Tomorrow is Election Day…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and I have no hesitation in saying I’m nervous.

I also freely admit I have no idea what will happen, particularly in terms of the House. And it’s not just me; no one knows. Some prognosticators will be right in their predictions and some wrong, but that will probably be due far more to luck more than to knowledge.

But I’m not quite as critical of pollsters as a lot of people are. Elections are getting more and more difficult to predict. Telephone polling, which has been the usual way to do it for the least umpteen years, has become almost impossible to perform correctly because so many people either have blocks on their phones or simply won’t answer unless they know the source of the call and it’s a trusted friend, relative, or business. So how can a pollster get a representative sample of the electorate?

In addition, enthusiasm is such a huge driver of turnout that relying on samples that use a similar turnout model to the most recent election is probably going to be a flawed method. That’s not pollsters’ fault; it’s just inherently difficult and I believe has become more so.

What’s more, the House races are usually going to be harder to predict than a presidential race or even the Senate. That’s because every single seat in the House is up for grabs every two years. That’s 435 races, folks, and although the majority of them are not what you’d call “competitive”—instead, they’re in districts in which the outcome is pretty much a foregone conclusion—enough of them are in doubt that the polling challenge is formidable. Most districts don’t have neat little borders like states do, the population involved is ordinarily smaller, and there are so many districts needing to be surveryed that it would be quite expensive to keep polls up-to-date. Since viewpoints often change close to election time, the information is not usually so current except in a few very hotly covered races.

So we have even people like Nate Silver hedging their bets:

“So in the House we have Democrats with about a 4 in 5 chance of winning,” Silver told ABC’s “This Week.”

However, he noted that “polls aren’t always right.”

“The range of outcomes in the House is really wide,” he explained. “Our range, which covers 80 percent of outcomes goes from, on the low end, about 15 Democratic pickups, all the way to low to mid 50s, 52 or 53.”

“Most of those are under 23, which is how many seats they would need to win to take the House,” he said.”

“But no one should be surprised if they only win 19 seats and no one should be surprised if they win 51 seats,” Silver added. “Those are both extremely possible, based on how accurate polls are in the real world.”

If Nate isn’t careful, he might just talk himself out of a job.

Looking at 2016, a year in which most people claim the pollsters got it very wrong, I noted just a few weeks after that election that the polls were pretty spot on for the national popular vote. In fact, since I wrote that piece, more votes came in that proved the polls to have been even more spot on than was evident at the time of the post: the final results in the popular vote was that Hillary was two percentage points up, and that’s about what most of the pre-election polls had predicted.

But of course, in a presidential election the nationwide popular vote doesn’t matter, except in some people’s minds. What matters is the Electoral College, and that’s done on a state-by-state basis. That’s where the 2016 polls fell down, but only because many of the states that ended up going to Donald Trump, against pollsters’ predictions, did so by very small margins. That means they were extremely hard to have predicted. And they pretty much all went in the same direction—to Trump.

That’s what often happens in an election. There are trends. One trend is that the bulk of the close races will go to one party or another. This may occur this year in Congress, and is actually pretty well nigh impossible to predict.

Compromised CIA communications during the Obama years

The New Neo Posted on by

This is a very disturbing story:

From around 2009 to 2013, the U.S. intelligence community experienced crippling intelligence failures related to the secret internet-based communications system, a key means for remote messaging between CIA officers and their sources on the ground worldwide. The previously unreported global problem originated in Iran and spiderwebbed to other countries, and was left unrepaired — despite warnings about what was happening — until more than two dozen sources died in China in 2011 and 2012 as a result, according to 11 former intelligence and national security officials….

…[It] started in Iran in 2009, when the Obama administration announced the discovery of a secret Iranian underground enrichment facility — part of Iran’s headlong drive for nuclear weapons. Angered about the breach, the Iranians went on a mole hunt, looking for foreign spies, said one former senior intelligence official.

The mole hunt wasn’t hard, in large part, because the communications system the CIA was using to communicate with agents was flawed. Former U.S. officials said the internet-based platform, which was first used in war zones in the Middle East, was not built to withstand the sophisticated counterintelligence efforts of a state actor like China or Iran. “It was never meant to be used long term for people to talk to sources,” said one former official. “The issue was that it was working well for too long, with too many people. But it was an elementary system.”

By 2010, however, it appears that Iran had begun to identify CIA agents. And by 2011, Iranian authorities dismantled a CIA spy network in that country, said seven former U.S. intelligence officials. (Indeed, in May 2011, Iranian intelligence officials announced publicly that they had broken up a ring of 30 CIA spies; U.S. officials later confirmed the breach to ABC News, which also reported on a potential compromise to the communications system.)

Iran executed some of the CIA informants and imprisoned others in an intelligence setback that one of the former officials described as “incredibly damaging…” A lack of proper vetting of sources may have led to the CIA inadvertently running a double agent, said one former senior official — a consequence of the CIA’s pressing need at the time to develop highly placed agents inside the Islamic Republic.

Please read the whole thing.

Apparently the system was not changed, and the same thing occurred in China. The article also points out that during the entire time, John Brennan was Obama’s Homeland Security advisor, and then shortly after the beginning of Obama’s second term he became head of the CIA.

Who’s organizing and funding the caravan?

