Ukraine. Biden. Trump.

The New Neo Posted on by

I utterly refuse at this point to write a big long in-depth post on this subject. Others have given their blood, sweat, and tears in such an effort, and I suggest you read what they have to say: for example, this as well as this.

To me, this tweet by Sean Davis sums it up:

Brian Stelter, the MSM, and the power of words

The New Neo Posted on by

Here a tweet from CNN’s Brian Stelter:

Most of the responses I’ve seen on Twitter are to point out that Trump’s telling the truth, and to mock Stelter in various ways. Richly deserved, I’d say, because – among other things – Stelter seems to have no sense of how ludicrous he sounds, particularly in view of the exceptionally low esteem in which the MSM is held by so many people of all political persuasions at present.

Stelter is 34 years old, one of the young reporters that seem to dominate the news these days (I first wrote about the phenomenon nine years ago). Not only that, but like most of these young folks who shape (or try to shape, or think they should be able to shape) Americans’ views of the world, Stelter has done virtually nothing but be some sort of reporter. He was hired right out of college by the NY Times:

He attended Damascus High School, graduating in 2003, followed by Towson University where he served as editor-in-chief of The Towerlight from 2005 to 2007. While still a student, he created TVNewser, a blog about television and cable news which he later sold to Mediabistro. He graduated from Towson in May 2007, and joined The New York Times as a media reporter later in July of that year, aged 22.

In November 2013, he became the new host of CNN’s Reliable Sources[5] and also chief media correspondent.

So he’s not just a reporter, he’s a media reporter, which I’m going to assume is a reporter who reports not only in the media but on the media. As such, I would guess he’s really really really invested in the reputation of the media (if you’re interested in how he got noticed as a news-about-the-newsbusiness blogger back in college – Brian Williams, of all people, seems to have been a fan – see this article that appeared in USA Today in 2006).

No wonder Stelter, like so many people in the MSM, takes it really really personally when Trump calls him and the others “a joke.” But what interests me the most is that Stelter called Trump’s words a “disappointing use of presidential power.”

Now, words do have a certain power. As a media person, Stelter knows that. But that is not what is usually meant by presidential power. Presidents have many other powers as the chief executive, and if they want to flaunt it they have a tremendous number of ways to do it.

Calling a press who has hounded him, lied about him repeatedly, ignored the things he’s done that are good, and gotten almost every major story of the past few years wrong “a joke” is just an exercise of the right to call something exactly what it is. No action was threatened and no specifically presidential power exercised.

Why am I even paying attention to this, or to Stelter? I think he is expressing something that’s common among those in the MSM today, and I’m not just talking about their youth. His remark points out how much those in the MSM value words as power, and also that they think that they and their allies are the only ones entitled to use words to shape ideas or even to describe something, particularly if that “something” happens to be the poor performance of the MSM. Stelter also reflects, I believe, the MSM’s expectation that Republican presidents will just sit back and take it like a gentleman.

Trump is no gentleman, although he can be one when he wants to. With the press, he doesn’t want to, nor should he want to. And the Stelters of the world are not just disappointed, they are shocked and outraged and angry.

Now that Salvini’s gone, the EU wastes no time…

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…in pushing for more “migrants”:

The [new] Franco-Italian migrant pact is the latest example of top European elites pushing their open-door immigration policy without bothering to consult the elected governments of the EU member states. In 2015, Merkel signed an agreement with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, agreeing to take in hundreds and thousands of migrants each year from Turkey’s refugee camps and settling them across Europe. According to Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the direct intake of migrants from Turkey under Chancellor Merkel’s plan could be as high as half a million per year.

With Salvini out of office [in Italy], the EU is wasting no time in steamrolling its open borders agenda in the Mediterranean, opening up the continent for millions of illegal migrants from Arab North Africa and the Middle East. As the EU, driven by Macron and Merkel, pushes ahead with its project of reshaping Europe through mass immigration, Europe’s ruling elite do not see any need to consult their electorates. Instead, they apparently believe in flooding Europe with illegal immigrants and creating irreversible facts on the ground.

