Moving that Overton window: hey, let’s gerrymander the state boundaries to game the Electoral College

The New Neo Posted on by

That’s not exactly what this article at FiveThirtyEight actually says, at least not up-front. The author, Ella Koeze, is just speculating what it would be like to have different state boundaries than now, rather than abolishing the Electoral College entirely to change the way presidential elections go:

Our current state borders are fairly arbitrary. Throughout American history, people have been proposing new states, but most don’t appear on the map today, either because they once existed but were later redrawn, or because they simply never caught on. But what if some of these would-be states were around today? Would moving those state borders, without changing any votes, change our political reality?

The short answer is probably not, at least in 2016: Of the 13 maps we tested, none of them flipped the outcome of the last presidential election. These new maps did shift the Electoral College vote margin by as much as 38 votes, but since President Trump won by more than 70 votes, it wasn’t enough to swing the election to Clinton.

But it was enough to help, and it certainly could change things in the direction of a Democrat win in some future close election. So the effect would be as I stated it in the title of this post.

And here’s another point the author makes:

While none of those fake maps would have produced a different outcome in 2016, there is a relatively easy way to rewrite the past — if we free ourselves from the constraints of history and instead do a little strategic shuffling. By reallocating two protuberant state parts (the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the Florida Panhandle) to their neighbors (Wisconsin and Alabama, respectively), we can flip the outcome of 2016 with a single click.

As I read this, it is clear to me that what is happening has several dimensions. The first is the idea—not equivocally stated but nevertheless implicit—that the Electoral College is in need of change. The second is that a goal of such change could or would or should have been to make Hillary Clinton president. The third is that there is nothing sacred about not only the Electoral College but also the state boundaries. They are mere tradition, perhaps ripe for change as political needs warrant. Let’s “free ourselves from the constraints of history,” shall we?

These points also have to do with getting people to consider not just the changes detailed in the article, but whatever other changes might be possible. There’s no attempt to discuss the reasons we might have an Electoral College or in particular why it might still be desirable, or why we might have these particular state boundaries (the latter described as “arbitrary)—what purpose the whole edifice serves, and what would be gained or lost by changing. The thrust of the piece is how such changes would work in the political sense in terms of who would win a presidential election.

The article ends this way [emphasis mine]:

This is all fun, but the states won’t be shifting their borders anytime soon. For better or worse, we will return to the same old red-and-blue map on the next election night, and we’ll simply be watching to see if any states change color. But even if the Electoral College isn’t going anywhere, it’s still worth remembering that nothing about our political map is inevitable.

“Worth speculating,” indeed.

Comey’s moles

The New Neo Posted on by

See this.

One thing I have to say is that I await IG Horowitz’s report with interest. If only half of what’s alleged to be in it is really in it, it will still make fascinating reading.

[NOTE: Now, somebody somewhere is probably going to say I didn’t use the word “mole” properly. But it’s close, anyway, and I like the sound of “Comey’s moles.”]

The offending shoe: 3rd go-round

The New Neo Posted on by

In one of the previous shoe threads, this comment caught my eye:

Once you start thinking about it, it does become rather gross to sit on a pro-shoe carpet. Someone literally may have walked in dog urine, or bubble gum residue, or some homeless guy’s whatever not 5 minutes ago, and now you’re sitting in it, getting all that sticky goodness onto your hands.

Actually, once you start thinking about almost anything connected with hygiene you almost invariably wind up in deep, deep do-do (sorry, couldn’t resist the pun).

I think the idea of this dog-poop-on-the-shoes discussion is that some people consider that shoes always are carriers of microscopic dog poop or the bacteria in the dog poop or whatever makes dog poop noxious. That is probably true, and it extends to human poop because not everyone has great hand-washing habits. So it also may be true of hands, doorknobs, seats, whatever we touch really.

I don’t think we’re talking about people stepping in a stinking pile of dog poop and then walking right into your living room and onto your rug (although I suppose that could happen, particularly with kids). I think what we’re talking about is the idea of shoe soles as inherently dog poopy, as constant vectors of dog poop and other nefarious but invisible dangers.

That gets us into the realm of OCD. Constant hand-washing and the like.

We are surrounded by gazillions of bacteria that live on and in us. Some are harmful and some are not. Walking outside in shoes and then walking inside in shoes does not ordinarily cause disease. Children sit on the floor all the time. There is evidence that exposing oneself to bacteria in moderation is a good thing for health.