The New Neo Posted on by

An article at Sarah Hoyt’s site by Bill Reader has some answers. Read the whole thing; the basic answer is “the Central American Left,” but here are some details that might especially interest you:

…Barolo Fuentes, a Honduran socialist who was one of the frontmen for this caravan, and his friends in the LIBRE party; Pueblo sin Fronteras, a project of the Chicago-Based 501c La Familia Latina Unida; and a brief look at Venezuela, recently highlighted by Vice President Pence and currently in the spotlight as a possible funding source for all this…

…So, this wasn’t just nondescript social activism, but someone who has deliberately and repeatedly assisted specifically with illegal immigration…

La Tribuna picks up the story above in more detail, and describes [Fuentes] as having organized caravans since 1999. They note also that he is an “ex-deputy” in the National Congress of Honduras, for a group called Libertad y Refundación (Freedom and Refoundation) AKA LIBRE for short. The Honduran government is unicameral, but he was essentially the local equivalent of a senator/representative. Who is LIBRE? Why, they’re a Leftist Political Party in Honduras. They were founded in 2011 by the National Popular Resistance Front/ National People’s Resistance Front (FNRP). LIBRE was christened by Manuel Zelaya, the Honduran president who was deposed in a coup in 2009…

Zelaya, 2009, Honduras. Does that ring a bell? It should, if you’ve been reading this blog since then, because I wrote about Zelaya a lot. The context was that Obama supported him. If you want to refresh your memory just do a search on this blog for “Zelaya,” but the article with the most information is probably this one. There are plenty of others.

Then, from the Reader article, we also have this:

All of this suggests that the original organization of the caravan was indeed put together in Honduras—specifically, by people from LIBRE. The question is, did it stay that way?

To begin to answer that question, we turn our attention to Pueblo Sin Fronteras. To understand that group, first we need to get to know another group— La Familia Latina Unida, an extension of the pro-illegal immigration advocacy 501c out of Chicago, Centro Sin Fronteras. La Familia Latina Unida, in turn, is the organization that runs Pueblo Sin Fronteras. So, to be clear, Centro Sin Fronteras begat La Familia Latina Unida, which begat Pueblo Sin Fronteras. Pueblos Sin Fronteras may not be familiar to you, but their handiwork is—they organized the last caravan which came to the US in April, though that caravan mostly dissolved before it actually reached the border. According to Influence Watch, Centro Sin Fronteras was founded by Emma Lozano, a Chicago pastor and sister of left-wing community organizer Rudy Lozano, in 1987…

Centro Sin Fronteras is currently running on the back of grants from the Public Welfare Foundation, and the Wieboldt Foundation—certainly Left-Wing funding organizations, though surprisingly, not directly tied to George Soros. That said, Centro Sin Fronteras, you will perhaps be interested to hear, has been a beneficiary of the National Immigration Forum, which in turn receives donations from the Open Society Foundation, which of course is George Soros’ baby. The last donation was modest and back in 2010, though. I mention it to highlight what Trump has highlighted, and what a lot of those on the Right who have paid attention have known forever— in liberal charitable donation wankery, all roads eventually lead to Soros. The group apparently hasn’t been amazingly good about regularity in tax filings recently, so it’s hard to say how they’re doing of late.

You are free to criticize George Soros without being anti-Semitic (Part II)

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Please see Part I here.]

I ended Part I in the following way:

…accusing Soros of being a “formenter of social dissent” and an “agitator funding and masterminding protest” is simply the truth about Soros. If it’s the truth, it’s the truth. Nor do you have to be a white supremacist worried about the “undermining of a white, Christian social order” to worry about a leftist with a ton of money funding leftist activists.

But is Soros “malevolent” and “sly” about it? And does he actually fund the caravan?

Not every conspiracy theory rumor about Soros is true, of course. But there is no question that Soros has indeed funded much leftist activism and other leftist causes; it’s a matter of public record. These are facts, not rumor:

…[D]uring the 2003–2004 election cycle, Soros donated $23,581,000 to various 527 Groups (tax-exempt groups under the United States tax code, 26 U.S.C. § 527). The groups aimed to defeat President George W. Bush. After Bush’s reelection, Soros and other donors backed a new political fundraising group called Democracy Alliance, which supports progressive causes and the formation of a stronger progressive infrastructure in America.

Soros also has donated plenty of money to Obama and Hillary. He’s promoted democracy in Eastern Europe (not everything Soros does is bad, as far as I can tell). But whether a person believes that he’s used his money mainly for ill or mainly for good, it is clear that it is absolutely correct to say that Soros “foments dissent” and “funds and masterminds protests,” whether the WaPo thinks that feeds too well into anti-Semitic memes or not. The rest of this post will detail some of his activities in that direction, as well as other causes.

Soros has funded various campaigns to decriminalize marijuana, and supported legalized suicide for the dying, Regarding Israel:

“I don’t deny the Jews to a right to a national existence – but I don’t want anything to do with it.” According to hacked emails released in 2016, Soros’s Open Society Foundation has a self-described objective of “challenging Israel’s racist and anti-democratic policies” in international forums…

On Soros and George Bush:

On November 11, 2003, in an interview with The Washington Post, Soros said that removing President George W. Bush from office was the “central focus of my life” and “a matter of life and death.” He said he would sacrifice his entire fortune to defeat Bush “if someone guaranteed it.”

