Earth pyramids

The New Neo Posted on by

Ever hear of earth pyramids? I hadn’t.

I thought it was some sort of spoof when I first saw these photos. Maybe an old April Fools’ prank? But they are real:

At many places across South Tyrol, in northern Italy, one can see a peculiar geological formation called “earth pyramids”. They consist of tall cone-shaped pillars made of clay, with a boulder resting on top.

These unusual structures started forming from moraine clay soil left behind after the last Ice Age when the glaciers melted away. In dry condition the soil is hard as stone, but as soon as it rains, it turns into a soft muddy mass, starts sliding, and forms large slopes 10 to 15 meters steep. When the rainy season starts, these slopes erode away. But when there are rocks in the mud, the clay soil underneath these rocks stays protected from the rain. So, while the surrounding material is continually carried off with the rain, the protected pillars rise out of the ground to form majestic earth pyramids. It can take hundreds to thousands of years for these pyramids to form.

More here.

Why are these not exceptionally famous the world over? Well, somebody’s heard of them, because they have their own Trip Advisor page.

Here’s my advice, Grace

The New Neo Posted on by

“Grace” is not actually her name. But she’s the woman whose tell-all story of a bad date with comedian Aziz Ansari (nope, never heard of him before, but I sure have now) has gone viral.

I’m not at all sure I’d recommend that you read it, because it will probably enrage you and sadden you in equal measure, and it feels like a terrible invasion of privacy—Ansari’s privacy, that is. It is very graphic and very cruel, but I guess all celebrities are fair game now to the MeToo crowd.

The story exhibits the same problems that were apparent from early in the history of this movement: the strange lack of agency of women who think of themselves as strong and able to function in the world.

In other words: Dear Grace and others with similar tales, if you mean “no,” say it. And then act it out. Get up, get dressed, get going. Why so tongue-tied? Why expect a man to read your mind when you are sending the most mixed signals possible—going to his apartment on a first date, taking off your clothes, etc. etc. and so forth, and expecting him to understand that your “yes” means “no” and your “not this moment but maybe later” means “never”?

And while we’re on the subject—what on earth did you expect from this encounter? You didn’t know this guy, except his public persona in various roles. If you engage in casual sex with someone you don’t know, it just might not go very well.

Young women today are not all like Grace. I know plenty of them who are not. But something has gone horribly, horribly wrong with a lot of young women, some combination of feminism and leftism and the sexual revolution and hookup culture and widespread divorce and the self-esteem movement and trophies for everyone and—have I missed anything?

Immigrants: where they come from, or who they are?

The New Neo Posted on by

An assumption that goes with the story of s***holeGate is that what Trump was saying was “Let’s favor people from Norway over people from s***hole countries like Haiti and in Africa.” That makes him a racist and a mean one at that, in the eyes of the MSM and a great many people who read it.

I happened across the following interview with Tom Cotton. He was at that meeting, and he has a different impression about what was said. His answer goes to the actual issues involved (amazing, isn’t it?) rather than semantics: the question of whether Trump is judging people by national origin or by each person’s individual characteristics, beliefs, and skills, and which is a more desirable way to go about setting up an immigration policy. It went like this:

According to that, it was Durbin and Graham who wanted to continue the program of favoritism based on national origins, and Trump who wants to end it and substitute skills-based admission policies. This is congruent with Trump’s public utterances as well as being congruent with Durbin and Graham’s policy positions.

So what Trump may have actually said was something like this: Why would we want to favor people from certain countries, in particular from certain s***hole [or some other pejorative word] countries like Haiti? Hey, if you’re going to favor a country, why not Norway instead, a first-world country? (That’s what’s known as a rhetorical question). And then Trump might have continued with something like: It’s all the wrong way to go, favoring one country over another—as I’ve said repeatedly, we need a completely different, skills-based system.

And Durbin (and perhaps Graham) started salivating at the thought that he now could get some aides together and “brief” them (so that they could tell the press) on the fact that in the meeting, Trump had called some mostly-black nations “s***holes” and said we should favor Norwegians! Hey, what a racist moron that Trump is!

I think that’s probably very very close to what actually happened.

Playing telephone: are we tired of s***holeGate yet?

The New Neo Posted on by

I am sorely tired of it.

On the other hand, it raises so many fascinating issues that it’s hard to keep from mulling it over once again.

Fortunately, a lot of other people have done the legwork so I’ll link to them in a moment.

But first I want to emphasize a couple of things that I think have gotten lost in the shuffle. The first is that the original WaPo story rested on the word of “several” anonymous people (I later heard it was two, but I’m not sure of that) who were not at the meeting with Trump but were “briefed” on it later. What they told the WaPo was what they had been told by others about what Trump had said (since then there’s been a great deal of back-and-forth disagreement by people who were at the meeting about what may or may not have been said, but I’m talking about the original story).

To the best of my recollection, that didn’t used to be the standard for journalism. It’s basically a little game of political telephone. Perhaps the WaPo likes to play games of telephone (especially against the right and/or Trump). But personally, I don’t, and it doesn’t matter who is being quoted or misquoted, or what party that person might be from.

