Let’s take a look at Bill Cosby again, shall we?

The New Neo Posted on by

Distasteful though that process may be.

I wrote a lot about the Cosby charges and the Cosby trial. It’s easy to take a look, here.

The gist of the situation regarding Cosby was and is as follows:

I happen to think Cosby is guilty. I also think he has a scummy sexual history: cheating on his wife, and kinky stuff involving drugged women. But when I say that I think he’s guilty, I don’t mean that he’s guilty of having a scummy sexual history of cheating and drugging, although those things are apparently true. I mean I think he’s guilty of at times having sex with women (or at least one woman) without their consent, having given them drugs. Those were the acts for which he was tried, and it came down to the issue of consent.

If you look at just about all of those posts I wrote about the Cosby accusations and trial, I’m actually defending him because I thought he did not get a fair trial. And that is despite the fact that I think he most likely is guilty. But I think the rules of evidence were misapplied in his case, as I wrote here.

Now, perhaps you may not care if Cosby was unfairly treated by the court because you think he’s a scumbag. I do care, though, because I care more about the fairness of the legal system—and the protection of the rights of the innocent, which is everyone till proven guilty—than I care about putting Bill Cosby in jail.

If that makes me a bleeding heart, so be it. I don’t think it does, though. I think it makes me very skeptical of the honesty and decency of people in power, particularly when they think that right is on their side in addition to might. All tyrannies, or at least a great many of them, begin with people who think they have good intentions.

A lot of people think that Cosby was a scumbag, that he used drugs to sleep with women who were practically unconscious, and so it’s obvious that the women didn’t consent and that they’re telling the truth in their accusations. Such people sometimes don’t care what the prosecutors did to Cosby because they want him in the slammer and they don’t care if prosecutors have to cut a few corners to do it.

I disagree, which may put me in the minority at this point. But it also puts me in league with the Founding Fathers, who were very concerned about such issues. Their deep concern and the protections they built into the Constitution have protected us for a long time, but I fear that concern has virtually evaporated in the face of MeToo. And actually, it’s been evaporating for quite some time.

To turn to that other court, the court of public opinion—a lot of people have pointed out that cases like that of Roy Moore and Harvey Weinstein have accustomed us to think that the accusations of one person are stronger if there are other, similar accusations. Now, we reap the dubious “benefits” of that with Kavanaugh, where even the most suspect accusations are strengthened (in the eyes of some people, anyway) when there’s more than one accuser. But weak, suspect accusations are weak and suspect no matter how many there are. What makes accusations especially weak or suspect? Sketchy memory, a long previous silence, a political and/or financial motive for making the claim, and reading about other claims from other women giving the new accuser ideas for a similar set of charges. It’s not hard to do for anyone who may have had any prior encounter with the accused, and who has the motivation.

Is Rosenstein toast?

The New Neo Posted on by

The news is coming from all angles today. There’s a report that Rod Rosenstein is on the way out:

Axios has reported that “Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has verbally resigned to Chief of Staff John Kelly in anticipation of being fired by President Trump, according to a source with direct knowledge.”

Other reports indicate that Rosenstein is headed to the White House and “expecting to be fired” and he will not resign.

Last week, The New York Times wrote using anonymous resources that Rosenstein offered to wear a wire to tape Trump and try to rally Cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment.

That’s about it so far. An anonymous source tells us Rosenstein and/or Trump is doing this, and the leavetaking is apparently is based on last week’s Times story (based on an anonymous source) that Rosenstein had offered to spy on Trump for the Resistance.

I will update when more is known.

I do wonder, though, why the Times published the story about the wire offer. I would have thought they wanted to protect Rosenstein. There’s an angle here I must not be seeing. Perhaps it’s that they wanted to provoke Trump into firing Rosenstein, and then have Trump attacked for it?

The anti-Kavanaugh plan of attack

The New Neo Posted on by

This evening I wrote a post about the second Kavanaugh accuser. I want to add a few more thoughts, but I decided to use a separate post.

Not only was it inevitable that the left would find someone else to accuse Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, however vague the accusation and however deeply they had to dig—but it is also fairly obvious that they’ve known about this second person for some time (it took a while to interview her and write the story). I think it’s highly likely that all those negotiations with the Senate over the first accuser’s testimony had one basic goal: to postpone the vote till this second story could be published.

