IG Horowitz’s report on Comey: he’s bad, but the DOJ doesn’t care

The New Neo Posted on by

We had pretty much been told this is what we would get. And yes, this is what we got:

A scathing inspector general report released Thursday said that fired FBI Director James Comey violated bureau policies by drafting, leaking and retaining memos documenting private discussions with President Trump.

The Justice Department’s official watchdog concluded that the memos Comey kept were, in fact, “official FBI records,” and said Comey set a “dangerous example” with his actions…

While the findings of the probe were forwarded to the DOJ, the department has declined prosecution, as Fox News reported earlier this month. But for Comey, who has cultivated the image of a by-the-book and irreproachable leader since his termination in 2017, the review shined a harsh light on his decisionmaking in the final, beleaguered weeks of his tenure at the head of the nation’s top law enforcement agency.

The 83-page document outlined a series of violations, including that he broke FBI policies and the bureau’s employment agreement…

The report repeatedly and pointedly alleged that Comey wrongly violated policies for personal reasons — in this case, in order to spur a special counsel probe.

I wouldn’t call those “personal reasons” at all. I’d call them political reasons—to use the so-called Deep State to spur a soft coup against the president. Doesn’t sound all that personal to me, although personal reasons—revenge—also factored in.

And is the DOJ setting a “dangerous example” by not prosecuting?

Well, it depends what’s in store for Comey next. Rumor has it that there are much better (that is, worse, and more easily provable in the legal sense) things on which he will be prosecuted.

Time will tell, right?

One thing of which I’m pretty sure is that the left will use this IG report to say “no biggee, move along” while the right sees it (correctly, I believe) as a huge indictment of Comey.

But a metaphorical indictment, not a literal one.

On Democrats who skate

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Art Deco” writes (the first line is a quote from commenter “huxley”):

Not all Democrats skate. Ask Al Franken.

Franken was collateral damage in their campaign contra Roy Moore. If the media / DNC / Capitol Hill complex had been less pressed for time, the scandal, such as it was, would have gone away.

True.

The “me too” campaign and its fallout had many purposes. One of those purposes was to create zero tolerance for the likes of Roy Moore—and hopefully, Donald Trump. Along the way some eggs had to be broken and omelets made.

But I think another principle was too never do anything that would hurt the left too much. Franken was a no-brainer in that respect. The most salient fact about Franken was that his political demise cost the Democrats nothing in terms of power. He was in a very blue state and his replacement was always going to be bluer than blue, so his removal had a neutral effect on the balance of power and gained them virtue points. It hurt Franken personally, but that was not their concern.

Power is what it’s all about.

I’m trying to think of a case where someone was thrown overboard who mattered to the Democrats in the sense of causing a loss of power. The left might be a bit sad about losing Harvey Weinstein’s money, I suppose, but there’s plenty more where that came from.

Bill Clinton was the quintessential example. His sexual behavior was just fine when he was president, and Democrats united behind him to protect him. But after Hillary had lost, and the Clintons no longer mattered, it was okay to jettison and marginalize him.

And then there’s Ted Kennedy.

It’s all purely pragmatic—and if there are exceptions, I can’t think of them right now.

Fighting back: left and right and the press

The New Neo Posted on by

It may seem almost funny to those on the right who’ve been complaining for years (pre-Trump, anyway) about how the right never fights back—but people on the left often say the same thing about the left: that is, that the left doesn’t fight hard enough.

Yeah, tell me another one, you say.

But I get this information from visiting blogs or other sites on the left, which I do fairly often. The subject comes up there now and then, and is met by a chorus of “Yes, we don’t fight back enough. The right knows how to fight. We’re much too nice, too noble. We’ve got to get tougher and even sometimes fight dirty.”

Mirror image of what a lot of people on the right have been saying about themselves, or at least about their elected officials on the right. That’s one of the reasons Trump was elected, of course: as Lincoln said of General Grant, “he fights.”

Which brings us to one of the many current ruckuses at the NY Times:

The mothership of fake news is now complaining that conservative activists are scrutinizing journalists for signs of bias that can be found on the Internet and social media. The lead paragraph in the Times’ front-page story of lament is:

A loose network of conservative operatives allied with the White House is pursuing what they say will be an aggressive operation to discredit news organizations deemed hostile to President Trump by publicizing damaging information about journalists.

The most prominent member of the media exposed thus far is Tom Wright-Piersanti, editor at the political desk of the Times itself. After Breitbart exposed this bigot for mocking Jews and Indians, Wright-Piersanti was demoted by the Times (but not terminated). His excuse for his bigotry was that he was in college.

