The New Neo

Human nature: is it good or is it bad?

Posted on June 22, 2019 by neoJune 22, 2019

Commenter Richard Saunders has written:

I’m wondering where the stupid idea that people are inherently good got started. Until fairly (in historical terms) recently, everyone understood that the basic rule of human conduct was, as Thucydides put it, “The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.” Was it Rosseau? Marx? And why would anyone believe humans were inherently good when all of human history shows the opposite?

I thought I’d take up the question.

Very briefly and incompletely.

It’s an old old question: what is the nature of humanity? I can’t say whether Rousseau was the first to push the “good” idea (I doubt it), but he certainly was a big one for popularizing it and spreading it. Rousseau was the inspiration for much of leftist thought, and his basic idea can be very roughly summarized as the conviction that humankind is born with a kind of innate goodness and that it is society and its institutions that have gotten in the way.

This thought can lead people in any of several directions. One of those directions, for example, could be the formation of small Utopian communities that don’t seem to do all that much harm to anyone (except perhaps some of their members) although such groups usually have a rather short life.

Rousseauvian ideas can lead instead to those who work with a larger canvas, or would like to do so: anarchists of the leftist variety—that is, people who dream this sort of dream:

…a future society that replaces private property with reciprocity. In this society, no one owns things. People do not work for money to buy things. They do their work because it is the best for society and the things they need are given to them without cost. It wants a society where there is no one in charge. Each person does what they need to without others to lead them.

Good. Luck. With. That.

But at least the people who seek those ends don’t ordinarily propose to put into effect an all-encompassing police state to effect their lofty and unattainable goals. They are anti-statists, although in the highly unlikely event that their dream ever began to be implemented, they might change their minds on statism in a hurry when they saw the chaotic results of anarchy in action.

Totalitarian control by the state, or something close to it, is another option for the Rousseauvian point of view. It is the province of Communism and the nearly-obligatory end point of Socialism.

And now I’m going to leave politics, and I’m also going to skip what the ancient Greeks or Hindus or Buddhists thought or think about whether humankind of innately good (although please feel free to explore all of that in the comments) and cut right to viewpoints of Christians and Jews.

Now of course, neither Christianity nor Judaism has had a single unitary opinion about this. Different branches of each religion give different emphases to different aspects of human nature. But this is a simple summary of the basic Christian attitude (from Billy Graham):

From one point of view, the Bible says, we are basically good—that is, we were created in the image of God, and every human being bears within them something of God’s image or character. We aren’t like every other creature on earth; we know right from wrong, and we know human life shouldn’t be thoughtlessly destroyed. We are infinitely valuable in God’s eyes! The Bible says, “You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor” (Psalm 8:5).

But from another point of view we are basically bad—and the reason is because we have rebelled against God and chosen to live only for ourselves. The Bible calls this “sin”—and like a deadly cancer, it has infected our souls and twisted our bodies and minds. Evil lurks just below the surface of our hearts, and threatens to turn us into moral and spiritual monsters.

Judaism says something somewhat similar, although there’s much less emphasis on sin as “a deadly cancer” and more on sin as a failure to hit the mark:

On the question of human nature, as in most areas of abstract belief in Judaism, there is a lot of room for personal opinion. There is no dogma on the subject, no required belief about the nature of humanity…

In Genesis 2:7, the Bible states that G-d formed (vayyitzer) man. The spelling of this word is unusual: it uses two consecutive Yods instead of the one you would expect. The rabbis inferred that these Yods stand for the word “yetzer,” which means impulse, and the existence of two Yods here indicates that humanity was formed with two impulses: a good impulse (the yetzer tov) and an evil impulse (the yetzer ra).

The yetzer tov is the moral conscience, the inner voice that reminds you of G-d’s law when you consider doing something that is forbidden…

The yetzer ra is more difficult to define, because there are many different ideas about it. It is not a desire to do evil in the way we normally think of it in Western society: a desire to cause senseless harm. Rather, it is usually conceived as the selfish nature, the desire to satisfy personal needs (food, shelter, sex, etc.) without regard for the moral consequences of fulfilling those desires.

The yetzer ra is not a bad thing. It was created by G-d, and all things created by G-d are good. The Talmud notes that without the yetzer ra (the desire to satisfy personal needs), man would not build a house, marry a wife, beget children or conduct business affairs. But the yetzer ra can lead to wrongdoing when it is not controlled by the yetzer tov…

People have the ability to choose which impulse to follow: the yetzer tov or the yetzer ra. That is the heart of the Jewish understanding of free will.

