The Brooklyn preschool exposé

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not sure why I initially clicked on this article in New York Magazine entitled “The Battle of Grace Church What happened when Brooklyn’s oldest nursery school decided to become less old-fashioned? A riot among the one percent.”

Maybe because I’m interested in education, or my native New York, or just how a preschool becomes “less old-fashioned” (does it have to do with pronouns, for example?), or how the one-percent might have rioted without the event making headlines in the newspapers.

But click I did. And I was about a third of the way through what turned out to be a mega-long piece when I realized that it was likely that the sole reason the article was published was to stir up anger against a bunch of rich white women in Brooklyn.

Oh, I suppose that may not have been the sole reason. Another reason was to get clicks.

But I kept reading it anyway, hoping to get to something other than cattiness and pettiness and the stoking of bitterness, envy, and contempt in equal measure. If there was some higher purpose for writing the article I fail to see it.

The piece doesn’t ever describe anything that could remotely be defined as a “riot,” either, although it certainly describes turmoil of the type that so often happens in small fiefdoms when someone comes in and stirs the pot without really learning much about the prevailing culture and what might be best to preserve about it, and how to tactfully go about changing some of the rest.

Reading many of the comments after the article, I was struck by how many of the readers seemed to fall right in line with what I see as the propagandist aims of the piece. Many of the comments express rage at how entitled and white-privileged these parents—both nouveau riche and old money rich—are, as well as at the lack of racial diversity among the students at the school, which is a very expensive private operation.

I live in a very different sort of community than the one described in the article. Very. But what I see there is that parents worry about their kids and want the best for them, that the rich can pay for things the poor can’t, that private for-profit institutions can make their own decisions about these things, that people (both rich and poor) are often superficial and shallow and petty, and that it’s easy (and perhaps profitable) to stir up rage at those who have far more money than average.

The offending shoe

The New Neo Posted on by

Have you noticed how many people seem to have adopted the custom of asking all visitors to their homes to take off their shoes?

I’ve been seeing more and more of this in recent years, and it always bugs me. Maybe it shouldn’t—after all, a person has a right to make the rules in his or her home, and if you don’t like it, tough. And I understand it if the weather is bad—muddy, for example—and the shoes are obviously messy in some way.

But as a general rule? It makes it difficult for people like me, who have nerve damage in their feet. In my case it’s from my back injury, but it’s also true of many diabetics (a rather numerous bunch), the elderly, and other random assorted people. If your feet are messed up in some way, it can be painful to walk without shoes, or even (as in my case) without your own carefully selected and nicely broken in shoes.

The pile of assorted slippers the no-shoes crowd kindly provides is not a good substitute. First of all, I wear a very small size that they usually don’t have, and their slippers swim and flop on my feet. Secondly, slippers aren’t comfortable for me in general and I never wear them, even at home.

This fad for no shoes has spread even—or maybe especially—to airbnbs, as you’ll see if you look in the “rules” section for each rental. Some vacation!

And no, most of the people trying to enforce this are not of Japanese origin, where it’s a tradition to remove shoes and where people also used to generally use the floor as furniture.

The rationale here in the US seems to be that it’s more sanitary not to have shoes on the floor. But really, how many people do want to eat off the floor? Do the same people not allowing shoes in the house also refuse to have any pets that walk outside and also walk around in the house (or in some cases, sleep in the owner’s bed)? And how sanitary do they think socks are?

I have some backup for my point of view:

“In general, the concern with shoes ‘tracking germs’ is very misplaced,” says Dr. Amesh A. Adalja, a board-certified infectious disease physician at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. This is largely in part due to the icky fact that our home and very bodies are already crawling with germs and microbes.

“There may be aesthetic reasons to remove shoes if they’re soiled with mud or animal feces, but there are just as many bacteria on socks or bare feet,” adds Adalja.

It just seems to me that demanding shoe removal is a way to inconvenience people and the benefits aren’t especially great. And for me, it’s more than an inconvenience. I’ve been stopped at thresholds by the request and had to think about how long I will stay, how much I will sit and how much I will stand or walk, and whether it’s worth it to me to be in discomfort or perhaps pain in order to comply, and if I should speak up or not.

