Now we have the “adversity” SATs

The New Neo Posted on by

The College Board, which has been devising and administering the test known as the SATs, has announced the latest tweak they’ve devised to try to even the playing field:

The College Board, which oversees the SAT exam used by most U.S. colleges during the admissions process, plans to introduce an “adversity score” which takes into consideration the social and economic background of every student…

The new adversity score is being calculated using 15 factors, including the crime rate and poverty level from the student’s high school and neighborhood, The Wall Street Journal first reported.

Students won’t be privy to their scores but colleges and universities will see them when reviewing applications.

There are so many negative things about this move that I almost don’t know where to start. One of them, though, is apparent from that last sentence in the quote: students won’t see them, but the colleges will? So the whole thing will be hush-hush and kept even from the students themselves and their parents? I would think some sort of challenge could be mounted on that issue alone. One’s college fate, to be decided by some rating of how much (or how little) you’ve had to overcome in your life, that you are not allowed to even see?

But that’s a small issue compared to the larger one, which is the futility and hubris—and downright unfairness—of all attempts at what Thomas Sowell called “cosmic justice.” If you’ve never read his great book The Quest for Cosmic Justice, please do it soon. In the book, written in 1999, he describes the futility and inherent injustice of all such efforts. I could quote page after page after page, but for now I’ll just offer this short excerpt [emphasis mine]:

Cosmic justice is not about the rules of the game. It is about putting particular segments of society in the position that they would have been in but for some undeserved misfortune. This conception of fairness requires the third parties must wield the power to control outcomes, over-riding rules, standards, or the preferences of other people…

Implicit in much discussion of a need to rectify social inequities is the notion that some segments of society, thought no fault of their own, lack things which others receive as windfall gains, through no virtue of their own. True as this may be, the knowledge required to sort this out intellectually, much less rectify it politically, is staggering and superhuman. Far from society being divided into those with a more or less standard package of benefits and others lacking these benefits, each individual may have both windfall advantages and windfall disadvantages, and the particular combination of windfall gains and losses varies enormously from individual to individual…

To apply the same rules to everyone requires no prior knowledge of anyone’s childhood, cultural heritage, philosophical (or sexual) orientation, or the innumerable historical influences to which he or his forebears may have been subjected. If there are any human beings capable of making such complex assessments, they cannot be numerous. Put differently, the dangers of errors increase exponentially when we presume to know so many things and the nature of their complex interactions.

Simply put, it is hubris to think we could do this. It simply cannot be done with any fairness whatsoever.

But in addition, the SATs are supposed to be objective tests. For decades there have been efforts to make the tests themselves more culture blind and therefore more truly objective. Work on that if you must, but objective tests must be scored objectively and if that can’t be done then just do away with them. Don’t start this “adversity” stuff.

There are plenty of other ways to put your thumb on the scale: knowledge about the high schools involved and their quality, teacher recommendations for each particular student that can mention individual histories that might matter, interviews, and the personal essays (both long and short) that accompany college applications.

That should be more than enough.

[ADDENDUM: And in Canada we have this:

The Liberal government of Canada has formulated a new program to which all universities are expected to commit. It is called “Dimensions: Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.” A “Charter” for “Dimensions” has been distributed to all university presidents, who are urged to sign, endorsing the program for their universities…

What does “equity, diversity, and inclusion” mean in practice? It means that certain categories of people must [be]favoured in academic competitions, while unfavoured categories of people must be excluded. The favoured must be put up for grants, or else the grants would not be forthcoming; conversely, unfavoured categories of people must be excluded from the competition, or else the grants would not be forthcoming.

How are favoured and unfavoured categories of people decided? According to the Charter:

“To advance institutional equity, diversity and inclusion, specific, measurable and sustainable actions are needed to counter systemic barriers, explicit and unconscious biases, and inequities. This includes addressing obstacles faced by, but not limited to, women, Indigenous Peoples, persons with disabilities, members of visible minority or racialized groups, and members of LGBTQ2+ communities.”

The theory of “systemic barriers,” much loved by sociologists, attributes the different distributions of categories of people in society to prejudice and discrimination on the basis of race, gender, and ethnicity. A “social justice,” equitable, diverse, and inclusive distribution would be for each gender, race, and ethnic group to be represented in every department, faculty, and university, in every list of competition winners, in every new hire, according to its exact percentage in the general population.

This new criterion, “representation according to its exact percentage in the general population,” has been institutionalized without any consent of the general population, without any legislation, without any vote…“Equality of results” is far from the liberal idea of “equality of opportunity,” in which occupational, monetary, and academic achievement results vary according to the motivation, preferences, abilities, and commitments of individuals.

The theory of “systemic barriers” assumes that there is no material difference among people in regard to motivation, preferences, abilities, and commitments, and that all differences in statistical representation are the result of prejudice and discrimination. This is clearly false.

Actually, I’m not so sure the theory assumes that. I think people who advocate this sort of thing don’t care any more, although perhaps they once did. I think that diversity has been raised to the highest level of urgency, above all other considerations, and there is no interest in hearing any argument that might counter that.]

Comey the Commie

The New Neo Posted on by

I couldn’t resist that headline, even though it’s not true that Comey is a Communist.

