For Purim: Hamantaschen meets cancel culture

The New Neo Posted on by

An alert reader sent me this, and I have to say it’s one of the more depressing and yet funny things I’ve read in a long time. It’s not the Babylon Bee, either. It seems that Orwell’s Minitrue has taken on the task of rewriting recipe history.

Yes, food articles about recipes. The particular example given is a recipe for hamantaschen, the Purim cookie (the Jewish holiday starts tomorrow evening) that has symbolic meaning but basically tends to sound better than it is. The original article was entertaining; the expurgated culturally-approved one reads like the boring history textbooks I recall from my youth.

Here’s an excerpt from the original, now apparently disappeared down Winston Smith’s memory hole:

Full disclosure: I am not Jewish. But as someone who attended roughly three Bar or Bat Mitzvahs a weekend during 1992, and as someone who cooks professionally, I thought I could at least weigh in on the Jewish cookie department.

Hamantaschen are a triangular-shaped cookie made to commemorate the Jewish celebration of Purim. The story of Purim involves a bad guy, Haman, a nice Jewish lady, Esther, and her ultimate victory over his plot to destroy the Jewish people. Hamantaschen are shaped to resemble Haman’s 3-cornered hat and traditionally stuffed with sweet fillings made of poppy seeds, dried fruits, or fruit preserves (among others). Sounds tasty, right? But upon reflection, Jews and non-Jews alike on the BA staff could only call up childhood memories of dry and sandy hamantaschen that left your mouth coated with a weird film. “The filling was the thing that you thought might save it, but there was never enough,” says assistant editor Amiel Stanek. “And when you did get to the center, it was jam all the way up to the top,” senior editor Meryl Rothstein chimes in. Point being, it was an imbalanced cookie experience.

So I set out to convert the haters.

The new approved version, whisked away by Winston’s pneumatic tube to be placed in the archives (until displaced in the next purge):

Editor’s note 2/10/2021: The original version of this article included language that was insensitive toward Jewish food traditions and does not align with our brand’s standards. As part of our Archive Repair Project, we have edited the headline, dek, and content to better convey the history of Purim and the goals of this particular recipe. We apologize for the previous version’s flippant tone and stereotypical characterizations of Jewish culture.

Hamantaschen are a triangle-shaped cookie made during the Jewish festival of Purim, a holiday that commemorates Esther’s victory over Haman and his plot to destroy the Jewish people. Hamantaschen are shaped to resemble Haman’s 3-cornered hat and traditionally stuffed with sweet fillings made of poppy seeds, dried fruits, or fruit preserves (among others). Sounds tasty, right? But achieving the right balance is not always easy to pull off.

These literary and cultural revisionists are crazy, and they’re everywhere these days.

Don’t let them know it – but Purim is a holiday that might trigger some Iranians into feeling bad.

[NOTE: By the way, what’s with the constant use of the word “pneumatic” in dystopian novels of the first half of the 20th Century? The Minitrue of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four used a transport system described that way, and Huxley’s Brave New World kept describing well-endowed women and cushiony chairs as “pneumatic.”]

[NOTE II: I actually haven’t had much traditionally Jewish food in my lifetime. But “dry and sandy” actually does describe nearly every Jewish dessert I’ve ever had, with the exception of this yummy stuff – particularly the version made at Rein’s Deli in Vernon, Connecticut.]

Why didn’t more professors oppose the Gramscian march or at least stick up for free speech?

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “huxley” asks this question:

I’m trying to understand how academia slid further and further to the left…

I’m interested in Prof. Everybody, the academicians who watched and are still watching as their world was gradually taken over by the left.

Ideally, being a professor is a more serious calling than being a pipefitter or computer programmer. If nothing else it requires a commitment to academic freedom. Given the opportunity, we have heard many high, wise words to that effect. However, we have seen few efforts from the rank-and-file to uphold that commitment against the left over the past fifty years or so.

I’m wondering how that worked.

I don’t have the answer, but I have some guesses.

(1) Most people are afraid to speak up when their livelihood is threatened, and that’s not just people in academia. I’m not sure whether professors are less courageous than most, although they might be. But I don’t think that sort of commitment to liberty no matter what is common anywhere.

(2) That said, professors tend to work in the realm of ideas – except for those in more practical fields such as science, where ideas have more obvious consequences and require (or used to require) more proof. Leftism is an idea with some emotional attractiveness, and my guess is that professors may be more likely than others to be drawn to it, because of their general preference for dealing with ideas.

