The weakness of Theresa May’s position…

The New Neo Posted on by

[See UPDATE at end of post.]

…is described here:

Only days ago, May had to withdraw a vote on her Brexit Withdrawal Agreement from Parliament because it was universally recognized that she would lose it. Bear in mind that this vote was to confirm her signal achievement, which she has spent the last two years negotiating and promoting, undistracted by any significant success or even aspiration on other issues. Moreover, she is opposed on it by four-fifths of Tory supporters in the country on it. Her attempt to salvage the Withdrawal Agreement internationally by a tour of European capitals since Monday has been a complete failure. And Tories in Parliament are in disarray and semi-rebellion. It should be curtains for May.

And yet she may win the vote and hang on, considerably weakened. The results of the vote should be available soon, at which point I plan to update this post.

UPDATE 4:20 PM:

May lives to fight another day. Here’s how the vote went:

[The 200 to 117 vote] buys her time: The Prime Minister’s victory protects her from another leadership challenge from within her own party for 12 months.

But the result will not offer any assurances to the Prime Minister’s supporters that she is able to get her all-important Brexit deal through the UK’s Parliament.

In that first article, written before the vote, the author points out:

Yet as Tory MPs go into the committee room to cast their votes tonight, she is a firm favorite to survive. That may surprise you, but it’s happened before. When John Major called a confidence vote on himself in order to quell widespread discontent on the Tory benches, commentators warned that he was a deadweight on Tory hopes of reelection and that MPs who backed him would be turkeys voting for Christmas. But the turkeys voted for Christmas nonetheless, and Christmas promptly arrived in the form of Tony Blair’s 1997 Labour landslide, which cut the number of Tory turkeys in Parliament down to a low of 197. That experience does not seem to be deterring May’s supporters, however.

So this could ultimately backfire on the Tories.

The Nebra sky disk and a rather unusual plea bargain

The New Neo Posted on by

I’d never heard of the Nebra sky disk before, but it’s really quite lovely. 1600 BC is the approximate date of its construction, and I can see why it was originally thought to be a forgery. But it’s not:

The disk, two bronze swords, two hatchets, a chisel, and fragments of spiral bracelets were discovered in 1999 by Henry Westphal and Mario Renner while they were treasure-hunting with a metal detector. Archaeological artifacts are the property of the state in Saxony-Anhalt. The hunters were operating without a license and knew their activity constituted looting and was illegal. They damaged the disk with their spade and destroyed parts of the site. The next day, Westphal and Renner sold the entire hoard for 31,000 DM to a dealer in Cologne. The hoard changed hands within Germany over the next two years, being sold for up to a million DM. By 2001 knowledge of its existence had become public. In February 2002 the state archaeologist Harald Meller acquired the disk in a police-led sting operation in Basel from a couple who had put it on the black market for 700,000 DM. The original finders were eventually traced. In a plea bargain, they led police and archaeologists to the discovery site. Archaeologists opened a dig at the site and uncovered evidence that supports the looters’ claims. There are traces of bronze artifacts in the ground, and the soil at the site matches soil samples found clinging to the artifacts. The disk and its accompanying finds are now held at the State Museum of Prehistory in Halle.

The two looters received sentences of four months and ten months, respectively, from a Naumburg court in September 2003. They appealed, but the appeals court raised their sentences to six and twelve months, respectively.

Here’s the disk:

More on the war against Trump: know-nothing Comey

The New Neo Posted on by

In his recent testimony before the House of Representatives, James Comey presented himself as being something like a sleepwalker—he remembers nothing, knows nothing, and cannot even speculate on things he was involved in, much less ones that involved others in the agency he headed.

I think I can use this image without being called a racist, because Comey is white as the driven snow:

Comey doesn’t mind looking like a fool as long as he doesn’t implicate himself as a knave. He also knows that those who support him will see his tactic as a smart one—as any lawyer is aware, if a witness says he or she doesn’t know something it’s awfully hard to cite that person for perjury.

If you want to learn more about the details of what Comey professes not to know, please see this, this, and this. From the latter:

Somehow Comey managed not to know anything about the FBI’s most important case from the summer of 2016. He said that he hadn’t troubled himself to read the originating documents for Crossfire Hurricane and couldn’t be bothered to find out the agency’s claimed “predicate” for it.