And of course, another difference between Christianity and Judaism is that Christianity believes that accepting Christ as one’s savior is the way that leads out of the sinfulness of humankind. Judaism relies on personal free will and a decision to follow the yetzer tov, “the moral conscience, the inner voice that reminds you of G-d’s law.”

[NOTE: In a somewhat related matter, I refer you to my discussion of a famous and somewhat relevant passage in The Diary of Ann Frank:

Most of us have read Anne Frank’s diary, or at least parts of it, in some form or other, and even those of us who did not are probably familiar with at least a few of its quotes, the most famous of which may be Anne’s observation: “in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

It’s instructive to look at the quote once again, embedded in its original context. When we do, we find it to be far more complex and dark than it appears when as a single famous sentence standing alone…[emphasis mine]:

…”It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually turning into a wilderness, I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too. I can feel the sufferings of millions, and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”

Anne Frank seems to take the long view. Hers is a consciously willed optimism that takes into account some of the greatest horrors the world has ever known, and includes her own untimely death, which she correctly foresees. Whether the peace and tranquility she ultimately envisions are temporary or permanent, and whether they are of this earth or beyond it, her message has nothing of the innocence or simplicity of a trusting child, although it has often been portrayed that way.]

NYC public education has become dedicated to racial categories: Part II

Posted on June 22, 2019 by neoJune 22, 2019

[NOTE: Part I can be found here.]

By now you may have heard of Richard Carranza, the current chancellor of the New York City public school system. He was appointed by NYC mayor de Blasio, and he’s made quite a splash:

…[I]t’s obvious [Carranza] expected every one here to agree with him that the city’s eight elite high schools are bastions of racism.

His calculations are as simple as groupthink can be: because black and Latino students don’t do nearly as well as white and Asian students on the single-entry test, the test is racist.

By that simplistic standard, so are the standards for playing for the Yankees and the Knicks.

But that is why Carranza was hired. It certainly wasn’t for his vast experience, or his knowledge of the New York City school system. A little background from when Carranza was first announced as the new chancellor (and this is from the NY Times, which might be expected to be somewhat sympathetic to his agenda) [emphasis mine]:

If the New York City school system, with its 1.1 million students, were its own metropolis, it would be the 10th largest in the country, bigger than Austin, Indianapolis or San Francisco. And starting next month, there will be a new mayor in town.

Richard A. Carranza will become chancellor of the system, with its 75,000 teachers and 1,800 schools, on April 2, taking on a job that is organizationally complex, intensely political — in a word, daunting.

But Mr. Carranza comes to the position with only modest big-district experience on his résumé, making it difficult to judge the skills and accomplishments he will bring to the job.

He spent seven years in San Francisco, first as a deputy superintendent and then leading the district, but there are just 14 public high schools in San Francisco. In New York, there are more than 400. Then he ran the schools in Houston, which is a larger system, but Mr. Carranza’s time there was so short that graduation rates from his first year in office have yet to be released.

Before Mayor Bill de Blasio made his choice, he said he would pick someone who would hew closely to the agenda set during his first term by Chancellor Carmen Fariña. Mr. de Blasio’s initial selection of Alberto M. Carvalho, superintendent of the Miami-Dade County schools, took some by surprise. Mr. Carvalho had focused on increasing school choice through magnet programs and some charter schools — not Mr. de Blasio’s priority. But he was also a career educator who had demonstrated strong results in increasing graduation rates and was hailed as a shrewd choice.

But after Mr. Carvalho’s very public about-face in turning the job down, the mayor seems to have reverted to a more familiar character.

From this excerpt we learn that de Blasio’s first choice, who seems to have been far more qualified and somewhat less politically correct/leftist that Carranza, turned de Blasio’s offer down in an embarrassing and public manner. So it’s possible that Carranza was a rush appointment.

From the same article, here’s more about Carranza’s background:

In San Francisco, Mr. Carranza championed an effort to change discipline practices, a path Ms. Fariña and Mr. de Blasio have taken as well, and suspensions were reduced by half during his four years as superintendent. In Houston, he started a program called Achieve 180, aimed at improving low-performing schools, which is similar in its approach to Mr. de Blasio’s Renewal Schools program. The Renewal program has shown mixed results so far, while for Achieve 180, which is still in its first year, it is too soon to tell…

The central goals Mr. Carranza articulated in Houston revolved around giving poor students a better shot. One of his major, and most controversial, plans involved making changes to the city’s magnet-school programs by giving some preference to children from low-income families and eliminating many of the test-score and academic requirements. Houston’s high-performing magnet schools are dominated by white middle-class families, and factions of the board are fierce defenders of the current rules.

