Allan Bloom quotes to ponder

The New Neo Posted on by

In light of the brouhaha that arose in response to President Trump’s recent comments lauding nationalism, I think it’s illuminating to revisit two quotes from Allan Bloom’s 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind.

Here’s the first:

Contrary to much contemporary wisdom, the United States has one of the longest uninterrupted political traditions of any nation in the world. What is more, that tradition is unambiguous; its meaning is articulated in simple, rational speech that is immediately comprehensible and powerfully persuasive to all normal human beings. America tells one story: the unbroken, ineluctable progress of freedom and equality. From its first settlers and its political foundings on, there has been no dispute that freedom and equality are the essence of justice for us. No one serious or notable has stood outside this consensus…All significant political disputes have been about the meaning of freedom and equality, not about their rightness. Nowhere else is there a tradition or a culture whose message is so distinct and unequivocal—certainly not in France, Italy, Germany, or even England…Belonging to one of these peoples may be expained as a sentiment, an attachment to one’s own, akin to the attachment to father and mother, but Frenchness, Englishness, Germaness remain, nonetheless, ineffable. Everybody can, however, articulate what Americanness is…

But the unity, grandeur and attendant folklore of the founding heritage was attacked from so many directions in the last half-century that it gradually disappeared from daily life and from textbooks. It all began to seem like Washington and the cherry tree—not the sort of thing to teach children seriously. What is influential in the higher intellectual circles always ends up in the schools. The leading ideas of the Declaration began to be understood as eighteenth-century myths or ideologies. Historicism, in Carl Becker’s version (The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas, 1922) both cast doubt on the truth of the natural rights teaching and optimistically promised that it would provide a substitute. Similarly Dewey’s pragmatism—the method of science as the method of democracy, individual growth without limits, especially natural limits—saw the past as radically imperfect and regarded our history as irrelevant or as a hindrance to rational analysis of our present. Then there was Marxist debunking of the Charles Beard variety, trying to demonstrate that there was no public spirit, only private concern for property, in the Founding Fathers, thus weakening our convictions of the truth or superiority of American principles and our heroes (An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, 1913). Then the Southern historians and writers avenged the victory of the antislavery Union by providing low motives for the North (incorporating European critiques of commerce and technology) and idealizing the South’s way of life. Finally, in curious harmony with the Southerners, the radicals in the civil rights movement succeeded in promoting a popular conviction that the Founding was, and the American principles are, racist…

Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it.

And here’s the second:

Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being…In some nations the goal was the pious person, in others the warlike, in others the industrious…Aristocracies want gentlemen, oligarchies men who respect and pursue money, and democracies lovers of equality. Democratic education, whether it admits it or not, wants and needs to produce men and women who have the tastes, knowledge, and character supportive of a democratic regime. Over the history of our republic, there have obviously been changes of opinion as to what kind of man is best for our regime. We began with the model of the rational and industrious man, who was honest, respected the laws, and was dedicated to the family (his own family—what has in its decay been dubbed the nuclear family). Above all he was to know the rights doctrine; the Constitution, which embodied it; and American history, which presented and celebrated the founding of a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”…

But openness…eventually won out over natural rights, partly through a theoretical critique, partly because of a political rebellion against nature’s last constraints. Civic education turned away from concentrating on the Founding to concentrating on openness based on history and social science. There was even a general tendency to debunk the Founding, to prove the beginnings were flawed in order to license a greater openness to the new…

Some say the world will end in fire…

The New Neo Posted on by

…some say in ice:

Professor Valentina Zharkova gave a presentation of her Climate and the Solar Magnetic Field hypothesis at the Global Warming Policy Foundation in October, 2018. The information she unveiled should shake/wake you up.

Zharkova was one of the few that correctly predicted solar cycle 24 would be weaker than cycle 23 — only 2 out of 150 models predicted this.

Her models have run at a 93% accuracy and her findings suggest a Super Grand Solar Minimum is on the cards beginning 2020 and running for 350-400 years.

