Where would the MSM be without shaky and suspect speculations?

The New Neo Posted on by

Before the findings of the Mueller report were released, the MSM’s meat and potatoes had been speculating about its content for years. The speculation just about always went in one direction only: it would sink Trump. This was an audience-getter and a money-maker, as well as wish fulfillment.

Once the Mueller findings were out, it didn’t take long to regroup. Barr’s summary statement was parsed to mean that Trump is probably guilty of obstruction (of a crime that didn’t take place) and it just didn’t rise to the level of legal proof although there was plenty of evidence for it, evidence that would come out in the full Mueller report. That’s what’s driving them now.

Today we have this ray of hope for the left:

…[A]n article was released last night by The New York Times claiming that members of Robert Mueller’s team were “simmering” over AG Barr’s characterization of the report.

There are a lot of reasons to be skeptical of that [Times article’s] report. There were zero named sources. There weren’t even any direct anonymous sources. Instead, we got the ridiculous “people familiar with” trope that used to never pass as responsible journalism. In regards to details, there were none, with the Times reporting that no one elaborated on what they were actually upset about.

That didn’t stop the Times from reporting on it. Nor did it stop the Twitter folk; for example:

I actually have little doubt that there are indeed people on Mueller’s team who are upset. There are plenty of people there who would probably have dearly loved to take Trump down, and who would be more than willing to interpret every smidgen of evidence (and it stands to reason there are such smidgens) in an unfavorable light. However, the Times didn’t even say it talked to such people, just to “people familiar with.”

The WaPo had an article too:

Shortly after The New York Times piece, a more sanitized leak from Mueller’s team was printed in the The Washington Post. This time saying they were simply frustrated with how little Barr disclosed in his initial summary. This time, they stopped short of actually accusing him of misrepresenting matters.

All of that was followed by a statement from the DOJ:

The Department of Justice released a statement Thursday morning slamming new reporting from the New York Times and Washington Post. Both newspapers accuse Attorney General William Barr of mishandling the release of material in Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel report, in addition to mischaracterizing the findings of the report in the four page summary released two weeks. ago…

“As the Attorney General stated in his March 29th letter to Chairman Graham and Chairman Nadler, he does not believe the report should be released in ‘serial or piecemeal fashion.’ The Department continues to work with the Special Counsel on appropriate redactions to the report so that it can be released to Congress and the public,” the statement continues.

I don’t know about how much the word “slamming” applies. But it certainly is a correction. Barr’s office and Mueller’s office are working together to release as much as possible of the report. I can practically guarantee that, when that happens, unless the full report declares Trump guilty (and I think we can safely say that is highly unlikely), the anti-Trump forces will pick through every single word to find a hook on which to declare Trump guilty. Every slight equivocation, every bit of evidence of even the remote possibility of something that can be interpreted as supporting guilt or even suspicious behavior, will be emphasized and repeated and harped upon.

The word bun can have many meanings

The New Neo Posted on by

I saw this link at Instapundit: Man Buns: Proof Positive That Western Civilization Is Doomed.

I thought it meant buns in the old-fashioned sense of butt. I imagined there must be some new men’s fashion that emphasized said area in some way. That’s how old and out-of-it I am.

But (that’s with one “t”) I was wrong, wrong, wrong. We’re talking about hairstyles.

However, this is good advice I think:

Most of the “man buns” I’ve seen have been on male model types who have little to lose by going “ugly.” In other words, because these men tend to be extremely attractive, they can afford to take gross liberties with their looks.

A partially balding man with bifocals who struggles with weight problems might be advised to stay away from the “man bun,” because, as is the case with women with top knot muffin buns, it will only showcase his physical imperfections.

I stopped wearing any sort of bun years ago because at a certain point buns generally become unflattering, and I’d reached that point. But I almost never used to wear a bun outside of the ballet setting anyway, even when I was quite young. The reason was that I found them uncomfortable, probably because I have the sort of unruly hair that requires an arsenal of hairpins and other paraphernalia to keep it all in place. Far from being convenient, a bun took a lot of time and effort, and what did I get out of it? Practically nothing.

Solitary imaginings

The New Neo Posted on by

Hope you never need this information: how to survive solitary confinement.