Just about what you would expect. And recently it’s gotten worse. There are so many problems and so many articles that in the interests of brevity I’ll just list a few:

This article about how Carranza instituted a “toxic” whiteness purge that cost some DOE executives their jobs

Carranza held a training for school administrators on how concepts such as “individualism” and “objectivity” are part of “white supremacy culture.”

There’s also this:

A consultant [named Amante] hired by the [New York] Department of Education told administrators at a workshop that “racial equity” means favoring black children regardless of their socio-economic status, sources said.

“If I had a poor white male student and I had a middle-class black boy, I would actually put my equitable strategies and interventions into that middle class black boy because over the course of his lifetime he will have less access and less opportunities than that poor white boy,” the consultant, Darnisa Amante, is quoted as saying by those in the room.

“That’s what racial equity is,” Amante explained.

“Racial equity” appears to be a growing industry right now, as you can see if you Google the term, with many consultants and consulting groups for hire, ready to do training sessions with educators and others. Their goal is what Thomas Sowell called The Quest for Cosmic Justice—the chase after the impossible, usually with dreadful consequences:

Cosmic justice is not just a higher degree of traditional justice, it is a fundamentally different concept. Traditionally, justice or injustice is a characteristic of process. A defendant in a criminal case would be said to have received justice if the trial were conducted as it should be, under fair rules and with the judge and jury being impartial…[T]raditional justice is about impartial processes rather than either results or prospects…

But this is not what is meant by those people who speak of “social justice.” In fact, rules and standards equally applicable to all are often deliberately set aside in pursuit of “social justice.” Nor are such exceptions aberrations. The two concepts [traditional and “social” justice] are mutually incompatible.

What “social justice” seeks to do is to eliminate undeserved disadvantages for selected groups…[T]his is often done in disregard of the costs of this to other individuals or groups—or even to the requirements of society as a whole.

This is what education has become today. And not just in New York.

All cars look alike to me

Posted on June 21, 2019 by neoJune 21, 2019

And there may be a reason for it.

I was never what you’d call a car person (or a cat person, for that matter), but I used to be able to tell most models of cars apart. Or at least, many.

Now? Just a few. Very few, actually. I already knew it had a great deal to do with safety regulations, but this article explains the situation in depth, including the law of diminishing returns and unintended consequences—such as, for example, how fuel mileage regulations for regular cars have encouraged the proliferation of SUVs that use much more gas per mile. Nice going!

My particular pet peeve is how the regulations concerning body integrity make the windows tinier and tinier and ruin the sightlines.

But none of it explains Americans’ preference for black and gray and white cars. What a bore parking lots are these days! Whatever happened to the wonderful car colors of my youth? Gone, gone—or at least, rather rare.

Here’s an article on that, too:

Cars of yesteryear (if we accept yesteryear to mean the 1960s through the early 1980s) were often painted in bright, popping colors—supersaturated pigments in hues that don’t appear on most modern vehicles. But the appeal of these paint jobs has to do as much with the way the paint looks on the car as it does the color of the paint. Older paints sat flat on the surface of the car; there was no swirling iridescence to give an illusion of movement below the surface. And the finish, though not quite matte, was a lot less glossy than the finish on modern cars.

These vintage paint jobs were almost certainly the result of either acrylic lacquer or enamel paint technology. Acrylic lacquers dominated from the late 1940s until the 1960s. Lacquers were high solvent paints that dried very quickly, to a hard and shiny finish (though not nearly as glossy as we’ve become accustomed to). Lacquers were often highly pigmented, allowing for rich colors. But that hard, shiny finish became brittle with age and exposure; lacquer didn’t play well with water or UV rays, which tended to fade its vibrant colors. And, although this wasn’t a prevailing concern at the time, lacquer’s high solvent composition meant that these paints gave off a ton of environmentally unfriendly volatile organic compounds. Acrylic enamels, developed in the 1960s, were a lower solvent alternative; these paints took a bit longer to dry, but they were more durable and weather-resistant, and they gave off fewer VOCs. Best of all, acrylic enamels looked very similar to lacquers.

