Neoneocon.com is having technical difficulties

The New Neo Posted on by

Grrrr!!!

You may have noticed that my blog neoneocon.com is down right now. My host is working on it, as they say. The B-team—the one that answers the phone there—didn’t seem able to solve it, so they kicked it up to the A-team. Now I’m just waiting to hear back from that group.

Meanwhile, I’ll be posting here.

I’m not sure whether this problem has anything to do with the planned transition to this site, but so far it doesn’t seem to be related, although I guess I’ll find out more as time goes by. If you look around here you’ll notice that most of the content from the old blog is now displayed on this blog. I call that progress.

But the current problem with the other site is very frustrating, I have to say. Please bear with me while it’s being worked on.

Caroline Glick on the reaction to Trump’s Helsinki remarks

The New Neo Posted on by

In her article on the subject, Glick appears to agree with me on what Trump was trying to do:

Trump tried to strike a balance. He spoke respectfully of both Putin’s denials and the US intelligence community’s accusation. It wasn’t a particularly coherent position. It was a clumsy attempt to preserve the agreements he and Putin reached during their meeting.

And it was blindingly obviously not treason.

In fact, Trump’s response to Lemire, and his overall conduct at the press conference, did not convey weakness at all.

Lemire is the AP reporter who asked the “gotcha question.”

But Glick takes her analysis further:

In Obama’s first summit with Putin in July 2009, Obama sat meekly as Putin delivered an hour-long lecture about how US-Russian relations had gone down the drain.

As Daniel Greenfield noted at Frontpage magazine Tuesday, in succeeding years, Obama capitulated to Putin on anti-missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, on Ukraine, Georgia and Crimea. Obama gave Putin free rein in Syria and supported Russia’s alliance with Iran on its nuclear program and its efforts to save the Assad regime. He permitted Russian entities linked to the Kremlin to purchase a quarter of American uranium. And of course, Obama made no effort to end Russian meddling in the 2016 elections.

TRUMP IN contrast has stiffened US sanctions against Russian entities. He has withdrawn from Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. He has agreed to sell Patriot missiles to Poland. And he has placed tariffs on Russian exports to the US.

So if Trump is Putin’s agent, what was Obama?

But that was then. This is now. And the reason behind the reaction of Trump’s opponents is quite obvious: impeachment. To get there, they must drum up the most outrageous charges against him, state them with vehemence and conviction and near-unanimity, and count on both the ignorance and/or the animus towards Trump of enough US voters in November to elect a Democratic-dominated House and pave the way for a successful impeachment vote.

As Glick writes:

To objective observers, the allegation that Trump betrayed the United States by equivocating in response to a rude question about Russian election interference is ridiculous on its face. But Democratic election strategists have obviously concluded that it is catnip for the Democratic faithful. For them it serves as a dog whistle…

But by embracing Brennan’s claim of treason, Pelosi, Hoyer, Schumer and other top Democrats are winking and nodding to the progressive radicals now rising in their party. They are telling the Linda Sarsours and Cynthia Nixons of the party that they will impeach Trump if they win control of the House of Representatives.

Indeed.

One thing I’ve never completely understood is why a party would want to impeach a president if they don’t know they have enough votes in the Senate to convict that president. That’s the higher bar, as the GOP discovered when they tried Clinton. Yes, I realize they believe that impeachment weakens a president, and it certainly distracts any president subject to it. Do they think Trump would voluntarily resign if impeached? I certainly don’t think so. Do they think they would get a Senate conviction because enough Republicans would vote with them? Perhaps.

Glick goes on to list all the ways that this campaign by Trump’s opponents weakens us in foreign affairs. It’s well worth reading the whole thing.

But Trump’s opponents do not care about that. Many of them would dearly love to weaken us on the world stage, and the rest are so consumed by their Trump-hatred that nothing else matters to them.