Even a story as thin as this second one gives ammunition to the anti-Kavanaugh forces. No matter how suspect the accusations, sheer numbers tend to convince people. I don’t see the logic in it—twenty hazy, ancient, vague, uncorroborated recollections about a person that one political party wants to destroy are no better than one. But precedent made it clear to the left that it can work.

A little over a week ago I wrote a post that ended like this:

…beware!! It’s scorched earth, and we [the left] will use every method we can think of to destroy you.

And this is the truth.

Another point that occurs to me is that, not only was the campaign to delay the confirmation vote and let Ford testify before the Senate based on the knowledge that this New Yorker article was in the hopper, and the delay was precisely timed to make sure it was published shortly beforehand, but now Ford really doesn’t have to testify at all. Maybe she will, but maybe she won’t. But the negotiations and delay to get to this second accuser were the point. And if Ramirez wants to testify—or temporarily claims she does—the idea would be to effect another delay until, if possible, the rollout of another accuser.

In fact, the article about the third accuser is probably already being written. There is no question that other accusers are being sought, encouraged, and/or solicited [see *NOTE below].

And still another point of it all is to peel off people like Flake and Collins and Murkowski and have them vote “nay.” They will find it harder and harder to hang tough in the face of multiple accusers.

The GOP had better come up with a strategy against this, or it will destroy the party. It may even destroy the country. Maybe it already has.

Or maybe, just maybe, the mendacity, the transparent plotting by the left, the leading of the witnesses, the danger posed by false and uncorroborated defamation, will finally touch enough people that they’ll realize what’s going on here and reject it.

Maybe. That’s my hope, anyway.

[ *NOTE: Coaching the witness:

First, Ramirez says she was completely inebriated when the misconduct supposedly occurred.

Second, she told the New Yorker she wasn’t certain what happened until “after six days of talking with her attorney” a former elected Democrat. According to Farrow and Mayer, “in her initial conversations with The New Yorker, [Ramirez] was reluctant to characterize Kavanaugh’s role in the alleged incident with certainty.” But one can do plenty of brain washing in six days.

We’ve all heard of the “MeToo” movement. Now we have the “MeToo, My Democrat Attorney Thinks” movement.

I have no doubt this happens quite often.

And then after the goal is reached and the accused candidate is defeated, we never hear from the accuser again.]

[ADDENDUM: It occurs to me that the entire country has become one big Title IX hearing, in which due process is waived, a woman is always presumed to be telling the truth, and all men are scum. The only difference here is that only Republican men are scum; for Democrats, the accusations bounce right off.]

A second accuser, of course

The New Neo Posted on by

Everyone has been expecting this. And there may be a third and a fourth, but they will be revealed one by one, in single file, with timing exquisitely calibrated in order to drag the entire thing out.

There will be however many of them that it takes, no matter how trivial the stories, no matter how ancient, no matter how tenuous the identification, no matter that no one who was supposedly there corroborates the tale.

It doesn’t take much to concoct a story of this sort, and for those who must believe this (or pretend to believe it) for their own purposes, it is enough:

…the New Yorker has released a story by Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer detailing an accusation from Kavanaugh’s Yale days.

The story…introduces a woman who claims Kavanaugh exposed himself and put his penis right in front of her face. It’s a very serious allegation… and one that is so flimsy that the accuser herself doesn’t appear too confident in her own allegations, and virtually every other source the New Yorker spoke to refutes the claim.

This is from the New Yorker article:

A third male student then exposed himself to her. “I remember a penis being in front of my face,” she said. “I knew that’s not what I wanted, even in that state of mind.” She recalled remarking, “That’s not a real penis,” and the other students laughing at her confusion and taunting her, one encouraging her to “kiss it.”…She remembers Kavanaugh standing to her right and laughing, pulling up his pants. “Brett was laughing,” she said. “I can still see his face, and his hips coming forward, like when you pull up your pants.” She recalled another male student shouting about the incident. “Somebody yelled down the hall, ‘Brett Kavanaugh just put his penis in Debbie’s face,’ ” she said. “It was his full name. I don’t think it was just ‘Brett.’…

…after several days of considering the matter carefully, she said, “I’m confident about the pants coming up, and I’m confident about Brett being there.”…

One of the male classmates who Ramirez said egged on Kavanaugh denied any memory of the party. “I don’t think Brett would flash himself to Debbie, or anyone, for that matter,” he said. Asked why he thought Ramirez was making the allegation, he responded, “I have no idea.” The other male classmate who Ramirez said was involved in the incident commented, “I have zero recollection.”