Because factory testing standards in the 1970s were less stringent than they are today, car companies were able to get away with using highly pigmented paints that were brittle and not very durable. To make matters worse, acrylic lacquers and enamels were single-stage paints, meaning that these paint jobs weren’t even protected by a clear top coat. They didn’t wear well. According to Jerry Koenigsmark, who has worked at PPG, one of the main automotive paint companies, for 30 years, a lot of the colors that were used back then simply wouldn’t pass muster today. “The saturation and depth of color was a lot better,” said Koenigsmark, “because they didn’t have a lot of the specs that we have now—adhesion testing, gravel chip testing, engineering tests. If I had the exact same pigmentation of a highly saturated color from the ’60s … that paint would be brittle.”

Picture a modern car: If you look at one in the daylight, it almost certainly has a gloss on it so shiny that the paint seems to swim under the surface. What you’re looking at is a polyurethane based clear-coating technology that accounts for much of the difference in appearance between cars of the 1960s and 70s and cars of today. Modern technology uses a base coat, which carries all the pigments, and a clear coat, which adds a deeply glossy layer on top. It creates an effect a bit like looking at a bright color underwater—the experience of the color is interrupted, and sometimes dulled, by the reflection off the surface of the paint.

But as you move around this imaginary car, you’ll notice something else: The paint shimmers and sparkles, and its hue seems to change as you look at it from different angles. That iridescent quality is the result of the other major technological change that came about in the early 1980s: the development of mica-based effect paint. Metallics were available before the 1980s, but they were made by adding aluminum flakes to paint. These first-generation metallics gave a very flat and reflective surface…“Mica,” says Jane Harrington, the manager of color styling at PPG, “gave colors a more of a luster or gem quality”—a pearlescence that is difficult to describe but obvious when you see it…According to Harrington, these days a lot of colors are blended with aluminums and micas, with variously-sized flakes that add to the dimensional quality of the paint. These effect paints are applied over the pigmented base coat, and below the glossy clear coat. They add depth to the paint, but they also tend to diffuse color. In some form or another, they have become nearly omnipresent in modern paint jobs.

True. I’d noticed that weird Las-Vegas-casino-like shimmer, but I never knew what it was about or why it was so ubiquitous on modern cars. Then again, that still doesn’t explain all the white and black and gray, because they still are capable of making bright ones. You continue to see the occasional red car, for example.

Maybe I’ll get a red one next.

Someone has decided…

Posted on June 21, 2019 by neoJune 21, 2019

…that Joe Biden is too old, too white, too Sleepy (is that the same as “unwoke?”), and too loaded with baggage to be able to be the Democratic nominee for president in 2020.

Funny thing is, till now Biden had seemed to be the one best poised to beat Trump. Then again, it’s very early. But I really don’t know who the Democrats think should be their front-runner instead. Seems to me that none of the present candidates have the oomph to be carried to victory.

But voters often surprise me.

What’s up with all the “Trump is being told to wage war on Iran” talk?

Posted on June 21, 2019 by neoJune 21, 2019

[See UPDATE below]

I happened to turn on my TV late last night to a cable news station and I immediately started hearing talk about how Trump was going to start a war with Iran.

The line went something like this: “he is surrounded by people who are all telling him to attack Iran.” Then lots of discussion of how he was teetering on the brink of such action. Even though he’d often criticized presidents who had sent troops to faraway places too readily and gotten mired down, he was nevertheless poised to do it because of these warmongering advisors (such as Bolton) who were all around him.

And then his presidency and re-election chances would be ruined. This would become “Trump’s War.”

And the funny thing was, I happened to have been tuned to Fox at the time.

I already knew about recent heated events involving Iran, including the shooting down of the drone. But what else had happened since then that I’d missed?

So I Googled around a bit and discovered that two articles had appeared earlier in the day—one in the NY Times and one in the WaPo—saying that Trump had actually ordered a strike on Iran and then pulled back at the very last minute. However, I no longer trust a word they say about the inner workings of Trump’s mind and his White House.

But if you don’t think the Times and WaPo drive the news, think again.

I went to read the Times story, and as I had expected, it was from the usual anonymous sources who supposedly were in the Trump inner circle. This particular story had as its sources “multiple senior administration officials involved in or briefed on the deliberations.” This could mean someone in the know or not, someone friendly to Trump or not, someone lying or not, and note “involved in or briefed.” So perhaps not even present.

This sounds quite familiar.

Of course, it’s possible the story is true. I can’t verify it; I certainly haven’t spoken to any sources, much less “multiple” “official” “senior” ones who may have been “involved in” or “briefed” on this. But I’ve seen this picture too many times before.