That was one of my first thoughts. Even if Salvini, or a government similar to his, comes back into power in Italy, there will probably be no way to deport those who have arrived under this new plan. The only thing that can happen is that Italy can pull out of its pact with France.

Here’s something about Salvini’s history:

The announcement comes just weeks after Interior Minister Matteo Salvini’s right-wing Liga party dropped out of the ruling coalition in Rome. Under Salvini’s reign, the country had shuttered its ports for EU-backed ‘rescue’ boats carrying migrants from North Africa, a move bitterly opposed by France and Germany. Salvini’s Liga came to power in June 2018 after forming a coalition government with the left-wing 5-Star party.

There’s that parliamentary coalition thing that can be so hard for Americans to understand. Here’s an explanation for what happened in the political sense. Hint: it didn’t involve the voters having a say in a new election. It involved those coalitions.

Here’s the most important part, which is a prediction:

And in all likelihood, all [Salvini] would have to do is sit back and await his turn, as the temporary Five Star-Democratic Party [composed of Salvini’s disparate opponents who managed to form a coalition against him] tie up erodes gradually.

The alliance between the two longstanding foes has looked dysfunctional from the start with clear fissures apparent from early in the negotiations.

Their loose 26-point joint programme will almost certainly be unable to compensate for the plethora of disagreements that will inevitably surface once they get down to the business of government.

All the while, Salvini will be on a war footing, whipping up a blizzard across the land in preparation for the inescapable general election. And that’s where Salvini will flourish.

The more I learn about European politics, the more ours looks good in comparison. Relatively speaking, that is.

Beto O’Rourke is all in on reparations for marijuana offenders

The New Neo Posted on by

I continue to marvel that Beto O’Rourke almost became a senator from Texas. Of course, back then he didn’t sound quite as far-left as he does now.

Prior to that, O’Rourke was a member of the House from a largely Hispanic and strongly Democratic Texas district:

He defeated his Republican opponent, Barbara Carrasco, in the general election with 65 percent of the vote. Upon O’Rourke’s election, the district was no longer represented in the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, a 26-member group established in 1976, because he lacks Hispanic heritage. As the district was 80 percent Hispanic, with 77.6 percent of Hispanics being of voting-age, some officials, including David Austin, the El Paso-based border representative for the U.S./Mexico Border Counties Coalition, argued that he should be permitted to join.

O’Rourke has not endeared himself to the public by his tough talk about confiscating AR-15s. But the subject of this post is his latest, O’Rourke’s suggestion to pay formerly imprisoned drug (marijuana) offenders reparations.

Yes, you heard that right.

Let’s take a look at Beto’s proposal. It’s quite a document, and I’m not going to deal with all of it, just the reparations part:

Call for a federal tax on the marijuana industry, revenue from which will be used to:

Provide a monthly “Drug War Justice Grant” to those formerly incarcerated for nonviolent marijuana offenses in state and federal prison for a period based on time served. The grants will be funded completely by the tax on the marijuana industry.

Fund substance use treatment programs.

Support re-entry services for those who have been incarcerated for possession.

Invest in communities disproportionately impacted by marijuana arrests, including investments in housing and employment support, substance use and mental health treatment, peer and recovery support services, life skills training, victims’ services.

Support those disproportionately impacted by marijuana arrests, including those who have been convicted of marijuana possession themselves in participating in the marijuana businesses by providing technical assistance, industry-specific training, access to interest free/low-interest loans, and access to investment financing and legal services.

Ensure those most impacted by the War on Drugs are the ones benefiting from the economic activity related to marijuana. As President, Beto will tie federal funding for criminal justice systems to requirements that states or local governments:

Waive licensing fees for producing, distributing, or selling marijuana for low-income individuals who have been convicted of marijuana offenses.

Licensing fees can cost up to $120,000, a figure that excludes associated business costs such as legal fees, insurance, taxes, and marketing. These exorbitant fees shut out exactly those who have been unjustly penalized from America’s drug policies from benefiting from a legal marijuana economy.

Ensure that the majority of licenses go to minority-owned businesses and those disproportionately impacted by the war on drugs, including those who have been convicted of marijuana use or possession themselves.

