Bars without alcohol: it’s a trend

The New Neo Posted on by

It seems to be a growing trend among young people:

Getaway is a sober bar, a new kind of dry nightlife option that is cropping up in New York City. The idea is to provide outlets for people who want to socialize in a bar-like location, but without having to drink alcohol.

So they serve funny drinks like the “shrub,” described in the article as “an acidic beverage made from vinegar, fruit, sugar, club soda and zero alcohol.” Since two of these and some bread cost the author $15, I’d say that’s pretty pricey for what is essentially a flavored club soda.

I’m also a bit puzzled by the entire phenomenon. As a non-drinker myself (or rather, as an alcohol sipper—a thimblefull is about my limit) and a lover of plain club soda or seltzer, I’ve never had any problem ordering my preferred beverage, festively adorned with a wedge of lime for the occasion, in any bar.

What is meant by having to drink alcohol? No bar forces people to imbibe it.

I think it means two things. The first is without having the temptation of ordering alcohol, which helps those who like alcohol (I don’t) to refrain from ordering it if they’re on the wagon. The second is without being subjected to other people’s drinking and drunkenness. And that latter phenomenon in turn reduces one of the problems that sometimes goes with drinking too much, which is the phenomenon of sexual encounters without consent or with consent that’s not remembered properly, and the consequent accusations that can ruin a life.

The article focuses on the wellness aspect of not-drinking (although, isn’t some wine still supposed to be good for you? or have I missed an update on that?), but it also touches on the sexual concerns when it notes, “one of the most common factors among the harassment complaints made today at Google is that the perpetrator had been drinking (~20% of cases).”

And it’s not just Silicon Valley types who are involved. I find this quite fascinating:

Last month, Liquid Death made waves when it launched. The startup applies the bold marketing of energy drinks to a water-in-a-can beverage. Its tagline is “Murder Your Thirst.” Like an alcohol brand, it has an age gate on its website that says, “This water may give nightmares to persons under 18 years of age.”

The idea is to make consumers look cool while they keep hydrated, and to the unsuspecting eye, one may never know they’re downing simple H2O.

The original impetus, according to CEO and co-founder Mike Cessario, was to cater to heavy metal and punk rock fans. But the ability to drink water out of a can (which is more ecofriendly than plastic) and look like you’re drinking a beer or an energy drink, has broader appeal.

Boy, am I ever out of it. I’ve been drinking water or club soda for many many decades, and I’ve never considered trying to hide that fact, or that there might be money to be made in developing a product that helps consumers hide that fact.

I guess that’s why I’m not a rich person, in addition to not being the life of the party.

The NeverTrumper Max Boot—and NeverTrumpers in general

The New Neo Posted on by

I find NeverTrumpers interesting. Are they political changers, or political fail-to-changers? Are they virulent anti-Trumpers because of class and style objections, elitism, being part of the DC circle, desire to curry favor with liberal friends, or (as most of them claim) bedrock conservative principles?

No, this isn’t going to be an essay that goes into all that in depth. For now I’ll just say that I think it’s different for different NeverTrumpers.

For Max Boot, the subject of this piece, it appears to be connected with a deeper change from being on the right to being on what passes for the center these days. I never did read Boot too often even in his pre-Trump days, and I seldom read him now, but if that article I just linked gives a fair picture of him, it seems that he’s an example of that rarest of aves: a right-to-left changer (or rather, a conservative-to-middle changer).

I get the impression that the reasons for Boot’s change can be summed up as this: he never had a foundational conservatism rooted in one of the most basic conservative tenets of all, which is that humans are fallible and flawed. Boot appears to have been profoundly naive about that and remains so today. That is the constant within his personality that determines much of the rest.

For example [emphasis mine]:

Boot is ashamed not just of what conservatism has become under Trump, but of what he now realizes it has always been. Yes, Trump’s emergence on the political stage was the precipitating event that awakened Boot to his “naïve faith [his words, not mine] in the conservative movement and the American political system”; but the deeper truth is that the corrosion of conservativism has always been there. Max Boot, in reassessing his whole political outlook, is seeing his “consciousness raised.” He has just discovered that “modern conservatism is permeated with racism, extremism, conspiracy-mongering, ignorance, isolationism, and know-nothingism.”