You may recall that in an earlier quote it was stated that Soros donated about 25 and a half million dollars to effect that particular defeat. It didn’t work, but that’s an awful lot of money, and an awful lot of influence for one person to buy. And that statement has nothing to do with anti-Semitism, either. I would say the same thing no matter what Soros’ ethnicity or religion.

There’s much more, including Soros’ instigating and then profiting from a financial crisis (see this). No less a man of the left as Paul Krugman wrote of Soros (or actually, of financiers like Soros whom he refers to as “Soroi”): “these days there really are investors who not only move money in anticipation of a currency crisis, but actually do their best to trigger that crisis for fun and profit.”

In 2006 Soros wrote that “the main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.” This is a man who is willing to put his money exactly where his mouth is. Is there any wonder people on the right would fear and despise him? They don’t have to invent conspiracy theories—although some do—to believe he is dedicated to using his money and the vast resources at his command to undermine that “main obstacle” as well as advancing the progressive causes in which he believes and that he has supported for a long time.

Is it any wonder that many people on the right assume that Soros may be funding all kinds of leftist causes more secretly, in addition to the leftist causes he funds in plain sight?

Soros is not EveryJew. He doesn’t stand for Jews in general, he stands for himself.

As far as the theory that Soros is funding the current caravan from Central America goes, I’ve seen no direct evidence that this is the case. However, I can’t really blame anyone for imagining that perhaps he is the source of the funds and organization that are obviously coming from somewhere. And that’s basically what Trump said:

As the White House administration increases its pressure on the caravan of migrants heading to the United States from Central America, one reporter asked the president if he thought someone was paying for it.

Trump replied: “I wouldn’t be surprised, I wouldn’t be surprised.” A reporter then asked: “George Soros? Who’s paying for it?” to which Trump replied: “I don’t know who, but I wouldn’t be surprised. A lot of people say yes.”

Again—as with so many of these controversial Trump quotes—it was the media that brought it up, in what they thought was a “gotcha” question. Trump’s answer—“I wouldn’t be surprised”—is my answer, too, and it simply makes sense. That doesn’t mean it is true, but it means it is very plausible (or perhaps we should say that it’s credible, which seems to be the MSM’s new favorite word).

That article I just linked is from Newsweek. In it, they don’t mention who might be funding the caravan instead. Nor do they describe Soros very well, although they describe him in a way that suits their purposes. First, they call him a “prominent Democratic donor. Then, they say this:

Soros, a Holocaust survivor and a billionaire philanthropist, was among the targets of mail bombs sent to key Democratic figures last week, allegedly by Trump supporter Cesar Sayoc.

Just a nice nice guy, and a victim of the right. Nothing about his activist activities around the world, or about something that’s even more relevant, Soros’ Open Society Foundation and its activities. I’ve said that there’s no evidence that Soros has funded this particular caravan, although it’s a possibility. But there certainly seems to be bona fide evidence that he helps illegal immigrants once they’re here as well as encouraging illegal immigration to this country and open borders:

Both the NILC [National Immigration Law Center] and its offshoot, United We Dream, get big bucks from Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF). In fact, both nonprofits list OSF as a key financial backer. In the United States Soros groups have pushed a radical agenda that includes promoting an open border with Mexico and fighting immigration enforcement efforts, fomenting racial disharmony by funding anti-capitalist black separationist organizations, financing the Black Lives Matter movement and other groups involved in the Ferguson Missouri riots, weakening the integrity of the nation’s electoral systems, opposing U.S. counterterrorism efforts and eroding 2nd Amendment protections. OSF has also funded a liberal think-tank headed by former Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and the scandal-ridden activist group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), so corrupt that Congress banned it from receiving federal funding.

Incredibly, the U.S. government uses taxpayer dollars to support Soros’ radical globalist agenda abroad. As part of an ongoing investigation, Judicial Watch has exposed several collaborative efforts between Uncle Sam and Soros in other countries. Just last week Judicial Watch published a special investigative report that exposes in detail the connection between U.S.-funded entities and Soros’ OSF to further the Hungarian philanthropist’s efforts in Guatemala. The goal is to advance a radical globalist agenda through “lawfare” and political subversion, the report shows. Much like in the United States, OSF programs in Guatemala include funding liberal media outlets, supporting global politicians, advocating for open borders, fomenting public discord and influencing academic institutions.

That article is by Judicial Watch, which bases its work on access to records it obtains through requests and court orders through the Freedom of Information Act (there’s also this article that appeared in the NY Times in 2014, back when Obama was president and such things didn’t need to be denied).

It seems that Soros’ activities are often connected not just with direct grants to political candidates and the like, but are accomplished through his Open Societies Foundation. Reading about the Foundation and what it does,the first thing that strikes me is the huge scope of the thing (worldwide) and the amount of money involved: for example, $873 million in 2013.

The description of what the Foundation promotes is very general, and some of it actually sounds good: early on, goals were ending Communism in Eastern bloc countries and fighting HIV and AIDS, for example. But then there are things like this, which clearly qualify as leftist activism:

OSF reported granting at least $33 million to civil rights and social justice organizations in the United States. This funding included groups such as the Organization for Black Struggle and Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment that supported protests in the wake of the shooting of Trayvon Martin, the death of Eric Garner, the shooting of Tamir Rice and the shooting of Michael Brown.