(3) Not only that, but much of the leftism advanced in the universities has employed race and the threat of calling someone a racist in order to first attract and then intimidate those who might object.

(4) For the most part, professors are people who have done well in school and never left it, staying to take on more power and prestige within that setting. Therefore I don’t think they are selected for courage, or for even necessarily for thinking for themselves (with exceptions, of course). For the most part, they have been very good at taking in information and then giving it back again, perhaps with a small advancement on current knowledge in a very circumscribed field. So there may be more people in academia who are selected for conformity, and they are less likely to buck the prevailing winds.

(5) My guess is that, particularly for professors in the sciences or in business, those who object to the leftward drift of the university have quite a few options in the private sector and may choose to leave the university rather than stay and fight. Professors in the humanities probably are more likely to be with the leftist program in the first place, but if they’re not, they probably have far fewer options outside of academia. And so they stay and keep their mouths shut.

(6) Not everyone did keep his or her mouth shut. I know some professors who stayed and fought. But it’s been a lonely battle over the years, and a frustrating and ultimately a losing one.

(7) The takeover of the academy by the left started a long time ago. I won’t quibble over when, but suffice to say it has been many decades. So there’s been a selection factor over the years as well, a factor that’s only increased over time. At a certain point it became well-nigh impossible for a new hire who didn’t toe the party line to be given a job in the first place. Therefore the number of professors on the other side (or potentially on the other side), has became smaller and smaller over time.

(8) Freedom of speech is one of those concepts that is probably difficult for a lot of people to defend when it involves speech they don’t like. I’m not sure why academicians would be any different in that respect, particularly since they deal in the world of ideas and like to be right.

I keep coming back to Allan Bloom and his 1987 book The Closing of the American Min when dealing with such matters. So I’ll give him the last word; here he is describing events at Cornell University in 1969, where he was a professor [emphasis mine]:

The [Cornell] provost was a former natural scientist, and he greeted me with a mournful countenance…there was nothing he could do to stop such behavior in the black student association. He added that no university in the country could expel radical black students, or dismiss the faculty members who incited them, presumably because the students at large would not permit it.

The provost had a mixture of cowardice and moralism not uncommon at the time. He did not want trouble. His president had frequently cited Clark Kerr’s dismissal at the University of California as the great danger. At the same time the provost thought he was engaged in a great moral work, righting the historic injustice done to blacks. He could justify to himself the humiliation he was undergoing as a necessary sacrifice. The case of this particular black student clearly bothered him. But he was both more frightened of the violence-threatening extremists and also more admiring of them. Obvious questions were no longer obvious. Why could not a black student be expelled as a white student would be if he failed his courses or disobeyed the rules that make university community possible? Why could the president not call the police if order was threatened? Any man of weight would have fired the professor who threatened the life of the student. The issue was not complicated. Only the casuistry of weakness and ideology made it so. No one who knew or cared about what a university is would have acquiesced in this travesty. It was no surprise that a few weeks later – immediately after the faculty had voted overwhelmingly under the gun to capitulate to outrageous demands that it had a few days earlier rejected – the leading members of the administration and many well-known faculty members rushed over to congratulate the gathered students and tried to win their approval. I saw exposed before all the world what had long been known, and it was at last possible without impropriety to tell these pseudo-universitarians precisely what one thought of them.

It was also no surprise that many of those professors who had been most eloquent in their sermons about the sanctity of the university, and who had presented themselves as its consciences, were among those who reacted, if not favorably, at least weakly to what was happening. They had made careers out of saying how badly the German professors [during the Nazi era] had reacted to violations of academic freedom. This was all light talk and mock heroics, because they had not measured the potential threats to the university nor assessed the doubtful grounds of academic freedom. Above all, they did not think that it could be assaulted from the Left or from within the university. These American professors were utterly disarmed, as were many German professors, when the constituency they took for granted, of which they honestly believed they were independent, deserted or turned against them. To fulminate against Bible Belt preachers was one thing. In the world that counted for these professors, this could only bring approval. But to be isolated in the university, to be called foul names by their students or their colleagues, all for the sake of an abstract idea, was too much for them. They were not in general strong men, although their easy rhetoric had persuaded them that they were – that they alone manned the walls protecting civilization. Their collapse was merely pitiful, although their feeble attempts at self-justification frequently turned vicious. In Germany the professors who kept quiet had the very good excuse that they could not do otherwise. Speaking up would have meant imprisonment or death. The law not only did not protect them but was their deadly enemy. At Cornell there was no such danger. There was essentially no risk in defending the integrity of the university, because the danger was entirely within it. All that was lacking was a professorial corps aware of the university’s purpose, and dedicated to it. That is what made the surrender so contemptible.