In a statement, two of those male classmates who Ramirez alleged were involved in the incident, the wife of a third male student she said was involved, and three other classmates, Dino Ewing, Louisa Garry, and Dan Murphy, disputed Ramirez’s account of events: “We were the people closest to Brett Kavanaugh during his first year at Yale. He was a roommate to some of us, and we spent a great deal of time with him, including in the dorm where this incident allegedly took place. Some of us were also friends with Debbie Ramirez during and after her time at Yale. We can say with confidence that if the incident Debbie alleges ever occurred, we would have seen or heard about it—and we did not. The behavior she describes would be completely out of character for Brett. In addition, some of us knew Debbie long after Yale, and she never described this incident until Brett’s Supreme Court nomination was pending. Editors from the New Yorker contacted some of us because we are the people who would know the truth, and we told them that we never saw or heard about this.”

I think maybe a full trial is in order for Kavanaugh, don’t you think? We can have Christine and Debbie testify (after some memory-refreshing by a bunch of lawyers), and we can put out a call for other accusers among every woman (or man; hey, let’s not limit it, maybe he abused men sexually, too, and dogs) who ever knew Brett Kavanaugh.

A look back:

The girls [in Salem] delivered up their own reports with difficulty, falling into testimony-stopping trances, yelping that Burroughs [the accused] bit them. They displayed their wounds for court officials, who inspected the minister’s mouth. The imprints matched perfectly. Choking and thrashing stalled the proceedings; the court could do nothing but wait for the girls to recover. During one delay, Chief Justice Stoughton appealed to the defendant. What, he asked, did Burroughs think throttled them? The minister replied that he assumed it was the Devil. “How comes the devil then to be so loath to have any testimony born against you?” Stoughton challenged. A brainteaser of a question, it left Burroughs without an answer.

He was equally bewildered when ghosts began to flit about the overcrowded room. Some observers who were not bewitched saw them too. Directly before Burroughs, a girl recoiled from a horrible sight: she explained that she stared into the blood-red faces of his dead wives. The ghosts demanded justice…

At one point, a former brother-in-law testified, Burroughs had vanished in the midst of a strawberry-picking expedition. His companions hollered for him in vain. They rode home to find that he had preceded them, on foot and with a full basket of berries. He had divined as well what was said about him in his absence. The Devil could not know as much, the brother-in-law protested…

Out of excuses, Burroughs extracted a paper from his pocket. He seemed to believe it a deal-clincher. He did not contest the validity of spectral evidence, as had others who came before the court, who did not care to be convicted for crimes they committed in someone else’s imagination. Instead, Burroughs, reading from the paper, asserted that “there neither are, nor ever were witches, that having made a compact with the Devil can send a Devil to torment other people at a distance.” It was the most objectionable thing he could have suggested. If diabolical compacts did not exist, if the Devil could not subcontract out his work to witches, the Court of Oyer and Terminer had sent six innocents to their deaths…

Early on the morning of August 19th, the largest throng to date turned out to inspect the first men whom Massachusetts was to execute for witchcraft. Martha Carrier joined them on the trip to the gallows. As the cart creaked up the hill, George Burroughs, George Jacobs, John Proctor, and John Willard insisted that they had been falsely accused. They hoped that the real witches would soon be revealed. They “declared their wish,” a bystander reported, “that their blood might be the last innocent blood shed upon that account.” They remained “sincere, upright, and sensible of their circumstances, on all accounts.” They forgave their accusers, the justices, the jury; they prayed they might be pardoned for their actual sins. Cotton Mather journeyed to Salem for the execution. Some of the condemned appealed to him in heartrending terms. Would he help them to prepare spiritually for the journey ahead? It is unclear if he did so or if he held the same hard line as the Salem town minister, who did not pray with witches.