Sometimes I have simply refused and politely explained why, which results in one of those awkward moments when there’s a pause while the host considers whether to refuse me entrance or whether to give me a pass on shoe removal. But even if the person says it’s alright for me to go inside with my offensive shoes still on my poor old feet, then I end up feeling like some sort of pariah.

I hope the fad doesn’t spread any further, but I have a hunch it will.

Acosta holds a press conference

The New Neo Posted on by

I didn’t watch the Acosta press conference, but here’s a summary of what he said about his role in the Epstein case:

Labor Secretary Alex Acosta,…who served as a U.S attorney in Florida, said in a news conference that his office intervened in the case after state prosecutors failed to secure a plea deal that would have resulted in jail time for Epstein and give justice to his victims…

“I think what they would find is that the office acted appropriately,” Acosta said at the news conference. He also pushed back against criticism that he violated the law by not informing Epstein’s victims about the non-prosecution agreement.

Calling the case “complex,” Acosta argued that he and the other federal prosecutors were following Justice Department policy, and they waited until they secured the plea deal and added a provision that Epstein pay restitution to victims before notifying them in case the deal fell apart.

Interesting.

Reaction on the left is as expected: he’s a lying scumbag.

Reaction on the right: I can’t find too much as yet.

So here’s my own reaction: I’d like more information.

If that seems like a copout, so be it. But as far as I’m concerned, plea deals are strange beasts whose ins and outs depend on the details. And we don’t know the details yet.

Acosta is a person with a lot of opponents on the right as well as the obvious ones on the left. Those on the right are dissatisfied with his performance as Secretary of Labor for being insufficiently conservative, and with his performance in the Epstein case for failing to inform the victims of the plea deal in a timely fashion. Although I confess to not having previously followed the criticisms of Acosta, some of these arguments from his opponents seem compelling to me, at least at first glance.

But plea deals tend to always look bad, because as compromises they punish offenders less than the public ordinarily desires. With a plea deal, by definition the prosecution doesn’t get everything it wants. But in exchange, it gains the certainty of a conviction—and, in the case of the underage (at the time of the offenses) girls who might have needed to testify in the Epstein case, the elimination of the requirement that they do so.

To evaluate the Acosta deal fairly, we would have to know what the state prosecutors were about to give up and what Acosta changed about the deal, how strong the evidence for conviction was in the legal sense, whether the accusers were willing and able to testify and whether their testimony would have held up under cross, why they were not notified in a timely fashion, and probably a host of other things. So far I don’t know the answers, and I don’t see anyone revealing them.

This will almost certainly end up being resolved in some way that reflects politics. If I had to predict, I tend to think that Acosta ultimately may have to resign.

Lickers: among the enemies of civilization

The New Neo Posted on by

When I decided to title this post “the enemies of civilization”, I didn’t mean what’s often meant by the phrase: barbarians who plunder and murder and rape and pillage.

I’m talking about the sort of thing Sarah Hoyt was referring to in this excellent post, which deals with a topic I’ve been meaning to write about—the breaking of the social contract in ways that seem minor but aren’t.

A long time ago I wrote about a childhood version of this in a post called “The Martin Higby phenonmenon.” It describes a situation in which a few people (or in the case of Martin Higby, one person) can cause trouble for the rest of us by not following the basic rules of civilized behavior by which the group functions. Those violations can be small and still have a pernicious effect for everyone.

Sarah Hoyt writes about a present-day version: people who’ve followed the latest craze of licking various public food items that are for sale and then putting them back on the shelves, and celebrating their actions on social media. Hoyt writes:

Civilization could be considered the way that humans changed — tamed — themselves so we can live in vast quantities, close together. The city requires a different discipline from the ape band, which had maybe fifteen individuals, whose lives were brutish, nasty, short and infinitely dirty. To improve that, it started with behavior that allowed us to live in larger groups: software in the head that allowed to consider ever more extended family and eventually strangers part of the ‘band’, and ways to keep food clean, and ways to control our tempers so that we didn’t all spend all of our time killing each other. Ways to share, and ways to behave that increased trust between total strangers. This included trusting those who handled and sold your food…

Part of the tenets of civilization is that something like this should be unthinkable. You don’t taint water and food. Even cats don’t shit where they eat.