Protect marijuana businesses owned by low-income individuals and people of color from predatory investors and discrimination.

What could possibly go wrong? Let’s help the former drug dealers and stoners go legit by giving them subsidies to become legal drug dealers. A creative proposal, is it not?

And among other flaws, Beto’s plan ignores the fact that further increasing the price of legally regulated marijuana as compared to the price of black-market marijuana by slapping a new and probably rather substantial federal tax on the former will only encourage the dominance of the latter, the unregulated black-market type (which is already thriving, as I discussed in this previous post).

O’Rourke is going nowhere as a candidate, although for a little while he was a media darling. What’s going on with this drug reparations proposal? Perhaps Beto’s just trying to move the Overton window so that the other candidates can step in with only-slightly-less harebrained schemes and they will sound relatively sane. Or perhaps he’s smoked too much dope in his young life.

Caroline Glick’s primer on the Israeli election (with an added note about Jews, Arabs, and race)

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Glick starts out this way:

The US media coverage of the Israeli election has misrepresented the results of Tuesday’s vote. This isn’t necessarily deliberate. Israeli elections are inscrutable for most foreigners, particularly for Americans who are used to the clarity of the presidential system and two-party system.

Hear, hear!

But you know what? I bet that, although US reporters probably don’t understand the election, their negative coverage of the results for Netanyahu is still deliberate. Lacking understanding and skewing the results against the guy on the right whom they hate aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.

Glick’s analysis of the results goes like this:

Wednesday Netanyahu assembled the heads of all the right wing and religious parties that form the basis for Likud-led governing coalitions. The factions unified into one right-wing bloc and agreed on principles for future coalition talks. They agreed to conduct coalition talks as a bloc, under Netanyahu’s leadership. By forming this 55-member bloc, Netanyahu created a situation where he is the only possible prime minister. Either the Blue and White Party — or one of its three factions — joins him, or Amir Peretz and Orly Levy bring the Labor party in, or Israel goes to new elections. Those are the only options.

In other words, it’s either going to be Netanyahu or elections. It’s up to Gantz, and Peretz.

Moreover, the balance of power is still very much on the Right. The Right has 55 seats. The Left has 44. Israel Beitenu leader Avigdor Liberman, the man who induced Israel’s political paralysis 10 months ago when he resigned his position as defense minister, and maintained the stalemate in April when he refused to join a Netanyahu-led coalition and forced the country into a second Knesset election, is nothing but a Bibi hater. If he joins Gantz with his 8-seat faction, Gantz will still be short 9 seats. A coalition with Liberman and the Arab parties is inconceivable because Liberman’s Russian voter base would abandon him if he were to go that route.

Israeli politics is strange enough that I suppose anything’s possible. But Glick’s explanation makes sense, which is more than I can say for the coverage I’ve read in most of the MSM.

She adds:

This week the Washington Post slandered Netanyahu — and Israeli society. The editorial board falsely claimed that the public’s aversion to including the Arab parties in a government is a product of racism. This is a lie. Israelis don’t want to share power with the Arab parties because there is not one Arab party that accepts Israel’s right to exist. There were Arab politicians elected yesterday that have written odes to terrorist murderers on their Facebook pages. Arab lawmakers were elected that have met with terror kingpins. Arab lawmakers routinely support the Palestinian war against Israel and express support for Hamas.

It is not racist for Israelis not to want Hamas supporters and champions of terrorist murderers in the Israeli government or receiving security briefings from the military and intelligence services. It is rational.

But Caroline, get with the program. Rationality is racist. Wanting to exist when someone of a favored 3rd-world minority “race” wants to destroy you is racist.

Ignoring for the moment, of course, that Arabs and Israelis are for the most part of the same race. What’s more, although they do form separate genetic groups, they are in fact rather closely related genetically – and that includes Ashkenazi Jews (the Jews of Europe minus Spain and Portugal).