But apparently he once was a Communist, according to his own report, and it wasn’t just a supposed one-off like Brennan (whom I wrote about here).

During a 2003 interview in New York magazine, back when he was still US Attorney for the Southern District of NY, here’s what Comey said:

Comey has been savaged by William Safire and lauded by Chuck Schumer; just what kind of Republican is he, anyway? This sets Comey howling again. “I must be doing something right!” he says. “In college, I was left of center, and through a gradual process I found myself more comfortable with a lot of the ideas and approaches the Republicans were using.” He voted for Carter in 1980, but in ’84, “I voted for Reagan—I’d moved from Communist to whatever I am now. I’m not even sure how to characterize myself politically. Maybe at some point, I’ll have to figure it out.”

I think by now he’s figured it out, all right. Is “Trump-hater” a political party, or does it transcend parties?

And please see this piece I wrote a while back about this whole “Comey is a Republican” characterization.

It’s one thing to have been sort of leftist in college (during the 1970s, Comey was a teenager). But to have been a Communist was still quite unusual and quite radical. People change (this blog is dedicated to exploring political change), but that doesn’t mean that former Communists should be heading the FBI, unless they have fully explained their previous affiliation with Communism and what motivated their change, and exactly and precisely where they are politically today (something Comey never does). Even then I wouldn’t advocate naming that person director of the FBI, much less of the CIA like Brennan. But Obama appointed both of them to their respective positions of governmental power.

[ADDENDUM: No need to point out to me that it’s possible that Comey really is still some sort of Communist in deep cover. Yes, it’s possible (although if he were, I doubt he’d be admitting his past Communist sympathies in a 2003 interview). But I just don’t happen to think that’s what’s going on with him.]

Harvard and Ronald Sullivan: the dancing bears of the university give in to student pressure

The New Neo Posted on by

By now you’re probably read about the the dismissal of Ronald Sullivan and his wife from their posts at Harvard College’s Winthrop House:

The story begins last January when the African American Law School Professor Ronald Sullivan joined Harvey Weinstein’s defense team…

…[Sullivan’s] decision to represent the man at the centre of the #MeToo scandal proved too much for some radical students, who began organizing protests in Harvard Square. The chant heard most often at these rallies is ‘Believe Survivors’, the same phrase that activists used when campaigning against Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court. The implication is that the presumption of innocence should not be extended to men accused of rape or sexual assault.

Initially they wanted to get Sullivan fired from Harvard Law School, but the law school stood firmly behind Sullivan. Law schools still seem to understand the importance of allowing attorneys to defend unpopular clients without losing their teaching jobs. But then the college was approached with a different tactic by the activists:

Sullivan’s critics, perhaps realizing they weren’t going to get very far arguing that Harvey Weinstein wasn’t entitled to due process, focused instead on trying to get him removed as a dean of Winthrop House, one of Harvard’s undergraduate dorms, where he has served for 10 years. This position, which Sullivan shares with his wife Stephanie Robinson, a law lecturer at Harvard, is a pastoral one and, as such, gives him some responsibility for students’ mental health and well-being. This, then, was his Achilles heel.

This is an important point that gets somewhat lost in some of the articles on the issue—the approach of the anti-Sullivan activists was definitely tied to his defense of Weinstein, but it had a psychological twist involving his position as Winthrop dean:

To date, the only half-decent argument that’s been made against Sullivan being able to combine these two roles is one put forward by the feminist intellectual Catharine MacKinnon, also a professor at Harvard Law. For her, the issue turns on whether ‘sexually abused students can feel comfortable confiding in’ a dean who’s representing ‘a credibly accused multiple perpetrator of sexual assault’. She doesn’t categorically say they can’t, but she thinks it’s ‘an equality question’ for him and Harvard to consider…

But the Dean of Harvard College, a sociology professor named Rakesh Khurana, said after a meeting with Sullivan that he took ‘seriously’ the concerns expressed by the activists and said ‘more work must be done to uphold our commitment to the well-being of our students’. Those were no empty words, either. A few days later, he announced Harvard would carry out a ‘climate review’ of Winthrop House, an example of bureaucratic gobbledygook that didn’t bode well for Professor Sullivan. As he pointed out in the New York Times: ‘Never in the history of the faculty dean position has the dean been subjected to a “climate review” in the middle of some controversy.’

Sure enough, Khurana announced the outcome of the review on Saturday: Sullivan and his wife’s employment as faculty deans of Winthrop House would end on June 30.

‘Over the last few weeks, students and staff have continued to communicate concerns about the climate in Winthrop House to the college,’ he wrote in an email to students and staff at Winthrop. ‘The concerns expressed have been serious and numerous.’

Not only does this constitute a capitulation of the dancing bears (see *NOTE below) at Harvard to sensitive students over the right of a law professor to defend unpopular clients (and, connected with that, the right of that defendant to even have an effective defense with a lawyer of his/her choice), but it also represents Harvard’s placing the needs of the #MeToo crowd over its championing of a minority group professor as well as a profound break with its own law school, as describe here:

According to The New York Times, “They were the first African-American faculty deans in Harvard’s history.”…

The Harvard Crimson reports that over 50 law professors at Harvard, including Dershowitz, are standing behind Sullivan.