And there are also common-sense ways to avoid getting sick from exposure to them under ordinary circumstances. Wash hands now and then, particularly after encountering someone with a cold, for example. If someone is known to have a serious contagious disease, quarantine. Otherwise, most people are perfectly fine with ordinary shoes in ordinary homes, doing ordinary things.

I don’t sit on the rug, either, although I know lots of people do (especially kids) and I certainly used to do it without any bad effects, in houses where people did not remove their shoes—and even owned dogs.

And don’t get me started on cats, who wade into cat litter and move it around with their little cat paws.

The rest is aesthetics. I choose to be kind to guests rather than having a clean clean spotless sparkling floor. Floors are meant to be walked on. Shoes protect feet, particular outside but also indoors (splinters, glass, or the feet of people like me with nerve damage). And I wouldn’t put a floor or rug in my home that is so delicate it can’t be walked on in shoes without damaging it.

Your mileage may differ.

[NOTE: Who knew that shoes in the house would turn out to be such a fertile topic?]

Ilhan Omar believes she doesn’t need to answer any questions she doesn’t feel like answering

The New Neo Posted on by

Ilhan Omar is dealing with a lot of accusations, but she has one way of dealing with them, and it’s an approach that worked very very well for her so far and may continue to do so: calling anyone who questions her a racist and refusing to dignify their questions with an answer.

Sound familiar?

National media had largely kept away from judging the merits of the accusation that [Omar] was related to her second husband, which have circulated since her entry into politics in 2016, but after Trump’s comment many came to quick conclusions. CNN’s Jim Acosta jumped in immediately to criticize Trump for diving in on “disgusting lies.” The Daily Beast‘s Will Sommer published a lengthy piece on Friday that did little to nothing to debunk what he calls a “baseless smear.”…

Omar has consistently been unwilling to answer questions since the allegation first surfaced. Her team’s first on-the-record statement regarding whether she was married to her brother, to a PowerLine reporter in August 2016, was a refusal to answer questions.

“There are people who do not want an East African, Muslim woman elected to office and who will follow Donald Trump’s playbook to prevent it,” a campaign spokesman said, months before she was first elected. “Ilhan Omar’s campaign will not be distracted by negative forces and will continue to focus its energy on creating positive engagement with community members to make the district and state more prosperous and equitable for everyone.”…

Her office’s only recent comment on the marriage issue has been an attempt to dissuade “legitimate media outlets” from investigating it.

“Whether by colluding with right-wing outlets to go after Muslim elected officials or hounding family members, legitimate media outlets have a responsibility not to fan the flames of hate,” her office said. “Continuing to do so is not only demeaning to Ilhan, but to her entire family.”

The accusations about Omar’s marriage to a man who possibly is her brother is actually not a charge of incest, because part of the accusation is that it was a marriage in name only, perhaps for the purpose of immigration fraud. Omar’s position is that answering such charges is beneath her because they are slurs. Well, they do indeed reflect poorly on her if true, but there is actually a lot of evidence that’s been amassed that they may indeed be true, and it is indisputably true that she is guilty of filing fraudulent tax returns based on who her legal spouse may have been at a particular time.

Omar is counting on the fact that it has become nearly impossible to accuse a “person of color” of anything bad. Evidence doesn’t matter, even actual guilt doesn’t matter. Racism accusations have long been a powerful tool, and in recent years such charges have been elevated to almost unassailable.

But perhaps the public is tiring of this. I know I am. Perhaps the general public sees that the charge of “racism” has become all-purpose, and constitutes a get-out-of-jail-free card for anyone in a designated victim group.

That’s not the way it should work. If equality under the law means anything, it should mean that. But hey, isn’t equality under the law just one of those white-supremacist notions now, if it is used in a way that doesn’t suit the left’s purposes?

Another day…

The New Neo Posted on by

…another race hoax.

At least this one didn’t involve a large and expensive police investigation.

On the other hand, the accuser is Democrat Erica Thomas, who is the Minority Vice Chair of the Georgia House of Representatives.

You can read about the incident at the link. I’m not going to waste much more time writing about it except to say that these things are becoming more common, and are seen as a way to get Trump, blame Trump, hurt Trump, and advance the general narrative.

Also, it’s pretty humorous that the “white man” Erica Thomas accused says he’s actually a Cuban-American (which now qualifies as “brown” whatever one’s skin color—unless one is George Zimmerman, in which case the person is a “white Hispanic”) who is a lifelong and loyal Democrat and can’t stand Trump.