The last time we had a little ice age only two magnetic fields of the sun went out of phase.

This time, all four magnetic fields are going out of phase.

The rest of the Frost poem is here:

From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

More about the poem’s origins:

It was published in December 1920 in Harper’s Magazine and in 1923 in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book New Hampshire….

According to one of Frost’s biographers, “Fire and Ice” was inspired by a passage in Canto 32 of Dante’s Inferno, in which the worst offenders of hell, the traitors, are submerged, while in a fiery hell, up to their necks in ice: “a lake so bound with ice, / It did not look like water, but like a glass … right clear / I saw, where sinners are preserved in ice.”

In an anecdote he recounted in 1960 in a “Science and the Arts” presentation, prominent astronomer Harlow Shapley claims to have inspired “Fire and Ice”. Shapley describes an encounter he had with Robert Frost a year before the poem was published in which Frost, noting that Shapley was the astronomer of his day, asked him how the world will end. Shapley responded that either the sun will explode and incinerate the Earth, or the Earth will somehow escape this fate only to end up slowly freezing in deep space. Shapley was surprised at seeing “Fire and Ice” in print a year later, and referred to it as an example of how science can influence the creation of art, or clarify its meaning.

Please see this post of mine from 2014 for a look at more of Frost’s take on science, and the breadth and depth of his intellect. There’s another poem there which, although far inferior to “Fire and Ice,” is relevant to this discussion and may surprise you.

Black Friday: don’t forget Amazon and don’t forget neo

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s the day after Thanksgiving, otherwise known as Black Friday. The day to wait patiently in store lines for bargains—between bites of turkey salad sandwich, doses of Tums, and the ritual of making turkey carcass soup.

But neo readers needn’t wait in those lines if you (act of shameless self-promotion coming up) just use this blog as the portal for your Amazon holiday gift purchases. Click on the Amazon widget in the right sidebar (or go here if for some reason the widget isn’t showing), and everything you buy during that visit will send a tiny bit of money my way, and it won’t cost you one extra cent. Or here’s a link to Black Friday specials.

So now it’s time to relax and enjoy eating those leftovers to your heart’s content.

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The Great Fires and the forgetting

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the earliest posts I ever wrote on this blog (in January 2005) was called “The tsunami and the forgetting“. It was about the phenomenon of people forgetting—and certainly forgetting the details of—huge and terrible disasters, even recent ones.

Here’s an excerpt:

We hardly hear about the tsunami anymore, although for a while it dominated the news. The tsunami was videotaped in a staggering variety of manifestations: from the tall towering waves of Japanese art, to rolling swells that almost resembled a normal tide coming in–except for the fact that this particular tide just kept coming and coming and coming. We viewed forlorn beaches where villages had once stood, and saw keening mourners whose anguish was almost unbearable to watch even on the small screen.

Over and over, newspeople, relief workers, politicians, and officials declared this to be an unprecedented catastrophe. But in the annals of history there have been far greater catastrophes (at least in terms of number of deaths), and many of them have been almost utterly forgotten–although some of these have actually occurred relatively recently…

Only those of a certain age might remember the massive 1970 floods in Bangladesh which killed 300,000 people…An earthquake in the city of Tianjin in China in 1976, in the bad old days when almost no news emerged from that country, was reported to have killed at least 255,000, and more likely 655,000. How many of us have even heard of the city, much less the earthquake? Those with longer memories than I might even recall the flooding of the Yangtze in 1931 that caused at least three million deaths–and this was in a time when the world’s population was far smaller than it is today.

Stranger still is the lack of common knowledge about the 1918-9 influenza epidemic that disrupted most of the world (with the exception of Africa and South America) at the same time WWI was ravaging Western Europe. It was an event medieval or even Biblical in its apocalyptic scope. How many people died worldwide? Estimates vary, but the most conservative state that the death toll was 25 million. Oher estimates go much higher, up to 70 million or even 100 million. And, as this transcript [dead link] from a fascinating PBS documentary on the pandemic relates, “As soon as the dying stopped, the forgetting began.”

