Election Day open thread

The New Neo Posted on by

[BUMPED UP: I’m bumping this post up to the top for now, so please scroll down to see the newer posts. After the polls close in the east and returns begin, I’ll be starting a new Election 2018 thread.]

It’s Election Day, 2018.

I’m tense. And you?

I’m sure I don’t have to remind you to get out and vote.

I’m trying to remember whether I ever failed to vote in a midterm election back when I was relatively non-political. The answer is “maybe.” I know that I always voted in presidential years, and I’m pretty sure the same was true for midterms, but I can’t be sure.

Two different parties, two different worlds?

The New Neo Posted on by

Not exactly, but sort of:

…[T]he American electorate has separated into two increasingly homogenous political tribes. As Lilliana Mason points out in Uncivil Agreement, “partisanship can now be thought of as a mega-identity.” The Republican mega-identity is religious, middle-class, rural, and white. The Democrat mega-identity is secular, working class, urban, non-white, and gay. But perceptions about group homogeneity can clash with reality.

I’m living proof of that. By sex, religion, education, appearance, general background, probably every demographic marker you can name, I should be a liberal Democrat. And indeed, once upon a time (in the increasingly distant past) I was a liberal Democrat. But when I turned into a conservative (which did not happen overnight), nothing else about me changed.

I do have a quarrel with the list of stereotypic attributes for perceptions of “the Democrat mega-identity” (otherwise known as “stereotype”). Urban, yes. Non-white? To a certain extent—that is, including a much higher percentage of non-whites than the Republican Party does (you can see the actual statistics for 2016 here; both parties are majority white, however, although the percentage for Republicans is much higher than for the Democrats). But “working-class”? Those days ended quite a while ago, not just with Trump. Reagan made the first inroads since the Depression, although I’m having trouble finding some statistics, and I think the political affiliation of this group has been rather fluid over the years. But “working class” does not automatically mean “Democrat” any more.

And “gay”? I would assume that the majority of gay people are indeed Democrats (although of course there are plenty of exceptions, such as this guy—and I also remember going to a Tea Party rally right at the start of that movement, and chatting for a long time with a woman who said she was a Hispanic lesbian who’s a Republican, and could I imagine what that was like for her?). But gay people are very much a minority in terms of percentages of overall numbers, even in the Democratic Party.

I think this is a fascinating statistic:

…Americans are convinced that they are locked in a political grudge match against a homogeneous tribe of outsiders.

As a result, Republicans and Democrats are increasingly unwilling to get married, be friends, or live beside one another. In 1960, only 5% of Republicans and 4% of Democrats disapproved of their child marrying outside their party. In 2014, 30% of Republicans and 23% of Democrats disapproved of inter-party marriage. Compare this to interracial marriage, a former taboo. According to Gallup, 87% of Americans now favor interracial marriage, up from 4% in 1958.

This next statistic surprised me (it’s from 2014):

Along the same lines, 63% of Republicans and 49% of Democrats report being friends primarily with those sharing their political views.

In my experience (and I’ve looked at life from both sides of the political fence) it’s more common for Democrats to shun Republicans as friends than vice versa. Maybe what’s not so common is for them to admit it. Or maybe the question was poorly worded; maybe when a lot of Democrats were answering, they were interpreting lack of sharing of political views as being, for example, a Democrat but not quite as far to the left as they are. Here’s the link to the survey question, which was asked in 2014 during the Obama years (and by the way, the summary results as I read them are actually 42% for Republicans and 33% for Democrats):

I would guess that things have gotten considerably more polarized these days rather than less.

And then there’s this:

Another nationally representative study found that 20% of Democrats and 15% of Republicans believe that their country would be better off if large numbers of people in the other party died.

Whoa! Are those the folks who’d be more than willing to start another Civil War? In this case, it was more Democrats who feel that way.

I once had some guy who I was having dinner with say to me in surprise, “I don’t understand it; you’re so smart, and yet you’re a Republican!” He was being sincere. This was at least ten years ago, and the polarization was already bad enough.

It took every bit of my discipline not to beat the living crap out of Politifact for this stupidity

The New Neo Posted on by

No, not really.

I’ve never beaten the living crap out of anyone, much less a website. I confess that, although as a child I certainly hit some people back when they hit me, I did zero damage and am in fact a rather weak-armed specimen of humanity, as well as a person who tends to fight only with words.

Even as a blogger I’m kind of mild.

But Politifact had to twist and turn and bob and weave to even attempt to make something a bit less offensive out of what Joe Manchin said about his debate on Novermber 3rd, and whether a tweet from the West Virginia Republican Party about it was correct.

Here’s the tweet:

That’s indeed what Manchin had said. But this is what Politifact had to say about it, in order to rate it as only “mostly true” rather than “true, true, true”:

The tweet linked to an article in the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication, that included verbatim text from the campaign appearance in Marmet, W.Va., as well as an audio clip.

Here’s what Manchin said:

“You might have seen the debate the other night. (Applause) I want to tell you something. It took every bit of my discipline not to beat the living crap out of them. You don’t come to someone’s state. You don’t come in here and not knowing who we are and just be spewing out horrible things. Every other word was trust, liberal, trust, dishonest, and I’m thinking, ‘Trust?’ Here’s a man who ran for Congress, Patrick Morrisey ran for Congress in New Jersey in 2000. He ran in the primary and got beat, only got 9 percent of the vote. Who trusts who?”

