The economy, stupid

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter and forecaster extraordinaire “Cornhead” (aka attorney David Begley) writes about a question-and-answer session with Warren Buffett that he attended:

In response to another question Buffett said that while he spent his own money backing Hillary Clinton, it would have been completely wrong (and illegal) to spend corporate money backing one political candidate. I can say with complete confidence that Warren Buffett is not part of the Resistance and he has moved on from Hillary’s defeat.

I found it very interesting that Buffett seemed to back President Trump on some of his trade policies and particularly on steel. Warren rattled off some numbers about how much of our economy is dependent upon foreign trade and how it is generally good for America…

Many times Warren and Charlie [Munger] spoke favorably of the Trump tax cuts. Their point is that the corporate tax cuts will be channeled into more investment in America and higher wages for workers as confidence in the American economy grows. Buffett thinks that the full effect of the tax cuts is still not fully priced into the market.

From Buffett’s Wiki entry:

Buffett is a notable philanthropist, having pledged to give away 99 percent of his fortune to philanthropic causes, primarily via the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He founded The Giving Pledge in 2009 with Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, whereby billionaires pledge to give away at least half of their fortunes. He is also active contributing to political causes, having endorsed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. presidential election; he has publicly opposed the policies, actions, and statements of the current U.S. president, Donald Trump

Here are more details of Buffett’s political point of view; he seems like a garden-variety liberal to me. I wonder whether his (perhaps grudging) support of the tax cuts, as reported by Cornhead, is representative of the reasons behind recent upticks for Trump in polls such as the one reported on here [emphasis mine]:

…But 52 percent of Americans approve of the president’s handling of the economy of the economy. And 57 percent say things are going well. That’s eight percentage points more than earlier this year, and it’s the highest mark since January 2007, before the last recession…

The improvement in the “how are things going” number is driven mostly by Democrats, though. 40 percent of the Dems in the survey say America is doing well. Only 25 percent said so in February. And 26 percent of Democrats approve of Mr. Trump’s handling of the economy, compared to 15 percent three months ago.

The pocketbook can be a heavy persuader.

What’s up with these New York AGs?

The New Neo Posted on by

Another one bites the dust, amidst accusations by former lovers:

New York Attorney General Schneiderman follows the trail of infamy taken by once-esteemed New York politicians Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner when his resignation takes effect today amid accusations of sexual misconduct.

The claims against Schneiderman, a champion of the #MeToo movement and outspoken warrior against sexual harassment and abuse, include violent abuse…

Later Monday, Schneiderman said he would resign Tuesday after The New Yorker detailed allegations from four women who say he slapped, choked and degraded them. Schneiderman, 63, acknowledged engaging in role-playing “in the privacy of intimate relationships” but denied assaulting anyone or engaging in non-consensual sex.

So at the very least Schneiderman seems to have been into rough sex, which is not illegal if both parties are consenting adults. The women, however, say this was not the least bit consensual.

The article was by Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow,the latter of course being the guy who revealed the Weinstein story. Once again, the New Yorker (a very liberal magazine) has decided that the exposure of the alleged abuse of women by a powerful man trumps (if you’ll pardon the expression) the protection of an influential liberal.

And oh, the irony and possible hypocrisy:

Schneiderman was outspoken in his criticism of Harvey Weinstein, the now-disgraced, one-time giant of filmmaking accused by numerous women of sexual harassment and assault. In February, Schneiderman’s office filed suit against Weinstein and The Weinstein Co. alleging sexual harassment and discrimination carried out by Harvey and his top lieutenants.

Is Schneiderman guilty? Those of you who are regular readers know that I don’t ascribe to “believe the women”—or “believe the men,” for that matter. I don’t believe or disbelieve people based on the sexual (or racial, or religious, or…) category to which they belong. I don’t know enough about this story to say I am absolutely certain one way or the other, although I did read the New Yorker article and I do lean towards the “most likely guilty” side.

More:

Selvaratnam [one of the named accusers] describes Schneiderman as “a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” figure, and says that seeing him lauded as a supporter of women has made her “feel sick,” adding, “This is a man who has staked his entire career, his personal narrative, on being a champion for women publicly. But he abuses them privately. He needs to be called out.”

I will say this: the stories told in the article are believable, and they allege a common pattern of behavior that involves very heavy drinking (“a bottle and a half of wine, or more” regularly) and some sedative abuse by Schneiderman. That’s a toxic combination that can not only markedly impact behavior, cloud judgement, and/or release inhibitions, but it can impair memory. It may be that Schneiderman doesn’t even remember any of it—a guess I do not offer as any sort of excuse whatsoever on his part.

