The New York Times takes a good long hard look at itself in the mirror…

The New Neo Posted on by

….and is pretty darn pleased with what it sees, for the most part.

Just needing a little tweaking to get the narrative right.

The link above is to a Slate article about a session Times executive editor Dean Baquet had recently with staff:

The remarks showed Baquet and the other speakers conceding some technical and procedural failings but rejecting, or avoiding, deeper criticisms of the paper’s performance. A staffer, submitting a question anonymously, suggested that the headline that had caused all the trouble—“TRUMP URGES UNITY VS. RACISM”—“amplifies without critique the desired narrative of the most powerful figure in the country.”

Baquet and other editors addressed the headline as an operational problem, the result of a “system breakdown,” where a front-page layout had left too little space for nuance. “We set it up for a bad headline,” Baquet said, “and the people who were in a position to judge it quickly and change it, like me, did not look at it until too late.”

The headline Baquet is referring to is one in which the paper did something extraordinarily rare for the Times: relate what someone on the right had said without simultaneously adding a spin that informed readers just how awful the speaker actually is. In other words, what used to be called “reporting the news.” My favorite phrase there was not from Baquet, but from the unidentified staffer who characterized that straightforward and accurate headline as “amplifying without critique the desired narrative of the most powerful figure in the country.”

In other words: when Trump does something good, or says something right, we can’t just tell you what he said without somehow negating it. We can’t “amplify” his words by publishing them “without critique.” We must negate anything good he says lest people start to trust him or like him or think he’s not a racist.

Because they know, absolutely know, he’s a racist, and anything he says that goes against that perception must not be allowed to stand. Baquet is quite clear in saying that they threw everything they had into the collusion charges, and now that it’s fizzled, “Trump is a racist” is the new focus.

But how best to do it? A lot of verbiage is exchanged on that score. Baquet indicates it can’t be done too explicitly. You can’t keep writing “Trump is a racist, Trump is a racist.” It needs nuance. It needs depth, variety and finesse. But some on staff want the paper to be more bold. Here’s the longer quote from that staffer (my remarks in brackets):

Saying something like divisive or racially charged is so euphemistic. Our stylebook would never allow it in other circumstances. I am concerned that the Times is failing to rise to the challenge of a historical moment. What I have heard from top leadership is a conservative approach that I don’t think honors the Times’ powerful history of adversarial journalism. I think that the NYT’s leadership, perhaps in an effort to preserve the institution of the Times, is allowing itself to be boxed in and hamstrung. This obviously applies to the race coverage. The headline represented utter denial, unawareness of what we can all observe with our eyes and ears. It was pure face value. I think this actually ends up doing the opposite of what the leadership claims it does. A headline like that simply amplifies without critique the desired narrative of the most powerful figure in the country. If the Times’ mission is now to take at face value and simply repeat the claims of the powerful, that’s news [pun almost certainly unintended] to me. I’m not sure the Times’ leadership appreciates the damage it does to our reputation and standing when we fail to call things like they are.”

You can see right there, as clear as can be, the Times’ sense of its mission. Forget the old function of the editorial page or of op-eds. An editorial isn’t enough; the opinion must be in the article and in the headline, force fed to the reader. Here’s Baquet again:

…what was wrong with the story is that the “Trump said X” headline wasn’t enough to capture the hypocrisy and all the kind of nuance we’re talking about. So I think we built a page on deadline that made it really hard to put a headline on it…We [should] have redrawn the page in away that allowed us to put a more nuanced headline on it. That would have been, in retrospect, the ideal situation.

Read the whole thing, if you can stomach it.

First Tlaib says she will, and then she won’t

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday, Israel denied visas for Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, after pressure from Trump, under a law permitting the government to bar entry to advocates of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

However, Tlaib asked to being allowed to come anyway to visit her grandmother, who is 90-years old, if Tlaib promised not to propagandize against Israel during the visit.