Morrissey picked up on the “beat the living crap” remark, tweeting that “the national media should look at so-called Mr. Civility in action.”

But the West Virginia Republican Party’s tweet twisted Manchin’s words by not reporting his entire remark.

In Marmet, Manchin did express his frustration with Morrisey’s attacks in the recent debate — enough frustration to feel an impulse to “beat the living crap out of” his opponent.

But the tweet leaves out an element of what Manchin said — that “it took every bit of my discipline” not to do it. In other words, by the time he was speaking in Marmet, he had already extinguished that impulse.

That said, even what Manchin did say does seem to conflict with a prior pledge in favor of civility.

Ya think?

Actually, the West Virginia GOP’s tweet did not “twist Manchin’s words by not reporting the full quote.” The full quote does indeed say that Manchin
wanted to “beat the living crap out of” his Republican opponent. Nor did Manhin say that he had put the impulse behind him before the debate began. That’s Politifact’s imagination. The full Manchin quote indicates that “it took every bit” of his “discipline” to restrain himself from hauling off and belting his opponent during a debate, a war of words. If it takes every bit of discipline to desist from becoming physically violent, that certainly indicates wanting to do it and yet somehow, even with every ounce of your effort, barely managing to restrain yourself.

In addition, the tweet contained a link to an article with this headline that included the “discipline” part of the quote: “Manchin: ‘It Took Every Bit of My Discipline Not to Beat the Living Crap Out’ of Republican Opponent.”

There was nothing misleading about that WVGOP tweet. There is, however, quite a bit that’s misleading about the Politifact article—although you’d have to be pretty stupid to actually be misled by it.

Manchin, by the way, is 71 years old. I doubt he’ll be beating the living crap out of anyone these days. But his opponent isn’t exactly a spring chicken, either, at 50. I have to say, though, that it’s Manchin who looks more like a lean, mean fighting machine, at least in the physical sense.

Do you like coffee? I don’t. Now they’re saying it’s our genes.

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve written before about the fact that I hate coffee. So this National Geographic article, which reports that scientists have said that whether we like coffee or have trouble with it is at least partly genetic, is of interest.

Of course, a genetic basis for coffee love and coffee hate isn’t really any sort of a surprise. But my attention was caught in particular by the article’s opening sentence:

A warm cup of coffee is a necessary part of the morning routine for millions of people around the world.

A warm cup of coffee? Even I, non-coffee-drinker extraordinaire, am aware that most coffee-drinkers prefer a hot cup. Isn’t “warm” some sort of abomination?

Which makes me think that the article was written by a non-coffee-drinker like me.

More:

Regular coffee drinkers will develop some level of tolerance to caffeine over time that can be reversed just by backing off the daily cup. But if you avoid coffee because it makes you anxious, sleepless, or nauseous, it could be due to variations as small as a single nucleotide in your DNA—the A, G, C and T of the genetic alphabet…

…[W]hen it comes to caffeine, just two genes handle most of the work. CYP1A2 produces a liver enzyme that metabolizes roughly 95 percent of all ingested caffeine. AHR controls how much of that enzyme you produce. Together, these genes control how much caffeine circulates in your bloodstream, and for how long…

“For someone who has a genetic variant that leads to decreased caffeine metabolism, they’re more likely to consume less coffee compared to someone who has a genetic variant that leads to increased caffeine metabolism,” Cornelis says.

There’s another gene that influences how much anxiety a person feels from ingesting caffeine, and also genes that influence whether you perceive coffee as noxiously bitter or not.

For me, coffee makes me nervous both physically and mentally, upsets my stomach, and tastes bad, too. Not a great combo. Why on earth would I drink it? The only kind of coffee I like is coffee ice cream, which isn’t coffee at all, really. With coffee ice cream, the sugar overrides the bitterness, and the amount of caffeine is negligible. As for an upset GI system—well, since I’m lactose-intolerant, too, that already happens if I eat a large quantity of ice cream.

But—go ahead, enjoy your coffee. I’ll just sit here in the corner by myself.

Tomorrow is Election Day…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and I have no hesitation in saying I’m nervous.

I also freely admit I have no idea what will happen, particularly in terms of the House. And it’s not just me; no one knows. Some prognosticators will be right in their predictions and some wrong, but that will probably be due far more to luck more than to knowledge.

But I’m not quite as critical of pollsters as a lot of people are. Elections are getting more and more difficult to predict. Telephone polling, which has been the usual way to do it for the least umpteen years, has become almost impossible to perform correctly because so many people either have blocks on their phones or simply won’t answer unless they know the source of the call and it’s a trusted friend, relative, or business. So how can a pollster get a representative sample of the electorate?

In addition, enthusiasm is such a huge driver of turnout that relying on samples that use a similar turnout model to the most recent election is probably going to be a flawed method. That’s not pollsters’ fault; it’s just inherently difficult and I believe has become more so.

What’s more, the House races are usually going to be harder to predict than a presidential race or even the Senate. That’s because every single seat in the House is up for grabs every two years. That’s 435 races, folks, and although the majority of them are not what you’d call “competitive”—instead, they’re in districts in which the outcome is pretty much a foregone conclusion—enough of them are in doubt that the polling challenge is formidable. Most districts don’t have neat little borders like states do, the population involved is ordinarily smaller, and there are so many districts needing to be surveryed that it would be quite expensive to keep polls up-to-date. Since viewpoints often change close to election time, the information is not usually so current except in a few very hotly covered races.

