Royal wedding, royal dress

The New Neo Posted on by

I didn’t know until yesterday that today was the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, but of course once I learned it I had to comment on the fashion.

To wit, the dress:

I happen to like plain, classic, simple, modest wedding dresses, and this one is certainly that. But I think it’s a bit of a yawn and not all that flattering. I seem to be in a minority there.

But I wish them well. Marrying into British royalty is a step into a lifetime of intense press coverage and scrutiny of one’s every hiccup, fashion or otherwise, and I hope Meghan is up to it. Harry had no choice—he was born to it—but she did.

I’m not sure when the last time that an American married into the inner royal family of Britain. Does Wallis Warfield Simpson count? After all, her intended, Edward VIII, was already king when they contemplated marriage, so that’s marrying into the family big time. But he had abdicated prior to their official union, for the purpose of marrying her (and perhaps because being king didn’t quite suit him anyway). Simpson was—like Markle—not only an American, but a divorcee as well, in Simpson’s case a two-time divorcee. Scandal!

Well, the times they have a-changed. What once caused a constitutional crisis isn’t all that big a deal these days (even if Harry were king right now, which he is not and is unlikely to ever become).

One more thing—Markle is biracial, which apparently has engendered a certain amount of online racist commentary from the people who get off on online racist commentary. At this point in time, for most of us, Meghan’s race is another fact about her that isn’t of much import or impact, although it’s mildly interesting and another sign of the times.

I wish the couple much good luck in the future.

[NOTE: Fashions worn by some in the crowd of guests can be found here. It’s a challenge to look chic and yet not staid when the requirements are fancy but not formal, sleeves covering arms and shoulders, no decolletage, no black or white, and a hat.]

Another false accusation of racism…

The New Neo Posted on by

…an accusation that is easily proven false.

Why would someone make a claim that is so very easily disproved? Do people doing this fool themselves into thinking the paranoid story they’ve made up actually happened the way they’re telling it? Or do they not recognize what a bodycam is? Or are they devotees of “fake, but accurate”? Or do they just figure that the lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its boots on?

In this case the depressing fact is that the liar is South Carolina’s NAACP president Rev. Jerrod Moultrie. This is his story of a recent traffic stop:

Me: hello sir how can I help you

Officer: I am stopping you cause you fail to put on a turn signal and do you have any drugs in the car

Me: sir how would you know If I used my tum signal when you was approaching me as I turn and is there any drugs in your car?

Officer: License and registration

Me:sir can I take off my seat belt and get it

Officer: sure

Me: (as i open glove box i said )sir this is a new car i just purchased and all ! have is bill of sale, insurance card and registration from car I am transferring tags

Officer: ok where you work and who car is this and why you in this neighborhood

Me: sir I am a pastor and I live in the house on the left

Officer:And I guess I am the bill gates

Me: sir what’s the problem

Officer: I ask who car for the last time and why you in this neighborhood

Me: I told you for last time who car and where I live.( as my neighborhood starts to come out there house) By the way sir can I speak to your supervisor

Officer: walks away with my information When he returned he said did you know your tags comes back to another vehicle

Me: sir I just explain this to you

Officer: you need to park this vehicle and never drive it till you get this straight with DMV

Me: sir I have purchased multiple vehicles and never heard this now officer and I start fussing cause I said well i will be driving my car sir and anyt time I want

Officer: I am waming you to not drive this car till tags get straight and just know I am doing you a favor tonight not taking you to jail or writing you a ticket

Me: sir you might be doing your Self a favor but you certainly not doing me a favor.

The reverend finished off his post by saying that his wife and baby were in the back seat, but still he was profiled and accused of having drugs.

“Guess I can’t be a pastor and can’t drive a Mercedes Benz and live in a nice neighborhood,” Rev. Moultrie said. “”¦someone needs to answer for this behavior and this officer will.”

And here is the bodycam video:

Moultie has recently taken down his Facebook post describing the incident. This man has greatly set back his own cause and given ammunition to those who doubt all such claims as a matter of course. Why on earth would he not realize that to begin with?

The “whistleblower” on Michael Cohen’s finances

The New Neo Posted on by

The war on Michael Cohen continues with the disclosure of some of his financial records:

Michael Avenatti, Stormy Daniels’s attorney, published a memo last week that he said detailed Michael Cohen’s financial transactions…

But questions arose about how Avenatti had obtained the confidential information, especially as he referenced “3 Suspicious Activity Reports” related to Cohen’s dealings and teased more significant disclosures to come. The Treasury Department launched an inquiry into the potential leak.

