Politicians and promises: Trump vs. the Socialists

The New Neo Posted on by

An interesting discussion ensued in the “Being a Socialist means you never have to explain” thread. In the post, I had pointed out that both Sanders and Warren were promoting single payer health care and refusing to tell us how such an enormous entitlement would be funded. Commenter “Montage” responded by making two analogies to things Trump had promised when he was campaigning:

Sort of like the ‘wall’. Mexico will pay for it, right? Oh wait well it will get paid for. How? Not important.

Then while campaigning Trump said he would eliminate the debt in 8 years. How? Tax cuts! What? Now the debt has increased by 68%.

Just for starters, it’s true that politicians all make promises they can’t keep. But Trump has kept far more of his promises than most.

Turning to specifics, the Wall was a linchpin of Trump’s campaign. When Trump said Mexico would pay, I recall that the vast majority of his supporters thought it was hyperbole, almost some sort of joke. They wanted a Wall and they wanted him to build one, but they were not actually expecting Mexico to pay. And so far the Wall is being built and is not being funded by Mexico. However, the funding involves no particular increase in taxes but rather the diversion of money from one program to another.

In addition, the amount of money involved in the Wall is relatviely small for a government project and practically irrelevant compared with the utterly enormous and exponentially greater expense of single-payer health care.

Now let’s take the debt. My first response (which is partly tongue-in-cheek and partly not) is that Trump said in eight years, and only two and three-quarters have passed so far. Give him the full eight and who knows.

In addition, as commenter “Art Deco” pointed out, the debt has “only” increased 15% since Trump took office, not 68% as claimed. “Montage” countered by saying he meant the deficit, not the debt.

What did Trump actually promise? Was it about the debt or the deficit? It’s surprisingly difficult to determine, because people so often confuse the two. Here’s an example of the sort of article I found when I Googled it. The headline says he promised to eliminate the deficit in 8 years, but the article (and links) talks about the debt.

As best I can tell, it was the national debt Trump promised to eliminate. And the time frame was eight years. What’s more, although “Montage” seems to think Trump promised it would be accomplished through tax cuts, that’s actually not what Trump said:

The Republican presidential front-runner said in a wide-ranging interview with The Washington Post that he’d be able to get rid of the more than $19 trillion debt “over a period of eight years.”

Eliminating that amount of debt in eight years is highly improbable, according to most economists, The Washington Post reported. It could require using $2 trillion a year from the annual $4 trillion budget to pay off holders of the debt.

Trump insisted in the interview that “renegotiating all of our deals” would help pay down the debt by sparking economic growth.

“The power is trade. Our deals are so bad,” Trump said. “I would immediately start renegotiating our trade deals with Mexico, China, Japan and all of these countries that are just absolutely destroying us.”

The Washington Post also refuted that claim, reporting that many economists have said a trade war could cripple the U.S. economy.

So, if Trump does get a second term and eight full years, it will be possible to know the truth or falsehood of the claim. Trump certainly has renegotiated our trade deals, and – contrary to the predictions of “many economists” – so far the US economy is far from crippled.

But the bottom line is that, although Trump’s prediction about the reduction of the debt may end being wrong – for one thing, he doesn’t have control of Congress, which votes on funding – he did not refuse to say how it would be done. Sanders and Warren are refusing to even say what they propose to do to fund an extraordinarily large new entitlement, which is not business as usual nor is it false promises as usual. It is a refusal to even address the issue of finances at all.

What’s happening in Lebanon?

The New Neo Posted on by

There have been protests recently in Lebanon, and Prime Minister Saad Hariri has resigned as a result. What’s it all about?

Well, some is economics:

Lebanon, one of the most heavily indebted countries in the world, already was dealing with a severe fiscal crisis before the protests began, one rooted in years of heavy borrowing and expensive patronage networks run by entrenched political parties.

That sounds a bit…familiar. Elites, unresponsive to the people

A proposed tax on the WhatsApp messenger service, coming on the heels of a deeply unpopular austerity package, sent hundreds of thousands of people into the streets starting on Oct. 17 in the largest protests the country has seen in more than a decade.

Banks have remained closed since then, as protesters have packed public squares and blocked major thoroughfares, bringing the country to a halt in hopes of pressuring the government to resign.

The army reopened roads on Wednesday as the protesters stood down in the wake of their first victory, the resignation of Prime Minister Saad Hariri the night before. The Association of Banks in Lebanon said banks would reopen Friday for the first time since the protests began…

“The cost the political elite have imposed on the Lebanese population is in billions of dollars of public theft and mismanagement of the economy,” said Sami Atallah, an economist who heads the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies…

The sectarian political system put in place after the civil war distributes political power and high offices to Lebanon’s various religious sects.