So we have even people like Nate Silver hedging their bets:

“So in the House we have Democrats with about a 4 in 5 chance of winning,” Silver told ABC’s “This Week.”

However, he noted that “polls aren’t always right.”

“The range of outcomes in the House is really wide,” he explained. “Our range, which covers 80 percent of outcomes goes from, on the low end, about 15 Democratic pickups, all the way to low to mid 50s, 52 or 53.”

“Most of those are under 23, which is how many seats they would need to win to take the House,” he said.”

“But no one should be surprised if they only win 19 seats and no one should be surprised if they win 51 seats,” Silver added. “Those are both extremely possible, based on how accurate polls are in the real world.”

If Nate isn’t careful, he might just talk himself out of a job.

Looking at 2016, a year in which most people claim the pollsters got it very wrong, I noted just a few weeks after that election that the polls were pretty spot on for the national popular vote. In fact, since I wrote that piece, more votes came in that proved the polls to have been even more spot on than was evident at the time of the post: the final results in the popular vote was that Hillary was two percentage points up, and that’s about what most of the pre-election polls had predicted.

But of course, in a presidential election the nationwide popular vote doesn’t matter, except in some people’s minds. What matters is the Electoral College, and that’s done on a state-by-state basis. That’s where the 2016 polls fell down, but only because many of the states that ended up going to Donald Trump, against pollsters’ predictions, did so by very small margins. That means they were extremely hard to have predicted. And they pretty much all went in the same direction—to Trump.

That’s what often happens in an election. There are trends. One trend is that the bulk of the close races will go to one party or another. This may occur this year in Congress, and is actually pretty well nigh impossible to predict.

Compromised CIA communications during the Obama years

The New Neo Posted on by

This is a very disturbing story:

From around 2009 to 2013, the U.S. intelligence community experienced crippling intelligence failures related to the secret internet-based communications system, a key means for remote messaging between CIA officers and their sources on the ground worldwide. The previously unreported global problem originated in Iran and spiderwebbed to other countries, and was left unrepaired — despite warnings about what was happening — until more than two dozen sources died in China in 2011 and 2012 as a result, according to 11 former intelligence and national security officials….

…[It] started in Iran in 2009, when the Obama administration announced the discovery of a secret Iranian underground enrichment facility — part of Iran’s headlong drive for nuclear weapons. Angered about the breach, the Iranians went on a mole hunt, looking for foreign spies, said one former senior intelligence official.

The mole hunt wasn’t hard, in large part, because the communications system the CIA was using to communicate with agents was flawed. Former U.S. officials said the internet-based platform, which was first used in war zones in the Middle East, was not built to withstand the sophisticated counterintelligence efforts of a state actor like China or Iran. “It was never meant to be used long term for people to talk to sources,” said one former official. “The issue was that it was working well for too long, with too many people. But it was an elementary system.”

By 2010, however, it appears that Iran had begun to identify CIA agents. And by 2011, Iranian authorities dismantled a CIA spy network in that country, said seven former U.S. intelligence officials. (Indeed, in May 2011, Iranian intelligence officials announced publicly that they had broken up a ring of 30 CIA spies; U.S. officials later confirmed the breach to ABC News, which also reported on a potential compromise to the communications system.)

Iran executed some of the CIA informants and imprisoned others in an intelligence setback that one of the former officials described as “incredibly damaging…” A lack of proper vetting of sources may have led to the CIA inadvertently running a double agent, said one former senior official — a consequence of the CIA’s pressing need at the time to develop highly placed agents inside the Islamic Republic.

Please read the whole thing.

Apparently the system was not changed, and the same thing occurred in China. The article also points out that during the entire time, John Brennan was Obama’s Homeland Security advisor, and then shortly after the beginning of Obama’s second term he became head of the CIA.

Who’s organizing and funding the caravan?

The New Neo Posted on by

An article at Sarah Hoyt’s site by Bill Reader has some answers. Read the whole thing; the basic answer is “the Central American Left,” but here are some details that might especially interest you:

…Barolo Fuentes, a Honduran socialist who was one of the frontmen for this caravan, and his friends in the LIBRE party; Pueblo sin Fronteras, a project of the Chicago-Based 501c La Familia Latina Unida; and a brief look at Venezuela, recently highlighted by Vice President Pence and currently in the spotlight as a possible funding source for all this…

…So, this wasn’t just nondescript social activism, but someone who has deliberately and repeatedly assisted specifically with illegal immigration…

La Tribuna picks up the story above in more detail, and describes [Fuentes] as having organized caravans since 1999. They note also that he is an “ex-deputy” in the National Congress of Honduras, for a group called Libertad y Refundación (Freedom and Refoundation) AKA LIBRE for short. The Honduran government is unicameral, but he was essentially the local equivalent of a senator/representative. Who is LIBRE? Why, they’re a Leftist Political Party in Honduras. They were founded in 2011 by the National Popular Resistance Front/ National People’s Resistance Front (FNRP). LIBRE was christened by Manuel Zelaya, the Honduran president who was deposed in a coup in 2009…

Zelaya, 2009, Honduras. Does that ring a bell? It should, if you’ve been reading this blog since then, because I wrote about Zelaya a lot. The context was that Obama supported him. If you want to refresh your memory just do a search on this blog for “Zelaya,” but the article with the most information is probably this one. There are plenty of others.

