The New Neo

The politics of knitting, and the meaning of “always”

Posted on June 25, 2019 by neoJune 25, 2019

I chuckled along with just about everyone else when I saw this:

The move by Ravelry, a popular knitting site, to ban support of President Trump drew both criticism and applause. But “knitting has always been political," said the editor of a knitting magazine. https://t.co/KdrBqz1tEX

— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 25, 2019

Always??? Always been political?

I used to be a knitter, and got rather good at it. After I hurt my arms thirty years ago I had to stop. But I can’t say I ever noticed any politics connected with knitting, with the exception of fictional characters like Madame Defarge. Then there were a few literary references like this from Shakespeare: “Sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care.”

So, what on earth did this bizarre statement mean? My suspicion is that, for the person who said it, “always” started quite recently. And “knitting” refers to the online knitting community, which is apparently a Big Deal.

And yes, that does seem to be pretty much it. First, Ravelry’s reason for the ban—which is pretty much standard leftist censorship for the usual bogus leftist reasons:

But on Sunday, Ravelry, a popular website for knitters and crocheters, took a political stand when it announced that it was banning content that supports President Trump, in what it said was a resolution against white supremacy.

“We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy,” the site said in a statement explaining the decision. “Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy.”

The policy applies to content on the site, including knitting patterns and forum posts, but not to people, according to Ravelry, which said it still welcomed Republicans and those with conservative political views. “You can still participate if you do in fact support the administration, you just can’t talk about it here,” the statement said, adding that “hate groups and intolerance are different from other types of political positions.”

In other words, Trump supporters are white supremacists, and Ravelry don’t have to prove it—it’s a self-evident fact. And of course these white supremacists make people uncomfortable, and we can’t be having people be unhappy or uncomfortable. So we will institute a very bizarre ruling—sort of the knitting equivalent of “don’t ask, don’t tell”—whereby we hate the sin but love the sinner. Trump supporters are welcome; they just need to shut up about it so no one else will get their tonsils in an uproar.

Political speech in general is allowed; just not pro-Trump speech.

The people who run a website can ban whomever they want and whatever speech they want to ban. But Ravelry’s reason for doing this says a lot not only about those who run the site, but about the continuing spread of leftist thought to take on more and more of the populace.

As for “always,” here’s the broader quote, which is a great deal less nonsensical than it initially sounded:

“The knitting community has been this happy little bubble for a long time,” said Amy Singer, the editor of Knitty, an online knitting magazine, which for years had a policy of “no religion, no politics.”

But as has happened elsewhere in society, she said, the bubble burst because not everyone felt included. This year, knitters of color began speaking out on Instagram about their experiences with racism and prejudice in the community.

The community has also recently been talking about other issues of equality, including the size and racial representation of online models, as well as economic diversity, Ms. Singer said.

“There are people who have been talking down to other people because they can’t afford anything better than craft yarn from Michael’s,” she said. “Knitting has always been political, whether you believe it or not.”

So Singer seems to actually have been talking about the online knitting community, and although I have happily managed to have zero to do with the online knitting community, my guess is that she’s correct about it. Politics rears its ugly head practically everywhere these days, more and more and more.

Now the left has taken over Ravelry, proving the general truth of O’Sullivan’s Law: any group that isn’t explicitly on the political right will eventually become leftist.

That site to which I just linked attempts to explain how this happens, and I think the following is correct:

One of the reasons for this is leftist intolerance versus right-wing tolerance. Right wingers are willing to hire openly left-wing employees in the interest of fairness. Left-wingers, utterly intolerant, will not allow a non-Liberal near them, and will harass them at every opportunity. The result over time is that conservative enterprises are infiltrated by leftists but leftist enterprises remain the same or get worse.

Also, leftism is in and of itself a form of decay. It’s what happens not just to television shows but to nations, churches and universities as the energy given off by the big bang of their inception slowly ebbs away. Rather than expend vitality in originality and creation they become obsessed with introspection, popularity and lethargy.

I cannot imagine that a lot of Trump supporters will be eager to remain at Ravelry (definitely not revelry) under a gag order.

I was in Burlington, Vermont this past weekend…

Posted on June 24, 2019 by neoJune 24, 2019

…visiting friends.

I also had a yen to see sunset over Lake Champlain, and just to get away and do something a bit different.

I had a good meal. The weather was fabulous. I saw a fascinating exhibit of the art of Harold Weston here, which was happily—and uncharacteristically, for today—devoid of political proselytizing (surprising in an area known for its extreme leftism).

I took a couple of photos of favorite paintings, but the problem is that with Weston the colors are the thing, and the complexity of color and the exact hues don’t reproduce very well. But here’s one:

As for that sunset over the lake, I may just have hit one of the most underwhelming sunsets in Burlington history, considering that it had been a lovely day. But it was nevertheless beautiful:

And speaking of politics, do not take the Ben and Jerry’s Factory Tour. It’s a factory tour in-name-only (fee charged, by the way), because production is halted on weekends and plenty of other times as well. It’s mostly a stupid and way-too-cutesy film that tells you how wonderful Ben and Jerry’s has been in bending the world towards social justice.