There are others. And through it all, the Times confesses that, although the information released so far is stripped of context – “context” meaning the excuses liberals give for themselves but not for others — it has been authentic and harmful to its targets.

And apparently there are hundreds of other media people on the left who have likewise implicated themselves on social media, mostly as bigots and haters of various kinds.

It often puzzles me why people would be so dumb as to publicly air such comments and sign their names to them. Bigotry certainly exists, but it’s been a no-no in polite society for many decades in this country, hasn’t it? That even includes anti-Semitism cloaked as hatred of Israel, which appears to be the left’s current favored bigotry (hatred of white people is even more favored, but I don’t think that’s considered bigotry these days as long as it’s expressed by someone in a favored minority group or by a virtue-signaling white person on the left).

More:

What is happening is that the bigots in the media are being exposed. And if they are purged, then there may be a chance that the public will get some unbiased reporting. But the liberals don’t like this. It’s okay for them to smear any conservative they want with immunity, but it’s not cricket for the opposition to hit back. Such have been the rules for the longest time. No more.

The difference between Schwartz’s operation and what the media regularly does is that Schwartz’s information is factual. The media, on the other hand, often makes things up out of thin air. Anyone remember Sarah Palin, Brett Kavanaugh, or a boatful of others? This is why Rush Limbaugh coined the term ‘the drive-by media.’ The media will slime a conservative with innuendos and falsehoods, call it news, and then when facts later come out to refute the original charge, walk away as if nothing happened. .

One of the many things wrong with so-called journalists today is that they think very very very highly of themselves. Speaking truth to power, shining a light in the dark places, all the news that they decide is fit to print, and so on and so forth. Why don’t we appreciate them more, these selfless toilers for us all?

Ilhan Omar’s Byzantine love life…

The New Neo Posted on by

…doesn’t interest me all that much. What is far more repellent to me is her ability to smile, and smile, and be a villain in the political sense.

But if you would like to get up to speed on what Omar’s been doing in the sack lately, be my guest. As usual, Powerline will fill you in. They’ve been revealing Omar’s various lies and games for many years now.

I’m already feeling fear in the pit of my stomach about the Senate in 2020

The New Neo Posted on by

There are various imperiled GOP seats in the Senate up for re-election (or defeat) in 2020.

Losing the Senate would be a nightmare for anyone wanting to stop the left from gaining the upper hand. There isn’t a whole lot the Democrats can do in the House without the Senate, although they will try (and succeed) to do some damage. But with the Senate as well as the House, Democrats can pass a lot of bills and most importantly block any federal or SCOTUS judicial appointments, even if Trump continues as president.

Of course, if he’s president, he can veto the bills. But if he’s not president and a Democrat wins that office as well as the Senate, then nothing will stop the leftist juggernaut, and the forces in charge will be more hard left than anything we’ve seen in power in this country before.

I cannot understand how so many people who are not as leftist as the current Democratic crop of candidates would be willing to vote for them. Actually, I can understand it, considering the constant, unremitting, many-years-long, pervasive, and overwhelming orchestration between the press and the Democratic Party to claim that Trump is the Second Coming of Hitler.

What I absolutely cannot understand is why people on the right would abandon a senator such as Susan Collins of Maine as being insufficiently conservative for their tastes. Such people live in a dreamworld and will facilitate the rise to power of what they profess to hate.

The recent history of press bias

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an interesting Twitter thread:

It’s a long thread with many parts, so I’m going to combine many of the tweets here as though it were a single article, and add my own comments after each section.

Picking it up after the tweet I just embedded:

Before cable TV, talk radio, and the rise of social media, the news of the day moved slooooowly and could be controlled and shaped by the powers-that-be…

Back in the day, the NYT (there was only a “print edition”) broke the news of the day each morning, which was used directly by other major and minor newspapers and/or repeated by the Associated Press and United Press International news services across the land.

Americans were conditioned over time to catch daily news summaries each evening on their favorite broadcast TV network. The leading stories on those broadcasts were almost always the major news stories printed by that day’s edition of the NYT…

I remember it more or less that way, except that when something very dramatic happened, regular programming was suspended and the news moved rather quickly. It had to be something major, of course—the assassination of JFK comes to mind—but the news was quite responsive even in those days, as long as the event was big enough.