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

Plastic waste: it’s the third world, not the first

The New Neo Posted on by

Ninety percent of plastic waste that enters the water comes from rivers in Asia and Africa:

As governments around the world rush to address the global problem of plastic pollution in the oceans, researchers have now pinpointed the river systems that carry the majority of it out to sea…

One thing is certain: this situation cannot continue,’ Dr. Christian Schmidt, a hydrogeologist at the Germany’s Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research said when the study was first published…

His team analysed data on debris from 79 sampling sites along 57 rivers – both microplastic particles measuring less than 5 mm and macroplastic above this size.

China’s Yangtze River was the worst polluter, and ferries some 1.5 million tonnes of plastic into the Yellow Sea every year, the study found…

The rivers with the highest estimated plastic loads are characterised by high population…

‘These rivers are also in countries with a high rate of mismanaged plastic waste (MMPW) production per capita as a result of a not fully implemented municipal waste management including waste collection, dumping and recycling.

Somehow none of this is surprising.

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

It’s worse than you think with Ocasio-Cortez and her statement on unemployment

The New Neo Posted on by

Even Politifact and FactCheck couldn’t parse Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s astonishing statement about the cause of unemployment in a way that made her look anything but ignorant on the subject. From the first site:

During the interview, Ocasio-Cortez said, “Unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs. Unemployment is low because people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their family.”…

…[But] by the official statistics, multiple job holders account for a tiny fraction of American workers.

And this percentage isn’t high by historical standards…

…[P]eople who might be working 70 or 80 hours a week amount to a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage—310,000 people at most in a pool of employed Americans totaling more than 150 million…

… a person is counted as employed as long as they have at least one job. They don’t get counted twice if they have two jobs. So Ocasio-Cortez is wrong in saying multiple job holding and long hours affect the unemployment rate.

The second site, FactCheck, agrees. So Ocasio-Cortez is wrong and wrong, as well as wrong.

But why do I say it’s worse than you think? Two reasons. The first is that you don’t need Politifact or FactCheck to know that Ocasio-Cortez is wrong. I’ve often written here that economics is not a strong suit of mine and that in fact I consider myself weak in that area. I took it in high school rather than college, and it didn’t stick very well.

Nevertheless, when I heard that Ocasio-Cortez had said that, common sense told me that of course she was wrong. I didn’t need (nor should any other even marginally intelligent person need) unemployment statistics to know that a lot of people working two jobs would not lower unemployment rates. It makes zero sense on the face of it. So Ocasio-Cortez isn’t just economics-ignorant, she’s lacking in very very basic common sense.

But it’s even worse than that. Much worse. After all, I said there were two reasons.

The second is this: Ocasio-Cortez is a graduate of Boston University with a degree in (drum roll, please!) economics and international relations. Yes, economics.

You can look it up:

She graduated fourth in her class from Boston University’s College of Arts and Sciences in 2011 with a bachelor’s degree in economics and international relations.

Fourth in her class. In economics.

What is going on in BU’s economics department? What on earth are they teaching there? I know that leftist politics has taken over most of the universities in the country, but economics has some basic principles that still must be learned. Right? Right??

[ADDENDUM: And she’s not so great in her other field, international relations, either—although since that’s a much “softer” subject, it’s understandable that her courses were probably steeped in leftist twaddle. For example:

[Joe] Lieberman also took a shot at Ocasio-Cortez views on international politics. “Ms. Ocasio-Cortez didn’t speak much about foreign policy during the primary, but when she did, it was from the DSA policy book—meaning support for socialist governments, even if they are dictatorial and corrupt (Venezuela), opposition to American leadership in the world, even to alleviate humanitarian disasters (Syria), and reflexive criticism of one of America’s great democratic allies (Israel),” he wrote.

Ocasio-Cortez recently flip-flopped in the span of a few days on the issue of Israel and Palestine. On Friday, she asserted the Jewish state’s right to exist but raised eyebrows after incoherent statements about Israel’s “occupation of Palestine.” She insisted she’s “not the expert at geopolitics on this issue.”

