The definitive Covington video

The New Neo Posted on by

Truth is the first casualty in the war the press is waging against the right (and against Trump, and against MAGA hats, and against white males, and against Republicans…). So here’s a video put out by Nicholas Sandmann’s defamation lawyer to try to correct the lies that have been told about the Covington incident and the behavior of all involved:

Preparations for the lawsuits on behalf of Sandmann go forward.

[NOTE: Because the Covington teens are not public figures—or at least, they weren’t until the incident with Nathan Phillips went viral—the Sullivan rules do not apply. It would ordinarily be much easier to prove defamation against them than against a public figure such as Justin Fairfax. The fact that they are minors should help them as well.]

Justin Fairfax talks about suing

The New Neo Posted on by

Fairfax claims he’s been falsely accused, and perhaps he has:

A statement released by the Democrat’s office said, “The Washington Post, acknowledging that it had no corroboration, just smeared an elected official. We reiterate that this allegation is false. At no time has the lieutenant governor assaulted anyone at any time or at any place.”

I have a few questions for Fairfax, questions that I think we can safely say won’t be asked of him by the stalwart members of the MSM. I bet they aren’t questions he’s asking himself, either.

Do you have the same opinion concerning the publication of the many smears published about elected officials or other public figures on the right? What is your opinion, for example, about what happened to Justice Kavanaugh? If you think that’s different, why? Is it because you know you’re innocent, and yet you’re willing to assume he’s guilty—when the allegations against him were older, vaguer as to time and place, uncorroborated, brought up only at a time when he stood to become a member of the Supreme Court and at no other time in his previous judicial life, given an enormous forum in Congress, and disseminated far and wide by your party, the Democrats? Did you ever speak out against that campaign by your party to destroy a man’s life on charges at least as flimsy if not flimsier than those made against you?

And what do you have to say about all of that now?

Forgive me if these words of yours just don’t ring true to me as a fair expression of your actual viewpoint on the subject no matter who the target may be:

“This type of smear is what we meant when we said that politics and the coverage of it needs to rise to a higher level that befits our country and the 400-year history of our Commonwealth,” the statement from Fairfax’s office read. “This is what we meant when we said that people who continue to spread these false allegations will be sued.

If the parties were to change, my guess is that you’d sing a different tune. I don’t sing a different tune, by the way, but then again I’m not a politician. I have the same rules for both parties, and I don’t #BelieveTheWomen unless the case being made is very strong.

Oh, and Justin Fairfax is a lawyer, graduate of Columbia. As such, he no doubt is aware of the law governing defamation of a public figure, where the bar is very high. Fairfax is a public figure. The woman did make an allegation, and the WaPo first tanked it and then reported it when another outlet had published it. It was reported as being an allegation rather than a proven fact.

I don’t see how Fairfax has a case against anyone, unless he happens to have a video of the encounter and can prove that every single thing in it was consensual—and even then, I believe that he’d only have a case against his accuser, not the newspaper who reported the accusation.

[NOTE: I did some research trying to discover if Fairfax had made any previous statement on the Kavanaugh accusations. I couldn’t find one, but if you can, please offer it.]

One standard for allegations against Republicans…

The New Neo Posted on by

…a different standard for allegations against Democrats.

From Justin Fairfax:

“Does anybody think it’s any coincidence that on the eve of potentially my being elevated that that’s when this uncorroborated smear comes out?” he asked. “Does anybody believe that’s a coincidence? I don’t think anybody believes that’s a coincidence, again, particularly with something — this is not the first time this was brought up.”

He asserted that the Post investigated the account for three months before it “dropped the story” because it was uncorroborated.

“It’s uncorroborated because it’s not true,” he said, adding that “you don’t have to be cynical, you don’t have to understand politics to understand when someone is trying to manipulate a process to harm someone’s character without any basis.”

That point that starts with “you don’t have to be cynical” is a truth that most Democrats only activate when it’s a Democrat being accused. When it’s a Republican, the gloves are off and it’s #BelieveAllWomen.

The power of the weak: hunger strikes and forced feeding

The New Neo Posted on by

Some illegal immigrants in detention are on a hunger strike, and ICE is force-feeding them.

It takes a special person to stick with a hunger strike, but it’s a tried-and-true method by which those in power can be pressured. The pressure of a hunger strike depends, of course, on those in power having a sense of morality, because truly tyrannical regimes couldn’t care less if those in its prisons or detention centers starve themselves to death. Fewer mouths to feed.

But despite the efforts of the left to paint the US as such an amoral power, it is not. So hunger strikes remain a potent weapon.