Burroughs appears to have climbed the ladder first. With composure, he paused midway to offer what many expected to be a long-delayed confession. A wisp of his former self after fourteen weeks in a dungeon, he remained a contrarian. Perched above a crowd that included his former in-laws and parishioners, a noose around his neck, he delivered an impassioned speech. With his last breaths, Burroughs entrusted himself to the Almighty. Tears rolled down cheeks all around before he concluded with some disquieting lines. “Our Father, who art in Heaven,” Burroughs began, continuing, from the ladder, with a blunder-free recitation of the Lord’s Prayer—an impossible feat for a wizard, one that any number of other suspects had not managed. For a few moments, it seemed as if the crowd would obstruct the execution.

Minutes later, the minister dangled from a roughly finished beam.

More “Midnight Run”

The New Neo Posted on by

While we’re at it—and to get some relief from all the angst right now—an earlier post today where I added a clip from “Midnight Run” reminded me of how much I love that movie.

Love love love that movie.

And so, just for fun, here’s another clip:

And this, one of the most touching scenes in any movie, ever:

Lucy (aka Christine Blasey Ford) holds the football for Charlie Brown (aka the GOP in the Senate) once again

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the latest:

Note the same old passive-aggressive snark that I pointed out in this post.

(For those of you unaware of the Peanuts reference in the title of this post, please see this.)

Apparently there’s also an issue about flyiing—Ford claims she needs the extra time because of fear of flying (a fear occasioned by the supposed attack when she was 15, the genesis of every subsequent problem in her entire life).

Now, I certainly respect people with a bona fide fear of flying. But her claim almost inevitably conjures up this scene from one of my favorite movies, “Midnight Run.” Here Robert De Niro works for a bail bondsman trying to bring fugitive embezzler Charles Grodin back to face the music, and Grodin—determined to escape or at least to delay so that De Niro misses his deadline—pretends to be afraid of flying, although we later learn it’s all a ruse and he’s actually a pilot:

The face of justice: accuser and accused

The New Neo Posted on by

This post isn’t really about Kavanaugh and Ford, although obviously that’s the jumping-off spot. It’s about the larger issues that the controversy reflects, which have to do with the nature of justice.

Robert Frost (yes, that Robert Frost) had this to say on the subject (from a talk he gave at Bread Loaf in 1960):

Naturally there’s a constant natural conflict between justice and mercy. The big joke is that somebody on earth ought to balance them up. Probably God does. It could be assumed. That is the most Godlike thing: to balance them—mercy for justice or a just mercy. But there’s something there that’s almost too hard for a mortal man to get.

When I was a child I was very taken with these questions. That may sound unusual, but I don’t really think it is. Children (many children, at least) naturally want the world to be a just place. They want the guilty punished and the innocent rewarded. They want it to be easy to tell the difference. And they don’t want to wait decades to see it happen.

In fact, many children are so into the idea of justice that if bad things happen to them they imagine they must indeed be bad people. But that’s another topic for another time.

But justice and mercy are not usually easily balanced for most people, even children. Most people either fall into what I would call the prosecutor mentality, bent on punishing the perps, or the defense attorney mentality, bent on making sure the accused has the benefit of the doubt and is not railroaded into jail.

I was much more the victim in my life as a child. I was small, young, and a girl, surrounded by adults who were not necessarily all that kind, and older boys who were intent on teasing me and even hitting me quite often, and I was not strong enough to defend myself successfully although I constantly tried—really, on a daily basis. Now, that’s not the worst thing a child ever faced, but believe me it wasn’t an easy situation either.

Based on my situation, one would think I would grow up with the prosecutor mentality. But for some reason I grew up with the defense attorney mentality. I had a horror of false accusations—an absolute horror. In fact, one of my early heroes was Clarence Darrow (I wrote about him in this lengthy post), and when I went off to law school years later it was with the idea of becoming a defense attorney. Although Criminal Law and Evidence were indeed two of my favorite courses, I realized early on that I didn’t have the temperament (read: cojones) to become a defense attorney or even a trial attorney of any sort.

But I’ve never lost my outrage when people rush to judgment on the face of flimsy evidence. I think I am quite consistent as well, not just favoring those whose politics match mine but applying the same rules to all.

The Kavanaugh hearings have been another terrible manifestation of the fact that so many people are only too happy to rush to the attack of someone whose politics they don’t like, and to defend a person whose politics they do like, and to mouth pious and yet pernicious stupidities like “believe the women” or “believe the victims.” That way lies the end of our system of justice, which though flawed is one of the best if not the best ever developed by humankind.