These events occurred over fifty years ago, and those observations were published nearly thirty-five years ago. The only things that have changed are that the vast majority of professors don’t even pay lip service to free speech anymore, the threats against them if they did are more serious, and probably most of them know very little about how professors behaved in the Germany of the 1930s.

Let me doubly emphasize this portion of what Bloom wrote back then:

But to be isolated in the university, to be called foul names by their students or their colleagues, all for the sake of an abstract idea, was too much for them. They were not in general strong men, although their easy rhetoric had persuaded them that they were.

The quality of mercy

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Lee Also” writes this:

I have always felt that, as doctors take the Hippocratic Oath when they receive their degree, Portia’s Speech should be administered to freshly minted JD’s as an oath:

“The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes…”

The rest of the speech can be found here. One of its themes is to pit mercy against the cry for justice, two strains in the law that continue to this day.

However, I don’t think it’s the answer. After all, the left is very big on mercy – for the left. What has happened in many cities across the land is the application of a very dichotomous standard of mercy: looters and rioters on the left, in particular if they are minorities, are given enormous benefit of mercy. For those on the right, in particular those involved in the Capitol incursion of January 6th, even if their only offense was trespassing? Why, throw the book at them because they deserve no mercy.

Mercy can be a tool just like anything else, and if it is applied differently to different groups, or if it’s applied to the exclusion of justice, that’s a huge problem.

But let’s take a look at Portia and “The Merchant of Venice,” shall we?

I don’t think I’ve ever read the entire play, but I’ve certainly read significant portions of it. What’s more, my introduction to it was through the route of an essay by newspaper columnist Harry Golden that I read as a youngster, in which he asserted that Shakespeare had a kind of double message in his play. I don’t have access to the entire Golden essay anymore, but I remember it well enough to recall this sort of thing from the essay:

Shakespeare gave his audience a play in which they could confirm their prejudices – but he did much more. Shakespeare was the first writer in seven hundred years who gave the Jew a “motive.” Why did he need to give the Jew a motive? Certainly his audience did not expect it. For centuries they had been brought up on the stereotype, “this is evil because it’s evil,” and here Shakespeare comes along and goes to so much “unnecessary” trouble giving Shylock a motive. At last – a motive!

Fair sir, you spit on me Wednesday last;
You spurned me such a day; another time
You called me dog.

Much more at the link, including this additional excerpt from Golden’s essay:

[Shakespeare] is actually writing a satire on the Gentile middle class and the pseudo-Christians, and he wastes no time. What does Antonio, this paragon of Christian virtue, say to this charge of Shylock’s? Does he turn the other cheek? Does he follow the teaching of Jesus to “love thine enemies?” Not by a long shot. This “noble” man replies to Shylock’s charge:

I am as like to call thee so again,
To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too.…

And when it all goes against Shylock [at the end], Shakespeare seems to go out of his way to give us a frightening picture of the “victors.” He has them standing together pouring out a stream of vengeance. We’re not through with you yet Jew, and the money we have left you after you have paid all these fines, you must leave that to Jessica and your son-in-law who robbed you. Shakespeare keeps them hissing their hate. Tarry yet a while, Jew, we’re still not through with you. You must also become a Christian. The final irony. The gift of love offered in an atmosphere which is blue with hatred. And as all of this is going on, Shakespeare leaves only Shylock with a shred of dignity!

I pray you, give me leave to go from hence.

You may agree or disagree with that interpretation of the play, but there’s a lot to be said for it. I recall that Golden also pointed out that Shylock is given this speech:

SALARINO

Why, I am sure, if he forfeit, thou wilt not take
his flesh: what’s that good for?

SHYLOCK

To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else,
it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and
hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses,
mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my
bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine
enemies; and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath
not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as
a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison
us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not
revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will
resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian,
what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian
wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by
Christian example? Why, revenge. The villany you
teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I
will better the instruction.

[NOTE: Robert Frost saw the mercy vs. justice problem long ago and had this to say. It’s well worth reading.]