Yesterday, the New Yorker published a piece by the very busy Ronan Farrow that purported to give the whistleblower’s account of why the leak occurred:

A law enforcement official leaked the documents, the official told Farrow, after becoming concerned that two reports on Cohen’s suspicious financial activity could not be found in a government database. Both of those reports, according to the New Yorker, detail even more substantial financial transactions ”” about $3 million, three times the amount of last week’s disclosures.

This is an extraordinary allegation. This whistleblower is claiming the documents went missing from the database, the more sinister ”” but so far unverifiable ”” implication being that they were purposely being withheld.

We have become quite used to this sort of abuse of confidentiality among “law enforcement officers”—who of course cannot be expected to go to authorities and discover why such reports might be missing, but must go immediately to the press (and/or to Stormy Daniels’ attorney?).

But it turns out that there might be a very good reason such information went missing:

Did that happen here? Why, yes, it apparently did:

And this:

In his original story, Farrow actually covered the possibility of an innocent explanation for the fact that the data couldn’t be viewed:

But because that doesn’t seem sensational enough, most of the news reports of the “missing” records ignored the possibility that the omission of the material was not a coverup.

Now this particular leaker faces the possibility of a criminal charge:

FinCEN also reiterated that the Treasury inspector general is still investigating the disclosure of the one SAR document, which is a federal criminal offense.

I recall that when Michael Cohen’s papers were raided by authorities, there was speculation that the purpose of the raid was to obtain information to leak to the media to damage Cohen and Trump. I doubt that this “whistleblower” will ever be charged with anything.

Another horrific school shooting

The New Neo Posted on by

This time in Texas near Galveston, with 10 people reported dead and the shooter in custody, wounded.

If this incident is like so many others (and my guess is that it is): (1) the actual facts will only come out slowly and laboriously, with many errors; (2) the event will be used to make political points against the right and firearms; and (3) it will emerge that no form of new gun control law being advocated in its wake would have had an effect on this particular shooter, who (4) was probably known or should have been known as a potentially violent person.

RIP to the dead, and comfort to their families.

[NOTE: See also this, about some of the early spin.]

Crossfire Hurricane: the FBI spied on Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

In a very long article in the NY Times, the newspaper tries to get ahead of the forthcoming IG report by admitting a couple of things, but burying and/or downplaying them. Par for the course.

Rather than re-invent the wheel and fisk the Times myself, I’ll defer to experts who have already done it. First we have Mollie Hemingway at The Federalisit, who offers ten key takeaways from the Times article, some of which I’ll briefly summarize here (please read the whole thing, however):

Whereas FBI officials and media enablers had previously downplayed claims that the Trump campaign had been surveiled, in this story we learn that it was more widespread than previously acknowledged…

…This is a stunning admission for those Americans worried that federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies might use their powers to surveil, leak against, and target Americans simply for their political views or affiliations.

“Stunning” only to the right; the left considers it a fine way to cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil.

Hemingway also points out that the Times article admits that after two years of this, there is still no evidence of collusion on the part of the Trump campaign. And the extent of the spying by the FBI was broader than previously disclosed:

Now we learn that it wasn’t just Page, but that the government was going after four campaign affiliates including the former campaign manager, the top foreign policy advisor, and a low-level advisor whose drunken claim supposedly launched the investigation into the campaign…

The surveillance didn’t just include wiretaps, but also national security letters and at least one government informant to spy on the campaign.

Hemingway has many other points to make, but I’m going to discuss just one of them, number seven:

One thing that is surprising about the [Times] story is how many errors it contains. The problems begin in the second sentence…

Hemingway lists a whole bunch of egregious errors, things that could easily have been ascertained with simple fact-checking. But I disagree with two points she makes here. The first is that it is surprising how many errors the story contains. It is not surprising; it is the Times’ modus operandi. What’s more, they are not actually errors. IMHO, they are purposefully and knowingly misleading. This is propaganda, not reporting, and the Times is very good at it.

How many people read the Times and/or use it as a reliable source? A great, great many—even though the right doesn’t trust it, many others still do. How many people read Mollie Hemingway in The Federalist? I think everyone should, but I would wager a guess that it’s a lot fewer than are reached by the NY Times. And the Times knows it, and they aim to keep it that way.

Now we turn to Andrew C. McCarthy. As usual, his take is not only clear, but he also gives a learned legal perspective on an element that few others have pointed out, the difference between a criminal investigation and a counterintelligence one (and again, please read the whole thing if you can) [the italics are McCarthy’s, but the passages in bold are my emphasis]:

What the Times story makes explicit, with studious understatement, is that the Obama administration used its counterintelligence powers to investigate the opposition party’s presidential campaign.

