Donald Trump and Boris Johnson

The New Neo Posted on by

Wouldn’t you like to be a fly on the wall when these two get together in private?

Whatever else you might say about them—their similarities and their differences—one thing they share is that both are highly entertaining.

Not to their enemies, of course, at least not when either man is doing well. But Trump has always been an entertainer, among his other traits, and apparently so has Johnson.

Even their names are kind of entertaining. “Trump” has a built-in humor (at least to me; it sounds like “Hrumph!”), and a lot of people riff off of it. As for Johnson, I think the name speaks for itself: Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.

Both are outsize, colorful personalities. Both are somewhat heavy-ish guys physically, too, although Trump is considerably taller (either 6′ 2″ or 6′ 3″ to Johnson’s 5′ 9″). Prior to becoming PM, Johnson served an apprenticeship (to coin a Trumpian phrase) in politics for many years, unlike Trump who did not. Before that, Johnson had been a journalist.

Johnson has a more eclectic genealogy than Trump: one great-grandfather who was a “Circassian-Turkish journalist…[and] secular Muslim,” one great-grandfather who was a Russian Jewish immigrant to the US, and various others of English, German and French heritage.

In a coincidence I find very curious, both were men born in New York City—Johnson in Manhattan and Trump in Queens. Their birthdays aren’t far apart, either, although Trump is much older: Trump’s is June 14, 1946 and Johnson’s is June 19, 1964. They also share the fact that they sport unusual hairstyles for men their age and station, with Johnson’s down-do almost the reverse of Trump’s upsweep, and each a sort of trademark.

Both came from rich families, but Johnson had a very patrician education and by all accounts was a brilliant student. No one would ever have called Trump the latter, but he was a brilliant student of what he was interested in—which was business and making deals and money. Both have been married and divorced two times (for Johnson, he is actually in the process of divorce number two). Trump was one of five children growing up, and Johnson one of four. Trump has five children of his own, and Johnson four plus one out of wedlock.

Their enemies (and some of their admirers) describe them similarly. Here are some quotes from Johnson’s Wiki page:

Sonia Purnell described Johnson as “the most unconventional, yet compelling politician of the post-Blair era” in British politics…Giles Edwards and Jonathan Isaby commented that Johnson appealed to “a broad cross-section of the public”, with his friends characterising him as a “Heineken Tory” who can appeal to voters that other Conservatives cannot. Gimson expressed the view that “people love him because he makes them laugh”…

Purnell recognised that during the 2008 mayoral election, he was “polarising opinions to the extreme”, with critics viewing him as “variously evil, a clown, a racist and a bigot”. Writing in The Guardian, journalist Polly Toynbee for instance referred to him as “jester, toff, self-absorbed sociopath and serial liar”, while Labour politician Hazel Blears called him “a nasty right-wing elitist, with odious views and criminal friends”

But my very favorite is this: Johnson’s “like Donald Trump with a thesaurus.”

Disparate-impact theory: school discipline and race

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a discussion in National Review about a report recently issued by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. It’s entitled “Beyond Suspensions: Examining School Discipline Policies and Connections to the School-to-Prison Pipeline for Students of Color with Disabilities.”

Although this might conjure up an image of a bunch of black students who have some sort of marked physical disability ending up in prison, that’s not what we’re talking about here.

The entire report is an example of the application of disparate-impact theory (see this for an explanation of what that is), and it uses the word “disabilities” in a way that’s technically correct but misleading to the lay reader.

Here’s an excerpt from the National Review article:

It’s undisputed that black students, as a group, are disciplined more than white students. For the commission majority, this is evidence of racially disparate treatment, as it’s an article of faith that discipline disparities aren’t due to disparities in behavior. As Gail Heriot and I point out in our separate dissents, there’s, to put it mildly, very little evidence that this is the case…

The Commission majority also is concerned that children of color with disabilities are punished more often than children without disabilities. When the majority refers to “disabilities,” they’re not referring, by and large, to children who are, e.g., deaf or in wheelchairs. “Disability” includes “emotional disturbance,” which essentially means “bad behavior for which there is not another clinical diagnosis.” Unsurprisingly, when “disability” is defined to mean “bad behavior,” “children with disabilities” are more likely to be disciplined.