I thought of that post again in the wake of the Camp Fire that tragically and horrifyingly has taken so many lives, although the number is of course dwarfed by those previous tolls.

And then I was surprised to read a headline saying that the Camp Fire was the worst since 1918, when the Cloquet Fire in Minnesota caused 453 known deaths (there may have been many more), destroyed 38 communities, and displaced or injured over fifty thousand people.

And until yesterday I’d never even heard of the Cloquet Fire. Had you? Maybe if you live in Minnesota you have, but has anyone else?

I discovered that there were some similarities between the Cloquet Fire and the Camp Fire. Although we don’t usually think of Minnesota as a dry state (at least, I certainly don’t), it had been experiencing a drought and high winds, and it happened in the fall.

And then, reading about that fire led me to links about another destructive and out-of-control forest fire in Minnesota (with the same conditions of drought and high winds), the Hinckley fire of 1894. I’d never before heard a thing about that one, either. But I came across an article from a 1977 issue of American Heritage that was one of the most riveting, intense, bloodcurdling tales of horror and heroism I’ve ever read.

Please read the whole thing. Our ancestors were tough, tough people.

But that one was not the deadliest fire of its kind in US history. That dubious honor goes to the Peshtigo fire that took place in Wisconsin in 1871, also involving a drought and high winds, and also occurring in the fall. The number of dead was never determined, but estimates are between 1,500 and 2,500 people:

Occurring on the same day as the more famous Great Chicago Fire, the Peshtigo fire has been largely forgotten.

The day after

The New Neo Posted on by

Lighter blogging today. Just having fun with family, friends, and food.

And turkey soup. Must make turkey soup! I like chicken soup, but turkey soup has a darker, richer, more robust flavor that’s perfect this time of year. You can put just about anything edible in it and it tastes fine. My sister-in-law sometimes adds a little leftover cranberry sauce to it, and even that is good.

But the cranberry sauce is best with the obligatory turkey sandwiches.

I usually am not that keen on turkey stuffing (otherwise known as dressing) baked outside the bird. But yesterday I ate a fabulous one. I don’t have the exact recipe yet, but I intend to get it. I do know it had the following ingredients: rye bread, challah, onions, celery, parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme (with those last four ingredients, do I hear music playing?), salt, butter, and chicken broth.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post]

I wish all of you a wonderful Thanksgiving. Here’s some corny American pictorial propaganda in honor of the occasion, one of my favorite holidays:

This painting was not originally created for the Thanksgiving holiday. It was part of Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms” series of 1941. Inspired by a post-Pearl Harbor speech of FDR’s about the war effort and why we were fighting, and designed to help sell war bonds, this particular one illustrated “Freedom from Want.”

So on this Thanksgiving Day I’ll reiterate the sentiment: may we all have freedom—of religion, of speech, from want, from fear.

Why did so many of the trees in Paradise survive the fire, when nearly all the homes were incinerated?

The New Neo Posted on by

That question was asked recently several times on this blog, and this article provides a lucid answer.

I highly recommend the entire article. Since the November 8 fire, I’ve certainly learned far more about wildfires that threaten homes than I ever knew before. But that particular article is especially informative.

Here’s the part about the trees:

“[The Paradise fire] was an urban conflagration,” Pangburn [a member of the incident management team with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection] said. “It was structure-to-structure-to-structure ignition that carried the fire through this community.”…

Fires that spread from house to house generate a force of their own. Embers, broadcast by the wind, find dry leaves, igniting one structure then another, and the cycle is perpetuated block after block. Break that cycle and the fire quits, and destruction can be minimized.

