The young-old—or is it the old-young?

The New Neo Posted on by

Did you ever notice that young people sometimes write and/or perform as though they’re old?

Some do it very successfully; the best example that comes to mind is T. S. Eliot—who perhaps was born old—who began writing his masterpiece “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” with its aura of disillusionment and ennui, a life not-quite-lived and all played out, at the ripe young age of 22.

It was published when he was about 27, and it was his first professionally published poem:

Prufrock laments his physical and intellectual inertia, the lost opportunities in his life and lack of spiritual progress, and he is haunted by reminders of unattained carnal love. With visceral feelings of weariness, regret, embarrassment, longing, emasculation, sexual frustration, a sense of decay, and an awareness of mortality, “Prufrock” has become one of the most recognised voices in modern literature.

Turning to a very different artist in a very different time with a very different message, I was shocked many years ago when I learned that singer Tom Waits had been all of 24 years old when the song “Ol’ 55,” one of my favorites, came out. He may have written it even earlier than that, but I don’t know if it was significantly earlier. At any rate, in this case it’s the sound that’s so old; Waits’ musical growl sounds like that of a grizzled old-timer (and it got even deeper as he got only a bit older):

The 2020 Democratic presidential field widens…and widens…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and widens.

I wouldn’t rule any of them out, however obscure, however extreme. We’ve seen too many surprises in the past.

I remember how optimistic I was about the GOP field in 2016. And then the debates began, and the sheer numbers were part of the problem. The debates had about as much content as a Twitter war, and each person got about as much time to answer each question as a tweet.

My guess is that the Democratic field will be similar in that respect, and that it will yield a similar number of surprises—or more.

[NOTE: I just added a new category: “Election 2020.” Arghhhh!]

Politicians and lies

The New Neo Posted on by

The title of this article by Holman Jenkins intrigued me: “Politicians Never Lied Before Trump,” and so I clicked on it. I was almost certain that the title was sarcastic—of course politicians lie often, and have done so since time immemorial—and sure enough, the title was indeed meant as sarcasm.

But that discussion was just the lead-in; the rest of the piece was about the wall. But I want to talk about the lies right now, not the wall.

It seems completely obvious to me that one of the most common activities of politicians is to lie. To some extent, politics almost demands it, depending on how one defines “lie.” Is a bragging exaggeration a lie? Is an optimistic promise a lie? How exaggerated does it have to be before it becomes one, rather than mere hyperbole?

Opinions are not lies, as long as the speaker really believes what he or she says (which is not always the case in politics or in life). Opinions can be incorrect, they can be based on faulty reasoning or faulty information, but as long as they are sincere you can’t call them lies. And yet so-called “fact checkers” do so on a daily basis.

Facts are facts, but sometimes competing information (Kellyanne Conway’s much-maligned “alternative facts”) is out there and it can be very difficult to ascertain what’s correct and what’s incorrect. So politicians constantly argue by citing one fact or another, or one statistic or another, that bolsters their own point of view. That’s only a lie if the facts are obviously wrong or made up.

Some politicians lie to brag—that’s one of Trump’s favorite types of lie. Some lie to fool the American people about policy, its motives or its effects—that’s Obama’s favorite kind of lie, and he did it very smoothly. I consider the latter type of lie far more pernicious for a politician to tell than the former type.

And some politicians lie about themselves—not just to brag, but about something much deeper: their aims and their plans for the country. Obama again.

One of the most famous supposed lies in recent years was the “Bush lied about WMDs” accusation. But there has never been any convincing evidence that he actually lied, although there is very convincing evidence that he was mistaken and/or misled. But that doesn’t stop the meme that he lied, which is in itself a lie if and only if the person who is espousing it thinks it’s actually highly unlikely to be true.

I often hear that Trump lies far more than any other president. That’s not my perception, unless you count as lies a lot of things that aren’t, and/or a lot of things that are minor and inconsequential. The people who keep telling me that Trump lies so much are astounded and offended if I try to say that Obama lied as well; they just don’t see it that way. One can go to charts listing the lies of either or both to prove a point, but of course the charts almost always (maybe even always) represent partisan efforts to make one or the other look worse (for example, see this critique of one of the Times’ efforts). And I’m not interested in sheer numbers—it’s the subject matter and import of the lie that matters, not the quantity.

Which leads me to the conclusion that Obama’s lies were far worse than Trump’s.

