Three staff members killed at California veterans facility

The New Neo Posted on by

This is terrible:

A gunman and three female hostages were found dead at a military veterans home in Northern California on Friday evening, officials said, a grim end to a standoff that lasted nearly eight hours.

Shortly before 6 p.m., officers stormed into the room where the gunman had held the hostages at the Veterans Home of California in Yountville, said Chris Childs with the California Highway Patrol.

They found the gunman and the three hostages dead, he said. The coroner’s office identified the victims as Christine Loeber, 48; Jennifer Golick, 42; and Jennifer Gonzales, 29…

Loeber was the executive director of The Pathway Home and Golick worked there as a staff psychologist. Gonzales was a clinical psychologist with the San Francisco Department of Veterans’ Affairs Healthcare System.

The gunman, identified as Albert Wong of Sacramento, had been a resident at the facility until about two weeks ago when he left or was asked to leave for as-yet-undiclosed reasons. The facility treats veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Therapists who work with potentially violent clients—and that’s a great many therapists—are always at risk for becoming the target of that violence, although it’s certainly not a common occurrence. I am actually rather surprised that more such incidents don’t occur, and I’m not talking solely or even in particular about working with veterans with PTSD.

My guess is that these victims were not chosen at random. We also have this report:

Golick’s father-in-law, Bob Golick, said in an interview that she had recently expelled Wong from the program.

The program was featured recently in a nonfiction book entitled Thank You For Your Service that was later made into a movie (read more here).

RIP.

The Steele dossier’s credibility

The New Neo Posted on by

The Weekly Standard’s Eric Felten takes a good long look at the Steele dossier itself, and finds it impossible to believe on the face of it.

Forget all the brouhaha surrounding it. Just reading it should have discredited it and made it clear the allegations were absurd and almost certainly came from a Russian campaign of misinformation.

Scott Johnson of Powerline agrees.

Meanwhile…

The New Neo Posted on by

…the left is all excited (see also this) about Stormy Daniels, and hope that everyone will soon share that excitement, too.

Daniels has told a number of stories about whether she had an affair with Trump. But if I had to guess, I’d say she did. At this point, however, the news would make most people shrug.

What will come of her lawsuit to be freed of the non-disclosure agreement she signed I do not know, but I don’t think this is the thing that will finally sink Trump or even damage his reputation. His reputation in terms of affairs is pretty clear, and has been for decades.

North Korea agrees to talks with Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

It looks as though there will be a meeting between North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and President Trump:

News of the meeting was delivered by South Korean officials after talks with Mr Trump at the White House.

They passed a verbal message from Mr Kim, saying the North Korean leader was “committed to denuclearisation”.

South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in said the news “came like a miracle”.

“If President Trump and Chairman Kim meet following an inter-Korean summit, complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula will be put on the right track in earnest,” he said.

I think it can safely be said that people on both sides of the political spectrum were surprised.

I linked to a BBC article because I wondered what their take on it would be in terms of whether to give some credit to Trump, and here’s what they said:

Is this a victory for Trump?

Mr Trump has repeatedly belittled Kim Jong-un, and last year threatened him with “fire and fury” if North Korea continued to threaten the US. He has at times said there is no point in talking to North Korea.

But Mr Chung made a point of saying it was Mr Trump’s “maximum pressure policy” which had brought the parties to this point, a gesture which the president is likely to appreciate.

Our correspondent says Kim Jong-un has also scored a propaganda win, first with the Olympics and now by being seen to reach out to the US.

You can almost feel the BBC’s reluctance to give Trump any credit at all, but they did manage to report the praise from South Korea’s Chung when he made the announcement.

Actually, what Chung said was this [emphasis mine]:

I explained to President Trump that his leadership and his maximum pressure policy, together with international solidarity, brought us to this juncture. I expressed President Moon Jae-in’s personal gratitude for President Trump’s leadership.