Open thread

The New Neo Posted on by

About a year and a half ago I took a bunch of new neo-apple (neo-neo-apple?) photos and chose the one I’ve been using for the blog since then. At the same time, I had some fun manipulating that photo and a couple of others with special effects. I never used any of them, but I think I’ll put one of those photos up from time to time in these open threads.

Here’s a sample:

Remove that blindfold: a metaphor for “equity”

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “huxley”.]

It strikes me that this is a good metaphor for what’s been happening to the idea of justice at the hands of the campaign for “equity” [emphasis mine]:

For decades leading symphony orchestras have used “blind auditions” to hire musicians. That is, the musicians are not seen at all, only their music is heard. That way, implicit or explicit racial, ethnic, or gender bias cannot enter into the hiring decision, only the quality of the music. It is as close to a pure meritocracy as I can imagine…

But, that pure meritocracy has resulted in fewer Blacks and women on orchestras relative to the population as a whole. That result is not a product of bias, because the race or ethnicity or gender of the musicians were not known…

If the musicians onstage are going to better reflect the diversity of the communities they serve, the audition process has to be altered to take into fuller account artists’ backgrounds and experiences.

Removing the screen is a crucial step.

Blind auditions are based on an appealing premise of pure meritocracy: An orchestra should be built from the very best players, period. But ask anyone in the field, and you’ll learn that over the past century of increasingly professionalized training, there has come to be remarkably little difference between players at the top tier….

But if there really is “remarkably little difference” in the abilities of minority musicians who audition versus the other people who audition, then would one not expect more proportionate representation of minority musicians among those who are accepted in blind auditions (by the way, in the classical music world, “minority” includes women)? If this proportionate representation doesn’t happen as a result of blind auditions, might we not conclude that there actually could be a difference in quality that can be perceived by the ear of those doing the judging? I also wonder what percentage of auditioners are minorities, and whether that does or does not reflect their percentages in the general population. What if there just aren’t that many minority candidates auditioning in classical music? I haven’t seen anything that addresses that possibility, and it would seem to matter.

The original assumption of blind auditions was that prejudice in the judges had been causing the lower number of minorities to be selected, and so a screen would guarantee impartiality and eliminate the influence of bigotry. It seemed to make sense and was well-suited to music, which is an auditory art. But when it failed to sufficiently alter the situation, then another solution was recommended by some: a corrective had to be applied, which would begin with the screen being removed in order to make decisions that were not blind at all but favored the group.

I haven’t been able to locate a follow-up to indicate whether the proposal was instituted. But that’s not relevant to the main point I’m trying to make, which is that the story made me think of the blindfold on so many of the statues of Justice. We’ve taken it off, metaphorically speaking, in order to promote “equity.”

Take a look at the old image while you still can, before they pull it down like so many others:

Some background on the antiquity of the image:

The personification of justice balancing the scales dates back to the goddess Maat, and later Isis, of ancient Egypt. The Hellenic deities Themis and Dike were later goddesses of justice. Themis was the embodiment of divine order, law, and custom, in her aspect as the personification of the divine rightness of law…

Lady Justice is most often depicted with a set of scales typically suspended from one hand, upon which she measures the strengths of a case’s support and opposition…

The scales represent the weighing of evidence, and the scales lack a foundation in order to signify that evidence should stand on its own.

Since the 16th century, Lady Justice has often been depicted wearing a blindfold. The blindfold represents impartiality, the ideal that justice should be applied without regard to wealth, power, or other status. The earliest Roman coins depicted Justitia with the sword in one hand and the scale in the other, but with her eyes uncovered. Justitia was only commonly represented as “blind” since the middle of the 16th century.

The paradox of the “equity” promoters’ arguments is that justice should be applied equally, but if an outcome doesn’t favor a certain group then the blindfold on justice must be removed so that the group is favored. In that way, fairness is reached, because “fairness” has been redefined as a result that exactly reflects the proportion of certain groups in the general population.

But that metric is also differentially applied. No one has ever seriously suggested that the overwhelmingly black proportion of NBA players would need correcting. It is understood that the NBA is a meritocracy and that is allowed to let stand, and that is actually as it should be.

It’s the old equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome argument. Thomas Sowell wrote the definitive work on that quite some time ago, but Sowell’s out of fashion except for among us troglodytes on the right.