As for the FBI’s most important “source” for Crossfire Hurricane, Christopher Steele, he showed no curiosity about him either, though Comey’s lawyer obviously coached him enough to repeat the sanitizing fable that Steele’s dirt-digging continued earlier work by Fusion GPS for Republicans. Comey claimed not to know that Hillary’s law firm paid Fusion GPS, but confidently stated that Republican money launched the “dossier” project, which is a falsehood. The Steele project was separate from Fusion GPS’s work for anti-Trump Republicans during the primaries.

How did Steele’s dossier get to the FBI? Comey plumb didn’t know! Did the FBI confirm his information? Comey couldn’t remember. Had he studied, before signing, the Carter Page warrant application that gave the FBI the power to rifle through Page’s life, both past and present? Nope; Comey didn’t think that necessary, though he did hear from someone that Page was supposedly working for the Russian government. Did he know that Steele had been dropped by the FBI for disseminating his paid opposition research on Trump to anti-Trump reporters? No, Comey didn’t, and wasn’t sure to this day if that had happened.

There’s so much more going on with all the anti-Trump investigations that to cover them all would take a full day of writing. So I’ll just give you some links. I warn you that they make for depressing reading, because just as it doesn’t seem that Comey will experience any consequences for his actions, it also seems as though these conspiracies may indeed bear just the fruit their planners intended: see this, this, and this.

Immigrants and need

The New Neo Posted on by

A fight is going on over a bill that would reduce welfare payments to non-citizens who want to become citizens:

The Trump administration is now on the clock to finalize one of the biggest changes to legal immigration policy in a generation, after the official comment period ended Monday on a plan to require immigrants to show they aren’t a public burden if they want to extend their visas or get on the path to citizenship.

Immigrant rights groups and other Trump opponents mounted a feverish last-minute push to try to derail the proposal. They submitted tens of thousands of comments calling the plan misguided and racist and warned that it would keep needy immigrants from visiting doctors and leave children hungry because their parents fear signing them up for free school lunches, lest they lose their chance at citizenship.

The president’s backers said they expect Mr. Trump and his team to finalize the proposal. If anything, they said, it doesn’t go far enough to crack down on what appears to be rampant welfare use by noncitizens and their children.

New immigrants have often had a rough time financially, but in the past they had to rely mostly on the help of relatives and/or private relief agencies, the latter often financed by the financially successful previous immigrants from their countries. Even with that help, it was often a very bitter struggle, especially for the first generation. However, that process meant that most people who came here didn’t expect to be given everything and knew they had to work hard, and for the ones that found it too onerous there was always the option of going back (before 1920, the number of immigrants to this country who ended up returning home is said to have been 30%).

Now the government and welfare have taken over much of that function. The current statistics:

The center [for Immigration Studies] released a study this month calculating that a staggering 63 percent of households led by noncitizens use at least one welfare program. The rate for households led by native-born Americans is just 35 percent.

Those are pretty high figures for both non-citizens and citizens, but the non-citizen figure is nearly double the citizen figure, which is rather telling (I’m assuming these are figures for legal immigrants, but nowhere in the article does it actually make that distinction). However, the figures are high because they include certain things we don’t necessarily think of as welfare programs, such as tax credits:

In its official filing, the department estimated that about 20 percent of noncitizens receive food stamps or public housing assistance.

[The] 63 percent figure includes other programs such as tax credits or nutrition assistance under the Women, Infants and Children program, and includes households where the children, who often are citizens, receive benefits such as Medicaid.

Those would not be targeted by the rule, nor would American parents who adopt special-needs children from overseas and apply for Medicaid benefits to help with their care.

The article mentions that a law was passed during the Clinton administration that was a milder version of the one being considered now, but the Clinton law has been very rarely enforced. The currently proposed law:

…would add food stamps, public housing and long-term institutionalized care to the list of potential public charge grounds. Disaster relief, assistance to immigrants serving in the armed forces or their families, and emergency medical care would not count against an immigrant.

The attacks on this proposal follow expected lines, citing cruelty to immigrants and a chilling effect that would cause them to not seek needed services.

I’m not sure what I think of this one. Food stamps for a newly-arrived immigrant family—legal immigrants, that is—does not seem like a bad idea to me. Perhaps food stamps for non-citizens should be time-limited. I think that far more important would be to stop the flow of illegal immigrants—the wall and other measures—and to restrict birthright citizenship to the children of legal immigrants as well. Those two arenas are where the more major problems arise.