Why would someone who actually was close to Trump leak this information? It seems to me that it could hurt Trump and feed into the “he’s so crazy he’s gonna start a war” mentality. Then again, someone loyal to Trump might leak this information (with Trump’s approval of the leak) if Trump actually has no intention of attacking Iran but wants Iran to think he just might be crazy enough to do it. What good’s a threat if there’s no chance whatsoever that it will be carried out?

Hats off to the writers at the Babylon Bee

Posted on June 20, 2019 by neoJune 21, 2019

Funny funny funny stuff:

Ocasio-Cortez Gets Head Stuck In Bucket, Journalists Rush To Explain Why It Was Actually A Genius Move

On Wednesday, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez somehow got her head stuck inside a bucket. She was heard yelling, “Who turned out the lights?” while repeatedly running full speed into walls. Republicans immediately pounced, using this as proof that Ocasio-Cortez is “kind of a dummy.” Many journalists, on the other hand, leaped to Ocasio-Cortez’s defense, saying her getting her head firmly wedged inside of a plastic bucket was further proof of her being an intelligent and dynamic politician….

Please read the whole thing.

Some actual consequences for the doxxing of senators

Posted on June 20, 2019 by neoJune 20, 2019

Someone’s going to prison:

Almost a year ago, we witnessed the weeks-long drama of hearings to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. While progressive outrage theater transpired on the streets of DC and Democrats in the chamber made fools out of themselves, a very serious crime unfolded behind the scenes.

A Democrat aide named Jackson Cosko, who was angry about Kavanaugh, stole private information about Republican senators and made it public. Now he is going to jail.

The sentence is four years.

From Politico:

U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan said the sentence for Jackson Cosko, 27, was needed to send a signal that criminal harassment driven by political motives would be punished severely in an era marked by extreme political polarization…

In April, Cosko pleaded guilty to five felonies, admitting that after being fired last year from his work as a systems administrator on Hassan’s staff, he repeatedly used a colleague’s key to enter the office, install keylogging equipment that stole work and personal email passwords, and downloaded a massive trove of data from Senate systems.

Cosko also acknowledged that after growing angry about the GOP’s handling of the Supreme Court nomination, he released home addresses and phone numbers of Sens. Lindsry Graham, Orrin Hatch, and Mike Lee on Wikipedia. After initial press coverage of that doxing, Cosko released information about Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Rand Paul.

I wonder—if someone from the MSM had broken into the systems and published the information, would there have been any repercussions?

I am going to assume that this decision will be appealed. The judge, by the way, was a Reagan appointee from 1982. That’s 37 years ago, which illustrates the long reach and influence of judicial appointments.

Reparations theater in the House

Posted on June 20, 2019 by neoJune 20, 2019

Just keep going, Democrats. Most of America doesn’t think much of what you’re doing.

The slavery reparation hearings yesterday in the House were all theater anyway; an attempt to shore up the base. The Democrats in charge of this have no idea how reparations would actually work. What the House was actually debating was whether to formally study the idea of reparations—debating whether to debate.

The details of how reparations would actually be done remain extremely obscure because in addition to being a bad idea in general there’s no good way for it to be put in operation. The Democrats would rather do a lot of virtue-signaling and jaw-jaw about it.

Reparations would be difficult to quantify and make practical laws about in order to apply in the real world. One thing we do know, for example, is that there are no people alive who were slaves in the United States, and there are no people alive who owned slaves in the United States.

There are people who are slave descendants, but for some of them, that would be hard to prove since the details of their ancestry have gotten lost. There are people who are descendants of slave owners, but how many of them even know their genealogy in that respect? And some of those present-day descendants of slave owners are actually people who are of mixed race, because the slave owners often had children by their female slaves. So, do people who are descendants of both slave owners and slaves get reparations, too? And what proportion of slave-owner-DNA to slave-DNA would allow such a person to become a recipient of reparations rather than a contributor to the fund?

That’s not an facetious question. It describes a real situation that probably exists for many people labeled as black who are actually around 50% white genetically speaking, or people labeled as white although they have DNA that is 15% of black origin. Any serious reparations law would have to deal with that reality. This points out the preposterous nature of trying to figure out rules for reparations many generations after the fact, and after the races have become somewhat mixed. Do we administer DNA tests and give money on the basis of percentage of black DNA vs. white DNA? It is a repellent thought, but I don’t see how those issues could be avoided if reparations were to actually be taken seriously by those discussing them.

And of course, what about slave descendants who are now wealthy and successful? Do they get payments from a poor white person whose great-great-grandpappy had some slaves and after that the family fell on hard times?

