Keeping a security clearance: yes or no?

The New Neo Posted on by

I agree with the basic idea stated here (although apparently not everyone on the list has a security clearance at this point):

This is characterized by the left as Trump taking revenge on those who criticize him. But the reason I agree with what Trump is suggesting be done is not really because these people have proven to be politically-motivated leakers inimical to the administration (although most of them certainly have). I believe that once any person is no longer in a job requiring a security clearance in order to access sensitive and/or classified information—either directly or through speaking to others who do have such jobs—it should be standard operating procedure to revoke such a clearance. If the expertise of that person is again needed later by an administration, a new clearance can probably be expedited and obtained after a more speedy investigation.

And particularly, of course, if such people have become affiliated with the press, retaining a security clearance seems like a travesty and the argument to revoke their clearance becomes even stronger.

But until now, lifelong security clearances seem to have been part of the game (sometimes parlayed into paid or unpaid press and/or speaking gigs), although most of us didn’t realize that. It’s a relic of another time, when such people were thought to be paragons of integrity above the partisan fray.

Ha.

However, I’ve been thwarted in my attempts to discover exactly what privileges a security clearance offers when a person is no longer involved in the job for which he or she needed it in the first place. I’ve read answers that are all over the place, ranging from “they can’t read anything classified” to “yes they can.” At any rate, I see no pressing need for it, and I see potential danger in it.

This State Department website has this to say:

Eligibility will be granted only where facts and circumstances indicate access to classified information is clearly consistent with the national security interests of the United States. Access to classified information will be terminated when an individual no longer has need for access…Security clearances are subject to periodic reinvestigation every 5 years.

I have no idea whether that applies to other agencies than State, no idea whether someone who is no longer in the position continues to have that particular type of access, and no idea whether the rules are different if the person wasn’t just a lowly hire but a big muck-a-muck when in office.

This article purports to answer some of those questions but I have no idea if it’s correct. It seems to be saying, however, that people keep their clearances and have some level of access to classified material but perhaps not the deepest classified material, and that the 5-year renewal is pretty much automatic for the higher-ups.

[NOTE: This post was originally on my older blog and had comments, but unfortunately the comments didn’t transfer over here.]

Trump and Juncker: the dealmakers

The New Neo Posted on by

Is this a deal on trade with Europe, or just a blueprint for a future deal?:

President Trump’s top economic adviser said Thursday that the United States and the European Union will join forces to hold China accountable for unfair trade practices and intellectual property theft.

National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow told Fox Business Network today that the US and Europe “will be allied” against China a day after Trump and EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker announced an agreement to work toward a free trade agreement.

Kudlow said China had “broken the world trading system” and that Junker “made it clear” Wednesday that the EU would back the Trump administration’s efforts to curb trade abuse from Beijing…

Trump and Juncker announced Wednesday that the US and EU had agreed to begin talks geared toward removing all tariffs and trade barriers imposed on each other.

The EU has agreed to increase U.S. soybean and liquified natural gas (LNG) imports, lower industrial tariffs and work more closely together on regulations and energy. The US also agreed to not impose further tariffs on the EU while negotiations continue, including planned levies on foreign automobiles.

Whatever it is, it sure sounds very promising. Roger Simon at PJ Media thinks it’s even more promising than that.

One thing I don’t understand is people who fail to understand Trump’s negotiating style. After all, it’s not as though his modus operandi hasn’t been amply demonstrated. It’s not as though he didn’t write a best-selling book (or dictate one, or supervise the writing of one) about it.

People can disagree with Trump’s goals. They can certainly worry that his tactics won’t work, will backfire, or will wreak havoc. I certainly worry about negative repercussions at times; it’s not an unreasonable worry. But so far things have gone rather well. And I certainly realize what Trump is doing when (for example) he threatens to impose extreme tariffs if people don’t do such and such and such and such. His threats have power because he is perceived as a loose cannon—will he or won’t he? So, if people are afraid to call his bluff—and also if they can get to the point where they see mutual advantages in playing nice with him—he gets the deal.

