Writing about (or not writing about) Trump’s NATO and British meetings

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s a huge and important topic, but I haven’t written much about either so far. It’s not for lack of coverage; there’s plenty of that. It’s from weariness at the spin.

The MSM are doing the usual catastrophizing. Trump is a disaster. Everyone hates him. No one trusts him. He’s a crazy bull in a China shop.

Strangely enough, some of the people in question in what often involves closed-door meetings—the European and/or NATO leaders—seem to say things are going well and the meetings were “productive.” Do we believe them, or are they just issuing standard and meaningless diplomatic hype?

Much of the press has ignored the fact that previous presidents Bush and Obama both asked European allies to pay more for defense, too. But they asked so nicely. Trump sounded as though he meant it, which is apparently a no-no.

My opinion? The proof is in the pudding; the whole thing is in the negotiating, deal-making stage. Let’s see what actually happens.

One thing I do know is that all of Europe can’t possibly hate Trump. There’s a huge percentage of the population of many of the countries of Western Europe, and certainly of Britain and Germany, who are itching for their very own Trump-like leaders to win and to change policy in those countries, particularly policy towards immigration. They have made their wishes known at the ballot box, a threat to the leaders of both countries.

More Mueller-related indictments of Russians who will never be extradited

The New Neo Posted on by

The timing of the indictments, on the eve of Trump’s visit to Russia and meeting with Putin, is certainly interesting.

Eleven of the 12 Russian operatives are charged with either hacking into or “spearphishing” (sending emails to trick people into providing passwords) the computer networks of Democratic Party officials; spying on network activity and collecting information; and creating fictional personas to spread the information and conceal that the source was actually Russian officials with military intelligence agency GRU. The veiled proxies included an organization named DCLeaks (which claimed to be Americans) and Guccifer 2.0, who claimed to be a single Romanian person. The hacking campaign dated back to March 2016, according to the indictment.

The 12th Russian operative (as well as one of the previous group of operatives) is charged with hacking into election-management systems on the state level, where that person is alleged to have stolen information about roughly 500,000 voters. Eleven of the 12 operatives are also charged with money laundering…and with aggravated identity theft, for using peoples’ names and passwords to commit fraud.

Rosenstein took great pains to explain that, thus far, there are no allegations that any Americans knew they were communicating with Russian intelligence officers as they went around arranging the release of the internal Democratic Party records. There’s also no allegation as yet that any attempts to meddle with the election systems affected the outcome of the presidential vote.

This sounds very similar to the previous indictments that went nowhere, except that these are not private individuals, they are with Russian military intelligence.

Russians also had attacked the Republican side of things, although they didn’t encounter much success and didn’t seem to try as hard.

The latest indictment can be found here. I wrote about the previous indictments here.

By the way, the activity in the present indictment began in March of 2016, before Trump won the nomination. Its main function, as in the activity described in the previous indictments, was apparently to sow discord in the American system.

More details of the Thai cave rescue

The New Neo Posted on by

Well worth reading. When the Times sticks to straight reporting, sometimes it does a very good job.

I learned details I hadn’t known before. For example:

10,000 people participated, including 2,000 soldiers, 200 divers and representatives from 100 government agencies…

More than 150 members of the Thai Navy SEALs, outfitted with improvised equipment sometimes held together with duct tape, helped create the escape route…Overseas military teams brought search-and-rescue equipment. The Americans provided logistics, while British divers navigated the most hazardous stretches…

Tham Luang Cave is a rare place where a person can become completely isolated. There is no GPS, no Wi-Fi, no cellphone service. The last known survey was conducted in the 1980s by a French caving society, but many of its deepest recesses remain unmapped. Spelunkers consider the cave one of the most challenging in the world…

The 30-strong American team, which was integral to the planning, recommended that each child be confined in a flexible plastic cocoon, called a Sked, which is marketed as a rescue stretcher and is a standard part of the Air Force team’s gear…

“They just had to lay there and be comfortable,” said Major Hodges, the leader of the American team…

At one point, the plastic bundles containing the teammates were placed on the hoses for the water pumps, which acted as an impromptu slide. Rope lines hoisted the soccer team aloft so they could swing past particularly craggy parts of the cave. In one leg of the escape, the cocoons were placed on floating stretchers, and Thai frogmen pushed them along.

Much much more at the link, including diagrams, drawings, and photos.

Now people lose their positions for quoting someone else’s use of the n-word

The New Neo Posted on by

Even if the person doesn’t approve of and doesn’t agree with the quote, but was using it to illustrate another point.

Also, apparently it’s now not okay to disapprovingly relate stories from the past about racial intolerance.