Then, from the Reader article, we also have this:

All of this suggests that the original organization of the caravan was indeed put together in Honduras—specifically, by people from LIBRE. The question is, did it stay that way?

To begin to answer that question, we turn our attention to Pueblo Sin Fronteras. To understand that group, first we need to get to know another group— La Familia Latina Unida, an extension of the pro-illegal immigration advocacy 501c out of Chicago, Centro Sin Fronteras. La Familia Latina Unida, in turn, is the organization that runs Pueblo Sin Fronteras. So, to be clear, Centro Sin Fronteras begat La Familia Latina Unida, which begat Pueblo Sin Fronteras. Pueblos Sin Fronteras may not be familiar to you, but their handiwork is—they organized the last caravan which came to the US in April, though that caravan mostly dissolved before it actually reached the border. According to Influence Watch, Centro Sin Fronteras was founded by Emma Lozano, a Chicago pastor and sister of left-wing community organizer Rudy Lozano, in 1987…

Centro Sin Fronteras is currently running on the back of grants from the Public Welfare Foundation, and the Wieboldt Foundation—certainly Left-Wing funding organizations, though surprisingly, not directly tied to George Soros. That said, Centro Sin Fronteras, you will perhaps be interested to hear, has been a beneficiary of the National Immigration Forum, which in turn receives donations from the Open Society Foundation, which of course is George Soros’ baby. The last donation was modest and back in 2010, though. I mention it to highlight what Trump has highlighted, and what a lot of those on the Right who have paid attention have known forever— in liberal charitable donation wankery, all roads eventually lead to Soros. The group apparently hasn’t been amazingly good about regularity in tax filings recently, so it’s hard to say how they’re doing of late.

You are free to criticize George Soros without being anti-Semitic (Part II)

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Please see Part I here.]

I ended Part I in the following way:

…accusing Soros of being a “formenter of social dissent” and an “agitator funding and masterminding protest” is simply the truth about Soros. If it’s the truth, it’s the truth. Nor do you have to be a white supremacist worried about the “undermining of a white, Christian social order” to worry about a leftist with a ton of money funding leftist activists.

But is Soros “malevolent” and “sly” about it? And does he actually fund the caravan?

Not every conspiracy theory rumor about Soros is true, of course. But there is no question that Soros has indeed funded much leftist activism and other leftist causes; it’s a matter of public record. These are facts, not rumor:

…[D]uring the 2003–2004 election cycle, Soros donated $23,581,000 to various 527 Groups (tax-exempt groups under the United States tax code, 26 U.S.C. § 527). The groups aimed to defeat President George W. Bush. After Bush’s reelection, Soros and other donors backed a new political fundraising group called Democracy Alliance, which supports progressive causes and the formation of a stronger progressive infrastructure in America.

Soros also has donated plenty of money to Obama and Hillary. He’s promoted democracy in Eastern Europe (not everything Soros does is bad, as far as I can tell). But whether a person believes that he’s used his money mainly for ill or mainly for good, it is clear that it is absolutely correct to say that Soros “foments dissent” and “funds and masterminds protests,” whether the WaPo thinks that feeds too well into anti-Semitic memes or not. The rest of this post will detail some of his activities in that direction, as well as other causes.

Soros has funded various campaigns to decriminalize marijuana, and supported legalized suicide for the dying, Regarding Israel:

“I don’t deny the Jews to a right to a national existence – but I don’t want anything to do with it.” According to hacked emails released in 2016, Soros’s Open Society Foundation has a self-described objective of “challenging Israel’s racist and anti-democratic policies” in international forums…

On Soros and George Bush:

On November 11, 2003, in an interview with The Washington Post, Soros said that removing President George W. Bush from office was the “central focus of my life” and “a matter of life and death.” He said he would sacrifice his entire fortune to defeat Bush “if someone guaranteed it.”

You may recall that in an earlier quote it was stated that Soros donated about 25 and a half million dollars to effect that particular defeat. It didn’t work, but that’s an awful lot of money, and an awful lot of influence for one person to buy. And that statement has nothing to do with anti-Semitism, either. I would say the same thing no matter what Soros’ ethnicity or religion.

There’s much more, including Soros’ instigating and then profiting from a financial crisis (see this). No less a man of the left as Paul Krugman wrote of Soros (or actually, of financiers like Soros whom he refers to as “Soroi”): “these days there really are investors who not only move money in anticipation of a currency crisis, but actually do their best to trigger that crisis for fun and profit.”

In 2006 Soros wrote that “the main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.” This is a man who is willing to put his money exactly where his mouth is. Is there any wonder people on the right would fear and despise him? They don’t have to invent conspiracy theories—although some do—to believe he is dedicated to using his money and the vast resources at his command to undermine that “main obstacle” as well as advancing the progressive causes in which he believes and that he has supported for a long time.

Is it any wonder that many people on the right assume that Soros may be funding all kinds of leftist causes more secretly, in addition to the leftist causes he funds in plain sight?

Soros is not EveryJew. He doesn’t stand for Jews in general, he stands for himself.

As far as the theory that Soros is funding the current caravan from Central America goes, I’ve seen no direct evidence that this is the case. However, I can’t really blame anyone for imagining that perhaps he is the source of the funds and organization that are obviously coming from somewhere. And that’s basically what Trump said:

As the White House administration increases its pressure on the caravan of migrants heading to the United States from Central America, one reporter asked the president if he thought someone was paying for it.