One of the activities that led to my political change was the fact that I could find people’s actual words online—the complete text of a speech, for example—and could come to my own conclusions about what that person had really said rather than to rely on what the MSM (or some other informant with a bone to pick) had told me the person had said. I was naive enough at the beginning to be surprised to learn that my favorite news outlets quite often twisted or in some way misrepresented the words of people they didn’t like. But long long ago that ceased surprising me.

So, what did Trump actually say about Haitians or Norwegians or the people of other unspecified failed countries in Africa? We don’t know, you don’t know, the WaPo doesn’t know. I can think of innocuous ways to interpret the reports and I can think of ways that make Trump look very bad. But I wouldn’t trust Dick Durbin or the WaPo or the anonymous telephone-game players—or President Trump, either—on the matter.

One reason is that people often lie to serve their own interests or what they think is in their party’s political interests. Another is that people often are very poor reporters on what they said or what another person said. I’ve noticed it in my private life. I noticed it when working with people. I’ve noticed it with friends. I’ve noticed it and noticed it and noticed it. It’s the reason I often wish I had an audiotape of various exchanges, in order to solve the argument. But most of the time we don’t.

Trump needs to know that from now on he should either not meet privately with political opponents or he should tape everything (I think the latter is by far the best solution, and apparently they’ve begun to do it with interviews with reporters—see this).

But why don’t most Americans know not to trust games of telephone from either side? Is it because people tend to believe what they want to believe?

For what it’s worth, here’s what the WaPo was told by their anonymous informants who didn’t hear it themselves:

Trump then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries such as Norway, whose prime minister he met with Wednesday. The president, according to a White House official, also suggested he would be open to more immigrants from Asian countries because he felt that they help the United States economically.

In addition, the president singled out Haiti, telling lawmakers that immigrants from that country must be left out of any deal, these people said.

The “deal,” by the way, was a reference to a deal that favors and encourages immigration from certain countries at the expense of other countries.

Not even Trump was talking about banning anyone, and he wasn’t talking about race. He was talking about economics and education—even according to those anonymous informants who are certainly not his fans. He was talking about whether we should favor and encourage more immigration from failed and depressed countries.

For the newest developments, here’s my roundup for today:

William Jacobson on why Durbin did what he did, and on Durbin’s history of lying.

More along those lines here.

Did Trump say “s***hole”?

And here, from the post I just linked, is one of the more bleakly humorous exchanges I’ve seen since this whole mess began:

A preface: all porn performers are described as “porn stars,” much as all models now seem to be supermodels, but [Jenna] Jameson really was a star. As such, she made a lot of money, got married and had a kid or two. And she turns out to be a conservative who is active on Twitter.

So: Sally Kohn, who I take it is a somebody on Twitter, tweeted this:

To which Ms. Jameson retorted:

By the way, the Salvadorans came here in 2001 because of earthquakes in the country, under a program labeled “temporary.” There was never any guarantee of staying, although:

“The past practice of allowing foreign nationals to remain in the United States long after an initial emergency in their home countries has ended has undermined the integrity of the program and essentially made the ”˜temporary’ protected status a front operation for backdoor permanent immigration,” said Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, which favors less immigration overall.

Hard to argue that this is exactly what’s happened. A “temporary” program is wink-wink temporary. What’s more, no one is being expelled at this point; the status doesn’t change until 2019. Also:

A senior administration official briefing reporters on the decision said it was based on the status of El Salvador’s recovery from the 2001 earthquakes. The country has received millions of dollars in aid and rebuilt schools, homes and hospitals, the official said.

In the past two years, the United States has repatriated 39,000 Salvadorans, showing the ability of El Salvador to absorb an influx, the official said.

The government of El Salvador said on Monday that it was glad the administration decided to at least leave the program in place until September 2019.

“El Salvador’s Foreign Ministry lobbied heavily for the interests of our fellow citizens,” the government said in a statement, adding that it would continue to search for alternatives and seek action by the U.S. Congress to protect the migrants.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce had urged the government to extend TPS protections for Salvadorans, Haitians and Hondurans, saying “the loss of employment authorization for these populations would adversely impact several key industries,” including “construction, food processing, hospitality, and home healthcare services.”

All Congress has to do is pass a bill to protect the Salvadorans and make their status permanent. It has a lot of time in which to do it.

As I said, we’re in the very best of hands

The New Neo Posted on by

I titled my previous post about the nuclear alert in Hawaii “Reassuring evidence that we’re in the best of hands.” Well, there’s more evidence [hat tip: commenter “Ann”]:

Around 8:05 a.m., the Hawaii emergency employee initiated the internal test, according to a timeline released by the state. From a drop-down menu on a computer program, he saw two options: “Test missile alert” and “Missile alert.” He was supposed to choose the former; as much of the world now knows, he chose the latter, an initiation of a real-life missile alert…

Part of what worsened the situation Saturday was that there was no system in place at the state emergency agency for correcting the error, [Hawaii Emergency Management Agency] spokesmansaid. The state agency had standing permission through FEMA to use civil warning systems to send out the missile alert ”” but not to send out a subsequent false alarm alert, he said.

FUBAR. FUBAR. If you don’t know what that means, you can look it up.

Who is writing this software? Who is approving it?