When I read that, the phrase that immediately came to my mind was “poisoning the well.” That was far worse than what Hoyt is describing, and it’s an ancient and horrific transgression, something that invading armies sometimes did to the conquered populace, or something that disfavored groups (the Jews, for example) were falsely accused of doing in order to fan the flames of hatred against them.

Now people are performing some modern-day equivalent of well-poisoning or at least the perception of well-poisoning, and then photographing themselves and celebrating it, and doing this to food that will be feeding people in their own communities whom they don’t know and with whom they have no special beef. How destructive and nihilistic is that?

No matter if it doesn’t actually spread a disease (which in most cases it certainly won’t) or do any actual physical harm to anyone. It is nevertheless a sort of psychological terrorism, a seemingly sociopathic desire to shout out a big F-U to the entirety of the society in which the perpetraror lives.

Disturbing, to say the least.

John Waters on Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

I was previously unfamiliar with the name John Waters, but he’s the guy who directed the films “Pink Flamingoes” and “Polyester,” (neither of which I’ve seen). His Wiki page describes him as “an American film director, screenwriter, author, actor, stand-up comedian, journalist, visual artist, and art collector, who rose to fame in the early 1970s for his transgressive cult films.”

Probably not someone you’d expect to be a Trump fan, and you’d certainly be 100% correct on that. But this recent interview with Waters reveals him as one of those people who says some things that run counter to the usual narrative of the left, and I think the following political observations of Waters in the interview are quite interesting.

The first one is a rather pithy summation of the Trump phenomenon (the “we” here being the left and the liberals and all the NeverTrumpers as well):

So I get why Trump supporters like [Trump], because he is doing what he said he was going to do and we hate him so much he makes us crazy.

Another set of observations [in the rest of the quotes the interviewer’s remarks are in bold]:

Is there a Democratic primary candidate you support?
Here’s what I think: [Trump] is gonna win again, because I say it myself and they all go “Ahhh!” when I say that. And I say, “Who are you gonna vote for?” Silence. There are 40 characters that are going to divide it all up. You know, the gay one I like. I’d vote for any of them, even though it would be really hard for me to vote for Elizabeth Warren who has never once said a funny thing in her entire life.

She is the best one, I would argue.
I think she will lose. Any of the ones that have already been out there will lose, big time. And any of the ones that try to be super left wing will really lose, too. And all the other ones just haven’t been around.

I hope he’s right on that, because I find every single one of them way too leftist for my tastes, and/or too incompetent.

More:

To me [the Democratic candidate] better be somebody young and somebody new. Who knows! It’s a civil war, and I believe that it could be decided by one vote. It’s split right down the middle. It’s just exhausting to me.

But I get why they like [Trump], because he infuriates us. And it’s everything he said he was gonna do. So he’s not lying to them. We were just too stupid and sat home and didn’t vote. Because the Democrats — so that’s what you get.

That’s the only time Waters takes the easy way out—ascribing Hillary’s loss to Democrats staying home because they were too sure she’d win.

But then Waters follows it up with this, which I find to be a refreshing and unusual admission for someone on the left:

Although to be fair, Hillary Clinton did win the popular vote.
Yeah, but that’s not the way it works. If we won and he won the popular vote, we wouldn’t have said that. They’re always gonna say that. Well, then change it! But until they do, that’s the way it works.

Epstein: the quarry is Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

I was just reading an email from a reader who mentioned that the real target of the SDNY action against Epstein is Trump. Just as occurred with many of the prosecutions related to the Mueller investigation, the idea is to get the accused to turn on Trump in exchange for some sort of leniency.

Well, naturally. And even if Epstein himself doesn’t give them what they want, the press can report all sorts of rumors about it. The fact that Bill Clinton has a far greater paper trail that potentially implicates him in terms of Epstein is of no importance whatsoever to present-day Democrats, who consider him (and his wife, to a certain extent) as a Great White Albatross.