That seems to be what’s happening right now with Europe.

I didn’t read Trump’s book. But that’s how I read his style. It’s not rocket science; but it does take cojones (or stones or chutzpah; take your cultural pick) to pull it off.

So here’s my question: are people who hate Trump just pretending to not get his style of dealmaking? Or do they really not even understand the concept? Because they write as though it’s one or the other.

Again, it’s certainly possible to criticize it or disagree with it but nevertheless show understanding of it. But so far I haven’t seen too much of that.

[NOTE: After I wrote this post, I noticed that today Andrew Klavan has written in a similar vein.]

[NOTE II: This post was originally on my older blog and had comments, but unfortunately the comments didn’t transfer over here.]

A tiny little wee postponement

The New Neo Posted on by

As my regular readers have no doubt noticed, the transfer to this site didn’t happen yesterday, although I had announced that it probably would.

There were some unexpected difficulties. Or maybe I should say there were some expected difficulties, because it’s certainly not unusual to run into glitches when dealing with something like this.

So, apologies for the delay. The transfer won’t be happening today either because the person doing the heavy lifting on this is busy with stuff in his life today. The goal now is for the redirect to be completed some time over the weekend or perhaps early next week.

I’ll let you know when I know more.

The DNA of 9/11

The New Neo Posted on by

26-year-old Scott Michael Johnson was a securities analyst who worked at the investment banking company Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, located in the World Trade Center. On 9/11 he was killed, but only now has the New York City medical examiners’ office announced that it has positively identified the victim using newer techniques of DNA analysis.

This confirmation is good for the family, although very sad. So many died in that attack, and so many of them were young.

It’s strange to think that there are college students now who were mere babies at the time of 9/11, and who therefore have had the event as part of their historical world-view from the start. It’s also strange to think that, as the linked article mentions, 40% of the dead from that day are still unidentified though DNA. I hadn’t realized the number of unidentified was still that large. It is a graphic reminder of many things, including how devastating the heat and the collapse were, incinerating and then pulverizing everything in their path.

RIP.

[NOTE: This post was originally on my older blog and had comments, but unfortunately the comments didn’t transfer over here.]

The press and the Kavanaughs: I think in the future everybody should assume that every email they write will become public

The New Neo Posted on by

All hail the intrepid, leave-no-stone-unturned investigative reporters of the NY Times and their colleagues in the AP, busy night and day protecting the republic:

The New York Times and Associated Press both filed requests under the Maryland Public Information Act (PIA) seeking e-mails that Ashley Kavanaugh, the wife of President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, sent as town manager of The Village of Chevy Chase Section 5, according to documents obtained by America Rising Squared (AR2) and shared exclusively with the NTK Network.

The two news organizations took different approaches to obtain the e-mails. According to the documents, the AP made a sweeping request for “all emails sent or received” by Ashley Kavanaugh’s Village of Chevy Chase email address.

By contrast, The New York Times is currently requesting that The Village of Chevy Chase Section 5 hand over “any emails to or from Ms. Kavanaugh that contain any of the keywords or terms listed below.”

And what a list it is, including words like “liberal,” “abortion,” “gay,” and “federalist,” while also explicitly asking for e-mails containing the names of certain individuals.

As Ed Morrissey of Hot Air points out, it’s not as though the Times or the AP has suddenly taken an intense interest in the workings of the local government of Chevy Chase, Maryland, fascinating though that task might be. They wish to troll through the emails of Kavanaugh’s wife for the sole purpose of finding a passage they could use to smear her as a racist, a sexist, a something-ist that will reflect poorly on her husband, who is up for confirmation to the Supreme Court. Even if they found such an item (seek and ye shall find—especially if you define the “ists” broadly enough) it would merely be guilt by association. But hey, what not give it a go?