I told President Trump that, in our meeting, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said he is committed to denuclearization. Kim pledged that North Korea will refrain from any further nuclear or missile tests. He understands that the routine joint military exercises between the Republic of Korea and the United States must continue. And he expressed his eagerness to meet President Trump as soon as possible.

President Trump appreciated the briefing and said he would meet Kim Jong-un by May to achieve permanent denuclearization…

The Republic of Korea, the United States, and our partners stand together in insisting that we not repeat the mistakes of the past, and that the pressure will continue until North Korea matches its words with concrete actions.

South Korea certainly isn’t mincing words about giving credit to President Trump. That part about “not repeating the mistakes of the past” and continuing the pressure is, I believe, a direct reference to the lack of teeth in previous attempts to deal with the North.

It would be absurd to make any predictions about this meeting—including even whether it will actually come about. No one should trust the North Koreans, and I am virtually certain President Trump does not. One thing he is not is especially gullible.

Back in August, when the rhetoric between Trump and Kim was escalating, I wrote this:

Trump is a blowhard, but he’s also a wildcard, and that can work to advantage because instead of hearing a mere statement that some action is “intolerable” or “unacceptable,” the foreign leader to whom such statements are directed just might believe that a US president means what he says for a change, and that certain unpredictable but upsetting actions might follow on the heels of the “mere words.”

Of course, the danger is that the leader hearing those words may react in a way that escalates things mightily, and may not be particularly sane or rational. There’s not much indication that the current leader of North Korea is either sane or rational, and so any reaction on his part short of an extremely violent one could depend on others reigning him in, either China or “the North Korean leadership around” him.

And plenty of people in this country and abroad believe that it’s Trump who’s neither sane nor rational. But, as I indicated, that can work in several opposing ways—either to make people more wary of riling him up, or more desperate to fight fire with fire and not just limit the fighting to fiery words.

And of course “the foreign-policy elite…claim to be shocked.” I think they actually are shocked, and feel oh so superior in their own ability to deal with North Korea. But, as the editorial also said (and it actually understates the case) they don’t have much credibility either. In fact, they have next to none (with me, anyway).

That’s the problem with North Korea. No one understands enough about Kim Jong-un to be able to predict his reactions to what the West does. If anything, he appears to be even more unpredictable than his father was, and that’s saying something. Anyone seeking to evaluate the positives or negatives of what Trump said must take that into account.

I have little doubt that a great many things have also has been going on behind the scenes in diplomatic back channels. But if anything good ends up coming of all of this (and I deeply and sincerely hope it does), I believe part of the reason would be because Trump’s words of threat were credible and Kim understood that.

And if it actually turns out that the result is good, I would also dearly love to see the left’s reaction. Would it be something like what happened when the Soviet Union fell during the Reagan administration, when for the most part “experts” not only didn’t see it coming, but ascribed it to anything other than Reagan’s actions?

[ADDENDUM: Here’s a great and funny take on the Trump-haters’ fears that something good might come of this.]

Nick Freitas of Virginia on gun control

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[Hat tip: commenter Geoffrey Britain.]

He’s talking about gun control, but it’s a primer on how to talk about heated issues in general:

Freitas bears watching. When I say that he gave a primer on how to talk about these issues, I certainly don’t mean that a productive talk ensued. In fact, a few Democrats walked out and accused him of—you guessed it—racism.

By the way, the pundits were wrong about Texas this time. I’ve always been reluctant to make political predictions, although every now and then I’ve gone out on a limb to do so. But it’s only become more difficult to make them, not easier, and the polls—always iffy in terms of predictive value—have become more and more discredited in my eyes.

Mind-reading machine

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This doesn’t sound like a good idea to me:

…[A] new artificial intelligence research project coming out of Japan…can analyze a person’s brain scans and provide a written description of what they have been looking at.