Let me pause for a moment to note that if any group is permeated by racism, extremism, conspiracy-mongering, ignorance, and know-nothingism (not isolationism, however)—as well as the desire to restrict liberty and a love of big government statism—it is the left. I will add that although I don’t think the right is “permeated” by those charactistics Boot lists, they certainly exist there. But nearly all political movements and groups (and certainly all groups which contain more than two or three adherants)—have elements of all those things.

It’s human nature. As Katherine Hepburn’s character said in “The African Queen”: “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.” But that Max Boot might have at one time thought that an entire group—conservatives—had succeeded in rising above human nature is rather puzzling. However, if someone was once that naive and misguided about a group, the fall from that sort of idealism can be quite hard. Boot appears to have taken it hard, anyway, and to have—as often happens—as a consequence swallowed much of the leftist line on what convervatives actually are: now he sees them as irredeemably racist and sexist.

If they’re not perfect, I guess they’re awful.

As I indicated, it’s not really Boot himself who interests me all that much. It’s Boot as an example of the much larger group of NeverTrumpers on the right, who in turn illustrate some even larger trends about how some people make up their minds about politics.

I also think that, for the people (and I count Boot among them) who previously were fairly prominent pundits on the right, there is an element of having gotten too deeply into Trump-hatred prior to the election, and finding it impossible to turn the ship around at this point. They made a choice and they’re sticking with it, and if they continue to do all they can to put Trump down than maybe they’ll contribute to his downfall and be able to say “I told you so.”

A commenter at that article has stated this premise quite well. I’ve long thought that something like this is operating for a great many prominent NeverTrumpers on the right, because it’s really difficult for most people to publicly admit having been wrong and to change their minds:

I think Boot’s biggest gripe…is that his candidate did not win the Republican nomination for the 2016 election . He despised Trump and, acting on the widely held belief that Hillary would win, staked out such a hateful position on Trump that with Hillary’s election, Boot could claim that he was prescient and entitled to a preferred place at the Conservative table. When Trump won, Boot had already boxed himself.

The more extreme the stance previously, the more boxed-in the pundit can become.

I say this as someone with a bit of experience on that score. I was very much against Trump the primary candidate, and wasn’t the least bit shy about saying so. But I always maintained that I was going on his previous record and his behavior while in the heat of the primary battle, and that as president he might act differently and he might pleasantly surprise me—and that if he did become president (something I did not think would happen) than I very much hoped I’d get that pleasant surprise. If so, I’d be happy to admit I’d been wrong.

And that’s the way it’s panned out.

But for most of the pundits who did not understand that Trump might turn out much better than they thought (and did not hope that he would), but who instead put all their eggs (and then some) in a “Trump is evil incarnate” basket, there is probably no turning back.

If your computer suddenly stops recognizing that there are new photos on your cellphone

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m writing this as a public service. I hope to spare at least one person from the same sort of 5-hour effort I recently went through when my computer suddenly and mysteriously refused to load any new photos from my cell phone.

In fact, it wouldn’t even recognize that they existed. “No new photos found” was the message, despite well over a hundred of them, ready and waiting. A search for things such as “why can’t my computer find new photos on my android?” and many variations on that theme yielded an infuriating list of site after site explaining how to load photos onto a computer, interspersed with sites with complicated instructions that didn’t work to fix my problem.

Many hours and tons of frustration later, I tried the only thing left: I changed the charging cord that connected my phone to my computer. And voila! Cured.

This makes no sense to me. Why would a cord that’s functioning perfectly fine to charge the phone, and doing perfectly well at connecting the phone (the computer recognized the phone and was checking for photos in the usual manner) fail to actually locate those photos? What does a cord have to do with it?

But folks, if you ever have a problem like the one I had, do yourself a favor, save yourself hours of hair-pulling exasperation, and just change that cord.