Or will it be that all white people must pay all black people? Are Hispanics exempt? What about recent white immigrants to this country? All my ancestors came here post-Civil War except one branch, and that branch came here in the 1840s and lived in New Jersey, and only one person in that group was of fighting age (very marginally; he was in his 40s) during the Civil War. Maybe he even served in the Union Army; I simply don’t know. Should I pay reparations, without an ancestor who had anything whatsoever to do with slavery?

Are those whose ancestors came here after 1865 not going to have to pay, or if they’re white do they have to pay anyway, just for the unspeakable crime of being white? And if descendants of post-1865 arrivals wouldn’t have to pay, do those people have to prove how recently their families came here? What constitutes “proof”? Do they have to document the arrival dates of all eight great-grandparents or all sixteen great-great-grandparents? What if one great-great-grandparent was already here before slavery ended but the others weren’t? Would reparations be pro-rated?

How about white people who lost ancestors fighting against slavery during the Civil War? Would it matter? Do they get a reparations break, having already paid in blood? What if it’s only one ancestor who died? How many ancestors would have had to die in order to qualify for the exemption? What if the ancestor only had lost a leg? How much of a discount is a leg worth?

I could go on and on, but the absurdity and complexity of the entire enterprise is obvious.

At least Bernie Sanders has come out as being against it. Bu the hearings yesterday were a travesty, and perhaps the lowest point was reached when Coleman Hughes (a black writer) took the floor and was booed for saying things like this:

“Nearly everyone close to me told me not to testify today. They told me that even though I’ve only ever voted for Democrats I’d be perceived as a Republican, and therefore hated by half the country. Others told me that by distancing myself from Republicans I would end up angering the other half of the country,” he said. “And the sad truth is that they were both right. That’s how suspicious we’ve become of one another. That’s how divided we are as a nation.”

…”If we were to pay reparations today, we would only divide the country further making it harder to build the political coalitions required to solve the problems facing black people today,” he continued. “We would insult many black Americans by putting a price on the suffering of their ancestors. And we would turn the relationship between black Americans and white Americans from a coalition into a transaction. From a union between citizens into a lawsuit between plaintiffs and defendants.”…

He used his own situation as an example, saying that even though he grew up decades after Jim Crow in a “privileged household” and attends an Ivy League school, reparations would be allocated to him.

“You might call that justice, I call that justice for the dead at the price of justice for the living,” he said.

As he spoke, people in the room audibly objected and contradicted him several times. After he finished and said the bill was a mistake, he was widely booed.

The chairman of the hearing, Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen (Tenn.), banged the gavel for order, saying, “Chill, chill, chill, chill.”

Cohen then said of the young black writer who spoke of his enslaved ancestors that “he was presumptive, but he still has a right to speak.”

“Presumptive”? Excuse me but—WTF?

The disruptions continued, to include laughter and mocking.

The Democratic members of Congress who did this should be ashamed, but shame is foreign to them.

[NOTE: Another impressive speaker was Burgess Owens. See this.]

I don’t know whether this will actually happen…

Posted on June 19, 2019 by neoJune 19, 2019

…but if it does it could be massively entertaining:

President Trump has reportedly made plans to live-tweet the first two Democratic primary debates scheduled for next week against the advice of his closest aides.

Guy’s a showman.

Actually, I have come to reflexively distrust almost everything reported as inside info coming from the White House. Likewise, I distrust this report.

However, if Trump does have this plan, I do believe that his closest aides might indeed warn him against it. And I do believe that if they do, he’ll do whatever he wants to anyway.

California has become a third-world country…

Posted on June 19, 2019 by neoJune 19, 2019

…according to Victor Davis Hanson:

By many criteria, 21st-century California is both the poorest and the richest state in the union…

…[B]y some indicators, the California middle class is shrinking — because of massive regulation, high taxation, green zoning, and accompanying high housing prices. Out-migration from the state remains largely a phenomenon of the middle and upper-middle classes. Millions have left California in the past 30 years, replaced by indigent and often illegal immigrants, often along with the young, affluent, and single.

If someone predicted half a century ago that a Los Angeles police station or indeed L.A. City Hall would be in danger of periodic, flea-borne infectious typhus outbreaks he would have been considered unhinged…Yet typhus, along with outbreaks of infectious hepatitis A, are in the news on California streets. The sidewalks of the state’s major cities are homes to piles of used needles, feces, and refuse…

California’s transportation system, to be honest, remains in near ruins…

California’s cycles of wet boom years and dry bust years continue because the state refuses to build three or four additional large reservoirs that have been planned for more than a half-century, and that would store enough water to keep California functional through even the worst drought. The rationale is either that it is more sophisticated to allow millions of acre-feet of melted snow to run into the sea, or it is better to have a high-speed-rail line from Merced to Bakersfield than an additional 10 million acre-feet of water storage, or droughts ensure more state control through rationing and green social-policy remedies.