The trouble with the Commission’s approach is that when you decree, in the face of all evidence to the contrary (including the testimony of their own parents), that children of all racial groups misbehave at exactly the same rates, the only way to get discipline rates to be the same is to artificially depress them. Accordingly, misbehaving students aren’t suspended or expelled, they’re invited to take part in “restorative practices” and “positive behavioral interventions and supports.” When you don’t suspend or expel misbehaving students, schools descend into chaos.

The following describes what happened to teachers in schools in Minnesota, for example, as a result of Obama-era directives:

They have lost their authority to control the classroom. They’re told they’ll be coached what to say, with whom, about classroom and school disruptive behavior. They’re told to shred, delete computer documents showing student violence that does not support the administrative agenda.

They’re directed to tolerate students who disrupt by screaming, swearing, tormenting, bullying, hitting, kicking, using pencils and scissors to stab other classmates. They use laptops, desks, and chairs as weapons. And these all go unreported.

I used the term “Obama-era directives,” but this report is new, and it supports the methods used in those directives.

Our children are being sacrificed on the altar of a politically-correct fiction that fails to adequately confront some very real problems. And by “children” I mean children of all races, those who misbehave as well as those who don’t.

How did the Squad get elected? And what’s the game plan to get more far leftists into the House?

The New Neo Posted on by

Step 1: Find a congressional district that’s bluer than blue, where any Democratic nominee is a shoe-in to be elected. Some of these are natural districts, almost always located in big urban centers. Others are carefully gerrymandered to create a situation in which a Democratic nominee cannot lose.

Step 2: Locate one in which the current Democratic representative has some weaknesses. Maybe he or she is a bit too stale, having been around really long. Maybe he or she is a bit too white—or, for the “he’s”, a bit too male or too heterosexual.

Step 3: Recruit a far left candidate from a favored demographic that is a designated victim group: black, Hispanic, Muslim, female, or a combination of as many of those characteristics as possible.

Step 4: It helps if the new candidate is a she who is very pretty and quite young.

Step 5: Primary the current Democratic representative.

Step 6: In the primary, count on only the most leftist activists to show up in any significant numbers. It’s best if the turnout is less than a third of eligible voters, which is often the case in a primary in a place where there’s an incumbent whom people assume will win against his or her Democratic challengers, particularly if they are extremists.

Step 7: Win the primary. Once you do that, you’re home free, because the Republican (if there even is one running) has just about zero chance of winning against any Democrat in this particular district.

Then do it again. And again. Until your power is consolidated.

It can be done in the Senate, too, in true-blue states. But the House is much easier.

That is a way it may be possible for the far left to gain more power, particularly in the House, even if the majority of America and even the majority of Democrats do not support far left politics.

The curious case of Robert Mueller

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: For the purposes of this post, I’m going to assume that Robert Mueller was not acting when he seemed vague yesterday. I think this is a correct assumption, although I’m aware of theories to the contrary. I believe that, although Mueller has a history of certain strengths, Oscar-worthy acting is not among them. It wasn’t just his denials and vagueness, it was the relative consistency of those qualities during his testimony. His performance, if indeed it was a performance, was just too pitch-perfect and of-a-piece to be a job of acting.]

So what can we conclude about Robert Mueller and the Mueller Report from yesterday’s congressional testimony by Mueller?

The great majority of onlookers on the right have concluded that it’s highly unlikely that he had much to do with the report that bears his name, or even the investigation it purports to describe. That is troubling, and another troubling aspect of it is that somehow this didn’t get reported previously by our fabulously thorough and brilliant (not to mention objective) MSM.

Funny thing, though, we have an article yesterday in the NY Times explaining what they euphemistically call Mueller’s “hands off” approach:

Soon after the special counsel’s office opened in 2017, some aides noticed that Robert S. Mueller III kept noticeably shorter hours than he had as F.B.I. director, when he showed up at the bureau daily at 6 a.m. and often worked nights.

He seemed to cede substantial responsibility to his top deputies, including Aaron Zebley, who managed day-to-day operations and often reported on the investigation’s progress up the chain in the Justice Department. As negotiations with President Trump’s lawyers about interviewing him dragged on, for example, Mr. Mueller took part less and less, according to people familiar with how the office worked.