Israel said yes.

Tlaib changed her mind, naturally.

Tlaib must consider it better propaganda this way.

A sample of Utopian leftist thought today: Part I, Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists

The New Neo Posted on by

Utopia for Realists. If that book title sounds like an oxymoron, it certainly doesn’t to its author Rutger Bregman:

Imagining utopia, writes Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, “isn’t an attempt to predict the future. It’s an attempt to unlock the future. To fling open the windows of our minds.”

Sounds a bit like Marianne Williamson recast as a more policy-oriented semi-intellectual. I say “semi” because I expected that, when I looked him up, he’d be an academic of some sort, but he’s not, although he got a Master’s in history. Bregman’s a prizewinning Dutch journalist and author, and he’s thirty-one years old. And he was even younger—twenty-seven—when the book came out.

And yet he’s regarded by a great many people as a deep and important thinker/philosopher. It’s certainly possible at that age—there have been some—but I don’t think it’s likely. The Vox interview has so many errors of judgement that I was thinking of fisking it line by line, but that endeavor made me weary. So I’ll just take one especially fascinating paragraph from a different interview with Bregman that I found, and let that stand for the whole.

I’m not sure when this interview with Bregman (and many others) happened because I can’t find a date. But it was probably some time after Utopia for Realists was published:

Rutger: Income is associated with working, right? And we have — most people — still have a very narrow definition of work. And it might be hard to change that. Now, if you were to use a word like social dividend, or I don’t know social grant, or dividend of progress, or whatever, then most people would understand that this doesn’t have to do anything with working. That’svery important, you know, the way [people] perceive the money. They should really perceive it as a right — not as a favor — it’s their right, you know?. Just like the freedom is a right, freedom of association is a right, and maybe a very promising way to do that is to do with with a carbon tax…So the idea would be to introduce a carbon tax and to give the money to the people — I think that could be a very promising way forwards. And it’s also a way to get around the pretty difficult, strategical or political issue of how people will perceive this money. And maybe income isn’t the right word, maybe we should use the word dividend — social dividend.

Hey, let’s call it a salary! A salary for living! Let’s call it macaroni!

Semantic smoke and mirrors. If you call it the right thing, they will come. Change the label and people will accept it. So according to Bregman, it seems that not only do rights not come from the deity, they can be newly created by words cleverly chosen so that the people will accept them.

[Part II coming tomorrow.]

The sex bureaucracy: I think curfews worked a lot better

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s a funny thing.

When I went to college many moons ago, we had boys’ dorms and girls’ dorms. Not only that, we called ourselves “boys” and “girls.” I had just turned seventeen when I went away to school, and I was happy to live in an all-girls dorm and be able to kiss my boyfriend goodbye at the door at curfew time.

It wasn’t perfect, but it seems it was a darn sight better than this dreadful state of affairs:

Writing in the California Law Review, Gersen and her husband Jacob argued that the creation of a “sex bureaucracy,” as the title of that article christened the system of administrative oversight of student sex lives [during the Obama administration as a result of the “Dear Colleague” letter], entailed “the enlargement of bureaucratic regulation of sexual conduct that is voluntary, non-harassing, nonviolent, and does not harm others.” The Gersens go on to note that “watered-down notions of nonconsent” embedded into regulation allowed “ambivalent, undesirable, unpleasant, unsober, or regretted sexual encounters to meet the standard.” The system thus “will investigate and discipline sexual conduct that women and men experience as consensual (if nonideal) sex.” The conduct deemed illegal, the Gersens wrote, “plausibly covers almost all sex students are having today.”

Are pre-sex consent forms next? They’re going to be long ones, too:

These expansive definitions of wrongdoing were paired with an adjudication system lacking nearly every aspect of fair process. “In recent years, it has become commonplace to deny accused students access to the complaint, the evidence, the identities of the witnesses, or the investigative report, and to forbid them from questioning complainants or witnesses,” Gersen noted in a recent piece in The New Yorker looking back at the changes wrought by the Dear Colleague letter.