To generate its captions, the artificial intelligence is given an fMRI brain scan image, taken while a person is looking at a picture. It then generates a written description of what they think the person was viewing. An illustration of the level of complexity it can offer is: “A dog is sitting on the floor in front of an open door” or “a group of people standing on the beach.” Both of those turn out to be absolutely accurate.

“We aim to understand how the brain represents information about the real world,” Ichiro Kobayashi, one of the researchers from Japan’s Ochanomizu University, told Digital Trends. “Toward such a goal, we demonstrated that our algorithm can model and read out perceptual contents in the form of sentences from human brain activity. To do this, we modified an existing network model that could generate sentences from images using a deep neural network, a model of visual system, followed by an RNN (recurrent neural network), a model that can generate sentences. Specifically, using our dataset of movies and movie-evoked brain activity, we trained a new model that could infer activation patterns of DNN from brain activity.”

Nothing to worry about, he says, because it’s a long way from having any real-world applications.

Ah yes, that’s what they always say.

It all reminds me of a wonderful Ursula LeGuin story entitled “The Diary of the Rose,” which I’ve previously written about in a somewhat different context:

…[The story] appeared in [LeGuin’s] book The Compass Rose, one of my favorite collections.

This particular story is about a futuristic society in which a machine that images people’s minds and thoughts has been invented, and is being used for political indoctrination and control. People whose minds deviate too greatly from the PC norm are sent for a type of electroconvulsive therapy that destroys their memories and personality.

Here’s an excerpt from the story, which takes the form of a diary by the worker who operates the machine and writes reports on the brain readings:

Half-hour scope session with Ana J. at 8:00…

It is amazing how banal most people’s minds are. Of course the poor woman is in severe depression. Input in the Con dimension was foggy and incoherent, and the Uncon dimension was deeply open, but obscure. But the things that came out of the obscurity were so trivial! A pair of old shoes, and the word “geography”! And the shoes were dim, a mere schema of a pair-of-shoes, maybe a mans’ maybe a woman’s, maybe dark blue maybe brown. Although definitely a visual type, she does not see anything clearly. Not many people do. It is depressing. When I was a student in the first year I used to think how wonderful other people’s minds would be, how wonderful it was going to be to share in all the different worlds, the different colors of their passions and ideas. How naive I was!

I highly recommend the story, and the whole collection actually.

Intersectionality and anti-Semitism

The New Neo Posted on by

The author of this article in New York magazine is either clueless or disingenuous when he asks, “Why Won’t Women’s March Leaders Denounce Louis Farrakhan’s Anti-Semitism?” (the title of his piece).

The author can’t quite figure it out. But it’s rather easy if you’ve been paying attention at any time in about the last 50 years or so. The left is quite uniformly either actively anti-Semitic or passively so, and that even includes many Jews (almost entirely secular Jews) who are very much part of the left itself.

But Farrakhan is also the beneficiary of a concept that has recently become very hot on the left, and that’s something called intersectionality. If you haven’t heard the word before, it’s time to get familiar with it. Google it and you’ll find no end of articles about it, but the summary version is that it divides society into a series of groups based on a discrimination/oppression hierarchy, and then posits that one’s membership in each group determines the depth of one’s claim to victimhood as well as one’s right to speak about anything connected to that group.

Here’s how it’s defined by the left, when it began in the late 80s as a way for feminists to differentiate the experience of black women from white women:

The movement led by women of color disputed the idea, common to earlier feminist movements, that women were a homogeneous category essentially sharing the same life experiences. This argument stemmed from the realization that white middle-class women did not serve as an accurate representation of the feminist movement as a whole. Recognizing that the forms of oppression experienced by white middle-class women were different from those experienced by black, poor, or disabled women, feminists sought to understand the ways in which gender, race, and class combined to “determine the female destiny”.

Leslie McCall argues that the introduction of the intersectionality theory was vital to sociology, claiming that before its development there was little research that specifically addressed the experiences of people who are subjected to multiple forms of subordination within society.