Training horses for the film “Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken”: the horse has to want to jump

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember those extraordinary diving horses we talked about a while back? If not, refresh your memory here.

In that thread and in other online discussions, one of the big questions is: how are the horses trained to do that? There are plenty of animal rights activists who are against the practice and assume it represents (or represented; I don’t think there are any venues left where it’s done for entertainment) cruelty to the animals. Even if a person doesn’t assume it’s cruel, the wonder is how it’s done at all.

Here’s an explanation of how the horses were trained for the movie “Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken,” a film based on the life of one of the women who rode these horses [emphasis mine]:

There are three horse diving scenes in the picture. In this picture as in all other pictures, there were doubles trained for the picture. Six horses in all were in “Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken.” Four were trained to dive. While the real Sonora’s horses dove forty feet, the horses that made the picture never dove over ten feet, which is the maximum that American Humane Association’s Guildelines will allow.

American Humane was on the compound for the full training period. Corky Randall, one of the most cautious horse wranglers in Hollywood, was hired by Pegusus Productions to train the horses. The horses were chosen very carefully and only horses that liked the water were used. Training was done very slowly by first seeing if the horses liked to swim. They were allowed initially to swim in the tank made for the picture.

As training progressed, they were allowed to step off one foot into water, then two feet and so on until they had reached the ten foot maximum. The horses always jumped on their own. In order to achieve the forty foot height, a lot of Hollywood magic was used. The ten foot ramp was made to expand to thirty feet. A cage was designed to place at the top of the ramp so when the horses climbed thirty feet, they just walked into the cage. Footage of the assent was run back to back to make the assent appear long. Then a mechanical person on a mechanical horse, with the footage of the real audience all set against drawings of buildings in the background, made the jump appear to be forty feet. The jump is shown in cuts with only leaving the board and entering the water being the real horse jumps. The lead horse playing Lightning always made beautiful dives. However, the horse playing Redlips always twisted to the side when he jumped making it easy to fake a bad dive in the story.

But my very favorite part of the description of the training of the horses for the movie is this:

The tank at the compound had to be blocked off when not in use because the horses and dogs on the ranch would run up and jump off on their own when there was no training being done.

They apparently enjoyed it.

All this was for the movie, of course. We don’t know if the horses for the earlier dives at amusement parks were chosen and trained in the same manner (progressing to greater heights, however). But it makes sense that they were. As one of the riders said (quoted in my previous post on the subject):

Some people say they must have forced the horses to do what they did. Sonora told me many times the last thing anyone would want was to be up on a tower with a horse that did not want to be there.

[NOTE: The title of this post is a play on the old joke: Q—How many therapists does it take to change a lightbulb? A—One, but the lightbulb has to want to change.]

Oberlin’s insurer is unlikely to cover the Gibson lawsuit award

The New Neo Posted on by

Oberlin’s insurer is highly unlikely to cover Oberlin’s liabilities against Gibson’s Bakery.

It makes sense; why should an insurer be liable for the willful and knowing wrongdoing of the insured? Here’s a more technical statement of the situation, written by the insurance company’s lawyers prior to the verdict:

While the Lexington policy potentially provides coverage in relation to “personal and advertising injury,” defined to include defamation and/or disparagement in certain circumstances, the Lexington policy excludes any such coverage if “personal and advertising injury” is caused “with the knowledge that the act would violate the rights of another … ,” or if the insured published material it knew to be false. Further, the Lexington policy provides coverage for punitive damages insurable by law, but only where the corresponding award of compensatory damages is also covered by the Lexington policy. In this action, plaintiffs Gibson Bros., Inc., Allyn Gibson, and David Gibson allege that defendants Oberlin and Ms. Raimondo published material that falsely characterized the bakery owned by plaintiffs (“Gibson’s”) as being a racist establishment. While such allegations potentially implicate “personal and advertising injury,” plaintiffs also alleged that the statements were published with malice, were intended to injure plaintiffs’ business reputation, and were part of a purported campaign to harm plaintiffs. If it is established that the defendants knew the alleged statements were false, or if the defendants knew their alleged acts would violate plaintiffs’ rights, the Lexington policy would exclude coverage for any resultant damage.