That is, there was no criminal predicate to justify an investigation of any Trump-campaign official. So, the FBI did not open a criminal investigation. Instead, the bureau opened a counterintelligence investigation and hoped that evidence of crimes committed by Trump officials would emerge. But it is an abuse of power to use counterintelligence powers, including spying and electronic surveillance, to conduct what is actually a criminal investigation.

The Times barely mentions the word counterintelligence in its saga. That’s not an accident. The paper is crafting the media-Democrat narrative. Here is how things are to be spun: The FBI was very public about the Clinton-emails investigation, even making disclosures about it on the eve of the election. Yet it kept the Trump-Russia investigation tightly under wraps, despite intelligence showing that the Kremlin was sabotaging the election for Trump’s benefit. This effectively destroyed Clinton’s candidacy and handed the presidency to Trump…

It’s also bunk. Just because the two FBI cases are both referred to as “investigations” does not make them the same kind of thing.

The Clinton case was a criminal investigation that was predicated on a mountain of incriminating evidence.

…The scandal here is that Mrs. Clinton was not charged. She likes to blame Comey for her defeat; but she had a chance to win only because the Obama Justice Department and the FBI tanked the case against her ”” in exactly the manner President Obama encouraged them to do in public commentary.

By contast, the Trump case is a counterintelligence investigation. Unlike criminal cases, counterintelligence matters are classified. If agents had made public disclosures about them, they would have been committing crimes and violating solemn agreements with foreign intelligence services ”” agreements without which those services would not share information that U.S. national-security officials need in order to protect our country.

In the scheme of things, though, the problem is not that the FBI honored its confidentiality obligations in the Trump case while violating them in the Clinton case. The scandal is that the FBI, lacking the incriminating evidence needed to justify opening a criminal investigation of the Trump campaign, decided to open a counterintelligence investigation. With the blessing of the Obama White House, they took the the powers that enable our government to spy on foreign adversaries and used them to spy on Americans ”” Americans who just happened to be their political adversaries.

The Times averts its eyes from this point ”” although if a Republican administration tried this sort of thing on a Democratic candidate, it would be the only point.

There is what happens, and then there is the story, and then there is the story about the story.

[NOTE: Of course, it all conjures up this. It’s interesting to go back and look at that, considering what we know now.]

More racial woes at Starbucks

The New Neo Posted on by

I thought this was some sort of joke at first, mainly because I’d never heard the word “beaner” as a slur against Mexicans:

Nearly two weeks ahead of their day of nationwide racial bias training, coffee chain Starbucks is facing new accusations of racism after a Latino customer discovered a racial slur written on his coffee order.

A Latino man named Peter received a cold coffee drink labeled “BEANER.”

“En espaé±ol es ”˜frijoleros’, ”˜beaner,’ you know, in English,” said the victim’s friend Miguel Acosta.

“He went to Starbucks, and they asked for his name, and his name is ”˜Peter,’ and they wrote this ”˜beaner,’ Acosta told CBS2 News through a coworker who was translating. “And he’s saying that’s not fair.”

But hey, you learn something new every day, and today I learned that “beaner” can indeed be used that way:

Beaner is derogatory slang for Mexicans or people of Mexican descent. The term originates from the prevalence of pinto beans and other beans in Mexican cuisine…

It appears that the term may be going through a phase of melioration, where the negative connotation of an ethnic slur is “reclaimed” by those against whom it is directed and used in a neutral or even positive manner.

It seems that Peter isn’t interested in “reclaiming” beaner, though.

I have three things to say about the incident.

The first is that in any organization as large as Starbucks, with as many employees as it has, of course there are going to be incidents in which an employee does something wrong or behaves badly. Real racism exists. No company is immune, and each incident can be handled on its own merits without making a federal case out of it or needing to boycott the business—although in today’s social media frenzy, that’s exactly what people want to do.

The second is that quite a few of these incidents turn out to be hoaxes. This one may or may not be.

The third is that there is a simple explanation that might even be true. It is connected—strangely enough—to the post I just put up a few minutes ago, before I had ever seen this “beaner” story. If Peter’s friend Acosta is any indication, Peter may have said the name “Peter” with an accent (can I say that without being racist?). The Starbucks employee taking the order may have heard something that sounded to him or her like “beaner,” and thought it was Peter’s name, because the two words really do sound quite a bit alike. In addition, maybe (like me) the employee had never heard the word “beaner” used as a pejorative. The whole thing may have been an innocent mistake.