What we know and don’t know about pot use

The New Neo Posted on by

We don’t know all that much about pot, but much of what we do know is that it appears to be bad for some people:

Over the past couple of decades, studies around the globe have found that THC—the active compound in cannabis—is strongly linked to psychosis, schizophrenia, and violence. Berenson interviewed far-flung researchers who have quietly but methodically documented the effects of THC on serious mental illness, and he makes a convincing case that a recreational drug marketed as an all-around health product may, in fact, be really dangerous—especially for people with a family history of mental illness and for adolescents with developing brains.

A 2002 study in BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) found that people who used cannabis at age 15 were more than four times as likely to develop schizophrenia or a related syndrome as those who’d never used. Even when the researchers excluded kids who had shown signs of psychosis by age 11, they found that the adolescent users had a threefold higher risk of developing schizophrenia later on. One Dutch marijuana researcher that Berenson spoke with estimated, based on his own work, that marijuana could be responsible for as much as 10 percent of psychosis in places where heavy use is common.

I haven’t read the studies, but my guess is that they contain the caveat that there may be something about cannabis users in adolescence (or other ages) that’s already somewhat different, and that it might be this other variable that predisposes users to schizophrenia or to any of the other negative effects. But I don’t know; the statistics are certainly troubling.

A lot of pot proponents point out that alcohol is as bad or worse. Agreed. However, we already tried to ban alcohol and it just didn’t work; it was too well-ingrained in our society (and not just ours, either). Has it become the same for pot? I tend to think so. Since the 1960s it’s become almost a mainstream drug. Whether that means we should legalize it or just decriminalize it (two different things) I don’t know.

But I think it’s too late to do much else other than one of those two, and we’ll reap the consequences. In fact, I think we’ve already reaped some of the consequences of increasing pot use, and they’re not good. I’ve written about this before—for example, here, in which I quoted some research results:

The findings showed habitual marijuana users made repeated errors even when told that they were wrong. Users also had more trouble maintaining a set of rules, suggesting an inability to maintain focus. Early-onset users and those who used the most marijuana had the most trouble with the test, making more than twice as many errors and fewer correct responses than later-onset smokers.

In my opinion, if you re-conceptualize the movie “Idiocracy” as being about a society taken over by stoners, you get the picture. That’s an exaggeration of course, but it’s the trend I see.

Therapy wars: psychoanalysis vs. cognitive behavioral therapy

The New Neo Posted on by

This is one of those articles that Pocket seems to think I would be interested in, and they weren’t mistaken. It compares psychoanalysis to cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for treating emotional problems.

It’s not a bad article at all, but I have a few things to add. The field of therapy has become so complex over time that those are just two of an almost countless array of therapies available out there. Those two are among the more extreme examples of opposing genres: psychoanalysis being the ultimate long-term “talk” depth therapy focused on the irrational and hidden aspects of the human mind and heart, and CBT being short-term and emphasizing ways of dealing with problems by correcting cognitive errors.

Back when I was in school to learn to be a family therapist (which by the way is a very different approach than either of those, and differs in general from techniques of individual therapy), I came to some conclusions about all of this.

The summary version is that therapy can be approached from any dimension: behavioral (action-oriented), emotional (feeling-oriented), or cognitive (thought-oriented). All three dimensions are interrelated and each influences the others, so that whichever one the therapist enters on and concentrates on, it has a ripple effect on the other two. For different clients different approaches can be best; there are no hard and fast rules about it. And different therapists are drawn to working in ways that happen to suit them, so they pick and choose as well.

But overall, the most important factor is the relationship between therapist and client. Some “click” and some do not. It’s not as simple as liking or not liking, either. It’s difficult to define and quantify, but it matters greatly.

The article touches on that towards the end:

…[M]many scholars have been drawn to what has become known as the “dodo-bird verdict”: the idea, supported by some studies, that the specific kind of therapy makes little difference. (The name comes from the Dodo’s pronouncement in Alice in Wonderland: “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.”) What seems to matter much more is the presence of a compassionate, dedicated therapist, and a patient committed to change; if one therapy is better than all others for all or even most problems, it has yet to be discovered.

My sentiments exactly.

Another theory on why time seems to go more quickly as we get older

The New Neo Posted on by

This:

Time is happening in the mind’s eye. It is related to the number of mental images the brain encounters and organizes and the state of our brains as we age. When we get older, the rate at which changes in mental images are perceived decreases because of several transforming physical features, including vision, brain complexity, and later in life, degradation of the pathways that transmit information. And this shift in image processing leads to the sense of time speeding up.