The two named women (there are four in all, but only two have revealed their identities) seem to have no political ax to grind (they are “progressive feminist” Democrats). However, they are Scheniermann exes, so they may have personal reasons to want to get him into trouble, and also (although they are alleged to move in different social circles) they have friends in common and “have become aware of each other’s stories”—presumably before they read those stories in the New Yorker. None reported the abuse to police, but that’s not surprising, since they also allege that Schneiderman threatened them. After all, as one of them is quoted in the article as saying: “What do you do if your abuser is the top law-enforcement official in the state?”

What, indeed.

Well, one thing you do is to talk to Ronan Farrow. And today, as a result, Schneiderman has resigned.

Is this also another case of the Trump curse?

Mueller: is there any there there?

The New Neo Posted on by

Robert Mueller is facing more than the scorn of Judge Ellis. There’s another trial in which Mueller’s team recently came up short.

Here’s how it all began. Remember?:

In February, to huzzahs of delight from the media, the Democrats, and the NeverTrump people, Robert Mueller announced, via his errand boy Rod Rosenstein, the indictment of thirteen Russian nationals and three Russian entities for a variety of alleged computer crimes during the 2016 election.

There were some potential problems with that. For example:

One of the many criticisms of Mueller’s move was that it was pure propaganda. He could charge these people all he wanted, but they were never going to be extradited and tried. That seemed obvious.

Well, guess what?

Then in April, the most amazing thing happened. One of the indicted companies informed Mueller that it had retained US counsel and would see him in court…

Because the Russian oligarch has enough money to hire real lawyers who fight for a living, Mueller faced real opposition rather than people with no resources to defend themselves. You can be excused for looking at the manhandling Mueller’s people took from Manafort’s legal team and concluding they aren’t used to doing much besides bullying indigent defendants into a plea bargain.

More:

Eric Dubelier of Reed Smith, who represents Concord Management and Consulting LLC, has posed dozens of questions to Mueller’s prosecutors, demanding detailed information about how prosecutors built their case and the identity of all witnesses and cooperators.

According to a filing Friday in federal court in Washington, Dubelier even wants prosecutors to catalog U.S. efforts to influence foreign elections around the world since 1945.

Mueller asked for more time, but the court has denied the request, and the arraignment is supposed to occur on Wednesday.

The cost of Canadian health care

The New Neo Posted on by

The true costs are mostly hidden:

Let’s start with how much Canadians actually pay. The OECD arrives at its figures by the hopelessly simplistic method of dividing a nation’s total health care expenditure by its population. Thus, Canadians pay about $5,500 a head while we pay a little over $10,000 apiece for our system. But these figures are meaningless to actual Canadian families. What matters to them is how much they pay for coverage, via taxation. The Fraser Institute, a non-partisan think tank based in British Columbia, reports that the average two-adult family pays more than $12K annually. And it gets worse:

Between 1997 and 2017, the average Canadian family’s cash income increased by 96.6%.”¦ Over that two decades, the cost of health care insurance for the average Canadian family (all family types) increased by 173.6%.

Canada really knows how to do health care inflation:

For the average Canadian family, between 1997 and 2017, the cost of public health care insurance increased 3.2 times as fast as the cost of food, 2.7 times as fast as the cost of clothing, 1.9 times as fast as the cost of shelter, and 1.8 times faster than average income.

In addition, there’s the issue of choice:

As Sally Pipes, CEO and Thomas W. Smith Fellow in Health Care Policy at the Pacific Research Institute, writes:

I came to the United States in 1991, in part, to escape the single-payer system called Medicare, in my native Canada. A recent OECD study of nine developed nations showed that Canada was the only country that outright banned any private coverage for procedures deemed medically necessary.

And then there’s the issue of the waits. Back in the 1990s, I personally observed the terrible situation that chronic pain patients in Canada and Great Britain faced, when in connection with my arm and back injuries I was on a discussion board for chronic pain (the following quote’s from a post I wrote in 2009):

It was actually my injuries that first propelled me online over ten years ago, looking for information to help me with my decisions, and to read about the experiences of other people who suffered from similar problems. One of the things I found at that time that made a deep impression on me were the stories told by patients in Canada and Britain. Although they didn’t have to worry about insurance coverage, they were uniformly the most miserable of all the chronic pain patients on several message boards I frequented. They had to wait forever for tests. There were far fewer specialists in Canada and Britain who knew anything about their injuries or how to treat them either surgically or medically. The problems of these patients were generally considered unimportant and they were given low priority.

