Obama: blame and credit, credit and blame

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Richard” calls scathing attention to a meme that I’ve noticed becoming common among Democrats these days: “the Obama Recovery.”

Simply put, it is the assertion that economic effects are delayed in a very special fashion with Obama. Everything bad that happened to the economy during the 8 years of Obama’s presidency was Bush’s fault and was blamed on Bush, including the slowness of whatever recovery there was.. And everything good that might happen to the economy during Trump’s presidency (however long he may last as president) is to Obama’s credit, not Trump’s.

It’s really quite simple. Remember Marc Antony’s funeral oration in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”?:

The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar.

That’s what Obama said about Bush: the evil lives after him, on and on and on, making it impossible for successor Obama. And now the opposite for the legacy of Obama: any recovery under Trump is one owned by Obama.

Obama was the first president in my memory to blame his predecessor—pretty much incessantly—for what went wrong during his own tenure. It was actually one of the first things I ever noticed about Obama, back when he was campaigning in 2008, and it seemed unusual to me at the time, although now (unfortunately) we’ve gotten very used to it. In fact, I even coined a phrase for Obama back then: “the blame duck.”

What follows is the text of a post I wrote on the subject in July of 2010:

Abe Greenwald of Commentary puts his finger on one characteristic of Obama’s that strikes an especially discordant note: his repetitive need to pass the buck and make excuses.

It was one of the very first things I noticed about Obama, and it later moved me to coin the descriptive name for him that appears in the title of this post: the blame duck.

Here’s Greenwald on the subject of Obama’s excuses:

Imagine a man who is up for a sales job at a company in crisis. He tells his prospective boss that not only will he rescue sales but he’ll also lower costs, turn out a better product, get the competition to cooperate instead of compete, raise wages, improve the food in the company commissary, and redecorate the offices to boot. This man then gets hired. For a year, sales continue to lag, and everything else stays the same. The new employee explains that the guy who used to have his job left behind an unconscionable mess, which has made it very hard to do the things he had promised in the interview phase. After a year and a half, sales hit an historic low, the product is being recalled, competitors have formed a guild and are pulling ahead, everyone at the company has taken a salary hit, a few people have gotten food poisoning in the commissary, and the offices are more dilapidated than ever. On top of that, vendors can’t get him on the phone, he’s insulted his co-workers, and he’s taken more vacation time than the company allows. The boss finally asks him what’s gone wrong. “I could never have lived up to your expectations,” the man says.

It’s not just the blaming and the excuse-making itself, it’s the fact that such behavior is unprecedented in a president in my lifetime. What’s more, it’s that nearly half of the American public isn’t yet turned off by this sort of thing in a POTUS. Back when I was growing up, such an approach by a president would be unthinkable and even (yes, I know this isn’t PC) unmanly. It just wasn’t done; it was weak and unseemly and showed lack of leadership.

The fact that it now seems acceptable is probably a result of the decades-long abdication of the idea of personal responsibility, beginning in the school system with the self-esteem movement. Obama may be the first president who not only is a product of that system, but more importantly, was elected by people raised in that system. He knows his audience well.

The German cities and the migrants

The New Neo Posted on by

I was going to call these German cities that have refused to take any more migrants “no-sanctuary cities.” But then I realized that it’s not quite the flip side of the US sanctuary cities, because sanctuary cities in the US are welcoming illegal immigrants and saying they will not be deported or turned over to authorities, whereas these German cities are refusing to accept legal “migrants” to Germany:

With Germany still struggling with the endless migrant influx, yet another German city has imposed a ban on refugee intake. Pirmasens in southwestern Germany became the latest town to block new migrants from moving in, German newspapers reported on Wednesday. German cities of Cuttbuss, Salzgitter, Delmenhorst, and Wilhelmshaven have also placed similar restrictions in the recent months.

According to the local media reports, town officials cited insufficient funds for turning away fresh refugees. Previously, the town of about 40,000 took in more than 1,000 migrants in the wake of the migrant crisis that began in the autumn of 2015. The town was reportedly having trouble accommodating and integration the new arrivals, mostly young men from Arab and Muslim countries. In January, the eastern Germany city of Cuttbus had suspended refugee intake after a series of violent crimes involving migrant perpetrators.

