Paddock’s computer missing its hard drive

The New Neo Posted on by

This should come as no surprise. Paddock was no dummy:

Paddock is believed to have removed the hard drive before fatally shooting himself, and the missing device has not yet been recovered, sources told ABC News.

Investigators digging into Paddock’s background also learned he purchased software designed to erase files from a hard drive, but without the hard drive to examine it is impossible to know if he ever used the software, one source said.

I assumed he’d either destroyed the entire computer or never used it to plan his crime in the first place. This is a man who was intent on taking his secret to the grave.

Revelations about the Obama administration

The New Neo Posted on by

A lot of news is coming out now about certain goings-on during Obama’s presidency: for example, the FBI offered to pay for further work on the so-called “Trump dossier.” That’s in addition to the revelations that came yesterday revealing that the DNC and the Clinton campaign were among those who funded it, despite previous denials.

The WaPo has been driving both of these stories. I wonder why. The paper is not ordinarily big on printing things that reflect poorly on either the Obama administration, Clinton, or the DNC, but it seems that these stories do just that. The WaPo writes:

The dossier alleges extensive ties between the president and Russia, but its contents are unverified. It has become the subject of three separate investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Trump has called the document false.

It’s certainly not just Trump who’s called the document false. Even Vox (just to take one example), not known for being particularly Trump-friendly, writes:

Former British spy Christopher Steele did this work for Fusion, and authored what became known as the Steele dossier, which contained salacious (and uncorroborated) political financial, and sexual allegations about Trump and his top associates.

Vox is careful to add this:

Before that point, Fusion GPS had reportedly already done research into Trump, on behalf of a Republican client. But we don’t yet know who that Republican client is.

The WaPo mentioned this Republican too. One wonders whether such a person exists, although it’s certainly possible. However, not only has that person not been named or characterized in any way except as a Republican, but the source for the information has never been named.

Today we also learned this:

While Eric Holder was U.S. attorney general, the Justice Department allowed prosecutors to strike agreements compelling big companies to give money to outside groups not connected to their cases to meet settlement burdens. Republican lawmakers long have decried those payments as a “slush fund” that boosted liberal groups, and the Trump DOJ ended the practice earlier this year.

But internal Justice Department emails released Tuesday by Goodlatte indicated that not only were officials involved in determining what organizations would get the money, but also Justice Department officials may have intervened to make sure the settlements didn’t go to conservative groups.

It strikes me that the more an administration or campaign—any administration or campaign—feels itself immune from investigative reporting of a negative nature by the press, the more and more corrupt it will feel free to be. Of course, it only tends to be the left and/or the Democrats who feel immune to such criticism.

The Obama administration was emboldened to put such a scheme in place. It probably wasn’t just because the press was in Obama’s corner, either. They may have felt—in fact, I think they did feel—that they had established a Democratic dynasty that would be in place for a very long time and would continue to cover it all up. They felt this dynasty was due to a combination of press support, changing demographics, and their own political acumen. This turned out to have been erroneous, but it was believed.

I also think that even now this sort of news falls on a lot of deaf ears, except for the right, in large part because of people’s desire to tune out what they don’t like. How one looks at such news depends at least in part on one’s political bent. If you want to know how the left is reacting to it, go to any leftist blog or webpage and you’ll see the way the denial of any Democratic culpability works. So I think another factor is that they felt that even if the facts came out, the public for the most part wouldn’t care.

Even back in February of 2017 it was fairly well-known that the Trump dossier was a case of Fake News. But it served its purpose, didn’t it? It fueled the post-election Democratic message of Trump and the Russians being in collusion. That not only led to many Democrats believing such a thing, but it also led to the opening of the Mueller investigation of Trump, a fishing expedition which could lead to some way to impeach him (at least, that’s the hope). As Sean Davis wrote:

I’m not sure about the word “entirely” there, but certainly “in large part.”

[ADDENDUM: More examples of the Democratic/liberal/left reaction to the story.]

[ADDENDUM II: And here’s a credible explanation as to why the WaPo told the story: “the real purpose of it seems to be not unveiling a bomb, but defusing one.”]

Starting a civil political discourse club

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not sure I like the name, but this seems like an interesting idea:

Start a Club

It’s hardly possible to overstate the value of placing human beings in contact with other persons dissimilar to themselves”¦Such communication has always been one of the primary sources of progress.
”” John Stuart Mill, 1848

Do you have a friend, relative, co-worker, or fellow citizen whose politics is different from yours, yet with whom you find that discussions are mutually beneficial? Would you be willing to go public, putting on something as small as a dinner party, or as large as a public or televised discussion? If so, then consider declaring yourselves an Asteroids Club and sharing your example with others here on this site.