The sex bureaucracy, in other words, pivoted from punishing sexual violence to imposing a normative vision of ideal sex, to which students are held administratively accountable. Georgia Southern University, for instance, explains that “Consent is a voluntary, sober, imaginative, enthusiastic, creative, wanted, informed, mutual, honest, and verbal agreement.” The California Law Review article culminates in a discussion of a case in which a gay male student was found responsible for sexual misconduct for waking his partner with a kiss (the sleeping cannot consent) and for looking at his partner’s genitals without consent while showering (consensually) with him.

Students living under this regime are in a system that is stark raving mad, deeply unfair, and tremendously destructive to human relationships.

California’s proposed anti-Semitic curriculum to be revamped

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Please see my earlier post on California’s proposed curriculum.]

The pressure from the public worked—for now anyway:

The California State Board of Education (SBE) announced on Aug. 12 that the proposed anti-Israel Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) will be replaced with an entirely new draft.

SBE President Linda Darling-Hammond, Vice President Ilene Straus and Board Member Feliza Ortiz-Licon said in the statement, “The current draft model curriculum falls short and needs to be substantially redesigned. Following the Instructional Quality Commission’s review and response to all public comments, a new draft will be developed for State Board of Education review and potential approval. The Board will ultimately adopt an ethnic studies model curriculum that aligns to California’s values.”

What will replace it? What are “California’s values” these days?

One realization that’s disturbing is that, if activist groups hadn’t brought this to light and encouraged people to protest the newly-proposed curriculum, the new course of study would almost surely have been implemented as written.

That’s a lesson in how it was done for the last fifty years or so (or more). The slow Gramscian takeover took place under the radar for most people. Now it’s been almost fully accomplished and has reached critical mass and beyond.

Democrats say: nice SCOTUS you’ve got there, it would be a shame if something were to happen to it

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an article at National Review by David French, who is not ordinarily a rabble-rouser. It begins this way:

I just finished reading of the most astonishing legal briefs I’ve ever read. It is easily the most malicious Supreme Court brief I’ve ever seen. And it comes not from an angry or unhinged private citizen, but from five Democratic members of the United States Senate. Without any foundation, they directly attack the integrity of the five Republican appointees and conclude with a threat to take political action against the Court if it doesn’t rule the way they demand.

Extremely ominious.

The brief was filed in a case involving a particular gun law that was amended in a way that gun control proponents think should moot the case against the law. The brief was filed by Senators Sheldon Whitehouse, Mazie Hirono, Richard Blumenthal, Richard Durbin, and Kirsten Gillibrand:

The senators ask the Court to dismiss the case to “stem the growing public belief that its decisions are ‘motivated mainly by politics.’” It then details how much money the NRA spent to support the confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh (there’s no mention of the amount of money progressive groups have spent to support the confirmation of progressive judges), questions the sources of money funding amicus briefs opposing New York’s law, and then claims that if there were transparency, the petitioners’ “amicus army would likely be revealed as more akin to marionettes controlled by a puppetmaster than to a groundswell of support rallying to a cause.”

There’s much more, and I suggest you Read the Whole Thing.

Here’s another quote from the brief:

The Supreme Court is not well. And the people know it. Perhaps the Court can heal itself before the public demands it be “restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics.” Particularly on the urgent issue of gun control, a nation desperately needs it to heal.

The entire thing is predicated on the senators’ rage at the fact that there is a 5-4 conservative slant to the Court at the moment. This of course de-legitimizes the Court in their eyes, whereas the reverse situation—a “progressive” majority—would just be independent, objective decision-making. Right?

[NOTE: More from Professor William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection.]

The broken neck bone adds to the suspicions

The New Neo Posted on by

You’ve probably already heard this:

An autopsy on the body of Jeffrey Epstein revealed the convicted sex offender had several broken bones in his neck, including the hyoid bone, according to a report.