So there are two basic problems being cited, the first financial and the second social (although crime also has financial costs as well). “Accommodating and integrating the new arrivals” tends to take the form of giving them welfare, even though they are overwhelmingly young and able-bodied males. The strain and cost of dealing with an influx of migrants is considerable in both the financial and the social sense:

The researchers [in a recent study] studied the data from the German state of Lower Saxony to examine the correlation between the migrant arrivals and the recent surge in violent crimes between 2014 and 2016, a period during which such crimes surged by 10.4 percent. More than 90 percent of these additional crimes were attributed to the newly arrived migrants.

The latest data released by the German governments shows that almost 20 percent of the population is now threatened by poverty. Estimated 16 million Germans were currently living in poverty””with elderly pensioners among the hardest hit. The poverty figures under Merkel’s watch have grown “higher than ever since the unification,” a German broadcaster commented.

“The conflict over the distribution of resources” among poor natives and immigrants has begun,

So, why should migrants be taken in ? That is the question that’s been asked over and over ever since the recent influx began. What obligations does a country have? A city? A private citizen or organization? (I wrote about the question in the religious/philosophical/moral sense here).

In Germany:

…[A] food bank in the German city of Essen sparked a nationwide controversy by deciding to stop handing out free food to migrants. The charity Essener Tafel justified the measure by stressing the need to feed the elderly and the needy.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel slammed the charity for barring the migrants”” the majority of whom are young, able-bodied man. “One shouldn’t run services on the basis of such categorisations. That’s not good,” Chancellor Merkel commented earlier this week.

According to Merkel, then, are private charities required to take on all comers on a first-come first-served basis? In the US, even government-run welfare requires that a person fall into at least one of certain categories before that person can go on the dole. And that’s government. Can private charities with much more limited resources not decide to set their own criteria?

This is why Essener Tafel felt it needed to do take that step:

The charity Essener Tafel called it a temporary restriction necessary because the share of foreigners using the food bank had soared to 75% in recent years.

The charity says it helps about 16,000 poor people in Essen, a city in the western industrial Ruhr region…

Foreigners registered for the handouts before Essener Tafel’s new rule took effect last month can still use the food bank.

Other than those older applicants who are grandfathered in, the requirement is to show a German passport.

And this is one of the things that has happened to Essener Tafel as a result:

An especially potent approach in Germany, I would imagine.

What did Trump mean by “Take the firearms first…”?

The New Neo Posted on by

Let’s look at what Trump said, in context:

Vice President Mike Pence:

Violence, restraining orders, California has a version of this. And I think in your meeting with governors earlier this week, individually, and as a group, we spoke about the states taking steps. But the focus is to literally give families and give local law enforcement additional tools if an individual is reported to be a potential danger to themselves or others. Allow due process so no one’s rights are trampled but the ability to go to court, obtain an order and collect not only the firearms but any weapons in the possession.

President Trump:

Or, Mike, take the firearms first and then go to court. Because that’s another system. A lot of times by the time you go to court, it takes so long to go to court, to get the due process procedures. I like taking the guns early. Like in this crazy man’s case that just took place in Florida. He had a lot of firearms. They saw everything. To go to court would have taken a long time. You could do exactly what you’re saying but take the guns first, go through due process second.

As is true with so many things Trump says, it’s hard to figure out exactly what Trump meant by that last sentence I quoted. His words certainly can be interpreted as meaning “away with due process, just grab the guns!” His imprecision in speech is both regrettable and exploitable, and in addition that imprecision often goes in the direction of sounding like it expresses a tyrannical impulse.

Before Trump took office, this was a trait of his that very much alarmed me. Before he had a track record in government, I believed some of his utterances to be a strong indication that he would be governing as a tyrant. But since he’s been president, although the language of the tyrannic impulse (or something that sounds like that, and certainly could be that) is still there at times in his speech, I don’t see action from him that falls into that category. In fact, I saw more of that sort of thing from Obama.