[NOTE: I’m unfamiliar with the news outlets initially reporting on this: NTK network via America Rising Squared. So I’m taking it with a small grain of salt. Take a look at the original article at NTK and judge for yourself.]

[NOTE: This post was originally on my older blog and had comments, but unfortunately the comments didn’t transfer over here.]

Update on the big blog move

The New Neo Posted on by

Quite a few people have come here today, no doubt wondering when the move will happen.

I don’t know for sure, but when I hear something I will post it at both blogs. It’s supposed to happen today or this evening, but I don’t know what time.

Suspense!

Talking to doctors about pain

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an article at NPR that gives advice on talking to doctors about pain. It questions the usefulness of the old tried-and-true 1-10 pain scale and comes down in favor of more descriptive words.

It’s not that I disagree entirely; it’s just that my experience as a chronic pain patient (which I was for about 15 years) taught me some different lessons.

If you’re interested in my story, I’ve written about it previously in many posts, some of which can be found here. Right now I’ll just say that I was in fairly severe chronic nerve pain for well over a decade and saw countless doctors from many disciplines (in particular, orthopedists, neurosurgeons, neurologists, and physical medicine and/or chronic pain specialists). I still have some chronic pain but if I’m careful with certain limits I’ve established, it’s of a minor variety. But much of the time during all those years it was very major, and I often despaired that it would ever get significantly better. The improvement began as a result of a surgery that most doctors thought would not help me, but which one of the world’s finest elbow surgeons was willing to perform on me.

These are some of the things I learned during those fifteen years about talking to doctors on the topic of pain (pain specialists were an exception; they generally—although not always—tended to do significantly better than the others, as one might expect since pain was their bailiwick).

Nearly every time I went to a doctor’s office I was required to fill out that 1-10 pain scale. For the most part, most doctors never seemed to even have looked at it and never referred to it or wanted to talk much about it. Often the examinations and discussions were extremely cursory due to time constraints.

I also usually had to fill out a chart and put Xs and Os and various other marks on a picture of the human body in order to show the sites of my pain and the quality of pain involved at each site (burning, stabbing, electric, etc.). I almost never got any hint from the doctors that they had looked at those, either, although they did seem to know my general situation (back injury plus arm injuries).

Sometimes I was asked to circle descriptive words as well (words are suggested in the article I highlighted today). Ditto; no attention was paid to that either. And one of the things that used to drive me somewhat nuts was that, despite all that information, doctors continually referred to my pain as “numbness.”

Now I ask you: is pain numbness?

Whenever doctors would say point to some part of my body and say something like, “The numbness you report here…” I would respond by telling them it wasn’t numbness, it was pain. Often it was burning pain. Sometimes other kinds of pain. Sometimes disordered sensations of various kinds. But I had no numbness. A common response on their part was to say something like “Pain, numbness; it’s all the same neurologically.”

Now, I understood that they meant—or at least I thought I understood that they meant—that pain and numbness are sensory nerve sensations and deficits and disorders, as opposed to motor nerve problems such as weakness or foot drop or reduction in grip strength or muscle wasting (I had the latter two in my arms and hands). But pain and numbness are certainly not the same to the patient, and a patient with a significant pain component to his or her complaints (and I certainly had that) is not going to be happy when the doctor calls his/her pain “numbness.”

I felt like taking a hatpin out of my purse (no, I don’t really carry hatpins), jabbing the doctor with it, and asking how that numbness felt. This was something like what doctors did regularly to my feet and arms, going up and down with a little pin, and I always could feel the sharpness so that they already knew (or should have known) from that that numbness was not one of my complaints. But it didn’t seem to penetrate to most of them.

That doesn’t mean that some of my doctors weren’t good doctors or weren’t trying to be helpful. Some were, some weren’t. In the end, I found a couple of extremely good and helpful doctors (neither of whom ever made the numbness-is-the-same-as-pain error), such as Dr. David Roos of Colorado, who guided me, and Dr. Frank Jobe of Los Angeles, who supervised my arm surgery. They are both deceased now, but I owe them a great deal. RIP, Drs. Roos and Jobe, and thank you.