The hyoid bone, which is near the Adam’s apple, can be broken in a suicide by hanging – especially in older people – but is more common in strangulation murders, The Washington Post reported.

Some people are making a great deal out of this. It doesn’t surprise me that they are doing that, because it’s a situation rife with suspicion from start to finish. There either was a conspiracy to silence Epstein or allow him to silence himself, or there was gross negligence by the prison administration and staff, or both simultaneously.

A very bad situation.

However, to me this information about the broken bones doesn’t add much. But you get articles like this:

“The hyoid bone in the neck being fractured and other fractures in the neck, make it more likely, and again, this is a percentage call, more likely that it was a homicide than a suicide,” Siegel said during an interview on “America’s Newsroom.”

No, it doesn’t. It makes it highly possible that it was either, because hyoid bones apparently get broken with some regularity in both situations. Yes, they are broken more frequently in strangulations. But they are broken frequently enough in hangings too, so this fact essentially tells us little of any use about what actually occurred in this particular case.

For example:

Multiple studies from different countries have backed up several critical points in The Post’s article: Namely that the hyoid bone being broken is more common in strangulation homicide deaths, but it does occur in a fair number of suicides by hanging, especially in older people.

However, TMZ reported that Epstein “either hurled himself off the top bunk or had his feet to the ground and leaned forward to cut off his air supply” and that such an act could explain the hyoid bone breakage. TMZ also reported Epstein “suffered petechial hemorrhaging, caused when someone hangs himself or is strangled or smothered.”…

Three authors specifically studied broken hyoid bones in hanging cases in the article Fractures of the hyoid bone and thyroid cartilage in suicidal hanging. They conducted “A prospective study of hyoid bone and thyroid cartilage fractures in Thai people who died from suicidal hanging between November 2008 and August 2009.”

The results of that study found that a broken hyoid occurred in about one-fourth of cases: “Twenty male cases of suicidal hanging were reviewed. Fractures of the hyoid bone and/or thyroid cartilage were found in five cases (25%).”

This study also noted: “Fractures of the hyoid bone and thyroid cartilage in 25% of Thais who died of suicidal hanging were related with older ages and incomplete hanging but not related with location of the knot.”…

That 2005 article is called Fracture of Hyoid Bone in Cases of ASphyxial Deaths Resulting From Constricting Force Round the Neck.

“Some have claimed hyoid bone fracture in about 20% cases of hanging. Some have claimed hyoid bone fracture in about 68% cases of hanging. They also claimed that hyoid bone fracture increases with age above 40 years due to calcification and immobilization of joints. Some also claimed that hyoid bone fracture increases with using hard ligature for hanging and strangulation,” the article notes.

Much more at the link.

I’m not going to go on and on about this. But it’s pretty clear to me that there are reasons to be suspicious, but I don’t see the neck fracture or absence of a neck fracture as determinative in any useful way.

One thing I do know is that speculation about what happened to Jeffrey Epstein will not end. I can’t even imagine a finding of fact that would end it. Can you?

Osipova: the turning machine

The New Neo Posted on by

Everyone up for a palate cleanser? I am.

I’m not one for mere technical feats, however amazing. But Osipova’s turns here are so amazing they made me gasp, and it takes a lot to do that because I’ve seen a lot of great turners.

Ordinarily, fouettes are not a big interest of mine, because they seem like a parlor trick rather than a feat of artistry, however much skill and strength it takes to do them successfully. I’ve written about that before, here (although the YouTube video that was originally on that post has now gone dark).

But Osipova is in another thing entirely. I assume she’s a “natural turner” par excellence (a phenomenon also explained at that link). But Osipova takes it way beyond that.