Paradise, though, never had that chance. Defensible space and hardened structures could not have kept the firestorm, carried on gusts clocking in the low 50s and feeding on the homes and low-lying vegetation, from reducing the town to ash…

Most telling were the trees. Most of the pines that sheltered this community still had their canopies intact. The needles, yellowed from the intense heat, were not burned — evidence that the winds that morning had pushed the fire along so fast it never had a chance to rise into the trees. But as a surface fire, it lit up the homes that lay in its path.

“I don’t know if there was anything that could have been done to save Paradise,” Pangburn said. “It was some of the most intense fire behavior that I have ever witnessed.”

There is so much more in the article, with many suggestions for how communities should be built based on what we’ve learned from fires in recent years, that I can only repeat my recommendation that you read the whole thing.

Keys to Democratic success

The New Neo Posted on by

I wasn’t particularly surprised at the results of the recent election. They were predicted, although not every exact detail. Probably none of you were really surprised, either.

But on another level I continue to be surprised at how many people seem to think the direction in which the Democratic Party is going now is just peachy keen. And yet I also know that I shouldn’t be at all surprised, because some of the reasons for it are glaringly obvious.

The first reason states the positives of what the Democrats offer: they promise “free” stuff to people who really do need it or who feel they need it. That has obvious appeal to the people who get the stuff, and that appeal doesn’t need explaining. But the approach also has great attractiveness to many of the people who will pay for the stuff. What do they get out of it? The feeling of being good and generous people, concerned with the welfare of others—unlike those mean and uncaring Republicans who are not good people at all. The approach also appeals to academics and intellectuals because they think they’ll be the ones to design the welfare state with their superior knowledge.

The second reason states the negatives of what Democrats say Republicans offer: racism and bigotry. The left has successfully managed to brand the right, even the moderate right—in fact, any Republican, particularly in what the left likes to call “the age of Trump,” as though he’s a dictator—as racist. With the ever-expanding definition of racism these days, they can include as racist those laws that—for completely unintended reasons, even if applied even-handedly—happen to fall disproportionately on minorities. And they can include as racist any criticism of a minority person, however justified and however much evidence is presented. When everything’s a dog whistle, the air is thick with racism.

The actual consequences of a given policy in the real world, and the fact that most people in both parties want the common good and just have different ideas about methods to achieve it, has gotten lost. Now we have a titanic and Manichean battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil.

That’s also why it’s important to the left to brand all people on the right who happen to be members of a minority group as betrayers of their own race (and thus, in a sense, racists themselves) and/or as inauthentic members of their own race. A black Republican is, to the left, an oxymoron—or at least must be presented as one. Such a person is a living breathing refutation of the “Republicans are racists” message, and therefore are especially and uniquely dangerous to the left and must be redefined in a way that eliminates the contradiction.

Happy day-before-Thanksgiving to you

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a slightly-edited reprint of a previous post.]

I happen to like Thanksgiving. Always have. It’s a holiday for anyone and everyone in this country—except, of course, people who hate turkey. There are quite a few of those curmudgeonly folks, but I’m happy to report I’m not one of them. Even if the turkey ends up dry and overcooked, it’s nothing that a little gravy and cranberry sauce can’t fix. And although the turkey is the centerpiece, it’s the accompaniments that make the meal.

My theory on turkeys is that they’re like children: you coax them along and just do the best you can, but as long as you don’t utterly ruin or abuse them, they have their own innate characteristics that will manifest in the end. A dry and tough bird will be a dry and tough bird despite all that draping in fat-soaked cheesecloth, a tender and tasty one can withstand a certain amount of cooking incompetence.

One year long ago my brother and I were cooking at my parents’ house and somehow we set the oven on “broil,” an error that was only discovered an hour before the turkey was due to be finished cooking. But it was one of the best turkeys ever. Another time the turkey had turned deep bluish-purple on defrosting and was so hideous and dangerous-looking that it had to be abandoned. Another terrible time, one that has lived in infamy ever since, my mother decided turkey was passe and that we’d have steak on Thanksgiving.