Back to the Foundation’s Wiki entry:

NGO Monitor, an Israeli NGO, produced a report which says, “Soros has been a frequent critic of Israeli government policy, and does not consider himself a Zionist, but there is no evidence that he or his family holds any special hostility or opposition to the existence of the state of Israel. This report will show that their support, and that of the Open Society Foundation, has nevertheless gone to organizations with such agendas.” The report says its objective is to inform OSF, claiming: “The evidence demonstrates that Open Society funding contributes significantly to anti-Israel campaigns in three important respects: 1. Active in the ‘Durban strategy;’ 2. Funding aimed at weakening U.S.support for Israel by shifting public opinion regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iran; 3. Funding for Israeli political opposition groups on the fringes of Israeli society, which use the rhetoric of human rights to advocate for marginal political goals.” The report concludes, “Yet, to what degree Soros, his family, and the Open Society Foundation are aware of the cumulative impact on Israel and of the political warfare conducted by many of their beneficiaries is an open question.”

That’s actually pretty interesting. It shows how difficult it is to prove the extent of Soros’ involvement in any one policy. Since it is his enormous Foundation offering the assistance— rather than Soros himself giving a grant out of his own pocket, cause by cause—it is always possible for him to preserve some degree of deniability, and for the left to characterize his critics as anti-Semites making stuff up.

Good luck, Professor Abrams

The New Neo Posted on by

Samuel Abrams is a Sarah Lawrence professor who has had the audacity to write about the lack of intellectual diversity among faculty and administrators on today’s college campuses, and of course the SJWs don’t like it and think he should leave:

Professor Samuel Abrams is a conservative-leaning tenured professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College. He is active in Heterodox Academy, a group of almost 2000 academics devoted to intellectual diversity on campus.

Prof. Abrams recently wrote an op-ed for the New York Times about the lack of ideological diversity among administrators at his school and elsewhere. The column, titled Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators, brought together research Prof. Abrams had done on left-leaning bias among college professors and administrators, and how it stifles open debate.

Predictably, some people on campus reacted in this manner:

After penning an op-ed for The New York Times decrying the ideological homogeneity of his campus administration, a conservative-leaning professor at Sarah Lawrence College discovered intimidating messages—including demands that he quit his job—on the door of his office. The perpetrators had torn down the door’s decorations, which had included pictures of the professor’s family.

In the two weeks since the incident, Samuel Abrams, a tenured professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence, has repeatedly asked the college’s president, Cristle Collins Judd, to condemn the perpetrators’ actions and reiterate her support for free speech. But after sending a tepid campus-wide email that mentioned the importance of free expression, but mostly stressed her “commitment to diversity and inclusive excellence,” Judd spoke with Abrams over the phone; according to him, she accused him of “attacking” members of the community.

“She said I had created a hostile work environment,” Abrams said in an interview with Reason. “If [the op-ed] constitutes hate speech, then this is not a world that I want to be a part of.”

What’s more, when the two met in person, Judd implied that Abrams was on the market for a new job, he said.

“I am not on the job market,” he said. “I am tenured, I live in New York. Why would I go on the job market?”

I have to say that my first reaction to the story was surprise—not at the reaction of some students and of Judd, but at the fact that Abrams had ever been hired by Sarah Lawrence in the first place. Even back in the Stone Age when I was in college, Sarah Lawrence was known as an artsy-fartsy college with no required courses, and written evaluations instead of grades. What on earth is Abrams doing there, of all places?

Another thing of which I was almost certain, even before I looked it up, was that Judd was not the person who hired Abrams. And that turns out to be correct. Judd became the college’s president in August of 2017, and Abrams was hired eight years ago.

That last link is to an article about him in the college magazine. Here’s an excerpt:

n the heat of a presidential campaign that divided the nation into two camps barely able to communicate with each other, Sam Abrams (politics) took students from his course “Presidential Leadership and Decision Making” on a field trip deep into what most of them regarded as enemy territory: a Donald Trump rally on Long Island…

Abrams wanted to give his undergrads something he believes most college students these days aren’t getting—what he likes to call “viewpoint diversity.” He wanted them to see “what the world looks like that’s not pro–Bernie Sanders.”

When he came to Sarah Lawrence eight years ago, Abrams says, he was viewed as “the token raging conservative, but the reality is I’m not even close to that.” In a 2016 New York Times op-ed, he described himself this way: “In most places I’d be considered a moderate, but in the campus context I might as well have been Ted Cruz.”

In the article (I can’t find a date on it, but obviously it’s at least 2016 and perhaps later), Abrams makes it clear that he’s not a Trump supporter. My guess is he’s more or less in the Romney mold, politically. But he is correct that at Sarah Lawrence—and at most campuses today—that makes him Ted Cruz. And not just Cruz, but a Nazi.

I wish him well—he’s a brave man. He’s chosen to thrust himself into the spotlight for a worthy cause, that of intellectual diversity on campus. And he has made an important point in his most recent op-ed, which is that campus administrators are, if anything, more doctrinaire and rigidly leftist than professors.

Judd probably made the same point.

What’s in a name?

The New Neo Posted on by

These days, it’s likely to be four letters:

American names are shrinking. The two most popular names in the US for baby boys in 2017 were Liam and Noah; for girls, Emma and Ava were two of the three most popular. That’s a dramatic shift from just a few decades ago. In 1990, no name in the top ten had less than five letters—the interminable Michael and Christopher topped the list. No name with fewer than six letters made the top five in 1990—thank you Jessica, Ashley, Brittany, Amanda, and Samantha.