But we’re not allowed to have innocent mistakes anymore.

So which is it, Yanny or Laurel?

The New Neo Posted on by

The latest internet craze is to listen to the audio and answer the burning question of whether you hear “Yanny” or “Laurel.”

I heard “Yanny”—or rather, just to show you what a weirdo I am, I actually heard “Yammy.” Close enough.

The explanation:

Computer synthesis programs can produce unnatural sounds that fall on the boundaries between the two sounds. The listener will place these chimeric sounds into one category or the other depending on the best match. Because humans have differences in their auditory function and category boundaries, some will hear ”˜Yanny,’ while others will hear ”˜Laurel.’…

“You will never confuse ”˜Yanny’ and ”˜Laurel’ when spoken by actual talkers, because they can only produce natural sounds that fall within the distinct parameter spaces of the two sounds.”…

Tinny speakers, like the ones on TV sets and laptops, tend to emphasize the higher frequencies, which brings out the “Yanny.” Older people, who have begun losing some of the higher frequencies in their hearing, are more likely to hear “laurel.”

And those older people who have begun losing some of the higher frequencies are more likely to be male than female, so my guess is that more of the older men hear “Laurel” than women do.

In no surprise at all…

The New Neo Posted on by

…most of the people the IDF killed during the March of Return have been members of Hamas—and that’s according to Hamas itself.

But remember:

[A]n emotional Glaude lashed out at Israel: “All of that is important. And all of those babies are dead. All of those people are dead. They’re dead. And we are talking about racehorses. I mean the politics,” he exclaimed sounding as though he were on the verge of tears…

“I mean, there are a lot of folks who are dead today. For what? I’m sorry, this is me being a moralist, I suppose,” he added, serruptitiously patting himself on the back. Host Katy Tur even thanked him for his ridiculousness, saying, “I’m happy you’re always the moralist. You bring it back down to Earth, that’s important.”

If any babies were killed—and we don’t know whether they were—it would be because Hamas cold-bloodedly decided to put them in among a bunch of terrorists in order to create sympathetic martyrs.

And don’t sit on a hot stove waiting for the MSM to retract all the Israel-bashing.

RIP Tom Wolfe

The New Neo Posted on by

Writer Tom Wolfe has died at 88.

Reading a lot of commentary around the web, I notice that Wolfe was a deeply meaningful writer to a great many people, some of whom say he changed their lives. I have to be honest and say that the Tom Wolfe phenomenon passed me right by; I don’t think I’ve ever read a full-length work of his, just some of his articles. I may have to remedy that failing of mine.

So that doesn’t make me the best person to eulogize Wolfe. I have long been aware of him, however, and his influence. Radical chic? Wolfe coined the phrase, and it stuck. The Me Decade, likewise. He had a way with words, Wolfe did.

Here’s an article from 2015 that sheds some light on what made Wolfe Wolfe:

[Wolfe] doesn’t use his new experience of East Coast sophisticates to distance himself from his southern conservative upbringing; instead he uses his upbringing to distance himself from the new experience…

He’d gone to Yale with the thought he would study his country by reading its literature and history and economics. He wound up discovering sociology””and especially Max Weber’s writings about the power of status seeking. The lust for status, it seemed to him, explained why otherwise intelligent American writers lost their minds and competed with one another to see just how devoted to the Communist cause they could be. In a funny way, Yale [where his professors rejected the first version of his dissertation as being too critical of Communist-friendly writers] served him extremely well: it gave him a chance to roam and read and bump into new ideas. But he didn’t immediately see that:

These stupid fucks have turned down namely my dissertation, meaning I will have to stay here about a month longer to delete all the offensive passages and retype the sumitch. They called my brilliant manuscript ”˜journalistic’ and ”˜reactionary,’ which means I must go through with a blue pencil and strike out all the laughs and anti-Red passages and slip in a little liberal merde, so to speak, just to sweeten it. I’ll discuss with you how stupid all these stupid fucks are when I see you. [T.W., aged 26, letter to a friend, June 9, 1956.]

After Yale, Wolfe no longer felt the need to “slip in a little liberal merde.” He’d had enough for a lifetime—a long and productive lifetime, as it turns out.

Another thing that would be almost impossible to miss was Wolfe’s sartorial signature, the white suit. It made him stand out, which I assume was the goal. It gave a fourfold message: here was a person who was unique, Southern, conservative, and bold, all at the same time.

RIP, Tom Wolfe:

[NOTE: Here’s the original “Radical Chic” article by Wolfe, published in New York magazine.]

Now I know why I’m not an endurance athlete

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s because I’m too introspective.