[NOTE: This post was originally on my older blog and had comments, but unfortunately the comments didn’t transfer over here.]

Mueller is still looking for the pony: the never-ending investigation

The New Neo Posted on by

The title of this post refers to the old joke about the optimistic child:

There is a famous joke about a child who wakes up on Christmas morning and is surprised to find a heap of horse manure under the tree instead of a collection of presents. Yet, the child is not discouraged because he has an extraordinarily optimistic outlook on life. His parents discover him enthusiastically shoveling the manure as he exclaims, “With all this manure, there must be a pony somewhere!”

Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel in May 2017 as a result of a leak by the newly-fired James Comey that was intended for just that purpose. Mueller’s task was to investigate possible collusion of the Trump campaign with the Russians to subvert the election process in this country. Mueller has vast teams of lawyers at his disposal, and they’ve been shoveling the manure ever since in hopes of finding a pony.

So far, there is no convincing evidence related to the purpose for which they were appointed, although they’ve indicted a number of people in the process on charges having zero to do with their supposed purpose. As far as I can tell there are no practical limits currently being set on the investigation, either in scope or time.

I have long felt that special prosecutors and/or counsels are dangerous political instruments which serve no purpose in most cases in which they are appointed, and that goes for either side. In this, I’m with Alan Dershowitz:

I think the investigation should end and I think the Congress should appoint a special non-partisan commission,” said Dershowitz. He said he thinks a Congressional committee would be too partisan.

“That’s the way it’s done in other western democracies,” he continued. “They don’t appoint a special counsel and tell them to ‘Get that guy…’ that’s what they did in the Soviet Union. Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the KGB said to Stalin, ‘Show me the man, and I’ll find you the crime!’” That’s what special counsel does.”…

The issue of criminalization [of political differences] has not been subject to rational discourse,” said Dershowitz. “Democrats hate when they politicize and criminalize political differences against Democrats… when they did it with Bill Clinton. Republicans hate when they do it against their people… President Trump. But each one supports it when they’re against their enemies and partisanship prevails over principle. It’s very hard to have a reasonable discussion.”

Dershowitz said that citizens should fear the direction of this investigation for their own sake. He warned that today criminalization of political differences appears – now – to only affect presidents and political leaders. “Tomorrow it can affect you and me. If you give the prosecutor the ability to stretch the criminal law to fit a target, it’s very dangerous.”

And I am bipartisan as well in my condemnation—for example, I was and remain against the process that ended up with Bill Clinton’s impeachment. I’ve written several times before about why I hold that opinion and will not rehash it in this post, but please go here and start reading, with special attention to the links in that last paragraph.

That post I just linked contains a quote by another Democrat (or ex-Democrat? hard to keep it all straight) whose recent work I admire, Mark Penn. Keep in mind when you read this that Penn worked for both Clintons, and was Bill’s right-hand man during the Starr investigation and the impeachment process:

To Penn’s mind, an investigation such as this one [Mueller’s]—especially given its unbounded nature—will always be detrimental to the operation of a successful administration and federal government. “I think a lot of people see it as a sporting event: Just get the president! What difference does it make?” he explains. “They think it’s a wholly legitimate tool to use against a president and an administration you don’t like. My attitude on that is, if you don’t like him, vote him out. Introducing these elements into politics is a kind of tool. It had a bad impact in ’98, and a bad impact here.”…

“What’s unprecedented here is the fuzziness of the accusation of ‘Russian collusion,’ which led to the prosecutors examining everybody in the campaign, getting every email and piecing together virtually every meeting about everything, and then investigating everybody in the White House, in this search for that one contact with Russia that might prove it,” he says.