Girls’ and boys’ name lengths both reached their peak in 1989, with girls’ names averaging over 6.4 letters, and boys’ names average about 6. Since then, the average girl’s name fell by 0.4 letters and the average boy’s name by over 0.2 letters. The US government data used for this analysis includes all names given to at least five babies in a given year, which is the vast majority of names.

A lot of parents are using what used to be considered nicknames as given names, probably a trend towards less formality. There’s also a general trend towards shorter titles of businesses, as the article points out:

The length of popular song names are getting shorter. So are the length of video game names. Even company names are shrinking (e.g. Dunkin’ Donuts is now just Dunkin).

Shorter attention spans, too?

What’s going on at Google?

The New Neo Posted on by

Employee protests, that’s what:

After a day of global protests, employees at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters added their voices to calls for major change to company policies on gender pay equity and sexual misconduct.

Chants of “Stand up, fight back” and “Women’s rights are workers’ rights” reverberated through a crowd of several hundred workers who gathered on the eastern edge of the company’s vast Mountain View campus at about 11am on Thursday.

Google is not alone in Silicon Valley in being a tech company that veers to the left. Oh, I don’t doubt that a number of Google employees at the Silicon Valley campus are on the right—probably keeping a fairly low profile—but I also don’t doubt that most of its employees and executives share a basic pro-left political orientation. So one might call this a blue-on-blue battle, in the main.

But just try to get much detail about what the protesters are actually saying, other than the generality that women make less money there than men. But are the protesters saying that women make less than men doing the same exact job and working the same exact hours with the same production and the same seniority? Or are they just comparing salary differentials in general (by sex) and finding them wanting?

I’ve read several articles (including this older one) dealing with the alleged pay gap at Google, and so far I haven’t found any details about the form the discrimination is alleged to take, although those details make a difference—to me, anyway, although perhaps not to so many of the protesters.

And then there are the charges about the ignoring and/or coverup of sexual harassment charges at the company:

…female employees who spoke in a packed courtyard aired serious grievances.

One organizer of the California headquarters event shared the story of an anonymous co-worker who said she complained of sexual harassment by a Google vice-president, who then kept his job at the company for three more years.

Why did he keep his job? Was it because the company was investigating and affording him that arcane and apparently somewhat-outdated protection (particularly on the left), due process? If so, was the company instead supposed to fire him immediately because She Said So? And then tar and feather him on the way out? Would that have made them happy?

I don’t know. Maybe that’s not what this is about at all. But from that article it was extremely difficult to tell.

One of the people who was alleged to have sexually harassed someone and yet gotten an exceptionally generous severance package was Andy Rubin, the developer of the Android phone system. He denies the harassment charges.

Here’s what Wiki has to say about the harassment allegations and Rubin’s departure from Google:

On October 31, 2014, he left Google after nine years at the company to start an incubator for hardware startups.

While the departure was presented to the media as an amicable one where Rubin would spend more time on philanthropy and start-ups, according to media reports in 2017 and 2018, [Google] CEO Larry Page personally asked for Rubin’s resignation after a sexual harassment claim against Rubin was found to be credible. Rubin disputed these reports and denied wrongdoing. The incident, among others, led to protests from Google’s employee workforce in 2018 over Rubin reportedly receiving a $90 million “exit package” to expedite his separation from the company. Google responded by sending a memo to employees saying no employees dismissed due to sexual harassment concerns after 2016 had received payouts.

Not much to learn there. Accusations, yes. But were the charges true or false? And what were they, exactly?

I found much more information here, however (emphasis mine):

According to the report [recently in The NY Times], [Google] stayed silent about sexual misconduct allegations against three executives over the past decade, including Android creator Andy Rubin, who left the company in 2014. Tech news site The Information previously reported that Google had investigated Rubin for an inappropriate relationship while at the company.

But the Times uncovered new details, including a reported $90 million exit package that Rubin is said to have been granted when he departed the company. The Times reported that Rubin was accused of coercing a female employee, with whom he’d been having affair, into performing oral sex in a hotel room in 2013. A Google investigation found her claim to be credible and then-CEO Larry Page asked Rubin to resign, according to the Times.

Sam Singer, a lawyer for Rubin, disputed the allegations in the Times report.

“None of the allegations made about Mr. Rubin are true,” he told CNN Business in a statement, calling them “demonstrably false.”

So these allegations were made by a woman with whom Rubin was having an affair. That doesn’t mean coercion couldn’t have been involved; of course it could have been. But it does put the charges in an immediately different light. And since the word “credible” has merely come to mean “it wasn’t an absolute impossibility that this might have occurred,” it remains well-nigh impossible to figure out what may have actually happened.

Which brings us to the motherlode, the NY Times story that appeared about a week ago:

What Google did not make public was that an employee had accused Mr. Rubin of sexual misconduct. The woman, with whom Mr. Rubin had been having an extramarital relationship, said he coerced her into performing oral sex in a hotel room in 2013, according to two company executives with knowledge of the episode. Google investigated and concluded her claim was credible, said the people, who spoke on the condition that they not be named, citing confidentiality agreements. Mr. Rubin was notified, they said, and Mr. Page asked for his resignation.