That hands-off style was on display Wednesday when Mr. Mueller testified for about seven hours before two House committees.

And the Times knew nothing of this till now? So either they are incompetent as reporters, or they were covering it up. But Now It Can Be Told, because the cat is out of the bag, due to the dogged persistence of Jerry Nadler.

The Times tries to explain it this way:

The team’s loyalty to Mr. Mueller, who insisted on a leakproof operation, remains deep. Little has emerged about the inner workings of the special counsel’s office even in the weeks since the team disbanded in May.

But what has dribbled out suggests that Mr. Mueller’s wobbly performance might not have come as a surprise to his subordinates.

But somehow the Times manages to get leaks when it thinks it will benefit the left. A report on Mueller’s lack of involvement in his own investigation, however, wouldn’t have benefited anyone but Trump had it gotten out earlier. So funny thing, we’ve had no news on it till now. Now, however, it can act as an explanation for Mueller’s poor performance and reassure the troops that the Mueller Report [sic] was written by people other than Mueller, who did know what they were doing.

Questions abound, of course. One is: who actually supervised instead of Mueller, and who actually wrote the report? The Times is suggesting that the answer to the former question is “Aaron Zebley,” and the answer to the latter question is “the group of [Democrat-partisan] lawyers who worked on it under the figurehead Mueller and the real Zebley.”

In that article I just quoted, the Times only identifies Zebley as “a long-time aide of Mueller’s.” But the paper also wrote still another article focusing on Zebley’s lengthy career, some of it in the same law firm as Mueller, and some of it as a federal prosecutor as well as for the FBI, and much of it in association with Mueller.

However, the author of that Times piece entitled “Who Is Aaron Zebley” somehow neglected to mention—of this newly-important figure—that in 2015-2016 Zebley had been (as reported in the Washington Examiner) the counsel to Justin Cooper, who was:

…the controversial IT aide to Hillary Clinton who set up her private email server and smashed some of her mobile devices with a hammer.

Now, a lawyer’s defense of someone doesn’t mean that a person is in league with his client in any political way. But it certainly is a salient fact for the public to know, and the crackerjack reporters on those two Times pieces somehow manage to leave it out.

My questions are as follows: if Mueller was just a figurehead, why didn’t this fact become known, and how bad was the situation? Was he originally more functional, or did people know right from the start that he couldn’t do the job, and was the plan always to have the others set the tone and control the all-important “narrative”?

Perhaps we’ll find some of these things out some day. But if we ever do, I doubt it will be because the Times does its own investigative reporting on it.

There’s a lot of other news today…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and I’m going out now, so I’ll just briefly mention a couple of things.

The first is an update on Erica Thomas, who accused a guy in the supermarket of telling her to go back where she came from (a la Trump, supposedly). Not only does he turn out to be an avid Trump-hater and person of Cuban descent (we already knew that), but she apparently got who said what to who kind of mixed up.

And speaking of mixed up—strictly in biological terms, Rashida Tlaib is no more a “woman of color” than I am (someone pointed this out the other day but I can’t find the link right now). However, as I’ve written before, “of color” sounds like a biological term but it is strictly a political term, defined by the left in a hierarchy of intersectional oppression to mean anyone who can use the race card to either exonerate him/herself or accuse any critic of racism. Such people include black people, Hispanic people (unless you’re a “white Hispanic” like George Zimmerman who didn’t act in the proper leftist manner), native Americans, and people of Palestinian and other middle eastern descent (that’s Tlaib). Absolutely excluded: Jews and Asians.

Hong Kong is in turmoil

The New Neo Posted on by

More than two decades ago, when China took over Hong Kong, I recall getting a very uneasy feeling. How could this possibly go well?

Here are some recent events there:

Also please see this by Michael Yon:

The conflict in Hong Kong is not about the Extradition Bill — and now many other issues are piling up almost weekly. The issue is that Communist China is trying to swallow and digest Hong Kongers who know the taste of freedom.

Humans are far more likely to fight to keep something they have than to fight for something they do not have. Mainland Chinese as a group never in their lives have tasted freedom. The communist cowboys in Beijing ride their broken slave horses daily and the broken horses just stare at the ground and go where they are told.