At least, not for John H. Schnatter, founder and former CEO (and now former chairman, a position he resigned on Wednesday) of Papa John’s Pizza, as he discovered recently.

Here’s how it went:

The call was arranged between Papa John’s executives and marketing agency Laundry Service. It was designed as a role-playing exercise for Schnatter in an effort to prevent future public-relations snafus [irony alert]. Schnatter caused an uproar in November 2017 when he waded into the debate over national anthem protests in the NFL and partly blamed the league for slowing sales at Papa John’s.

On the May call, Schnatter was asked how he would distance himself from racist groups online. He responded by downplaying the significance of his NFL statement. “Colonel Sanders called blacks n—–s,” Schnatter said, before complaining that Sanders never faced public backlash.

Schnatter also reflected on his early life in Indiana, where, he said, people used to drag African-Americans from trucks until they died. He apparently intended for the remarks to convey his antipathy to racism, but multiple individuals on the call found them to be offensive, a source familiar with the matter said.

The call occurred back in May, by the way. The resignation just happened.

I think maybe he was toast anyway, and the call was some sort of set-up.

More from the theater of the Strzok hearing

The New Neo Posted on by

Gohmert goes there:

Note the outrage of the Democrats. Terrible, terrible that their delicate sensibilities—and the extreme decorum of the House—has been offended! Gohmert only said what everyone was thinking, of course, and the visual of looking at Strzok’s smirking face while Gohmert said it was certainly instructive.

Smirk:

Noun

smirk (plural smirks)

An uneven, often crooked smile that is insolent, self-satisfied or scornful…

Verb

smirk (third-person singular simple present smirks, present participle smirking, simple past and past participle smirked)

To smile in a way that is affected, smug, insolent or contemptuous.

Synonyms

simper
shit-eating grin (vulgar)

All of the above.

ADDENDUM: From Ace:

Strzok declared that even asking him about his bias “is just another victory notch in Putin’s belt and another milestone in our enemies’ campaign to tear American apart.”

I wonder if he used that line when his wife asked him where he was last night. “Your questioning my whereabouts last night,” I imagine him thundering, “is exactly what Vladimir Putin wants, Traitor.”

Come to think of it, questioning anything that Peter Strzok has ever done in his life, or the actions of any other pre-Trump member of the federal government, is just another victory notch in Putin’s belt!”

ADDENDUM II:

Wow:

Are you watching the Strzok testimony?

The New Neo Posted on by

I watched some of it, and plan to watch some more but certainly far from all of it.

One reason I won’t watch much is that I already know what left and right will be doing. But another big reason, probably the biggest, is that I wouldn’t trust one thing Strzok says. He is a liar and a cheat, and of course his political bias has been clear for all to see. He will also be doing major ass-covering in his testimony, trying to convince us that his obvious bias (actually, hatred and contempt) isn’t really bias and that even if it is bias that bias didn’t affect his decisions about the very people he is biased against.

It’s simply unbelievable on the face of it. I don’t care what party such a person would be from or which direction the bias would go in, such a person is inherently untrustworthy. And even if he did sincerely think his bias hadn’t affected his decisions, he would probably be the last person to know whether it did or didn’t. That’s the way bias often works.

Watching Strzok testify, I have to say that he comes across as arrogant, angry, and duplicitous. Hey, maybe that reflects my own bias, but I don’t think so; it is plain in the expression on his face, just watching the visuals without the audio. His memory about what he wrote and why he wrote it comes and goes conveniently. His explanations are absurd for certain things he wrote, such as the idea that you can “smell” Trump voters—oh, it was just some random word he chose to indicate they seemed different than other voters. Believable? Not at all.

But what could Strzok say to defend himself that would be convincing? Nothing.

The American people—the portion who are paying attention, anyway—are like a jury here, although of course it’s not actually a trial. Juries pay a lot of attention not just to the words of a witness’s testimony but to what’s called his or her “demeanor.” Strzok’s demeanor is completely unconvincing and off-putting. And his words, likewise—at least, the ones I’ve heard and read. His pose of objectivity and outraged moral rectitude comes across as absurd, since we’ve read his private emails reeking with political bias and addressed to his partner in adultery.

Here’s a little sample of Strzok’s demeanor. It also illustrates why I’ll miss former prosecutor Trey Gowdy when he leaves Congress:

[NOTE: I’ve bumped this post up a bit.]

The NeverTrumper dividing line

The New Neo Posted on by

Do you ever want to have been wrong about something?

As a never-NeverTrumper but definitely a huge Trump critic during the 2016 presidential campaign, I wanted to be wrong about him.

Now, I hate being wrong and much prefer to be right. But the stakes were too high to indulge my pride, and so I wanted to be wrong.