On, and another person connected with Trump who can be slammed (probably correctly, in this case) is Trump’s Secretary of Labor, Alexander Acosta, who years ago was the US Attorney instrumental in arranging the previous lenient deal that let Epstein off surprisingly lightly. What was that about?

I tried to find an article that attempts to explain the curious timing of all of this new flurry of intensity regarding prosecuting Epstein, and all I could find was this from CNN. Despite its promising title—“Why the Jeffrey Epstein charges came now, more than a decade later”—it ignores the elephant in the room, the desire to get Trump and/or his associates. The article basically fails to answer the question at all, except to say that a November 2018 spread in the Miami Herald by an investigative reporter was the likely spark. This certainly doesn’t seem to be an adequate explanation to me:

Instead of facing federal charges, Epstein pleaded guilty to two state prostitution charges in 2008 and served just 13 months in prison. He also registered as a sex offender and paid restitution to the victims identified by the FBI.

That arrangement came under intense scrutiny last November [2018] in a Miami Herald investigation that examined how it was handled by then-US Attorney Alexander Acosta, who now serves as labor secretary in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet.

The Herald investigation said that Acosta agreed not to file federal charges against Epstein despite an investigation identifying 36 underage victims. The agreement, the Herald said, “essentially shut down an ongoing FBI probe” and further granted immunity to “any potential co-conspirators” in the case…

Authorities on Monday did not specifically mention the Herald’s work. But Berman praised the “excellent investigative journalism” that assisted their case, and FBI Assistant Director in Charge William F. Sweeney Jr. also cited unspecified reporting.

“When the facts presented themselves — as Mr. Berman hinted at — through investigative journalist work, we moved on it,” Sweeney said.

Former child abuse prosecutor Roger Canaff said that the Herald’s investigation brought a tremendous amount of public attention on this case.

As I connect the dots, there might be some genuine outrage at how relatively lightly Epstein got off, but far more important in terms of motive was the opportunity to distract the public and call its attention to Acosta, who had nothing to do with Trump at the time as far as I know but who now serves under him, and then potentially to Trump. That Clinton and others might be collateral damage is of no importance to them by now; he’s become a liability anyway.

[NOTE: More potential collateral damage that the left might welcome is none other than liberal-gone-off-the-reservation Alan Dershowitz, who was accused by an Epstein accuser. You can read about the case here, here, and here.]

[NOTE 2: I will add that in the Epstein case and in all such cases one should go on evidence only. Some of the accusers may be making false accusations, and even when the accusations are against people you may consider political enemies (such as Bill Clinton, for example), exactly the same rules of evidence should apply as when the accused are people you favor politically.]

[ADDENDUM: This is what Acosta has to say about the plea deal.]

Caring: opinions on issues vs. emotional voting behavior

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve long noticed that people’s opinions on issues and their voting behavior doesn’t have as much congruence as one might think.

For example, when I read about polls that say the majority of Americans favor the deportation of illegal immigrants, it should indicate Republican victory in 2020, considering the vast differences in the two parties on that issue and related others. But that’s not necessarily the way it works because I don’t think most people make voting decisions that way.

You yourself may have had the experience, for example, of talking with a friend or relative who, when pressed issue by issue, seems to be somewhat conservative in his or her views and yet consistently and predictably votes Democratic. I’ve certainly had that experience with people I know. And the explanation I’ve come up with is that they vote based on other things that are harder to pin down.

Sometimes it’s simply a person’s tradition or habit, family and/or personal and/or ethnic. That’s easy and doesn’t require much attention to issues or candidates. Sometimes it’s something amorphous about a candidate, like the perception that “he/she cares more.” I seem to recall (although Googling it just now I can’t find anything) that a lot of people liked Obama because they felt he cared about them. That was an Obama trait that was completely and utterly invisible to me, but that’s not important—what was important was if a great many people saw it that way and voted for him for that reason.

The Democrats have cornered the market on the perception of “caring.” That’s a much harder sell than the tough-love type of caring expressed in conservatism.

