All the news that’s depressing enough to print: on disbarments

The New Neo Posted on by

I have to gird my loins (metaphorically speaking) to look at the news these days. It’s hard to know what to say about so much of it, other than that it feels like a looking-glass world in which the Red Queen is in charge and “the best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”

Some of the depressing news is quiet and probably has no significance for most people. For example, if you were to conduct a poll of the American public and ask them who Kevin Clinesmith is, how many would be able to identify him as the FBI lawyer who falsified an email as part of the Russiagate web spun to snare Trump? I would say that 10% would probably be a high estimate.

So I think that this recent story about Clinesmith’s law license wouldn’t have much meaning to most people:

Former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith and his legal team have agreed to a one-year law license suspension in Washington, D.C., after the official was found guilty in August 2020 of illegally modifying a statement relating to the Russiagate investigation and scandal, according to new bar records.

A District of Columbia Board on Professional Responsibility committee will hear the suspension proposal on July 19 and decide whether to approve or reject Clinesmith’s bar sanction.

If the panel proceeds with the suspension, Clinesmith will be prohibited from practicing law again until August 2021, one year from the date when he reported his guilty plea to the D.C. disciplinary counsel’s office.

Clinesmith pleaded guilty in court to the charge that he had doctored an email that was presented to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) in 2017 concerning whether or not former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page had been a “source” for the CIA. He was then sentenced to 12 months probation and 400 hours of community service in January 2021.

In other words, not even much of a wrist slap – more like a love tap. The message? If you’re on the side of the left, you can get away with things like that with hardly any consequences at all.

Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani – who was on the other side – has had his law license suspended:

Rudolph W. Giuliani … had his law license suspended after a New York court ruled on Thursday that he made “demonstrably false and misleading statements” while fighting the results of the 2020 election on behalf of Donald J. Trump.

Alan Dershowitz has something to say on the matter:

Rudy Giuliani has been suspended from the practice of law without a hearing, based largely on First Amendment-protected statements he made outside of any court of law. A panel of the Appellate Division of New York suspended the former mayor of New York and former United States Attorney last week without giving him an opportunity to dispute the charges against him at an evidentiary hearing. Moreover, he was suspended largely on the basis of statements he made not in court but on television…

Although Giuliani is now entitled to a post-suspension hearing, it seems clear that the judges already have made up their minds, saying that the result will “likely” be “substantial permanent sanctions” — which means disbarment…

…[T]here are no compelling arguments why anyone — lawyer or non-lawyer — should be denied the full protection of the First Amendment when he or she participates in the marketplace of ideas on television, podcasts or other media, even when representing a client.

Any statements made in such a public context can be rebutted in the marketplace of ideas, and so the public needs no special protection from statements made by lawyers…

The rules under which Giuliani has been suspended are so vague that they cannot possibly satisfy the standards of due process, especially where public speech is concerned and clarity is required before it is suppressed.

The court cited a rule allowing disbarment for conduct, including speech that “adversely reflects on the lawyer’s fitness as a lawyer.” It is difficult to imagine a more subjective standard subject to selective application. The panel also cited a rule that called for disbarment for knowingly making “false statements of fact or law to a third person.”

As usual, Dershowitz is both clear and correct. And then he adds this, which expresses my sentiments exactly:

If these rules were applied across the board fairly, and equitably, thousands of lawyers would be disbarred every year.

If we’re going to apply such a standard – which I think is absurd – then I nominate Ben Crump to be first in the disbarment line. He’s lied over and over and over about nearly every one of race-centered police violence cases in which he’s been involved, and his lies have done remarkable damage.

And no, I won’t sit on a hot stove till Crump’s disbarment occurs.

Rocky Mountain high: the results of legalizing marijuana in Colorado

The New Neo Posted on by

Colorado was a US trailblazer in the legalization of marijuana. It was legalized there for medical use in 2009, and for recreational use in 2014. That means that there’s quite a bit of data now about the results in that state, and a lot of it is not encouraging:

Advocates for legalization were adamant that a major purpose was to create a regulated market that would drive out the criminal element and end the violence that drives the black market. It fact, the exact opposite has happened, with a thriving black market still dominating the trade, as has happened everywhere states have legalized marijuana, from California to Illinois…

Easier access, greater prevalence, higher psychoactive potency from increased THC, a continued criminal element, and more intensive daily use have all occurred since the experiment began. Maybe the sky hasn’t fallen, but a great deal of damage has rained down on Colorado, as measured across several indicators.