Google could have fired Mr. Rubin and paid him little to nothing on the way out. Instead, the company handed him a $90 million exit package, paid in installments of about $2 million a month for four years, said two people with knowledge of the terms. The last payment is scheduled for next month.

Mr. Rubin was one of three executives that Google protected over the past decade after they were accused of sexual misconduct. In two instances, it ousted senior executives, but softened the blow by paying them millions of dollars as they departed, even though it had no legal obligation to do so. In a third, the executive remained in a highly compensated post at the company. Each time Google stayed silent about the accusations against the men.

So, now companies are supposed to publicize unsubstantiated allegations as long as they are “credible,” and to not only fire the accused but punish them by not giving them severance packages? And all of this can and should be done without a trial or proof (at least as far as I can tell)? And all reported in the Times, told to reporters by sources in the company who remain anonymous to the public and therefore cannot be questioned or evaluated for reliability.

I don’t know about you, but this whole thing sends a chill down my spine. In the case of Rubin (the only accused Google executive we get a few details about), that chill is about what appears to be the blowing up of something that seems to be a fairly typical lover’s quarrel in an area of human interaction that is unbelievably murky: the way that two lovers in a consensual relationship negotiate the sexual acts in which they are going to be engaging. What is “coercion” under those circumstances? What sort of “coercion” is actionable? How on earth do you prove or disprove that it happened the way it’s said to have happened?

And no, you cannot just believe one sex or other. Correction: of course you can, and many do, but that goes against our entire system of justice and fairness and replaces it with a new type of pseudo, witch-hunt “justice”: social justice. And yes, I know, that’s the goal of the left; it’s not an accident.

One of the many takeaways from this is don’t have sex with anyone in your company. Good luck enforcing that one, right? Nor would it even actually protect men (or women, for that matter, although it’s usually men who are accused) against false accusations by someone outside of the company. And that includes a wife, I suppose, who could just as easily make the sort of charge that was made against Rubin.

We’re not given any details of the charge of coercion against Rubin in terms of the form the coercion was alleged to have taken. Maybe Rubin pointed a gun at his lover’s head, right? I doubt it. Maybe he threatened to fire her. That would at least make sense in terms of the company’s having a special interest in the story. But how on earth could anyone ascertain the truth or falsehood of such claims, unless they were backed up with emails from Rubin that contained similar threats? And if he’s dumb enough to have done that, maybe he should be fired for stupidity alone.

I certainly haven’t a clue what actually happened between these two people. But neither do any of those protestors, I can pretty much guarantee.

Just to make the Rubin story even more convoluted, here’s a quote in that Times article, from Rubin and his spokespeople:

Sam Singer, a spokesman for Mr. Rubin, disputed that the technologist had been told of any misconduct at Google and said he left the company of his own accord.

“The New York Times story contains numerous inaccuracies about my employment at Google and wild exaggerations about my compensation,” Mr. Rubin said in a statement after the publication of this article. “Specifically, I never coerced a woman to have sex in a hotel room. These false allegations are part of a smear campaign by my ex-wife to disparage me during a divorce and custody battle.”

Wow. Just wow. A divorce and custody battle, the classic venue in which false accusations sometimes appear.

The Times article is long, and there’s a bit more in there about Rubin:

[His] success gave Mr. Rubin more latitude than most Google executives, said four people who worked with him.

Mr. Rubin often berated subordinates as stupid or incompetent, they said. Google did little to curb that behavior.

A little voice in my head says “well, perhaps they were stupid and incompetent.” Was Rubin’s initial problem, then, a lack of tact and people skills? Perhaps. It’s not an unusual problem for those who are very tech-oriented and who then are called on to manage people.

And then there’s this:

It took action only when security staff found bondage sex videos on Mr. Rubin’s work computer, said three former and current Google executives briefed on the incident. That year, the company docked his bonus, they said.

You mean like, Fifty Shades of Grey type stuff? But isn’t that mainstream now? Of course, it’s very stupid to put porn on your work computer, if that’s what Rubin did. What in fact did Rubin do?:

Mr. Singer, the spokesman for Mr. Rubin, said the executive “is known to be transparent and forthcoming with his feedback.” He said Mr. Rubin never called anyone incompetent.

Mr. Rubin, 55, who met his wife at Google, also dated other women at the company while married, said four people who worked with him. In 2011, he had a consensual relationship with a woman on the Android team who did not report to him, they said. They said Google’s human resources department was not informed, despite rules requiring disclosure when managers date someone who directly or indirectly reports to them.

In a civil suit filed this month by Mr. Rubin’s ex-wife, Rie Rubin, she claimed he had multiple “ownership relationships” with other women during their marriage, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to them. The couple were divorced in August.

The suit included a screenshot of an August 2015 email Mr. Rubin sent to one woman. “You will be happy being taken care of,” he wrote. “Being owned is kinda like you are my property, and I can loan you to other people.”

We are supposed to take this literally? Obviously, it seems likely that Rubin had a pretty scummy and promiscuous sex life. Not so very unusual among powerful people. But I highly doubt this particular exchange was anything other than banter of the sort you often find in romance novels—and porn. The money was probably real enough, but it seems as though everyone involved was a consenting adult.

And then we get this, which is apparently a further reference to the charges I already discussed, about coercion to have oral sex:

Mr. Rubin was casually seeing another woman he knew from Android, according to two company executives briefed on the relationship. The two had started dating in 2012 when he was still leading the division, these people said.

By 2013, she had cooled on him and wanted to break things off but worried it would affect her career, said the people. That March, she agreed to meet him at a hotel, where she said he pressured her into oral sex, they said. The incident ended the relationship.

The woman waited until 2014 before filing a complaint to Google’s human resources department and telling officials about the relationship, the people said. Google began an investigation.

What does “casually seeing” and “dating” mean these days, in this context? Are we to understand they were just dating without having sex? Is that even believable (credible)? Other reports refer to this as an affair (and earlier in the same article the Times has called it an “extramarital relationship”), so again it’s impossible to understand what’s actually being alleged here. My best guess is that “casually seeing” means “having regular sex without commitment.”

The woman says she had thoughts of breaking it off (the “casual seeing,” or the affair? Or were they one and the same?) but did not express those thoughts to the man in question because she’s worried about the effect on her career (duh, maybe she should have thought of that before she began a some type of affair with a married higher-up at the company? Or maybe she began that affair with the thought that it would help her career?).

Again, the “pressure” or coercion is unspecified in the story, although I would imagine it was specified by the woman when she detailed her charges against Rubin to the company. I wonder why the Times—which has seen fit to tell us just about everything else it can find—hasn’t told us the details of that. Perhaps for some reason the reporters couldn’t get the information about the nature of the coercion, or perhaps they got it and failed to publish it because the information weakens their story in some way.

And then, of course, there’s her wait before filing a complaint. What was that about? We’re not told.

Do the Google employees who are demonstrating about this know, or care, about any of its oddities? Do they entertain any doubt at all about Rubin’s guilt? Do they know what he is even supposed to be guilty of? How many of them just believe that a bad man was mean to a woman, and Google didn’t immediately place him in the stocks so that they could throw rotten tomatoes at him?

Who knows? Not me.

The latest jobs report is out

The New Neo Posted on by

And the news is very very good:

Job growth blew past expectations in October and year-over-year wage gains jumped past 3 percent for the first time since the Great Recession, the Labor Department reported Friday.

Nonfarm payrolls powered up by 250,000 for the month, well ahead of Refinitiv estimates of 190,000. The unemployment rate stayed at 3.7 percent, the lowest since December 1969.

“The job market is doing remarkably well, particularly this late in the expansion,” said Jim Baird, partner and chief investment officer for Plante Moran Financial Advisors. “This report adds yet another data point to a narrative that has been positive for the labor market this year. Little seems to stand in the way of the economy finishing 2018 out on solid footing.”

I wonder if it will matter in terms of Tuesday’s election.

Biting off more than I can chew

The New Neo Posted on by

I tend to have an unofficial and unplanned schedule for blogging. I don’t always follow it, but usually I do most of my posting some time in the early-to-mid-afternoon. There are early-morning exceptions, of course, as well as late-night ones. But generally that’s the pattern: early-to-mid-afternoon.

But sometimes I get behind, even though I don’t meant to. Today was one of those days. This time it happened because of something that’s not unusual: I started a post that I thought would be short, very short. In this case it was about the Google demonstrations. I was just going to say a little bit about them and move on. But it took me longer than I thought it would to get any information except the most basic, and then the story ended up being more convoluted than I expected.

That’s the thing about blogging, or one of the things. Time. You never know how much time a post will take, or where it will lead you. My natural curiosity seems to dictate that I try to write something that’s not just surface and knee-jerk, but that goes into a certain amount of depth instead (although this being a blog and considering the need to produce a few posts each day, it can’t be too much depth).

But that all takes time. And my efforts are not always successful.

Thus, my 600-or-so current drafts, containing full-fledged posts, half-posts, disorganized notes, lists of sources, or just ideas for posts. At least I’m unlikely to run out of ideas if I have a dry spell.

[ADDENDUM: Oh, and by the way, I haven’t forgotten Part II of my Soros post. Probably will be published tomorrow. Probably.]

Trump speech and press conference on the caravan and illegal immigration

The New Neo Posted on by

I was out all afternoon and as I drove home I happened to turn the radio on while Trump was giving a speech and then answering questions about the caravan and illegal immigration policy. And so I listened to it.

So far I haven’t been able to find a transcript of its text—I wanted to be able to refer to it for this post. But having heard about a half-hour of his remarks, and then thought (while I sat in traffic) about how the press would cover them, I was not surprised by this CNN headline: “Trump says he will restrict asylum, claims troops will shoot at rock throwers.”

Did he, now?

Actually, I didn’t hear him do either. On the first point, I heard him say he would apply the asylum laws in a timely and more efficient manner, by detaining arrivals rather than releasing them into the general population to disappear by the time their hearings come about. I heard him say that at present most people who do show up for their hearings are denied asylum, and that he believes the bulk of the new arrivals will also be denied asylum under the system that will be implemented. He did not say the rules for asylum itself would change, and he said people will still get hearings but that the hearings will occur sooner than before.

On the second point, he said that people who throw rocks at soldiers or police in order to injure them, as recently occurred in Mexico at the hands of some in the caravan, will be treated as though these people had firearms, because hurled rocks can do grievous and serious injury.

Here are some quotes from the CNN article:

President Donald Trump on Thursday claimed he would sign an executive order “next week” aimed at restricting US asylum rules, as he seeks to use a group of Central American migrants heading for the US border as part of his midterm election closing argument.

He also suggested that the US troops he dispatched to the US-Mexico border could fire on someone in the migrant caravan if the person threw rocks or stones at them.

Compare that “could” to the headline’s “will” as in “claims troops will shoot at rock throwers.” Quite a difference.

But in addition, if you look at what Trump actually said rather than CNN’s paraphrasing of what he said, you’ll find this quote from Trump much further down in the CNN article:

Asked if he envisions US troops firing on anyone in the groups of migrants, Trump told reporters at the White House: “I hope not. I hope not — but it’s the military.”

“I hope there won’t be that,” Trump said, but added that anybody throwing rocks or stones at the military service members will be considered to be using a firearm, “because there’s not much difference when you get hit in the face with a rock.”

So again, that—which was in response to a question by the press in the first place—gets translated into “claims troops will shoot at rock throwers.”

Later on in the CNN article you can see this:

A White House aide had said earlier Thursday that Trump would unveil an executive action requiring migrants to request asylum at legal points of entry and preventing them from claiming asylum if they are caught crossing the border illegally. Although the President referenced such a policy in his speech, he offered no defense of how such a plan, once finalized, could be legal, given laws presently allowing migrants the right to claim asylum once they are on American soil.

Well, perhaps the reporters might have actually, you know, looked it up to have found the answer to their question. The rule is this (an excerpt from a long article):

The European Court of Justice (ECJ), supreme court for the European Union (EU), has ruled that would-be migrants must seek asylum in the first country they reach.

CNN, one of the many media outlets reporting on the ruling, says this: “The European Union’s top court has ruled that refugees must continue to seek asylum in the first European country they reach, even in exceptional circumstances like the migrant crisis of 2015.” What they should have said is “especially in exceptional circumstances like the migrant crisis of 2015”, because it is during crises that having bright-line guidelines to follow become most important…

Mexico has an affirmative obligation to accept and make a judgment about the Hondurans’ claims to asylum because it, too, is a signatory to the U.N. Convention. Just as surely, the aliens themselves had an affirmative obligation to seek safe haven there. Consider that San Diego ports of entry are on the extreme west coast of the continent, whereas Honduras sits considerably east and south. A quick look at a map shows that this family spent considerable time traversing nearly the whole of Mexico and had plenty of time and opportunity to seek out Mexican officials to seek asylum. That they didn’t do so is notable.

How distressing that the Europeans, who have made such a muddle over their own illegal mass migration responses, have gotten this issue right while the leaders in our homeland security organizations still don’t seem to get it.

The problem is that here in the United States this international principle of demanding that migrants claim asylum or refuge at the first safe country they reach is mostly honored in the breach. Everyone pays lip service to it, but no one, least of all our pusillanimous political or government leaders, really expects America to demand that the international convention be scrupulously adhered to, either by those who are allegedly seeking shelter from harm, or by the countries those migrants use as doormats en route to America as the nation of economic choice.

So, that would be the legal basis for saying that people in the caravan must “request asylum at legal points of entry” and be prevented “from claiming asylum if they are caught crossing the border illegally.” But since I actually heard Trump discussing the fact that their asylum claims would be heard after a border crossing, I wonder if CNN isn’t also wrong about the idea that Trump was saying that people in the caravan wouldn’t be able to claim asylum once here.

This type of muddled and/or mendacious coverage is typical; there’s nothing particularly special about CNN.

At this point, reading and interpreting news articles is a something of a full-time job—minus the pay, of course, and no commute. First there’s the article and its point of view. Then there’s the research to see what the actual facts might be. With a speech and/or press conference, that usually involves getting a transcript (although in this case I haven’t found one yet) to check on what a person really said versus what the article reports that he or she said. And after that there’s usually a lot more to do in order to fact check everything as best as one can.

Who has time for all of that? Even bloggers like me want to leave the computer every now and then to do more than pee.

And so the research always remains incomplete. But oh, wouldn’t it be nice if neutral and intelligent reporters did their jobs as they’re supposed to be done? Ah, but then the reporters wouldn’t be able to change the world in the direction they wish.

ADDENDUM: I found a video of the speech and press conference. I’ve cued up one of the most relevant parts, but of course you can watch the whole thing:

Rise and shine—after a while

The New Neo Posted on by

This explains a lot:

Every morning, people sleepily drag themselves out of bed, wandering through a brain fog that seems to take forever to dissipate. Early risers will deny it exists, but evidence in a new paper in the journal NeuroImage suggests otherwise. The University of California, Berkeley team behind the study also reveal the one way to get through it.

The term for that cognitive fog is “sleep inertia,” but before the current study we’ve never been quite sure why people experience it, says Raphael Vallat, Ph.D., the lead study author and post-doctoral fellow at The University of California, Berkeley. In the paper, he proposes a reason why it exists: Even when the body is awake and moving in the morning, its brain is asleep in some capacity for some time after.

I don’t drink coffee, although some people swear by it (you know who you are!). I can’t stand coffee or any caffeinated beverage.

I also like to use a snooze alarm; I’m most definitely not a morning person (unless you count the wee hours of the morning, when I hit my stride).

But once I’m actually out of bed and standing, I seem to wake up to what I would consider full alertness quite quickly. And you?