Remember back when Merrick Garland was described as being a moderate?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s what a “moderate” looks like these days, from Garland’s statement on his nomination to be Biden’s AG:

That mission remains urgent because we do not yet have equal justice. Communities of color and other minorities still face discrimination in housing, education, employment, and the criminal justice system; and bear the brunt of the harm caused by pandemic, pollution, and climate change. 150 years after the Department’s founding, battling extremist attacks on our democratic institutions also remains central to its mission. From 1995 to 1997, I supervised the prosecution of the perpetrators of the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, who sought to spark a revolution that would topple the federal government. If confirmed, I will supervise the prosecution of white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol on January 6 — a heinous attack that sought to disrupt a cornerstone of our democracy: the peaceful transfer of power to a newly elected government.

So Garland already believes he knows why all those heinous attackers – the majority of whom attacked no one and nothing – were there, even though they say they were there to demonstrate in support of holding a hearing in Congress to evaluate some of the allegations of election fraud. I would think the “peaceful transfer of power” would involve a close look at allegations of fraud – but apparently not.

The left is fond of saying there’s “no evidence” of this or that which the right is claiming – that certain assertions of the right are “baseless.” I wouldn’t doubt that there were a couple of white supremacists in the crowd at the Capitol on January 6th, but the idea that the rioters and the demonstrators (two different things) there that day were driven by that philosophy is – wait for it – baseless.

But why would it be surprising that the DOJ and FBI have now dedicated so much of their resources and energy to pursuing people on the right whose offenses were smaller than those on the left who have been either ignored or winked at? After all, those two government institutions have led the charge against Trump and his administration for over four long years.

If you’d like to see some of the differential treatment of the rioters and demonstrators, please see this, this, and this. From the latter:

[Barnett] turned himself in to Arkansas police two days after the riot, and was charged with entering a restricted building, violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, and theft of “public property,” aka the envelope.

A week later, after hearing from seven character witnesses, Arkansas magistrate Erin Wiedemann refused the government’s demand that he be held without bail until trial.

She ordered him released on $5,000 bail, and his wife, Tammy Newburn, was to pick him up the next day. But prosecutors swiftly appealed and, that night, a judge in DC, Chief Judge Beryl Howell, ruled he remain in jail.

He was whisked away to a federal prison in Oklahoma and later moved to DC with others from around the country who have been charged over the Jan. 6 riot.
see also

Richard Barnett accused of carrying stun gun during Capitol riot

Barnett waived his Miranda rights when the FBI interrogated him and spent his entire lifesavings of $25,000 on legal fees that did not save him from jail. An additional weapons charge was added, for a stun stick that he claims had no batteries.

He fired his lawyer and is currently unrepresented and broke.

Veteran New York criminal-defense lawyer Steven Metcalf, representing 25-year-old Jake Lang, who is facing federal riot charges, says he never has seen such heavy-handed treatment of defendants outside of “international drug-kingpin clients.”

Lang also was transferred to DC in the dead of night without his lawyers being informed.

“There is zero logical sense why they were transferred to DC,” Metcalf said. “All the [court] proceedings are going to be virtually conducted [online] for the foreseeable future…It just goes to show the unfair treatment and aggressive prosecution.” …

His cousin has been trying to gather donations for his legal defence but has been hampered by the fact fundraising platforms such as GoFundMe have banned anyone involved in the Capitol riot.

Yet a 28-year-old woman shown on video punching a female Trump supporter in the face has raised $250,000 on GoFundMe.

Barnett shouldn’t have brought the stun stick to the Capitol, obviously, and shouldn’t have put his foot up on the desk that turned out not to be Pelosi’s, but her aide’s.

He maintains he did not break into the Capitol but was carried by the crowd through open doors. Halpin, his cousin, has footage from his cellphone recorded as he entered the building, in a fast-moving crush of bodies. You can see his hand try to grab the door jamb as the crowd surges through.

Even before reading that, I had wondered whether a significant number of the people in the Capitol that day might have been carried in by the crush of the crowd, without originally having intended to enter the building.

But back to Garland. His remarks about January 6th weren’t his only important statements that indicate a certain frame of mind. For example, there’s also this:

For now, Garland is handling the tension between his rejection of discrimination as a moral wrong and the Biden equity doctrine by pretending that the latter is something other than what it is — indeed, that it is the opposite of what it is. Parrying Cotton’s line of inquiry, Garland said he had read “the opening of that executive order” (why not the whole thing?) and was struck by its definition of equity as “the fair and impartial treatment of every person, without regard to their status, and including individuals who are in underserved communities where they were not accorded that before.”…

…[But] in Biden’s definition of equity, the administration is not pledging to treat all people fairly and impartially, as Garland intimated. The definition says the government must consistently undertake to ensure systematically that people are treated not only fairly and impartially but justly. That is, we are talking social justice: Not equal treatment under the law, but rather the displacement of our current system, which the Left insists is inherently racist, by a newly imposed system designed to achieve the Left’s peculiar conception of justice: the utopia of equal outcomes.