Continued:

In those days, the Democrat Party almost completely controlled the political narrative largely thanks to their media allies at the NYT and other major newspapers, as well as at the three broadcast TV networks. But there was at least a veneer of “impartiality” in those days…

…the media narrative was tightly controlled and aligned with the liberal political establishment’s policy objectives.

The only conservative voices were a few token columnists on the op-ed pages and a few conservative magazines with tiny subscription bases, such as National Review, The American Spectator, Human Events, and the Conservative Chronicles.

I think this is somewhat of an exaggeration, although only somewhat. But even I, a New Yorker and daily reader of the Times, was exposed to some conservative voices here and there. William F. Buckley was quite prominent on television, for example, with his show Firing Line. Granted, it was on public TV, but can you imagine a show like that given a slot on public TV today? Here’s the show’s history, including how it managed to breach the liberal wall and be aired on PBS in the first place:

In 1971, Firing Line moved to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) under the auspices of the Southern Educational Communications Association, an arm of South Carolina Educational Television. This was somewhat unusual, given the reputation among many conservatives that PBS unfairly discriminated against non-liberal viewpoints in its other programming. SECA/SCETV, however, was one of the very few public broadcasting entities of the time that was sympathetic to the conservative movement. Besides, the program had already been carried by a number of individual PBS (and its predecessor National Educational Television) stations for a number of years.

Because the program received a relatively unfavorable Sunday evening timeslot on PBS’ schedule in the early 1970s, Buckley and long-time director Warren Steibel briefly attempted to return Firing Line to commercial TV, but could not find sponsors. Thus, the program would remain on PBS until Buckley and Steibel discontinued production on December 17, 1999, with Buckley’s final episode airing December 26, 1999.

In addition, Buckley was a regular on late night talk shows. Aside from Buckley, though, I can’t recall others given such a platform.

More:

The stifling of conservative voices by the Establishment received a big course correction with the election of President Reagan in 1980. The Fairness Doctrine, which in reality was used to control political discourse in the media, was abolished.

And a conservative upstart by the name of Rush Limbaugh led the rise of conservative talk radio, and he paved the way for a veritable explosion of alternative media sources, which broke the Establishment’s chokehold on the daily news narrative.

Yes, Limbaugh was an outrage, according to the liberal point of view. How was it that this upstart troglodyte had managed to penetrate the defenses and gain an audience?

Continued:

Of course, the other major event essentially concurrent with Rush’s debut on August 1988 was the development of the Internet…

And thankfully, the Internet was unleashed and has been essentially unregulated unto the present day. The Internet led to an explosion of news sources and a goldmine for alternative and independent news media.

Unto the present day. But several ways around this have been found, in the present day. One is the use of social media to mob, dox, and attack anyone insufficiently leftist. So the internet has become a force for shutting down speech the leftists don’t like. In addition, of course, we have ideological gaming of search algorithms as well as banning and/or limiting people espousing politics on the right.

More:

…One by-product of the Internet age and the proliferation of cable news networks was the acceleration of the news cycle to the point of “instantaneous news” virtually “in the moment.”

No longer could the daily narrative be shaped in the normal way by the legacy media. And the profusion of voices conveying “news” has only accelerated with the advent of social media. The Establishment’s daily narrative was diluted by dozens of other voices.

As I already said, that is starting to end. The left has been finding creative ways to attenuate and/or block those “dozens of other voices,” although many of them still get through.

Continued:

…Another result was the blurring of the lines between “investigative” and hard news journalists versus “opinion journalists” – in effect, the lack of differentiation between the news pages and the opinion pages in the media these days.

The legacy media began to convey opinions even in hard news, and the political spin was invariably liberal and obvious to the discerning news consumer. That led to further fracturing of news sources, with the legacy media losing significant market share (and $$!).

I think the timing is wrong here. It’s been getting worse and worse over time, but the beginning of this sort of thing was with Walter Cronkite during the Vietnam War. I chronicled this event in some detail here as well as here.

More from the Tweet thread:

And thus, the political battle lines became more pronounced with each passing year, with the legacy media and their Establishment backers trying to regain market share and control of the news cycle and narrative, by hook or by crook.

Can’t quarrel with that description.

[ADDEMDUM: Here’s some history on the Times’ political leanings.]

The Founders, slavery, and the Times’ 1619 Project

The New Neo Posted on by

In 1619, slavery was ubiquitous throughout the world. There was nothing surprising or unusual about it being brought to the Americas. Slavery has nothing to do with American exceptionalism or American aspirations or values, unlike the claims of the 1619 Project. .