Of course, to many universities 11 million dollars is just chump change. Even if the award climbs to 33 million when punitive damages are included, a lot of elite universities would find this relatively easy to pay. My sense, though, is that Oberlin has had some financial difficulties even before this, and that it therefore could be a significant hit for the school.

[ADDENDUM: One possible or even probable consequence is that Oberlin sues the insurer and tries to force it to cough up the money.]

Biden: just doing what he thinks he has to do

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s been a great deal of discussion about Biden and his reversal on the Hyde Amendment. But I haven’t gone into it much, because I already find Biden such a loathsome character.

Maybe “loathsome” isn’t the right word. But I have long found him to be an opportunistic mediocrity who seems well-suited to politics (that’s not a compliment) and who doesn’t appear to have a deeply-held set of values. Of course, that doesn’t distinguish him from most politicians, but I didn’t say he was distinguished, although he’s got staying power and has held many many offices, including having been VP. That’s why the Democrats are pushing him; he’s their only elder statesman at the moment, or at least their most “likeable” one.

That word “likeable” often puzzles me when applied to politicians, and it’s applied often. I find Biden sort of sleazy, and he seems rather doddering lately. But apparently he has a lot of likeability to which I’m blind (as did Obama). At any rate, “likeability” isn’t one of my top criteria for voting. It’s Biden’s political stances I’m against.

But I think his political stances actually involve doing and saying whatever he thinks will get him where he wants to go, politically. Right now he wants the Democratic nomination. If he gets it, he will be a few weeks shy of his 78th birthday. That doesn’t seem to be a selling point, does it? But I see his reversal on the Hyde Amendment as his effort to keep up with the youngsters in the Democratic Party rather than anything to do with principle.

If you want to get up to speed on Biden and the Hyde Amendment, see this. It’s not just a change of mind or even a supposed change of mind (such as Obama’s on gay marriage, for example), it’s a change and a change and a change:

For starters, “abortion rights in crisis” doesn’t explain why Biden has flipped three times on this issue in the span of a month, including twice in the span of 24 hours. If he’s worried about Brett Kavanaugh and fetal-heartbeat laws, he should have switched to a no on Hyde months ago and stuck to it. I’d add that if Biden’s view of Hyde is dependent on the threat level to Roe, he should have flipped to no on Hyde decades ago, after Clarence Thomas was confirmed. The Supreme Court at the time had *eight* Republican appointees, five of whom had been appointed by Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush…

Why was the threat in the early 1990s insufficient to get him to reconsider his view of Hyde? Why is the threat now, when the Democratic Party is far more militantly pro-choice than it was then, sufficient to make him do so?

The “best” argument available to Team Biden that doesn’t admit the plain truth, which is that he’s afraid he can’t get nominated in 2019 by remaining pro-Hyde, is that he … just hasn’t thought very deeply about this issue. He remained blithely pro-Hyde for the better part of 50 flippin’ years only to have his new campaign staffers convince him literally overnight that poorer areas of the country deserve some federal sugar to keep the abortion mills running. It was the first time he devoted more than eight seconds of thought to the subject, his aides might say, and a lightbulb went off over his head.

That’s not a very good campaign pitch either, though, for obvious reasons. And it would cut the heart out of Biden’s longstanding defense of his pro-Hyde position, that this is supposedly “deeply personal” for him and a matter of considered moral deliberation.

I agree. I think it reveals Biden as what he’s been all the time. Now, maybe that’s what people want. But I don’t think it plays well with either side.

It occurs to me that…

The New Neo Posted on by

…if Trump manages to drain any portion of the swamp, it will be because he represents an irresistible target to the swamp denizens, and in the extremity of their zeal to get him they reveal themselves in ways that are especially noticeable and outrageous.

And then, because Trump himself isn’t afraid to say things that other more polite politicians would never be caught uttering, he sets a tone that is more combative toward his critics, spurring them on to greater heights of frenzy.