So I look to another explanation of what Trump meant here. Fortunately, I don’t have to look far. I’m not interested in twisting Trump’s words to make them seem benign when they’re not, but I actually think he probably meant something far more benign in this case, and that this is supported by the context. For example, I’ve noticed—way before he made this statement—that Trump seems to emphasize the mental health aspects of mass shooting prevention, and to differentiate those from the strictly legal model involved in police arrests and the like.

Now, those two systems are actually both ultimately governed by the legal system, but with different emphases. In other words, there is due process involved in the mental health system in the sense that taking someone’s rights away (infringing on liberty through involuntary commitment and/or gun removal, for example) requires some sort of due process that complies with rules to limit that action to situations in which it is deemed necessary. But I think that here, Trump is using “due process” to talk about the strictly law-and-order system (i.e., arrest and prosecution, whether under the adult rules or the rules for juveniles) rather than the mental health system that can end up involving the court system at times. This distinction is also indicated by Trump’s words, “…that’s another system,” in the second sentence of that second paragraph in the quote.

It seems to me that Trump is actually talking about something like the red flag legislation he has advocated in the past, statutes that allow for preventive and temporary removal of firearms from persons deemed dangerous who have not yet committed any crimes, with a court hearing coming later. These laws work like this [emphasis mine]:

The laws allow weapons to be seized for a brief time ”” typically two or three weeks ”” after which a petitioner, usually a police agency, must go back to court to let a judge decide whether the gun owner’s behavior amounts to a threat to himself or others and whether the weapons should be held longer.

Trump failed to make that clear, but I’m almost certain that’s what he meant. But in failing to make it clear, he gave ammunition (pun intended) to his opponents, an opportunity they will not fail to use.

Richard Landes at Second Draft: demonstrating how the MSM contributes to the Palestinian cause by hiding reality

The New Neo Posted on by

Richard Landes is a brilliant man who has worked tirelessly for close to two decades to expose the biases and distortions present in worldwide media coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict. I also count him as a friend.

I’ve written about Landes and his work many times before. Among other things, he is the person who uncovered the media’s compliance in shaping the al Durah story into anti-Israel propaganda, and he also coined the phrase “Pallywood.”

Now Landes has put out a new video: “Everyone Agrees”. Well worth watching. Well worth sending to people who might not be aware of the ways in which the media covers up the fact that Palestinian leaders speak one line when addressing the West in English, and quite a different line in Arabic for their more local audiences:

Landes includes some backup material to the video here.

If you’d like to see more of Richard Landes’ work, please go to his blog The Augean Stables and start exploring.

Surprise! The New Yorker has a mostly positive article about Jordan Peterson

The New Neo Posted on by

Take a look.

The following quote is in line with something I’ve observed as well, which is that Peterson speaks in an unusually measured, solemn way that comes across as exceedingly thoughtful. His every utterance appears to emanate from a very deep place inside. You may agree with him or disagree, but you never get the sense he’s saying anything he hasn’t thought about long and hard, with every fiber of his considerable intellect and emotional insight. Like Horton, Peterson says what he means and he means what he says:

Peterson has a way of making even the mildest pronouncement sound like the dying declaration of a political prisoner. In “Maps of Meaning,” he traced this sense of urgency to a feeling of fraudulence that overcame him in college. When he started to speak, he would hear a voice telling him, “You don’t believe that. That isn’t true.” To ward off mental breakdown, he resolved not to say anything unless he was sure he believed it; this practice calmed the inner voice, and in time it shaped his rhetorical style, which is forceful but careful. In “12 Rules for Life,” Peterson recounts a similar experience when, as a psychologist, he worked with a client diagnosed with paranoia. He says that such patients are “almost uncanny in their ability to detect mixed motives, judgment, and falsehood,” and so he redoubled his efforts to say only what he meant. “You have to listen very carefully and tell the truth if you are going to get a paranoid person to open up to you,” he writes. Peterson seems to have found that this approach works on much of the general population, too.