It seems to come down to the ability to focus imagination on positives, what is called intentional imagination rather than uncontrolled imagination:

Mental imagery can supplement perceptual input—but it can be equally useful when perceptual input is painful, tedious, or lacking. A prisoner in supermax can use mental imagery to create the space and time that confinement strips away…

He also used his imagination to time travel, imagining “alternate endings to past interactions with people—what if I said this? Or what if I would’ve invited her for coffee or something like that?” He wrote about painful relationships and episodes, reframing them and extracting a lesson. Memory is both constructive and reproductive, says Alex Schlegel, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In fact, imagination and memory run on parallel tracks in the brain. By engaging the imagination, [the prisoner in solitary] was able to “rewrite” his past in a more positive light, and reframe his future.

This is similar to a technique some therapists use called reframing, but in intentional imagination the scene is played out in great detail and the entire thing acts as a powerful reframe.

Venezuela is a train wreck…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and as a result, South America has its own refugee problem:

On one end, these countries are trying to pressure [President] Maduro now to step down, because they know that this migrant crisis is going to get even worse the more politically unstable the country gets. Countries like Colombia understand that Venezuela used to be a country that took their immigrants, especially during the darkest days of the paramilitaries and the guerrilla fighting, but at the same time, they understand they can’t take every Venezuelan that comes.

And not only that, because of this crisis that’s getting worse and worse, because of lack of medicine mainly, people are coming into these countries with diseases that should be controlled in Venezuela — diseases like diphtheria, malaria, tuberculosis have made a huge comeback in Venezuela. So if you’re a neighboring country like Brazil or Colombia or a country like Ecuador or Peru, who are farther away but are also taking immigrants, this is a very scary situation that’s right on your doorstep.

That article is at NPR, and I wonder whether they acknowledge the fact that those arguments are similar to what President Trump and the right are saying about our very own illegal immigrants.

Here’s an interesting piece from someone who’s not a Trump lover, criticizing the left for its embrace of Maduro. I think some of these clips of Democratic Maduro-love could make a good campaign video for Republicans in 2020:

The dying of the dinosaurs

The New Neo Posted on by

In the comments to yesterday’s post about climate change, a lot of people mentioned this article that appeared in The New Yorker and caused a big sensation.

I had already read the article and found it to be absorbing. It helps that the author of the piece is a novelist, because not only did the article zip right along, but it read almost like a short story, a very dramatic one. The picture it created of the aftereffects of the asteroid hit that is presumed to have ended the dominance of the dinosaurs as a group and paved the way for mammals to rise was both fascinating and terrifying:

Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere. Picture the splash of a pebble falling into pond water, but on a planetary scale. When Earth’s crust rebounded, a peak higher than Mt. Everest briefly rose up. The energy released was more than that of a billion Hiroshima bombs, but the blast looked nothing like a nuclear explosion, with its signature mushroom cloud. Instead, the initial blowout formed a “rooster tail,” a gigantic jet of molten material, which exited the atmosphere, some of it fanning out over North America. Much of the material was several times hotter than the surface of the sun, and it set fire to everything within a thousand miles. In addition, an inverted cone of liquefied, superheated rock rose, spread outward as countless red-hot blobs of glass, called tektites, and blanketed the Western Hemisphere.

Some of the ejecta escaped Earth’s gravitational pull and went into irregular orbits around the sun. Over millions of years, bits of it found their way to other planets and moons in the solar system…

There’s much much more, but you get the idea.

The description of the discoverer of the fossil find that supposedly documents this event is fascinating as well. He appears to be monomaniacal about bones and how they fit together; obsessed with them from around the age of four, helped along by a great-uncle who was a renowned orthopedist.

“We have the whole KT event preserved in these sediments,” DePalma said. “With this deposit, we can chart what happened the day the Cretaceous died.” No paleontological site remotely like it had ever been found, and, if DePalma’s hypothesis proves correct, the scientific value of the site will be immense. When Walter Alvarez visited the dig last summer, he was astounded. “It is truly a magnificent site,” he wrote to me, adding that it’s “surely one of the best sites ever found for telling just what happened on the day of the impact.”

As I read the article, though, one thing that struck me was this question: hasn’t earth a lot of impact craters from fairly large asteroids? Did they cause similar extinctions? Was this the largest asteroid ever? The extent of the cataclysm described in the article is based on computer modelings, but how accurate are those modelings?