I know plenty of people with positions very different from mine. In fact, that’s the vast majority of the people I know. I don’t quite live in a complete bubble, but it’s mighty close; probably 90%, anyway. The problem is that for every person in that 90% with whom I’ve found discussions to be “mutually beneficial,” I’ve found ten with whom they’re not only not mutually beneficial but highly acrimonious. And that’s true no matter how polite and respectful I try to be.

So I’d have trouble scaring up a group like this, although in principle I think it’s a fabulous idea.

Here’s how they suggest starting:

Your Asteroids Club must begin with an enduring, established relationship between two people who don’t see politics the same way. If you don’t start with this core of trust, expect choppy waters. Identifying a central friendship is a step that is key to future success. Resist the temptation to begin the club between two friends on the same side of the aisle. If you want to start it with a likeminded friend, find two more acquaintances who are your political foils to join your effort. Have a get-together with your friend/s to both cement the concept and discuss your goals…

After having started with solid personal relationships, your next task is to enlarge your group. People who join should be willing to at least entertain agreement with the founding notion: an acknowledgement that the other “side” may see some real threats more clearly than does one’s own side. Keep the group roughly balanced politically. Avoid bringing in flame-throwers or participants who you intuitively find worrisome. This group of people is most critical as they will create the culture of what is to follow, especially if you plan to hold large or public events. Once the Asteroids Club culture is established, challenging personalities and stronger partisans can join without undue disruption.

I’m curious what you think.

There is no group you should always believe

The New Neo Posted on by

Anyone who says that members of a certain group always tell the truth is lying.

There is no such group on earth. I don’t care if it’s a group of Catholic nuns or Buddhist monks. There are liars in every group, at least potentially.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that I’d take the word of an ex-con in the same way I’d take the word of some upstanding citizen of the community. But it means that in any given circumstances—and in particular if that circumstance is a court of law—a person is only as good as the evidence behind him or her.

The difficulty lies when there is no evidence other than a person’s word. Sometimes with sexual harassment or assault claims there is some independent corroborative evidence: an emailed photo, for example. That’s the petard with which Weiner was hoisted. But harassers and abusers aren’t always so dumb as to leave evidence, and then we are left with a hesaid/shesaid scenario. In that case we look at demeanor, before and after behavior, and all sorts of other information that could help us come to a decision.

But never should we rely on something like “being a woman” or “being a man” to tell us whether a person is a truth-teller in each particular circumstance. Nor does membership in a certain race or religion or any other demographic group, including being a child. Even children lie about abuse, sometimes at the behest of a scheming parent and sometimes on their own. It happens, although how often it happens is a matter of some dispute.

In the area of abuse there have been some pretty wild pendulum swings in terms of the belief in the veracity of members of groups. In my opinion, it’s best not to use such categories at all. But that’s not the way things have been going lately [emphasis mine]:

[A recent NBC piece] says one of the big problems with [To Kill a] Mockingbird is that it “complicates the modern ”˜believe victims’ movement”. As most people educated in a school in the Anglosphere over the past 30 or 40 years will know, Lee’s tale focuses on siblings Scout and Jem and their dad Atticus, a lawyer who defends Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a white woman called Mayella. Mayella is lying. …Letting schoolgirls read this book will fuel their “growing suspicion that people don’t believe girls who say they have been raped”, says the NBC News piece. It makes us think there is “reason to doubt” rape accusers.

So the NBC piece isn’t as eccentric as it first seems. It speaks to a now mainstream view: that women (and children) who claim to have been sexually assaulted must be instantly, uncritically believed. “I believe” has been the rallying cry of feminists and journalists and others for years. “Believe the women”, they say, just as anti-abuse campaigners in the 1980s and 1990s said “Believe the children” about children who claimed they had been taken into forests and ritually molested by men in black cloaks (they hadn’t)…

But here’s the thing: there is “reason to doubt” rape accusers. Just as there is reason to doubt everyone who makes an accusation of a crime, be it rape, assault, harassment, or whatever. Indeed, doubt is written into fair justice systems. We treat accusers sympathetically, yes, but not religiously. (“Is the accuser always holy now?”, a character asks in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, to indicate how horribly wrong things can go when accusers are treated religiously.) Our belief in the innocence of the accused, our insistence that his guilt must be established beyond reasonable doubt, our affording to him of numerous opportunities to scupper the accusations against him”—all of this is designed to indicate skepticism towards accusations, and make it difficult to turn accusation into conviction. Why? For one simple reason: the accused stands to lose something incredibly precious—his freedom. It is right that that should not be easy. It is right that we should be doubtful towards those who say things that could remove liberty, the stuff of life, from another person.