Being a liberal or leftist and voting for Democrats is not just a way to vote for candidates perceived as more “caring”—even though they may be anything but—but it’s also, as has often been observed, a way to establish one’s own bona fides as a caring individual. That’s also known as virtue-signaling, but some of that virtue-signaling is to oneself.

Take it from me, when a person goes from a decades-long practice of voting for Democrats, and lives among friends and family who do likewise, it’s a huge leap across a strange and foreboding chasm to vote Republican. It’s hard to admit even to oneself at first, and it takes time to say without much emotion or apology, “Yes, I’m a conservative, and this is why.” A person has to be prepared for the negative reactions of others, sometimes those near and dear. And sometimes the most difficult moment of truth is when a person admits to him or herself that this changed has actually occurred and they are now on the other side of the divide.

These days that divide seems to be a Great Divide. My memory is that it didn’t used to be so wide a gap.

Tree planting and climate change

The New Neo Posted on by

If true, this is pretty amazing:

“This new quantitative evaluation shows [forest] restoration isn’t just one of our climate change solutions, it is overwhelmingly the top one,” said Prof Tom Crowther at the Swiss university ETH Zürich, who led the research. “What blows my mind is the scale. I thought restoration would be in the top 10, but it is overwhelmingly more powerful than all of the other climate change solutions proposed.”…

But tree planting is “a climate change solution that doesn’t require President Trump to immediately start believing in climate change, or scientists to come up with technological solutions to draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere”, Crowther said. “It is available now, it is the cheapest one possible and every one of us can get involved.” Individuals could make a tangible impact by growing trees themselves, donating to forest restoration organisations and avoiding irresponsible companies, he added.

I have no idea whether AGW is correct, and I’ve done a lot of reading and written many posts on the subject. But this seems to offer the possibility of a mode of attack that those on both sides could agree would be the least disruptive way of trying to approach it:

New research estimates that a worldwide planting programme could remove two-thirds of all the emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere by human activities, a figure the scientists describe as “mind-blowing”.

The analysis found there are 1.7bn hectares of treeless land on which 1.2tn native tree saplings would naturally grow. That area is about 11% of all land and equivalent to the size of the US and China combined. Tropical areas could have 100% tree cover, while others would be more sparsely covered, meaning that on average about half the area would be under tree canopy.

The scientists specifically excluded all fields used to grow crops and urban areas from their analysis. But they did include grazing land, on which the researchers say a few trees can also benefit sheep and cattle.

Perhaps too good to be true. And certainly a major effort would be required. But it sounds more practical than any other solution I’ve heard.

[NOTE: If you have access, here is the full text of the article.]

About that citizenship census question: moving the Overton Window

The New Neo Posted on by

I recently went into some depth on the history of the citizenship question in the US Census:

I’ve done some genealogical research online about my family, and looked at quite a few census pages in many different years. Questions about citizenship were long a feature of the federal census. Here’s a timeline:

“From the first time in 1820 to the most recent in 2000, when only a small sample of households were asked, questions about citizenship on the census have had a history of stops and starts, twists and turns over 200 years.”

There’s a chart at the link, describing the changes in the question over the years, with examples. It’s clear that this is not a new question, and that even quite recently it’s been asked of a sampling of households (usually 1 in 6). Why it was okay to ask 1 in 6 but not okay to ask everyone? It seems an obviously valid question to me.

It also seems quite obvious why Democrats and the left are fighting this. They are afraid of what it will reveal. Note, though, that the question does not take the form, “Is this person an illegal immigrant?” The proposed question is the same one that’s been asked of a sample of respondents for decades: “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” It is ludicrous to think a nation has no right to ask such a question on its census. If for some reason that nation—the executive branch and Congress, not the courts—decides that in practice the question is actually inefficient and/or discourages responses in general, then those branches of government can decide not to use it again. SCOTUS should not be the branch to make that decision ahead of time, based on some theory about what might happen [the theory being that illegal immigrants will be undercounted because they won’t participate in the census].

SCOTUS actually punted on this one, but the practical result is that the delay will make it very difficult for forms to be printed if the federal government decides to include the question, because a ruling won’t be coming down in time.

There have been conflicting reports on whether the government will go ahead with the question or not.