But during a town hall style sit-down with Democracy Now on Monday, she balked at repeating her support for the two-state solution and thus Israel’s right to exist. “This is a conversation I’m sitting down with lots of activists in this movement on and I’m looking forward to engaging in this conversation, she said.

Fourth in her class, folks. Fourth in her class.]

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

Those Republicans, Comey and Mueller

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “TommyJay” asks an interesting question:

I may have this wrong, but didn’t both Comey and Mueller rise to power in the FBI as card carrying members of the Republican party? Didn’t we hear this from Democrats when they felt the need to support these two guys over the last couple years?

Can we call them Double Agent Democrats now?

Well, that’s several interesting questions. But I’ll stick to trying to answer the first one.

Actually, neither man rose to power within the FBI; both men’s careers up to the point of being named FBI director had been spent entirely outside that organization.

James Comey was with the Department of Justice under Bush II (2003-2005, US Attorney in Southern NY, and then Deputy AG). But in 2005 Comey left, and for the next eight years held a variety of non-governmental positions in business as general counsel and also in academia at Columbia University. Then in 2013 he came back into the federal government on his appointment by Obama to head the FBI.

So Comey had no direct FBI experience prior to his heading the agency, and had been out of government work in general for quite a few years. It turns out it’s not uncommon for FBI directors to have worked only for the DOJ prior to their directorship of the FBI, although some have done some prior work with the FBI (see this).

I have no idea whether the repeated assertions that Comey was a Republican are based on anything other than his own reports. I had little success in getting to the bottom of it—that is, I’ve only found articles such as this one, in which Comey states that for most of his life he was a registered Republican. It’s apparently based on this from his testimony before the House on July 7th of 2016:

REP. GERALD CONNOLLY (D), VIRGINIA: Thank you.

And welcome, Director Comey and although our politics are different, I gather you’re a Republican. Is that correct?

COMEY: I have been registered Republican for most of my adult life. Not registered any longer.

This was, of course, before the election of Donald Trump and before his nomination, but after he had clinched the nomination. However, unless Comey had just changed his registration, my guess is that it had happened some time before the Trump phenomenon began, although I have no way to know.

It is claimed that Comey contributed money to both the McCain and the Romney campaigns, which indicates Republican affiliation but not conservatism. It’s also curious that I could not find the information by a search at the site where the writers of the previous link said they found it. Maybe it’s been removed, or maybe I did the search improperly.

My best guess is this: that Comey was indeed a moderate, country-club type Republican for many years. At some point, probably between 2012 and 2016, he left the party (he was appointed to head the FBI by Obama in 2013, but I don’t know how that figures into his ideological timeline). One thing of which I am virtually certain is that, by the time Trump secured the nomination of the Republican Party, Comey was a NeverTrumper who hated Trump and wanted to make sure he did not become president. His subsequent increasing revulsion towards and virulent animus for the GOP stems almost entirely from that, IMHO. It’s not an unheard-of trajectory.

At this point, Comey is indistinguishable in his actions from a liberal or leftist Democrat, whatever his general political leanings may be now or may have been in the past. He’s not shy about his activism, either.

As far as that statement about being a registered Republican for most of his life goes, however—for most of my life I’ve been a registered Democrat, but that statement would give you a very poor idea of the nature of my politics for the last fifteen or so years. The fact that Obama appointed Comey could mean he’d secretly converted to being a Democrat by then, or it could mean nothing at all.

Here’s an article from 2013 explaining why Obama chose Comey despite his supposedly being a Republican.

As for Mueller, here’s an interesting article written in July of 2001 when he was tapped by President Bush to become head of the FBI. Previously, much like Comey (who succeeded him as head of the FBI) he was from the DOJ and had been a US Attorney (in San Francisco in Mueller’s case):

Some suggested that Mueller’s lack of experience within the FBI could hurt him. Freeh, in contrast, had served as an FBI agent before becoming a federal prosecutor and judge. But others argue that change can best be implemented by an outsider. “There is a delicate balance they were trying to strike between someone who could restore confidence as an outsider, which Mueller is, and someone who knows enough about the FBI so that he could start off running when he takes over,” said Ronald Kessler, author of “The FBI: Inside the World’s Most Powerful Law Enforcement Agency.