According to Penn, this process could very easily dissuade people from joining campaigns, presidential administrations, or other parts of the government, because it will lead them to believe that to do so could put them at risk of facing costly legal fees, FBI investigation, and possible prosecution. “We can’t run a campaign, democracy, or government under this kind of open-ended investigation,” he argues.

I agree wholeheartedly with Penn and Dershowitz. But Democrats—and as far as I can tell, most people, who love it when it’s their side doing the investigating of the other side—don’t. And right now the Democrats are excitedly awaiting the discovery of the pony.

Meanwhile, today’s news is that Mueller is looking busily at Trump’s old tweets:

Special counsel Robert Mueller is reviewing President Trump’s tweets as he pursues an investigation into whether the president obstructed justice, The New York Times reported Thursday.

The Times, citing three people briefed on the matter, reported that Mueller is particularly interested in Trump’s tweets about Attorney General Jeff Sessions, former FBI Director James Comey and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

The president has used the social media platform to fiercely criticize each official.

Mueller’s office declined to comment to the Times.

“If you’re going to obstruct justice, you do it quietly and secretly, not in public,” argued Rudy Giuliani, the lawyer representing Trump in the Russia probe, in a statement to the paper.

However, Trump’s lawyers told the Times that they don’t believe Mueller is focused on a particular action for obstruction of justice, but rather is looking at the tweets as part of a larger pattern of behavior.

Any pattern of any behavior on anything, as long as it leads them to their goal.

What is their goal? It’s multiple, and the investigation itself—even if it never directly implicates Trump—has the potential to matter. One goal is of course the obvious one of finding a smoking Trump gun, but another goal is to hurt those around him and make it dangerous to work for him so that future possible appointees will be discouraged from doing so. Wouldn’t you think twice before becoming a Trump appointee? I certainly would.

A third goal is to pressure those who once worked for Trump by indicting them and threatening them so that they will rat on him, and whether they make something up or whether it’s true hardly matters. Any ratting will do, just as with jailhouse snitches.

The fourth goal is to create a public climate that is so toxic to Trump that he cannot function.

And a fifth goal is to turn enough members of Congress of either party against him that it results in his impeachment, no matter what Mueller finds or doesn’t find. A sixth and related goal (are you still with me?) is to create so much suspicion that the public will turn Congress over to the Democrats in 2018 in order to begin the impeachment process.

I also think that investigators with power get drunk on that power as a rule, and are loath to give it up, so all these investigations have their own built-in self-perpetuating energy.

[NOTE: This post was originally on my older blog and had comments, but unfortunately the comments didn’t transfer over here.]

Come and get those pheromones

The New Neo Posted on by

“Low-cost pheromones!!” a bot that tried to post today on the blog advertised.

I used to get up to 10,000 spambots a day here, the vast majority trapped in a spam filter than I had to clean out several times a day or it would clog the blog and slow it somewhat. Then suddenly the total went down to about 50 a day, where it has remained.

I don’t know why, but it’s definitely a good development.

I obviously don’t usually look at them, but every now and then I glance at a couple before deleting them, and find something briefly amusing and/or edifying there. The one above was edifying.

They sell pheromones? Indeed, indeed they do. But beware, low-cost or high:

Humans technically have the organ that other animals use to detect pheromones, but many scientists argue that our vomeronasal organ (which sits between the nose and the mouth) is a puny little shell left over from ancient history, incapable of sending smells straight to our brain stem for unconscious response.

That being said, it’s totally possible that humans have pheromones — including ones that drive potential suitors wild.

But since we don’t know what those pheromones are, it’s impossible to sell them. Instead, when you buy a product that claims pheromones as an ingredient, you’re buying the finest in pig-produced chemicals. And despite what many marketers say, there’s no real evidence that humans are sexually swayed by the hormones that get pigs hot and bothered.

And I would be very careful when visiting a farm.