The following was in the article as well:

Scientists still debate many of the details, which are derived from the computer models, and from field studies of the debris layer, knowledge of extinction rates, fossils and microfossils, and many other clues. But the over-all view is consistently grim. The dust and soot from the impact and the conflagrations prevented all sunlight from reaching the planet’s surface for months. Photosynthesis all but stopped, killing most of the plant life, extinguishing the phytoplankton in the oceans, and causing the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere to plummet. After the fires died down, Earth plunged into a period of cold, perhaps even a deep freeze. Earth’s two essential food chains, in the sea and on land, collapsed. About seventy-five per cent of all species went extinct. More than 99.9999 per cent of all living organisms on Earth died, and the carbon cycle came to a halt.

Earth itself became toxic. When the asteroid struck, it vaporized layers of limestone, releasing into the atmosphere a trillion tons of carbon dioxide, ten billion tons of methane, and a billion tons of carbon monoxide; all three are powerful greenhouse gases. The impact also vaporized anhydrite rock, which blasted ten trillion tons of sulfur compounds aloft. The sulfur combined with water to form sulfuric acid, which then fell as an acid rain that may have been potent enough to strip the leaves from any surviving plants and to leach the nutrients from the soil.

So how did the mammals survive? What did they eat, for example? I’d like to know a lot more about that.

Would a similar-sized impact always and inevitably have a similarly horrific result? Haven’t many asteroids hit earth, and were some of them almost as big? I found this article that goes into the question a bit, enough for me to conclude that we aren’t entirely sure how big the Chicxulub crater (the impact described in the New Yorker article) actually is, although it’s certainly very very big. But I noticed that about five million years prior to Chicxulub, there had been another large impact (called the Kara crater) that doesn’t seem associated with any mass extinction (at least, I couldn’t find any discussion of it in a brief perusal). If not, then why?

I certainly don’t know. But I found an article from 2017 that raises some interesting points:

Of all the places in the world an asteroid could have walloped ancient Earth, the Yucatán Peninsula was possibly the worst…

According to the paper, this mass extinction happened because the space rock slammed into an oily tinderbox, blasting enough soot into the atmosphere to cause extreme global cooling…

The impact chilled the planet by a global average of 14 to 18 degrees Fahrenheit, with a drop of 18 to 29 degrees over land, the study finds.

Only 13 percent of Earth’s surface is made up of rocks that could have burned off that much soot, the team argues this week in Scientific Reports. That means if the asteroid had landed almost anywhere else, the nonavian dinosaurs may not have died out after all.

“This is a fascinating paper that … argues that even given the large size of the impactor, the mass extinction itself was of low probability,” says Paul Chodas, manager of the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The possibility of a catastrophic asteroid impact is the meat-and-potatoes of many science fiction stories and films. Often they feature humankind attempting to head the asteroid off at the pass, and in real life we do have some rudimentary efforts to move in that direction:

In 2016 a NASA scientist warned that the Earth is unprepared for such an event. In April 2018, the B612 Foundation reported “It’s 100 per cent certain we’ll be hit [by a devastating asteroid], but we’re not 100 per cent sure when.” Also in 2018, physicist Stephen Hawking, in his final book Brief Answers to the Big Questions, considered an asteroid collision to be the biggest threat to the planet.[4][5][6] In March 2019, scientists reported that asteroids may be much more difficult to destroy than thought earlier. In addition, an asteroid may reassemble itself due to gravity after being disrupted.

If you’re interested in some of the contemplated approaches, see this. Suffice to say that our skills in this direction are in their infancy.

[NOTE: Here’s a database of known impact events.]

Turkey’s Erdogan and the democracy train

The New Neo Posted on by

I guess Turkey’s Erdogan and his party didn’t do enough to fix the elections in Turkey this time, and must have underestimated the strength of his opponents, because the election didn’t go as he’d hoped. The NY Times calls it a “political quake”:

Step by step over the years, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey sought to ensure nobody could challenge him. He marginalized adversaries. He purged the army, the police and the courts. He cowed the press. He strengthened his powers in the Constitution. And he promised Turks a bright economic future.

So it was a huge surprise when the outcome of weekend municipal voting showed on Monday that Mr. Erdogan’s party had not only lost control of Ankara, the political center, but maybe Istanbul, the country’s commercial center, his home city and longstanding core of support.

Even if the results were not final, they amounted to the most momentous political earthquake to shake Mr. Erdogan in nearly two decades of basically uncontested control at the helm of Turkey, a NATO ally and critical linchpin of stability in the region.

What was different this time was the rapidly tanking economy and a highly disciplined opposition.

It deployed monitors to not only scrutinize the vote tallies but also sleep on sacks of sealed counted ballots to guard against possible tampering by members of Mr. Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party, the AKP.