Much more at the link.

However, on the issue of building more reservoirs, there’s this, which contends that the picture is far more complex than ordinarily painted (and more complex than what VDH has written in that article). It seems like a no-brainer to build them, doesn’t it? But maybe not.

However, now I’m getting into one of my many fields of non-expertise. But I’ll give it a try. VDH speaks of building reservoirs, and the link in the paragraph above talks about building dams, but I am under the impression that the two are ordinarily linked and that the dam is constructed to form and control the reservoir which is the result of the dam (I’m sure you’ll correct me if I’m wrong on this).

At any rate, here’s an excerpt:

Think California should build a lot more dams to catch these deluges? Forget it.

Yes, the next severe drought is inevitable. And after California dries out and becomes parched again, we’ll wish we’d saved more of the current torrents. Instead, the precious water is washing out to sea.

There’s one dam being planned north of Sacramento in Colusa County that makes sense: Sites. There are also some dam expansion projects that could work.

But California is already dammed to the brim. Every river worth damming has been. And some that weren’t worth it were dammed anyway….

In total, California dams can store 43 million acre-feet. We’re nearing the practical limit for what water geeks call “surface storage.”

We’ve about used all the good dam sites.

And dams have become almost unaffordable, like a lot of other things in California. People may like the idea of a brand new reservoir — until they realize who’s going to pay for most of it. They are, through higher water bills…

“Right now everybody thinks all this water is rolling out to San Francisco Bay and there are missed opportunities,” Mount says. “That’s the traditional ‘wasting into the ocean’ argument. But then ask yourself, how much of the time does that happen in California?…

“If you use these reservoirs only about every 10 years, if they don’t fill often enough, then they’re not paying for themselves.”

Water sales are how the dams mostly get paid for.

Dams also get silted up, and that reduces their capacity. De-silting them is a big project that costs a lot of money, too.

The article ends abruptly with this sentence: “the future for California water storage is underground.” What does that involve? And how much does that cost? Probably plenty, as well.

I tend to think any solutions to the California water problem aren’t so very simple. California is a place that supports a much larger population than can be easily sustained, and providing water has always been one of the biggest issues. It will almost certainly remain so.

But as VDH describes, California has many many more problems than that, and some of them are indeed of California residents’ and government’s own creation. The waste of money and effort involved in the high-speed rail fiasco is an excellent example.

As our left demands socialist health care, the Scandinavian countries move towards increased private coverage

Posted on June 19, 2019 by neoJune 19, 2019

Fancy that:

The Scandinavian systems are similar to Medicare for All in the respect that they use regional offices to administer reimbursements to providers.

Yet they differ in critical ways: They employ cost-sharing for certain services, they are less comprehensive in their coverage, and they allow for private health insurance plans to complement or supplement the government system to cover out-of-pocket expenses and to circumvent wait times or rationed access to specialists.

These are precisely the things Medicare for All would abolish. It’s intriguing that while socialists in America would rush to nationalize the health care system, Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes are all gradually increasing their use of private health insurance.

Between 2006 and 2016, the portion of the population covered by private insurance increased by 4% in Sweden, 7% in Norway, and 22% in Denmark…

Private plans in Sweden and Norway are mainly designed to supplement the government-run plan.

In addition to covering out-of-pocket costs, these plans also guarantee prompt access to specialists or elective procedures, which the state plans often fail to provide.

Denmark also allows “complementary” insurance plans, which cover services that are partially or not at all covered by the national system, including dental and vision services.

This growing European interest in private health insurance typically stems from dissatisfaction with the state-run systems, which often provide poor or incomplete coverage and long wait times…

This would all be illegal under Medicare for All. Private health insurance would be abolished for everyone.

I was first exposed to the problems with government health care coverage in the 90s, when as a result of my chronic arm and back injuries I participated in an online forum for chronic pain sufferers. We had some members from Canada and Great Britain, and their stories stood out in marked contrast to those in the US. The foreigners not only had to wait unconscionable amounts of time for appointments, they sometimes did not even qualify for tests or surgeries that they needed. The treatment of chronic pain in this country is hardly perfect—and treating chronic pain is inherently difficult—but in Canada and Great Britain the suffering of such patients seemed immensely greater than the suffering experienced by those in the US.