Kelefa Sanneh, the author of the New Yorker article, indulges now and then in a bit of doubt and ambivalence about Peterson (as well as the obligatory Trump-bashing), but never quite manages to segue into real criticism of Peterson. It’s my sense that Peterson really impresses him, although he may have started out not wanting to feel that way.

School shooters and fatherlessness

The New Neo Posted on by

The Parkland shooting seems to have inspired a surge of references to the alleged fatherlessness of most school shooters (and even of most mass murderers). This article is fairly typical of such pieces, for example, and I see similar assertions in comments just about everywhere on the right side of the blogosphere.

However, I’ve not seen compelling evidence that fatherlessness is more common in shooters than in the general population of young people these days. Now, that does not mean I think that fatherlessness is not an extremely important issue and a scourge. It is both, most definitely. But still, fatherlessness doesn’t appear to be more prevalent among school shooters or other mass murderers than among other people of the same age, although there’s a common misconception to that effort.

It also depends how one defines “fatherlessness.” Just as an example, the Parkland shooter Cruz had a father who died when Cruz was six years old. He was indeed fatherless, but his home wasn’t “broken” in the usual sense of divorce, so does it really make much sense to blame the breakdown of the family and the divorce rate for Cruz’s fatherlessness and his violent behavior, as some do? The last straw for the already-troubled Cruz was probably his mother’s death (also apparently no one’s fault), which left him orphaned, which is also not an especially common state these days either among shooters or among non-shooters.

Another favorite example is Adam Lanza, commonly cited as the child of divorce and fatherlessness. However, after the divorce of Adam’s parents (which occurred when Adam was a teenager), his father was actually still quite heavily involved in Adam’s life until the son estranged himself from his father against his father’s wishes (see this for more on that). How do we analyze that? And in the cases of both Nikolas Cruz and Adam Lanza, they both exhibited fairly serious psychological problems from a very early age, when their fathers were very much part of the family.

I imagine I’ll be criticized for this post, because it may appear that I’m minimizing the deleterious effects of fatherlessness. But that is neither my intent nor does it reflect my belief. I believe that fatherlessness and the increased divorce rate are pernicious aspects of modern life, and that they have very negative effects on a huge number of children (and increase incarceration rates and delinquency), and statistics show that divorce clearly is far more common than when i was growing up. But I just do not find the evidence for school shooters coming disproportionately from fatherless homes to be compelling or well-done.

Most of the articles I’ve read that make that claim either report anecdotal evidence and/or cite a study that involved analysis of the shootings in a single year, which is hardly a way to take a comprehensive look at it. Maybe I’m missing something—I haven’t spent an enormous amount of time researching this, and if there’s compelling evidence I missed, I’m open to it. However, after the Newtown school shooting I wrote an article for PJ on this very topic in which I went into some details of my own observations, and I suggest you read it in its entirety.

Also, have the number of school shootings gone up in recent years? It turns out that we probably don’t know, because of the difficulty in tracking, measuring, and defining what constitutes a mass murder or a school shooting or other act of mass violence—not to mention the political uses to be made of tweaking the data to make a political point. But there’s some evidence that school shootings have actually declined since the 1990s rather than increased, contrary to public perception.

Of course, one school shooting and one death is one too many. But I would rather rely on hard evidence before I come to conclusions about what’s to blame for these killings.

Andrew C. McCarthy on the Schiff memo

The New Neo Posted on by

McCarthy says the Schiff memo is worse for the Democrats than for the Republicans.

An excerpt from McCarthy:

To be clear, the only reason Steele’s own biases have any pertinence is that the FBI and the DOJ relied vicariously on Steele’s credibility, as a substitute for their failure to corroborate his informants’ information. It was improper to do this. Yet even if a prosecutor goes down a certain road wrongly, the duty to be candid with the tribunal still applies. The prosecutor is obliged to tell the whole story about potential bias, not a skewed version.

Schiff’s memo struggles mightily, and futilely, to demonstrate that Steele’s credibility issues were sufficiently disclosed. But that is a side issue. The question is whether Steele’s informants were credible. To the limited extent that committee Democrats grapple with this problem, they tell us that, after the first FISA application, the FBI and the DOJ provided additional information that corroborated Steele’s informants. There are four problems with this…

Read it. It’s complicated, but well worth reading in its entirety.