Until that time, if I’d thought about the health care system in those countries at all, I had assumed it was a great thing that there was universal coverage. But during this experience I learned that, at least for nerve injuries and chronic pain of the sort I had, the care here was far better. In fact, many of these people dreamed of saving up enough money to come to the US to some of the surgeons I’d been able to see. But they could not afford it, and they continued to suffer.

I’m not a rich person. But ever since then I’ve continued to pay extra for the medical insurance most likely to preserve my freedom to choose. If I hadn’t been able to have surgery on the west coast, I believe that even now, ten years later, I would probably be suffering from pain at or above the level of those early years. The prospect is so dreadful that I shudder to even think about it. I’m just grateful that wasn’t the case.

I wasn’t political in the 90s, back when this was happening. I had no ax to grind against single-payer—in fact, prior to that experience I probably would have said it was a good thing. But I couldn’t help but notice the desperation and increased suffering of the people on those boards from Canada and Great Britain.

There is no free lunch. There is no free health care. And anyone comparing outcomes in different countries by comparing statistics on infant mortality and life expectancy is comparing apples and oranges. These matters are influenced by much more than a healthcare insurance system.

Diversity at the university

The New Neo Posted on by

Political diversity, that is:

There are more than ten Democrats for every one Republican among elite professors at America’s top liberal arts colleges, a new study found. Worse, Democrats outnumber Republicans by 70 to 1 in religion departments, and that wasn’t the worst disparity.

Mitchell Langbert, an associate professor of business management at Brooklyn College, examined the party affiliations of 8,688 tenure-track, Ph.D.-holding professors at 51 of the top 60 liberal arts colleges in U.S. News and World Report’s 2017 rankings, and found that there were 10.4 times as many Democrats as Republicans. This sample proved far from complete, since 37.8 percent of professors are either not registered to vote or not registered with a specific party, but the study did show a rough litmus test of political opinion at top colleges…

Worse, 39 percent of the colleges he surveyed had not one Republican on the faculty. The political registration in the remaining 61 percent proved slightly more than zero but nevertheless “absurdly skewed against Republican affiliation and in favor of Democratic affiliation.” At Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. ”” ranked number 1 by U.S. News and World Report ”” Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 132 to one.

“Thus, 78.2 percent of the academic departments in my sample have either zero Republicans, or so few as to make no difference,” Langbert reported.

It didn’t used to be that way. But that’s the way it is now, and the trend really got going in the 1990s. A little while ago I saw a video in which Jonathan Haidt described the reasons:

Here’s another excellent Haidt video on the subject of universities’ lack of diversity of political thought:

“Re-imagining” the classics

The New Neo Posted on by

“Re-imagining” works of art that have withstood the test of time is a trend, one I encountered last night when I attended this performance of the full opera “Hansel and Gretel” at the Yale School of Music.

I’ve written about this opera and my love of it before (see also this), and I’m well aware that sometimes directors are inspired to “re-imagine” it—always in ways that undermine the classic’s beauty, charm, and even the gravitas of parts of it (yes, gravitas).

So I’m usually aware of the warning signs that I might have that kind of experience if I attend a certain production. While I’m tolerant of some changes—in costuming, in translation, in orchestration (often missing and replaced by a forlorn and single piano), there are certain changes I really have trouble stomaching, such as the ones in the current Met production (see this).

I didn’t see any hints of special problems in the description of the evening’s offering: “Yale Opera: A fully-staged production of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel in the intimate Morse Recital Hall.” The accompanying photo at that website looked like a standard but minimalist production. But it turns out it’s not a photo of the current production, which is costumed something like a more schlumpy version of this:

And the college setting didn’t clue me in, either, because I’d seen beautiful versions at CUNY-Purchase in New York, with a full orchestra and traditional staging and scenery. Here’s an example of a Purchase production, if you’re an H&G aficionado:

Too bad I didn’t look at this article about the Yale production (published after I’d done my research and purchased my tickets) before I hied myself to Yale and sat in the audience for what turned out to be one of the most dreadful experiences I’ve ever had in the theater.

And that’s saying something.

At least the Yale campus was in full spring flower. I got there early and walked around and saw trees and bulbs in bloom on a gorgeous day. So there’s that.