The basis of the concept is in leftist thought, and is grounded in the left’s generalizations about group categories and a leftist postmodernist mindset that sees society almost solely in terms of power and oppression, with the oppressed groups as the only ones with legitimacy. In a way, it is an attempt by the left to act out “the first shall be last”—without its Christian associations and values, of course, and with “first” and “last” defined as the left wants to define them.

Individuals are no longer important, except as defined by their interlocking and sometimes-overlapping membership in various oppressed and/or oppressor groups.

Various people (see this by David French, for example) have called intersectionality a substitute for religion in the non-religious, and so my use of a Biblical phrase makes sense if you buy French’s analogy:

The [intersectionality] faith is fierce. Intolerance in the name of tolerance is the norm. Debate and dialogue are artifacts of scorned “respectability politics.” I’m reminded of the worst sorts of fundamentalist Christian sects, the kind that claim to take the Bible literally yet live as if mercy is alien to Scripture and that commands to “love your enemies” or “bless those who persecute you” somehow fell off the page. In the church of intersectionality, grace is nowhere to be found.

However, I don’t see intersectionality as a religion any more than any other theory on the left is a religion. What intersectionality (and other canons of the left) shares with religion is the possibility of fanaticism and intolerance within a belief system, and that is actually what French is describing in his analogy rather than religion itself.

I wrote this post so far before reading an article by Ben Shapiro that makes much the same point I’m making about intersectionality and the Woman’s March leaders (as well as other Democrats) who refuse to denounce Farrakhan, which is that intersectionality demands that Farrakhan’s blackness trumps any need to worry about his anti-Semitism. This would be true even if the left weren’t itself anti-Semitic, so the left’s failure to denounce is actually multiply-determined.

Being a spy is risky

The New Neo Posted on by

It was clear from the start that the recent severe and sudden illnesses of UK-dwelling former anti-Russian spy Sergei Skirpal and his visiting daughter Yulia Skripal were most likely the result of poisoning. Skirpal had been “convicted of passing the identities of Russian intelligence agents working undercover in Europe to the UK.”

Now it’s been announced that, “Scientists at the UK’s military research facility at Porton Down have been examining a substance thought to be behind their collapse.” A policeman who came to their aid is also seriously ill, and previously Skripal’s 43-year-old son died under mysterious circumstances.

Russia has a history of this sort of thing, including possibly helping the Bulgarians with this dramatic murder (an event that also occurred in the UK, in London to be precise).

But although it’s virtually certain that the Skripals were poisoned, and probably by some nerve agent, it’s not quite as crystal clear that the Russians did it, although there’s no doubt they would be capable of it. In Skripal’s case, however, someone else may be trying to kill him, and perhaps make us think the Russians did it. Here’s why:

The possibility of an unexplained substance being involved has drawn comparisons with the 2006 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko – a public inquiry concluded the killing of the Russian dissident was probably carried out with the approval of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin.

Former MI5 officer Annie Machon pointed out that the two cases were very different, however.

Mr Litvinenko was a whistleblower, dissident and consultant for MI6 actively at the time of his death, she said, whereas Mr Skripal has already been caught, convicted and pardoned [by Russia] and allowed to freely find safe haven in the UK.

“There’s no conceivable reason that I can see that the Russian state would have been targeting him at the moment,” she told BBC’s Breakfast. “That’s why we need to think about what else he might have been involved in.”

Maybe, however, the idea for the Russians is to just send the message, “If you turn on us, neither you nor your family will ever be safe, even after we pardon you.”

Why selfies are distorted, especially noses

The New Neo Posted on by

This is one of the more depressing—albeit minor—pieces of news I’ve read in a long time:

Last year, more than half of plastic surgeons were approached by patients who wanted to look better in selfies, according to a survey by the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.

Talk about technology taking over! I’m not sure whether those requesting a nose fix actually realize that selfies are not reality but nevertheless consider selfies more important than reality, or whether they believe that the way they look in selfies constitutes the reality of how they look.