In that same 1960 speech, Frost also said this:

The Democratic Party and the Republican Party are having quite a time about it right now. They both want to sound merciful enough, and they both want to sound just enough. They’re going to outdo each other in getting that right. The nice way is to choose the Democrats for being too merciful. Somebody calculated that the mercies that they promised the world were going to cost us about fifty billion dollars a year—if they did all they had in their program. The Republicans have got to sort of match that somewhere if they don’t get broke.

Frost correctly predicted that, in the effort to seem “nice” and counter the Democrats’ seeming niceness, the GOP would move to the left and end its own fiscal austerity. That’s indeed what happened.

Frost also says there that both parties were attempting to sound both merciful and just. That was probably true then, but it’s not true anymore—or rather, I observe that the Democrats have completely abandoned the “mercy” part of the equation where their political opponents are concerned. Or you might say that they’ve redefined “just” and “mercy” as being whatever they see as benefiting one of their protected classes/groups of people: women, minorities, everyone but white men.

Needless to say, that’s not justice. But it’s the new kind of “justice”—so-called “social justice.” See, they’ve even co-opted the word “justice.”

When did ticket scalping become perfectly fine?

The New Neo Posted on by

When I was young, ticket scalping was against the law, at least that was my distinct impression and my distinct memory.

It also wasn’t so easy to do. Tickets had to be bought either at the box office or with a transaction through the mail. It was harder to do it in bulk. And in order to scalp them, since the internet didn’t exist, people ordinarily had to stand around in the theater district—preferably near the theater in question—and ask passers-by if they wanted to buy a ticket to a popular show. It exposed the scalper to being arrested, because the person and the transaction were visible and sometimes even obvious.

At least, that’s the way I remember it.

Now scalping is big business. Big big business online. People apparently manage to buy blocks of tickets (even though there are some safeguards in place online to supposedly prevent this) and then they sell them for huge bucks to desperate theatergoers, mostly tourists I’d imagine. The old scalpers used to buy the tickets for around eight dollars and mark them up somewhat, but since Broadway tickets now cost hundreds of dollars even at the outset, the scalpers can make a much tidier profit. For a really big show, the tickets can go for many thousands of dollars.

And this all seems to be on the up and up—or at least winked at—with companies like Ticketmaster being the middleman.

When did this become perfectly okay? I missed the transition. According to current law, it’s not legal to sell tickets (in New York, for example) “for more than $5 or 10% (whichever is greater) over the face price of the ticket.” Don’t make me laugh; the markups are enormous these days, and no one even can tell the face price of the original tickets.

It’s like having an argument with your crazy girlfriend: the latest from Ford

The New Neo Posted on by

[Scroll down to see UPDATES below]

Excerpt from Ford’s lawyer’s letter in response to Grassley’s deadline of 10 PM this evening [and this is not The Onion]:

…The imposition of aggressive and artificial deadlines regarding the date and conditions of any hearing has created tremendous and unwarranted stress on Dr. Ford. Your cavalier treatment of a sexual assault survivor who has been doing her best to cooperate with the committee is completely inappropriate…

The 10 PM deadline is arbitrary. Its sole purpose is to bully Dr. Ford and deprive her of the ability to make a considered decision that has life-altering implications for her and her family. She has already been forced out of her home, and continues to be subjected to harassment, hate mail, and death threats. Our modest request is that she be given an additional day to make her decision.

Note the words that echo the idea of big strong men hurting the little woman: the deadline itself is “aggressive” and the purpose is to “bully” her. Christina Ford (“Dr.” to you) is no longer 15 years old, but the letter implies that that’s her approximate mental and emotional age.

There’s no acknowledgment, of course, of the fact that Ford set this entire thing in motion, that she has had nearly two months (or more) to prepare and 36 years before that, that she is the one who blindsided Kavanaugh and the Republicans in the Senate rather than the other way around, that they have already given her many extensions, and that Kavanaugh’s family has also experienced incredible stress and death threats as a result of her accusations.