Remember, for example, the furious eruptions of the Trump opposition—the ridicule, the outrage—when Trump declared that the Obama administration had wiretapped Trump Tower? The media focused on the word “wiretapped,” which Trump later said wasn’t meant literally but as a shorthand for spied on or used surveillance on. But at this point, his statement seems rather pedestrian, doesn’t it? That’s true for so many of the things Trump said that originally seemed way off-base even to some of his supporters.

I was curious to see what I wrote at the time about that original wiretapping tweet of Trump’s, so I went back and found this post from March of 2017. It was very early in his presidency. Looking back on it now, I see that I had a bit of a beef with him saying what he said through a tweet, but otherwise thought it not unlikely that he would end up being vindicated in some way. It’s interesting to look at the comments there, too, for example this comment of mine

I think I indicated in my post that I wish he hadn’t tweeted this this way, but had instead presented a case.

However, that doesn’t mean that a case won’t be presented. Trump likes to get his opponents all riled up and then surprise them by being more sober and grounded than they expected.

But implying [any spying that was done on him] was okay because it was legal misses the point almost entirely. The point is that it might have represented a case of using the justice system to get a political opponent. That’s a no-no, even if legal. A president [in this case I was talking about Obama and the departments under him] is given enormous powers. He or she should not abuse them, even in ways that are legal.

Interesting. If you read the post, it seems there was a lot of information out there already about the FISA warrants on Trump associates. It’s astounding that so far it’s taken two years and change for a lot of related information to come out more fully.

And apparently, we’re not finished yet.

A done Deal

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, well, well:

“I am pleased to inform you that The United States of America has reached a signed agreement with Mexico,” President Trump tweeted Friday night.

“The Tariffs scheduled to be implemented by the U.S. on Monday, against Mexico, are hereby indefinitely suspended,” he added.

“Mexico, in turn, has agreed to take strong measures to stem the tide of Migration through Mexico, and to our Southern Border,” he said.

“This is being done to greatly reduce, or eliminate, Illegal Immigration coming from Mexico and into the United States. Details of the agreement will be released shortly by the State Department. Thank you!”

Gibson’s Bakery wins lawsuit against Oberlin

The New Neo Posted on by

If you read Legal Insurrection regularly, you’ve probably been following their in-depth coverage of the trial in which a long-time family-run business in the town of Oberlin, Ohio, sued the college. The verdict is now in, and the plaintiffs have won:

According to our reporter in the Courtroom, the jury awarded $11 million. Here are the details: Allyn W. Gibson was awarded $3 million, David Gibson $5.8 million, Gibson Bros. $2,274,500. Next Tuesday there will be a separate punitive damages which could be a double award (meaning tripling the $11 million to $33 million).

Go to the link for the details. Professor Jacobson writes:

The verdict sends a strong message that colleges and universities cannot simply wind up and set loose student social justice warriors and then wash their hands of the consequences. In this case, a wholly innocent 5th-generation bakery was falsely accused of being racist and having a history racial profiling after stopping three black Oberlin College students from shoplifting. The students eventually pleaded guilty, but not before large protests and boycotts intended to destroy the bakery and defame the owners. The jury appears to have accepted that Oberlin College facilitated the wrongful conduct against the bakery.

More from post-trial statements:

Lee Plakas, who handled much of the month-long trial and who gave the closing argument, said this case “is a national tipping point.”

“What the jury saw is that teaching students and having them learn how to be upstanding members of the community is what colleges are supposed to do, not appease some students who they are afraid of,” Plakas said. “People around the country should learn from this, that you can use the legal system to right the wrongs, even if the one doing the wrong is some huge institution who thinks they can do anything they want.”

Roger Copeland, a retired Oberlin College professor of theater and dance, was in the courtroom and seemed ecstatic after the jury came back with their verdict. Prof. Copeland is somewhat famous in the courtroom for getting this response on a Raimondo text to co-workers after a letter-to-the editor he wrote was critical of the school for their handling of the Gibson’ affair. “Fuck him,” Raimondo responded in a text message about Copeland. “I’d say unleash the students if I wasn’t convinced this needs to be put behind us.”