Here’s a description of Yale’s production from that recent article:

In reimagining [there’s the dread word; beware, beware!] Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel for Yale Opera’s spring production, director John Giampietro found inspiration in the technology that consumes us even as we recognize the benefits of being so thoroughly connected.

…Giampietro wanted to ask, by way of the production, “How is this immediate to our world and our experience?” The Brooklyn, New York-based director pointed out that “in our modern-day world, we’re sort of lost as a civilization,” we’re having “our lost-in-the woods moment,” consumed by technology and asking ourselves, “What is real?”

In the Yale Opera production, the mother hooks the children up to a virtual realty game in which they enter a forest depicted by projected designs. To find and rescue their children from danger, the parents, too, have to enter a virtual reality and play the game…

That doesn’t even begin to describe how awful a “re-imagining” this actually was.

Here’s what I have to say to wannabee geniuses like Giampietro: If you must make a commentary on the alienation of modern life and the internet, start your own blog. And if you want to stage an opera on that subject, write your own friggin masterpiece. Don’t ruin someone else’s.

Perhaps if Giampietro wrote his own opera on that theme, few people would come to it. Or perhaps he’s popular enough that it could get the crowds, and I encourage him to go for it. But by putting on “Hansel and Gretel,” he gets a ready-made audience for what amounts to a bait-and-switch. At least make sure you put “re-imagined” on the website, so people are forewarned.

What Giampietro did to this opera was an abomination—hard to follow (even though I know it by heart), devoid of meaningful context (the plot was actually nonsensical in various ways), with the delicate, humorous, and touching interplay between and among the characters virtually (to coin a phrase) gone.

And whoever “designed” the set (white couches and a light show projected on the back wall) and the “costumes” (mostly black and white clothes that might be suitable for waitresses in a hamburger place or maybe working out) should get out of the theater, pronto. I’ve never seen a more visually boring piece of “entertainment.”

The sad thing—or perhaps it’s the happy thing—is that the performers’ voices were wonderful. If you closed your eyes you could even imagine you were listening to a good recording of the opera—albeit miked, as far as my ears could tell; and if these are opera students, why the miking, particularly when they were only competing for attention with a single piano? (See this for a discussion of the amplification of opera sound).

I wish these young and talented opera singers good luck with the current trends in the operatic (and theatrical, for that matter) world. They should be better served by their directors, but somehow I doubt that they will be.

John Kerry at it again, doing what he does best

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the many many perks of the end of the Obama administration was the long-hoped-for fading away from public life of John Forbes Kerry.

When I looked at that Wiki entry of Kerry’s I was surprised to see that he is still only 74. Of course, I already knew that 74 was around the age he had to be. But my momentary startle was probably due to the fact that it seems he’s been around forever.

That’s because Kerry’s fame began at a fairly young age, when he got a lot of publicity as an antiwar activist during the Vietnam years while he was still in his twenties. One of his activist activities (activists have activities, right?) was to talk with the Vietcong in early 1971:

Kerry, a leading antiwar activist at the time, mentioned it in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April of that year. “I have been to Paris,” he testified. “I have talked with both delegations at the peace talks, that is to say the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and Provisional Revolutionary Government,” the latter a South Vietnamese communist group with ties to the Viet Cong.

Kerry’s campaign said earlier this year that he met on the trip with Nguyen Thi Binh, then foreign minister of the PRG and a top negotiator at the talks. Kerry acknowledged in that testimony that even going to the peace talks as a private citizen was at the “borderline” of what was permissible under U.S. law, which forbids citizens from negotiating treaties with foreign governments. But his campaign said he never engaged in negotiations or attended any formal sessions of the talks.

…John O’Neill, an organizer of the Swift boat group and co-author of the anti-Kerry book “Unfit for Command,” said it would be “unprecedented” for a future commander in chief to have met with enemy leaders. “It would be like an American today meeting with the heads of al Qaeda,” he said.

Historian Douglas Brinkley said Kerry’s trip to Paris, after his honeymoon with his first wife, Julia Thorne, was part of Kerry’s extensive fact-finding efforts on the war. “He was on the fringes,” said Brinkley, the author of “Tour of Duty,” a book about Kerry’s military service. “But he was proud of it. . . . He wanted to make his own evaluation of the situation.”

Kerry rubbed me the wrong way even then, although I was a liberal antiwar Democrat myself. Could not stand his unctuous self-righteous posturing, which dripped phoniness and self-aggrandizing drama.

One of the first blog posts I ever wrote was about Kerry, when he was running for president in 2004. Which brings us to now:

Former Secretary of State John Kerry has been engaging in shadow diplomacy to try to preserve the Iran nuclear deal, a major diplomatic achievement of his, according to a new report.