In the end, the questions are basic ones regarding immigration, questions that comes up again and again: what do we owe new arrivals to this country? Howe many are reasonable to take in, and who will they be? How can we best assure they ultimately become contributing and productive residents and/or citizens rather than a drain on public finances, and how soon after their arrival does this need to happen?

The lengthy history of the liberalism of urban dwellers

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “CatoRenasci” writes:

Consider that urban areas have been more ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ or ‘radical’ (pick an adjective) since time immemorial – at least as far as we have any sort of reliable history: classical writers, both Greek and (especially) Roman often spoke of rural areas as the source of solid republican virtue and the cities as subject to the mob. In more recent times, many of the Founders worried about the cities and praised the (more or less) self-sufficient yeomanry. And, of course, the French Revolution really was a creature of Paris, not of France as a whole. Similarly, most revolutions…

This seems to me to be a basically true observation, although I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some exceptions. CatoRenasci further notes:

The American Revolution, and perhaps the Glorious Revolution in England which preceded it, and to which it is related, are among the few exceptions…

I’m not so sure whether the driving forces behind the American Revolution could be characterized as wholly rural or urban; it seems as though there was a mix of both. For example, Jefferson and Washington and Madison come to mind as largely rural, Hamilton and Franklin and Adams as urban—but that’s just off the top of my head; I’m not an expert on the life history of all the Founding Fathers.

Yesterday I noted the historical trend of liberalism in American cities when I wrote that quite a few US cities “are more or less lost to conservatism, and have been for a long long time (probably almost always, in the case of New York City and a few others).”

CatoRenasci continues:

I think part of the problem historically is how disconnected the urban dweller is (and it’s far more true now than ever) from the production of the things necessary for urban life: food, clothing, even technology.

Indeed; exactly that. It’s something that the Czech author Milan Kundera has noted, in a quote I’ve used many times but will offer again here. It’s about something he calls “imagology” in a 1990 book of his entitled Immortality:

For example, communists used to believe that in the course of capitalist development the proletariat would gradually grow poorer and poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe workers were driving to work in their own cars, [the communists] felt like shouting that reality was deceiving them. Reality was stronger than ideology. And it is in this sense that imagology surpassed it: imagology is stranger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving when people at home had nothing to eat. My Paris neighbor spends his time an an office, where he sits for eight hours facing an office colleague, then he sits in his car and drives home, turns on the TV, and when the announcer informs him that in the latest public opinion poll the majority of Frenchmen voted their country the safest in Europe (I recently read such a report), he is overjoyed and opens a bottle of champagne without ever learning that three thefts and two murders were committed on his street that very day.

Imagology has almost totally replaced reality for many urban dwellers.

There are different laws for Trump than for Clinton or Obama

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the most disturbing things about the war on Donald Trump is the differential application of the law and the political nature of decisions to prosecute.

Andrew C. McCarthy describes the situation thusly:

The major takeaway from the 40-page sentencing memorandum filed by federal prosecutors Friday for Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former personal attorney, is this: The president is very likely to be indicted on a charge of violating federal campaign finance laws.

It has been obvious for some time that President Trump is the principal subject of the investigation still being conducted by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York…

when Cohen pleaded guilty in August, prosecutors induced him to make an extraordinary statement in open court: the payments to the women were made “in coordination with and at the direction of” the candidate for federal office – Donald Trump.

Prosecutors would not have done this if the president was not on their radar screen. Indeed, if the president was not implicated, I suspect they would not have prosecuted Cohen for campaign finance violations at all. Those charges had a negligible impact on the jail time Cohen faces, which is driven by the more serious offenses of tax and financial institution fraud, involving millions of dollars.

Moreover, campaign finance infractions are often settled by payment of an administrative fine, not turned into felony prosecutions. To be sure, federal prosecutors in New York City have charged them as felonies before – most notably in 2014 against Dinesh D’Souza, whom Trump later pardoned.

In marked contrast, though, when it was discovered that Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was guilty of violations involving nearly $2 million – an amount that dwarfs the $280,000 in Cohen’s case – the Obama Justice Department decided not to prosecute. Instead, the matter was quietly disposed of by a $375,000 fine by the Federal Election Commission.