You know, when I go to some shlocky webpage by mistake and I want to leave, they almost always ask me “Do you really want to leave our wonderful site and miss all the great bargains here?” before they’ll release me. In other words, there’s at least a two-step process for getting out, and sometimes even more. And even at bona fide sites—for example, when I want to delete spam at Yahoo mail—it requires a two-step process in order to do it. They basically say something like, “Are you sure?”

I realize that with a nuclear alert, time is of the essence. But a delay of a second or two in alerting the whole state that they’re about to die seems like a small price to pay in order to make sure it doesn’t get announced in error. But somehow, that never occurred to anyone—or if it did occur, it was decided in favor of a simple one-step process subject to error.

And then—no way to inform the state’s citizens that it was a false alarm. If anyone has had any dire health consequences as a result of the prolonged terror the state’s residents and their loved ones had to endure, I bet there’ll be some lawsuits down the road.

How long did the scare last? Way too long: thirty-eight minutes.

Across Hawaii on Sunday, people spoke about gathering their families for what they thought would be their last moments, until the “false alarm” announcement went out…

Neil Abercrombie, the previous governor, whom Mr. Ige defeated in a Democratic primary in 2014, called the episode “a monumental example of failure of leadership ”” incredible.”

“It’s beyond incompetent,” he said. “It is stunning. It should have been rescinded instantly.”…

The Pacific Command first told Hawaii media that there was no approaching ballistic missile at 8:23 a.m. ”” about 13 minutes after Hawaii sent out the alert.

Of course, Trump is really to blame:

On building walls

The New Neo Posted on by

There are walls, and then there are walls.

Robert Frost wrote:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbours? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.”

Originally, I had thought to offer just an excerpt from the poem. But then I decided to put the whole thing up there because—as so often is the case with Frost—there’s so much food for thought in it. The speaker in “Mending Wall” is someone who represents the view that walls might not be a good thing to have. His neighbor represents the more conservative view, in the old-timey—not necessarily political—sense of “traditionalist.”

The two lines in the poem that made me think of it recently are these: “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know/What I was walling in or walling out…” Indeed, that’s an important distinction that many people who are part of the “don’t love a wall” political contingent forget when it suits their purposes.

Now, I can’t say I always love a wall. But I’m New Englander enough to know that good fences ordinarily do make good neighbors—or, rather, they can help keep goodish neighbors from going bad.

Walls mark boundaries and help avoid disputes. Walls are also symbolic in terms of personal boundaries—in other words, “don’t get so close that I feel smothered by you; I require some privacy.” Neighbors are often so close physically that each can feel invaded by the other if they aren’t careful to respect personal boundaries as well as property ones.

Different areas of the country and the world have different standards and customs about this. In New England, we’re known for being a bit standoffish. That can be bad when you’re new in the neighborhood and expecting the welcome wagon. It can be good if you’re a bit reserved and like your privacy. But fences don’t keep people from being close if they want to be.

Which brings us, of course, to countries. The “walling in or walling out” distinction is all-important there, and often glossed over by the left. Berlin Wall, border wall with Mexico, Israel/Palestinian wall—all the same, all pernicious. The left would like you (or the US, or Israel) to be forced to have your boundaries overstepped, although at the same time they’re not above living in gated communities themselves.

The Berlin Wall was to keep people inside a country, not out. The purpose was to make the country itself—East Germany—a prison, and escape punishable by death. The purpose was to end liberty for its own citizens.

Building a border wall to keep people from another country out, on the other hand, is protective. One can argue with whether it’s necessary or not in any given case. But it is well within the rights of any country to build one, and it does not change the rights or restrict the liberty of its own citizens. The only thing it does is protect the country’s territory from people from an adjacent country who want to enter without permission of the host country. And for the most part, those people are also still free to visit that country and even to emigrate there if they follow the rules of the country they want to enter.

Seems pretty reasonable to me.

Such boundary walls are actually quite common around the world, as you can see, and there are myriad reasons for having them (scroll down at the link for the very long list). Is it only the US that’s not allowed to have a wall?

[NOTE: By the way, regarding whether an actual wall could be built along the entire border, I tackled that question in August of 2015.]

Reassuring evidence that we’re in the best of hands

The New Neo Posted on by

NOT.

Reports of an alert about a missile threat to Hawaii ricocheted across social media Saturday and caused anxiety in the state. But authorities said the alert was false and sent as an error…

According to screenshots, the alert read, “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”

Well, I’m used to ignoring a great deal of what my computers tell me: Your phone is infected by a virus and unless you go here something terrible will happen etc. etc. etc…

But man, that must have been a scary thing to receive. It’s frightening even to think that it takes some error like this to correct such glaring flaws in the system:

Hawaii’s Governor David Ige, who said he was meeting with authorities to determine what caused the alert, said on remarks broadcast on CNN that an employee had pressed the wrong button. “This change in shift routine happens three times a day, seven days a week, 365 days out of the year. For the most part it occurs flawlessly. There was an error today and we will be investigating and changing procedure so that we can avoid this from ever happening again,” Ige said.

Seems to have been a local Hawaii thing. Gremlins?