Since I like to eat, I am drawn to the fact that Thanksgiving is a food-oriented holiday with a basic obligatory theme (turkey plus seasonal autumnal food) and almost infinite variations on that theme. Sweet potatoes? Absolutely—but oh, the myriad ways to make them, some revolting, some sublime. Pie? Of course, but what kind? And what to put on it, ice cream, whipped cream, or both?

For me, there are three traditional requirements—besides the turkey, of course. There has to be at least one pecan pie, although eating it in all its sickening sweetness can put an already-sated person right over the top. The cranberry sauce has to be made from fresh cranberries (it’s easy: cranberries, water, and sugar to taste, simmered on top of the stove till mushy and a bright deep red), and lots of it (it’s good on turkey sandwiches the next day, too). The traditional stuffing in my family is non-traditional: a large quantity of cut-up Granny Smith apples cooked in fair amount of sherry as well as a ton of butter till a bit soft; and then mixed with prunes, almonds, and one Sara Lee poundcake reduced to small pieces by crushing with the hands.

Thanksgiving is one of the few holidays that has a theme that is vaguely religious—giving thanks—but has no specific religious affiliation. So it’s a holiday that unites. It’s one of the least commercial holidays as well, because it involves no presents. It’s a home-based holiday, which is good, too, except for those who don’t have relatives or friends to be with. One drawback is the terribly compressed travel time; I solve that by not usually traveling very far if I can possibly help it.

The main advantage to hosting the day is having leftovers left over. The main disadvantage to hosting the day is having leftovers left over.

I wish you all a wonderful Thanksgiving Day, filled with friends and/or family of your choice, and just the right amount of leftovers!

Federal judge in San Francisco temporarily blocks Trump’s orders re the caravan and asylum seekers

The New Neo Posted on by

This should come as no surprise whatsoever:

A federal judge in San Francisco late Monday temporarily halted President Donald Trump’s move to restrict asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, dealing another blow to the administration’s immigration agenda.

Judge Jon Tigar’s ruling suspends implementation of a fast-track regulation and presidential proclamation issued Nov. 9 that barred migrants who cross the border between ports of entry from seeking asylum. The order will remain in effect until Dec. 19, when the court will consider arguments for a permanent ban.

The court’s ruling—which may or may not stand—seems to throw the entire issue back to Congress. By the way, I am nearly 100% certain that had Obama issued a similar order, this very same judge would have ruled differently.

I don’t think Congress will be acting on this in a way that assists Trump. If they did, they’d have to do it extremely quickly, before the new Democratic-majority House is seated. And I’m not even sure that the current GOP-majority House would support Trump on this, although I suppose it might. Same for the GOP-controlled Senate, although that control will continue in the new Congress.

If the judge’s order ends up being confirmed by later court rulings, these caravans will continue to be organized and sent by activist leftists in Latin America. The caravans have many purposes in addition to the obvious ones of affecting US demographics and ultimately voting behavior. One big one is to take up a great deal of the border control’s time and effort sorting through the asylum applications that every single one of the “migrants” will submit. Separating the wheat from the chaff is a tedious and lengthy task, and either the criteria will be loosened and a lot of bogus asylum claims will be granted, or stricter standards will be in place and the MSM and the left will set up a constant drumbeat of propaganda sob stories. Win/win for the left and the open borders crew, except for the possible backlash.

[NOTE: Judge Tigar was appointed by Obama in 2012. This underscores the importance of the power to appoint federal judges. Whether you believe his ruling is correct or incorrect, the power of a single federal judge can be very great.]

The MSM, the blogosphere, and me

The New Neo Posted on by

Blogging used to be the hot new thing. That was back in the dark ages of the Bush administration.

I’m not sure when I first discovered blogs, but it was probably around 2002, about two years after I had transitioned to reading most of my newspapers online. I also don’t remember what blog it was, but my guess is that the site is long defunct.