There’s still another aspect of the story, covered heavily in the Harvard newspaper the Crimson, which is that the “climate” in Winthrop House concerning Sullivan and Robinson seems to have a history prior to this incident. I read the whole Crimson article (it’s long) and found it not the least bit evident what they’re talking about, except that it seems that some people complained about the couple and had some trouble with them earlier. A commenter at the article wrote this, and I agree with it: “There are a lot of adjectives [in the Crimson article], like ‘toxic’ and ‘antagonistic’, but a paucity of specifics. All they really add up to is, ‘something I dislike.’ What did Robinson supposedly do or not do?”

At any rate, it’s fairly clear that these previous complaints were about other things, and that Sullivan and Robinson’s dismissal as deans would never have occurred but for the prospect of Sullivan defending Weinstein and the pressure from students worrying about being triggered. In an irony, Sullivan has actually quit the Weinstein defense team because of a scheduling conflict, but I doubt that would have put a dent in the students’ demands. He had already been branded as evil and insufficiently nurturing.

A lot of things are going on here, none of them good. But I’d like to discuss one thing that I don’t think has been emphasized enough in the Sullivan controversy, and that is the idea of what students should expect from universities as well as what universities should expect from students.

Are students to be considered adults? And if the university is still in loco parentis, does it need to be consistent in this regard?

When I was in college it was pretty clear: students were not adults. For the most part, we couldn’t legally drink. We couldn’t vote. Women not only didn’t live in men’s dorms and vice versa, we couldn’t even go upstairs in each other’s dorms. Women had curfews every single night; men did not.

Obviously, much of this was for the protection of women from sexual predators and pressures. It’s not that the rules couldn’t be circumvented—they could, and they sometimes were. But the colleges weren’t saying okay to a lot of sex among college age students, and for the most part society itself wasn’t saying okay, and therefore it was also easier for young women to learn how to say “no” to pressure, something a lot of compliant and people-pleasing (and love-seeking) women had trouble doing even if they really wanted to say “no.”

Simply put, society was strongly reinforcing women’s right to wait till they were ready to have sex. What that meant for each individual woman was different, but the general trend was quite different than now, when pressures are quite the opposite.

At the very same time, we college students were all treated as adults in that we weren’t given the impression that the world of the college was there to conform to our emotional needs and/or demands. If something made us uncomfortable—if a professor was insufficiently warm and fuzzy, or was defending a murderer or rapist, or whatever might upset us but was within the law—well then, it was pretty much suck it up, buttercup. That had its problems, too, but it had the distinct advantage of teaching us something about the world, which is that the world wasn’t going to cater to our vulnerabilities, and that it was up to us to try to get stronger and tougher and deal with it.

Not a bad lesson, really.

Today’s students probably have more to contend with, really—although they also have more resources in terms of counseling available if they need help dealing with the pressures. It’s not just the hookup culture, which I think is profoundly tension-producing. It’s social media, whipping them into a frenzy. It’s more instability at home—more divorce, for example, and more drug use. But in particular it’s that way too many adults have failed to teach them that no, the world doesn’t function around you and your PTSD, difficult and upsetting though this may be.

[*NOTE: The term “dancing bears” is one I’ve used several times before. It comes from a quote from Allan Bloom’s 80s classic on the university and its students, The Closing of the American Mind:

[S]tudents discovered that pompous teachers who catechized them about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears.

As I wrote in the post I just linked, in response to that Bloom quote:

Well, now that the universities have been purged of just about all remaining conservative professors and administrators, campus activists don’t have to listen to all that blather about academic freedom. Or if they do, it’s all about freedom for the left, freedom to threaten anyone and everyone who disagrees with them.]

“He did it!” “No, HE did it!”

The New Neo Posted on by

Now boys, stop squabbling.

Comey and Brennan are like two perps being questioned about a possible felony murder, each naming the other as the triggerman:

A potential rift is emerging between James Comey and John Brennan over who pushed to include information from the unverified Steele dossier in an intelligence community assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Comey, a former FBI director, sent an email to subordinates in late 2016 indicating Brennan, a former CIA director, wanted to include materials from the dossier in the intelligence community assessment, known as the ICA, Fox News reported.

Proactive CYA by Comey?

A former CIA official speaking on Brennan’s behalf is disputing the assertion. The former official told Fox that Brennan and James Clapper, a former director of national intelligence, opposed Comey’s push to include Steele dossier information in the ICA.

The dispute pits two former intelligence community officials against each other…

What caused the ice ages?

The New Neo Posted on by

Short answer: no one really knows although theories abound, and the causes are probably interactions among multiple factors.

I’ve always found the history of earth’s ice ages to be fascinating, from the moment I discovered some maps as a child flipping through my old World Book Encyclopedia (those of you of a certain age will know what I’m talking about). I’ve also always found it to be very very mysterious, and that hasn’t changed.

A few excerpts from the vast number of articles out there [emphasis mine]:

During the present ice age, glaciers have advanced and retreated over 20 times, often blanketing North America with ice. Our climate today is actually a warm interval between these many periods of glaciation. The most recent period of glaciation, which many people think of as the “Ice Age,” was at its height approximately 20,000 years ago.