The British helped Hong Kongers taste freedom, and rule of law, and Hong Kongers love their freedom and legitimate judicial system. They will fight. The real fight is beginning.

Honk Kong is a key battle ground in a much larger war. Taiwan and others are watching.”

And wow

The New Neo Posted on by

Just wow:

Harvard Law professor Lawrence Tribe is a leftist and an extreme Trump-hater. If he says this, you better believe the Democrats are regretting pulling Mueller back into the spotlight.

[ADDENDUM: By the way, Tribe and the rest remain firmly convinced that Trump is guilty of everything that has been alleged. They just are disappointed that this particular hearing didn’t fulfill their hopes and dreams. And some of the responses to Tribe’s tweet are from people who think all kinds of wonderful things did happen at the hearing. Hope dies hard.]

[ADDENDUM II: Much more here; please read the whole thing.]

Here are two highlights from the post I just linked; there are plenty more there:

And this:

ADDENDUM III:

And what can you say about these quotes from none other than Michael Moore? Well, I can say this: Moore still believes that Trump is guilty as the day is long, but he’s bitterly disappointed in Mueller’s performance today and hopping mad at those who thought grilling Mueller in front of the world would be a peachy keen idea. Moore also seems to think that Trump will win in 2020:

“Trump must be gloating in ecstasy,” he added. “Not because of the failure that is Robert Mueller — his Report is still a damning document of crimes by Trump—but because Trump understands the power of the visual, and he understands that the Dems aren’t street fighters and that’s why he’ll win.”

“Dems aren’t street fighters.” I wonder what he’d like them to do now to prove that they are. Maybe he’d like Cory Booker to pump up the old testosterone some more and follow through on this threat?

More on political change and what it requires

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember the film “Annie Hall”? You may not be fond of Woody Allen—I’m not fond of Woody Allen—but that’s still a great film and a very entertaining one. I loved it at the time.

Remember the spider-killing scene? Funny, funny, funny. But I bet you don’t remember a certain aspect of it that came to my mind when I was writing this post on liberals and political change.

First, a quote from that post of mine:

Some liberals are not the least bit interested in getting more information, especially from sources on the right. In fact, this is a large group, I believe. One big reason for this is that, by a certain age, people’s views generally are rather set and become so entrenched that they see no particular need to revisit them, and they have other more pleasant things to do with their time.

Also, one of the ways the left trades on and relies on that is the practice of continually discrediting sources on the right, even relatively mainstream ones like Fox News (excuse me: Faux News), as being a bunch of lying, racist, hatemongerers. So why waste one’s time listening to such pig swill?

So there is little interest in hearing or reading anything that isn’t the usual MSM or even further left fodder. And a corollary of that is that a source such as CNN, for example, which the right finds to be unreliable at best and purposely deceiving at worst, the usual liberal finds relatively trustworthy. These are very hard beliefs to break, particularly if they are so strong the person will not even give another news source a try.

But what on earth does all of this have to do with the spider scene from “Annie Hall”? Watch (and for those who absolutely don’t want to watch this short scene, go to around 1:08 and you’ll see the exact part I’m referring to):

Mueller’s testimony

The New Neo Posted on by

I haven’t watched it, because unless the circumstances are extraordinary (and these are not) I cannot stand lengthy Congressional testimony. I find it suffices for me to read about it and to watch selected clips later.

In the case of Mueller, I also can’t imagine what he could say that would change anything for anyone, unless that person has recently returned from a trip to Mars or perhaps further away.

So, why did the Democrats ask Mueller to testify? I think it’s because they became addicted to their Mueller news fix and have been having withdrawal symptoms. They were talking about his investigation and expecting it to be the smoking gun for so very long that once it was out it was an almost shocking anticlimax and faded away all too soon. They just can’t let it go.

Oh, I have little doubt they’ll find some nuggets of supposed Trump-awfulness to gnaw on for a while. But there certainly don’t seem to be many forthcoming.

The consensus is that Mueller looks tired and old. I’ve never gotten the impression that he’s a man who likes to be in front of the cameras. Some takeaways can be found in the following links at Legal Insurrection: this, this, and particularly this one. I’d also recommend this at Powerline and this at RedState.