The special qualities of ballet dancer Margot Fonteyn [Part I]

The New Neo Posted on by

British ballerina Margot Fonteyn was never showy, never athletic, never gymnastic. She was restrained, delicate and refined, light as air. She seemed like a real (although ideal) human being rather than an infinitely stretchable creature with elastic for connective tissue.

Fonteyn’s biggest strengths were acting ability and charm, which Fonteyn had in particular abundance. They made up for her lack of the sort of modern-day high extensions I’ve referred to as “extreme ballet”:

Although many arts contain elements of the physical””for example, musicians must use their bodies to coax a glorious sound from inanimate instruments””dance has always been the art that most seamlessly merges the athletic with the esthetic as well as the dramatic. But balance must be there or it becomes an empty physical exercise (what some of my dance teachers used to call circus tricks or nightclub acts), sensational in the physical sense, empty of the soul that makes it all meaningful.

Fonteyn was the antithesis of extreme ballet. Her leg never went very high, and I doubt that she could even land a job in the corps de ballet in one of today’s ballet companies due to this gymnastics failure. Somehow she managed to get the job done in terms of technique and doing the steps, perhaps through sheer willpower, but it was her perfectly-placed torso and arms and her expressive face that carried the day. They were the calm and serene center from which she danced.

No one moves anything like this today. Film has trouble capturing what Fonteyn actually did (or for that matter, what any dancer does). But I think this clip shows you at least a small glimpse of what was so very special about seeing Fonteyn in person. It’s a brief excerpt from “Sleeping Beauty,” often thought to have been her greatest role:

I’m not sure how old Fonteyn was in that clip, but I believe it was taken fairly early on (the narrator describes an opening night in 1949, when she would have been 30, but I think the film was taken somewhat later). Here she is again in the same ballet; this was in 1965 when Fonteyn was 45 or 46, geriatric in ballet years.

But watch Fonteyn’s backbend at 20:13-20:21 in the short excerpt I’ve cued up here. It’s not just some athletic feat, although it is an athletic feat. It’s a feat of timing and expression and line—how she pushes it beyond what you expect, how she sustains it, and then how she suddenly snaps right out of it. Note also the restraint and yet the beauty of her not-very-high arabesques:

As a contrast, take a look at the same moment performed by modern-day Diana Vishneva, a Maryinsky star who has often appeared in this country with American Ballet Theater. Vishneva can dance rings around Fonteyn in the technical sense, and she’s not devoid of artistry—she’s certainly not a mere automaton. But the line and the timing of Fonteyn in that backbend—a physical feat that ought to be a piece of cake for Vishneva—are nowhere to be seen. If you blink you might even miss the backbend moment; it begins at about :50 and ends just a few seconds later:

The role is supposed to be that of a 16-year-old at her birthday, but Vishneva looks so solemn and intent on getting that leg way up there, and keeping secure in her balances (neither thing really is a problem for her) that she forgets to show us why she’s dancing—the joy of it. This is what I so often see in too many dancers today: a sequential posing, an overriding attention to and awareness of the beautiful picture they are making with each separate step rather than a liquid and expressive flow of movement. Smiles that come and go often seem fake, alternating with a sometimes-tense preparation for the physical feat that is about to come.

[NOTE: To be continued in Part II, coming soon.]

Another changer worth reading about

The New Neo Posted on by

Another in a long long line of change stories.

The title? “Coming Out As A Republican To My Democrat Family Went Worse Than Coming Out Gay.”

No surprise to anyone who knows a lot about what happens to political changers, but it was probably a surprise to him. Here’s a quote:

I am not a sex offender. But a number of my friends no longer have time to see me. Lifelong acquaintances now regard me with fear and distrust. I have been unfriended en masse on social media and excoriated by friends who deign to remain. And I have been singly excluded from social gatherings when the rest of my family was invited.

No, I am not a sex offender. I am something even worse than that. I am a Donald Trump supporter…

When, in my adulthood, the liberal policy agenda became problematic for me, I found myself at a loss. I began to raise questions with my family and friends, and met resistance. It was not because my concerns were particularly inappropriate; I was just not supposed to be questioning at all…

For the first time in my progressive life, standing up for the values that I most strongly espouse””truth, morality, self-reliance, boundaries, tolerance, and a healthy dose of Jewish skepticism””was damaging my reputation and character. When I publicly opposed my dad’s support of the Iran deal, I was admonished. I had few friends with whom I could have a civil political conversation: one stopped all communication with me for two weeks because Trump won the presidency.

If Republicans are bad, Trump is nothing less than Satan embodied. Post-election family gatherings devolved into group Trump-bashing, which intensified as more rumors of my dubious views wafted across town. I did not even bother going to gay pride because it was fused with a Resist march. If you do not want to impeach our president, you have no place in gay life.

Please read the whole thing.

And if the author, whose name is Adam Levine, happens to come across my blog, I bid him welcome and invite him to read all my posts on the topic of political change, many of which deal with the social ostracism factor. It’s not an easy thing to experience, and it can be a real shock.

Immigration: the heart of the matter

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the better s***hole essays is this one by Roger Kimball, which explores a slightly different territory than most:

But sometimes, outrage is but a patina of indignation whose chief motive is incontinent delight. Which is it for the talking heads at CNN? Are they genuinely morally offended by the president’s comments? Or are they really absolutely delighted by the opportunity he has given them to say “shithole” over and over again while also running endless chyrons reminding viewers that the president referred to (if he did refer to) Haiti, El Salvador, etc., as “shithole countries” from which we should not seek immigrants?