Our entire criminal justice system is built on that edifice. Tear it down and you destroy safeguards that are basic to our liberty.

Late posting today

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m late posting today because I was phoned by a friend whose husband (also a friend of mine) just got a “very bad” cancer diagnosis. We talked about it over lunch.

Is there any “good” cancer diagnosis? No. And yet some really are much better and some really are much worse. This is one of the “worse” ones.

Getting older requires that we deal more and more often with grim announcements like this. I tried to comfort my friend as best I could, but there’s no way around it: it’s devastating news for her and for him, and upsetting news to me too.

Spring and Fall
By Gerard Manley Hopkins

to a young child

Mé¡rgarét, é¡re you gré­eving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leé¡ves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! é¡s the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wé­ll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sé³rrow’s spré­ngs é¡re the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It é­s the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

That’s a photo I took a couple of weeks ago, up north.

Another Peterson rant

The New Neo Posted on by

Now that I’ve been listening to Jordan Peterson, you’re probably going to see quite a few excerpts here from his talks.

How does he get the ability to speak so fast and so long while hardly pausing for breath? This video features seven rants, but I’ve cued it up to show just one of them, on the topic of equality of outcome:

Male breast cancer

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a man who wants to publicize the fact that males get breast cancer, too.

I think this is important information for men to know. I alluded to it in passing in this 2013 post, and included the fact that one in a hundred breast cancer cases are in men. That’s a lot more than most people would think.

But now I’ll add that one of the reasons I’ve long been aware of that fact is that a very dear male friend of mine died of breast cancer almost twenty years ago, after suffering from it for about ten years. He was only in his late forties when diagnosed. His mother had had the disease but lived to a ripe old age, and I am convinced he had the BRCA2 gene although I’ll never know.

Andrew C. McCarthy on the Obama/Clinton Uranium One deal

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been waiting for Andrew C. McCarthy to weigh in on the Uranium One Obama/Clinton deal (the scandal that so far isn’t, according to most of the MSM). McCarthy has written a scorcher of an article on the subject in National Review.

McCarthy is someone whose opinion I’ve come to trust. For the most part, he tends to be reasonable and not to imagine things, and he’s also had a tremendous amount of prosecutorial experience.

He’s very very concerned about Uranium One. Rather than quote from his article, I suggest you read the whole thing.

Republican Like Me

The New Neo Posted on by

This piece in the NY Post by former NPR CEO Ken Stern caught my eye. The title is “Former CEO of NPR opens up about liberal bias.” It is about that, but it’s actually about something a good deal more than that:

Spurred by a fear that red and blue America were drifting irrevocably apart, I decided to venture out from my overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhood and engage Republicans where they live, work and pray. For an entire year, I embedded myself with the other side, standing in pit row at a NASCAR race, hanging out at Tea Party meetings and sitting in on Steve Bannon’s radio show. I found an America far different from the one depicted in the press and imagined by presidents [see *NOTE below] (“cling to guns or religion”) and presidential candidates (“basket of deplorables”) alike.

Mock him if you will; it’s easy to do. After all, why did it take him all these years to learn something about Republicans? And what is he, an anthropologist, learning the arcane customs of some exotic far-off people? Note that the places he went—NASCAR races and Tea Party meetings—didn’t give him much variety in terms of Republicans, and played into certain stereotypes. But maybe that was just as well, because moderate and/or “country-club” Republicans probably wouldn’t have had as much of an impact on Stern.

However, I give him credit. Rather then continuing to demonize people he didn’t know, he set out to learn something, and his mind was open enough for some of his preconceptions to be changed. That’s not very common; it’s unusual for people to be able to change their minds and admit it, as I’ve said many times:

None of my new hunting partners fit the lazy caricature of the angry NRA member. Rather, they saw guns as both a shared sport and as a necessary means to protect their families during uncertain times…

I also spent time in depressed areas of Kentucky and Ohio with workers who felt that their concerns had long fallen on deaf ears and were looking for every opportunity to protest a government and political and media establishment that had left them behind. I drank late into the night at the Royal Oaks Bar in Youngstown and met workers who had been out of the mills for almost two decades and had suffered the interlocking plagues of unemployment, opioid addiction and declining health…To a man (and sometimes a woman), they looked at media and saw stories that did not reflect the world that they knew or the fears that they had.

Over the course of this past year, I have tried to consume media as they do and understand it as a partisan player. It is not so hard to do. Take guns. Gun control and gun rights is one of our most divisive issues, and there are legitimate points on both sides. But media is obsessed with the gun-control side and gives only scant, mostly negative, recognition to the gun-rights sides.