Again, it’s not clear on what basis Mueller is sometimes called a “conservative Republican.” He doesn’t sound all that conservative to me:

Mueller is a conservative Republican, but one with unusual bipartisan credentials. He was appointed to his current prosecutor’s post in San Francisco by President Bill Clinton with the strong support of Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.

He headed the Justice Department’s criminal division under Bush’s father, and he temporarily served as Attorney General John Ashcroft’s deputy in the first few weeks of the current administration.

That’s about all I was able to come up with. I will add that being in a position of power often seduces people into abusing that power.

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

It’s my fifth anniversary at Legal Insurrection!

The New Neo Posted on by

Wow, time doth fly when you’re having fun. And Professor Jacobson has written a very gracious post over at Legal Insurrection in honor of my fifth anniversary there.

If you’re unfamiliar with Legal Insurrection, it’s a very fine, very popular, and very highly-ranked conservative blog with Cornell law professor William A. Jacobson as founder, lead author, and head organizer of everything and everybody. I’m one of a group of contributing authors there. As you could guess from the blog’s name, the specialty of the blog is current legal issues and news, but it’s hardly limited to that. Two other topics LI has been especially active in reporting on are the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement against Israel, and all the anti-free-speech anti-liberty PC extremism on campuses.

One funny thing I’ve noticed sometimes in the comments to my posts at Legal Insurrection is that every so often someone assumes I’m a man and uses male pronouns for me. In Professor Jacobson’s post about me today, I see that he managed to dig up a number of old photos I had forgotten existed on the web. Don’t get excited; none of them show my face, but they certainly show enough of me to indicate that I’m not a man (hmmm, that sounds more risqué than I intended). It brought back memories of the reason I decided to put my photo on this blog in the first place, long long ago: everyone, and I mean everyone, who was coming to my blog back then had assumed I was a man.

It was a curious thing. It made me wonder—do I write like a man, whatever that means? Or did the moniker “neo-neocon” conjure up a masculine vibe? Would “neo-neocona” have been better? Or was it just that most conservative political bloggers (in those days, and probably now as well) were men?

I don’t have a clue what the actual reason was for the assumption that I was a man, but I figured that a photo would help disabuse people of that notion. But, since I was anonymous at the time, I didn’t want a full-face photo, and it was my son who came up with the idea of the apple. It immediately struck me as an appropriate visual reference, plus a solution to a knotty problem.

Now it’s become my trademark. A few years ago I asked people if I should do away with the apple, and the consensus was “no.” Someday I might, however. I also might update the photo, because the one I’ve been using on this blog is old, and I’ve gotten—well, let’s just say more mature—since it was taken.

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

A little interlude for an emotional reaction

The New Neo Posted on by

These last few days have been especially wearying and disheartening in terms of politics, haven’t they?

It’s one of those situations in which no matter how low I tune my expectations, people continue to go lower, and they do it in a smooth segue from somewhat reasonable/rational to less so to even less so to unhinged.

I’ve never seen anything like it in this country, and I’ve seen a lot because I’m pretty old.

So I guess this is just an open thread to talk about…the whole thing.

Frozen diet dinners: Healthy Choice Power Bowls

The New Neo Posted on by

Yeah, yeah, I know—“frozen diet dinners” don’t sound all that exciting. But I’m always looking for a way to have a quick, convenient, and tasty meal that’s pretty healthful and not incredibly salty, and these are the best I’ve found yet. I had no idea till I went to that site I just linked that the brand had so many varieties, because my local market only stocks three of them. Quite a few of them are ethnic-food-inspired, and for frozen food (and diet food as well) they actually taste pretty good.