Here’s the current story:

ICE authorities confirmed on Thursday that at least six immigrant detainees have been force-fed through nasal tubes and nine others have been refusing food. The detainees are located in centers in El Paso, Texas; Miami, Florida; Phoenix, Arizona; and San Diego and San Francisco, California.

Detainee rights activists working with the hunger strikers in Texas say the majority of the hunger strikers are ethnic Indians who entered the United States over the southern border and were detained more than six months ago. The strikers are demanding release on bond, after spending months behind bars.

A lawyer for two of the Texas detainees, Ruby Kaur, told National Public Radio that the detainees began hunger strikes at the beginning of this year to call attention to what they say are inhumane conditions, verbal threats, and lack of information about their cases.

One interesting sidelight of this story is why “ethnic Indians” (that is, from Asia; we’re not talking about Native Americans) would enter over the Mexico border. We know why, of course; because that border is permeable. But it’s another indication that people from all over the world come to the US that way.

Once people decide to go on a hunger strike and publicize it (the two go hand in hand, because publicity is a big big part of the pressure), the government’s options are limited to force-feeding, letting them starve, or giving in to their demands.

If the demands are reasonable they should be granted—but of course, if they’re reasonable, they should have been granted in the first place without the hunger strike. Once the hunger strike begins, both of the two remaining options—force-feeding or letting them starve—are bad, as well as being bad publicity. But of the two, force-feeding is the better option, although the left will make the most of it as an example of the depravity and cruelty of US authorities and ICE.

Higher taxes for thee but not for me

The New Neo Posted on by

Recent polls indicate that Americans overwhelmingly support raising taxes on the rich:

…[A] new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll released Monday that found 76 percent of registered voters believe the wealthiest Americans should pay more in taxes. A recent Fox News survey showed that 70 percent of Americans favor raising taxes on those earning over $10 million — including 54 percent of Republicans.

The numbers suggest the political ground upon which the 2020 presidential campaign will be fought is shifting in dramatic ways, reflecting the rise in inequality in the United States and growing concerns in the electorate about the fairness of the American system.

Actually, I think it reflects a lot of other things, too.

The first is the surge in Democrats and/or the MSM pushing the idea as a great one.

The second is human nature, which is the reason the Ten Commandments include a prohibition on “coveting.”

The third is widespread ignorance about what percentage of our taxes the rich already pay.

The fourth is widespread ignorance about what higher tax rates actually mean in terms of whether such rates will end up raising the total tax revenue collected, or what it would do to the economy in general. But my guess is that most people not only are not aware that higher rates on the rich do not necessarily translate to higher tax revenue, but many don’t care because the driving force behind this for many people is to punish the very rich.

So, what percentage do the rich already pay [this data is from 2016 taxes, the most recent I could find]?:

The latest federal income tax data reported by the IRS shows that the top 1 percent of income earners pay 39.5 percent of all federal income taxes, nearly twice the 20.6 percent share of national income they earn. The entire bottom 50 percent of all taxpayers pay 2.7 percent of federal income taxes, which is only a small fraction (about one fourth) of their share of national income.

The top 1 percent, indeed, pay a much bigger share of federal income taxes than the entire bottom 90 percent of income earners, who pay only 29.1 percent of federal income taxes, while earning 53 percent of national income. That means as well that the top 1 percent pay a bigger share of income taxes than the entire middle class combined, defined as the middle 20 percent of income earners.

The author of that article (written in 2017) adds:

[Democrats such as Liz Warren] know that what they are saying is false, because the above data is all publicly available and they are not stupid. But they know their Democrat voter base has no idea what the rich pay in taxes, and they can stoke envy and anger among them with their false demagoguery, enhancing their turnout at the polls.

They know the so-called mainstream media will never tell the public the truth either. CNN employs economic analysts, but you will never see CNN interview one of them for five minutes on air about whether the data says the rich pay their fair share of taxes without a chorus of left wingers to shout them down.

By the evidence of the polls I cited at the beginning of the article, it’s not just Democrats who fall for this. Fifty-four percent of self-identified Republicans agreed that taxes on the very rich should be raised.

Opinion on this also depends in part on how the “very rich” is defined. Ten million dollars seems safely high, and so more people are going to support that as a cutoff. But the history of such raises is that there is downward creep. In fact, the Sixteenth Amendment, which was passed to allow an income tax, was presented as only affecting the very very rich:

Thirty-six state legislatures had to ratify the 16th Amendment before it could go into effect. The public and most newspapers seemed to favor it. The main argument for ratification was that the amendment would force the wealthy to take on a fairer share of the federal tax burden that had in the past been largely carried by those earning relatively little. Only a few critics spoke out forcefully against the amendment. John D. Rockefeller, one of the country’s richest men, stated: “When a man has accumulated a sum of money within the law. . . the people no longer have any right to share in the earnings resulting from the accumulation.”