Of course, equality of outcomes is not possible in this life, since we all have different talents and flaws…

Plainly, if the goal of promoting equity truly were to treat everyone equally, there would be no need to catalogue different statuses. Instead, Biden’s order would simply say what Garland incorrectly claimed that it does say, namely, that all people must be treated equally regardless of their status. Alas, Biden’s equity doctrine cannot do that. Its modus operandi is to factor status into every equation, in order to assess whether there has been a disparate outcome between different racial groups; or between a) Biden’s list of preferred statuses (collectively, the “underserved”) and b) those who don’t make Biden’s list — i.e., the oppressor class of white heterosexuals who are not poor, disabled, or residing in rural areas.

Garland either is an ignorant fool or a lying hypocrite on this – or, I suppose, he can rationalize it to himself in some way. But the promotion of that sort of “equity” used to be a radical leftist point of view, which now has become the mainstream Democrat position.

The left’s approach is to redefine and label things in a certain way and act on those redefinitions. Even those Capitol demonstrators who were not violent and had little to nothing to say about white vs. black (which was certainly not the subject matter of the demonstration) are “insurrectionist white supremacists.” If need be, the press and Democratic politicians and pundits will lie repeatedly about the extent and meaning of the violence – just think of the stories in the MSM of Officer Sicknick’s cause of death, an attempt to pin it on the demonstrators. If need be, redefine legal concepts and give them nice-sounding labels such as “equity” – who would object to equity? – and sell that to the public as you institute policies they would never vote for if informed of what they actually meant.

[NOTE: Because Garland is a human being, I would not rule out the idea that he also is still angry at the right for the blocking of his Supreme Court nomination.]

The left and “misinformation”

The New Neo Posted on by

This would be funny if it weren’t so ominous:

House Democrats are pressing cable and streaming services over their decisions to host channels that the lawmakers accuse of spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories that lead to “real world harm.”

Reps. Anna Eshoo (Calif.) and Jerry McNerney (Calif.), senior members of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, sent letters to the companies on Monday questioning their “ethical principles” involved in deciding which channels to carry and when to take action against a channel.

“Some purported news outlets have long been misinformation rumor mills and conspiracy theory hotbeds that produce content that leads to real harm,” they wrote.

CNN? MSNBC?

No, of course not:

“Misinformation on TV has led to our current polluted information environment that radicalizes individuals to commit seditious acts and rejects public health best practices, among other issues in our public discourse.”

The letter specifically calls out Newsmax, One America Network (OANN) and Fox News.

Note two key words there. The first is “misinformation.” Preventing the spread of “misinformation” has been the excuse given for clamping down on the free exchange of ideas on tech giants such as Twitter. The second is “seditious.” It’s been a favorite charge of the left’s since January 6th, and its definition has been extended to cover nearly anything on the right that challenges the current administration or the orthodoxies of leftist thought that now hold sway in so many arenas in the US. The unspoken third word is “insurrection,” widely applied by the left to the events of January 6th. That word has become so ubiquitous now that preventing further “insurrection” from the right is probably understood to be the underlying justification for this sort of tyrannical action on the part of the left.

Reichstag fire.

And all of this comes from the same people who had no problem whatsoever with four years of Russiagate madness being disseminated far and wide, common threats to kill President Trump, and many months of destructive leftist and anarchist anti-government and anti-police riots.

I will close with a passage I’ve used before. It’s from Through the Looking Glass, and it’s the part where Alice has the following chat with Humpty Dumpty [emphasis mine]:

…As I was saying, that seems to be done right – though I haven’t time to look it over thoroughly just now – and that shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents – ‘

‘Certainly,’ said Alice.

‘And only one for birthday presents, you know. There’s glory for you!’

‘I don’t know what you mean by “glory”,’ Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t – till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”‘

‘But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument”,’ Alice objected.

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – that’s all.‘

The left aims to be master, and it thinks it will be. Perhaps it even thinks it already is. At the very least, it doesn’t seem to think that the right will ever use such tactics against the left.