Trump replied: “I wouldn’t be surprised, I wouldn’t be surprised.” A reporter then asked: “George Soros? Who’s paying for it?” to which Trump replied: “I don’t know who, but I wouldn’t be surprised. A lot of people say yes.”

Again—as with so many of these controversial Trump quotes—it was the media that brought it up, in what they thought was a “gotcha” question. Trump’s answer—“I wouldn’t be surprised”—is my answer, too, and it simply makes sense. That doesn’t mean it is true, but it means it is very plausible (or perhaps we should say that it’s credible, which seems to be the MSM’s new favorite word).

That article I just linked is from Newsweek. In it, they don’t mention who might be funding the caravan instead. Nor do they describe Soros very well, although they describe him in a way that suits their purposes. First, they call him a “prominent Democratic donor. Then, they say this:

Soros, a Holocaust survivor and a billionaire philanthropist, was among the targets of mail bombs sent to key Democratic figures last week, allegedly by Trump supporter Cesar Sayoc.

Just a nice nice guy, and a victim of the right. Nothing about his activist activities around the world, or about something that’s even more relevant, Soros’ Open Society Foundation and its activities. I’ve said that there’s no evidence that Soros has funded this particular caravan, although it’s a possibility. But there certainly seems to be bona fide evidence that he helps illegal immigrants once they’re here as well as encouraging illegal immigration to this country and open borders:

Both the NILC [National Immigration Law Center] and its offshoot, United We Dream, get big bucks from Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF). In fact, both nonprofits list OSF as a key financial backer. In the United States Soros groups have pushed a radical agenda that includes promoting an open border with Mexico and fighting immigration enforcement efforts, fomenting racial disharmony by funding anti-capitalist black separationist organizations, financing the Black Lives Matter movement and other groups involved in the Ferguson Missouri riots, weakening the integrity of the nation’s electoral systems, opposing U.S. counterterrorism efforts and eroding 2nd Amendment protections. OSF has also funded a liberal think-tank headed by former Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and the scandal-ridden activist group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), so corrupt that Congress banned it from receiving federal funding.

Incredibly, the U.S. government uses taxpayer dollars to support Soros’ radical globalist agenda abroad. As part of an ongoing investigation, Judicial Watch has exposed several collaborative efforts between Uncle Sam and Soros in other countries. Just last week Judicial Watch published a special investigative report that exposes in detail the connection between U.S.-funded entities and Soros’ OSF to further the Hungarian philanthropist’s efforts in Guatemala. The goal is to advance a radical globalist agenda through “lawfare” and political subversion, the report shows. Much like in the United States, OSF programs in Guatemala include funding liberal media outlets, supporting global politicians, advocating for open borders, fomenting public discord and influencing academic institutions.

That article is by Judicial Watch, which bases its work on access to records it obtains through requests and court orders through the Freedom of Information Act (there’s also this article that appeared in the NY Times in 2014, back when Obama was president and such things didn’t need to be denied).

It seems that Soros’ activities are often connected not just with direct grants to political candidates and the like, but are accomplished through his Open Societies Foundation. Reading about the Foundation and what it does,the first thing that strikes me is the huge scope of the thing (worldwide) and the amount of money involved: for example, $873 million in 2013.

The description of what the Foundation promotes is very general, and some of it actually sounds good: early on, goals were ending Communism in Eastern bloc countries and fighting HIV and AIDS, for example. But then there are things like this, which clearly qualify as leftist activism:

OSF reported granting at least $33 million to civil rights and social justice organizations in the United States. This funding included groups such as the Organization for Black Struggle and Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment that supported protests in the wake of the shooting of Trayvon Martin, the death of Eric Garner, the shooting of Tamir Rice and the shooting of Michael Brown.

Back to the Foundation’s Wiki entry:

NGO Monitor, an Israeli NGO, produced a report which says, “Soros has been a frequent critic of Israeli government policy, and does not consider himself a Zionist, but there is no evidence that he or his family holds any special hostility or opposition to the existence of the state of Israel. This report will show that their support, and that of the Open Society Foundation, has nevertheless gone to organizations with such agendas.” The report says its objective is to inform OSF, claiming: “The evidence demonstrates that Open Society funding contributes significantly to anti-Israel campaigns in three important respects: 1. Active in the ‘Durban strategy;’ 2. Funding aimed at weakening U.S.support for Israel by shifting public opinion regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iran; 3. Funding for Israeli political opposition groups on the fringes of Israeli society, which use the rhetoric of human rights to advocate for marginal political goals.” The report concludes, “Yet, to what degree Soros, his family, and the Open Society Foundation are aware of the cumulative impact on Israel and of the political warfare conducted by many of their beneficiaries is an open question.”

That’s actually pretty interesting. It shows how difficult it is to prove the extent of Soros’ involvement in any one policy. Since it is his enormous Foundation offering the assistance— rather than Soros himself giving a grant out of his own pocket, cause by cause—it is always possible for him to preserve some degree of deniability, and for the left to characterize his critics as anti-Semites making stuff up.

Good luck, Professor Abrams

The New Neo Posted on by

Samuel Abrams is a Sarah Lawrence professor who has had the audacity to write about the lack of intellectual diversity among faculty and administrators on today’s college campuses, and of course the SJWs don’t like it and think he should leave:

Professor Samuel Abrams is a conservative-leaning tenured professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College. He is active in Heterodox Academy, a group of almost 2000 academics devoted to intellectual diversity on campus.