Introspection is a no-no for extreme athletes, according to this article on the subject.

Oh, there are a few other reasons, too. One is that I’m not crazy, and another is that I don’t like pain and when my body says “stop” I’m inclined to say “sure thing.”

Of course, blogging is a sort of marathon, and requires more than a little bit of OCD. But not like this:

Five weeks in [trying to set a new record for traversing the Appalachian Trail], [Jurek] was down more than a dozen pounds, and his ribs were visible. His eyes bulged, feral and unfocused. His body reeked of apple-cider vinegar as his sweat excreted excess ammonia. And his mind was beginning to crack. Late one night, he was mystified by the lights of a house he spotted on top of a mountain. A running partner had to explain that what he saw was the moon…

Just seven days into navigating the rocky, often rain-soaked path , Jurek was already overcome by doubt. In agony, one quadriceps torn and the kneecap on his other leg severely inflamed, he was overtaken by the demon that success had so long shielded him from: “Why was I even out here in the first place?” he asked, hobbling beneath a canopy of oak branches. A mantra favored by one of the many veteran ultra-runners who accompanied Jurek for parts of the trail provided his answer: “This is who I am, and this is what I do.”

In other words, don’t ask why. Breaking through his own limits makes Scott Jurek Scott Jurek, for whom the mantra served to help reaffirm the value of his long-guarded myopia. Damp and miserable in North Carolina, he wrapped athletic tape around his battered legs and limped onward.

He set a new record at 46 days, 8 hours, and 7 minutes, beating the old one by three hours. However, his record has since been broken twice.

To someone like Jurek, it matters very much who holds that record, and he held it for a little while. Plus, he knows he endured, he stayed the course, he accomplished what he set out to do despite enormous obstacles. That’s a personal achievement.

But to the rest of us, do we really care who is the record-holder, Jurek or somebody else?

Mueller: one smart fellow, he felt smart

The New Neo Posted on by

Robert Mueller hasn’t exactly been covering himself with glory lately.

Among other things:

At the arraignment [of the Russian company accused by Mueller of having tried to influence the US election], Concord’s lead counsel, Eric Dubelier, was asked whether he represents Concord Catering, another one of the charged Russian companies. He replied that he did not and added, “I think we’re dealing with the government having indicted the proverbial ham sandwich. That company didn’t exist as a legal entity during the time period alleged by the government.”

Then, hinting at more of the graymail yet to come, he remarked darkly that, “We now know that the special counsel apparently has access to [Concord’s] confidential filings at the Office of Foreign Assets Control, which in and of itself is a disturbing fact.”

Dubelier stated, “Your Honor, we waive formal reading of the indictment. We enter a plea of not guilty. We exercise our right to a speedy trial.”

So, what does all of this mean? Metaphorically speaking, it would appear that the yapping dog [Mueller] chasing the car has sunk its teeth into the spinning tire. There is no way for Rover to escape injury. Even if Mueller and his pit bulls win the discovery battle and the case at trial, what’s the prize? A $500,000 fine or compensation to victims? How will they collect?

This is a no lose situation for Concord and a self-inflicted wound for Mueller. And, as the saying goes, self-inflicted wounds are always the most painful.

As I read those words, I thought “unforced error.” And sure enough, in the next sentence:

More importantly, this unforced prosecutorial error is a victory for 63,000,000 Americans who voted for Donald Trump and strongly oppose having the outcome of the election undone by Mueller’s politically motivated and rigged investigation. It will be a pleasure to see Team Mueller dragged kicking and squealing into an American courtroom where for it the process will be the punishment.

First Comey, now Mueller, are being exposed as a great deal less smart (and certainly less honest) than their previous reps would have had us think. About a year ago when Mueller was first appointed special counsel, I couldn’t remember much about him. I looked him up and wrote the following:

Who is Mueller? He was appointed by President George W. Bush, confirmed unanimously by the Senate, and took office as FBI director just one week before 9/11, serving his 10-year term in that position. He continued in the office for two years beyond that at Obama’s request, and was replaced in 2013 by Comey.

How objective will Mueller be in this role [special counsel]? I cannot predict, but I caution that when Comey first took office he was uniformly praised as incredibly intelligent and fair. We all know how that worked out. But one can hope.

Trump fired Comey, but there’s no real need to fire Mueller, because at the moment he appears to be self-destructing. That doesn’t mean he still can’t be dangerous, because of his unfettered power. But he really does seem to be in the process of hanging himself (metaphorically speaking) with just enough rope.

[NOTE: The title of this post comes, of course, from this:

Charming lady.]