While it has kept the country from slipping back into armed conflict, it has transformed parties into political machines that maintain loyalty by distributing government jobs, contracts and other favors to supporters. The result is a bloated and costly public sector that struggles to provide even basic services like electricity, water and trash collection.

Basic services like electricity. Hmmm. California, anyone?

And to add to the California analogy (which granted, only involves certain aspects of the situation), we this little detail which will sound familiar, as well:

The trigger was a government proposal to impose a $6 monthly tax on WhatsApp users to raise funds following disastrous forest fires that burned thousands of acres…

The country is also facing electricity and water shortages, and has seen protests in the recent past over garbage pileup in cities.

That first article I linked mentioned the “sectarian political system put in place after the civil war” in Lebanon, but never described the details of that system. The second article explains it thusly:

Lebanon has a confessional system, which was introduced after the 1975-1990 civil war, in which a Christian will be President, a Sunni will be Prime Minister and a Shia Parliament Speaker. Roughly 54% of Lebanon population are Muslims (Shias and Sunnis make up 27% each), 40.5% Christians and 5% Druze.

Before that civil war, Lebanon had been one of the most religiously diverse countries in the Middle East and Beirut an international capital of some renown and influence. Then the tide began to turn:

Lebanon reached the peak of its economic success in the mid-1960s—the country was seen as a bastion of economic strength by the oil-rich Persian Gulf Arab states, whose funds made Lebanon one of the world’s fastest growing economies. This period of economic stability and prosperity was brought to an abrupt halt with the collapse of Yousef Beidas’ Intra Bank, the country’s largest bank and financial backbone, in 1966.

Additional Palestinian refugees arrived after the 1967 Arab–Israeli War. Following their defeat in the Jordanian civil war, thousands of Palestinian militiamen regrouped in Lebanon, led by Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, with the intention of replicating the modus operandi of attacking Israel from a politically and militarily weak neighbour. Starting in 1968, Palestinian militants of various affiliations began to use southern Lebanon as a launching pad for attacks on Israel. Two of these attacks led to a watershed event in Lebanon’s inchoate civil war. In July 1968, a faction of George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked an Israeli El Al civilian plane en route to Algiers; in December, two PFLP gunmen shot at an El Al plane in Athens, resulting in the death of an Israeli.

As a result, two days later, an Israeli commando flew into Beirut’s international airport and destroyed more than a dozen civilian airliners belonging to various Arab carriers. Israel defended its actions by informing the Lebanese government that it was responsible for encouraging the PFLP. The retaliation, which was intended to encourage a Lebanese government crackdown on Palestinian militants, instead polarized Lebanese society on the Palestinian question, deepening the divide between pro- and anti-Palestinian factions, with the Muslims leading the former grouping and Maronites primarily constituting the latter. This dispute reflected increasing tensions between Christian and Muslim communities over the distribution of political power, and would ultimately foment the outbreak of civil war in 1975.

In the interim, while armed Lebanese forces under the Maronite-controlled government sparred with Palestinian fighters, Egyptian leader Gamal Abd al-Nasser helped to negotiate the 1969 “Cairo Agreement” between Arafat and the Lebanese government, which granted the PLO autonomy over Palestinian refugee camps and access routes to northern Israel in return for PLO recognition of Lebanese sovereignty. The agreement incited Maronite frustration over what were perceived as excessive concessions to the Palestinians, and pro-Maronite paramilitary groups were subsequently formed to fill the vacuum left by government forces, which were now required to leave the Palestinians alone. Notably, the Phalange, a Maronite militia, rose to prominence around this time, led by members of the Gemayel family…

For its part, the PLO used its new privileges to establish an effective “mini-state” in southern Lebanon, and to ramp up its attacks on settlements in northern Israel. Compounding matters, Lebanon received an influx of armed Palestinian militants, including Arafat and his Fatah movement, fleeing the 1970 Jordanian crackdown…The consequences of the PLO’s arrival in Lebanon continue to this day.