Prof. Abrams recently wrote an op-ed for the New York Times about the lack of ideological diversity among administrators at his school and elsewhere. The column, titled Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators, brought together research Prof. Abrams had done on left-leaning bias among college professors and administrators, and how it stifles open debate.

Predictably, some people on campus reacted in this manner:

After penning an op-ed for The New York Times decrying the ideological homogeneity of his campus administration, a conservative-leaning professor at Sarah Lawrence College discovered intimidating messages—including demands that he quit his job—on the door of his office. The perpetrators had torn down the door’s decorations, which had included pictures of the professor’s family.

In the two weeks since the incident, Samuel Abrams, a tenured professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence, has repeatedly asked the college’s president, Cristle Collins Judd, to condemn the perpetrators’ actions and reiterate her support for free speech. But after sending a tepid campus-wide email that mentioned the importance of free expression, but mostly stressed her “commitment to diversity and inclusive excellence,” Judd spoke with Abrams over the phone; according to him, she accused him of “attacking” members of the community.

“She said I had created a hostile work environment,” Abrams said in an interview with Reason. “If [the op-ed] constitutes hate speech, then this is not a world that I want to be a part of.”

What’s more, when the two met in person, Judd implied that Abrams was on the market for a new job, he said.

“I am not on the job market,” he said. “I am tenured, I live in New York. Why would I go on the job market?”

I have to say that my first reaction to the story was surprise—not at the reaction of some students and of Judd, but at the fact that Abrams had ever been hired by Sarah Lawrence in the first place. Even back in the Stone Age when I was in college, Sarah Lawrence was known as an artsy-fartsy college with no required courses, and written evaluations instead of grades. What on earth is Abrams doing there, of all places?

Another thing of which I was almost certain, even before I looked it up, was that Judd was not the person who hired Abrams. And that turns out to be correct. Judd became the college’s president in August of 2017, and Abrams was hired eight years ago.

That last link is to an article about him in the college magazine. Here’s an excerpt:

n the heat of a presidential campaign that divided the nation into two camps barely able to communicate with each other, Sam Abrams (politics) took students from his course “Presidential Leadership and Decision Making” on a field trip deep into what most of them regarded as enemy territory: a Donald Trump rally on Long Island…

Abrams wanted to give his undergrads something he believes most college students these days aren’t getting—what he likes to call “viewpoint diversity.” He wanted them to see “what the world looks like that’s not pro–Bernie Sanders.”

When he came to Sarah Lawrence eight years ago, Abrams says, he was viewed as “the token raging conservative, but the reality is I’m not even close to that.” In a 2016 New York Times op-ed, he described himself this way: “In most places I’d be considered a moderate, but in the campus context I might as well have been Ted Cruz.”

In the article (I can’t find a date on it, but obviously it’s at least 2016 and perhaps later), Abrams makes it clear that he’s not a Trump supporter. My guess is he’s more or less in the Romney mold, politically. But he is correct that at Sarah Lawrence—and at most campuses today—that makes him Ted Cruz. And not just Cruz, but a Nazi.

I wish him well—he’s a brave man. He’s chosen to thrust himself into the spotlight for a worthy cause, that of intellectual diversity on campus. And he has made an important point in his most recent op-ed, which is that campus administrators are, if anything, more doctrinaire and rigidly leftist than professors.

Judd probably made the same point.

What’s in a name?

The New Neo Posted on by

These days, it’s likely to be four letters:

American names are shrinking. The two most popular names in the US for baby boys in 2017 were Liam and Noah; for girls, Emma and Ava were two of the three most popular. That’s a dramatic shift from just a few decades ago. In 1990, no name in the top ten had less than five letters—the interminable Michael and Christopher topped the list. No name with fewer than six letters made the top five in 1990—thank you Jessica, Ashley, Brittany, Amanda, and Samantha.

Girls’ and boys’ name lengths both reached their peak in 1989, with girls’ names averaging over 6.4 letters, and boys’ names average about 6. Since then, the average girl’s name fell by 0.4 letters and the average boy’s name by over 0.2 letters. The US government data used for this analysis includes all names given to at least five babies in a given year, which is the vast majority of names.

A lot of parents are using what used to be considered nicknames as given names, probably a trend towards less formality. There’s also a general trend towards shorter titles of businesses, as the article points out:

The length of popular song names are getting shorter. So are the length of video game names. Even company names are shrinking (e.g. Dunkin’ Donuts is now just Dunkin).

Shorter attention spans, too?

What’s going on at Google?

The New Neo Posted on by

Employee protests, that’s what:

After a day of global protests, employees at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters added their voices to calls for major change to company policies on gender pay equity and sexual misconduct.

Chants of “Stand up, fight back” and “Women’s rights are workers’ rights” reverberated through a crowd of several hundred workers who gathered on the eastern edge of the company’s vast Mountain View campus at about 11am on Thursday.

Google is not alone in Silicon Valley in being a tech company that veers to the left. Oh, I don’t doubt that a number of Google employees at the Silicon Valley campus are on the right—probably keeping a fairly low profile—but I also don’t doubt that most of its employees and executives share a basic pro-left political orientation. So one might call this a blue-on-blue battle, in the main.

But just try to get much detail about what the protesters are actually saying, other than the generality that women make less money there than men. But are the protesters saying that women make less than men doing the same exact job and working the same exact hours with the same production and the same seniority? Or are they just comparing salary differentials in general (by sex) and finding them wanting?