“We think they were not able to rig the election,” said Ilayda Kocoglu, 28, vice president of the Istanbul branch of the opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, who slept on some sacks herself. “They were not expecting us to be that organized, or that resolved.”

Republicans, take note.

This doesn’t mean the Erdogan is finished; he remains in office. And his party has some tricks up its sleeve. They are contending all of the results, for example. I haven’t yet found a description of what that process entails in Turkey, but since Erdogan controls so much of the country and has no hesitation to clamp down to guarantee the continuation of his power, my guess is that they’ll figure out a way to reverse the results. After all, it was Erdogan who said early in his career, “Democracy is like a train; you get off once you have reached your destination.” Erdogan believes he’s the destination, and democracy was just the vehicle that got him there.

[NOTE: For more details of my opinion of Erdogan, please see this.]

No, Biden’s not like Franken

The New Neo Posted on by

So now it’s been decreed by someone or other on the left that it’s time for the person who’s already been known for years on the right as “Creepy Uncle Joe” Biden to be accused of inappropriate touching:

Amy Lappos, 43, who was a congressional aide to Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., at the time of the alleged incident, told the Washington Examiner that Biden, 76, should not run for president in 2020 and should support a female candidate instead.

She described how he put his hand around her neck and pulled her toward him to rub noses. She said she thought he was going to kiss her on the mouth. “This is the Al Franken thing all over again,” she said.

Well, no. No it’s not. Franken was 100% expendable at the time; everyone knew he’d be replaced by a Democrat and thus the Party wouldn’t suffer. There were only pluses for Democrats in throwing him under that crowded bus. They’d get #MeToo points to use against the Republicans, and they’d lose nothing by it. Al who? Never heard of him.

Biden is different. He’s not in office but he’s running for the highest office in the land. Not only that, but he’s one of the frontrunners. His touchy-feely stuff occurred while he was in office, much of it in full view of the world, and yet only the right was mentioning it during the eight years he was VP. Fancy that.

Biden was protected then as Obama’s veep. Now he’s fair game, at least for the moment, at least a little bit. Why? Because someone among the Democrats must want him out of the race. I suspect some other candidate or candidates. Note in that quote I gave, Lappos says that Biden “should support a female candidate instead.” I don’t know which one is behind this (or ones are behind this), but it is not some sort of coincidence that much is being made of this now.

Nothing has changed about Biden. Nothing. The Democratic establishment—Nancy Pelosi and the like in Congress—is more or less defending him (albeit a bit weakly), so we can guess that they see him as a very viable candidate for their side and don’t want to lose him:

…Democrats took a similarly neutral position on Biden, a beloved figure in the Democratic Party who also served in the Senate for 35 years. They view his behavior as questionable but not something that rises to the level of sexual harassment.

“I think he’s got to just really be thoughtful about the change in culture,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash. “This is clearly not a sexual harassment allegation but it is a question of just making sure people understand the boundaries of how you interact with people.”…

On Monday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the accusations don’t disqualify him as a candidate for president, but on Tuesday in a Politico interview she suggested he hasn’t responded appropriately.

“To say ‘I’m sorry that you were offended’ is not an apology. ‘I’m sorry I invaded your space,’ but not ‘I’m sorry you were offended’ because what is that? That’s not accepting the fact that people think differently about communication,” Pelosi told Politico during a live event.

Biden, in a statement Sunday, said he never meant to offend the women.

But it’s not as though this “change in culture” is something that just happened yesterday. And it’s really not a change, actually. I’m pretty old, and it was never especially acceptable for some strange guy—even someone in political office—to do what Biden has done. It was always creepy, even when I was a girl. Among all Biden’s other failings (for example this and this), he is at the very least completely tone deaf to the usual standards of behavior between men and women. If it hadn’t become one of my least favorite words on earth, I’d even call his attitude “privileged.”

And yet the 76-year-old Biden (he is slated to turn 78 just a couple of weeks after the 2020 election) is one of the Democratic frontrunners. Go figure.

And someone’s not very happy about it.

Rahm Emanuel blames Trump for the Smollett case, which prompts Al Sharpton to blame Trump for the Tawana Brawley case

The New Neo Posted on by

When the Smollett case was settled with hardly a wrist-slap, Rahm Emanuel was spitting mad. But after a couple of days he thought better of his tirade and reverted to what Democrats so love to do and blamed Trump, the all-purpose excuse for everything wrong in the world.