I think it is the latter, and I believe there are two parts to the delight…

This is what I was referring to when I wrote, “But there’s no question that Trump’s choice of language made his enemies hoot and holler with glee…”—that “glee” being the “delight” of which Kimball writes.

Once it was clear that Donald Trump had done the unthinkable and won the 2016 election, the opposition was determined to prove him to be unfit for office and remove him from it, and anything Trump himself did to help their cause (or that they thought might help their cause) has been welcomed and celebrated. Sometimes they’ve had to invent things, but Trump’s often supplied them himself—although many of these incidents haven’t worked out for the left quite like they thought they would, have they?

I believe that this is the reason that Senator Durbin,—who was almost certainly the source of the s***hole story in the first place—spilled the beans on Trump. After all, “s***hole” wasn’t a public utterance, and if (as Paul Mirengoff points out at Powerline) Trump’s calling certain third-world countries “s***holes” was likely to “hurt America, then Sen. Durbin and others in the room should have kept Trump’s statement to themselves.” But there is little doubt that the opportunity to hurt Trump and the GOP trumped just about every other consideration.

Kimball goes on to say:

Which brings me to my second question: Was the president right to question the desirability of accepting immigrants from places like Haiti? Let’s leave his colorful language to one side. That was just a bit of rhetorical salsa on the burrito. The coarsening of language in the public square (and the private hearth) means that virtually anyone not cloistered hears and/or utters much ruder language almost daily.

The real issue is whether we justly prefer immigrants from some places over others.

I would say that the answer is an unequivocal Yes. Of course we do…

He is further correct that the Haitis of the world are conspicuously undesirable places: crime- and disease-ridden trous de merde that we may pity and may endeavor to help but that are not necessarily good sources of helpful immigrants.

And here we come to a second curiosity in the preening and ecstatic outrage over the president’s comment. Everyone, near enough, knows that he was telling a home truth. It was outrageous not because he said something crude that was untrue. Quite the contrary: it was outrageous precisely because it was true but intolerable to progressive sensitivities.

In other words, the potency of taboo is still strong in our superficially rational culture. There are some things””quite a few, actually, and the list keeps growing””about which one cannot speak the truth or, in many cases, even raise as a subject for discussion without violating the unspoken pact of liberal sanctimoniousness.

There’s a lot packed in there, and I suggest you read the entire essay. But I think that Kimball misses a big point connected with the deeper immigration controversy that (as I indicated yesterday) has been going on for long, long before Trump.

This is the real heart of the matter: what should our immigration policy be? Is the idea to let in the people we think would be best for the country, and do it at a rate that doesn’t overwhelm the people already here either culturally or economically? And if so, how do we best go about vetting people who would like to enter, in order to get the best result for the US? Does it matter what country the immigrants come from? Should we ask more questions about their ideology? What about their education and skills? Don’t we care about that?

Or is the idea to take in the greatest possible number—and even encourage more and more and more immigration—of people from the world’s most-failed countries (call them s***holes or call them failed-states or call them whatever you want to call them), the less-skilled and more downtrodden the better?

The first option is roughly the position of the GOP, although the party is split between that faction and a group that favors the second option, which is very roughly the position of the Democrats. So although Kimball wrote “Everyone, near enough, knows that [Trump] was telling a home truth” I don’t think that he’s completely correct there. I think that many people believe that countries such as Haiti are the very best sources of illegal immigrants, not despite but because of their failed-nation status. Many people (some of them for religious reasons) believe that it is very much in our interests—both our moral interests and even (at times) our economic interests because they would provide a source of cheap labor. For Democrats, there’s a practical part as well in that they believe it would serve their own electoral interests because they predict that such immigrants will be reliably Democratic voters.

It’s a real disagreement, and it has many parts. I touched on the religious aspects of the issue in this previous post. Here’s an excerpt:

A great many Christians seem to be arguing that we Westerners have a duty to accept all the refugees coming from war-torn countries such as Syria, or those in economic distress such as illegal immigrants from Mexico, whether the “we” be individuals here or in Europe. I’ve read many such arguments on blogs in posts and comments, and have seen them offered by talking heads on TV.

To me as a non-Christian, it is a puzzling argument. To me it seems that the prescription to give to charity, to help the needy, never requires that one help all the needy to the point of beggaring yourself. Nor does it require putting yourself in personal jeopardy. In other words, although Christianity has long admired the saintliness of martyrdom, it does not require it of individuals and certainly not of societies.

I don’t mean to imply that Democrats’ motives are especially pure here; I already have said that part of it is very practical for them because they think the vast majority of such immigrants will become Democrats. But there is the moral, compassionate, and sometimes even religious element as well—and that latter piece operates quite a bit for some in the middle or on the right who support the Democratic position on immigration. Trump’s words were offensive to them not just because they were vulgar, but because they go against that philosophy.