Although the exact causes for ice ages, and the glacial cycles within them, have not been proven, they are most likely the result of a complicated dynamic interaction between such things as solar output, distance of the Earth from the sun, position and height of the continents, ocean circulation, and the composition of the atmosphere.

Between 52 and 57 million years ago, the Earth was relatively warm. Tropical conditions actually extended all the way into the mid-latitudes (around northern Spain or the central United States for example), polar regions experienced temperate climates, and the difference in temperature between the equator and pole was much smaller than it is today. Indeed it was so warm that trees grew in both the Arctic and Antarctic, and alligators lived in Ellesmere Island at 78 degrees North.

Then earth cooled, then warmed, then cooled…well, you get the idea.

The Earth was once more released from the grip of the big chill between 5 and 3 million years ago, when the sea was much warmer around North America and the Antarctic than it is today. Warm-weather plants grew in Northern Europe where today they cannot survive, and trees grew in Iceland, Greenland, and Canada as far north as 82 degrees North.

We are still in the midst of the third major cooling period that began around 3 million years ago, and its effect can be seen around the world, perhaps even in the development of our own species. Around 2 and a half million years ago, tundra-like conditions took over north-central Europe. Soon thereafter, the once-humid environment of Central China was replaced by harsh continental steppe. And in sub-Saharan Africa, arid and open grasslands expanded, replacing more wooded, wetter environments. Many paleontologists believe that this environmental change is linked to the evolution of humankind.

Plate tectonics are part of the causal explanations as well. But only part.

Another theory explaining these changes in climate involves the opening and closing of gateways for the flow of ocean currents. This theory suggests that the redistribution of heat on the planet by changing ocean circulation can isolate polar regions, cause the growth of ice sheets and sea ice, and increase temperature differences between the equator and the poles.

Also carbon dioxide, but not manmade carbon dioide:

One mechanism proposed as a cause of this decrease in carbon dioxide is that mountain uplift lead to enhanced weathering of silicate rocks, and thus removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Here’s another article I think worth quoting [emphasis mine]:

Throughout the Quaternary period, high latitude winters have been cold enough to allow snow to accumulate. It is when the summers are cold, (i.e., summers that occur when the sun is at its farthest point in Earth’s orbit), that the snows of previous winters do not melt completely. When this process continues for centuries, ice sheets begin to form. Finally, the shape of Earth’s orbit also changes. At one extreme, the orbit is more circular, so that each season receives about the same amount of insolation. At the other extreme, the orbital ellipse is stretched longer, exaggerating the differences between seasons. The eccentricity of Earth’s orbit also proceeds through a long cycle, which takes 100,000 years. Major glacial events in the Quaternary have coincided when the phases of axial tilt, precession of equinoxes and eccentricity of orbit are all lined up to give the northern hemisphere the least amount of summer insolation.

See this as well [emphasis mine]:

Today’s ice age most likely began when the land bridge between North and South America (Isthmus of Panama) formed and ended the exchange of tropical water between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, significantly altering ocean currents…

Records show that ice ages typically develop slowly, whereas they end more abruptly. Glacials and interglacials within an ice age display this same trend.

On a shorter time scale, global temperatures fluctuate often and rapidly. Various records reveal numerous large, widespread, abrupt climate changes over the past 100,000 years. One of the more recent intriguing findings is the remarkable speed of these changes. Within the incredibly short time span (by geologic standards) of only a few decades or even a few years, global temperatures have fluctuated by as much as 15°F (8°C) or more.

For example, as Earth was emerging out of the last glacial cycle, the warming trend was interrupted 12,800 years ago when temperatures dropped dramatically in only several decades. A mere 1,300 years later, temperatures locally spiked as much as 20°F (11°C) within just several years. Sudden changes like this occurred at least 24 times during the past 100,000 years. In a relative sense, we are in a time of unusually stable temperatures today—how long will it last?

I’m not a scientist, but I can see why at least some scientists buck the current political trends and advance the idea that natural processes account for much or even most of our current tendency towards global warming, and/or climate change in general. My favorite climate scientist, Judith Curry, has this to say on the subject:

She tells me, for example, that between 1910 and 1940, the planet warmed during a climatic episode that resembles our own, down to the degree. The warming can’t be blamed on industry, she argues, because back then, most of the carbon-dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels were small. In fact, Curry says, “almost half of the warming observed in the twentieth century came about in the first half of the century, before carbon-dioxide emissions became large.” Natural factors thus had to be the cause. None of the climate models used by scientists now working for the United Nations can explain this older trend. Nor can these models explain why the climate suddenly cooled between 1950 and 1970, giving rise to widespread warnings about the onset of a new ice age. According to a group of scientists, we faced an apocalyptic environmental scenario—but the opposite of the current one.