That’s just a sampler on the right. For the left, there’s this sort of thing: “Robert Mueller Says Donald Trump Could Be Charged When He Leaves Office.” Ya think? So could any president—any of whom could be charged with any crime whatsoever, if there was sufficient evidence and a prosecutor wanted to go that route.

[ADDENDUM: By the way, this article mentions that Mueller was asked if Trump had been exonerated and he said “no,” and then was asked if he could be charged with obstruction when he’s out of office and Mueller said “yes.”

Both, however, are fake questions, asked merely for propaganda purposes. That’s because it is impossible (as I wrote when the Mueller report first came out) to exonerate anyone, ever, except in something like a murder where there are fingerprints or DNA that belongs to someone else and the accused is eliminated because he or she has an airtight alibi as well. Even then, prosecutors cannot possibly “exonerate” anyway. They can only charge and try to convict. That’s the very basis, the central core, of our criminal justice system. Anyone who pretends otherwise is a fool, a knave, or actually both.

And as I wrote in the body of this post, any president can be charged criminally for anything at all, if there is evidence, once he or she leaves office. That has nothing to do with whether sufficient evidence exists. It is quite clear that for Trump it does not.

Newspapers or people who report on this without making those points clear are in the business of propaganda. But that’s probably most people in politics and most newspapers.]

Boris Johnson…

The New Neo Posted on by

…becomes the Tory Party’s head and will be the new prime minister, as expected.

Brexit to follow?

“We are going to get Brexit done on 31 October and take advantage of all the opportunities it will bring with a new spirit of can do.

“We are once again going to believe in ourselves, and like some slumbering giant we are going to rise and ping off the guy ropes of self doubt and negativity.”

That’s a mixed metaphor, I think. Or maybe just a Gulliver reference.

But I get the message.

Waxing rights: more evidence…

The New Neo Posted on by

…that the world has gone stark raving mad.

See this:

A born male who identifies as female, and whose male genitalia is still intact, is suing female-only waxers on the basis that their refusal to wax his bollocks — sorry, her bollocks — is an act of discrimination. Yes, this person believes that because he identifies as female he should therefore have access to every female service, including the most intimate female services. Any female beautician who refuses to tend to his testicles is being ‘transphobic,’ apparently, because they are denying his womanhood. Even though he has a penis. And testicles. And is a man. That’s hate speech, I know.

This is the case of Jessica Yaniv, born Jonathan Yaniv, who has filed complaints against more than a dozen female waxers with the Human Rights Council (HRC) in British Columbia. Yaniv claims that the women’s refusal to give him a Brazilian– that is, to handle his penis and testicles and to remove his pubic hair, activities these women did not want to carry out — is discrimination. Yaniv says that self-identifying as a woman is sufficient to be treated as a woman and to get access to services typically reserved for women…

You can now be a bigot simply for believing in reality itself, in this case that people with penises are not women. Pressuring women to handle male genitalia against their will is dreadful and it suggests woke politics has now crossed the line from irritating to disgusting.

I think it crossed that line quite some time ago.

This case is in Canada. And perhaps the plaintiff will lose, even there. I am also quite sure that there are many trans people who find a demand and a lawsuit like this to be terrible. But there are also activists such as this plaintiff who are determined to be just as aggressive about their needs as the law will allow, and to push the legal envelope more and more to get their needs met.

Political change: the liberals

The New Neo Posted on by

In the “long slow march of leftism” thread there was a discussion about the distinction between leftists and liberals. Commenter “R.C.” and I initially disagreed on whether the friends I often talk about and call “liberals” are really liberals at all rather than leftists masquerading as liberals. I state my case here:

I know some leftists, and I know a great many liberals—and what’s more, I know the difference.

Most of the liberals I know are not all that politically oriented. They read and watch some of the news, but they don’t explore things in depth, and they know what the Times, NPR, and their friends tell them.

I’m not even knocking them for that. I never used to be especially interested in politics, and that description in the last paragraph could have described me through the end of the 20th century. I was busy with other things, and my politics had been formed years earlier and I thought they were pretty set. I wasn’t poorly informed but I wasn’t well informed either, and a great deal of what I thought I knew wasn’t true.

I was never never a leftist or even close to it.