[NOTE: Take a look at that Weston picture frame. He hand-carved most of his frames.]

No attack on Iran—but Trump orders new sanctions

Posted on June 24, 2019 by neoJune 24, 2019

Trump announces new Iran sanctions:

Today’s action follows a series of aggressive behaviors by the Iranian regime in recent weeks including shooting down a U.S. drone,” the president said in the Oval Office, calling Khamenei “responsible for the hostile conduct of the regime.”

The Treasury Department, in a news release, said “any foreign financial institution that knowingly facilitates a significant financial transaction for entities designated under this Executive Order could be cut off from the U.S. financial system.”

Amid the newly announced sanctions, Fox News has confirmed that the U.S. military also carried out a cyberattack against Iran last Thursday even as the president nixed plans for airstrikes in response to the downing of an American drone.

Sources said U.S. Cyber Command launched the cyberattack targeting the Iranian intelligence and radar installations used to down the U.S. Navy drone last week.

Seems to me to be a well-calibrated response.

One of the troubles with regimes such as Iran is that much of the time sanctions only hurt the people rather than helping to topple the government. Iran’s leaders have a very firm grip despite whatever suffering goes on as a result of sanctions, and unless and until the military and elements such as the Revolutionary Guard turn on those leaders, it’s hard to be optimistic:

Whereas the Islamic Republic of Iran Army defends Iran’s borders and maintains internal order, according to the Iranian constitution, the Revolutionary Guard (pasdaran) is intended to protect the country’s Islamic republic system. The Revolutionary Guards state that their role in protecting the Islamic system is preventing foreign interference as well as coups by the military or “deviant movements”.

The Revolutionary Guards have roughly 125,000 military personnel including ground, aerospace and naval forces. Its naval forces are now the primary forces tasked with operational control of the Persian Gulf. It also controls the paramilitary Basij militia which has about 90,000 active personnel. Its media arm is Sepah News.

Since its origin as an ideologically driven militia, the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution has taken a greater role in nearly every aspect of Iranian society.

If you Google the phrase “could sanctions really hurt iran,” you get a host of articles in the MSM and elsewhere saying “they really just hurt the people.” And no doubt they do hurt the people. But I wouldn’t trust the WaPo, the NY Times, CNN, Newsweek, and all the rest on that list to give me the full picture or even close to it.

Here’s a different point of view, from National Review:

The executive order, which expands upon existing sanctions that have effectively deprived Iran of oil-export revenue, freezes the assets of officials serving at the highest levels of the Iranian government, including those assets held by the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini…

…Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin dismissed the suggestion that the latest round of sanctions was “symbolic,” pointing out that order will effectively “lock up tens of billions of dollars” previously held by the most influential people in Iranian government.

And this:

America’s sanctions are hitting Iran hard. Its economy is in shambles. Substantial economic losses are far more painful to the Mullahs than the loss of a missile battery, a radar station, or even 150 troops.

Right now, Iran feels pain while the United States does not…

In fact, we have such a substantial advantage that Iran may calculate that it can obtain American concessions only if it makes the American people feel a degree of anxiety and uncertainty. American casualties can cause such anxiety. Economic disruption can cause such uncertainty. We can’t be sure that Iran won’t lash out again.

I make no pretense of believing that there is a clear, risk-free path of confronting (or engaging with) Iran. It’s a hostile regional power full of enemies who are consumed with jihadist zeal. It has engaged in a long, low-intensity war against the United States, and it has proven that it will endure incalculable hardship to preserve its revolution and maintain its enmity. We are their “Great Satan,” and there is no obvious solution to their anti-American resistance.

Unless circumstances materially change, Iran’s harassment should not be permitted to provoke an escalation. At the same time, however, Iran has to know that it ultimately faces the same risks that it faced in 1988 — when, at the height of the so-called “tanker war,” the mining of an American ship led to a crushing American response that sank or crippled a significant portion of the Iranian navy.

The problem with dealing with Iran is Iran. Anyone who pretends to know for certain what the best course of action would be is fooling him/herself, IMHO. But it seems to me that the middle course we’re taking here is best for now.

One of the major problems is that Europe is eager to do business with Iran. Another is that, for the threat of attacks and/or war to be credible, Iran must believe it to be credible, and for quite some time it has seemed that the US has no stomach for such a thing except in a very limited manner.

Google, censorship, and politics

Posted on June 24, 2019 by neoJune 24, 2019

According to Project Veritas, Google is determined to use its power to prevent Trump, or “another Trump,” from becoming president:

The report includes undercover footage of longtime Google employee and Head of Responsible Innovation, Jen Gennai saying:

“Elizabeth Warren is saying we should break up Google. And like, I love her but she’s very misguided, like that will not make it better it will make it worse, because all these smaller companies who don’t have the same resources that we do will be charged with preventing the next Trump situation, it’s like a small company cannot do that.”