Ratification moved slowly but steadily through the state legislatures. Some of the states had already passed income tax laws of their own in seeking new ways to finance public schools and other social needs. Surprisingly, the income tax amendment drew widespread support in cities and in rural areas alike, from both Democrats and Republicans, and in all geographical regions. Even New York ratified the amendment despite the state’s reputation as the capital of “money power” with numerous millionaires among its residents (including John D. Rockefeller). By early 1913, 42 states (six more than needed) had ratified the income tax amendment. Only six states rejected it…

Rep. Cordell Hull introduced the first income tax law under the newly adopted Sixteenth Amendment. He proposed a graduated tax starting with a 1-percent rate for incomes between $4,000 and $20,000 increasing to a top rate of 3 percent for those earning $50,000 or more…

The first tax collection day under the new law took place on March 1, 1914. Since the average worker earned only about $800 a year, few people actually had to pay any federal income tax. Less than 4 percent of American families made an annual income of $3,000 or more. Deductions and exemptions further shrank the pool of taxpayers. Nevertheless, the federal government collected $71 million that first year. Millionaire John D. Rockefeller alone paid an estimated $2 million.

All in all, most Americans thought the new tax was a great idea.

Superbowl ratings hit 10-year low

The New Neo Posted on by

Not a surprise. The NFL has been alienating a lot of viewers in recent years.

And probably quite a few of those who tuned in yesterday at the outset ended up tuning out before it ended because the game was a low-scoring defensive battle. Others aren’t all that interested because the somewhat-hated (outside of New England, that is) Patriots have become such a juggernaut that they seem to win and win and win.

I didn’t watch, but that’s because (a) I’m not a football fan; and (b) I was busy watching a movie with some friends. I hear from usually-reliable sources that even the ads were pretty bad, though.

On Northam and the blackface photo: is there no statute of limitations?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m going to assume most of you are aware of the brouhah around a photo that appeared on Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s medical school yearbook page in 1984 that showed two young men, one in blackface and one in a KKK hood. Northam apologized deeply for the photo, which he originally claimed was of him, although he also said he didn’t know which one of the two he was. After near-universal calls for his resignation, today he’s changed his story to this:

…[Northam] will not resign…his spokeswoman said, despite mounting pressure to do so, and the embattled governor has told a top Virginia Democrat that he now believes it is not him in a racist yearbook photo…

Northam told the top Virginia Democrat he was in touch with some of his former Eastern Virginia Medical School colleagues since issuing the apology. Those former classmates said they believed many of the pictures in the yearbook were mixed up.

Northam did not recall the picture being taken, he told the source, and said he was not involved in the production of the yearbook.

I may be alone in thinking this explanation is actually a possibility. Northam sounds remarkably befuddled and unusually unable to come up with a coherent story to defend himself—maybe he should be resigning for that. But that’s not the point of this post.

Nor is the point of this post what you think about Northam otherwise; you may strongly detest him, because he is also the person who spoke in defense of a bill that was being considered in Virginia that might have made abortion legal right up to the point of birth.

Democrats are eager to get rid of Northam at this point, because he’s become a huge liability and there’s a far more politically correct replacement waiting in the wings, 39-year old lieutenant governor Justin Fairfax, who is black. That way the Democrats get to turn an embarrasment—Northam—into a way to show how noble they are, and to put it all behind them (and to distance themselves from their earlier support of people such as Robert Byrd, for example). It’s all very practical; if they needed Northam to stay for some reason, I assume they’d get behind him no matter what he’s done. But they don’t need him.

However, I want to pursue a larger question, one that transcends party politics (or should, anyway), and goes beyond Northam himself and what you think of him: why care about someone’s racist prank at 24 when he’s now 59 and has a track record in all those intervening years, a record we can study and one that tells us who that person has been for most of his adult life?

Why go back to an obscure and relatively minor detail of a person’s young life and dig it up, and then punish that person for it while ignoring everything the person is now and what the person’s done since that silly insensitive and youthful move back when thoughtcrime wasn’t forever?

And I would say the same no matter what the party.

If Northam’s been a racist in recent years, discuss that instead. Or if there are other things about a person’s more recent record for which you think a person should resign—and in Northam’s case, there may indeed be—then stick to those.