My own position is that the country and self-interest comes first, although there is certainly room for some compassion. No country is obliged to take in anybody. On the whole, immigration does help the United States, but not unrestricted immigration. We need to be careful about the ideology and character of those we let in. To me that has zero to do with race and everything to do with the actual individuals who are coming here and whether they believe in the principles on which America was founded, and whether they are likely to become good citizens. I don’t think that’s an easy thing to determine, however. As I wrote in that earlier post:

There is a saying, “charity begins at home” that has these origins:

The notion that a man’s family should be his foremost concern is expressed in 1 Timothy 5:8, King James Bible, 1611:

But if any prouide not for his owne, & specially for those of his owne house, hee hath denied the faith, and is worse then an infidel.

John Wyclif had expressed the same idea as early as 1382, in Of Prelates, reprinted in English Works, 1880:

Charite schuld bigyne at hem-self.

So it seems clear that helping everyone in need is not possible in the real world. Nor does helping people require that you take them into your own home, either in small numbers or large.

Another principle to remember is that generally any behavior that is rewarded will increase in frequency. So, issue an open invitation to your house saying that all who come will be fed and clothed there and given money, and see what happens if you broadcast it throughout the entire world.

Those are the real issues, and the rest is a distraction.

How far will a psychopathic liar go? The case of Sharee Miller

The New Neo Posted on by

How far will a psychopathic liar go? Very far.

In a discussion yesterday about the ways in which unscrupulous people can be willing to lie, I was reminded of the story of Sharee Miller. If this were a movie it might be considered unbelievable. But it actually happened:

Speaking of movies, the story has been the inspiration for a made-for-TV movie that roughly parallels it in plot.

In 2016 Miller finally confessed to her guilt, by the way.

Here are more details, which will only make sense if you’ve watched the video or already know about the case:

Between her visits to Reno, Miller and Cassaday kept in touch through the Internet. They sent each other hundreds of e-mail and spent hours corresponding in private chat rooms. The two almost always used the same screen names: She was “Jerry’s Fool.” And he was “Sharee’s Fool.”

“Your fool for life, Jerry,” Cassaday would sign off.

“Love, your brat, Sharee,” she’d answer.

In a Sept. 23, 1999, chat session, Cassaday read that Miller had been pregnant, that he was the father, and he pressed for details.

“This next part will be hard. I lost my baby, Jerry.”

“No,” Cassaday responded.

“I never thought I would ever tell you that he hits. I got in trouble because I was with you.”

Cassaday demanded more details.

“Sharee, you can tell me now, or in person when I beat it out of him,” he wrote.

“Where did he hit you?” Cassaday demanded.

“Jerry, I can’t tell you.”

Cassaday pushed for more.

“He didn’t hit me, Jerry; he raped me. I lost the baby because of the force.”

The next day Cassaday wrote: “The things you told me ripped me in half. No one, I mean no one, is going to get away with the things he has done to you.”

The next month Miller wrote that she was pregnant again, this time with twins by Jerry.

“Baby, it’s all gonna be fine soon,” Cassaday tapped out on his computer. “We will live a wonderful happy life together.”

Soon, after Cassaday had moved back to Missouri, he received electronic pictures of the sonograms.

“I love the e-mails you sent me about the baby,” Cassaday wrote. “Please don’t stop sending me this stuff. I love you so much honey.”

Jerry Cassaday opened his e-mail Nov. 5 to a message written under Bruce Miller’s screen name. (The prosecution presented evidence to prove that Sharee Miller had posed as her husband, using his screen name, to send the following messages purportedly from Bruce.)

“SHAREE IS GROWING FAT WITH TWO BASTARDS IN HER,” the message read. “SHE HAS DECIDED SHE DOESN’T LIKE THE EXCESS WEIGHT AND IS GOING TO GET AN ABORTION.” The e-mail taunted Cassaday for six more paragraphs.

Cassaday called hospitals in Flint and Sharee Miller’s cell phone with no luck.

“I’m beginning to worry. Where are you honey?? I love you,” Cassaday wrote in a Nov. 6 e-mail.

At 2 p.m., Cassaday found this message on his computer: “This is Sharee. I am going away for a few days. I will contact you next week sometime.”

This e-mail, again purportedly from Bruce, greeted Cassaday the next afternoon:

“WELL, JERRY, SHE TOLD ME TO LET YOU KNOW SHE WOULD BE HOME SOON. I THINK THE ABORTION WENT FINE. SHE SOUNDED LIKE SHE FELT BETTER KNOWING SHE WASN’T HAVING ANY MORE KIDS. THANK YOU FOR MAKING MY RELATIONSHIP WITH MY WIFE BETTER.”

Later that day, Cassaday went back online and found electronic photographs that seemed to show Sharee had suffered a horrific beating. (The prosecution presented evidence to show that these photos were fabricated by defendant Miller).

On November 89, 1999, at around 6:30 p.m., Bruce Miller was shot with at 12-gauge shotgun. Bruce had just gotten off the phone with Sharee. Forensic and medical testimony established that the blast tore into Miller’s neck and upper chest, killed him instantly and knocked him out of the chair onto an oily piece of carpet.

The email and instant messaging contents were read to the jury by two deputies. This was their testimony regarding a chat session the day before the murder:

Deputy #2 [reading Sharee’s messages]: (In court) (Reading) “Jerry, I am scared. Jerry, if this don’t work, he will hurt me bad.”