Here she mixes it up in a way that would ordinarily be outside the realm of mere mortals. It used to be in my youth that merely doing singles in a long series was enough. But somewhere during the 1970s, I think the American Balanchine-trained dancer Gelsey Kirkland threw in some doubles and it was marvelous, astounding.

However, Osipova throws in triples and everything but the kitchen sink. She plays with centripetal force and centifugal force, because in certain of these poses—leg out straight, arms up, even jumps in the middle of the series of turns, which would seem impossible—her moves are designed to throw the turner off-center. But then she pulls it all back in again by going back to the original tight move with arms close to the body, and all of a sudden we have the fastest triples in the world. Watch the portion beginning at 3:25 and you’ll see what I’ve just described towards the end of that segment around 3:50:

And by the way…

The New Neo Posted on by

…I know this is picayune stuff, but I’m tired of seeing Jeffrey Epstein described nearly everywhere as a pedophile.

Actually, it is very clear that he was a hebephile who was primarily attracted to girls in late adolescence but under the age of consent, or those in their late teens over the age of consent. Not all the girls he had some sort of sexual congress with were underage.

Stating that fact is not an attempt to whitewash his crimes. They were crimes. But the word “pedophile” has a specific meaning that relates to sexual attraction and/or relations with prepubescent children. I have seen no evidence that Epstein had that particular attraction.

At this point I suppose it doesn’t really matter. But “pedophile” is one of those loaded trigger words, and it’s used (inappropriately, in this case) for a reason: to get people as angry as possible.

Why isn’t the truth enough? (That’s a rhetorical question.)

On hebephilia:

Hebephilia is defined as a chronophilia in which an adult has a strong and persistent sexual interest in pubescent-aged individuals, generally aged 11–14, although the age of onset and completion of puberty vary. The DSM-5’s diagnostic criteria for pedophilia and the general medical literature define pedophilia as a disorder of primary or exclusive sexual interest in prepubescent children, thus excluding hebephilia from its definition of pedophilia. However, the DSM-5’s age criteria extends to age 13. Although the ICD-10 diagnostic code for the definition of pedophilia includes a sexual preference for children of prepubertal or early pubertal age, the ICD-11 states that “pedophilic disorder is characterized by a sustained, focused, and intense pattern of sexual arousal—as manifested by persistent sexual thoughts, fantasies, urges, or behaviours—involving pre-pubertal children.” Because of some inconsistencies in definitions and differences in the physical development of children and adolescents, there is overlap between pedophilia, hebephilia and ephebophilia.

The term hebephilia was first used in 1955, in forensic work by Hammer and Glueck. Anthropologist and ethno-psychiatrist Paul K. Benedict used the term to distinguish pedophiles from sex offenders whose victims were adolescents.

One of the peculiarities of these sexual proclivities is that those who exhibit them often specialize rather narrowly. Epstein seemed to be into girls in later adolescence, for example ages 15 or so. He probably used this to justify what he did as not being such a big deal, as do some other people who consider such things okay.

I consider such things extremely not-okay. Even though the age of consent differs somewhat from state to state, Epstein was an exploiter of underage girls and that is both a legal and a moral crime.

But it’s not pedophilia.

Those sleepy prison guards

The New Neo Posted on by

This report certainly seems to support the “deep incompetence” theory. If you believe the NY Times report, that is:

Guards at the jail where Jeffrey Epstein was held fell asleep and failed to check on him for about three hours when he is believed to have killed himself, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

Several law enforcement and prison officials familiar with the matter confirmed reports that the two guards falsified records to cover up their mistake, according to the newspaper.

Both guards were placed on administrative leave Tuesday, the same day the Justice Department announced it ordered the Bureau of Prisons to temporarily reassign the warden at the Manhattan federal prison.

Talk about something conducive to conspiracy theories! Even a person not temperamentally inclined in that direction can be forgiven for being doubtful that such incompetence occurred.