Please read the whole thing. The negative effects seem formidable, but I don’t think it’s possible to re-criminalize cannabis, nor do I think it would work to stem the tide.

Free speech in chains

The New Neo Posted on by

Free speech has always been a hard sell. It goes against the human grain to a certain extent. People often feel a powerful desire to silence those whom they define as opponents, bullies, liars, or anyone else whose speech they think is offensive or dangerous to them.

Free speech requires that people stifle that impulse in the name of a principle that seems abstract: everyone benefits because it may be the speech suppressor who’s suppressed next time. The marketplace of ideas will be the judge, with the battle fought openly by allowing the speech to occur in the interests of liberty.

I’m of the opinion that, as our lives have become safer and more protected in terms of vanquishing disease, vastly lengthened lifespans, huge increases in conveniences, enormously faster communication, and a host of other improvements, many of us have become more intent on trying to eliminate many things perceived as still dangerous. As we’ve become safer, we’ve demanded even more safety, and expanded the definitions of “safe.”

Recent generations have grown up with the idea that their feelings will be protected even from hurtful speech. Where the children of yesteryear recited the nursery rhyme “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me,” and parents and educators emphasized resilience, in recent decades that attitude has mostly been replaced by the idea of protection from anything and everything upsetting.

That’s one of the reasons that dedication to free speech has been waning in the general population, particularly among younger people. In addition, the left in the US and many other western countries used to support allowing speech that might be offensive back when they were weak and the policy of free speech mainly protected them. But now that they’re feeling so much stronger, they can afford to try to suppress – though social media and cancel culture, as well as law – people on the right, and even those on the left who are insufficiently pure in their leftism. The radical left doesn’t care about protecting people’s feelings; they care about power and about shutting the opposition down. But they use and exploit the desire to spare feelings by appealing to it in pursuit of their goal.

And, as Mark Steyn writes, the left never, never ever rests [hat tip: AesopFan]:

The “free world” barely pretends to favor free speech these days…

For most people under thirty – forty? fifty? – freedom of expression takes a back seat on ever more issues. On climate, Islam, race, immigration, LGBTQWERTY and of course ChiCom-19, there is one correct position and it is entirely legitimate therefore to quash any dissenting views.

In such a world it is no surprise to find that Justin Trudeau’s ministry is preparing to restore “Section 13” of the Canadian Human Rights Code. The repeal of that vile law represents one of my few victories in the political realm. As the saying goes, there are no permanent victories in politics, and I would have a tougher time winning that battle today: The principled lefties (Margaret Wente) who offered support have themselves been canceled, and the queasier ones (Neil Macdonald) who objected on the grounds that all the attention was merely helping me sell even more books have been supplanted by more committed warriors who feel that, with Zuckerberg and Bezos at your back, there is no one so lofty he can’t be brought low…

We’re not alone in this. In Britain, Australia, France, Denmark, the Netherlands and many other places, democratic societies have become far too comfortable in policing the opinions of the citizenry…

… Ian Fine, the senior counsel of the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission, declared that his organization was committed to the abolition of hatred—not “hate crimes,” not even “hate speech,” but hate—a human emotion; you know, like the human emotions the control-freak enforcers attempt to abolish in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Stepford Wives. Any society of free peoples will include its share of hate: it could not be human without it. And, as bad as racists and homophobes and Islamophobes and whateverphobes may be, empowering Mr. Fine’s ever more coercive enforcement regime to micro-regulate us into glassy-eyed compliance is a thousand times worse.

If people are not taught to love liberty and to protect it, they will not defend it against those forces that would quash it.

Saturday was the 12th anniversary of commenter FredHJr’s death

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: The following is a somewhat revised version of a post that has appeared previously on this blog.]

Unbelievable that it’s been twelve years since commenter FredHJr died suddenly and tragically. As time passes, the number of readers here who don’t remember Fred must necessarily increase, so for those of you who don’t know who FredHJr was, please see this and this, as well as these.

Fred’s death was extremely tragic for his family. But it was tragic for this blog, too, because he was an invaluable and irreplaceable member of our community, a “changer” who knew a lot about the Left, and a keen observer of politics, history, religion, culture—of life itself. I still think about him often, wondering what he’d have to say about everything that’s happened in these last twelve years and in particular this last year.

Every year on the anniversary, I offer some excerpts from his many comments here.

This comment is from October 18, 2008, just a few weeks before Obama was elected president for the first time:

It’s the Marxist/Leninist ethics of expediency. No regrets. Whatever it takes to discredit anything the other side does and excuse the sins of your own side.

