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?

On birthright citizenship: the truth, the whole truth, and the “Trump truth”

The New Neo Posted on by

The other day Axios quoted Donald Trump as having said “We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States … with all of those benefits.” Then Axios added “more than 30 countries, most in the Western Hemisphere, provide birthright citizenship,” with a link on those words to this 56-page law review article.

My guess is that few people will follow the link, and even fewer will actually try to swallow a dry law review article of such enormous length. If they read the first page or two, they’ll see that the thrust of the article is to say that even a constitutional amendment banning birthright citizenship would be a violation of basic “human rights” as defined by international law.

I’m not going to read all 56 pages of the law review article either. But I’ll take Axios’ word for it that somewhere in the vast reaches of its pages a person could find a list of the “more than 30 countries, most in the Western Hemisphere, providing birthright citizenship.”

But there are much easier ways to get the information, which is obtainable at Wiki, for example. This entry and list as well as the following handy map came up as number 2 on the list when I did a Google search for “birthright citizenship.” Dark blue are the countries that have it and lighter blue those that have a modified and restricted form of it (the Wiki article itself goes into more country-by-country detail):

:

The effect of that Axios article on the casual reader would almost certainly be “hmmm, Trump is either lying or ignorant. Lots and lots of nations do exactly what we do.” The less casual reader—the reader who bothered to follow the link to that law review article—would probably add, “and what’s more it’s the proper thing to do in terms of human rights.” One reader in a million might pause to think “hmmm, that means that the only other developed country in the world that allows birthright citizenship to the extent that the US does is Canada. And unlike the US, Canada lacks a border with a state such as Mexico, from which a lot of people might be tempted to come in order to gain citizenship that way.”

The only border Canada has with anyone is with the US. And although there may be some US citizens or residents yearning for Canadian citizenship for their babies, I doubt that number is more than a very very few.

The point is that we’re the magnet for birthright citizenship and also for what’s called “birth tourism,” which is a separate but related issue.

Axios might just as easily written something like this: “Most of the countries in the Western Hemisphere also have birthright citizenship, but the only first world country other than the US that has it is Canada, and all the countries of Europe and the UK have banned and/or restricted it, as have most of the other countries of the world.” That’s a very different message, but it’s one that Axios did not give, although it would have been a simple matter to have done so, and would have given its readers the most accurate picture of the situation.

And Axios is not alone. For example, here’s John Cassidy in The New Yorker:

“We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for eighty-five years with all of those benefits,” Trump told reporters from Axios. “It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.”…

The first part of this statement was a Trump truth—that is, a blatant falsehood. Many other countries, including Canada, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico, have birthright-citizenship laws.

If you want to get really technical about it, the first part of Trump’s statement was a literal truth: we are the only country in the world in which a person entering can have a baby that becomes a citizen of the US. But I’ll not nit-pick, because that’s not what Trump seems to have been trying to say. Trump appeared to be saying that we are the only country with birthright citizenship, and that’s certainly not the case.

But just as with Axios—although Cassidy’s method is slightly different—Cassidy leads the reader astray by subtly implying that those “many” unnamed countries would be something on the order of Canada (the first one he lists), Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico—that is, either first-world countries or countries that are doing relatively well compared to the third-world countries that happen to actually constitute the rest of those “many countries” that have birthright citizenship. And Cassidy doesn’t even provide a link of any sort to the list, so that a reader could see for him/herself what those fairly abysmal countries are.

So here we have Trump being hyperbolic and untruthful, and implying that we’re the only ones with this policy. But his critics are being misleading (although in a more subtle way), implying that Trump’s point is ridiculous and that automatic birthright citizenship is commonplace and ordinary, and that there are many other nations that have the same situation regarding birthright citizenship as we do.

That is not the case at all. In fact, the US is the only highly-developed first-world country that (a) gives birthright citizenship, and (b) shares a border with a relatively undeveloped and crime-ridden country, and is therefore in a position to give relatively easy access to citizens of that country (Mexico, in the case of the US, as well as impoverished and crime-ridden Central America). Canada does not share that situation. All other countries in the world who do have a situation even remotely like ours forbid birthright citizenship of illegal immigrants. And most of the countries of the world that allow birthright citizenship are not what you’d call magnets for immigration or birth tourism. Au contraire.

I wish Trump would somehow convey that information more clearly. I wish it were easy to do it succinctly. But what Trump certainly does do is to get people’s attention.

Lindsay Graham, who is a lawyer, managed to say it this way:

“The United States is one of two developed countries in the world who grant citizenship based on location of birth,” Graham said. “This policy is a magnet for illegal immigration, out of the mainstream of the developed world, and needs to come to an end.”

“I plan to introduce legislation along the same lines as the proposed executive order from President,” the South Carolina Republican said in a statement.

I have yet to locate exactly what those lines of a Trump executive order on this would be, but I assume that no one—not even Trump—is proposing an end to birthright citizenship. He is proposing placing some limits on it. I assume that the children of legal immigrants would still automatically become citizens, the children of tourists would not, and the children of illegal immigrants would not.

Up till now, most people in this country haven’t paid much attention to birthright citizenship. They’re paying a lot more attention now.

[NOTE: I didn’t mention it in the post, but I wonder what was left out by Axios with that ellipsis (…) in Trump’s quote, and I wonder whether it would change the meaning of what he said at all. Maybe yes, maybe no.]

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

The New Neo Posted on by

It seems to me that we were allowed to criticize Bernie Madoff without being called anti-Semitic. And that was the case even though that criticism might dovetail with certain anti-Semitic legends about money and rapaciousness and Jews. But all of a sudden, pointing out the global machinations of George Soros—even things that are in the public domain—is anti-Semitic.

Because Trump, of course.

Criticizing one person from any ethnic or religious group is not criticizing them all. People are individuals, and every group contains bad ones and good ones and everything in-between. This should go without saying, but propagandists are skilled at ignoring it.

Remember when every type of criticism of Obama was called racist? Of course it wasn’t actually racist if you were criticizing his behavior. You were criticizing the man and the president, Barack Obama, not his race.

Same with Soros and being a Jew. With Soros there’s also the fact that, that although he was born a Jew by the Nazis’ definition—in other words, he was born in Hungary to parents of Jewish ancestry—he was never given any instruction in Judaism and his parents had actually repudiated Judaism. They weren’t just non-practicing Jews (although they were indeed that), they were actually anti-Jewish, according to Soros himself, who said that he “grew up in a Jewish, anti-Semitic home,” and called his parents “uncomfortable with their religious roots.”

I want to clear one thing up at the outset, however. There’s a lot of vilification of Soros for what he supposedly did during WWII in Hungary (as a child and young teenager), but the bulk of these accusations don’t appear to be true, or at least they are greatly exaggerated and built on only a small kernel of truth. On the other hand, Soros was mostly protected during World War II and didn’t seem to suffer, by his own admission. Soros himself has described WWII as an exciting period of life for him because his father seemed to have everything under control (Soros managed to masquerade as a non-Jew during this time) and “we managed not only to survive but to emerge victorious…”.

Nevertheless, most of the MSM and all of the left—and Soros is a hero to the left—is loudly proclaiming that attacks on Soros are anti-Semitic (article after article is easy to find, but I’ll just offer this rather typical quote):

“These attacks on Soros are driven largely by his Jewish faith,” [Rep. Adam] Schiff said. “The fact that he’s become a symbol is not an accident.”

“The fact that they’re promulgating this falsehood that he’s funding the caravan is an effort to give rebirth to this blood libel,” Schiff continued.

“His Jewish faith?” Soros has no Jewish faith. And there are many bona fide reasons to dislike Soros. It’s not paranoia or anti-Semitism to believe that he is using some of his vast wealth to fund a great many protests and leftist causes; I don’t think that fact is even hidden, it’s right out in the open. That Jews are sometimes excoriated as activist leftists doesn’t mean that Soros can’t correctly be called exactly that. And of course, because there are vicious ant-Semites out there, those anti-Semites are going to pick up every accusation against Soros and run with it, emphasizing Soros’ Jewishness and making his activities into a Jewish conspiracy.

Does that mean it’s anti-Semitic to criticize the man for what he actually does? It would be ridiculous to say that, but if you wanted to demonize his opponents and protect Soros from criticism, that would be exactly how you would go about it.

As does the WaPo here:

[Soros’] name has become a synonym for a well-worn anti-Semitic canard: the idea that Jews are malevolent fomenters of social dissent, agitators slyly funding and masterminding protest, seeking to undermine a white, Christian social order.

No, 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? Tune in tomorrow for my efforts to answer these questions and others.

[Part II here.]

Happy Halloween!

The New Neo Posted on by

Halloween was my favorite holiday, bar none, as a child.

The main reason was probably the candy. But the secondary reason—and maybe it even superseded the candy, come to think of it—was the opportunity even as a little kid to get dressed up in a costume and go out with other kids at dark, prowling around the neighborhood and ringing doorbells.

Alone, no adults present after we attained the age of 4 or 5.

Those days are gone. And not just for me—since I’m not a kid anymore—but for kids these days. Everyone under thirteen has an adult escort or escorts.

But it’s still a lot of fun to see the kids in their costumes, especially the little ones.

You know what other days are gone? My candy corn days. Usually at Halloween I put up a post on candy corn, a favorite seasonal treat of mine (at least, I try to keep it only seasonal). But I’ve had to add candy corn to my list of forbidden foods because it now has started to give me migraines, as do chocolate, peanuts (no Reeses for me!), figs (not too hard to cut out), blue cheese, and raisins.

But Happy Halloween anyway!

The best 100 foreign-language films, according to a BBC poll of critics

The New Neo Posted on by

As usual, I disagree.

Here’s who they polled:

The 209 critics who took part are from 43 different countries and speak a total of 41 languages – a range that sets our poll apart from any other.

The result: 100 films from 67 different directors, from 24 countries, and in 19 languages.

Most of the films on the list are acknowledged, tried-and-true, film masterpieces of the type beloved by critics but not necessarily by me. For example, number one is “Seven Samuri,” which (as with many although hardly all of the films) I’ve actually seen. But I found it a big snooze. Why do critics like it (and why did it inspire the making of “The Magnificent Seven”)? Because:

It introduced a culture that was foreign yet intriguing, and accessible to audiences weaned on Hollywood westerns. In later years, Kurosawa tended to downplay his enthusiasm for the films of John Ford, but his achievement was to combine the conventions of the western with a radical new fusion of Japanese genres: the chambara (swordplay film) and the jidaigeki (period drama)…

After all this meticulous scene-setting, the film’s final hour-and-a-half unfurls in an escalating series of skirmishes. The climactic battle, drenched by torrential rain, is a miracle of brilliantly choreographed chaos: combatants running hither and thither through the mud, galloping horses, spears, arrows and the occasional bullet, all filmed with multiple cameras, which insert the audience into the thick of the action. We always know who’s who, where everyone is, what they’re doing and – thanks to an infographic-style banner – exactly how many bandits there are left to kill at any given moment. There are casualties among the samurai, too, and, because we have come to know them, every death hits hard.

It’s not that I don’t sometimes like action films with all-male casts. I love “The Great Escape,” for example, one of my all-time favorites. But not this one.

On the other hand, number 4, “Rashomon,” intrigued me even as a child, when I first saw it. And nuumber 31, “The Lives of Others,” is one of the best movies ever made, IMHO, not just one of the best foreign-language movies. It should be way higher up on the list.

I’ve seen exactly one-third of these movies, by the way, so that’s not a bad sampling. But I haven’t loved most of the ones I’ve seen (“Amelie” was a favorite, however), although I’ve liked quite a few and admired quite a few as well. And I detested “Aguirre, the Wrath of God.”

On a list of my making, not only would “The Lives of Others” be much higher, but it would include the following highly idiosyncratic favorites of mine (some of them, notably the first, not so PC anymore):

Black Orpheus
Ballad of a Soldier
Two Women
Marriage Italian Style
Run Boy Run
The White Balloon (an Iranian film; the little girl looked eerily like me as a child and reminded me somewhat of myself as well)
Mandabi
The Emigrants; The New Land

I imagine there are more, but that’s what comes to mind at the moment. I tried to put the links up to the subtitled versions. Dubbed is convenient, but usually abominable. Don’t succumb to the temptation.