The main consequence was the civil war that just about destroyed Lebanon as a successful, functioning economy and diverse state. One of the consequences of all of this was the departure of many of the Christians of Lebanon. You may have noted that 40.5% Christian figure for present-day Lebanon, but all the population figures are suspect:

Lebanon has by far the largest proportion of Christians of any Middle Eastern country, but both Christians and Muslims are sub-divided into many splinter sects and denominations. Population statistics are highly controversial. The various denominations and sects each have vested interests in inflating their own numbers. Shias, Sunnis, Maronites and Greek Orthodox (the four largest denominations) all often claim that their particular religious affiliation holds a majority in the country, adding up to over 150% of the total population, even before counting the other denominations. One of the rare things that most Lebanese religious leaders will agree on is to avoid a new general census, for fear that it could trigger a new round of denominational conflict. The last official census was performed in 1932.

Religion has traditionally been of overriding importance in defining the Lebanese population. Dividing state power between the religious denominations and sects, and granting religious authorities judicial power, dates back to Ottoman times (the millet system). The practice was reinforced during French mandate, when Christian groups were granted privileges. This system of government, while partly intended as a compromise between sectarian demands, has caused tensions that still dominate Lebanese politics to this day.

The Christian population majority is believed to have ended in the early 1960s, but government leaders would agree to no change in the political power balance. This led to Muslim demands of increased representation…

I have read previously that the majority of civil war Lebanese refugees leaving the country were Christians, and that this changed the demographics of the country markedly. But the absence of reliable census figures makes it difficult or impossible to know.

At any rate, the country is a mess. Some of the causes of the mess are unique to Lebanon, and others represent trends common today in the world. What will happen as a result of the present upheaval? I doubt there will be a fundamental change for the better, but one can hope.

This, at least, is encouraging:

The resignation announcement Tuesday by Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri could have been expected to please Hezbollah. After all, Hariri — the son of former prime minister Rafik Hariri, who was murdered by Hezbollah emissaries in 2005 — is a longtime foe of the terror group.

But in reality, the resignation — like the protests raging across the country, which prompted it — is causing Hezbollah’s top brass a serious headache…

Hezbollah’s negative response to the protests mainly stems from its fear that the unrest gripping Lebanon since October 17 will spiral still further out of control. Criticism of Hariri is one thing, and is welcome as far as the terror group is concerned. But changing the regime system is another thing entirely, and could cause severe tension between the different ethnic and religious groups and potentially even far more violent confrontations.

Hezbollah is comfortable with the status quo and with the current failing system. It manages to rule the country even without its members serving as prime minister or president. It controls the Lebanese army even though the chief of staff is Christian, and it sets the country’s foreign and domestic policies, while leveraging the inter-religious divide to maintain its power.

Hezbollah is of course the Iranian-backed terror group, and if they’re worried it sounds like it could be a good thing.

The mystery of the decline in crime

The New Neo Posted on by

Why did crime fall precipitously in the 1990s? No one knows, but there’s no lack of theories.

The one highlighted in that linked article seems incorrect to me. Increasing cell phone use wasn’t really that much of a factor until later, as best I can recall. My leading theory, for what it’s worth, is that the increasing ubiquity of security cameras has deterred some crime.

As for why certain cities have such high crime rates and others with similar demographics don’t, that’s mysterious too but may have something to do with the way policing is done in each city.

And then there’s this intriguing point:

While most of the researchers above have focused narrowly on the 1990s crime decline, Tcherni-Buzzeo has a different temporal perspective. In her review paper, she showed a broader pattern of centuries of declining human violence. From that view, all the ways the entire world has changed can be summed to more peace, and the real aberration was the spike in crime from the 1960s through the 1980s.

This fits quite well with Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why violence has declined, which I wrote about in this previous post.

Being a Socialist means you never have to explain

The New Neo Posted on by

How dare you even ask a Socialist to explain?

As Bernie Sanders says:

When pressed by CNBC’s John Harwood on how a Sanders administration would come up with enough revenue for the program, Sanders dismissed the concern.

“You’re asking me to come up with an exact detailed plan of how every American – how much you’re going to pay more in taxes, how much I’m going to pay. I don’t think I have to do that right now,” Sanders asserted.

White House rival Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who co-sponsored the Sanders “Medicare for All” bill in the Senate and is pushing a nearly identical health plan on the campaign trail, has also dodged questions on how she would fund the program.

Numerous budget experts agree that it would be impossible to fund “Medicare for All” without drastically hiking middle-class taxes…

The approximate price tag for Sanders and Warren’s proposal comes in at an estimated $30 trillion over its first ten years, according to the experts at the Committee for A Responsible Federal Budget. Their study concluded that even introducing the most confiscatory tax rates on high-income families and corporations would only generate $11 trillion, only a third of the required revenue.