…Additional leaked documents detail how Google defines and prioritizes content from different news publishers and how its products feature that content. One document, called the “Fake News-letter” explains Google’s goal to have a “single point of truth” across their products…

[A Google] insider [whistleblower] shed additional light on how YouTube demotes content from influencers like Dave Rubin and Tim Pool:

“What YouTube did is they changed the results of the recommendation engine. And so what the recommendation engine is it tries to do, is it tries to say, well, if you like A, then you’re probably going to like B. So content that is similar to Dave Rubin or Tim Pool, instead of listing Dave Rubin or Tim Pool as people that you might like, what they’re doing is that they’re trying to suggest different, different news outlets, for example, like CNN, or MSNBC, or these left leaning political outlets.”

To those of us who have followed Google over the last couple of years, and especially during the last year, this is no revelation. But these efforts by Google and others raise this important legal issue: can Google do this and retain its current legal status?

While the First Amendment generally does not apply to private companies, the Supreme Court has held it “does not disable the government from taking steps to ensure that private interests not restrict . . . the free flow of information and ideas.” But as Senator Ted Cruz points out, Congress actually has the power to deter political censorship by social media companies without using government coercion or taking action that would violate the First Amendment, in letter or spirit. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act immunizes online platforms for their users’ defamatory, fraudulent, or otherwise unlawful content. Congress granted this extraordinary benefit to facilitate “forum[s] for a true diversity of political discourse.” This exemption from standard libel law is extremely valuable to the companies that enjoy its protection, such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, but they only got it because it was assumed that they would operate as impartial, open channels of communication—not curators of acceptable opinion.

When questioning Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this month, and in a subsequent op-ed, Cruz reasoned that “in order to be protected by Section 230, companies like Facebook should be ‘neutral public forums.’ On the flip side, they should be considered to be a ‘publisher or speaker’ of user content if they pick and choose what gets published or spoken.” Tech-advocacy organizations and academics cried foul. University of Maryland law professor Danielle Citron argued that Cruz “flips [the] reasoning” of the law by demanding neutral forums. Elliot Harmon of the Electronic Freedom Foundation responded that “one of the reasons why Congress first passed Section 230 was to enable online platforms to engage in good-faith community moderation without fear of taking on undue liability for their users’ posts.”

As Cruz properly understands, Section 230 encourages Internet platforms to moderate “offensive” speech, but the law was not intended to facilitate political censorship. Online platforms should receive immunity only if they maintain viewpoint neutrality, consistent with traditional legal norms for distributors of information…

Courts have held that “otherwise objectionable” does not mean whatever a social media company objects to, but “must, at a minimum, involve or be similar” to obscenity, violence, or harassment. Political viewpoints, no matter how extreme or unpopular, do not fall under this category.

Much more at the link.

This may sound like an arcane legal issue, but its enormous potential importance is quite obvious. Google and Facebook are huge internet forces, and it is very difficult for a political point of view to compete in the marketplace of ideas if they decide to ban it.

On the other hand, words like “obscenity, violence, or harassment” have always been somewhat difficult to precisely define, and it has only become harder to agree on when a line has been crossed, because we are so much less unified culturally.

And of course, when conservatism itself, and/or “mere words” that happen to hurt someone’s feelings, have been defined as obscene or violent or harassing, we’re sliding down a very slippery slope indeed.

The Gramscian march proceeds.

[BUMPED UP] It’s still donation time

Posted on June 22, 2019 by neoJune 22, 2019

[BUMPED UP. Please scroll down for today’s new posts 6/22.]

This weekend is the end of my donation drive, although feel free to donate any old time.

I’ll be deeply grateful if you decide to click on that Paypal “Donate” button on the right sidebar (or down below, if you’re on a cellphone) and contribute, whether it be a penny or quite a few dollars.

Thank you, thank you, thank you all!

Whistle Down the Wind

Posted on June 22, 2019 by neoJune 22, 2019

The other evening I suddenly remembered a film I saw long long ago, and had very much loved, back when I was a child. It came out in 1961 and was called “Whistle Down the Wind,” and nearly all I remembered about it was that it was British, in black-and-white, starred Hayley Mills (but not the Disney-esque Hayley Mills), and also featured Alan Bates.

I became curious: would the movie hold up if I watched it again after all this time? It took me quite a while to locate it—only some short clips are on YouTube, for example, and Netflix doesn’t seem to have it—but finally I did.

I watched it right though. I think it’s actually a small masterpiece, and the acting—particularly by the many children, of whom Mills is only one—is a revelation. Bates is no slouch, either. He gives a complex performance where he never overacts, while playing a role that could easily lend itself to histrionics. And it’s also a thoughtful movie that doesn’t shy away from some deep questions, although it’s not devoid of humor either.

Go here to watch it. I’m curious whether you feel the same way I do about it. I loved it all over again.

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.