I cook them longer than they say to; about 5 minutes seems to do the trick. Then let stand a minute, and mix it up. The one I’ve liked the best so far is this:

And this one is really good too, but it’s extremely spicy. So if that’s a problem for you, beware. Usually, prepared food that says it’s spicy isn’t very. Or, if it actually is spicy, the heat is all you can taste, and it’s harsh. This one was extremely spicy but still tasty. A little goes a long way—which is fortunate, because this being a diet meal, the portions are hardly huge:

Trouble among the Swedish literati

The New Neo Posted on by

And I mean big, big trouble.

No Nobel Prize in literature will be awarded this year as a result. Pity (that’s sarcasm, in case it’s not clear).

That first link I gave is to a very long story about the rot on the Nobel committee that ordinarily awards the prize, and the repercussions. If you don’t want to read something that long, that second link is much shorter. Here’s an excerpt from the latter:

The Academy, the 18-member body that chooses a laureate and awards the Nobel Prize in Literature annually, has seen seven of its members depart, including its first-ever female leader. In a release, the Academy noted that this would be the eighth time in its history it had chosen to declare what it called a “reserved prize,” and the fifth time the delayed prize would be awarded at the same time as the following years time.

But this time is different. The Academy has been reckoning with accusations of sexual harassment as the #MeToo movement continues to spotlight sexual abuse and misconduct that has long gone unaddressed in numerous entertainment industries, including the literary and publishing worlds.

The uproar surrounds the behavior of French photographer Jean-Claude Arnault, an associate of the Academy—he is married to one of its former members, Katarina Frostenson—who has been accused of sexually assaulting at least 18 women, including, possibly, the princess of Sweden. Arnault, through his lawyer, has denied all claims.

It’s a lot more complicated than that, actually, and also involves Frostenson, who’s been accused of separate (non-sexual) offenses. The longer article goes into that in exhaustive detail, but the bottom line is that these people seem to be incredibly full of themselves and to feel that rules are only for the little people.

Is “moderate Democrat” a complete oxymoron? Take the case of Jeanne Shaheen

The New Neo Posted on by

Jeanne Shaheen is a US senator from New Hampshire. New Hampshire is still considered to be a purple state, although it has gotten more blue in recent years. Shaheen is a Democrat and was a three-term governor of the state, who came to the Senate in 2008 and was re-elected in 2014. She was popular in New Hampshire as governor by positioning herself as a moderate who appealed to both sides, and although she did propose various taxes in a state which prides itself on not having a sales or income tax, her proposals were shot down by the legislature. For most of her ten years as senator she’s tended to keep a fairly low profile and has been a loyal Democrat voting the party line.

Today Shaheen tweeted the following:

Extraordinary.

Or, it would have been extraordinary even a year or two ago, particularly from the “moderate” Shaheens of the political world. But now it’s apparently standard to openly suggest such an unprecedented level of distrust and overreach. That someone with Shaheen’s history would tweet this sort of thing shows what the Democratic Party has become.

One of the saddest things about this is how few people probably realize how dangerous these developments are. Apparently anything is now okay, because TRUMP. And so far I haven’t seen all that much discussion of Shaheen’s tweet, except for this post by Powerline’s Paul Mirengoff, who writes sarcastically:

But why stop with the translator? Meetings with Putin aren’t the only opportunity to sell out the U.S. Why not demand testimony about what is said at meetings of the National Security Council or during conversations between Trump and John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Gen. Mattis, etc?

Why not make Trump wear a microphone and a body camera at all times?

Back when Obama was caught on an open mike talking to Medvedev about his own increased “flexibility” post-election (when he no longer would have to answer to the public), and Medvedev said he’s convey the message to Putin, no Republican suggested increased oversight of Obama’s dealings with Russia. He was the president, after all, although he had said something incredibly suspicious there, thinking it was off the record.

Shaheen’s behavior is an indication that the Democratic Party must see this sort of behavior on their part as a winner with the public, because otherwise they wouldn’t be speaking (and tweeting) so freely about their intentions. If Shaheen of New Hampshire feels free to be this route—or even compelled to go this route—it’s a very bad sign.