What I find especially interesting is that many people are willing to allow the candidates to avoid the question. Perhaps they think it will be done through magic. Or perhaps they merely believe that they themselves will not be the ones paying. Why worry when you’re spending other people’s money and the goal is virtuous?

The dog…

The New Neo Posted on by

…has now returned to the line of duty:

President Donald Trump lauded the canine at Sunday’s press conference in which he offered vivid details of how the elite U.S. Army special operators took down one of the world’s most wanted terrorists.

“Our ‘K-9,’ as they call it, a beautiful dog, a talented dog, was injured and brought back,” the president said in his national address from the White House…

…[R]etired Marine Ron Aiello told the New York Times that the dog was either a Belgian Malinois or German Shepherd.

“If they’re leading the patrol, they want a dog that is not only an explosive detection dog but on command can be aggressive,” said Aiello. “On a mission like this you want a dog that can be aggressive when necessary.”

I recently watched a demonstration of how dogs are trained to attack on command, using special padded sleeves that the trainers wear to protect themselves. Dogs are truly amazing creatures.

The right way to sing

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m an extremely mediocre singer with no technique at all, although I once took a short series of voice lessons during which my teacher managed to say that my singing voice was “not unpleasant.” Faint praise, indeed.

So I have no way of evaluating the helpfulness of the vocal techniques outlined in this piece, which describes how modern methods of singing have added strain to singers’ voices and how to sing in order to reduce that strain.

What I want to write about is the singer Adele. The article says:

Voice specialists liken the physical toll on singers and stage performers to what athletes endure. Surgery to the professional singer’s vocal cords is what ligament reconstruction has become to the football player’s knee. Dusty theatres, stuffy airplane cabins, erratic eating and sleeping patterns, the stress of living off stingy contracts – all affect the vocal cords. Add to it the occupational hazard, at least in opera and classical music, of taking on roles that require you to sing above your natural range, and the cords become extremely susceptible to injury…

The rise in vocal injuries is linked to a change in what we consider good singing. Across all genres, it has become normal to believe that louder is better. (One reason that Adele is such a big star is because her voice is so big.) As a result, singers are pushing their cords like never before, which leads to vocal breakdown…

…the emotionally charged, full-throated, operatic singing style Verdi and Wagner made popular in the late 19th century – and that Puccini amped up even further in the early 20th century – [has] infiltrated all singing genres and public performances. With each passing decade, the style grew more extreme.

So apparently a combination of straining for emotion as well as volume has damaged vocal cords, and this is what happened to Adele and many others.

I don’t know about the many others (especially the opera singers), because I’m not familiar with them. But I have noticed something about Adele and certain other pop singers, which is that even as an amateur who knows next to nothing about voices, I hear tremendous strain and artificiality in their voices all the time. But to my ear it doesn’t depend on volume at all. The goal seems to be to express emotion, particularly suffering and sorrow, although at times it might be passion, and I hear it as a squeeze or a grind in the voice in addition to a tendency to slide from note to note rather than to be crisp.

Diction is affected, too. The words are somewhat slurred, and the effect is of someone slightly tipsy or under the influence of some drug or other, or just awakened from sleep or about to go to sleep. To me, they all sound rather the same and quite repetitive. How this is accomplished vocally I have no idea, but I figure that if it sounds like stress even to me, it most likely is stress.

Left vs. right: the rules of the game

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “mhjhnsn” writes, in the thread about the Democrats’ reaction to the killing of Baghdadi:

…[W]hat this really says to me is that there is NOTHING that Trump can do to mollify, even for only a day, those who hate him, and this is a fight to the death. Those who think Trump is intemperate and that he should tone it down (people like me, often) need to think hard on that.

They will offer no quarter, no compromise. Think on that, because it is not how we products of American democracy and give-and-take politics tend to view things and we need to recognize reality for what it is–like it or not..

Whether “fight to the death” is literal or metaphorical, the idea is that this is a fight of great intensity in which the left plays only to win. Rule of law, or any mutually-agreed-on process that protects both sides because both sides know that one day one group is in power and the next day the other group may be – that’s over, if in fact it ever existed (the perception certainly was that it existed).

Actually, the far left never played by those rules. But much of the Democratic Party and the vast majority of Americans did, and that give-and-take was operating when I was growing up. But the far left has taken over what was once a group that contained a large number of moderates who are now either pushed way to the side or who are nonexistent in the Democratic Party. Now that the left is fully in the driver’s seat all bets are off, and they aim to (and expect to) be permanently in power, and are determined to do whatever it takes to get to that end.