That is the description of most of my friends.

And here is R.C.’s response:

In this day-and-age, it takes a bit of effort for me to overcome the suspicion that, for every open leftist ready to drive dissenters off campuses or out of tech companies, there are a half-dozen “liberals” who’re too well-salaried and middle-aged to bother mobbing and milkshaking the opposition, but who’re perfectly comfortable cheering on the ones who do.

I’m happy to hear that the folks you describe as liberal really are. I guess that means that if they could only learn about how their side of the aisle is really behaving, and how many of the news stories about right-wing misbehavior are blatant hoaxes, they’d start speaking up in opposition to it. I gather that, in your view, the problem is epistemological: They just don’t know.

How, then, can one “raise their awareness?”…

What do you think it would take for a standard liberal to conclude that their world-picture is incomplete in important ways, and start looking seriously at what they could learn from the other side of the aisle?

I know that 9/11 got the change rolling for you, Neo. (But, reading your old “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series, it seems to me you’d had a tickle or two of cognitive dissonance, as far back as the late 80’s, which 9/11 triggered into fuller activity.)

I hope that the liberals you know are similarly aware that there are gaps in their worldview, and merely underestimate their importance. Perhaps some future events, or even current ones, might stimulate a cascade of mind-changing?

(I just hope it won’t always take an act of war and thousands of tragic deaths.)

Here’s my response to those thoughtful observations and questions.

Some liberals are not the least bit interested in getting more information, especially from sources on the right. In fact, this is a large group, I believe. One big reason for this is that, by a certain age, people’s views generally are rather set and become so entrenched that they see no particular need to revisit them, and they have other more pleasant things to do with their time.

Also, one of the ways the left trades on and relies on that is the practice of continually discrediting sources on the right, even relatively mainstream ones like Fox News (excuse me: Faux News), as being a bunch of lying, racist, hatemongerers. So why waste one’s time listening to such pig swill?

So there is little interest in hearing or reading anything that isn’t the usual MSM or even further left fodder. And a corollary of that is that a source such as CNN, for example, which the right finds to be unreliable at best and purposely deceiving at worst, the usual liberal finds relatively trustworthy. These are very hard beliefs to break, particularly if they are so strong the person will not even give another news source a try.

People on the right have a different experience. Because so much of the MSM is leftist, a person on the right may find it nearly impossible to block exposure to what the left is saying. The right is far more familiar with leftist thought than liberals are with actual bona fide opinions on the right. For liberals it is far easier to have zero exposure to the viewpoints of the right unless it is something filtered through the prism of the left by distorted MSM reporting on it. This all favors the leftist or liberal message being solidly incessant for liberals, and limits their exposure greatly to the actual views of the right.

How many liberals have actually read items in even the more moderate press on the right, such as for example National Review? I would wager the percentage is extremely small. But who on the right hasn’t read the NY Times, for example?

That has to do with the consuming of information, which helps to form opinions. How can an opinion change without new information, or a new way to see old information? Political conversation between those who are on opposite sides doesn’t usually convince anyone of anything, in part because it generally gets too heated and emotional too quickly. Still another reason conversation doesn’t tend to work is because a political belief system is an edifice built brick by brick over time, made of thousands and thousands of perceptions, stories, lived experiences, attitudes, and facts we think we know. It is a difficult and sometimes lengthy process to dismantle that edifice.

Sometimes it happens. But that’s rather rare. And I believe that first in order for that to happen, a person also has to have a mind that is open to change. I’m not sure what goes into the making of such a mind or such a person, but I suppose I must have had that characteristic to begin with or I never would have undergone my political change. One thing I know is that I had always had the habit of countering my own arguments, of challenging them by reading opposing material if I could find it—a sort of natural skepticism, even about myself.

Maybe that can’t be taught. But if it’s an already-existing characteristic of a person, then new information has a chance of getting through and changing things—if that new information is viewed by the person as reliable and relevant. A new building gets constructed, brick by brick. In much of my “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series, I deal with how that happened to me.

[NOTE: There’s more to add—including the idea of political identity and membership in a political group, and the question of emotions vs. thought as being predominant in the person making political decisions. Maybe good for another post some time; this one’s long enough for now. But feel free to discuss it all in the comments.]