And let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that Northam (or any other person) actually had been a racist in his youth. And let’s say that decades ago he or she changed, and became a champion of racial equality. In other words, let’s say a person has a change of mind and heart—about that, or about any other topic. Wouldn’t that make that person okay, as long as the change is sincere and not faked? And couldn’t sincerity be proven by acts, by human interactions, and by the length of time all that good stuff has been going on since the time of the youthful unacceptable point of view?

Apparently not. Are we now at the point where it’s “one racist act, even if symbolic (a costume)—no matter how long ago and no matter how young you were—and you’re a racist forever, to be exiled from the world of public service or even polite society”?

How far back can we go with this? What if Northam had been 16? Would he be off the hook? I doubt it. What about if he’d been in that get-up at 10? At 5? What if his parents dressed him up that way as a baby? Where are the accusers willing to draw the line?

Writing this post made me think of someone I haven’t thought about in quite a while, George Wallace of Alabama. Remember him?:

With his coffin draped in the red and white flag of the state he dominated for three decades, former Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace was eulogized Wednesday as a passionate, talented man who later in life was not afraid to admit to the errors of his segregationist past.

“He knew both victory and defeat; he displayed courage; he endured pain. He experienced the roar of men’s applause and the shattering gun blast of despair,” said the Rev. Franklin Graham, son of the Rev. Billy Graham, in his eulogy.

“He accepted God’s forgiveness when he confessed and repented of his sins. The result was that he was changed and became a man redeemed,” Graham said. “He received forgiveness from communities that once saw him as their enemy. The result was that he became a trusted friend.”…

Nearly 1,000 people crowded into Wallace’s funeral service at the First United Methodist Church…

Wallace’s open casket had lain in state since Tuesday in the Capitol’s rotunda. About 25,000 people filed past to pay their respects.

Many blacks were among those mourning a man who, at his first inauguration in 1963, had vowed “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” and later stood in a doorway at the University of Alabama to prevent two black students from enrolling.

In the years after he was shot in 1972, Wallace renounced his segregationist views, began reaching out to black voters and appointed African Americans to state positions.

At Wednesday’s funeral, a black pastor read Psalm 23. Two black National Guardsmen folded the flag on the coffin and presented it to James, who then presented it to the Wallace family.

“We have to learn to forgive and forget,” said Reedie Russell, a black worker at Maxwell Air Force Base who also came to the rotunda. “This was history being laid to rest.”

The olden days, 1998.

It’s Groundhog Day. Again.

The New Neo Posted on by

What could be more appropriate on Groundhog Day than a repeat of an old essay about the movie, a personal favorite of mine (slightly edited, of course, because in the spirit of the movie we try to get it better each time)?

In discussions of the film “Groundhog Day” on this blog, I’ve noticed a couple of people questioning why the Bill Murray character would find Andie McDowell’s Rita deserving of all those years of his devotion and energy. For example, “…[W]hat, exactly, made the lovely but, let’s face it, vapid Rita worthy of Phil’s centuries of effort?”

My answer is that he discovered love. Yes, Rita was beautiful, and a good human being with many excellent qualities. But of course she was imperfect, and over the years (centuries? millennia?) Phil no doubt had learned just about all of her flaws. Still, it didn’t matter to him because it wasn’t about Rita, exactly—it was about the fact that, somewhere along the long path of his transformation to wisdom, he finally understood that every person in town, including the ones he couldn’t tolerate at the beginning, was worthy of his attention—and of something one might call “love,” in its broadest sense.

And somewhere along the way to that knowledge, Phil’s efforts in “Groundhog Day” stopped being about getting into Rita’s pants or even getting her to love him, although that certainly took up a larger percentage of his time (and the movie’s length) than some of his other pursuits. But he probably spent at least as much time learning to play the piano (a form of love, too), or to carve ice sculptures, or to become skilled at some of the more mindless and meaningless tricks he mastered, or learning details about the life of almost everyone in town.

Was the old derelict, whose life Phil tried to save over and over and over, “worth it” either? Such questions no longer mattered to him, because the gesture and the effort were worth it, and every life was worth something to him.

Rita, of course, had always been physically attractive to Phil. But as the film (and time) wore on—and on—she became the object not just of eros, but of agape as well. By the end of the movie, I think that Phil had come to appreciate the idea of the theme and variations versus the symphony, which I wrote about here:

And, although walking repeatedly in the same place is very different from traveling around the world and walking in a new place every day, is it really so very much less varied? It depends on the eye and mind of the beholder; the expansive imagination can find variety in small differences, and the stunted one can find boredom in vast changes.

