Dershowitz isn’t letting up on his criticism of the special counsel approach

The New Neo Posted on by

I happen to agree with Dershowitz on this:

“I think the investigation should end and I think the Congress should appoint a special non-partisan commission,” said Dershowitz. He said he thinks a Congressional committee would be too partisan.

“That’s the way it’s done in other western democracies,” he continued. “They don’t appoint a special counsel and tell them to ”˜Get that guy”¦’ that’s what they did in the Soviet Union. Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the KGB said to Stalin, ”˜Show me the man, and I’ll find you the crime!’” That’s what special counsel does.”

Dershowitz was quick to point out that he was not making a direct correlation between the United States and the former Soviet Union. “I’m not comparing obviously the Soviet Union and the United States. We have structural protections in our Bill Of Rights but it’s going down the wrong direction.”

“The issue of criminalization [of political differences] has not been subject to rational discourse,” said Dershowitz. “Democrats hate when they politicize and criminalize political differences against Democrats”¦ when they did it with Bill Clinton. Republicans hate when they do it against their people”¦ President Trump. But each one supports it when they’re against their enemies and partisanship prevails over principle. It’s very hard to have a reasonable discussion.”

It’s indeed hard to have a reasonable discussion, and that’s true even when people are trying to do so. Dershowitz is still trying. But he’s in the minority in that respect.

Which means that even a “non-partisan commission” would almost certainly be partisan. Or, if not partisan—if it were very equally balanced—it would probably be stalemated and unable to accomplish anything.

“Crazed girls flood Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz with fan mail”

The New Neo Posted on by

Not my headline; theirs.

It’s a common phenomenon, although to the “non-crazed” among us (that would be most of us), it seems like a bad choice and a bad bet:

Mass murderer Nikolas Cruz is getting stacks of fan mail and love letters sent to the Broward County jail, along with hundreds of dollars in contributions to his commissary account.

Teenage girls, women and even older men are writing to the Parkland school shooter and sending photographs ”” some suggestive ”” tucked inside cute greeting cards and attached to notebook paper with offers of friendship and encouragement. Groupies also are joining Facebook communities to talk about how to help the killer.

Five years ago I wrote this post on the subject of women who fall in love with (or at least, have romantic and/or sexual relationships with) prisoners, the badder the better:

Various theories are offered: attraction to the famous, violent tendencies in the woman herself, fantasies (sometimes religiously oriented) of the redemptive power of love, and the fact that often the couple never has to face living together day in and day out and so can remain in the courting stage. But I think the words of a lawyer quoted in the article offer what is probably a better explanation:
“There are lots of sad relationships in prison. A lot of opportunistic, shallow, revolting relationships and a lot of sad, hopeless people clinging to each other.”

In that post, I commented that for some prisoners it’s mostly the opportunistic, shallow, manipulative, and psychopathic elements that are operating.

Cruz—and heartthrob terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev—have the added advantage of being young, which I suppose enhances their attractiveness in the eyes of some. The fascination is not just limited to women, either, as the quote about Cruz’s admirers indicates.

The entertainment industry is shocked to discover that there might actually be money in catering to the half of America…

The New Neo Posted on by

…that it usually ignores at best or insults at worst.

In other words:

[The first episodes of the Roseanne revival] worked, leaving many TV insiders shellshocked today by the magnitude of the revival’s ratings success that revealed the untapped potential of comedies that provide realistic portrayal of blue-collar America. What’s more, Roseanne did that while also making a social commentary, something rarely seen since All in the Family, Norman Lear’s 1970s classic that has long been rumored to get a reboot.

Watch out for that “All In the Family” reboot, though. I caution anyone who’d try to do it, because of two elements that are sorely lacking: Carroll O’Connor as Archie Bunker and Jean Stapleton as his wife Edith. Roseanne Barr and John Goodman have their own charms (although maybe “charms” isn’t quite the right word) and talents, but O’Connor and Stapleton were brilliant artists who created characters with a real depth and poignancy to go with the humor. They often played it for laughs, but in the end they touched the heart. I doubt that they could ever be replaced.