The whole topic reminds me of an old “Northern Exposure” episode featuring Chris (see this for a previous discussion of my love for the series). The premise of this particular episode is that Chris has become irresistible to women, perhaps due to pheromones. And here it is:

[NOTE: This post was originally on my older blog and had comments, but unfortunately the comments didn’t transfer over here.]

Vienna: come for the pastry, stay for the subsidized housing

The New Neo Posted on by

This article in HuffPo describes how wonderful the housing in Vienna is, and how cheap: “Vienna’s Affordable Housing Paradise:
Public housing is the accommodation of last resort in the U.S. Not so in Austria’s capital city.”

Paragraph after paragraph describes the situation in the Austrian capital, a city of nearly 2 million, in which there is a century-old dedication to building affordable subsidized housing that is apparently quite pleasant and desirable. Anyone with an income under $53,225 a year after taxes is eligible, and 62% of Vienna’s residents live in these units* [see NOTE below] in what is called “social housing.”

Obviously this is a very different concept than our public housing, which only serves the very lowest of incomes and is riddled with problems. In Vienna, more than half the people live in these places, which makes the vibe very different:

Kathrin Gaál, Vienna’s councillor for housing, says social housing is aimed at both people with low incomes and “a broad middle class” in the city. “What makes Vienna unique is that you cannot tell how much someone earns simply by looking at their home address,” Gaál explains.

The article goes on and on about how wonderful the system is, and there is a particular effort to contrast it with the system in the US which is decidedly unwonderful. Hooray for those Europeans, right?

I kept wondering if and when the article would get around to explaining how this miracle of affordable housing is accomplished. You could read most of it and get the idea it’s done through a combination of will, benevolent kindness, and magic. But about 2/3 into the text of the more than 1000-word article you get one little laconic paragraph about it. If you blink, you might even miss it:

Social housing is a valued priority across Austria, funded by income tax, corporate tax and a housing-specific contribution made by all employed citizens. According to Councillor Gaál, Vienna’s annual housing budget—which is spent refurbishing older apartments in the city as well as building new social housing projects—amounts to $700 million with $530 million coming from the national government.

I said it was a paragraph, but it’s really only that first sentence that deals with the nitty-gritty. And the facts in that first sentence are really not all that nitty or all that gritty, because although elsewhere the article is rather specific about monetary figures, there’s nothing specific there about income tax or corporate tax rates in Austria, or about what the amount of that “housing-specific contribution” paid by all of the country’s employed citizens might be or how it is determined.

I just spent about twenty minutes Googling to find further information on the latter tax, and I gave up for now. But here’s a chart that describes Austria’s income tax levels. There are plenty of other taxes, too, including of course the VAT of 20% which certainly adds to the cost of living.

Different countries make different choices about how much shared responsibility to have for the welfare of others and how much individual responsibility, at what point to start helping, and whether help should be government-mandated or through voluntary charities or some combination of the two. The countries of Europe are generally much less individualistic than the US, and the welfare system is structured very differently with more reliance on taxes and mandated group responsibility. European countries have also benefited from US military protection, so they don’t have to spend anywhere near as much of their federal money as we do on defense. In addition, European countries have until very recently been far more homogeneous ethnically and culturally than the US, which helps them foster a sense of being all in it together.

The HuffPo article does mention a bit of a change in that regard in Vienna:

Austria has not been immune to fears about an influx of refugees benefiting from government assistance in recent years. The country elected a right-wing coalition government in December, and rhetoric about immigrants putting pressure on public resources has grown even in its cosmopolitan capital city.

“There is a still a strong idea here that public housing is something for everybody,” says Andreas Rumpfhuber, a Viennese architect. “But we have similar problems to other countries. We have right-wing populists talking about whether refugees deserve public housing. So there are still dangers ahead for the [Vienna] model.”

Surprise, surprise! That “we’re all in this together” feeling may not extend to the entire world and everyone in it.