The British brought slavery here. When the colonists rebelled against the British, slavery was grandfathered in, as it were, because at the time it could not be uprooted. But the Founders realized it was at odds with the values and hopes they had for their new nation, and they had various plans for how it might be eradicated. In fact:

In his initial draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson condemned the injustice of the slave trade and, by implication, slavery, but he also blamed the presence of enslaved Africans in North America on avaricious British colonial policies. Jefferson thus acknowledged that slavery violated the natural rights of the enslaved, while at the same time he absolved Americans of any responsibility for owning slaves themselves. The Continental Congress apparently rejected the tortured logic of this passage by deleting it from the final document, but this decision also signaled the Founders’ commitment to subordinating the controversial issue of slavery to the larger goal of securing the unity and independence of the United States.

Nevertheless, the Founders, with the exception of those from South Carolina and Georgia, exhibited considerable aversion to slavery during the era of the Articles of Confederation (1781–89) by prohibiting the importation of foreign slaves to individual states and lending their support to a proposal by Jefferson to ban slavery in the Northwest Territory. Such antislavery policies, however, only went so far…

…[S]everal individual Northern Founders promoted antislavery causes at the state level. Benjamin Franklin in Pennsylvania, as well as John Jay and Alexander Hamilton in New York, served as officers in their respective state antislavery societies. The prestige they lent to these organizations ultimately contributed to the gradual abolition of slavery in each of the Northern states…

Although slavery was legal in every Northern state at the beginning of the American Revolution, its economic impact was marginal. As a result, Northern Founders were freer to explore the libertarian dimensions of Revolutionary ideology. The experience of Franklin was in many ways typical of the evolving attitudes of Northern Founders toward slavery. Although enmeshed in the slave system for much of his life, Franklin eventually came to believe that slavery ought to be abolished gradually and legally.

Initially, some of the Founders thought slavery might even fade away over time. But the cotton gin’s invention changed all that and presented a new problem along with new economic opportunities for the South:

The invention of the cotton gin caused massive growth in the production of cotton in the United States, concentrated mostly in the South. Cotton production expanded from 750,000 bales in 1830 to 2.85 million bales in 1850. As a result, the region became even more dependent on plantations and slavery, with plantation agriculture becoming the largest sector of its economy. While it took a single slave about ten hours to separate a single pound of fiber from the seeds, a team of two or three slaves using a cotton gin could produce around fifty pounds of cotton in just one day.

The change was enormous.

The number of slaves rose in concert with the increase in cotton production, increasing from around 700,000 in 1790 to around 3.2 million in 1850. By 1860, black slave labor from the American South was providing two-thirds of the world’s supply of cotton, and up to 80% of the crucial British market…

Because of its inadvertent effect on American slavery, and on its ensuring that the South’s economy developed in the direction of plantation-based agriculture (while encouraging the growth of the textile industry elsewhere, such as in the North), the invention of the cotton gin is frequently cited as one of the indirect causes of the American Civil War.

And then there’s the way the brilliant Thomas Sowell put it [emphasis mine]:

Slavery was just not an issue, not even among intellectuals, much less among political leaders, until the 18th century – and then it was an issue only in Western civilization. Among those who turned against slavery in the 18th century were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry and other American leaders. You could research all of the 18th century Africa or Asia or the Middle East without finding any comparable rejection of slavery there. But who is singled out for scathing criticism today? American leaders of the 18th century.

Deciding that slavery was wrong was much easier than deciding what to do with millions of people from another continent, of another race, and without any historical preparation for living as free citizens in a society like that of the United States, where they were 20 percent of the population.

It is clear from the private correspondence of Washington, Jefferson, and many others that their moral rejection of slavery was unambiguous, but the practical question of what to do now had them baffled. That would remain so for more than half a century.

Sowell retired from column-writing in late 2016, and he’s almost ninety now. In that farewell column he had this to say, and I certainly can’t blame him:

During a stay in Yosemite National Park last May, taking photos with a couple of my buddies, there were four consecutive days without seeing a newspaper or a television news program — and it felt wonderful. With the political news being so awful this year, it felt especially wonderful.

This made me decide to spend less time following politics and more time on my photography…

Sorely missed.

But I can only imagine what he would have to say about the 1619 Project, if he could be persuaded to opine on it.

Perhaps Biden can be forgiven this one—but here’s a handy cheat sheet for him

The New Neo Posted on by

Practically everybody confuses New Hampshire with Vermont.