Over recent months, Kerry has been holding meetings and speaking with big players in the Iran nuclear agreement, who, like Kerry, do not want President Donald Trump to withdraw the US from the deal, The Boston Globe reported.

Citing a person briefed on the meetings, the Globe reported that Kerry had met with Iran Foreign Minister Javad Zarif at the United Nations in New York two weeks ago, their second meeting in about two months, to discuss ways of keeping the deal limiting Iran’s nuclear weapons program intact.

The former secretary of state also met last month with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, separately sat down with French President Emmanuel Macron in both Paris and New York, and spoke on the phone with European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, the source told the Globe.

Kerry has also quietly lobbied members of Congress, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, placing dozens of phone calls in recent weeks.

Kerry would like to preserve his “legacy,” of course. And what of the Logan Act? I think if a person is against that law in general—and I am—it shouldn’t be enforced against Kerry. But if ever there was a case that fit exactly into the scenario envisioned by the Logan Act, it would be this one:

(1 Stat. 613, 18 U.S.C. § 953, enacted January 30, 1799) is a United States federal law that criminalizes negotiation by unauthorized persons with foreign governments having a dispute with the United States. The intent behind the Act is to prevent unauthorized negotiations from undermining the government’s position. The Act was passed following George Logan’s unauthorized negotiations with France in 1798, and was signed into law by President John Adams on January 30, 1799.

Looking at the history of the Logan Act and the two prosecutions (no convictions) that have occurred under it, I can’t see a similar situation or one in the same class as that of Kerry, in which the secretary of state of a previous administration seeks to negotiate to undermine the policy of the present secretary of state and the current president.

Of course, as Trump himself has said recently, Kerry is “not the best negotiator we’ve ever seen.” One thing about private citizens negotiating with foreign nations against the interests of present administrations is that those private citizens no longer have the power they once possessed, as those foreign nations no doubt recognize.

Millennials discover mid-level cities

The New Neo Posted on by

It doesn’t surprise me.

I never wanted to live in New York, although I grew up there and most of the people I knew wanted to stay there the rest of their lives—and have done so.

Not me. I always felt overwhelmed by Manhattan. Not in the sense that I couldn’t find my way around (I could); it was the vastness of it and in particular the crush of people and the idea of trying to claw my way up towards the top of a very huge and simultaneously-clawing heap.

I loved the Broadway theater (back then; not so much now) and the dance and all the other cultural choices possible. But I knew it wasn’t going to be the place I’d be staying as an adult.

These days, with home and apartment prices having skyrocketed, I can understand why more and more young people have decided that first-tier cities with enormously expensive real estate markets are not where they’re going to settle and raise a family.

Enter, places like Indianapolis and Louisville:

After a decade of investment in parks and greenspace, homegrown tech hubs, and downtown redevelopment, many small and mid-size metros are seeing more signs of life and increased migration, according to a recent Brookings Institution analysis of U.S. Census data. This comes at a time when larger superstar cities are seeing slower population growth and an uptick in domestic out-migration.

Cities such as Madison, Wisconsin, and Indianapolis, Indiana, have thrived due to the growing tech scenes, including headquarters for large companies such as Epic and Salesforce, respectively, as well as investments in public infrastructure, such as the Indianapolis Cultural Trail and Madison-area bike trails. Silicon Valley investors see possibility in the Midwest. AOL founder Steve Case’s Revolution’s Rise of the Rest seed fund plans to invest $150 million in new companies in the region, especially in sectors such as health care, agriculture, transportation, finance, and manufacturing.

Louisville has made similar strides in recent years, investing millions of dollars in an expansion of its Frederick Law Olmsted-designed park system, adding a new convention center and a pair of hotels to the recently coined NuLu neighborhood, and building new apartments downtown. Mayor Greg Fischer brags about $12.5 billion in economic development in the region.

It’s happening to smaller cities, too. One of the problems with it all, though, which the article doesn’t mention, is that as smaller cities or large towns become more gentrified (which is actually what the article is describing), the lower economic tier of the population starts having to leave for less-discovered towns.

I’ve seen it happen many times in New England. A sleepy town with lots of housing and economic variety gets discovered and heats up in terms of the housing market, and the rise and then the exodus begins.