Case in point:

Allan Bloom on undermining the American vision

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Here’s a blast from the not-so-distant past—a repeat of a post I first wrote in May of 2016, close to two years ago. At the end of the original post I added a note stating that, despite my strong opposition to then-candidate Trump, one of his biggest appeals was “the fact that he ascribes to the traditional vision of America described by Bloom, the one that so many people (including me) are angry at having seen undermined for so long.”

True of President Trump as well, although I credit him now with more additional pluses than I thought he had back when he was running for office.]

I’ve written in praise of Allan Bloom’s book The Closing of the American Mind several times before, but here I go again.

It was published in 1987, which is now very close to 30 years ago. And yet its relevance has only grown in the intervening years. Here’s an example that resonates today:

Contrary to much contemporary wisdom, the United States has one of the longest uninterrupted political traditions of any nation in the world. What is more, that tradition is unambiguous; its meaning is articulated in simple, rational speech that is immediately comprehensible and powerfully persuasive to all normal human beings. America tells one story: the unbroken, ineluctable progress of freedom and equality. From its first settlers and its political foundings on, there has been no dispute that freedom and equality are the essence of justice for us. No one serious or notable has stood outside this consensus…All significant political disputes have been about the meaning of freedom and equality, not about their rightness. Nowhere else is there a tradition or a culture whose message is so distinct and unequivocal—certainly not in France, Italy, Germany, or even England…Belonging to one of these peoples may be expained as a sentiment, an attachment to one’s own, akin to the attachment to father and mother, but Frenchness, Englishness, Germaness remain, nonetheless, ineffable. Everybody can, however, articulate what Americanness is…

But the unity, grandeur and attendant folklore of the founding heritage was attacked from so many directions in the last half-century that it gradually disappeared from daily life and from textbooks. It all began to seem like Washington and the cherry tree—not the sort of thing to teach children seriously. What is influential in the higher intellectual circles always ends up in the schools. The leading ideas of the Declaration began to be understood as eighteenth-century myths or ideologies. Historicism, in Carl Becker’s version (The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas, 1922) both cast doubt on the truth of the natural rights teaching and optimistically promised that it would provide a substitute. Similarly Dewey’s pragmatism—the method of science as the method of democracy, individual growth without limits, especially natural limits—saw the past as radically imperfect and regarded our history as irrelevant or as a hindrance to rational analysis of our present. Then there was Marxist debunking of the Charles Beard variety, trying to demonstrate that there was no public spirit, only private concern for property, in the Founding Fathers, thus weakening our convictions of the truth or superiority of American principles and our heroes (An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, 1913). Then the Southern historians and writers avenged the victory of the antislavery Union by providing low motives for the North (incorporating European critiques of commerce and technology) and idealizing the South’s way of life. Finally, in curious harmony with the Southerners, the radicals in the civil rights movement succeeded in promoting a popular conviction that the Founding was, and the American principles are, racist…

Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it.

Every sentence of Bloom’s usually contains more food for thought than most entire books do. The Closing of the American Mind is so dense with thought that the reader has to pause frequently to mull it over and digest it, as one would a particularly rich meal. And not only do I agree with most of it, but it’s expressed in prose so clear and yet so lively, so succinct and yet deeply erudite, so detailed and yet broadly linking widely disparate thoughts and knowledge, that my admiration for the author (who continued in his lifetime to identify as a liberal, by the way) is enormous. Bloom was a man who was not only unique in his thoughts, but courageously unafraid to speak and write them regardless of where it might lead him and who might disapprove.

If you read the above passage of Bloom’s and think about our political position at the moment, I think you will realize that Obama was no anomaly, no outsider come to undermine America, but the culmination (so far, anyway) of at least a century of hard work. The ground was prepared long ago, and what Bloom wrote in 1987 could be considered a sort of prophetic vision of things to come, but not one of the extra-sensory variety.