It was an eye-opener for me at the time. Prior to that, if I’d thought about the British or Canadian health care systems at all, I thought they were pretty good. But even back then in those countries there was a two-tiered state of affairs in which the rich often hot-footed it out (most likely to the US) for treatment, and the rest of the population stayed put and was greatly underserved.

So the developments in Scandinavia are no surprise, nor should they be.

A little history lesson for AOC on camps, concentration and other

Posted on June 19, 2019 by neoJune 19, 2019

Not that AOC actually cares about history.

AOC is a rabble rouser and a demagogue. She may be ignorant about a particular fact or she may actually know the truth and be blatantly lying about it. But either way, she is a smooth operator who knows exactly what she’s aiming for in terms of effect. She has many admirers who are simpatico with her inflammatory rhetoric and cheer her on.

Recently AOC got a lot of criticism (and attention, which she almost certainly has as a goal) for the following remarks of hers:

In her social-media remarks, the freshman congresswoman said she wants to talk to those “who are concerned enough with humanity to say that ‘never again’ means something.”

“The fact that concentrations camps are now an institutionalized practice in the Home of the Free is extraordinarily disturbing, and we need to do something about it,” she continued.

Ocasio-Cortez warned, “We are losing to an authoritarian and fascist presidency.”

“I don’t use those words lightly,” she continued. “I don’t use those words to just throw bombs. I use that word because that is what an administration that creates concentration camps is. A presidency that creates concentration camps is fascist, and it’s very difficult to say that.”

Well, I guess the US has long been fascist, then, including during the administration of President Obama, because detention centers have been in operation prior to Trump and under the previous president. And I suppose we’d have to include as “fascists” the victorious allies over the Nazis in World War II, with their postwar displaced person camps:

Displaced persons camps in post-World War II Europe were established in Germany, Austria, and Italy, primarily for refugees from Eastern Europe and for the former inmates of the Nazi German concentration camps. A “displaced persons camp” is a temporary facility for displaced persons, whether refugees or internally displaced persons. Two years after the end of World War II in Europe, some 850,000 people lived in displaced persons camps across Europe, among them Armenians, Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Yugoslavs, Jews, Greeks, Russians, Ukrainians and Czechoslovaks.

At the end of the Second World War, at least 11 million people had been displaced from their home countries, with about seven million in Allied-occupied Germany. These included former prisoners of war, released slave laborers, and both non-Jewish and Jewish concentration-camp survivors. The Allies categorized the refugees as “displaced persons” (DPs) and assigned the responsibility for their care to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA).

These camps were an enormous undertaking and involved an enormous number of people, and it took a long while—commonly longer than people are held in a detention center in the US—to sort it out.

And I suppose that all the countries of Europe and Asia and Africa that hold refugees in camps are fascists as well.

In fact, everyone except AOC and her supporters are probably fascists.

AOC later pointed out to her critics that she didn’t say present-day camps were like “death camps” during WWII, and she didn’t. But of course she knows that most people are unaware of the distinction between WWII work/labor camps and death camps, and she’s aware that death camps are what is conjured up by the phrase “concentration camps” and the words “fascist” as well as the phrase “never again” (which refers to the Holocaust).

What AOC may or may not know is what the Nazi concentration camps (or labor or work camps) of WWII (as opposed to the death camps) were actually like. They were usually a form of death camp, too. Although the Nazis had various ways of treating different populations within these camps, some were mistreated more than others. But the basic idea of a Nazi concentration/work/labor camp was to work people to death and then replace them with others, who would in turn be worked to death. That’s different than gassing people outright on arrival, to be sure. But it’s horrific, vicious, and evil nonetheless (you can find more information and links here).

And those camps bear no resemblance whatsoever to detention centers for illegal immigrants to this country, and it’s obscene to say it does. Just for starters, those in our camps have only to return to their countries of origin and they’re perfectly free. They are kept under conditions that would seem almost paradisaical to those in Nazi work camps.

Unlike those people who think AOC is merely ignorant, I believe that AOC knows at least something of the truth and would prefer to lie for political reasons. I can’t prove that—maybe she really is a fool rather than a knave. But that’s been my impression.

[NOTE: And for those who would defend AOC by saying that concentration camps originated during the Boer War, that couldn’t be more irrelevant. AOC was clearly referring to WWII with the words “fascist” and the phrase “never again.”]