…this reveals a lot about who is about to take power and how they will wield it against the rest of us. They get away with it and many will not at all be troubled by it because they are shaped by the post-modernism, cultural Marxism that they imbibed during their formative and educational experience. If we as a people cannot name this accurately and expunge its corrosive influence over our lives, then down into the wages of perdition and disaster we go.

The comment is from October 28, 2008. The election was getting close:

Obama is part of a nexus of interests. What the American dopes who will put him in office are getting is a NETWORK of alliances and interests, running the gamut from Finance (Soros) to academia to media to law. Thus far, in order to appeal to the Middle Muddle he has been packaged as a moderate or centrist. But once in office the venomous swarm of this network will burst out of the nest and devour the host. You wait and see. And I’m not eager for the moment to say “I told you so.” I really would it be the case that it never happens at all.

This was a comment of Fred’s from the very beginning of the Obama presidency, but I think it’s worth mulling over today:

For me, Western Civilization is an incredibly complex work that has eclectically and also seamlessly borrowed the excellence and the virtues of Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, and the Enlightenment. The High Middle Ages and the Renaissance also made important contributions. In its totality it is a meritocracy and a liberation of humanity that has resulted in ever greater learning and material prosperity and health for most of the people who live under it. It is not an unblemished history. Yet in its totality it gleams with advancement when juxtaposed against civilizations which enslave humanity.

I think the beginning of the end of our civilization began with the French Revolution and The Terror. It was the beginning of the elaboration of totalitarian thought and throughout the 19th century this kept on finding newer permutations of elegant, intellectual terror. The 20th century was the culmination of the barbarity of totalitarianism.

These are chosen somewhat randomly, but so very much of what I looked at that Fred had written was on target.

RIP Fred, and may your family be comforted in their grief. We miss you.

There have been other commenters here who may have died, and I would like to mention them too, but for no one other than FredHJr did I actually get official word of that person’s death. One commenter who comes to mind is “strcpy,” who announced that he was very ill and then disappeared shortly thereafter, about ten years ago. I wrote him an email but never heard back, and I fear he’s gone. But I don’t know for sure. Another prolific commenter who disappeared many years ago was “Occam’s Beard.” I was never able to contact him after that, and so I fear something tragic may have happened. Something similar appears to be the case with commenter “parker.”

There may be others, as well. I wouldn’t necessarily find out what’s happened. Sometimes people just stop commenting because they get busy or they get tired or they get turned off. But it stands to reason some of them will have died. So I’ll take this opportunity to say RIP for all of them.

So, how long will Biden remain president?

The New Neo Posted on by

When Biden was first inaugurated as president I recall a lot of speculation on how long he would last in the job. Many people predicted that by now he’d be gone, declared incompetent or ill or incapacitated in some way, and Kamala Harris installed as his successor.

Doesn’t look that way.

I never thought it very likely. As long as Joe Biden can limp along, functioning in more or less the same strange manner in which he’s operated so far, he’s useful to the left and the Democrats.

Biden doesn’t seem interested in resisting much of the program of the left, and he provides a seemingly more benign front for their agenda (I don’t find him benign, but apparently much of the American public does, if you believe polls).

All the things that made sense to the Democrats during the 2020 campaign, and caused them to choose Biden as their nominee despite his myriad obvious drawbacks, are still operating. He has a faint glow from the reflected glory of Obama the Great, a lengthy previous political history that’s perceived as moderate and can fool a lot of people into thinking that he remains moderate, and yet he will basically do what the left says. The press will pretend he’s wonderful, and much of the public will therefore be relatively protected from learning how addled and how politically left he has become. One wouldn’t think it possible to hide such things, but the pretense seems intact even now for a lot of people.

What’s more, Kamala Harris has turned out to be a major disappointment to the left as a possible replacement. It’s not that she’s not fine with the leftist program – she is – but she’s just not the least bit charismatic. And that’s being kind. As I wrote back in August of 2019 regarding candidate Kamala Harris:

Have you ever noticed how voters can forgive a candidate almost anything if they like that person? One of Hillary’s big problems, for example — one Obama correctly sensed in the 2008 race, when she was his main rival — is that she’s “unlikable.”

So is Kamala Harris, IMHO.

Likability isn’t what I tend to look for in candidates, although it’s a plus because any president is someone we’re going to hear a lot and see a lot for quite a few years, and it helps if we like that person. And of course different people have different criteria for who’s “likable.” For example, I never really felt Obama’s likability; for me his policies got in the way. But I could see that he had a kind of smooth, polished charm that would appeal to a lot of people.