Please read the whole thing. Among other points McCarthy makes, there is very real question as to whether the NY prosecutors are able to indict a sitting president. Ordinarily the answer is “no.” As I said, please read the whole thing for the finer points of relevant law.

My focus here, however, is the law’s differential application, and the clear political goal in charging Trump (or D’Souza before him) versus the mild wrist-slap for Obama. This is extremely disturbing and has become standard operating procedure. Most Democrats applaud it, with the exception of Alan Dershowitz, because it’s in the service of the great and wonderful goal of bringing down Trump and conservatives. In these cases it’s not even necessary to “cut a great road through the law to get after the devil.” It’s merely necessary to apply the law (the letter of the law) to the person you hate and give a pass to the person you like.

And it’s also not necessary to actually convict, although with the right (that is, left) judge it’s possible to do so. What’s more important is to try to set the stage for impeachment.

There’s a great deal more on the subject of what’s been going on with the war against Trump, which began long before he was elected. I may discuss the following in more depth later on if I have time, but for now I’ll just list the following recommended articles: this one from Victor Davis Hanson, and this.

Conservatives and urban dwellers

The New Neo Posted on by

On the blue blue cities:

Conservatives do not do well in the cities…

But it’s not only the coastal dens of sin that we have written off: In Texas — Texas! — Republican office-seekers (a reasonable if imperfect proxy for conservative political tendencies) are largely shut out of the cities: Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, El Paso — all are reliably Democratic. There is no Texas city larger than Fort Worth that routinely elects Republican mayors or that can be relied upon to support Republican candidates in state and national elections.

That was written by National Review’s Kevin Williamson, who seems to believe that part of the problem is that conservatives disapprove of these cities (“coastal dens of sin that we have written off”) and have ignored them. I think he’s got the wrong order—I think that most city-dwellers (with the exception of, say, the residents of Salt Lake City) are not simpatico with Republicans or conservatism and the right has reacted by giving up in despair.

The real question is why the conservative message doesn’t resonate with city dwellers. That’s connected to other questions, such as why certain minorities (blacks, non-Cuban Hispanics, Jews) are so strongly and almost monolithically (particularly black Americans, who are ordinarily at least 90% Democratic) in support of the Democratic Party. Certain age groups lean heavily Democratic, and of course university towns tend to be that way too.

The answers are not necessarily mysterious, and some of them have been aired on this blog many times.

Willliamson adds:

Americans, in particular the younger ones, don’t seem to be getting the message. The best and brightest of them keep going to the colleges we [conservatives] hate, studying for the professions we hold in suspicion or contempt, and dreaming of moving to cities that we’d be content to see washed into the sea.

I know that some conservatives fit Williamson’s description, but I think he’s way overgeneralizing. I certainly don’t fit his description—I’ve lived in blue enclaves most of my life, and visit cities such as New York and San Francisco with enthusiasm (not that I’m necessarily typical, but I still think that in this essay he’s describing a rather small subset of conservatives).

However, those cities are more or less lost to conservatism, and have been for a long long time (probably almost always, in the case of New York City and a few others), What’s newer, I believe, is the loss of all those Texas cities. Perhaps it’s a simple case of changing demographics—the influx of Hispanics and also the migration of so many blue staters (Californians, for example) to places such as Texas, bringing their blue politics with them. In addition, for college towns such as Austin, the ever-increasing leftist slant of academics and education will also skew the population more and more to the left.

Williamson’s suggestion is the following:

Ambition for advancement, and the wealth and status that comes with it, was until five minutes ago part and parcel of American conservatism. That was the best message American conservatives ever had: “Being rich and happy is awesome! Here’s how you can do it, too.”

And there are still millions of Americans who want to advance and to enjoy the best things that American life has to offer, many (though by no means all) of which are to be found in the greatest abundance in American cities and in the cosmopolitan culture that America conservatives once took for granted as something of their own. What do we have to offer them? When is the last time we asked them what it is they like about Brooklyn and Austin? When is the last time we considered their personal and cultural aspirations with anything other than resentment, contempt, and outrage?

I really don’t know what Williamson is talking about. Conservatives have not abandoned that message described in the first paragraph of the above quote. They keep hammering on it, but people have to be receptive to it and to also believe conservatives can deliver it in order to listen. Conservatives have been successfully branded by the left as greedy and racist, and that is the filter through which residents of blue cities hear conservatives’ words.