And when did “go back where you (or your ancestors) came from” become a racial slur? It’s many things, but hardly that and certainly not obviously that. My maternal grandmother used to say it to my paternal uncle with some regularity, and they were from the exact same ethnic group. The difference? He had been born elsewhere and came here as a toddler, and her family had been here for many generations. The reason she said it? Not to beat around the bush—he was a Communist and she most definitely was not.

[NOTE: I told the story about my grandmother and uncle at greater length here.]

Olivia Hussey: timeless beauty

The New Neo Posted on by

What is it about Olivia Hussey, who played Juliet about fifty years ago in Zefferilli’s movie version of the classic? Here’s a video that features photos of Hussey when young and her daughter at a similar age (it can’t be embedded, so click on the link).

Hussey’s daughter India Eisley is also an actress, and although she’s a pretty girl her attractiveness is far more ordinary then her mother’s was. India’s looks are of a type popular these days: pouty and sexy at the same time it’s baby-faced. But Hussey had a timeless and classic quality that transcended her own moment, and made her perfect for the role of Juliet. She is young yet ageless, and when you look at her face you believe in a gravitas beyond her years. Her Romeo, Leonard Whiting (on whom I had a terrific crush), had it too but not to as great an extent. It’s that quality that made that particular pair perfect for their roles. They could act, too—really really well.

I am not the least bit objective because, as regular readers here know, Zefferelli’s R&J is one of my absolute favorites. But if you look at the comments to the video, you’ll see that people seem to agree; they still respond strongly and positively to whatever it is that Hussey had.

[NOTE: At the beginning of the video you can see a few photos of Hussey now, with her grown-up daughter. Age has thinned her face and sharpened her features somewhat and of course she doesn’t retain that achingly poignant quality, but she looks mighty good for her age.]

It’s hot here in New England

The New Neo Posted on by

And humid. Ugh!

Until now we’ve had a really good summer, though. The extreme heat is supposed to let up on Monday.

ADDENDUM: I just saw this article on the wonderful invention of air conditioning.

Today I am especially thankful for it. I can well remember the days when it was highly unusual. When I was a child, AC wasn’t in my house; it first appeared in my parents’ bedroom when I was eight or so. After that, on certain especially sultry nights, my brother and I were allowed to drag mattresses in there to sleep. But till them, we sweltered in our rooms, where neither fans nor open windows helped more than a teeny tiny bit.

And cars! We once traveled through the Mohave desert in the summer in a car without air-conditioning, circa 1960. Memorable. And awful.

The long slow march of leftism

The New Neo Posted on by

On this blog we’ve talked many times about the Gramscian march, the slow and steady and dedicated work of the left on the hearts and minds of Americans. This work has borne tremendous fruit, and may have reached a critical mass among the younger generation.

Much of this work was originally generated by the Soviets, who understood that the mind is a powerful weapon, and that influencing American thought over the years would be crucial.

So I recommend this piece, which although old (written over 13 years ago) was linked today by Instapundit. A few excerpts:

By contrast, ideological and memetic warfare has been a favored tactic for all of America’s three great adversaries of the last hundred years — Nazis, Communists, and Islamists. All three put substantial effort into cultivating American proxies to influence U.S. domestic policy and foreign policy in favorable directions.

I would observe that although the Nazis were rather poor at it—their philosophy didn’t travel all that well, being based on (among other things) the tremendous supposed superiority of the Germans— the Communists and the Islamists (who are sometimes allied despite their differences, because after all they have some of the same enemies) have been remarkably successful.

Especially the Communists:

The Soviets had an entire “active measures” department devoted to churning out anti-American dezinformatsiya…

…[Here are] some of the most important of the Soviet Union’s memetic weapons…:

—There is no truth, only competing agendas.
—All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.
—There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.
—The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.
—Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.
—The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)
—For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But ‘oppressed’ people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.
—When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

We have become all too familiar with these principles as the years go on and we see them demonstrated by the left time and again.

Most were staples of Soviet propaganda at the same time they were being promoted by “progressives” (read: Marxists and the dupes of Marxists) within the Western intelligentsia…

This worked exactly as expected; their memes seeped into Western popular culture and are repeated endlessly in (for example) the products of Hollywood.

Indeed, the index of Soviet success is that most of us no longer think of these memes as Communist propaganda. It takes a significant amount of digging and rethinking and remembering, even for a lifelong anti-Communist like myself, to realize that there was a time (within the lifetime of my parents) when all of these ideas would have seemed alien, absurd, and repulsive to most people — at best, the beliefs of a nutty left-wing fringe, and at worst instruments of deliberate subversion intended to destroy the American way of life.