And I submit that love is like that, too. Some people spend a lifetime with one love, one spouse; plumbing the depths of that single human being and what it means to be in an intimate relationship with him/her. Others go from relationship to relationship, never alighting with one person for very long, craving the variety.

It would seem on the face of it that the second type of person has the more exciting time in love. But it ain’t necessarily so. Either of these experiences can be boring or fascinating, depending on what we bring to it: the first experience is a universe in depth, and the second a universe in breadth. But both can contain multitudes.

Towards the end of the film (SPOILER ALERT), Phil makes it clear that he has given up the pursuit of Rita entirely, and immersed himself in his love for her instead. Is this what finally frees him?

In this discussion of the movie, there’s what I consider to be an error. The article states, “Of course, this being an American film, he [Phil] not only attains spiritual release but also gets the producer [Rita] into bed.”

Well, that may be literally true; on the final night, Rita and Phil do sleep in the same bed. But what I believe the writer might be implying—which is that they have sex before the morning comes rather than after—is untrue, as far as I can tell. (Note, also, the snide “American film” reference).

[NOTE: Here’s another essay on the film that’s worth reading.]

Hospitals are not a great place to get some rest

The New Neo Posted on by

But a new program is trying to change that—for the better:

…[I]n a new study, a Chicago hospital adopted sleep-friendly measures for patients that led to fewer nighttime awakenings without compromising care. Nighttime room entries dropped by 44 percent after researchers educated doctors and nurses on the health consequences of in-hospital sleep deprivation. The researchers also tweaked the hospital’s electronic health records system to avoid unnecessary overnight disruptions.

Over a year, patients in the so-called SIESTA unit also experienced an average of four times fewer disruptions for medication dosing and three times fewer for routine vital signs.

“We’ve known [inpatient sleep deprivation] is a problem since Florence Nightingale in the 1800s, so why hasn’t it been fixed? It’s a very patient-centered problem that also has health implications,” said study author Dr. Vineet Arora. She’s a professor of medicine at University of Chicago.

This would be wonderful, if it actually helps the situation that seems to prevail now, which is that you have to recover from the stresses of the hospital stay itself. I’m sure some of the awakenings are necessary, although disruptive, but apparently there are things they could do to make that aspect of thing less frequent, disorienting, and counterproductive to full healing.

The Title IX lawsuit against universities for creating a hostile environment for males

The New Neo Posted on by

This is awfully interesting:

California doctoral student who filed Title IX complaints in 2018 against Yale University and the University of Southern California for alleged discrimination against male students has now filed a similar complaint against Harvard University.

Ph.D. student and former USC assistant lecturer Kursat Christoff Pekgoz claims that Harvard, along with other institutions of higher education in America, has created a “hostile environment against men.”

“Male students/professors who deviate from the orthodoxy of campus gender politics often face mobbing or termination,” Pekgoz wrote in his recently filed complaint against Harvard.

The Ph.D. student’s previous complaints focused mostly on the exclusion of males from certain programs, much like a 2018 complaint filed against the University of Michigan by economics professor Mark Perry, who claimed that certain university resources, including funding and scholarships, were available only to women. The Department of Education has recently agreed to investigate Perry’s claims.

Bravo.

The suit against Harvard has a different twist, however:

Pekgoz’s complaint against Harvard, however, is centered around the Ivy League school’s status as a “sponsor and accomplice” of the American Psychological Association (APA), an organization that, according to Pekgoz, “has recently proclaimed that masculinity is a form of (or a driving factor for) mental illness.”

Pekgoz claims that Harvard’s use of recently revised APA guidelines result in a number of Title IX violations, including creating “different standards of behavior/sanctions/treatment for men and women,” adopting “biased” training resources that “rely upon sex stereotypes,” and simply “endorsing an external agency (i.e., APA) which discriminates on the basis of sex in offering services.”

Bravo again.

The APA has, in my opinion, long been a political group. This is just the latest iteration.

Pekgoz has created this guide for others wishing to mount similar challenges. If you know any interested people, you might want to send them the link.

And here is his website (he was born in Turkey, by the way, and emigrated here). His self-description:

I am a PhD Candidate at the University of Southern California. I have engaged in various forms of human rights advocacy throughout my life, including the rights of political dissidents against Islamic fundamentalism and Title IX Advocacy on college campuses. I have a Prior Degree in Molecular Biology and I am Currently writing My Dissertation on Law & literature in Renaissance Tragedy. I Created this Website to Provide Contact Information and to Offer Guidance to Individuals who Want to File Civil Rights Complaints.

Courageous guy. Much more at the link.