The article also indicates that Vienna is very affordable:

In fact, the extent of Vienna’s subsidized housing makes it one of the most affordable major cities in the world.

Follow that link, though, and you’ll see that the page is only saying that Vienna is one of the most affordable cities in terms of rent. That’s not at all the same as “affordable, period.” Vienna is not currently one of the most expensive 10 cities in the world (see page 4 at that link), but other cities in Europe are on that list and none in the US. Vienna certainly isn’t one of the cheapest 10 cities either (see page 7); let’s just say that no European city except Bucharest, and no US city at all, is on that particular list. Unfortunately, to get the full list—which would divulge where Vienna ranks—one must purchase it, and I’m not about to do that. And from what I could tell, the list doesn’t even factor in tax burdens, which would seem to me to be quite an important omission.

[* NOTE: It is interesting to compare Vienna with the closest thing the US has, which is rent control and rent stabilization in New York City. Granted, New York’s system is based on a very different principle and operates differently, but according to this chart about 61% of New York’s apartments fall under some sort of rent limits rules. Interesting that the percentage is so close to the percentage who live in subsidized housing in Austria.]

[NOTE: This post was originally on my older blog and had comments, but unfortunately the comments didn’t transfer over here.]

The Cohen-Trump tapes

The New Neo Posted on by

And what of the tape CNN played of a conversation between Trump’s attorney and Trump himself discussing possibly buying the rights to a Playboy bunny’s story of Trump infidelity?

Salient points:

(1) There’s no there there. No evidence of a crime, plus no such payment was ever made.

(2) Trump ultimately waived privilege on this particular tape after it was seized along with Cohen’s other records, so it’s no longer a confidential conversation protected by attorney-client privilege although it originally was.

(3) Cohen’s making the recording is not a crime in New York, where as long as one party to a 2-person conversation is aware of the taping, it’s legal to do so.

(4) However, it’s highly highly unusual for an attorney to make a recording of an attorney-client conversation without informing the client. Except in very rare circumstances that almost certainly do not apply here, it is also highly unethical.

The desire to catch Trump in some sort of past or present activity that will doom his presidency reminds me of an insatiably hungry animal that must be fed every few minutes with fresh new meat. So far, the animal has not been satisfied. But the tidbits of meat keep coming, and the beast chomps on them hungrily each time.

One does wonder, though—at least, I wonder—why Cohen decided to tape the transaction in the first place.

[NOTE: This post was originally on my older blog and had comments, but unfortunately the comments didn’t transfer over here.]

Another race hoax…

The New Neo Posted on by

…much like the others:

A waiter at a Texas steakhouse made up the viral story about a customer leaving him a racist note, his employer said Monday. The story gained national attention after Khalil Cavil, a 20-year-old server for Saltgrass Steak House in Odessa, Texas, posted a now-deleted image of the receipt he claimed was left for him on July 14.

On the bill, Khalil’s name was circled and the words, “we don’t tip terrorist,” were written at the top.

Cavil wrote in his post, which was deleted as of Tuesday morning: “I share this because I want people to understand that this racism, and this hatred still exists. Although, this is nothing new, it is still something that will test your faith.” Cavil’s Facebook page also appears to have been deleted.

Saltgrass originally said it had banned the customer blamed for the message. But now, the restaurant’s corporate office says it has learned the story was a hoax.

Cavil says he doesn’t know why he did it. But the phenomenon of hoax racist comments is so common that it seems to represent a real psychological phenomenon. My own theory is that it somewhat resembles Munchausen Syndrome, in which a person falsely induces the symptoms of an illness to get attention from other people and in particular from those in the medical field.

Look how Cavil was the center of concern and publicity for the week that people thought his claim was true. They even sent him money, which he is now supposed to return. It’s a con that offers built-in psychological and monetary rewards. And it advances the SJW narrative as well. What’s not to like?

[NOTE: This post was originally on my older blog and had comments, but unfortunately the comments didn’t transfer over here.]