Since our own dear MSM is so very focused on this “race” business, let’s take a look at the composition of Israel’s population:

Among the Jewish population [constituting about three-quarters of the population of Israel], over 25% of the schoolchildren and over 35% of all newborns are of mixed ancestry of both Ashkenazi and Sephardi/Mizrahi descent and increases by 0.5% each year. Over 50% of the Jewish population is of at least a partial Sephardi/Mizrahi descent.

Sephardi/Mizrahi are the Jews of Spain and Portugal or their descendants, plus the large numbers of Jews from Arab and other Middle Eastern countries who emigrated to Israel from those countries, which used to have substantial Jewish populations:

Mizrahi Jews…are descendants of local Jewish communities in the Middle East and North Africa from biblical times into the modern era. They include descendants of Babylonian Jews from modern Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan, Syrian Jews, Yemenite Jews, Georgian Jews, Mountain Jews from Dagestan and Azerbaijan, Persian Jews from Iran, Bukharan Jews from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

The term Mizrahim is also sometimes applied to descendants of Maghrebi and Sephardi Jews, who had lived in North Africa (Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco), the Sephardi-proper communities of Turkey, and the mixed Levantine communities of Lebanon, Old Yishuv, and Syria. These various Jewish communities were first grouped into a single ethnic identity in an official sense in the Jewish Agency’s 1944 One Million Plan.

Before the establishment of the state of Israel, Mizrahi Jews did not identify themselves as a separate Jewish subgroup. Instead, Mizrahi Jews generally characterized themselves as Sephardi, as they follow the traditions of Sephardi Judaism…

And here’s something about the genetics of it all, especially that of the Ashkenazi (European) Jews:

In August 2012, Dr. Harry Ostrer in his book Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People, summarized his and other work in genetics of the last 20 years, and concluded that all major Jewish groups share a common Middle Eastern origin. Ostrer also refuted the Khazar theory of Ashkenazi ancestry. Citing autosomal DNA studies, Nicholas Wade estimates that “Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews have roughly 30 percent European ancestry, with most of the rest from the Middle East.” He further noticed that “The two communities seem very similar to each other genetically, which is unexpected because they have been separated for so long.”…For example, Ashkenazi Jews share more common paternal lineages with other Jewish and Middle Eastern groups than with non-Jewish populations in areas where Jews lived in Eastern Europe, Germany and the French Rhine Valley. This is consistent with Jewish traditions in placing most Jewish paternal origins in the region of the Middle East.

A study conducted in 2013 found no evidence of a Khazar origin for Ashkenazi Jews and suggested that “Ashkenazi Jews share the greatest genetic ancestry with other Jewish populations, and among non-Jewish populations, with groups from Europe and the Middle East.

You can see more about it here as well as here.

Bill, we hardly knew ya

The New Neo Posted on by

De Blasio drops out of the race, and Trump mocks him:

President Trump wasted no time mocking Mayor Bill de Blasio on Friday after Hizzoner announced he was ending his far-fetched bid for the presidency.

“Oh no, really big political news, perhaps the biggest story in years! Part time Mayor of New York City, @BilldeBlasio, who was polling at a solid ZERO but had tremendous room for growth, has shocking dropped out of the Presidential race,” Trump tweeted Friday morning.

“NYC is devastated, he’s coming home!”

Ouch.

Why on earth did de Blasio run in the first place? Ego, I suppose.

And this might be the best moment to say I’m tired of having to look up his name to make sure I get the small “d” at the beginning right.

Trump’s plan for 2020

The New Neo Posted on by

Hmmm:

The story begins in New Mexico, which hasn’t been won by a Republican since George W. Bush in 2004 — and even that was a very near thing. Nevertheless, Bennett reports that Team Trump “is planning to announce a state director and additional ground staff there in the coming weeks.” The play is to “energize a slice of the state’s Hispanic voters” just big enough to turn it red. Jared Kushner told Time, “I can see us very aggressively playing in 18 swing states,” as opposed to just 11 last time around.

What would those states be? Kushner can’t be speaking of only states Clinton won in 2016, because she won only 19 states (plus D.C.). Clearly then Kushner is talking about battlegrounds both blue and red.

