

The Wyden proposal [as of March 2020] would apply to anyone with at least either $1 million in income or $10 million in assets for three consecutive years — with complex exclusions. In computing the value of assets for the $10 million threshold, for example, the proposal would exclude the first $2 million in personal residences, the first $5 million in family farms and the first $3 million in retirement portfolios.

However, many questions remain about which taxpayers would be subject to the Wyden proposal and how it would treat individuals moving in and out of the new regime.

I also notice that in MSM articles about the current proposal the word “billionaires” is often emphasized, for obvious reasons. But here’s a caution from my April 2019 post, involving the history of the income tax:

The main argument for ratification [of the 16th Amendment] was that the amendment would force the wealthy to take on a fairer share of the federal tax burden that had in the past been largely carried by those earning relatively little…

Rep. Cordell Hull introduced the first income tax law under the newly adopted Sixteenth Amendment. He proposed a graduated tax starting with a 1-percent rate for incomes between $4,000 and $20,000 increasing to a top rate of 3 percent for those earning $50,000 or more. The House Ways and Means Committee called upon citizens to “cheerfully support and sustain this, the fairest and cheapest of all taxes. . . .”

The first tax collection day under the new law took place on March 1, 1914. Since the average worker earned only about $800 a year, few people actually had to pay any federal income tax. Less than 4 percent of American families made an annual income of $3,000 or more. Deductions and exemptions further shrank the pool of taxpayers. Nevertheless, the federal government collected $71 million that first year. Millionaire John D. Rockefeller alone paid an estimated $2 million.

All in all, most Americans thought the new tax was a great idea. One taxpayer wrote to the Bureau of Internal Revenue, “I have purposely left out some deductions I could claim, in order to have the privilege and the pleasure of paying at least a small income tax. . . .”

Once the camel gets its nose in the tent, it will ultimately get the whole body in, and then some.

Can you walk and chew gum at the same time?

The New Neo Posted on by

I can.

Hey – I can even walk and listen to music at the same time, and I often do. So what?

But Roger Taylor. Ah, Taylor could sing up a storm and drum up a storm at the same time. To wit:

I listened to Taylor on that particular song and kept thinking “he sounds like somebody, he sounds like somebody.” But I couldn’t think who that might be. It was driving me nuts. And then it came to me—Rod Stewart.

Kind of.

But Stewart did just one thing at a time: sing. Taylor did a lot lot more. They both wrote songs, though.

Taylor’s got a mean falsetto, too, so high it might set your teeth on edge. But impressive in its own way:

I know that Taylor’s not the only singing drummer around. But still, they’re relatively rare, especially at that high level of accomplishment It takes a particular kind of mind that can double-task big time.

One of the other most impressive singing drummers of all time is Don Henley of the Eagles. I know a lot of people dislike him for various reasons. But boy, that guy could drum and sing:

ADDENDUM:

Levon Helm shows you how:

Teal is just ducky

The New Neo Posted on by

I had no idea that yesterday’s thread on the difficulty of distinguishing between intermediate shades of green and blue would occasion so many comments, but I’m glad it did. Color is a topic that’s dear to my heart. I’ve always been very affected by color and very sensitive to gradations of color, which can drive me a bit nuts when choosing paint.

I decided to find out a bit more about teal, and it turns out that there are many shades of teal with some having more green in them and some more blue. That explains quite a bit. But I didn’t know that the color was named after a small duck called the green-winged teal. However, it’s not the wing part that has sparked the color name; it’s a stripe on the duck’s head.

Of course, when I tried to find an illustrative photo of the head, I found a whole bunch in which the stripe looked to be a different color in every one. But isn’t that what you’d expect, with teal?

An example:

Photographed at Lindo Lake, Lakeside, CA. Original image: IR106708.CR2

Is that not adorable?

NOTE: Yes, I know the title is a pretty bad pun. Sorry, but I could not resist.

The Biden administration has taken to mocking those suffering from our current economic problems or who wish to exercise liberty

The New Neo Posted on by

Marie Antoinette was excoriated for having said a dismissive “Let them eat cake” when told about bread shortages for peasants. She almost certainly never actually said it, but the legend lives on, and it fosters the idea of an uncaring and spoiled elite to whom the suffering of the lower classes is just a thing to mock.

Now the Biden administration seems to think it’s a great idea to do so, as well:

And the latest is this:

White House press secretary Jen Psaki cracked a joke Tuesday about the supply chain crisis affecting businesses and consumers across the country, saying it’s a “tragedy” some people may have to wait longer for their treadmill to arrive.

The Democratic Party has increasingly become a party of the very rich – who already have home workout stations and personal trainers – and the government-dependent poor, who probably aren’t ordering treadmills from Amazon but who certainly will notice supply-chain problems. But Psaki is mocking neither group here. She’s laying into this administration’s favorite target, the kulaks – I mean the successful middle class.

Oh, and liberty? Especially about COVID vaccines? Hey, those people are killers, says our bring-us-together president:

Biden has said so many vile things that it’s hard to choose the worst, but that’s certainly one of them. And I have to say that, cynical as I’ve become, it nevertheless continues to puzzle me that anyone of any political persuasion other than the far left can listen to him and be anything but repulsed by his arrogance, nastiness, and dictatorial propensities. And yet many people don’t seem to see it (or perhaps they’re not watching).

And these same people thought Trump was bad. Go figure.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

Here we go again:

(1) We knew the administration was lying about nearly everything they said in connection with their Afghanistan pullout. It was quite obvious; their lies were neither well-crafted nor believable. The lies were actually insulting to intelligence, a way to thumb their noses at the right and to acknowledge that the left didn’t care and to hope that those in the middle weren’t paying attention.

Well, now we learn from purportedly informed sources that the administration itself has been in touch with more Americans than the 100 they previously mentioned who were there and wanted to get out: “363 Americans who are stuck in war-torn Afghanistan and around 176 U.S. permanent residents who are asking to be evacuated immediately.”

(2) Remember that NSBA letter that triggered the Garland announcement about the possibility that parents complaining to school boards are actually domestic terrorists (or perhaps the DOJ triggered the letter, which triggered the DOJ announcement)? Well, as Emily Litella would say:

There’s a reason this is happening. Simply put, the NSBA did not expect the strong blowback it got:

It appears that most member school boards did not consider accusing the parents who elect them of domestic terrorism was a smart move, and the letter seems to have been sent by a few activists without any vetting by the organization as a whole. Consequently, multiple state affiliates of NSBA have resigned from the organization.

In an effort to stop the bleeding, NSBA has now retracted and apologized for its letter to Biden…

They’re now saying that they “regret” and “apologize for” the letter. Then why was it sent in the first place? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way.

(3) I’ve said many times that economics is not my strong suit, so don’t expect me to be able to explain the supply chain problems. Of course, it’s not something that many people seem able to explain all that well, either. I was looking around for a good summary that might – accent on the might – be fairly objective. Perhaps this one?

(4) I wanted to update yesterday’s Alec Baldwin shooting incident post, but the situation is still quite unclear although some new information has dribbled out. So I’m not going to write a whole post on it right now, except to say that from looking at a number of articles, this is what I’ve gleaned: the gun was given to him by an assistant director rather than the armorer, which is not in accordance with protocol; Baldwin was told the weapon was “cold” (meaning no live ammunition); there had been some gun mishaps on the set earlier in which live ammunition was fired; and the shooting by Baldwin happened during filming and I’ve seen no reliable indication (so far) that he was messing around.