“I’m exhilarated by this verdict,” Copeland said, whose wife Michele worked at the school in food service and testified she was under orders by the school to cut the business off from the cafeteria bagels and pastries they provided because of the student unrest.

“What is most amazing about this trial is that the public was able to see what the process really was in how the school goes about its business,” Copeland said. “It’s almost like the mask has been ripped off the face and we can now see what the face really looks like.”

Much much more at the link.

Oberlin claims it was just defending students’ free speech rights (which is kind of funny, coming as it does from SJWs). That would, however, be a good defense—except that the plaintiffs proved to the jurors’ satisfaction that Oberlin’s participation in the campaign against Gibson’s (based on false accusations) went far beyond that.

Trump’s tariffs and Mexico: the Deal

The New Neo Posted on by

I recently wrote this post about Trump’s proposed tariffs on Mexico, and the condemnation of them. In it I said:

Regarding those tariffs and all the criticism thereof—I’m not saying tariffs are a good idea to actually implement, but I was under the impression that at the moment they are a bargaining chip, an opening bid in a complex negotiation. Isn’t that how these things tend to work? The tariff proposal (or actual tariffs, if they are implemented) may not be successful, but so far isn’t this one of those Art of the Deal things? I thought that was glaringly obvious.

Glaringly obvious that was the intent and the plan, anyway, to not have to actually implement the tariffs but to use them to change Mexico’s defiance into cooperation on illegal immigrants, particularly those using Mexico as transit from other areas. Not all plans are successful, but people should at least give Trump credit for using a certain tactic in furtherance of a strategy—although “giving Trump credit” does not compute with a lot of people.

The jury’s still out, but it looks as though so far this tactic has borne fruit. Remember, the idea was not actually to have to put the tariffs into effect; it was to get Mexico to take certain steps regarding illegal immigrants passing through that country on the way here.

Most people can’t admit errors, so that’s why this tweet is unsual:

More here:

The Mexican government is reportedly offering a slate of immigration-related concessions to appease the Trump administration as it seeks to prevent the imposition of tariffs on exports to the U.S.

Mexican negotiators are offering to deploy thousands of National Guard troops to its border with Guatemala and enact sweeping changes to its asylum laws, moves that are expected to prevent a significant number of Central Americans from illegally entering the U.S., The Washington Post reported Thursday.

President Donald Trump set a June 10 deadline for the Mexican government to demonstrate it would do more to stem illegal immigration from its country, or else face a 5% tariff on all its goods. The threat sparked immediate negotiations between U.S. and Mexican delegations in Washington, D.C. — which are expected to continue for the rest of the week.

Mexico, according to two officials who spoke with The Post, agreed to send up to 6,000 National Guard troops to its southern border with Guatemala, a major chokepoint for Central American migrants in their northbound journey to the U.S. That move is expected to immediately yield results in squashing the number of illegal immigrants.

Additionally, Mexican negotiators are prepared to revamp their asylum rules in the region. Under the proposal, Central Americans seeking asylum would have to remain in the first country they entered after leaving their homeland.

Now, it remains to be seen if this will actually be enforced. But so far those are very promising developments. Trump’s threats have extra power because other countries believe he’s just bold enough (or ballsy enough or reckless enough) to actually do what he threatens, if things don’t work out.

If this entire tariff-threatening approach is successful, I would like to see every single pundit who excoriated Trump for it eat crow.

A person can hope.

Ilhan Omar scandals—or should-be scandals

The New Neo Posted on by

Ilhan Omar is in a pack of trouble. Or she would be, if she weren’t a member of several intersectional groups generally protected by the MSM, the Democrats, and the left (that’s redundant, I know): Democrat, leftist, woman, Somalian, immigrant, Muslim:

Also please see this article from Scott Johnson at Powerline, entitled “Ilhan Omar’s Blizzard of Lies.”