How to counter that is the question, and I don’t have an answer. But neither does Williamson.

[NOTE: As for the #walkaway movement, composed of people who have left the Democratic Party—some of them young urban people and also members of minorities that are ordinarily strongly Democratic—although it’s an encouraging sign, it’s too small a group to matter at this point. However, listening to what they say is at least a beginning. I’ve listened to a great many of their YouTube videos, and generally they are saying that the Democratic Party was starting to repulse them more than that the Republican Party was attracting them. In fact, many of them have taken pains to say that although they’ve stopped being Democrats, they’re not Republicans.]

Huawei and the arrest of Wanzhou Meng

The New Neo Posted on by

Of concern for several reasons:

Lake recaps “the arrest in Canada of Wanzhou Meng, Huawei’s chief financial officer . . . on what appears to be Huawei’s evasion of U.S. sanctions against Iran.” Then Lake quickly cuts to the chase: “These are serious allegations, but U.S. intelligence agencies have an even greater concern: that China’s largest telecom company will allow the Chinese state to monitor the electronic communications of anyone using Huawei technology.”

Lake recounts how earlier this year U.S. spy agencies urged Americans not to use Huawei phones; how Australia banned Huawei from assisting the development of its 5G wireless network; and, how in October, Senators Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.) warned Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, that joint intelligence activities with the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand may be curtailed if Canada allows Huawei to aid in the construction or maintenance of his nation’s 5G wireless network.

Further, he informs readers how, in 2012, the House Intelligence Committee released a “comprehensive report on Huawei and ZTE” that determined: “Inserting malicious hardware or software implants into Chinese-manufactured telecommunications components and systems headed for U.S. customers could allow Beijing to shut down or degrade critical national security systems in a time of crisis or war.”

I would say that China is more to be feared than Russia these days, but neither country is our friend—which is an understatement. In the Cold War things were more clear and we were more aware. Plus, the internet did not exist, and the internet, the expansion of international trade, and modern telecommunications in general have opened up a whole new world of spying and/or influence possibilities.

Finding the musical fountain of youth

The New Neo Posted on by

I was looking at one of those “then and now” rock music videos, in which there are a series of clips of rock singers singing one of their old hit songs when it was new and then singing it again much more recently.

Sometimes the person has lost his or her voice, but sometimes the singer sounds as good as ever. The same for looks. Some of the singers look as though there are about a thousand intervening years between their two clips rather than a few decades. Some look forever young(ish).

Case in point—someone named Peter Cetera. I’d never heard of him before, but I had heard the hit song he sings here. In the first clip he’s 42 years old (already a little bit long in the tooth for a rock singer) and in the second he’s 73. But he looks pretty darn good for 73—although he’s dressed like a corporate businessman, and he’s taken on an eerie resemblance to Bill Clinton:

Another singer I’ve never heard of is Susanna Hoff. But again, I know the song she sings here. In the first clip she’s 37 and in the second she’s 59, but not only does she look good, but she seems to have retained much of the quality of her very distinctive vocals. Despite this, though, she seems like a very different person, and the song has a much more contemplative and introspective quality:

And here’s a change of pace. It’s from Britain’s Got Talent, and the guy singing here is a 64-year-old parish priest from Ireland. I include it because I’ve always liked this song, but I also think this illustrates a number of things, among them how a voice can sound younger than a person’s years although the person may not look especially young, and also how an older person can convey a depth of feeling and experience that is difficult for a younger person to achieve:

John Kelly on the way out as chief of staff

The New Neo Posted on by

No surprise here.

By the way, the lede in that article is very poorly written. Or maybe it’s very well written, depending on what the writers were hoping to convey. Let’s take a look:

Former White House chief of staff John Kelly, who was assigned to bring a level of discipline to President Donald Trump’s often chaotic administration, is leaving the post after internal tensions increasingly spilled into public view in recent months, Trump said Saturday.

So, what did Trump say? Do you think he said that Kelly is leaving “after internal tensions increasingly spilled into public view in recent months”?

Of course not; that’s the authors of the article saying it. Trump said Kelly is leaving, praised him, and the rest is the authors’ editorializing within a supposedly straight news article, along with either careless construction of the sentence or very careful construction of the sentence to make it seem that Trump admitted to all that.

Who will be Kelly’s replacement? The money is on Nick Ayers, Pence’s chief of staff.