As did Joe Biden, as one might expect:

Former Vice President Joe Biden mistakenly praised the state of Vermont on Saturday when asked about his impression of Keene, N.H., by reporters during a press gaggle.

Video of the exchange shows Biden remarking about Vermont’s “beauty” after an unseen reporter asks him for his “impression” of the town, which is located in southwestern New Hampshire, close to the state’s border with Vermont.

It’s actually not all that close by New Hampshire/Vermont standards, but I’ll let that pass.

People put the two states into the same category: thinnish and New Englandy. And that they are. But they are not similar. Here are some handy hints:

—Vermont is the socialist state. New Hampshire is the somewhat-libertarian (at least, it used to be) state.

—Vermont is very rural. New Hampshire not so much.

—Vermont has been invaded by New Yorkers, New Hampshire by Massachusetts people.

—Vermont is landlocked. New Hampshire has a seacoast.

—Vermont is one of the bluest states in the nation, perhaps the bluest. New Hampshire is trending blue but is still purple.

Why won’t Michael Mann release his data?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a report:

Global warming alarmist Dr. Michael Mann of Penn State University has lost his multimillion dollar libel suit in British Columbia. Not only did he lose, the suit was thrown out and Mann was ordered to pay defendant Dr. Tim Ball’s legal costs. The judge threw out the case “with prejudice” meaning Mann cannot not refile it…

Dr. Ball was sued because he said, of Dr. Mann’s seminal “hockey stick” work, “he belongs in the state pen, not Penn State.” While others came to the same conclusion about the hockey stick, Mann sued Ball for libel. After eight years, Mann refused to provide a single document under the court-ordered discovery. It is now reasonable to conclude “the hockey stick” (HS) was a fraud. This is vitally important because it was the HS that directly led to the Nobel Prize for Al Gore and United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). One of the major tenets of the catastrophic global movement has been falsified.

Note that it was Mann who began the action by suing Ball. This is curious, because he must have assumed he would be forced to defend his work—and perhaps to (as my math teachers used to say) show his work. So with eight years to do so, why did he refuse to do something he must have known would be demanded and might have assumed would sink his case, if it was false in some way?

The author of the quoted excerpt says that it’s reasonable to assume that Mann’s failure to produce the documentation behind the “hockey stick” means that the graph is a fake, a hoax, a fraud. And I agree that it’s reasonable to assume that. But is it correct to assume it?

There’s more information on the decision here, but nothing that sheds light on my question. And John Hinderaker has this to say:

The rules of discovery provide that a litigant must make available to opposing parties documents that reasonably bear on the issues in the case. Here, it is absurd for Mann to sue Ball for libel, and then refuse to produce the documents that would have helped to show whether Ball’s statement about him–he belongs in the state pen–was true or false. The logical inference is that the R2 regression analysis and other materials, if produced, would have supported Ball’s claim that the hockey stick was a deliberate fraud on Mann’s part.

Mann says that his lawyers are considering an appeal. He can appeal to his heart’s content, but there is not a court in North America that will allow a libel case to proceed where the plaintiff refuses to produce the documents that may show whether the statements made about him were true or false.

Again—what on earth was Mann thinking? Was he trying to wear Ball (or Ball’s money) out? Did he think Ball would be the first to blink?

Two years ago at PJ this article appeared:

Mann has jealously guarded his data, refusing to allow the world to examine his findings, claiming they are his “intellectual property.” Ball said in a recent interview, “We believe he [Mann] withheld on the basis of a US court ruling that it was all his intellectual property. This ruling was made despite the fact the US taxpayer paid for the research and the research results were used as the basis of literally earth-shattering policies on energy and environment. The problem for him is that the Canadian court holds that you cannot withhold documents that are central to your charge of defamation regardless of the US ruling.”

But isn’t science data a special kind of “intellectual property” which a reputable scientist ordinarily releases if asked, so that it can be peer-reviewed, critiqued, and the results possibly replicated? And if Canadian law indicates that such documents must be released if requested in a case such as Mann’s defamation suit against Ball, why would Mann think he could get away with this?

But then there’s this, from 2011:

Mendacious people who spread falsehoods on the Internet about the alleged fabrications of climate scientists often claim that the famous Penn State climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann has kept his data secret. Actually, as Dr. Mann’s 2005 letter to Congressman Barton states, Dr. Mann’s data is available on Internet at government and university sites. On page 6 of his letter to Congressman Barton, Dr. Mann even provides the link where the computer code used to make his 1998 “hockey stick” graph can be accessed.