SCOTUS refuses to hear the Pennsylvania cases that challenge the constitutionality of the voting changes

The New Neo Posted on by

Once again, this is no surprise:

The Supreme Court has refused to accept a case challenging the Pennsylvania election result, on the basis that the mail-in ballot procedures were illegal, as “moot”.

In other words: what difference, after all, does it make?

From Justice Thomas’ dissent:

The Constitution gives to each state legislature authority to determine the “Manner” of federal elections. Art. I, §4, cl. 1; Art. II, §1, cl. 2. Yet both before and after the 2020 election, nonlegislative officials in various States took it upon themselves to set the rules instead. As a result, we received an unusually high number of petitions and emergency applications contesting those changes. The petitions here present a clear example. The Pennsylvania Legislature established an unambiguous deadline for receiving mail-in ballots: 8 p.m. on election day. Dissatisfied, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court extended that deadline by three days. The court also ordered officials to count ballots received by the new deadline even if there was no evidence—such as a postmark—that the ballots were mailed by election day. That decision to rewrite the rules seems to have affected too few ballots to change the outcome of any federal election. But that may not be the case in the future. These cases provide us with an ideal opportunity to address just what authority nonlegislative officials have to set election rules, and to do so well before the next election cycle. The refusal to do so is inexplicable.

One wonders what this Court waits for. We failed to settle this dispute before the election, and thus provide clear rules. Now we again fail to provide clear rules for future elections. The decision to leave election law hidden beneath a shroud of doubt is baffling. By doing nothing, we invite further confusion and erosion of voter confidence. Our fellow citizens deserve better and expect more of us. I respectfully dissent.

I suspect that Justice Thomas doesn’t actually find the decision inexplicable. He may find it inexplicable in the legal sense, but I very much doubt he’s unaware of the other factors motivating the justices on the other side (who include Kavanaugh, Roberts, and Barrett). You might call it cowardice, and I think that’s part of it. But judges and lawyers are very good at finding justification for whatever they want to do, and I believe their justification is that the election really is over and it’s easier to say the question no longer needs to be settled. Why wade into that minefield?

Roberts is a good equivocator, and often tries to avoid changing the status quo. I believe that it’s highly possible that Kavanaugh and Barrett, courageous though they both were during their confirmations, were traumatized by them. Now that they’ve reached the seemingly safe harbor of SCOTUS, why make waves by taking a case they don’t need to take, and arouse the wrath of the left? After all, they know how destructive and intimidating that rage can be.

I also believe that this psychological intimidation is part of the reason the left puts nominees on the right through such a metaphoric baptism of fire. Whether or not it works to stop these judges from confirmation, the left is aware that it can work to frighten those they target – perhaps on a level so subtle that the justices themselves are not aware of it – and cause them to be subsequently reluctant to tangle with the left if they can find an excuse to avoid it.

That’s one of the things that is so admirable about Clarence Thomas. He has never been intimidated, and he is one of the justices who went through one of the worst confirmation processes ever.

Justice Alito joined Thomas’ dissent and wrote this:

…[T]he cases now before us are not moot. There is a “reasonable expectation” that the parties will face the same question in the future, see Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc., 551 U. S., at 463, and that the question will evade future pre-election review, just as it did in these cases. These cases call out for review,

They may call out, but their cries are not heard.

Even before this election, when I saw all the changes in the election rules and realized how dangerous they were, I didn’t think there would be a legal remedy. That has turned out to be the case. The only solution is prevention. That has been difficult, and if HR1 passes (which I wrote about here), prevention may be – to coin a phrase – moot.

Solar panels in the Sahara sounded like a really good idea

The New Neo Posted on by

Actually, maybe not.

So, a giant solar farm could generate ample energy to meet global demand and simultaneously turn one of the most hostile environments on Earth into a habitable oasis. Sounds perfect, right?

Not quite. In a recent study, we used an advanced Earth system model to closely examine how Saharan solar farms interact with the climate. Our model takes into account the complex feedbacks between the interacting spheres of the world’s climate – the atmosphere, the ocean, and the land and its ecosystems. It showed there could be unintended effects in remote parts of the land and ocean that offset any regional benefits over the Sahara itself.

Open thread

The New Neo Posted on by

When I recently came across this photo from a couple of years ago, I couldn’t remember why I took it. Did I think it was an especially pretty apple? Did it remind me of a Cezanne?

And then I remembered – it was a piece of marzipan I was about to eat.