Deputy #1 [Reading Jerry’s responses]: (In court) (Reading) “It’ll work. What is the fastest way into the yard from 75?”

Deputy #2: (In court) (Reading e-mail) “75 to Mount Morris Road exit. Now you need to listen to me for a minute. I will call Bruce at 5 PM.

Deputy #1: (In court) (Reading) “OK.”

Deputy #2: (In court) (Reading) “Is the gun loud?”

Deputy #1: (In court) (Reading) “Somewhat.”

Deputy #2: (In court) (Reading) “Just do it and get the hell out of there.”

Deputy #1: (In court) (Reading) “I want him to know who I am.”

Deputy #2: (In court) (Reading) “Jerry, please.”

Deputy #1: (In court) (Reading) “He will know.”

Deputy #2: (In court) (Reading) “He will know.”

Deputy #1: (In court) (Reading) But not for long.”

Deputy #2:(In court) (Reading) “Are you going to be able to live with this the rest of your life? Because I can.”

Deputy #1: (In court) (Reading) “I love you. Yes, I can.”

Prosecutors argued the actual murder took place almost as it was scripted in that instant message exchange…

According to evidence presented by the prosecution, just about everything that Jerry Cassaday was told about Bruce and Sharee Miller was wrong. Sharee Miller could not have become pregnant. She had a tubal ligation after the birth of her youngest child in the mid-1990s, court records show. The sonogram pictures that Cassaday received also were a fraud. Prosecutors pointed out that they were dated 1994.

The prosecution discounted allegations of spousal abuse, too. Flint area police agencies had never responded to any complaint of domestic violence at the Miller household. Bruce Miller had no criminal record, no known ties to organized crime. Neighbors described Bruce Miller as a loving family man.

After her husband’s murder, Sharee Miller received the junkyard, which she subsequently sold, about $16,000 in the couple’s bank accounts, a little stock and $80,000 in insurance, according to probate court records and investigators.

Heart of darkness.

The s***storm about the s***hole countries

The New Neo Posted on by

Never a dull moment.

The latest furor is over certain remarks that Trump is alleged to have uttered during a meeting about immigration with Dick Durbin, Lindsay Graham, and “other government officials.” His remarks were criticized variously for both form and content: that the words were vulgar, and that they were bigoted.

I would love to be able to quote exactly what Trump said, but unfortunately we don’t know exactly what he said because his remarks were unrecorded. The meeting was not public nor were reporters there.

I always very much prefer to deal with actual quotes because anything said by anyone can (and probably will) be twisted, misquoted, or misinterpreted. I’ve read many different characterizations of what Trump said at the meeting and they differ somewhat from each other. But with that caveat I’ll discuss the situation as best I can, assuming for the sake of argument that the reports are at least somewhat true.

Of course, that may be a false assumption. Trump has denied portions of the stories:

President Donald Trump on Friday denied that he had insulted Haitians amid an uproar about his reported description of African nations as “shithole countries” during a meeting on immigration with lawmakers.

“The language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used,” Trump tweeted. “What was really tough was the outlandish proposal made ”” a big setback for DACA!”

On Thursday, Trump used vulgar language during a meeting with a bipartisan group of senators at the White House, a Democratic aide briefed on the meeting told NBC News Thursday.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who was present at the meeting and spoke to reporters Friday, confirmed the president’s remarks and said that the media reports were accurate. In recounting the meeting, Durbin suggested that Trump’s “shitholes” slur was aimed at African nations.

Two sources and Durbin said that when the discussion turned to Haiti, Trump questioned why Haitians should be given specific consideration.

“Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out,” he said, according to sources.

The White House issued a statement Thursday that did not deny the remarks. But Trump tweeted Friday that he never said “anything derogatory about Haitians other than Haiti is, obviously, a very poor and troubled country.”

“Never said ‘take them out.’ Made up by Dems. I have a wonderful relationship with Haitians. Probably should record future meetings ”” unfortunately, no trust!” he added.

What can we glean from that? Trump writes “this was not the language used,” and added “Never said ‘take them out.'” So perhaps “this was not the language used” refers to “take them out” rather than “s-hole.” Who knows?

More importantly, who cares? Plenty of people. I am quite certain that among my liberal acquaintances who already thought Trump to be a racist—in other words, most of them—this report cements the deal. Of course, they were never going to be Trump supporters anyway.

The most salient thing on which accounts seem to agree is that Trump referred to some countries—perhaps in Africa, perhaps also Haiti—as “shitholes” or “shithole countries.” Let’s go with that, anyway, as a good possibility.

The definition of the word is:

vulgar slang

An extremely dirty, shabby, or otherwise unpleasant place.

So the problem doesn’t seem to be the word’s definition; these are in fact pretty desperate countries in which to live, which is one of the main reasons so many people flee them in the first place. That’s what Trump is referring to in his later tweet where he writes, “Haiti is, obviously, a very poor and troubled country.”