This brings us to why Curry left the world of the academy and government-funded research. “Climatology has become a political party with totalitarian tendencies,” she charges. “If you don’t support the UN consensus on human-caused global warming, if you express the slightest skepticism, you are a ‘climate-change denier,’ a stooge of Donald Trump, a quasi-fascist who must be banned from the scientific community.” These days, the climatology mainstream accepts only data that reinforce its hypothesis that humanity is behind global warming. Those daring to take an interest in possible natural causes of climactic variation—such as solar shifts or the earth’s oscillations—aren’t well regarded in the scientific community, to put it mildly…

What could lead climate scientists to betray the very essence of their calling? The answer, Curry contends: “politics, money, and fame.”…Among climatologists, Curry explains, “a person must not like capitalism or industrial development too much and should favor world government, rather than nations”; think differently, and you’ll find yourself ostracized. “Climatology is becoming an increasingly dubious science, serving a political project,” she complains. In other words, “the policy cart is leading the scientific horse.”

Why progressive anti-Semitism and why now?

The New Neo Posted on by

That’s the title of Victor Davis Hanson’s latest.

My own opinion is that progressives have been anti-Semitic for a long long time. Anti-Semitism is both ancient and widespread, and what’s more it occurs among various groups and for a wide variety of reasons, often many reasons at once. In this post I’m not going to take up the Sisyphean task of listing all those reasons that anti-Semitism exists (including the ones that contradict each other), nor will I list all the times and places it has surfaced and even become mainstream.

I’ll just stick to the case at hand and say:

(1) Anti-Semitism in its current manifestation wraps itself in the defensive cloak of criticism of Israel. And of course all criticism of Israel is certainly not anti-Semitism. However, criticism of Israel for doing things plenty of other countries do without receiving such criticism, and criticism of Israel involving lies, are two “tells” that reveal anti-Semitism at their core. A good rule of thumb is that if a double-standard is being applied, you’re looking at anti-Semitism.

(2) Ethnic Jews are fully capable of being anti-Semitic (in the sense of “Jew-haters”) themselves. Maybe without realizing it they have taken on the leftist double-standard critiques of Israel. Or maybe they are Jews only in that their ancestors were Jews, and that they themselves hate religious Jews (or sometimes any religious people) and want to differentiate themselves from such.

(3) One reason progressives hate Israel and apply a double-standard is that Israel has ceased to be a leftist country, although it once was. To my way of thinking, that is one of the key things to keep in mind.

(4) As VDH states, Trump is pro-Israel, and anything Trump is for the left is against. But the anti-Semitism of progressives didn’t start with Trump’s presidency, although its expression has increased somewhat since Trump has become president. I believe that Obama’s presidency—Obama’s treatment of Israel and particularly his despicable treatment of Netanyahu (a man the left despises and fears)—gave permission to the left to follow in his footsteps and to go him one better.

(5) As VDH also states:

The far Left is intertwined with Islamist activists. Both share a hatred of the U.S. and see the Middle East as a postcolonial victim of Western imperialism. Students and urban youth bond with radical Islamists in their shared dislike of the Western countries (such as Israel) in general and the United States in particular…

Anti-Semitism, to be frank, is deeply embedded also among the elite black progressive community.

The left’s devotion to special interest minority groups, and in fact their extreme reliance on the support of such groups, dictates their anti-Semitic stance. The left feels pretty secure in the continuation of traditional Jewish support for Democratic candidates, and even if they lose a few Jews (current Jewish support for Democrats seems to hover around the 2/3 mark) it probably won’t make much difference at all in election results, because the absolute number of Jews in the US is comparatively small.

Progressive anti-Semitism is over-determined, and I don’t see the situation getting any better with time.

The Steele dossier and the FISA court: what did the FBI know and when did it know it?

The New Neo Posted on by

John Solomon has been doing major reporting lately on the subject of the FBI’s knowledge of the phony nature of the Steele dossier. In the latest of a series of articles he’s written on the subject we find this [emphasis mine]:

…Government officials confirm that an October 2016 email revealing that Steele met with State Department officials — a breach of protocol for an informant if it was unauthorized — was sent to an FBI counterintelligence supervisor.

Multiple sources confirm to me that the recipient of the State Department email was Special Agent Stephen Laycock…

The email to Laycock from Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec arrived eight days before the FBI swore to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that it had no derogatory information on Steele and used his anti-Trump dossier to secure a secret surveillance warrant to investigate Trump’s possible ties to Moscow.

Officials tell me that Laycock immediately forwarded the information he received about Steele on Oct. 13, 2016, to the FBI team leading the Trump-Russia investigation, headed by then-fellow Special Agent Peter Strzok…

…[T]he email exchange means FBI supervisors knew Steele had contact with State and had reason to inquire what he was saying before they sought the warrant. If they had inquired, agents would have learned Steele had admitted to Kavalec he had been leaking to the news media, had a political deadline of Election Day to get his information public and had provided demonstrably false intelligence in one case, as I reported last week.

Current and former FBI officials told me it would be a red flag for an FBI informant on a sensitive counterintelligence case such as Russia to go talking about his evidence with another federal agency without authorization.

“This is quite important,” Brock said. “Under normal circumstances, when you get information about the conduct of your source that gives rise to questions about their reliability or truthfulness, you usually go back and reevaluate their dependability and credibility…

Republican House and Senate investigators who spent two years reviewing the Russia case say they were not provided the details of Kavalec’s contact with Steele or told about the existence of her handwritten and typed notes.

Lawmakers believe the new memos provide additional evidence Steele was unsuitable to be an informant before his dossier was used to justify a FISA warrant

The good news is that government officials weren’t so incompetent as to not have relayed the Kavalec information in a timely fashion. The bad news is that the information discrediting the dossier and/or its creator was ignored as Russiagate plowed forward.