This story is an excellent example of moving the Overton Window ever leftward, something in which the Obama administration specialized. You might even say it was the goal of that administration—the fundamental transformation of America, or at least of the mental map Americans have towards a host of issues.

Prior to Obama, although I’m virtually certain the left was working on getting people to consider a citizenship question to be some sort of offense against the “undocumented,” nevertheless such a question had long been included, although in more recent years it had only been asked of a sample of respondents. It was Obama who changed that by eliminating the question entirely:

Barack Obama was the first President to exclude a question on citizenship in the U.S. Census.

But today, the Trump administration is being assailed from the Left for its efforts to include the question.

The Left has responded typically, with accusations of racism. The question of nationality, they claim, is a danger to immigrants.

Any problem exists only for those people previously known as “illegal aliens,” who then started to be called “illegal immigrants” (the beginning of an Orwellian Overton Window shift on this) and now often labeled “undocumented” by the left in a further refinement of the re-labeling process. But that does not change the fact that the government has a valid interest in asking such a question, and it’s the same interest it always had all the many years such a question was considered standard and unobjectionable.

More:

NPR, quoting the Urban Institute, says the census threatens to put “more than 4 million people at risk of being undocumented.” The headline warns the addition of the question could lead to “worst undercount of black, Latinx people in 30 years.”

But the framing implies Trump is the first U.S. President to include a question on citizenship, when in fact Trump is simply following the established and understandable tradition of asking those who fill out the form if they’re actually Americans.

The charge against Trump is one that demands reframing – Obama was the first to not include a question on citizenship, naturalization, or nativity in almost 200 years. The Trump administration is simply undoing Obama’s 8-year effort to distort the status quo.

Obama’s own efforts to not ask the question was limited to the 2010 Census. From 2009 to 2016, the former president’s Census Bureau had no problem asking anyone if they were Americans on all eight of his annual ACSs (American Community Survey), which targeted smaller demographics key to the success of the Democrats in the eight years of his administration.

The ACS even asked the question in both English as well as Spanish.
American Community Survey (Census Bureau).

I’d love to see a poll asking people whether they believe this question would be originating with Trump—in other words, whether they think the question is new, and if not, when they think it stopped being asked. My guess is that most people have already bought the idea that it is Trump who is changing the usual practice on this, and don’t even realize that the change was really with Obama.

The Epstein mess

The New Neo Posted on by

As it stands now, the story of Jeffrey Epstein is sordid, troubling, and full of rumor.

If you’d like to get up to speed on it, see this, this, and this. From the latter article:

On Saturday, billionaire financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was arrested for the alleged sex trafficking of dozens of minors in New York and Florida between 2002 and 2005. In a criminal indictment unsealed Monday, federal prosecutors claimed that Epstein lured underage girls, some as young as 14, to his luxurious homes in Manhattan and Palm Beach under the guise of paying them cash for massages. He then molested them and encouraged them to recruit other young girls to return with them. The victims who returned with new victims were paid a finder’s fee.

“In this way, Epstein created a vast network of underage victims for him to sexually exploit, often on a daily basis,” the U.S. Attorney’s office said in a statement.

The hedge-fund manager and former friend of presidents Trump and Clinton faced similar charges a decade ago but escaped federal prosecution via a widely criticized, shockingly lenient plea deal. After a decade of legal efforts by many of his victims — and, more recently, increased scrutiny from lawmakers and the media — Epstein faces prosecution by the notoriously tough Southern District of New York and a long prison sentence if convicted.

We’ve heard about Epstein for a long time. His alleged activities were smarmy and exploitative, the plea deal seems highly suspect, and the possibilities for implicating others among the rich and famous are enormous.

It’s the latter possibility that has a lot of people salivating. One of the complications in Epstein’s story—in addition to the usual complexities involved in sorting out truthful allegations from false ones—is that some of those rich and famous people who were involved with Epstein may have been on his plane for the philanthropic endeavors to which he also lent his vast financial resources. The majority of them may not have had anything to do with any sexual activities with minors or even with adults, although some may have.

How to sort it out? It will be revealed over time—unless Epstein gets another secret plea deal.