And as I’ve said several times before, I am somewhat doubtful myself. But as I’ve also said, I am very much a proponent of Hanlon’s Razor, which goes like this: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” That should be “stupidity and/or incompetence and/or negligence.”

It’s rampant.

The story with the Epstein suicide now is that the prison is understaffed and guards were working double shifts. I find that easy to believe. Who wants to be a prison guard these days? Someone who needs the money, or someone who likes power over prisoners. It’s not the sort of thing, though, that you hear most little kids saying: “When I grow up, I want to be a prison guard.”

About those guards:

The New York Times Opens a New Window. reporting Monday night that one of the two guards assigned to keep watch on Epstein was not a full-fledged correctional officer and that neither guard had checked on Epstein for several hours before his body was discovered….

The average salary for a correctional officer inside of a Federal Bureau of Prisons facility — such as the MCC where Epstein was held — is on average $52,481.00 per year or roughly $25.23 per hour according to Payscale.com Opens a New Window.

The officers guarding Epstein, 66, were working extreme overtime according to a source speaking to The Associated Press. At least one of the officers was on his fifth straight day of overtime while another was working mandatory overtime to compensate for the staffing shortage on the morning of Epstein’s demise.

Several workers at MCC are forced to work almost twice as long as typical 40 hour work weeks, with some officers seeing 60 to 70 hours per workweek according to Serene Gregg, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3148, who spoke with the Washington Post Opens a New Window. .

“Our staff is severely overworked,” explained Gregg. “It wasn’t a matter of how it happened or it happening, but it was only a matter of time for it to happen. It was inevitable.”

The Federal Bureau of Prisons is so anxious to solve its worker and overtime problems at the MCC that it recently advertised a job fair online Opens a New Window. offering a, “10% incentive bonus for Correctional Officers hired, and on-board, before Sept. 30th, 2019.”

This is not an excuse of any kind for what happened. I’m not sure what the solution is, either. But the situation of extreme overwork does not surprise me, and it does not seem unbelievable.

However, with a prisoner such as Epstein, there is no question that his guards should have been the very best, the brightest, and the most alert and well-rested of the lot. Epstein was an extraordinarily high-risk prisoner as well as an exceedingly important one. Either there really was a conspiracy to kill him or allow him to kill himself or (the following is my leading theory still) there was abysmal incompetence involved.

Get Roger’s Goat!

The New Neo Posted on by

Roger Simon, founder of PJ Media, author of many novels and screenplays, has a new book out called The Goat. He explains here why he decided to self-publish it, after so many novels published in the conventional way:

The Amazon blurb begins this way:

Whatever happened to Dan Gelber – the divorced screenwriter who journeyed to Nepal in his seventies only to plunge to his death off of Mt. Everest?

And just who is Jay Reynolds – the mysterious twenty-year-old tennis prodigy who appears out of nowhere to battle Rafael Nadal at the French Open and Roger Federer at Wimbledon and become the new hope of American tennis, possibly “the greatest of all time”?

Award-winning mystery writer (Moses Wine series) and Academy Award-nominated screenwriter (“Enemies, A Love Story,” “The Big Fix”. “Bustin’ Loose,”), Roger L. Simon answers these questions and more in The GOAT, his first standalone novel in years.

Why am I self-publishing? Aside from the obvious publishing world bias against anyone to the right of Trotsky (this is particularly true for fiction; there are several good conservative venues for non-fiction), I have real reasons for having decided, after all these years and books, to self-publish. And not just because it’s clearly the wave of the future.

I believe in free markets and self-publishing is entrepreneurial. You get a greater hand in your own creative destiny, even if it’s more of a gamble.

The author foregoes a publisher’s advance for a significantly larger piece of the revenue pie and control of production, pricing, and marketing. Of course, that means paying for everything yourself from the cover design to formatting to ads.

I confess; I haven’t read the book. Yet. And I’m a friend of Roger’s. But it sounds really, really good.

[ADDENDUM: See this review at New Criterion.]