But we already had suspected and then surmised that. Now there seems to be proof. Please read the whole Solomon article.

As for what will happen, I’m with Ace on this:

They swore, under penalty of perjury, that they had no derogatory information to undermine the reliability of the Steele dossier — and they did have derogatory information in hand.

But they swore a falsehood to the court anyway.

This is something for which, if proven, the perpetrators should be convicted. Whether they will be or not is quite another question.

My guess is that, if questioned, one of their defenses will be that even though the letter was sent to them prior to their FISA application, they didn’t see it and/or didn’t read it, and therefore acted in good faith and didn’t lie in the application. In other words, fool rather than knave.

[NOTE: John Durham, U.S. attorney in Connecticut, has been appointed by Barr “to examine the origins of the Russia investigation and determine if intelligence collection involving the Trump campaign was ‘lawful and appropriate.'”]

Israel’s 71st birthday, and Tlaib’s recent remarks on the Holocaust and the founding of Israel

The New Neo Posted on by

Rashida Tlaib has been getting a lot of flak, and rightly so, for some remarks she made recently about Israel, the Palestinians, and the Holocaust. The context was a question about the one-state solution, and this is the part of her answer that’s drawing the criticism:

There’s kind of a calming feeling, I always tell folks, when I think of the Holocaust and the tragedy of the Holocaust and the fact that it was my ancestors — Palestinians — who lost their land and some lost their lives. Their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence in many ways have been wiped out and some people’s passports, I mean just all of it, was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews post the Holocaust, post the tragedy and horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time. And I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that, right? In many ways. But they did it in a way that took their human dignity away, right? And it was forced on them.

No, Tlaib did not say that thinking of the Holocaust itself gives her a “calming feeling.” I think that’s pretty clear, although the idea of putting the words “calming feeling” and “Holocaust” in the same sentence is bizarre on the face of it.

What’s really wrong with her remarks was the rest of it.

Today, May 14, is the 71st anniversary of the founding of the modern state of Israel. But it was no thanks to the people now known as Palestinians, to say the least. Israel was founded in 1948, when the British mandate ended, but during the actual Holocaust that occurred during WWII, the Arabs now known as Palestinians were mostly supporters of the Nazis:

The Palestinian Arab and Nazi political leaders said that they had a common cause against International Jewry. The most significant practical effect of Nazi policy on Palestine between 1933 and 1938, however, was to radically increase the immigration rate of German and other European Jews and to double the population of Palestinian Jews. The Mufti had sent messages to Berlin through Heinrich Wolff [de], the German Consul General in Jerusalem endorsing the advent of the new regime as early as March, 1933, and was enthusiastic over the Nazi anti-Jewish policy, and particularly the anti-Jewish boycott in Germany. “[The Mufti and other sheikhs asked] only that German Jews not be sent to Palestine.”…

…Up to the middle of 1938, Palestine had received one third of all the Jews who had emigrated from Germany since 1933 — 50,000 out of a total of 150,000.”[48] Edwin Black, benefitting from more modern scholarship, has written that 60,000 German Jews immigrated into Palestine between 1933 through 1936, bringing with them $100,000,000 dollars ($1.6 billion in 2009 dollars). This precipitous increase in the Jewish Palestinian population stimulated Palestinian Arab political resistance to continued Jewish immigration, and was a principal cause for the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, which in turn led to the British White Paper decision to abandon the League of Nations Mandate to establish a Jewish National Home in Palestine. The resultant change in British policy effectively closed Palestine to most European Jews who suffered persecution throughout World War II…

The Mufti opposed all immigration of Jews into Palestine. The Mufti’s numerous letters appealing to various governmental authorities to prevent Jewish emigration to Palestine have been widely republished and cited as documentary evidence of his collaboration with Nazis and his participative support for their actions…

In November 1943, when he became aware of the nature of the Nazi Final Solution, the Mufti said:

“It is the duty of Muhammadans in general and Arabs in particular to … drive all Jews from Arab and Muhammadan countries….Germany is also struggling against the common foe who oppressed Arabs and Muhammadans in their different countries. It has very clearly recognized the Jews for what they are and resolved to find a definitive solution [endgültige Lösung] for the Jewish danger that will eliminate the scourge that Jews represent in the world. ….”

As Tlaib says, the establishment of Israel “was forced on” the Palestinians. Against their will. And when the UN partitioned Palestine and gave them their own state in addition to creating the Jewish state, pretty much the entire Arab world declared war on Israel.

But Tlaib is probably counting on the fact that many people today (perhaps most?) are unaware of this history.

RIP Doris Day

The New Neo Posted on by

Doris Day died yesterday at the age of 97.

Day was all sunshine, and her singing voice was velvet. She was mocked by some for being so all-fired wholesome, but she was a great entertainer in several genres and made it all seem completely natural.