Did you watch the “Roseanne” premiere?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not ordinarily a sitcom viewer, but I watched about 10 minutes of the new “Roseanne” revival.

Then my TV decided to have a problem, and by the time it was fixed I had forgotten about the show and it was almost over anyway. I had decided to watch because I was curious about the Trump/antiTrump aspects that had been described in advance, as well as to see how everyone has aged. Apparently, the ratings were through the roof, which indicates that America was curious, too.

Years ago I’d watched the show at least a few times in its original incarnation. The new version features much the same cast of characters. Roseanne and husband are slimmer now, she’s more glammed up, the children are practically middle-aged (yikes!), and there are grandkids (one biracial, one a bit gender-something-or-other).

I have to hand it to Roseanne Barr for a certain amount of courage, to out herself as a Trump supporter in this day and age. Then again, she’s always been somewhat outré and willing—nay, eager—to shock the PC crowd (and just about everyone else), even back in her heyday as a TV personality.

From a review of the new show; this excerpt explains why the show interested me (although my TV had its problems before I got to see the relevant scenes):

When the new revival season of Roseanne, the groundbreaking sitcom that originally ran between 1988 and 1997, opens, Roseanne Conner and her sister, Jackie, haven’t spoken to each other since the 2016 election.

Jackie (played, as always, by the magnificent Laurie Metcalf, who won three Emmys for her work on the original series) voted for Hillary Clinton (or did she?), while Roseanne (played by Roseanne Barr, but you knew that already) voted for Donald Trump. The rift has consumed both women, but because this is a TV show and because we want to see Roseanne and Jackie together again, it’s taken place offscreen. In the premiere, the two talk again for the first time, reaching a fragile peace.

Tackling those issues on a sitcom is certainly timely, and could actually be funny if done right. We could use some humor on the subject.

Flynn vs. McCabe: If it weren’t for double standards there’d be practically no standards at all

The New Neo Posted on by

Jonathan Turley is one of those pundits who aren’t conservatives and yet whose work I really appreciate. Another is (often, anyway) Alan Dershowitz.

Turley makes a good point about the completely different treatment of Flynn and McCabe for lying to investigators:

I have been writing…on the contrast between the treatment of McCabe and former national security adviser Michael Flynn. McCabe has been erroneously portrayed as “losing his pension” but has not been charged. Flynn was charged and accepted a plea deal under 18 U.S.C. 1001 for making a false statement to investigators. Now McCabe is raising virtually the same defense that did not work for Flynn: that there was a lot going on and he was “confused and distracted.”

Given his willingness to hold forth publicly on his actions, McCabe does not appear to expect to be charged even though the Inspector General could refer a criminal allegation to prosecutors.

[McCabe] lashes about at President Donald Trump and critics to assert ”˜I did not knowingly mislead or lie to investigators.” He then added this familiar defense: “At worst, I was not clear in my responses, and because of what was going on around me may well have been confused and distracted ”” and for that I take full responsibility.”

That is reportedly the same defense raised by Flynn who admitted to meeting with Russian diplomats during the busy transition period but did not disclose or confirm that they spoke about sanctions. He reportedly also did not make such a disclosure to Vice President Pence. There was nothing unlawful in the meeting with the Russians or even unprecedented for an incoming national security adviser to discuss such points of tension between the countries.

We don’t know all the details, but it’s hard to see the differential treatment as anything other than politics. Oh, and position; McCabe is/was very much a higher-up in the law enforcement world (FBI) and Flynn is not.

There are also some differences in who it was that each man lied to, although both types of lie could be charged as crimes. Flynn lied to the FBI and McCabe to the IG. Here’s more from Turley (written a few weeks ago) on the practical aspects of this:

Ultimately, Inspector General Michael Horowitz has the authority to refer a matter to criminal investigators investigators in cases of false statements or other crimes. He can also refer matters to state bars in cases of professional misconduct by lawyers. He could do either in the matter of McCabe if investigators conclude that McCabe intentionally misled them. However, if history is any guide, McCabe is unlikely to find himself facing a charge.

It is a perceived luxury enjoyed by federal prosecutors that routinely charge others with even borderline false statements but rarely face such charges themselves. While most prosecutors adhere to the highest ethical standards, a minority of Justice Department lawyers have been accused of false or misleading statements in federal cases. However, they are virtually never charged with false statements by their colleagues. There is no such reluctance in using this easily charged crime against targets outside of the department.

Consider the case of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn…

Turley goes on to state that “investigators working under former FBI Director James Comey reportedly had concluded that Flynn did not intend to lie and should not be charged criminally for the omission.” To me, this makes it even more outrageous that he was charged nevertheless.

It’s really worth reading Turley’s whole article, because this really does seem like a case of prosecutorial persecution vs. prosecutorial leniency. Turley also goes into the history of what’s known as the “exculpatory no,” which used to offer relief from these sorts of prosecutions but was abolished by SCOTUS in a 1998 case—although McCabe seems to have earned an exception through an unofficial, extra-judicial “in-house exculpatory no.”

Justice Stevens op-ed: get rid of the Second Amendment

The New Neo Posted on by

This is shocking (or rather, it should be): former SCOTUS Justice Stevens (who is now 97), has written a NY Times op-ed piece calling for the elimination of the Second Amendment. The reason he gives is this:

Rarely in my lifetime have I seen the type of civic engagement schoolchildren and their supporters demonstrated in Washington and other major cities throughout the country this past Saturday. These demonstrations demand our respect. They reveal the broad public support for legislation to minimize the risk of mass killings of schoolchildren and others in our society.

…But the demonstrators should seek more effective and more lasting reform. They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment.

Gotcha.

As Ann Althouse writes:

It would not be simple [although Stevens had said it would be simple] to get rid of the Second Amendment through the amendment process. It would be virtually impossible.

And the idea that you’d excise a right from the Constitution to “weaken” a lobbying group that “stymie[s] legislative debate” is repellant. Notice the motive of restricting speech. A group speaks too powerfully; we need to change the Constitution.

Stevens concludes:

That simple but dramatic action would move Saturday’s marchers closer to their objective than any other possible reform.

We should remove rights from the Constitution because it would be dramatic and because it would move marchers closer to their objective??

I am very sad to see Justice Stevens writing like that, but he’s made this proposal before [in a 2014 book].

You can feel Althouse’s outrage, which I share. But I am really not surprised. What is somewhat new is that the anti-Second-Amendment folks are becoming less shy about their true aims regarding the Constitution. But even that was foreshadowed in 2013, when the NY Times published an op-ed by Louis Michael Seidman, a con law professor at Georgetown, in which he basically said many of the Constitution’s provisions are “archaic, idiosyncratic, and downright evil” (I wrote about Seidman’s piece here).

Justice Stevens wrote the dissent in Heller, as Althouse points out. My guess is that he’s still smarting at the fact that it wasn’t the majority opinion, and he sees an opportunity now, looking at MSM coverage of the protests, to rally the troops for the big prize, Second Amendment repeal.

It is one of those ironic facts of life that Stevens (who retired in 2010) was one of a number of justices originally appointed by Republicans, and thought to be at least moderately conservative, who turned more liberal over time. He often served as the “swing” vote on the Court. First appointed to Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit by Richard Nixon and with a conservative record as a jurist, Stevens was then nominated by Gerald Ford to SCOTUS. But Stevens later said (2005) that “learning on the job” was important. In addition, “a 2003 statistical analysis of Supreme Court voting patterns found Stevens the most liberal member of the Court.”

That’s quite a change.

I have a theory about this conservative-to-liberal drift for judges and justices, and one day I plan to write a longer post about it. But for now I’ll just say that the main explanation I see is that people enjoy power, and when they get power they like to expand it if possible. A SCOTUS justice has a lot of power to determine the course of events; more power than most non-elected people in this country ever get. Liberal judges tend to be in favor of not limiting themselves to things such as the language of the Constitution. They are more likely than conservatives to see “penumbras” in the law and want to follow its supposed spirit rather than its letter, and to regard the Constitution as a living, changing document. Pleased with their own power, they see themselves as just the people to lead others who wish to change what those old, archaic, and downright evil framers put in place.

I would imagine it’s a temptation that’s hard to resist, even for justices who start out conservative.

Will cutting calories make you live longer?

The New Neo Posted on by

No, but it will seem longer.

That’s my attempt at a joke. But maybe it’s not a joke. Maybe it’s true.

For many years there’s been an idea—derived initially from animal research—that restricting caloric intake makes a person live longer. Here’s a report on the latest findings, which are based in part on a study with a pretty Draconian design for its subjects. I certainly hope they were well-compensated for this kind of suffering:

Pennington is one of the few places in the world with these hotel-room-sized microenvironments, the most rigorous way to measure how many calories a person burns and where they come from””fat, protein, or carbohydrates.

After a night of fasting, participants entered the calorimeter promptly at 8:00am, and until 8:00am the following day they weren’t allowed to leave or exercise. Researchers delivered meals through a small, air-locked cupboard. As fresh air circulated into the room, the air flowing out went through a series of analyzers to measure the ratio of carbon dioxide to oxygen. Nitrogen measurements from urine samples help calculate a total picture of each participant’s resting metabolism.

Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? The findings were as follows:

…[C]utting calories, even modestly, lowered people’s metabolism by 10 percent. Some of that could be attributed to weight loss (on average folks lost 20 pounds over two years). But according to the study’s authors, the majority of the change had more to do with altered biological processes, which they observed through other biomarkers like insulin and thyroid hormones…“After two years, the lower rate of metabolism and level of calorie restriction was linked to a reduction in oxidative damage to cells and tissues.”

On reading that, one of the things I noticed is that it may validate the observation many dieters (and would-be dieters) make that dieting lowers one’s metabolism. This makes it more difficult to lose weight, not easier, because the same amount of food is used more efficiently by the body, although of course if the calorie restriction is big enough weight will be lost nevertheless. But a calorie restriction of 25% (that’s what was done in the study, amounting to 500 to 800 calories less per day), strictly held to over two years and resulting in a 10 pound per year weight loss, is just another indication of how difficult it is for many people to lose a very significant amount of weight. One would think the loss would be more, if you go by the old idea that 3500 calories of reduction leads to a pound of weight loss. By those calculations, the subjects should have lost far far more weight than they did.

But was the diet worth it in terms of health advantages? Do reduced metabolism and “a reduction in oxidative damage cells and tissues” make up for the deprivation? The study wasn’t long enough to determine the answer. Researchers differ:

Fontana’s own work with Calerie trial data suggests changes to specific insulin pathways matter more than overall metabolism decrease. He also points to studies where rats were made to swim in cold water for hours a day, dropping their metabolism. They didn’t live any longer than room temperature rats. In other studies, scientists overexpressed enzymes that protected mice from free radicals. They didn’t live any longer either. Redman’s data is interesting, he says, but it’s not the whole picture. “Twenty years ago the dogma was the more calorie restriction the better,” he says. “What we are finding now is that it’s not the number that matters. Genetics, the composition of the diet, when you eat, what’s in your microbiome, this all influences the impact of calorie restriction.”

That’s certainly been my personal experience, which of course is merely anecdotal.

To my surprise, that joke I made at the beginning of this post was echoed at the end of the article about the research:

Jeffrey Peipert [is a] 58-year-old ob-gyn [who] participated in the Washington University trial nine years ago, hoping to bring down his weight, which he’d struggled with his whole life. When he went in, his blood pressure was 132 over 84; after a few months on a restricted calorie regimen it dropped to 115 over 65. A year in he lost 30 pounds. But six months later he quit. It was just too much work. “It took away my energy, my strength, it definitely took away my sex drive,” says Peipert. “And tracking calories every day was a total pain in the neck.”

Today he’s gained all the weight back and has to take a pill for hypertension. But at least he feels like he’s living well, even if he maybe won’t live as long.

I know that the Taubes people will come out of the woodwork and say they’ve got the answer. I would like to caution them that, while I’m glad that way of eating works so well for you (and more power to you!), that sort of approach not only does not result in weight loss for me and for many others, but there are those of us who find we feel physically bad on the diet, too.

Different diets seem to suit different people. Each person needs to find the best balance for him/herself. That’s a cliche, but it seems true. Some people with “good” health habits die young, and some with “bad” health habits live a long and happy life. The rest is statistics, but most of us don’t plot our entire lives by statistics.

Bankruptcies caused by medical bills are not common

The New Neo Posted on by

Actually, they appear to be rare, as a recent study has indicated. But one of the reasons for passing Obamacare was the idea pushed by the liberal/left (including and especially Elizabeth Warren) that medical bills were an enormous driver of bankruptcies. And there was no big drop in bankruptcies post-Obamacare, either; there’s been a gradual decline that was already starting years before the policy took effect.

Actually, a bigger driver is probably loss of income as a result of illness:

[A] paper found that the size of the drop in income after an illness was about five times that of the resulting medical bills, suggesting that the financial strain is likely to be much more driven by income loss than health-care costs. And indeed if you talk to bankruptcy practitioners, you’ll hear the stories of plumbers whose heart attacks forced them to cut back on work; surgeons who developed a tremor in their 50s and saw their income plummet too far to make the mortgage; mothers of special-needs kids who had to quit their jobs in order to become full-time case managers. If a family’s debt was pitched right up to the edge of their old income, insolvency quickly looms.

If Dobkin et al. are right, the people who quoted [Elizabeth] Warren’s inflated statistics, focused around medical bills, didn’t just overstate the problem; they had us focus on a problem we didn’t have, instead of the one we did.

I just noticed…

The New Neo Posted on by

…that I’ve already written close to 1/3 the number of posts about Trump than I’ve written about Obama, although Trump’s only been president approximately 15% as long as Obama was.

I think that’s right; I had to do the math quickly, because I’m pressed for time at the moment. But I know that you’ll correct me if I made an error.

Will Trump’s tariff threats against China work?

The New Neo Posted on by

“Work” in the sense of getting China to make a deal, that is? Perhaps:

China is willing to hold talks with the United States to resolve their differences over trade, China’s foreign ministry said on Monday, as alarm grows over a possible trade war between the world’s two largest economies.

Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying made the comments at a regular briefing in Beijing.

The MSM and many others often treat Trump’s proposals as something he wants to actually do, because they might be something he actually wants to do. But Trump also might be just making the opening move in a negotiation game.

The MSM isn’t really wrong to treat the announcements that way, however, for two reasons. The first is that Trump is to some degree unpredictable, so it’s always possible he is very serious about actually doing what he threatens to do. The second is that it is tactically good to get other countries (like China, in this case) to believe Trump is serious about the threat (of a trade war, in this case) if in fact this belief will help bring those countries to the table to negotiate about a problem.

I think this may be an example of Point 5 in The Art of the Deal:

5. Use Your Leverage ”“ Never show desperation for a deal. Deal from strength using all the tools available to you to project strength. Sometimes that requires “imagination and salesmanship.” The U.S. Government and the President have a great deal of leverage to exert, economically, militarily, politically, etc.

That doesn’t mean it will work, of course. But if it does, I doubt you’ll see apologies from those who predicted disaster.