Most of us have had the experience of arguing with a person like this. Give an inch? They take a mile. Make concessions? They want more. They are the poor suffering victims. They don’t like your tone of voice. They don’t like the expression on your face. If you try to be calm, you’re cold. If you try to be sympathetic, you’re condescending. Nothing you do is okay, and everything they do is okay.

UPDATE 11:20 PM

So, is our long national nightmare over?

Can this news be true? I’m not sure I trust it:

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley appears to have ended the halting talks with Dr. Christine Blasey Ford about testifying next week about her allegations of sexual assault against Brett Kavanaugh. After setting a sudden 10:00 PM deadline for agreement with his terms and rejecting further talks with Ford or her lawyers, Grassley has reportedly scheduled a Committee vote on the confirmation for Monday.

Reportedly???? Does that mean “actually”? Or is it a rumor?

UPDATE 12:00 AM

Now it appears that Grassley is granting Ford another extension.

To me, this can only mean that a couple of GOP senators such as Flake are saying they won’t vote for Kavanaugh unless Ford is heard. So Ford’s got them over a barrel. This concerns me greatly, because of the pressured time frame as well as the possibility that Flake et al will continue to do the “maverick” thing and refuse to confirm Kavanaugh, even after the testimony (if the testimony ever occurs).

If that happens, the Democrats will be ecstatic and the GOP rank and file furious, and this will be reflected in the elections.

I hope I’m being too pessimistic, but that’s my worry.

Is tonight at 10 the really, for really real, absolute, deadline?

The New Neo Posted on by

Perhaps.

I am woman, I am strong, I am invincible—except when I make a last-minute unfounded accusation against a Republican nominee for SCOTUS about a supposed sexual offense that happened when we were both teenagers some 36-odd years ago, and the mean old GOP senators want me to actually testify in a timely fashion order to back up what I said.

Here’s Grassley’s answer:

I hope that means that Flake et al are on board now.

The fat lady has not sung, however.

[ADDENDUM: It just occurred to me that it’s a good thing that Gorsuch is already on the Court. Why? He attended Georgetown Prep, too, Class of ’85. That means he was only one year behind Christine Blasey Ford, who graduated from Holton in ’84.]

UPDATE 10:25 PM:

Are Christine Blasey Ford and her lawyers trying to drive the GOP—and much of America, including the vast middle—crazy with sheer annoyance?

Enough, already

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m getting tired of all this waiting on the Kavanaugh vote. Wasn’t there some sort of deadline today that came and went? Christine Blasey Ford and her lawyers have played Lucy and the football long enough for me.

So, what are Grassley and McConnell thinking? I don’t know. So far they’ve played this surprisingly well, but I lack faith that they’ll continue to do so.

The delays also make me wonder if the reason they’re not holding the vote now is that there are some defections on the GOP side. They can’t hold a vote unless they’re sure they’ll win it.

And while they’re at it—isn’t it about time to censure Dianne Feinstein?

UPDATE 2:08 PM:

Don’t know whether this report is true, but that’s supposedly where it stands at the moment. In negotiations. I think postponing at this point and allowing her to testify and set conditions is wrong. But my guess—as I wrote above—is that it’s what some of the more squishy GOP senators are insisting happens in order to get their vote.

A bigger GOP margin in the Senate would mean that those particular senators couldn’t hold the rest hostage.

UPDATE 5:15 PM

Curiouser and curiouser, cried Alice:

More here:

“We’ll do it on Wednesday, we expect the accuser before the accused, and we do intend to have the counsel do the questioning,” the senator said, summing up the Republicans’ stance.

The party is assenting to two of the terms Ford’s lawyers laid out in a Thursday evening call with staff from both parties, the senator said: limiting the hearing to one camera and ensuring that Kavanaugh is not in the same room as her.

GOP members of the Judiciary Committee held a conference call on Friday morning to discuss how to respond to the requests from Ford’s lawyers. But several elements of their offer appear to be nonstarters with Democrats and Ford’s camp, which had made clear that she could not be in the capital to testify before Thursday, according to a senior aide to the minority.

“They’re making this disingenuous counteroffer knowing she won’t be here,” the Democratic aide said.

The GOP has been told that Ford does not want to fly from her California home to Washington, according to the Republican senator, which means she may need to drive across the country to make the hearing. Ford has reportedly told friends she is uncomfortable in confined spaces, indicating a physical difficulty in making the trip by plane.