However, I’m pretty sure that most Democrats who bother to read about the Schiff memo at all will do so in the MSM rather than plow through anything McCarthy has to say in National Review, and they will conclude that the Schiff memo effectively neutralizes the Nunes memo and Grassley-Graham (which they’ve also read about in the MSM, if at all), even though it doesn’t.

That’s the way these topics tend to work for most people, especially the complicated topics that take some patience and logic to follow. Read a little summary in the MSM and you’re done. Or read the headlines.

McCarthy has another piece on the Schiff memo, too. An excerpt:

At the Washington Examiner, Byron York picks up on something I wish I had highlighted: The Schiff memo’s focus on past Russian intelligence efforts (in 2013) to recruit Page to become an agent for Russia. As Byron notes, the Schiff memo claims that “Steele’s information about Page was consistent with the FBI’s assessment of Russian intelligence efforts to recruit him and his connections to Russian persons of interest.”

The fact that a foreign power is trying to recruit an American to become an agent for that foreign power is not a sufficient basis to issue a surveillance warrant against the American under FISA. It would, of course, be sufficient to issue a warrant against the foreign spies who are making the recruitment efforts, but it is not enough for a warrant against the American citizen who is the target of the recruitment effort.

To get a surveillance warrant under FISA (i.e., the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, as codified at Title 50, U.S. Code, Sections 1801 et seq.), the FBI and the Justice Department must establish probable cause that the person to be monitored under the warrant is acting as an active, purposeful agent of a foreign power ”” not that the foreign power hopes to turn him into such an agent.

McCarthy goes on to say that the Steele dossier contained the only allegation of anything even approaching the necessary evidence, and it was so suspect that the FISA court should never have issued a warrant on those grounds. Furthermore, the FBI was required to interview Page (who had already demonstrated on many occasions his willingness to cooperate with FBI interviews) before seeking a warrant.

McCarthy is puzzled as to why the FBI and the FISA court made the decisions they did.

He’s been churning out these lucid and intelligent columns on the collusion/dossier story ever since the beginning, and for the most part he’s been spot on about it. But how many people does this reach, and how many care? I see his efforts as something like those of the grammarians trying to get people to understand how to use “I” and “me” when they seem determined to toss out the rules. He’s swimming against the tide of ignorance, indifference, and worse.

The FISA rules are there for a reason: to protect us while still allowing the government to investigate. If way too many people argue for those rules when it’s politically expedient and against them when it’s politically expedient, we are in for very bad times. Actually, we’ve been in those times for quite some time now. Call it a banana republic, call it tyranny, call it chaos, call it what you will.

I’ve posted this clip before, and I’ll probably post it again:

Good guys with guns

The New Neo Posted on by

The Parkland shootings—and the police reaction to them—have sparked predictable responses on both sides.

Here’s the way the liberal position on this seems to work, based on some or all of the following beliefs:

(1) “Good guys” don’t kill people unless otherwise the good guy faces certain death—and maybe not even then.

(2) A “good guy” should never have to risk his/her life to defend anyone else.

(3) Defending with guns is ineffective and dangerous, so best not to do it at all. Therefore, had the police gone into the school, it could and probably would have been even worse than it was. The police would have been killed, and maybe even more kids would have been killed in the crossfire. The same is true if civilians such as teachers had been armed. The fact that both police and civilians have often effectively intervened with guns to stop such violence, as well as the possible deterrent effect to killers like Cruz if they knew they could indeed meet armed resistance from “good guys”, is ignored.

(4) Therefore the only solution is to disarm citizens. That this disarmament is a pipe dream and that “bad guys” will always be able to get guns (or bombs, or other lethal means of destruction) is ignored.

In all of this I’m talking about the basic liberal voter who is susceptible to this line of reasoning. I am not talking about the leftist activist, who has other reasons for wanting to take your ability to defend yourselves away.