Something about blogs grabbed me immediately. I liked reading one person’s take on things, freely acknowledged as being one person’s opinion but backed up by links to the sources from which the opinion was derived, and often expressed informally and conversationally compared to the dry prose of most newspapers of the day. I liked the ability to comment, which wasn’t available at newspapers back then except through the laborious and hit-or-miss process of writing letters to the editor that might or might not (probably not) be selected for publication.

It was years before I became a blogger myself, and that was initially a lark with a free site set up by my son. I had no intention of ever using it, but a few months later I decided—on a sudden whim—to get serious about it and see what would happen. Little did I know that almost fourteen years later I’d still be blogging. At the time, I would have been surprised to learn I’d still be blogging fourteen days later.

Blogs had their heyday during the Bush administration, particularly individual blogs like this one. Now it’s all changed, of course, and blogs are somewhat passe, superseded largely by social media and also some group blogs. The latter spread the labor and offer readers more of a variety of points of view, and also encourage clicks by putting up new content often.

As all of this was transpiring, the news was changing, too. I’ve chronicled the beginnings of the transition away from the strict separation between straight news and opinion journalism in my posts about Walter Cronkite (see this and this), but now the two are a seamless fusion in which straight reporting has practically disappeared (if it ever existed in the first place). These days—and for quite a few years now—what is presented as straight news is a sometimes-subtle sometimes-flagrant blend of facts, suppositions, assumptions, misrepresentations, and omissions designed to lead the reader to a certain point of view rather than inform the reader of what happened.

There were many influences that led to this point: the turning point during Vietnam that Cronkite represented, the 24-hour news cycle as a hungry beast demanding to be fed, the rise of TV news as entertainment, as well as the internet influences of blogs and then social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

Although blogs are no longer so influential in terms of the MSM, they did garner a great deal of attention from regular journalists at the beginning. A lot of that attention featured attempts to say how superior journalists were, because journalists had all those trustworthy layers of fact-checking, all that experience and credentials, all that access to trustworthy government sources—in other words, all that skill and experience and inside info. But what subsequently happened is that newspaper reporting—already suffering—grew increasingly to feature the very flaws that the reporters had tried to pin on blogs.

These days when I read the MSM I usually have to wade through fiskable sentence after fiskable sentence. The term “fiskable” comes from the verb “to fisk,” coined to represent something that was happening as a result of the blogosphere: the penchant of bloggers to take an article from the MSM and refute it and critique it, sentence by sentence, almost word for word.

It was often ridiculously easy to do so. Articles were full of unsourced conclusions couched as tautologies, as well as quotes from anonymous “officials” that way-too-often turned out to be garbage. Then on to the next, and the next. Reporters grew younger and younger (and it wasn’t just that I grew older and older), bureaus closed down and papers relied more and more on stringers who had their own agendas.

Newspapers are still pretty good for covering some things, although nowhere near as good as they should be. For example, the fires in California have been covered pretty well, although of course there are some mistakes and revisions of the kind one might expect in a fast-breaking story of some complexity and detail. But once we get to the “why” of the fires, which concerns the interface of politics and science, the opinion journalism propaganda kicks in, big time.

To describe and link to the myriad ways that has occurred would be another long, long post, and this one is long enough already anyway. For now I’ll just say that it’s almost obligatory for each MSM article to add something simplistic such as “of course, the fires are all due to global warming, something Trump denies” while often failing to link to any scientific articles actually backing them up, and while often ignoring the ones that say otherwise and offer details on the extraordinarily complex set of causes and possible solutions to the wildfire problem in California (here was my quick effort at the latter).

In the last couple of years I’ve grown even more wary and weary of looking at the MSM. But it still influences a great many people, and it’s still our basic source for many stories. So there’s no way I’m going to be ignoring it. Although distrust of the MSM is high, most people read it and most people are still influenced by it in ways sometimes subtle and sometimes obvious.