I’m intrigued by the story of how Day began singing:

She developed an early interest in dance, and in the mid-1930s formed a dance duo with Jerry Doherty that performed locally in Cincinnati. A car accident on October 13, 1937, injured her right leg and curtailed her prospects as a professional dancer…

While recovering from an auto accident, Doris started to sing along with the radio and discovered a talent she did not know she had. “During this long, boring period, I used to while away a lot of time listening to the radio, sometimes singing along with the likes of Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller”, she told A.E. Hotchner, one of her biographers. “But the one radio voice I listened to above others belonged to Ella Fitzgerald. There was a quality to her voice that fascinated me, and I’d sing along with her, trying to catch the subtle ways she shaded her voice, the casual yet clean way she sang the words.”

Observing her daughter sing rekindled Alma’s interest in show business, and she decided Doris should have singing lessons. She engaged a teacher, Grace Raine. After three lessons, Raine told Alma that young Doris had “tremendous potential”; Raine was so impressed that she gave Doris three lessons a week for the price of one. Years later, Day said that Raine had the biggest effect on her singing style and career.

During the eight months she was taking singing lessons, Doris had her first professional jobs as a vocalist, on the WLW radio program Carlin’s Carnival, and in a local restaurant, Charlie Yee’s Shanghai Inn. During her radio performances, Day first caught the attention of Barney Rapp, who was looking for a female vocalist and asked if Day would like to audition for the job. According to Rapp, he had auditioned about 200 singers when Day got the job.

While working for Rapp in 1939, she adopted the stage surname “Day”, at Rapp’s suggestion.

So an accident that probably seemed like a terrible blow to the young woman ended up making her…Day.

RIP.

Whatever amount of time I may think it will take to write a certain blog post…

The New Neo Posted on by

…I probably should just triple it and I’ll be closer to the mark.

To take one example, here’s the post I wrote earlier today. It was based on a little article that caught my eye in the Guardian, about an expedition to explore the flooded lands that used to connect the British Isles to the mainland of Europe.

Pretty straightforward. Not too long. Do an intro, then a few quotes, a concluding paragraph, and voila! Done.

But as so often happens, that’s not how it went. As Frost said—“knowing how way leads on to way…”—one thought leads to another thought and some more research, which takes more time. And that leads to another thought that I hadn’t anticipated when I had the concept for the post, which leads to more research and more time. And then to a post that’s substantially different from the one I’d originally envisioned, and I hope more interesting.

I’m not complaining. That’s the way my mind works anyway, whether I blog or don’t blog. A regular Garden of Forking Paths (oh no neo, don’t turn this into a post on Borges!). But it does mean that, whatever amount of time I budget for writing, I’m usually underestimating.

Exploring Doggerland

The New Neo Posted on by

An ambitious expedition is about to start, with a mission to map the undersea area known as Doggerland, and in particular to take samples to see if any trace of human habitation can be found.

I’ve written about Doggerland before. It’s a large landmass that used to connect the British Isles to the mainland of Europe during the most recent Ice Age’s low sea levels, and it was submerged when the ice melted as the Ice Age ended. Speculation is that the area was settled, and that the humans there left evidence of their habitation that might be discovered, although it’s a longshot:

Using seabed mapping data the team plans to produce a 3D chart revealing the rivers, lakes, hills and coastlines of the country. Specialist survey ships will take core sediment samples from selected areas to extract millions of fragments of DNA from the buried plants and animals.

Prof Vincent Gaffney, from the University of Bradford’s school of archaeological and forensic sciences, said: “If this is successful it will be the first time anybody will have produced such evidence for settlements in the deep waters of the North Sea. This will be a real first. That would be new knowledge of what is really a lost continent.”

Theories abound as to what has caused the periodic ice ages of earth’s past, but it certainly wasn’t humankind’s carbon footprint. One wonders about whether ubiquitous flooding legends are connected to some of this melting and subsequent flooding. And when I say “ubiquitous,” I mean it:

The flood myth motif is found among many cultures as seen in the Mesopotamian flood stories, Deucalion and Pyrrha in Greek mythology, the Genesis flood narrative, Pralaya in Hinduism, the Gun-Yu in Chinese mythology, Bergelmir in Norse mythology, in the lore of the K’iche’ and Maya peoples in Mesoamerica, the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa tribe of Native Americans in North America, the Muisca, and Cañari Confederation, in South America, Africa, and the Aboriginal tribes in southern Australia.

That Wiki entry I just linked goes into quite a bit of detail about theories about the origins of these myths. Suffice to say that theories vary. The flooding that submerged Doggerland didn’t all happen in a day, or even forty days, but it seems to have been a result of both gradual and sudden processes [emphasis mine]:

As ice melted at the end of the last glacial period of the current ice age, sea levels rose and the land began to tilt in an isostatic adjustment as the huge weight of ice lessened. Doggerland eventually became submerged, cutting off what was previously the British peninsula from the European mainland by around 6500 BC. The Dogger Bank, an upland area of Doggerland, remained an island until at least 5000 BC. Key stages are now believed to have included the gradual evolution of a large tidal bay between eastern England and Dogger Bank by 9000 BC and a rapid sea-level rise thereafter, leading to Dogger Bank becoming an island and Great Britain becoming physically disconnected from the continent.