I don’t know what it is about Harris — I’d describe it as a certain harsh quality — but she just isn’t especially likeable. A lot of things about a candidate can be changed, but not that.

The only way it’s changed is for the worse. Harris isn’t just harsh; she giggles inappropriately, is sometimes unable to answer simple questions, and has generally failed to do much of anything. She must be a disappointment to those who probably assumed she’d be taking over soon, and she represents another reason Biden is still president.

I believe that situation will continue as long as Biden’s health (including his mental state) doesn’t decline very precipitously. He’s valuable just where he is.

There’s a lot of hype about “Dragon Man”

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s a sudden flurry of news articles about a “Dragon Man” skull. Supposedly from a possible archaic human species, the skull has an odd and perhaps suspect provenance:

Dragon Man (Homo longi) is an extinct species of archaic human identified from a nearly complete skull in Harbin, on the Northeast China Plain, dating to at minimum 146,000 years ago during the Middle Pleistocene…[A]rchaeologists [in China] considered modern humans to be more closely related to H. longi than to the European Neanderthals, which may force a revision of the current scientific consensus.

H. longi is broadly anatomically similar to other Middle Pleistocene Chinese specimens, and potentially represents the enigmatic Denisovans, though this is unconfirmed. Like other archaic humans, the skull is low and long, with massively inflated brow ridges, wide eye sockets, and a large mouth…The brain volume was 1,420 cc, within the range of modern humans and Neanderthals…

A local laborer found a nearly complete skull at the riverbank of Songhua River in 1933 when he was building the Dongjiang Bridge…for the Japanese-aligned Manchukuo National Railway. Recognizing its importance, likely as a result of public interest in anthropology recently generated by the Peking Man in 1929, he hid it from the Manchukuo authorities in an abandoned well…

Before his death, the third generation of his family learned of the skull, and reclaimed it in 2018. Later that year, Chinese paleoanthropologist Qiang Ji persuaded the family to donate it to the Hebei GEO University for study, where it has since been stored.

The lack of information about the exact location of the find complicates the dating. And the idea that this specimen is more closely related to modern humans than Neanderthals are sounds highly speculative at this point.

And why would Dragon Man be considered a new species? Sounds like quite a leap, and perhaps a publicity-seeking move. I’m not alone in my skepticism about the “new species” aspect of the find:

Many researchers prefer not to name new human species for several reasons, including the fact that DNA evidence shows that “species”, including Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, interbred. Most academics prefer to refer to the Denisovans as a “group” or “lineage” rather than a distinct species. “You can be a separate lineage and not have achieved species status,” says Bailey.

“I do think that the one type of analysis they use isn’t conclusive enough to say that there’s a new species,” says Sheela Athreya at Texas A&M University.

I took several college courses in physical anthropology, although I don’t remember many details and whatever details I do remember would be somewhat “archaic” themselves. Nevertheless, I think I retain enough information to have concluded quite some time ago that a lot of these claims of new species being discovered won’t hold up over time.

You are in for a treat: Violette Verdy in “Dances at a Gathering”

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve periodically searched and searched for a video of this particular dance by this particular dancer, and I’ve finally found it. Blurry though it may be, it captures at least some of the qualities of the mesmerizing, uniquely beautiful and supremely musical dancer Violette Verdy. Although she was French, she danced for most of her career in George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet and I saw her in person many many times.

This clip features one of the two Verdy solos I remember from Jerome Robbins’ late-60s masterpiece “Dances At a Gathering,” in which she was sublime. Robbins choreographed the role on her and tailored it to her very special gifts:

And here’s a later dancer, Aurelie Dupont (who, like Verdy, is French) attempting the same role. I’m not sure of the date, but it’s probably sometime between ten to twenty years ago. Although the commenters at YouTube seem to think she’s swell, I’m pretty sure they haven’t a clue what’s missing – which, to me, is just about everything.

The choreography isn’t all that difficult in terms of steps. The hard part is a matter of timing and feel. Here the dancer is continually and self-consciously displaying herself, which is the opposite of the lyric flow of Verdy’s rendition and its sense of joy and playfulness. Dupont’s dancing in this clip says, “look at this separate step, now look at this separate step, and see that I can raise my leg rather high here.”

I don’t even mean to be especially critical of this particular dancer. I simply don’t think that anyone except Verdy could even begin to do this variation justice, which is what makes the previous video so precious to me:

[NOTE: I’ve cued up the Verdy video to show only the “Dances At a Gathering” excerpt. But the whole thing is worth watching.]