Emanuel criticized Trump with one of the left’s favorite lies about him:

The mayor pointed to President Trump’s comments about a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., where a counter protester was killed. The president said there were “very fine people on both sides” of the protests.

Actually, Trump was referring not to those protestors but to the people involved in the statue-pulling-down dispute, and he was quite explicit about that—but hey, why abandon a good accusation just because it’s false?

Emanuel followed with this:

“The only reason Jussie Smollett thought he could take advantage of a hoax about a hate crime is from the environment, the toxic environment that Donald Trump created. This is a president who drew a moral equivalency between people who are trying to perpetuate bigotry and those who are trying to fight bigotry,” Emanuel said. “President Trump should literally take his politics, move it aside. He’s created a toxic environment, now he’s created a toxic, vicious cycle.”

That’s pretty twisted, even for those who people who accept that Trump has created some sort of toxic environment. Wouldn’t that result in tons of real hate crimes being perpetrated, and no need whatsoever to fake a hate crime?

Enter Al Sharpton. Sharpton’s been a little bit hard on Jussie up till now. Sharpton actually had the gall to say—ironic in light of Sharpton’s own participation in the Tawana Brawley hate crime hoax back in 1987, an act for which Sharpton was successfully sued, although supporters such as Percy E. Sutton, Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., and Earl Graves Jr., paid Sharpton’s fines and he never really suffered from the judgment because of that.

Now Sharpton has issued a new statement on the Smollett case:

I was listening to Rahm Emanuel the other day and I realized that he’s right. If Smollett did this, it’s because of the toxic environment about race that President Trump has created. And it got me to thinking. Who was very prominent in New York and elsewhere in 1987, during the time of the Tawana Brawley case? When Donald Trump, that’s who.

What was Trump doing in 1987? He’d just published The Art of the Deal. But what I think is far more significant is that he had talked about running for president. I looked it up. And you know what he said that year? He gave an interview where he said “I’m not running for president, but if I did… I’d win.”

Clearly, he was paving the way for his run. Clearly he was thinking long and hard about it. So he was already making the air toxic back in 1987. You don’t believe me? You can read about it in Politico. Everything he’s saying now he was saying then.

I’m convinced that Trump is the reason the Tawana Brawley case happened. But of course that hate crime was real, not fake like Smollett’s might be. I know; I was there.

[BUMPED UP.]

Report: millionaires are fleeing NY

The New Neo Posted on by

The NY Post headline reads: “Even New York’s millionaires are fleeing to less expensive cities.”

“Millionaire” sounds like a rich person—at least, it used to. But it occurs to me that in New York City these days a million doesn’t go very far. So why not take the money and run? In particular, if you own any real estate in New York, you can cash out and live like a king elsewhere.

“Unplanned” finds a larger audience than expected

The New Neo Posted on by

The movie “Unplanned” is about many things, but one thing it’s about is a person changing her mind on an important issue. In this case, the issue is abortion, and the change was from being head of a Planned Parenthood clinic to being an anti-abortion activist.

The movie wasn’t heavily promoted or predicted to do all that well, but in addition to that, many efforts at publicizing it were blocked, ostensibly because the subject matter was controversial. That hasn’t seemed to stop a lot of other promotional campaigns, so it’s hard to conclude anything other than that it was the movie’s un-PC pro-life stance that was the problem.

And this despite the fact that apparently the movie takes a “nuanced” view of things in terms of sympathy for women having to make the decision (Planned Parenthood, on the other hand, is the villain), although reviewers panning it disagree and think it’s simply a one-sided anti-abortion polemic.

I haven’t seen the movie, but many of the reviews that criticize the movie also state that the movie preaches to the choir, and that its intended audience is those who are already firmly in the anti-abortion camp.

I disagree. I haven’t seen the movie, but all the descriptions (including those of those who are giving it negative reviews) indicate to me that the movie actually would appeal—and intends to appeal—to those who aren’t sure about abortion or at least have some doubts where they stand.

I have read, for example, that in the younger generation, support for abortion has been declining somewhat rather than increasing. Polls over the last three decades indicate a periodic wobble but no clear trends, as far as I can see. I also think that there are two main issues involved: whether people think abortion should be legal or not and under what circumstances, and a second question as to whether this particular woman would ever have one. I believe (yet cannot prove) that there are a significant number of women who think abortion should be legal but who would not personally have an abortion if faced with an unwanted pregnancy.

It seems to me that the film probably is working on that last group more than on anyone else, trying to get an increase in the number of women who see abortion as something that is not a personal option for themselves.