The author, Stephen Green, then tries to guess which states they might be; you’ll have to read the article for that. Then he concludes:

But the point is this: Trump wants to broaden the battlespace enough that a clean sweep would give him the biggest GOP win since George Bush ran for Reagan’s third term in 1988. (Bush declined to deliver Reagan’s third term; voters declined to reelect him.)

Now, that’s what you call optimism. But at this point I don’t discount any possibility.

I do think, though, that the outcome in 2020 will depend at least in part on who the Democratic nominee might be. Right now none of them seem any good to me. But there are also a lot of people who hate Trump enough to vote for anyone—literally anyone—who opposes him.

Meritocracy and equality

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In the George Packer article I wrote about on Saturday, he sharply criticized “meritocracy.” We hear quite a bit of that sort of thing these days.

First, let’s define the word:

Meritocracy…is a political system in which economic goods and/or political power are vested in individual people on the basis of talent, effort, and achievement, rather than wealth or social class. Advancement in such a system is based on performance, as measured through examination or demonstrated achievement.

Note the phrase “rather than wealth or social class.” One of the criticisms of meritocracy that you hear these days is that meritocracy seems linked to wealth and/or class (or race or ethnic group or sex), and that it seems to perpetuate the links between these things rather than sever them. Another criticism is that it fosters a viciously competitive environment, but we’ll stick to that first criticism because it seems to be the major one.

In line with this, critics of meritocracy speak approvingly of equality. Long ago—when I was young—that meant equality of opportunity. But only conservatives speak of that these days. The left wants cosmic justice and cosmic (that is, impossible to achieve) equality. If you want to read what is meant by that, just pick up a copy of Thomas Sowell’s wonderful book The Quest for Cosmic Justice. Just one quote of many (more quotes can be found at the link):

A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.

Humans are inherently unequal in drive, intelligence, talents, personality, life experience, and a host of other attributes or deficits. These traits are not necessarily distributed with perfect equality between groups. Whether that inequality is innate or cultural or stems from some combination of the two, in the real world we cannot possibly create perfect equality of outcome, and all attempts to procure it are doomed. All we can do, and what we should continue to strive for but have to a certain extent abandoned, is equality of opportunity and equality under the law.

But the left says that if the playing field of privilege as the left defines privilege really were equal, the races and the groups would all achieve equally (and perhaps, as in Lake Woebegone, everyone would be above average). But the left’s strained effects to achieve the impossible are hurting everyone, and that includes those they are supposedly trying to help.

Meritocracy means that merit—as in achievement, both academic and in the larger world—brings rewards. It’s hardly a perfect system, but there is no way to avoid that sort of arrangement without making a society less productive and less free, as in the old Soviet Union. Kill the kulaks and you’ve killed the most successful people in the rural areas. Stop serving the needs of the smartest kids—of all races, even if the proportions of each group among the smartest (as best we can measure such things) turn out to be somewhat different than each group’s proportion of the general population—and you create a society less able to invent things, run things, build things, and achieve brilliance.

The future of climate change politics: Part I, the children

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[NOTE: This is a big topic, and so my plan is to tackle it in segments.]

There’s a great deal of fear going around about what is now known as climate change and what is more accurately described as anthropogenic global warming (AGW): the idea that we are in the throes of a potentially catastrophic warming of Earth’s climate caused by human activity.

Right now I’m not going to debate the science. I’m going to talk about the political phenomenon. Those who believe this is a real and imminent crisis facing us are understandably filled with a great sense of urgency, and in that urgency they are proposing many supposed solutions. As part of that drive, there has been a push to educate the young in the extreme danger that will soon be facing them.

We have this sort of thing from an adult, author Jonathan Franzen writing in The New Yorker. It indicates the scope of the fear that is being projected by adults and that children are picking up on:

The goal has been clear for thirty years, and despite earnest efforts we’ve made essentially no progress toward reaching it. Today, the scientific evidence verges on irrefutable. If you’re younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth—massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If you’re under thirty, you’re all but guaranteed to witness it.