Dr. Mann’s computer program for his 1998 “hockey stick” graph could have remained a secret because computer codes are private intellectual property; still, researchers can develop their own computer codes and use Mann’s data to verify his results. Scholars have replicated Dr. Mann’s results by using his data with their own computer programs.

Researchers need not have access to exactly the same computer programs (or “code”) as Dr. Mann developed. Dr. Mann’s results can be replicated using his underlying data and methodologies.

So which is it? If the data’s so accessible already, why didn’t Mann allow the court to access it?

Who’s telling the truth here, and who is mendacious?

[NOTE: This lawsuit reminds me somewhat of David Irving’s defamation suit against Deborah Lipstadt, which he lost because she was able to prove that her allegations against him were true. The suit by Mann against Ball, on the other hand, will never go to a trial on the merits because of his failure to produce the required information.]

Inner speech

The New Neo Posted on by

Do you talk to yourself? Not aloud (although you may do that, too; I certainly do), but in your head? Psychologists who study the phenomenon say:

…we don’t have to use full sentences to talk to ourselves, because we know what we mean.

Is it the same as thinking? No; thinking doesn’t necessarily involve inner speech, although it can:

Thinking means a lot of different things and we’re not often very good at being clear what we mean by it. So I try to avoid [the term]—quite a difficult term to avoid. But it’s kind of everything the mind does. A certain category of thinking that we call verbal thinking, and that’s essentially inner speech, the stuff that we do in words. But I certainly think you can be intelligent and do lots of really clever stuff without language.

Mathematical thinking certainly seems to occur outside of language, although some of the instruction is in language. Some is in symbols, though; math is a language all it’s own, just not a verbal one.

When I write, how does inner speech factor into it? I think that writing is a form of inner speech channeled directly and nearly instantaneously into the fingers.

And just as one might expect, many deaf people (especially those who were always deaf) have a kind of inner speech that features signing.

Firefox: the refresh that pauses

The New Neo Posted on by

Saturday night, at the end of a long day, I noticed that my computer’s ability to navigate Firefox had slowed down.

It wasn’t the first time I’d noticed it; the problem’s been going on for a while. It’s a subtle thing, not too bad but still mighty annoying for a person who uses a computer a lot.

Up popped a message saying that Firefox was running slow, and then it helpfully asked me whether I wanted to refresh it in order to make it go faster.

Now, ordinarily I am intensely conservative about anything involved with the running of my computer. That’s because I’ve noticed over and over that the people who come up with new, improved computer systems seem to have a different idea than I do about what constitutes an “improvement.”

In fact, their ideas and mine have often seemed diametrically opposed.

In particular, they love to do two things. The first is to assure the user that everything will go smoothly and that all settings will be saved. The second is to hide the elements the user loves, so that they never again can be found; and/or to replace words with tiny icons that are nearly indistinguishable from one other and might as well be hieroglyphics as far as I’m concerned.

This Firefox refresh suggestion caught me in a weakened, tired state. Oh, why not? I thought, uncharacteristically throwing caution to the winds. I’d like this to go faster.

Click.

The refresh went about as you’d expect. My familiar landmarks had disappeared, and in their place were icons, cryptic lines or dots, or blank space. What’s more, my bookmarks were gone.

Now, to you that may not seem like much. But I’m a huge user of bookmarks. Over the years I’ve collected hundreds, my little computer library.

Gone. Totally gone.

But although I broke out into a cold sweat, I figured there must be a solution. I found several webpages that purported to offer one. I’ll not bore you further with the tedious tale of exactly what happened when I tried to follow their labyrinthine instructions. Suffice to say it wasn’t pretty, it led to more sweating, and two long hours later I was no closer to a solution than before.

But having gone through denial and anger I leaped ahead to acceptance: Okay, so I’ll redo some of my bookmarks. How hard could it be? I know how to make a bookmark.

And ordinarily I do. But now I discovered that it was impossible to make any new bookmarks at all. My computer had apparently forgotten how.

Many “how to” webpages later and I remained completely stumped. Meanwhile, I had tried shutting down Firefox and starting it again. No dice.

And then suddenly—when I shut down and started Firefox for the second time—all my old bookmarks appeared. How could this be? Had Firefox not shut down properly the first time? Was it something I did or didn’t do?

Or was it just toying with me?

The little row of icons remains, however. I am trying to adjust to the programmers’ seemingly deep and abiding need for me to learn how to use them.

[NOTE: The title of this piece is a riff on this Coca Cola slogan.]