Take for instance the issue of the legitimate defensive gun use (DGUs), which is often dismissed by the media as myth. But DGUs happen all the time…

Reading this, you might well ask: and it took you how long to be aware of the point of view of the right, something that shouldn’t have required a year of total immersion because all you had to do was read a bit on the right and you would have seen it decades ago? As CEO of NPR, why didn’t it behoove you to become marginally well-informed about the other side?

These are valid questions, and I’d love to have a chat with Stern and hear his answers. It would be a friendly chat, because I tend to be kindly disposed to thoughtful mind-changers. He has written a book, however, and perhaps he deals with some of these questions in the book. It’s called Republican Like Me: How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned to Love the Right, and it’s due to come out tomorrow.

No, Stern didn’t end up a Republican. His title doesn’t refer to a political conversion; it is a riff on the book Black Like Me, which came out in the 1961 and was written by a white journalist who had darkened his skin and passed for black in the Deep South of the segregated era.

[*NOTE: This is probably nitpicky of me, but when Obama made his “bitter clinger” remark he was not yet president, he was a presidential candidate. That Stern makes the error of indicating Obama was president at the time (at least, that’s how I read what Stern wrote) surprises me, because this was a memorable moment in the campaign. Stern was the NPR CEO beginning in 2007 and held the post for eight and a half years, so he had that position at the time Obama made the statement.]

Joyce Carol Oates: marriage, memoir, and disclosure

The New Neo Posted on by

Joyce Carol Oates has been writing short stories and novels ever since the early 1960s. As a writer, she reminds me of Meryl Streep as an actress—that is, skillful, highly praised, prolific, versatile, and not especially appealing (to me, anyway).

A few years ago, Oates wrote a controversial memoir about her grief after becoming widowed. I haven’t read the book, although I’ve read a very long excerpt from it and I’ve read plenty about it. By all accounts she’d had a happy and companionate marriage for nearly 50 years until her husband passed away from pneumonia. Her memoir chronicles the first year of her widowhood.

Why do I say the book was controversial? Because of this curious omission:

Joyce Carol Oates has defended herself against Julian Barnes’s accusation that her failure to mention her remarriage a year after her husband’s death in her memoir of widowhood will cause some readers to feel “they have a good case for breach of narrative promise”.

A review by Barnes of Oates’s A Widow’s Story, which chronicles the 12 months after her husband of 47 years, Raymond Smith, died in February 2008, is largely generous…

But “there is something unhappy” in the prolific American novelist’s omission to mention the fact that she was remarried in March 2009, writes Barnes, with Oates only hinting “rather coyly on the last page” about her new husband’s existence. “She is writing about a year that began on February 18, 2008; we know from her own mouth (in an interview with the London Times) that she met her second husband in August 2008, they started going on walks and hikes in September, and were married in March 2009,” writes Barnes, whose own wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, died in October 2008.

That certainly does seem to be a startlingly large and important omission. People have taken sides on this issue, as you might expect. But I see it as two issues that are very different. Continue reading →

New teeth shed light on the origins of humans?

The New Neo Posted on by

Two teeth may not seem like a lot, but these teeth could wind up being an important clue in the history of human development:

At a press conference announcing the discovery, the mayor of Mainz said: ‘I don’t want to over-dramatise it, but I would hypothesise that we shall have to start rewriting the history of mankind after today.’

I wonder what he’d be saying if he was wanting to over-dramatize it.

In September 2016, researchers from the Mainz Natural History Museum in Germany discovered the set of teeth near the town of Eppelsheim.

In their study, published on ResearchGate, the researchers, led by Dr Herbert Lutz, wrote: ‘Both teeth, the crowns of an upper left canine and an upper right first molar, are exceptionally well preserved and obviously come from the same body of unknown sex.’

The molar was found to share characteristics with other species, including Lucy ”“ a 3.2 million-year-old skeleton of a human ancestor found in Ethiopia.

But the canine revealed potentially hominin qualities, which have never been seen in teeth discovered in Europe or Asia.

This raises questions about whether humans originated in Africa, as is commonly believed.

That sound like a potential powder keg. But fascinating.

Dueling headlines

The New Neo Posted on by

Seen at memeorandum:

Datelined yesterday, a Politico article headlined “Trump Likely to Block Release of Some JFK Files.”

In the WaPo this morning we find: “Trump Authorizes Release of JFK Assassination Documents Despite Concerns from Federal Agencies.”

Those documents will keep the conspiracy buffs very very busy.

[NOTE: I’ve already weighed in many times on my own opinion on the assassination, in particular here and here, as well as this, which is that Oswald was the sole assassin. Some of the arguments go on in the comments section of those posts as well.]