“Unfettered power”

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember the Paul Manafort case? The judge there (T. S. Ellis, a Reagan appointee) is not pleased with the Mueller crew:

“You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort,” U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III told Mueller’s team. “You really care about what information Mr. Manafort can give you to lead you to Mr. Trump and an impeachment, or whatever.”…

The Reagan-appointed judge asked Mueller’s team where they got the authority to indict Manafort on alleged crimes dating as far back as 2005…

“We don’t want anyone with unfettered power,” he said.

Mueller’s team says its authorities are laid out in documents including the August 2017 scope memo ”“ and that some powers are actually secret because they involve ongoing investigations and national security matters that cannot be publicly disclosed.

[Judge] Ellis seemed amused and not persuaded.

He summed up the argument of the Special Counsel’s Office as, “We said this was what [the] investigation was about, but we are not bound by it and we were lying.”

He referenced the common exclamation from NFL announcers, saying: “C’mon man!”

The judge also gave the government two weeks to hand over the unredacted “scope memo” or provide an explanation why not — after prosecutors were reluctant to do so, claiming it has material that doesn’t pertain to Manafort.

“I’ll be the judge of that,” Ellis said.

That last sentence indicates that Judge Ellis seems to have a considerable amount of wit.

The WaPo is covering the story as well.

I became curious about Judge Ellis himself. All that the article mentioned about him was that he was a Reagan appointee. Looking him up in Wiki (the only profile I could find), I see that he has a very Ivy-League-ish resume:

Born on May 15, 1940, in Bogoté¡, Colombia, Ellis graduated from Princeton University where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Engineering in 1961. Ellis served in the United States Navy as a Naval aviator from 1961 to 1966. Ellis earned a Juris Doctor, magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 1969. Harvard awarded Ellis a Knox Fellowship for study in England. He then received a Diploma in Law in 1970 from Magdalen College, Oxford University. Ellis then entered private practice with the law firm of Hunton & Williams (now Hunton & Williams LLP), located in Richmond, Virginia, where he remained until 1987.

Ellis was appointed by Reagan in 1987, and is now 77 years old. He also appears to be African American [see NOTE* below]. I would imagine he has an interesting life story, but I can’t seem to find much about it. For example, is his name—T. S. Ellis—some sort of reference to T. S. Eliot, or is that a coincidence? And what’s the Bogota angle?

[NOTE*: I was busy all day and evening yesterday, so it took me a while to get to the point of being able to check on that race question. But it turns out that the photo I saw earlier—the photo that was with Ellis’s profile, was captioned “T. S. Ellis”, and looked like a black man—was actually of former Louisiana Rep. William Jefferson, whose trial Ellis presided over.

For example, if you use Firefox and Google “T. S. Ellis,” as I did yesterday and did just now, look to the right of the page. You’ll see the beginnings of a profile of Ellis, but the photo is of Jefferson. Strange.]

Dershowitz is hopping mad

The New Neo Posted on by

I wouldn’t want to tussle with an angry, fired-up Dershowitz. The MSNBC guys in this video (don’t know their names) try to counter with their talking points, but to no avail.

Of course, this interview occurred before NBC had to eat crow and take back the story that Cohen was wiretapped, so the whole “if they’re wiretapping him there must have been a really serious offense!” argument on the left is now moot. But Dershowitz’s anger isn’t moot; he’s absolutely correct about the wrongness of finding an available crime in order to “get” the target, rather than the other way around. It’s especially bad when the target is the president of the US and you are his political enemy:

I love the irony of the reference to Tom Winter at the end there, called in to “clear this up.” Winter is the guy who broke the story and then had to walk it back.

There are more things in heaven and earth…

The New Neo Posted on by

…than are dreamt of in your philosophy:

The individual galaxies in galaxy clusters are held together by dark matter, according to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. During the universe’s first few million years, dark matter (and normal matter) began to collect into larger concentrations, eventually creating galaxy clusters. Some clusters are thought to contain up to thousands of galaxies.

To study the formation stage the protocluster was exhibiting, researchers ran observational data from the ALMA telescope through computer simulations. The two teams found that what they were witnessing occurred less than 1.4 billion years after the big bang. However, existing theoretical and computer models suggest that a protocluster as large as SPT2349-56 should have taken much longer to evolve.

“How this assembly of galaxies got so big, so fast is a mystery,” Tim Miller, a doctoral candidate at Yale University and lead author of one of the papers, said in the statement. “It wasn’t built up gradually over billions of years, as astronomers might expect. This discovery provides a great opportunity to study how massive galaxies came together to build enormous galaxy clusters.”

[NOTE: Hamlet said it.]