So far, I believe I was significantly more wrong than right about Trump. Although I’m about 1% sad about that, I’m 99% happy—and I’m hoping that time proves me right about that point of view, too.

But I get the feeling that one of the dividing lines—maybe the biggest one—between NeverTrumpers and the rest of the previously- or still-Trump-critical right is that the former group didn’t want to be wrong about him. They really really really didn’t want to be wrong about him. In fact, it’s my impression that they would have taken delight if things were now going even worse than they are, and they take no joy in the fact that they’re going better than they expected.

I’m not even sure they would admit they’re going better than they expected, certainly not in any meaningful way. If they’ve said it, I haven’t seen it.

Here’s another promising piece of medical news

The New Neo Posted on by

The power of a mitochondria injection:

In animal studies at Boston Children’s Hospital and elsewhere, mitochondrial transplants revived heart muscle that was stunned from a heart attack but not yet dead, and revived injured lungs and kidneys.

Infusions of mitochondria also prolonged the time organs could be stored before they were used for transplants, and even ameliorated brain damage that occurred soon after a stroke.

In the only human tests, mitochondrial transplants appear to revive and restore heart muscle in infants that was injured in operations to repair congenital heart defects.

I’m not sure that “transplants” is the correct word, however, because (if I’m reading the article correctly) the mitochondria seem to come from the patients’ own bodies. It doesn’t appear to be a really complicated technique, either.

On the Democrats’ dream of stopping Trump’s SCOTUS nominee

The New Neo Posted on by

See this in National Review by Jonathan S. Tobin:

The irony here for Democrats is that the “resistance” is fueled by their conviction that Trump has violated key norms and threatens the institutions of democracy. Yet if there is one aspect of his presidency that has been completely normal, it is his approach to judicial appointments. He has stuck to the list of qualified conservatives that he made public before his election. No one can pretend that his appointments are any different, in terms of their beliefs or credentials, from those that might have been put forward by any other Republican president. Rather than heralding an era of radical Trumpian madness, Gorsuch and the other Trump judges are just normal constitutional conservatives and a reminder that, his Twitter account notwithstanding, the Trump presidency is for the most part an exercise in conservative rather than extremist governance.

True. However, one thing that Tobin doesn’t discuss is that these days, many Democrats (and especially the resistance) believe that conservative governance is extremist governance. That is, it is by definition illegitimate and unworthy of serious debate, and deserves only invective.

Perhaps you know the old saying, Republicans think Democrats are stupid but Democrats think Republicans are evil? Well, it’s not exactly true; I know a lot of Republicans who think Democrats are evil. But it still is more true than false, and now more than ever many Democrats think Republicans are evil and that the most evil of all are conservatives. Therefore, by definition, anyone Trump would name to SCOTUS is of course evil.

That’s how they justify those placards they had prepared protesting Trump’s SCOTUS appointee with a blank space left for the name to be filled in later. Any name. It looks ridiculous to most observers, but to the resistance it makes perfect sense, because the entire list from which Trump was picking was obviously and completely composed of evil people.

Don’t walk too close to a tall building in China

The New Neo Posted on by

You’ll see why, if you watch this [hat tip: commenter “DNW”]:

Apparently it all has to do with this phenomenon:

Construction of “commodity housing” is driven by the disparity between urban and rural land prices. Rural land, which must be collectively owned, is redesignated by a municipality as urban-construction land, which can then be resold by the municipality at as much as forty times the price. He explains that municipalities must pass on about 40% percent of their tax revenues to Beijing and are responsible for about 80% of their expenses. Hence, there is an incentive to seek non-tax-income streams. According to Shepard, as of 2015, “40% of the revenue that local governments in China make is from land sales.” The Party further incentivizes construction on this newly urban land by using local GDP growth as one of the indicators that makes a local government look good within the Party.

In 2012, this type of development created $438 billion (394 billion euros) for China’s local governments.

Developers acquire new plots of land from local governments and are mandated to construct something more or less immediately. Developers can’t sit idly on vacant land and wait for the surrounding area to develop until it’s economically viable. This creates the quick-buck mentality in developers to rapidly build in the new area without the necessary demand for housing, new industries essential for employment to sustain the housing and new community.

Speed is of the essence. And it’s all due to control by the Party. Capitalism in China works a bit differently than here.

This next video was made in 2013, and it’s exceedingly bizarre. I’m surprised I hadn’t heard about this before. Paris, anyone?:

I looked up the city’s Wiki entry, and it appears that the population has not increased. The description included this:

Originally planned as a city for around 10,000 inhabitants, the current population of Tianducheng is estimated at around 2,000 people, many of whom are working on a nearby French-themed amusement park.

I would say the whole thing is a “French-themed amusement park,” although it doesn’t seem very amusing.