So that sets the tone: it’s is virtually certain to happen and to happen pretty soon, and to be awful. Franzen doesn’t bother to get into the science of it, which is wise because neither he nor I nor 99.99+% of his readers can understand the science, so it must be taken on faith or rejected on faith, plus whatever scientific knowledge and understanding each person may have. (More about that later, in another part of this series).

Franzen is hardly alone in his desperation and despair about this. He doesn’t really think a solution will be forthcoming at this point. That’s one of the thrusts of his article, in which he also writes what he thinks it would actually take to tackle the problem effectively:

The first condition is that every one of the world’s major polluting countries institute draconian conservation measures, shut down much of its energy and transportation infrastructure, and completely retool its economy. According to a recent paper in Nature, the carbon emissions from existing global infrastructure, if operated through its normal lifetime, will exceed our entire emissions “allowance”—the further gigatons of carbon that can be released without crossing the threshold of catastrophe. (This estimate does not include the thousands of new energy and transportation projects already planned or under construction.) To stay within that allowance, a top-down intervention needs to happen not only in every country but throughout every country. ..

Finally, overwhelming numbers of human beings, including millions of government-hating Americans, need to accept high taxes and severe curtailment of their familiar life styles without revolting. They must accept the reality of climate change and have faith in the extreme measures taken to combat it. They can’t dismiss news they dislike as fake. They have to set aside nationalism and class and racial resentments. They have to make sacrifices for distant threatened nations and distant future generations. They have to be permanently terrified by hotter summers and more frequent natural disasters, rather than just getting used to them. Every day, instead of thinking about breakfast, they have to think about death.

Franzen ends up concluding—and I concur—that this will never happen. And I add that this is correct whether the actual science, and Franzen’s fears, are valid or not. He also ends up recommending halfway measures such as forest conservation and replenishment, which are things that both left and right can get behind (we discussed it previously in this thread).

What effect does a message like this have on children? In a recent poll among teens, 88% believed in AGW and 52% were angry about it and 57% afraid. I’m surprised, given that 88% figure, that the other figures weren’t higher, but the poll also says that 88% of teens believe that there is still time to stop the worst effects. 64% of teens think climate change will hurt them personally, and 76% feel it will hurt people in the US.

So whatever the truth will turn out to be, the AGW advocates have done an excellent job in getting the word out. But not enough of a job to cause the sort of widespread panic that someone like Franzen feels would be required to actually change anything.

That’s where 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg comes in. As Richard Fernandez writes:

Even as the era of “small wars” is seemingly on the wane, environmental concerns, especially among the elite, are rising to panic bordering on despair. Sixteen-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg, speaking at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting at Davos, said without batting an eye that “adults keep saying we owe it to the young people, to give them hope, but I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.”

With such a frightened younger generation, it can only benefit the left, because government is seen as the solution.

Using censure to slap someone down for being too moderate

The New Neo Posted on by

Usually when Democrats run as moderates they end up voting like good little leftists, except for votes that don’t matter.

Democrat Senator Krysten Sinema of Arizona, who won a close election in 2016, ran as a moderate. I haven’t followed all the ins and outs (or, to be honest, any of the ins and outs) of her actual voting record, but it appears that every now and then she really has voted as a moderate.

Which has earned her this:

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.) is facing a censure vote from the Progressive Caucus of the Arizona Democratic Party, due to her support for some of President Donald Trump’s nominees…

The resolution, which will be considered by the Democratic state committeemen during the Arizona Democratic Party’s quarterly meeting Saturday, cites a pair of Sinema’s confirmation votes. They did not support her confirmation votes for William Barr as U.S. attorney general and for David Bernhardt as secretary of the interior. They were also annoyed by her resistance to join Democrats in trying to reinstate “net neutrality” rules.

I don’t believe this will pass the full Arizona Democratic Party; the group pushing this is the Progressive Caucus. In other words, the leftist branch. But the leftist branch is now wagging the dog on the national level of the Democratic Party, so perhaps that’s true in Arizona, as well, and perhaps it will pass. “Progressives” don’t believe in or tolerate disagreement or compromise of any sort, however small. It’s groupthink and goodthink all the way.