To that last part, I would add that many of the people now pushing these ideas are unaware of their origins, as well. Those of us who oppose them may not know the exact origin of each thought, but we certainly know their far-leftist and often Soviet provenance, as well as the intensity of the Soviet desire to “bury” us.

The essay continues:

The most paranoid and xenophobic conservatives of the Cold War were, painful though this is to admit, the closest to the truth in estimating the magnitude and subtlety of Soviet subversion.

And note this, and recall that it was written early in 2006 [emphasis mine]:

In this context, Jeff Goldstein has written eloquently about perhaps the most long-term dangerous of these memes — the idea that rights inhere not in sovereign individuals but identity groups, and that every identity group (except the “ruling class”) has the right to suppress criticism of itself through political means up to and including violence.

The Soviets didn’t invent it, but they promoted it heavily in a deliberate — and appallingly successful — attempt to weaken the Lockean, individualist tradition that underlies classical liberalism and the U.S. Constitution. The reduction of Western politics to a bitter war for government favor between ascriptive identity groups is exactly the outcome the Soviets wanted and worked hard to arrange.

Mission accomplished, at least on the Democratic side. And the left would like to label everything that has occurred lately on the right as an example of that same struggle, with Republicans representing the evils of “white supremacy” (which would be that “except the ‘ruling class'” exception referred to in the excerpt).

I know a great many liberals. And I would guess that, although most of them ascribe to the principles on that list of “the Soviet Union’s memetic weapons,” they are unaware that what they are espousing is far leftist propaganda, and remain ignorant even now of its origins and purpose.

And if I were to send them a link to this particular post, they would think I’d gone bonkers.

Observational nutritional studies: garbage in, garbage out

The New Neo Posted on by

Observational nutritional studies are inherently unreliable. I think that’s rather obvious.

And most nutritional studies are observational.

So we have this situation:

…[N]utrition research critics, such as John Ioannidis of Stanford University…point out that observational nutrition studies are essentially just surveys: Researchers ask a group of study participants — a cohort — what they eat and how often, then they track the cohort over time to see what, if any, health conditions the study participants develop.

The trouble with the approach is that no one really remembers what they ate. You might remember today’s breakfast in some detail. But, breakfast three days ago, in precise amounts? Even the unadventurous creature of habit would probably get it wrong. That tends to make these surveys inaccurate, especially when researchers try to drill down to specific foods.

Then, that initial inaccuracy is compounded when scientists use those guesses about eating habits to calculate the precise amounts of specific proteins and nutrients that a person consumed. The errors add up, and they can lead to seriously dubious conclusions.

At times researchers try to control for this by asking people to track their eating by writing things down. People still are unreliable about what they eat, and/or what they write down. It’s not just that they lie to researchers, it’s that they delude themselves as well. And it makes sense, because most people don’t want to concentrate on tracking in great detail what they actually eat, minute by minute and day by day, even when asked to do so.

Not only that, but I would guess that being studied can actually change the eating habits of some people, who eat more “good” foods and fewer “bad” ones for the duration of the study.

Lastly, the science is generally correlational, which is a weak way to study something.

That doesn’t mean that every single thing we know about food and health is wrong. It just means to take it with a grain of salt.

Now, about salt…

[NOTE: More details of the nature and scope of the problem can be found here.]

“You dirty rats”

The New Neo Posted on by

Los Angeles is experiencing an increase in its rat population:

At a press conference at Los Angeles City Hall on Tuesday, DeMaio there were two particular reasons behind the rodent explosion.

“First, the homeless population increase, which provides a source of food which supports population growth,” he said. “Second, many local governments, including Los Angeles, have banned the most effective practices for detecting and eradicating rats.”

Nice going.

Iran escalates

The New Neo Posted on by

Iran appears to have seized a British tanker.

This is a relatively recent story, so go there for updates.

A Whitehall source told the Telegraph of the Stena Impero: “It does look like it has been hijacked. Ships don’t follow that pattern. It turned right and straight into Iranian waters. It is really concerning that this has happened.

“It looks on the face of it as though the Iranian Revolutionary Guard have boarded and taken a UK-flagged ship. It appears to be linked to events around the Grace 1 tanker.”

British authorities seized the Iranian Grace 1 supertanker off the coast of Gibraltar on July 4, on suspicion it was carrying crude to Syria in violation of European Union sanctions.

The fate of the tanker has been at the centre of escalating tensions between the UK and Iran…