For the right, however, Parkland highlights how ineffective (or worse) government is to prevent acts of violence. Law enforcement had plenty of opportunity to prevent this particular event but passed its chances up at every turn, including the Broward police’s final failure to intervene while the killing was actively going on. Parkland proves to the right that citizens must be allowed to carry arms to defend themselves, because the government has been tested and found tremendously wanting.

I tend much more towards the conservative side of the argument, and I’ve written before about the stupidity of gun-free zones. I think the Sheriff of Broward County ought to resign over the failings of his department (and his subsequent politicizing and coverup), but I don’t think he ever will unless forced to. I also think that some sort of red flag law would be good to adopt, because people on record as being as unstable and threatening as Cruz should probably at least temporarily relinquish their rights to possess firearms—although at the same time I realize that (a) such laws would have to be carefully crafted to avoid abuse; and (b) given the way authorities had already behaved in the case of Cruz, I doubt anything would have been done to Cruz’s weapons even if Florida had had such a law in place.

Lastly, I would really really like to know what went down with the four members of the Broward police department who failed to enter the high school as the shootings were occurring. Did they do this (or rather, fail to do this) on their own, or were they given orders to stay back? If so, who gave the orders? What did they learn in training about an active shooter situation? Since Columbine, the general idea has been to engage the shooter in order to neutralize him:

And the final practical lesson of Columbine is a revolution in police response tactics. Cops followed the old book at Columbine: surround the building, set up a perimeter, contain the damage. That approach has been replaced by the “active shooter protocol.” Optimally, it calls for a four-person team to advance in a diamond-shaped wedge. (If there isn’t time to gather four officers, a single officer should charge in alone.) They’re trained to move toward the sound of gunfire and neutralize the shooter. Their goal is to stop him at all costs. They will walk past a dying child if they have to, just to prevent the shooter from killing more.

Was the Broward PD policy an exception? If so, why? Columbine was almost 20 years ago. That article I just quoted was written almost 10 years ago. Why did the Broward police fail to do what has become standard? And note how many liberals and the left are backing off from that policy, because they see it as in their political interests to argue that police should not be required to engage active shooters, despite the lessons of Columnbine.

[ADDENDUM: More here.]

More on that egregiously overreaching Pennsylvania Supreme Court redistricting decision

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s even worse than you may have thought [emphasis mine]:

The change took the people of the Keystone State unawares. While we dozed through a rainy three-day weekend, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court declared itself a lawmaking body, one over which the real legislators have no veto. They did so for all the usual reasons tyrants do what they do. “Fairness.” “Equity.” “Justice.” All things that, in a person’s own mind, he and he alone represents. They had a good story to tell, one that the mainstream media was apt to believe. The only thing they lacked was the law. But no matter. Courts do not need such things in Pennsylvania anymore.

The court’s Democratic majority would deny that any such change took place. They would say they were doing their job, interpreting the law, not making it up out of whole cloth. But not long after inventing a new requirement for congressional districting, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court invented the map, too. Rather than judging the legislature’s efforts against the legal standard (a standard they pulled out of thin air, but a standard, at least) they took the pencil out of the legislature’s hands and said “we’ll just write the thing ourselves.”…

Pennsylvania’s constitution contains no rule against weird shapes, and the United States Supreme Court had explicitly held that political gerrymanders, like the one passed in 2011, were legal. In Easley v. Cromartie in 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court held that unlike racial gerrymanders, political gerrymanders and gerrymanders to protect incumbents were allowed under the Constitution. In the 2004 case of Vieth v. Jubelirer, which concerned the previous version of Pennsylvania’s map, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor held that the issue of political gerrymandering was not even justiciable; that is, it was not a subject that courts had the authority to decide. And nothing in Pennsylvania’s body of state constitutional law changed in those years.

The real difference came in 2015, with the election of three Democrats to the state supreme court, giving the party a 5-2 majority.

Please read the whole thing.

The court failed, among other things, to follow precedent, or to name the specific provision the old districts violated so that the legislature could come up with something that fulfilled it (although later the court did invoke one, it was just that elections be “free and fair,” an incredibly broad and amorphous standard to meet).