At any rate, here’s the explanation for the big-nose-in-selfies phenomenon:

Most smartphone cameras have wide-angle lenses, says The Verge’s creative director James Bareham, and close-ups with wide-angle lenses cause distortion that makes objects closer to the camera ”” like, say, a nose ”” look larger. “It’s kind of one of the basics of photography: don’t shoot portraits on a wide-angle lens because you will look terrible,” Bareham says.

That’s what selfie sticks are for (or long arms, if you happen to have them), although I’ve noticed that selfie sticks don’t totally correct the problem.

Or maybe my nose has grown larger with age:

But cartilage – that’s the plastic-like stuff in ears and noses – cartilage continues to grow until the day you die. Not only does cartilage grow, but the earlobes elongate from gravity. And that makes ears look even larger.

So it’s really true. Older people do have larger noses and ears.

Fortunately, my nose didn’t start out all that large, and my ears and earlobes are still positively minuscule.

The liberal fantasy of what the thoughts of a Trump voter might be…

The New Neo Posted on by

…drives a lot of the Trump-hatred.

Actually, the liberal fantasy of what’s in the mind of conservatives and/or Republicans drives a lot of the hatred for conservatives and Republicans. Most liberals don’t just engage in strategic name-calling, either, when they call Republicans racists or religious nuts. For the most part the liberals I know seem to have a deeply held belief that they know these things about Republicans and are absolutely correct about them, and everything that occurs politically is interpreted in the light of that supposed knowledge.

You remember how every criticism of Obama was met with the liberal left cry, “You’re a racist!” One could look at that as strategic—that the person making the accusation didn’t really think it, and that of course that person realized that there could be valid criticism of a black president that had nothing to do with racism. And I suppose for some people it was strategic, a way to avoid dealing with the content of the criticism of Obama itself.

But with many of the people crying racism, I believe it worked the other way around. That is, conservatives and Republicans were by definition racists, and so because racism was their basic motivation then it made perfect sense to accuse them of being motivated by racism in criticizing President Obama—that most wonderful of presidents doing the most wonderful things.

Childhood is the kingdom: Millay reading Millay

The New Neo Posted on by

I find that lately I’ve been pulling back ever-so-slightly from day-to-day politics.

It’s not that I’m not writing about that sort of thing; I definitely still am. I just find that, for the most part, the stories du jour are about trivia and/or rumor and/or propaganda, as well as being repetitive, and I tend to want to ignore them. Trump White House in chaos! So and so will be fired! The stock market gets afraid of some piece of news and drops precipitously, and then settles down and rises again, often within a day or two of the plummeting.

I find myself being more and more drawn to the bigger questions. Not that I’ve ever ignored those, either, but it seems to me that the foundations of the entire enterprise are far more interesting and obviously important than what seems to dominate the news.

That’s where someone like Jordan Peterson comes in, and I think it’s why so many people—even young people—are interested in him. It’s not for nothing that his first book was called Maps of Meaning, because he’s interested in what Viktor Frankl called Man’s Search for Meaning, which Frankl considered the deepest motivator in human life.

That’s also where the arts fit in. The arts can be light and entertaining, but art can also call forth some very heavy emotions and thoughts and express them in ways that transcend the pedestrian, reaching parts of the human psyche and spirit that mere prose doesn’t touch.

All of that is an introduction to this video, which happened to strike me that way. It’s the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, who had a very indiosyncratic—and to our way of thinking, mannered—voice, reading a poem of hers called “Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies” (the link will take you to the text, which is on the right of the linked site). Millay specialized in very dramatic readings in a style no longer the least bit popular, and a lot of people seem to think her reading takes away from the poem. Millay usually specialized in rhyming poems and beautifully-crafted sonnets, but this free verse poem is pulled from some other part of her.

I wrote about Millay’s voice here, which was described by contemporary listeners as powerful and arresting. Millay was a petite woman, but this is not a petite voice: