4 in 10 Americans think socialism would be good for this country

The New Neo Posted on by

A recent Gallup poll indicates that 4 in 10 Americans think socialism’s pretty darn good. Here’s Gallup’s short version.

The Gramscian march has borne fruit, because (based on a poll from last year that has age-related data on the same subject), it seems this is an age-dependent phenomenon:

Americans aged 18 to 29 are as positive about socialism (51%) as they are about capitalism (45%). This represents a 12-point decline in young adults’ positive views of capitalism in just the past two years and a marked shift since 2010, when 68% viewed it positively. Meanwhile, young people’s views of socialism have fluctuated somewhat from year to year, but the 51% with a positive view today is the same as in 2010.

Older Americans have been consistently more positive about capitalism than socialism. For those 50 and older, twice as many currently have a positive view of capitalism as of socialism.

That’s probably because older people went to school back when socialism wasn’t praised to the skies, and also because they not only learned more about history and economics and civics, but older people have done more observing of the course of human events.

Here’s the full data, where you can see the Democrat vs. Republican breakdown, which is profound. 70% of Democrats think socialism would be good for the country vs. 13% of Republicans (and who are these mysterious socialist Republicans, by the way?). Also note that the margin of error of the poll is plus or minus 6%, which is quite large.

Then there’s this:

Additionally, while a majority of Democrats view socialism positively, that is not a major change in the eight years Gallup has tracked this metric. The major shift over this time has been the reduced rate of Democrats who now view capitalism positively (47%).

So the majority of Democrats are high on socialism, and this has been going on for at least eight years. It also represents not so much an increase in approval for socialism as an increasing disdain for capitalism.

But ignorance is also part of it, because it’s unclear that those lauding socialism have a clue what it actually is. They seem to be confusing it with “equality”:

Previous Gallup research shows that Americans’ definition of socialism has changed over the years, with nearly one in four now associating the concept with social equality and 17% associating it with the more classical definition of having some degree of government control over the means of production.

Combined with this increase in ignorance is an increase in confidence in one’s state of knowledge. It’s a common combination, I’ve found:

While 51% of U.S. adults say socialism would be a bad thing for the country, 43% believe it would be a good thing. Those results contrast with a 1942 Roper/Fortune survey that found 40% describing socialism as a bad thing, 25% a good thing and 34% not having an opinion.

Now only 6% have no opinion.

Dunning-Kruger effect, anyone?

That long-awaited declassification

The New Neo Posted on by

Seems as though we’ve been hearing this sort of thing for a long time now, doesn’t it?:

Republican Congressman and House Oversight Committee Member Mark Meadows there will be more information showing that President Trump was set up by senior officials with the FBI and DOJ. He made the comments Monday on “Fox & Friends,” adding that the declassification of documents will reveal it…

Moreover, the North Carolina Congressman explained that ‘the American people will be astonished’ when Trump declassifies more information. For example, the classified FISA interviews, Bruce Ohr 302 FBI interviews and the so called “Gang of Eight” binder.

Former House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy said Sunday, the new information could reveal “game-changer” evidence further disproving the collusion narrative.

“I think declassification is right around the corner and hopefully the American people will be able to judge for themselves,” said Meadows.

I can’t even imagine what a real “game-changer” would be. There are way too many people who would not believe even the most shocking of evidence about the actions of the Russiagate players, or would justify it and regard it as having been necessary and proper to get the evil Trump.

Now it’s Lynch vs. Comey

The New Neo Posted on by

Actually, it was Lynch vs. Comey close to half a year ago, but the testimony wasn’t made public till now:

Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch denied to congressional investigators last year that she ever instructed former FBI Director James Comey to minimize the Hillary Clinton email investigation by urging him to call it a “matter” instead of an “investigation.”

“I did not. I have never instructed a witness as to what to say specifically. Never have, never will,” Lynch told a joint task force of the House Oversight and Judiciary committees.

The transcript of the Dec. 19 interview, released Monday evening by House Judiciary ranking member Doug Collins, R-Ga., clashes with what Comey testified under oath.

If anyone gets into serious trouble for the entire Spygate matter, it’s a good guess that it would be Comey. Everyone seems to have a beef with him. Could it be because he’s an insufferable, self-righteous, holier-than-thou, self-serving liar?

Although I’m not sure how well that differentiates Comey from all that many of the others.

Teaching about cotton is apparently offensive

The New Neo Posted on by

This doesn’t appear to be some sort of spoof:

A cotton plant growing at Campbell Elementary School [in Arlington, Virginia] drew criticism online today, but Arlington Public Schools said allegations that staff were going to make kids “pick cotton” was a misunderstanding.

“At no time, never, was the school going to have students pick cotton,” said APS spokesman Frank Bellavia.

That prompts me to ask the following question: If the staff had said they were going to make only the white students pick cotton, would those same now-outraged people have applauded them?

Continuing:

Catherine Ashby, the Director of Communications for APS, tells ARLnow that a teacher planted cotton seeds in pots as an experiment to see how they would grow. Social media posts about the experiment from the teacher prompted objections from other educators.

“She tweeted about her experiment and what she was growing, and that’s what got other staff members upset about what she was doing,” said Ashby.

Social media again. The center of our outrage age.

More [emphasis mine]:

Community members started talking online about the incident after an email circulated from Campbell Principal Maureen Nesselrode, who called a staff meeting to discuss what to do with the plant. Bellavia said the plant was destroyed after the meeting.

So the modern Red Guards aren’t content with just destroying reputations of living people or statues of dead people. Offending plants must be destroyed.

By the way, the history of slavery and cotton are indeed intertwined—not that that’s any fault of the cotton. But Founding Fathers who thought (and/or hoped) that slavery might dwindle away in some sort of natural process over time didn’t account for the invention of the cotton gin, which gave slavery a huge boost of energy for a while:

The invention of the cotton gin caused massive growth in the production of cotton in the United States, concentrated mostly in the South. Cotton production expanded from 750,000 bales in 1830 to 2.85 million bales in 1850. As a result, the region became even more dependent on plantations and slavery, with plantation agriculture becoming the largest sector of its economy. While it took a single slave about ten hours to separate a single pound of fiber from the seeds, a team of two or three slaves using a cotton gin could produce around fifty pounds of cotton in just one day. The number of slaves rose in concert with the increase in cotton production, increasing from around 700,000 in 1790 to around 3.2 million in 1850. By 1860, black slave labor from the American South was providing two-thirds of the world’s supply of cotton, and up to 80% of the crucial British market. The cotton gin thus “transformed cotton as a crop and the American South into the globe’s first agricultural powerhouse”.

Because of its inadvertent effect on American slavery, and on its ensuring that the South’s economy developed in the direction of plantation-based agriculture (while encouraging the growth of the textile industry elsewhere, such as in the North), the invention of the cotton gin is frequently cited as one of the indirect causes of the American Civil War.

I wonder whether the cotton-objectors ever wear clothing made of cotton? I think to be ethically consistent they really need to purge King Cotton from their lives entirely.

[NOTE: By the way, that King Cotton link contains a lot of very interesting information, such as this:

When war broke out, the Confederates refused to allow the export of cotton to Europe. The idea was that this cotton diplomacy would force Europe to intervene. However, European states did not intervene, and following Abraham Lincoln’s decision to impose a Union blockade, the South was unable to market its millions of bales of cotton. The production of cotton increased in other parts of the world, such as India and Egypt, to meet the demand, and new profits in cotton were among the motives of the Russian conquest of Central Asia. A British-owned newspaper, The Standard of Buenos Aires, in cooperation with the Manchester Cotton Supply Association succeeded in encouraging Argentinian farmers to drastically increase production of cotton in that country and export it to the United Kingdom…

Stanley Lebergott (1983) shows the South blundered during the war because it clung too long to faith in King Cotton. Because the South’s long-range goal was a world monopoly of cotton, it devoted valuable land and slave labor to growing cotton instead of urgently needed foodstuffs.

In the end, “King Cotton” proved to be a delusion that misled the Confederacy into a hopeless war that it ended up losing.

Watch out for that law of unintended consequences.]

Anti-EU populism seems to be gaining in Europe

The New Neo Posted on by

The same trends that led to Trump’s election and the recent results in countries as far-flung as Brazil and Australia appear to be building in Europe—in particular, the European Parliament—as well:

…[P]opulist candidates might win almost one-fourth of the seats in the new [European] parliament…

In a fractured parliament, control over roughly one-fourth of the seats can give a faction substantial influence. Erlanger says that, with this level of representation, populists could “create serious delays and difficulties in the next parliament.” Moreover:

“In addition to passing or rejecting laws, European lawmakers have new powers that could allow populists to block trade deals, approve the bloc’s budget and play an important role in determining who will replace the European Union’s most powerful leaders.”

Mujtaba Rahman, the Eurasia Group’s managing director, puts it this way:

“For the first time, we’ll see meaningful populist representation at the European level, so there is at least a risk of a populist insurgency trying to take over or paralyze institutions from within, with implications for Europe’s capacity to act.”

Call it Euxit. And because Britain has yet to actually exit from the EU, the Brexit forces can be part of this movement within the EU.

A wild ride: those diving horses and their riders

The New Neo Posted on by

You may have heard of the famous diving horses (perhaps through the movie “Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken”), but I never had until a day or two ago. I was watching a TV show about Annie Oakley—what an astounding story—and somehow that led me to read about other attractions of the era and I stumbled into the diving horses (see this and this, for example).

At first I thought it was some sort of joke. But the diving horses were real. The practice was discontinued quite some time ago because of animal rights advocates campaigning against it (despite the fact that trainers say the horses were never mistreated and were not injured either). See for yourself:

Animal rights activists predominate in the YouTube comments, too.

Apparently it was a big Atlantic City attraction in my youth, and I could have seen the diving horses because my family went to Atlantic City a few times. But I never saw them; it’s the sort of thing you’d tend to remember. And of course there’s a Trump angle in the article–oh, isn’t there always?

Horse-diving continued until 1978, when pressure from animal rights groups forced organizers to shutter the show. In 1994, Donald Trump’s organization, which owns Steel Pier now, attempted to bring back the act by featuring diving mules and miniature horses, but public protests once again brought the act to an end.

I don’t know what date that was written, but perhaps before his presidency.

I cannot even begin to understand the mentality of a person who would voluntarily jump onto a horse about to dive off a high platform, and hang on tight. But hey, I don’t even ride horses when they’re on the ground.

More here:

While injuries did happen, it was more often the horse’s rider who was at risk than the horse. Former diving horse rider Sarah Detwiler Hart, recalled just how much trust there needed to between rider and horse: “They went when they were ready… I wouldn’t want to be on a horse that was agitated. My life depended on that horse doing that in a calm way, so there was no electrical devices or trap doors or anything like that during my time.”

And here’s an article about the heroine of the movie “Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken”:

In her book, Sonora refutes that these horses were made to jump against their will. She said they all loved it.

I found that difficult to believe (as did many animal welfare people) until Sonora followed that thought with:

“Some people say they must have forced the horses to do what they did. Sonora told me many times the last thing anyone would want was to be up on a tower with a horse that did not want to be there.”

That kinda makes more sense than them forcing the horses to do this. I mean, really, she has a point… I’ve been places where a horse didn’t want to be and they really let you know. I cannot imagine being with any of my horses on top of that tower… No human would put themselves 60? up on the air on a rickety tower with a horse – if the horse was into it. ‘Nuff said.

And this is from another rider (the riders seem to have mostly been pretty young women):

[Her father] then constructed the tower on which he put his daughter, Lorena. Here is what she had to say:

Lorena said her horses loved to jump, often making it difficult to get them to wait to build suspense before jumping. Much depended on the horse, with some leaping immediately off the platform while some took up to 5 minutes to look around. The horse Klatawah (Indian for “go away” or “go to h*ll”), would often paw with his hoof as many times as he felt before diving, a remnant of a pawing-his-age act he had performed. When the crowd was small, Klatawah would make a “few lazy scrapes” and dive from a “reclining” position, but he would prance and show off when the crowd was large.

“I felt his muscles tense as his big body sprang out and down, then had an entirely new feeling. It was a wild, almost primitive feel, that only comes with complete freedom of contact with the earth. Then I saw the water rushing up at me, and the next moment we were in the tank.”

Annette [the sister of the main character in the movie] explained why she dove for so long – even after her sister was blinded – and why Sonora continued to dive after her accident:

“But, the truth was, riding the horse was the most fun you could have and we just loved it so. We didn’t want to give it up. Once you were on the horse, there really wasn’t much to do but hold on. The horse was in charge.”

The most fun you could have.

I’ll just take their word for it.

Andrew C. McCarthy on the Steele dossier and the “verified application”

The New Neo Posted on by

Andrew C. McCarthy has been writing up a storm about Russiagate, Spygate, whatever you want to call it gate, for quite some time now, and he’s always worth reading. Here’s his latest:

In rushing out their assessment of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, Obama-administration officials chose not to include the risible Steele-dossier allegations that they had put in their “VERIFIED APPLICATION” for warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) because . . . wait for it . . . the allegations weren’t verified.

And now, the officials are squabbling over who pushed the dossier. Why? Because the dossier — a Clinton-campaign opposition-research screed, based on anonymous Russian sources peddling farcical hearsay, compiled by a well-paid foreign operative (former British spy Christopher Steele) — is crumbling by the day.

As I write, we mark the two-year anniversary of Robert Mueller’s appointment to take over the Russiagate probe — which is fast transforming into the Spygate probe.

The dossier not only hasn’t stood the test of time, it was never verified. And yet the investigators claimed it had been verified, as required. And they kept repeating the “verified” claim:

The rules of the FISC require the Justice Department to notify the court promptly if misstatements or inaccuracies have been discovered. Far from alerting the FISC that information in what it boldly labeled the “VERIFIED APPLICATION” was actually unverified, the Justice Department and the FBI kept reaffirming the dossier allegations to the court — in January, April, and June of 2017.

McCarthy also writes that in the disagreement between Comey and Brennan over who was least responsible for pushing the fake dossier, Comey might have the edge and Brennan might be more implicated. But even if that’s true, it certainly doesn’t absolve Comey:

Even if former director Comey is right that it was Brennan, not he, who was trying to slide the dossier into the ICA, Comey’s FBI still used it in the FISC. Plus, Comey himself did agree to brief Trump on it, though in a very incomplete way — alerting the president-elect to the lurid story about prostitutes in a Moscow hotel, but studiously omitting the tiny detail about how the FBI had used the “salacious and unverified” dossier in the FISC to contend that Trump’s campaign was in a conspiracy with Russia to undermine the election.

Much much more at the link.

Australia stays the course in “surprise” election results

The New Neo Posted on by

I hadn’t been following the poll predictions for today’s Australian election, but I heard something on the news about it yesterday and apparently the prognostications were all for a Labor victory and a resultant change in government. When I heard that I thought: Hmmm, I wonder. And then I realized that in the last couple of years I’ve become not just skeptical of polls but extremely skeptical.

And that has panned out, because—surprise, surprise!— “Morrison celebrates ‘miracle’ win”:

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has thanked voters for re-electing his conservative coalition in a shock result at the federal polls.

He told supporters he had “always believed in miracles” as partial results showed the Liberal-National Coalition close to a majority.

Opposition Labor Party leader Bill Shorten has announced he is resigning after accepting defeat.

Exit polls had suggested a narrow Labor win for the first time in six years…

Try finding someone who says they saw this result coming.

For well over two years, the coalition has trailed behind Labor in the opinion polls, and the assumption had been it would be Labor’s turn to govern.

But somehow Scott Morrison managed to turn things around at the 11th hour – and he did it largely on his own.

And this reminded me of Nixon’s “silent majority”:

Thanking his opponent, Mr Morrison paid tribute to “the quiet Australians” who had voted for the Coalition.

I’ve read speculation about why the polls keep being wrong these days, and often in the same direction of underestimating votes on the right. Some say it’s because a significant number of respondents on the right lie to pollsters about their prospective votes. There probably are such people, of course. But I don’t think that’s really what’s going on for the most part. My hunch is that people on the right (and certainly Trump voters of either party in 2016) are less likely to answer pollsters at all, and are more likely to hang up. Pollsters try to correct for low cooperation rates by correcting their samples for party balance, but I think in the current climate that’s especially inadequate. Turnout is very very difficult to predict.

Of course, a great many people would disagree with me, and say that the pollsters are purposely getting it wrong in order to motivate people on the left to go out and vote. For various reasons, I don’t think that’s what’s happening. The first is that it’s not clear whether overestimating or underestimating is the greater motivator, so it’s a big gamble if that’s what they’re doing. The second is that pollsters’ reputations are damaged by faulty polls that fail to accurately predict the outcome. Maybe at the beginning of a campaign they’re fudging the results somewhat for motivational reasons, but as the election draws closer I think they are quite motivated to get it right.

More of the astounding Gwen Verdon

The New Neo Posted on by

Once you watch a YouTube video on a certain topic, YouTube keeps suggesting more.

And more.

And sometimes I follow their lead—such as recently, with videos of Gwen Verdon that kept coming up following my writing this post about her. What an amazing dancer she was!

This is one of Verdon’s most famous movie dances. You’ve seen it already if you ever saw the movie “Damn Yankees.” In it she dances with husband-to-be Bob Fosse, performing a jointly-choreographed number (ignore the silly song; not important). Fosse was a good dancer, but to me Gwen outshines him utterly in this piece:

There’s not a moment there that Gwen isn’t perfect. Her dancing is witty and fun-filled, with incredible energy and precision as well (two things you might think would be contradictory). One of the things Verdon specialized in was what’s called “isolation” in the dance world. That is, she could take each muscle and use it independently and carefully, which made her seem to have even more muscles and joints that most people posses. Her hip action (featured quite prominently in that video) wasn’t just bumping and grinding; it was very complex, for want of a better word.

She gave every single moment 110%. And the whole time—and I think this was best of all, really—she had remarkable carriage, grace and ease throughout. There is never any tension to be seen in her body, other than the tension of muscles working exactly as she wanted them to work. And all done with a sunny smile.

Speaking of hips, feast your eyes on this. It’s not my favorite type of dancing, but Gwen is unsurpassed here and you can also see her isolation technique (as well as her control of cigarette smoking). This was done in 1968, when Gwen was about 43:

Teaching Islam

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a lawsuit that may go all the way to the Supreme Court:

During the 2014-2015 school year, a Christian teenage girl was forced to recite the Islamic conversion creed — the Shahada — in writing for her 11th-grade class. She was also taught that “Most Muslims’ faith is stronger than the average Christian.” The Thomas More Law Center (TMLC) sued the school responsible, and the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled with the school. TMLC appealed to the Supreme Court, filing a Writ of Certiorari on Monday.

“Under the guise of teaching history or social studies, public schools across America are promoting the religion of Islam in ways that would never be tolerated for Christianity or any other religion,” TMLC President and Chief Counsel Richard Thompson said in a statement.

Islamophilia rather than Islamophobia?

No wonder Comey et al. fear Barr

The New Neo Posted on by

I make no predictions about what will ultimately happen as a result of the investigations Bill Barr has ordered into the Russiagate investigation itself. But I do know that if I were Comey or any of the other high-up participants in the affair also known as Spygate, I’d be somewhat perturbed right about now [emphasis mine]:

“The first step is to find out exactly what happened, and we’re trying to get our arms around that, getting all the relevant information from the various agencies and starting to talk to some of the people that have information,” Barr told Hemmer…

“I think there’s a misconception out there that we know a lot about what happened,” he said.

“The fact of the matter is Bob Mueller did not look at the government’s activities. He was looking at whether or not the Trump campaign had conspired with the Russians. But he was not going back and looking at the counterintelligence program. And we have a number of investigations underway that touch upon it — the main one being the office of inspector general that’s looking at the FISA warrants.”…

It emerged earlier this week that hard-charging U.S. Attorney John Durham was tapped to examine the origins of the Russia investigation, and has been working on his review “for weeks.” Bill Barr assigned Durham to conduct the inquiry into alleged misconduct and alleged improper government surveillance on the Trump campaign in 2016 as well as whether Democrats improperly colluded with foreign actors…

“I’ve been trying to get answers to questions and I found that a lot of the answers have been inadequate. And I’ve also found that some of the explanations I’ve gotten don’t hang together,” Barr told Hemmer…

People have to find out what the government was doing during that period. If we’re worried about foreign influence, for the very same reason shouldn’t we be worried about whether government officials abused their power and put their thumb on the scale?”

Of course we should. And not just people on the right; everyone should be concerned about it. But they’re not; au contraire.