A recent hypothesis postulates that much of the remaining coastal land was flooded by a megatsunami around 6200 BC, caused by a submarine landslide off the coast of Norway known as the Storegga Slide. This suggests: “that the Storegga Slide tsunami would have had a catastrophic impact on the contemporary coastal Mesolithic population…. Britain finally became separated from the continent and in cultural terms, the Mesolithic there goes its own way.” A study published in 2014 suggested that the only remaining parts of Doggerland at the time of the Storegga Slide were low-lying islands, but supported the view that the area had been abandoned at about the same time as the tsunamis.

Another view speculates that the Storegga tsunami devastated Doggerland but then ebbed back into the sea, and that later Lake Agassiz (in North America) burst releasing so much fresh water that sea levels over about two years rose to flood much of Doggerland and make Britain an island.

All of this without apparent human intervention. It drives home the point that, whatever is happening now with global warming and climate change, enormous such events have periodically occurred in the past through some sort of natural non-anthropogenic process.

As for Lake Agassiz, here you go [emphasis mine]:

Around 13,000 years ago, [a lake formed from glacial melt] came to cover much of what are now Manitoba, northwestern Ontario, northern Minnesota, eastern North Dakota, and Saskatchewan. At its greatest extent, it may have covered as much as 440,000 km2 (170,000 sq mi), larger than any currently existing lake in the world (including the Caspian Sea) and approximately the area of the Black Sea…

The ice returned to the south for a time, but as it again retreated north of the present Canada–United States border around 10,000 years ago, Lake Agassiz refilled. The last major shift in drainage occurred around 8,200 years ago. The melting of remaining Hudson Bay ice caused Lake Agassiz to drain nearly completely. This final drainage of Lake Agassiz has been associated with an estimated 0.8 to 2.8 m (2.6 to 9.2 ft) rise in global sea levels.

Lake Agassiz’s major drainage reorganization events were of such magnitudes that they had significant impact on climate, sea level and possibly early human civilization. The lake’s enormous freshwater release into the Arctic Ocean has been postulated to have disrupted oceanic circulation and caused temporary cooling. The draining of 13,000 years ago may be the cause of the Younger Dryas stadial. Although disputed, the draining at 9,900–10,000 years ago may be the cause of the 8,200 yr climate event. A recent study by Turney and Brown links the 8,500-years ago drainage to the expansion of agriculture from east to west across Europe; they suggest that this may also account for various flood myths of prehistoric cultures, including the Biblical flood narrative.

What’s especially interesting is that the changes in a lake in the middle of North America would have such an effect on sea levels. That, in turn, has affected human history—and yet how many of us ever learned about Lake Agassiz in our history classes (or even our science classes, if we didn’t take geology)? Not me. How about you?

What’s your first memory?

The New Neo Posted on by

BUMPED UP just for fun.

[NOTE: I came across this old post of mine today, and thought it might be fun to repeat it.]

I’ve always had an excellent recollection for early events in my life, with the peculiarity that my memories tend to be visual as well as auditory and emotional. That is, not only can I remember a great many incidents occurring at a very young age—what happened, what was said, how I felt—but there’s also a sort of theatrical scene-setting. I can often recall where I was standing in relation to the other players—and, more oddly, what everyone was wearing at the time.

It took me a while to learn that most people don’t remember things that way. I would be reminiscing with a friend and would say, “Don’t you remember? You were standing over there, and you were wearing that black and white suit with the red silk blouse,” and the friend would gaze at me in puzzlement, wondering what I was talking about.

Of course, no independent corroboration exists to tell me whether I’m right or wrong. So perhaps I’m full of it; there’s no way to know for sure.

I once participated in a study of first memories. The researcher’s premise was that our earliest memories are not random and that, in particular, a person’s very first memory has some significance and is a sort of theme.

I have no idea what the results of that research were, or whether the concept is true, but I find it fascinating.

As for my first memory—well, first I’ll offer the following, from commenter sergey, posted quite some time ago:

Tolstoy also writes in his authobiographical notes on his rememberance of how he was born—not only all the environment of the room, but also his sensations of the delivery itself. My own first rememberance does not runs so close to the begining, but I do remember very clear how I was weighted after being brought from the clinic to the flat of our family doctor. It was cold being sripped of swaddling bands and put on scales platform, white and cold metal trough, and I was frightened when it begin to rock to and fro under me.

Why am I posting sergey’s first memory? Because it is virtually the same as mine. Although I think mine occurred when I was older, perhaps at ten months or so, I was very surprised indeed when I read his comment. It’s the first memory of another person, one who lives halfway across the world, and yet it represents a fairly accurate rendition of my own first memory.

If so, why this first memory rather than another? The theme in my early life that I think it represents is the idea “you’re on your own, kid”—at least, in the emotional sense.

That may have been my first memory; it’s pre-verbal. There are no words because I didn’t have them yet. But my first memory that involves thinking—and it’s a pretty big thought, actually—took place in the bathroom when I was about two. I was sitting on the john, probably being toilet-trained, and my mother was sitting on the edge of the bathtub, waiting for me. It suddenly struck me that we were two different people, a thought both scary and fascinating, perhaps even exhilarating.

I remarked to her in awe: “You’re you and I’m me.” Come to think of it, it’s another extension of that same theme mentioned above: “you’re on your own, kid.”

Feel free to offer your own first memories in the comments section.