There’s a problem, though, with the tone of the word “s-hole,” which is rightly called vulgar. That’s about decorum: what Trump said wasn’t couched in the sort of language presidents and diplomats ordinarily use in public, although it’s a good guess (and with some, a certainty—for example, LBJ) that they sometimes do in private. But although the meeting was private in a sense, Trump was nevertheless acting in his official capacity as president, with lawmakers from both parties in attendance. So he should have been on his guard and known that nothing like this remains private. Of course, maybe he didn’t care.

If Trump had originally said “dysfunctional” countries or “failed” countries or some other cliche more commonly used in public to refer to such countries that actually are a mess (such as in his later tweet about Haiti, “a poor and troubled country”), would it have mattered? Perhaps somewhat, although problems would probably have remained (I’ll get to those in a bit). But there’s no question that Trump’s choice of language made his enemies hoot and holler with glee, although it may have made quite a few supporters shrug and/or say “At last, someone’s telling it like it is.”

But tone was not the only issue here. And this is where we get into special difficulty because of the lack of a transcript or recording: what did Trump actually say and what did he actually mean? It appears that the context in which Trump is alleged to have said this was a discussion of a program that favors immigrants from these countries:

The lawmakers were describing how certain immigration programs operate, including one to give safe haven in the United States to people from countries suffering from natural disasters or civil strife…

The program that was being discussed at the White House is called Temporary Protected Status.

In November, the Trump administration decided to end the status for immigrants from Haiti and Nicaragua. It gave the approximately 59,000 Haitian immigrants who had been granted the status until July 2019 to return home or legalize their presence in the United States. Nicaraguans were given until January 2019.

This week, Trump moved to end the status for immigrants from El Salvador, which could result in 200,000 Salvadorans legally in the United States being deported, beginning in September of next year.

The bipartisan Senate plan would attempt to maintain TPS in return for ending or changing a “diversity” lottery program that has been aimed at allowing up to 50,000 people a year from countries with few emigres to the United States…

Another source familiar with the meeting said Trump was questioning why the United States should take in unskilled laborers from the countries under discussion and should instead welcome immigrants from nations that can offer skilled workers.

That seems to make sense, so let’s just assume that’s what Trump was getting at when he made the remarks in question. I think it’s likely that he was asking why we should favor people from these countries over those from more functional countries. It’s actually a good question although a non-PC one.

Liberals and the left (and some on the right, too, particularly some religious people) say that we actually have an increased duty to give safe haven to those who are from the more dysfunctional countries. On the other side, there are people who think our first duty is to make sure our country only accepts the number and type of immigrants we can safely handle, and that too vast an influx of people from dysfunctional countries at one time can lead to trouble and is unnecessary and unwarranted.

When I was very young, the rules about immigration were still governed by the The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, the passage of which had engendered a debate about our philosophy of immigration not unlike the debates we’ve had recently, although some of the details are different. The 1952 Act continued a previous quota system for immigrants from nations and regions based on their proportions already in the US population, and labor qualifications were part it:

The Act defined three types of immigrants: immigrants with special skills or relatives of U.S. citizens who were exempt from quotas and who were to be admitted without restrictions; average immigrants whose numbers were not supposed to exceed 270,000 per year; and refugees.

Harry Truman vetoed the bill; you can read his reasons why here. The gist of it was that he thought the bill was too inflexible in terms of reacting to crises and needlessly restrictive of immigration from Eastern Europe at the expense of Western Europe. But his veto was overridden and the bill enacted into law.

The remarks of one of the sponsors of the bill—Senator Pat McCarran, Democrat of Nevada—seem of special interest in light of more recent controversies:

I believe that this nation is the last hope of Western civilization and if this oasis of the world shall be overrun, perverted, contaminated or destroyed, then the last flickering light of humanity will be extinguished. I take no issue with those who would praise the contributions which have been made to our society by people of many races, of varied creeds and colors. … However, we have in the United States today hard-core, indigestible blocs which have not become integrated into the American way of life, but which, on the contrary are its deadly enemies. Today, as never before, untold millions are storming our gates for admission and those gates are cracking under the strain. The solution of the problems of Europe and Asia will not come through a transplanting of those problems en masse to the United States. … I do not intend to become prophetic, but if the enemies of this legislation succeed in riddling it to pieces, or in amending it beyond recognition, they will have contributed more to promote this nation’s downfall than any other group since we achieved our independence as a nation.

It’s certainly not difficult to recognize such sentiments, although they were made back in 1953. Interestingly enough, they came from one of Truman’s fellow Democrats, albeit one who was an ally of Joe McCarthy and was accused of having been anti-Semitic (McCarran’s statue may not be long for this world, either).

One of the challenges in discussions of immigration is how to voice very real concerns about the very real potential problems connected with the assimilation and absorption (or lack thereof) of immigrants from culturally different (in particular, “failed”) countries, and to differentiate those concerns from mindless bigotry. The left is pleased to call all such concerns bigotry, since they ordinarily emanate from Republicans.

Trump’s alleged s-hole remarks feed into the claims of those who say that Trump is both coarse and bigoted. What he actually said and what he actually meant by it has thus far been nearly lost in the tsunami of commentary on it. Will the entire episode actually matter in the end? Beats me.

[ADDENDUM: Ace suggests the “kinder, gentler term Garbage Pits of Wretched Refuse.”]