I’ve read several articles (including this older one) dealing with the alleged pay gap at Google, and so far I haven’t found any details about the form the discrimination is alleged to take, although those details make a difference—to me, anyway, although perhaps not to so many of the protesters.

And then there are the charges about the ignoring and/or coverup of sexual harassment charges at the company:

…female employees who spoke in a packed courtyard aired serious grievances.

One organizer of the California headquarters event shared the story of an anonymous co-worker who said she complained of sexual harassment by a Google vice-president, who then kept his job at the company for three more years.

Why did he keep his job? Was it because the company was investigating and affording him that arcane and apparently somewhat-outdated protection (particularly on the left), due process? If so, was the company instead supposed to fire him immediately because She Said So? And then tar and feather him on the way out? Would that have made them happy?

I don’t know. Maybe that’s not what this is about at all. But from that article it was extremely difficult to tell.

One of the people who was alleged to have sexually harassed someone and yet gotten an exceptionally generous severance package was Andy Rubin, the developer of the Android phone system. He denies the harassment charges.

Here’s what Wiki has to say about the harassment allegations and Rubin’s departure from Google:

On October 31, 2014, he left Google after nine years at the company to start an incubator for hardware startups.

While the departure was presented to the media as an amicable one where Rubin would spend more time on philanthropy and start-ups, according to media reports in 2017 and 2018, [Google] CEO Larry Page personally asked for Rubin’s resignation after a sexual harassment claim against Rubin was found to be credible. Rubin disputed these reports and denied wrongdoing. The incident, among others, led to protests from Google’s employee workforce in 2018 over Rubin reportedly receiving a $90 million “exit package” to expedite his separation from the company. Google responded by sending a memo to employees saying no employees dismissed due to sexual harassment concerns after 2016 had received payouts.

Not much to learn there. Accusations, yes. But were the charges true or false? And what were they, exactly?

I found much more information here, however (emphasis mine):

According to the report [recently in The NY Times], [Google] stayed silent about sexual misconduct allegations against three executives over the past decade, including Android creator Andy Rubin, who left the company in 2014. Tech news site The Information previously reported that Google had investigated Rubin for an inappropriate relationship while at the company.

But the Times uncovered new details, including a reported $90 million exit package that Rubin is said to have been granted when he departed the company. The Times reported that Rubin was accused of coercing a female employee, with whom he’d been having affair, into performing oral sex in a hotel room in 2013. A Google investigation found her claim to be credible and then-CEO Larry Page asked Rubin to resign, according to the Times.

Sam Singer, a lawyer for Rubin, disputed the allegations in the Times report.

“None of the allegations made about Mr. Rubin are true,” he told CNN Business in a statement, calling them “demonstrably false.”

So these allegations were made by a woman with whom Rubin was having an affair. That doesn’t mean coercion couldn’t have been involved; of course it could have been. But it does put the charges in an immediately different light. And since the word “credible” has merely come to mean “it wasn’t an absolute impossibility that this might have occurred,” it remains well-nigh impossible to figure out what may have actually happened.

Which brings us to the motherlode, the NY Times story that appeared about a week ago:

What Google did not make public was that an employee had accused Mr. Rubin of sexual misconduct. The woman, with whom Mr. Rubin had been having an extramarital relationship, said he coerced her into performing oral sex in a hotel room in 2013, according to two company executives with knowledge of the episode. Google investigated and concluded her claim was credible, said the people, who spoke on the condition that they not be named, citing confidentiality agreements. Mr. Rubin was notified, they said, and Mr. Page asked for his resignation.

Google could have fired Mr. Rubin and paid him little to nothing on the way out. Instead, the company handed him a $90 million exit package, paid in installments of about $2 million a month for four years, said two people with knowledge of the terms. The last payment is scheduled for next month.

Mr. Rubin was one of three executives that Google protected over the past decade after they were accused of sexual misconduct. In two instances, it ousted senior executives, but softened the blow by paying them millions of dollars as they departed, even though it had no legal obligation to do so. In a third, the executive remained in a highly compensated post at the company. Each time Google stayed silent about the accusations against the men.

So, now companies are supposed to publicize unsubstantiated allegations as long as they are “credible,” and to not only fire the accused but punish them by not giving them severance packages? And all of this can and should be done without a trial or proof (at least as far as I can tell)? And all reported in the Times, told to reporters by sources in the company who remain anonymous to the public and therefore cannot be questioned or evaluated for reliability.

I don’t know about you, but this whole thing sends a chill down my spine. In the case of Rubin (the only accused Google executive we get a few details about), that chill is about what appears to be the blowing up of something that seems to be a fairly typical lover’s quarrel in an area of human interaction that is unbelievably murky: the way that two lovers in a consensual relationship negotiate the sexual acts in which they are going to be engaging. What is “coercion” under those circumstances? What sort of “coercion” is actionable? How on earth do you prove or disprove that it happened the way it’s said to have happened?

And no, you cannot just believe one sex or other. Correction: of course you can, and many do, but that goes against our entire system of justice and fairness and replaces it with a new type of pseudo, witch-hunt “justice”: social justice. And yes, I know, that’s the goal of the left; it’s not an accident.

One of the many takeaways from this is don’t have sex with anyone in your company. Good luck enforcing that one, right? Nor would it even actually protect men (or women, for that matter, although it’s usually men who are accused) against false accusations by someone outside of the company. And that includes a wife, I suppose, who could just as easily make the sort of charge that was made against Rubin.