In this way, courts can dramatically change the political results of future elections. How very tempting!

SCOTUS kicks…

The New Neo Posted on by

…the DACA can back:

Under a lower court order that remains in effect, the Department of Homeland Security must continue to accept renewal applications from the roughly 700,000 young people who are currently enrolled in the program, known as DACA. The administration had intended to shut the program down by March 5, but that deadline is now largely meaningless.

In a brief order, the court said simply, “It is assumed the court of appeals will act expeditiously to decide this case.”

Monday’s denial also gives Congress more time to come up with a legislative solution, though repeated bipartisan efforts have failed so far.

The press and the Democrats have framed this as a defeat for Trump, which ignores this:

The Supreme Court’s denial Monday was expected, because the justices rarely accept appeals asking them to bypass the lower courts…

The Supreme Court has agreed only about a dozen times in the past century to immediately take a case and bypass the federal appeals courts, and those case usually involve a national emergency, such as nationwide strikes in the steel and coal industries.

In asking the court to take the case, the Justice Department took another unusual step in declining to ask the justices to block the lower court order in the meantime, which would have allowed the government to shut DACA down as planned. Such a start-and-stop approach, the government said, would frustrate the goal of winding the program down in an orderly way.

So this is SCOTUS business-as-usual.

Calmly we walk: Delmore Schwartz

The New Neo Posted on by

—John Updike: we may skate upon an intense radiance we do not see because we see nothing else.

Delmore Schwartz was a mid-20th-century poet with a tragic life but a wonderful gift. In fact, Saul Bellow wrote the novel Humboldt’s Gift based on Schwartz, who was a literary sensation at a young age but who faded with time and alcoholism and mental illness, dying alone in a New York hotel at the age of 52.

Schwartz looked the quintessential poet, too:

And he wrote some beautiful poetry that contains an air of mystery and awe.

One of my favorites is “Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day“. I suggest you follow the link now and read the poem in its entirety to get the feel and flow of the whole before I discuss bits and pieces of it.

The poem begins somewhat slowly:

Calmly we walk through this April’s day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
Number provides all distances,
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now…

Although it’s poetry, this beginning is rather pedestrian, in both senses of the word. The poet is talking to someone (“we”) as he walks—maybe a girlfriend or wife? Or maybe he’s using the universal “we” as in “this is how we all stroll around in the park on a nice spring day.”

The poem is also very specific. Its specificity is in the designation of a certain time: April, 1937. Poets don’t often pin their creations to such an exactness of date unless they are speaking of some great historic event. But this is not a great historic event. It’s an ordinary spring day in an ordinary New York park. And this “we” is walking very calmly (in fact, that’s the first word of the poem).

So nothing special is happening.

But then there’s a turning that takes the reader by surprise, maybe even by shock. The setup of the ordinary day is peeled back and is revealed as transcendent, as all days are, and the poet speculates on the deepest questions of existence. Here’s the next line, right after “Number provides all distances/It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now”¦”:

Many great dears are taken away,…

Whoa! Yes, they are, for all of us. And then he follows with this:

What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn …)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(… that time is the fire in which we burn.)

So within this most ordinary day in the park—a sort of cliche, really—we have the presence of death and its seeming (possible, questionable) obliteration of the self. And the mechanism for that is the passage of time—which is the school in which we learn and the fire in which we burn, because each moment dies as it is born.

I don’t know about you, but that transition passage hits me like a ton of bricks every time I read it. I never quite expect it even though I’ve read the poem many times. And the transition would not be as forceful without the specifics that precede it (those numbers do indeed “provide distances”). Perhaps we, the modern readers, feel it even more strongly, because it’s been over eighty years since that April day to which the poet is referring, and just about everyone who was around him on that day in the park (except some of the babies and children) is dead.

I’m not going to discuss every line of the poem, but here’s another excerpt in which the poet returns to the very specific, naming some of the people who are gone:

Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where are they now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
No more? No more?…

Five lines and four question marks. Good questions, too.