Thus, the unending Resistance war on Trump. Events such as the killing of Baghdadi can no longer be allowed to have a bipartisan unifying effect.

Much of the anger of the right at NeverTrumpers and others who have issues with Trump related to style, including his style of combat, need to (in the words of the commenter) “recognize reality for what it is – like it or not.” It’s a sad and sorrowful realization, but as time goes on it increasingly seems to be an inevitable realization.

And then there’s the reaction to al-Baghdadi’s death

The New Neo Posted on by

Lindsey Graham says “This is a moment where President Trump’s worst critics should say, ‘Well done, Mr. President.'”

That Lindsey Graham, always making with the jokes.

Because obviously that’s not going to happen. And as proof, we have: Trump went into “irresponsible” detail when he described the raid, Pelosi’s complaint that Trump told the Russians but not her and her Congressional band of leakers and carpers, Richard Engel saying the Kurds are still pissed, criticism of the situation room photo, and my own (and perhaps everyone’s) personal favorite:

There are many ways to describe a terror leader in a headline. But the Washington Post is getting ripped this morning for referring to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a headline as an “austere religious scholar.”

This headline was no accident, nor was it rushed. In fact, the original WaPo headline was “Islamic State’s terrorist-in-chief” and they changed to “austere religious scholar.” That shows a certain amount of contemplation. They got so much flak for the “religious scholar” designation that now they’ve settled on “extremist leader of Islamic State,” a still-tepid description for a man so vile and sadistic.

It makes one wonder what the present-day editors of the WaPo would make of Hitler’s death if they had to report it all over again:

“Animal-loving vegetarian with ambitious plans dies tragically”

Or Stalin’s:

“Former seminary student who became leader of a great nation is deeply mourned”

ADDENDUM:

I wasn’t far off from what was the actual NY Times headline for Stalin’s obit, which read, “Stalin Rose From Czarist Oppression to Transform Russia Into Mighty Socialist State.” [Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.]

Wow. That seems to be a real Times headline and not a parody site.

ISIS head al-Baghdadi reported killed

The New Neo Posted on by

Trump approved the raid by US special forces about a week ago:

A U.S. Army official briefed on the results of the operation told Newsweek that Baghdadi was killed in the raid, and the Defense Department told the White House they have “high confidence” that the high-value target killed was Baghdadi, but further verification is pending DNA and biometric testing. The senior Pentagon official said there was a brief firefight when U.S. forces entered the compound in Idlib’s Barisha village and that Baghdadi then killed himself by detonating a suicide vest. Family members were present. According to Pentagon sources, no children were harmed in the raid but two Baghdadi wives were killed after detonating their own explosive vests.

Did they wear the vests all the time, just in case?

The operation occurred in northern Syria near Turkey, and the Kurds were involved:

Kurdish fighters appeared Sunday to be claiming a role in the operation that is believed to have killed Islamic State group leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi…

SDF commander in chief Gen. Mazloum Kobani appeared to hail the raid early Sunday, claiming “a successful & historical operation due to joint intelligence work with the United States of America.”

What’s all this “appeared” business? Why so tentative, NBC?

Oh, and of course there’s the obligatory “al-Baghdadi didn’t really matter” article at CNN.

Was this raid related to the withdrawal announced just a short while ago that got so much criticism? Was that some sort of head fake and setup to this? There’s this, for example:

“Our sources from inside Syria have confirmed to the Iraqi intelligence team tasked with pursuing Baghdadi that he has been killed alongside his personal bodyguard in Idlib, after his hiding place was discovered when he tried to get his family out of Idlib towards the Turkish border,” said one of the sources.

Trump is going to be speaking at 9 AM, presumably about al-Baghdadi.

UPDATE 9:30 AM

According to Trump, al-Baghdadi was chased by dogs and died in a tunnel, “whimpering, crying, and screaming all the way…He had dragged three of his children” into the tunnel, who were killed by his suicide vest. He was identified positively.

US forces got “highly sensitive material” in the raid.

“We will continue to pursue the remaining ISIS terrorists to their brutal end.”

Trump mentions some of the brutal murders ISIS committed and then publicized.

He thanks Russia, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and the Kurds, who all participated – and of course, our military. And he emphasizes shame aspects of al-Baghdadi’s death: “He died like a dog. He died like a coward.”

Trump points out that they were very careful not to allow any leaks, and that only a relatively small number of people knew about the raid.