We’re not given any details of the charge of coercion against Rubin in terms of the form the coercion was alleged to have taken. Maybe Rubin pointed a gun at his lover’s head, right? I doubt it. Maybe he threatened to fire her. That would at least make sense in terms of the company’s having a special interest in the story. But how on earth could anyone ascertain the truth or falsehood of such claims, unless they were backed up with emails from Rubin that contained similar threats? And if he’s dumb enough to have done that, maybe he should be fired for stupidity alone.

I certainly haven’t a clue what actually happened between these two people. But neither do any of those protestors, I can pretty much guarantee.

Just to make the Rubin story even more convoluted, here’s a quote in that Times article, from Rubin and his spokespeople:

Sam Singer, a spokesman for Mr. Rubin, disputed that the technologist had been told of any misconduct at Google and said he left the company of his own accord.

“The New York Times story contains numerous inaccuracies about my employment at Google and wild exaggerations about my compensation,” Mr. Rubin said in a statement after the publication of this article. “Specifically, I never coerced a woman to have sex in a hotel room. These false allegations are part of a smear campaign by my ex-wife to disparage me during a divorce and custody battle.”

Wow. Just wow. A divorce and custody battle, the classic venue in which false accusations sometimes appear.

The Times article is long, and there’s a bit more in there about Rubin:

[His] success gave Mr. Rubin more latitude than most Google executives, said four people who worked with him.

Mr. Rubin often berated subordinates as stupid or incompetent, they said. Google did little to curb that behavior.

A little voice in my head says “well, perhaps they were stupid and incompetent.” Was Rubin’s initial problem, then, a lack of tact and people skills? Perhaps. It’s not an unusual problem for those who are very tech-oriented and who then are called on to manage people.

And then there’s this:

It took action only when security staff found bondage sex videos on Mr. Rubin’s work computer, said three former and current Google executives briefed on the incident. That year, the company docked his bonus, they said.

You mean like, Fifty Shades of Grey type stuff? But isn’t that mainstream now? Of course, it’s very stupid to put porn on your work computer, if that’s what Rubin did. What in fact did Rubin do?:

Mr. Singer, the spokesman for Mr. Rubin, said the executive “is known to be transparent and forthcoming with his feedback.” He said Mr. Rubin never called anyone incompetent.

Mr. Rubin, 55, who met his wife at Google, also dated other women at the company while married, said four people who worked with him. In 2011, he had a consensual relationship with a woman on the Android team who did not report to him, they said. They said Google’s human resources department was not informed, despite rules requiring disclosure when managers date someone who directly or indirectly reports to them.

In a civil suit filed this month by Mr. Rubin’s ex-wife, Rie Rubin, she claimed he had multiple “ownership relationships” with other women during their marriage, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to them. The couple were divorced in August.

The suit included a screenshot of an August 2015 email Mr. Rubin sent to one woman. “You will be happy being taken care of,” he wrote. “Being owned is kinda like you are my property, and I can loan you to other people.”

We are supposed to take this literally? Obviously, it seems likely that Rubin had a pretty scummy and promiscuous sex life. Not so very unusual among powerful people. But I highly doubt this particular exchange was anything other than banter of the sort you often find in romance novels—and porn. The money was probably real enough, but it seems as though everyone involved was a consenting adult.

And then we get this, which is apparently a further reference to the charges I already discussed, about coercion to have oral sex:

Mr. Rubin was casually seeing another woman he knew from Android, according to two company executives briefed on the relationship. The two had started dating in 2012 when he was still leading the division, these people said.

By 2013, she had cooled on him and wanted to break things off but worried it would affect her career, said the people. That March, she agreed to meet him at a hotel, where she said he pressured her into oral sex, they said. The incident ended the relationship.

The woman waited until 2014 before filing a complaint to Google’s human resources department and telling officials about the relationship, the people said. Google began an investigation.

What does “casually seeing” and “dating” mean these days, in this context? Are we to understand they were just dating without having sex? Is that even believable (credible)? Other reports refer to this as an affair (and earlier in the same article the Times has called it an “extramarital relationship”), so again it’s impossible to understand what’s actually being alleged here. My best guess is that “casually seeing” means “having regular sex without commitment.”

The woman says she had thoughts of breaking it off (the “casual seeing,” or the affair? Or were they one and the same?) but did not express those thoughts to the man in question because she’s worried about the effect on her career (duh, maybe she should have thought of that before she began a some type of affair with a married higher-up at the company? Or maybe she began that affair with the thought that it would help her career?).

Again, the “pressure” or coercion is unspecified in the story, although I would imagine it was specified by the woman when she detailed her charges against Rubin to the company. I wonder why the Times—which has seen fit to tell us just about everything else it can find—hasn’t told us the details of that. Perhaps for some reason the reporters couldn’t get the information about the nature of the coercion, or perhaps they got it and failed to publish it because the information weakens their story in some way.

And then, of course, there’s her wait before filing a complaint. What was that about? We’re not told.

Do the Google employees who are demonstrating about this know, or care, about any of its oddities? Do they entertain any doubt at all about Rubin’s guilt? Do they know what he is even supposed to be guilty of? How many of them just believe that a bad man was mean to a woman, and Google didn’t immediately place him in the stocks so that they could throw rotten tomatoes at him?

Who knows? Not me.