This is the last stanza, which never fails to give me goosebumps:

Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.

Schwartz is caught up in a great rush of feeling that I think can rightly be called cosmic—as he calmly walks through that April day in 1937. And now, perhaps, the strangeness of the word “through” in that sentence has more meaning.

The poet was a mere 23 years old when he wrote that poem. I think of him as a human tuning fork, vibrating too sensitively (and almost unbearably) to the harmony of the spheres.

Parkland authorities: let the record show…

The New Neo Posted on by

It would be a tedious and lengthy process to list all the ways in which the authorities messed up during the events leading up to and including the Parkland shooting. If you’ve followed the coverage, you probably already know what many of these ways are—although,since the MSM often gets things wrong, there’s no way to be sure the story we get today is the story we get tomorrow, and neither may be the full truth.

One particularly egregious failure to react properly appears to have been the actions of Scot Peterson and three other Broward County police officers who were outside the high school and stayed there, guns drawn, while the carnage was going on inside. Again, these are preliminary reports and we don’t know whether it actually happened this way, and if so why. Was this a policy of watchful waiting set out by the Broward police powers-that-be, and were the officers on the scene just following protocol? Or was (as I speculated here) there a set of individual failures of courage involved?

And the FBI’s failures have been likewise egregious. Reading the text of a recent call to the FBI from a concerned friend (or relative) of Cruz or his family, it’s hard not to feel mounting outrage at the FBI’s refusal to act in any way, not even to do something as simple as passing the information on to the local authorities. If ever there was a clear-cut case needing intervention, it was this one:

The tipster, whose relationship with Cruz was also withheld, said Cruz bought rifles and ammunition, using money from his dead mother’s bank account, and posted pictures of them on the mobile application Instagram. Cruz’s mother, Lynda, died Nov. 1.

“It’s alarming to see these pictures and to know what he’s capable of doing and what could happen,” she said of his Instagram. He also wrote he wants to “kill people,” she told the FBI employee.

She spoke to the FBI for 13 minutes. That’s a long time, and she gave a lot of very specific information. One of the things she said was this: “I just know I have a clear conscience if he takes off and…just starts shooting places up.” She had also called local police, according to the call.

The FBI tipster was not the only person who reported major problems with Cruz, both to the FBI and to the local police. And yet nothing of any note was done. Why? We can speculate all we want, and there is no dearth of theories, but I suggest that it was due to a combination of protectiveness (from the family and friends, who kept choosing not to press charges) and an official policy of preference for nonintervention, as well as sheer overwhelming incompetence.

The incompetence stems at least in part from the failure to connect any dots. So many alarms were sounded, from so many sources, all concerning the same young man, and yet it appears that for the most part each incident was treated separately. Was there even an attempt to link them, or a capacity for linking them, or any interest in linking them? Is it a police policy to treat each incident as though it were the first, as long as there are no arrests?

The ball was also dropped by the mental health system, which could have invoked a law in Florida known as the Baker Act (see this) and had Cruz involuntarily committed—for a little while, anyway. However, the counselor who initially evaluated Cruz did not recommend it (see note on chart for 9/28/16). Hindsight is 20/20, but I wonder whether the counselor had access to Cruz’s record, or if he/she merely made a decision based on a quick interview with Cruz?

My impression, however, is that the school did what it could. For example, in the same incident:

A counselor at the school told the Florida Department of Children and Families investigators that a professional from the mental health facility had visited Cruz and “found him to be stable enough [to] not be hospitalized.” The school counselor expressed concern with the department, according to the report, and said she and her staff wanted to “ensure that the assessment of Henderson was not premature.”

I get the impression of a school desperate to kick this upwards and get Cruz more intervention than they could give, but frustrated with the lack of a serious enough response from authorities. I can only imagine what that school counselor feels like right now. She gets to say “I told you so,” but what good does that do anyone?

It seems that many many people who encountered Cruz along the way tried to do the right thing, too. He was reported to authorities by ordinary citizens over and over again. So the failure doesn’t seem to be with the public at large, either.

The entire picture is frustrating, disturbing, and anger-provoking.