Perhaps that’s part of it.

But I believe the larger part of it is a combination of other factors. The first is that as we age each passing unit of time becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of the amount of time we’ve already lived. The second is that we are quite aware that the number of days we have left on earth is growing shorter and may even be quite short, as opposed to an earlier perception that we have lots and lots of time left. The third is the absence of novelty in the lives of many people as they grow old; the days all tend to blur together.

Beto O’Rourke: on a slow news day…

The New Neo Posted on by

…Beto O’Rourke instagramming his dental cleaning is a big story.

I kid you not.

This sort of thing promises to be the wave of the future in political campaigns.

Right now O’Rourke’s main activity since losing his Senate race seems to be running for president in 2020. Or maybe vice president, but nobody actually owns up to running for vice president. I would take O’Rourke very seriously, based on his 2018 Senate campaign, in which social media was a big deal in his gaining support:

O’Rourke ran his [2018 Senate] campaign without professional pollsters or consultants, and relied on volunteers with no experience running a political campaign. His campaign employed the use of mass text messages. According to the 2018 third-quarter report from the FEC, his campaign spent US$7.3 million on digital advertising alone (in contrast with Cruz’s $251,000). His first ad was filmed on an iPhone.

He posted to social media daily, including Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, and livestreamed his activities traveling the state, such as skateboarding in a Whataburger parking lot, washing clothes at a laundromat, and “blockwalking” in his constituents’ neighborhoods. He encouraged supporters to post selfies they had taken with him to social media. Some of his videos went viral, including his position on NFL players “taking a knee” and police brutality against unarmed black men. Supporters said O’Rourke’s “promise of compassion”, more than any specific policy position, drew their support.

O’Rourke understands the shallow nature of modern-day campaigning, the importance of social media, and his own appeal, which seems to be based on appearance, demeanor, and (dare I say it?) charisma.

O’Rourke was running against Ted Cruz, who sorely lacks those particular strengths. You might say that this was a contest of opposites. Cruz won, but Texas is somewhat different than the US, and O’Rourke’s charms might do well on a national stage (Trudeau comes to mind).

He certainly had no problem with fundraising;

O’Rourke raised more than $38 million in the third quarter, three times Cruz’s totals for the same period. It is the most raised in a U.S. Senate race in history. According to his campaign, the donations came from 802,836 individual contributions, mostly from Texas. When asked if he would share the funds with Democrats in other races, he declined, saying that he wanted to honor “the commitment that those who’ve contributed to this campaign have made to me.”

That kind of devotion seems Obamaesque.

Singing prodigies: Jeffrey Li

The New Neo Posted on by

Child singers are an interesting phenomenon. Some people like them; some don’t. Child singers can’t bring the depth of feeling to a song that someone with greater life experience can.

Or can they? At least, a few of them?

At 10 years of age, Jeffrey Li sang with an aching purity of tone and tremendous sincerity of delivery. This is a clip from some Asian talent show, seemingly for kids (with some strange shenanigans from the audience). The girl singing the duet with Li, Celine Tam, is around 7 years old here. She has a nice voice, too. But to me, Li is the undisputed star .

Please watch the whole thing, because one of the highlights occurs when they start their duet at around 2:33. I defy anyone not to get a little shiver at that point. And their pianissimo ending is superb as well:

At 13 years of age, Li is still great, singing the same song alone. But maybe not quite as great (here the audience screams in a distracting way, but Li doesn’t lose his composure):

And I love the reaction of Li’s parents as they listen.

Sooner or later Li’s voice will change as he goes through puberty. He may still sing very well, like Aled Jones before him. But as with Aled, he probably won’t be quite as good as he was as a child.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s recovery

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s a lot of speculation about what Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s current absence from the Court means. Is this the beginning of the end for RBG? Or just another bump on a long long road?

Ginsburg had major lung surgery on December 21. That’s about 3 weeks ago. I’ve known several people who had similar surgeries for similar reasons, and they were a lot younger than she is, and they were out of commission for far longer than that. It’s a pretty brutal surgery and the recovery tends to be painful.

I’m not a doctor and I don’t play one on TV, so take everything I say with a grain of salt, but I’m basing my opinion on the experience of those friends of mine, plus articles such as this one:

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg missed her first oral arguments in more than 25 years on the bench this week as she recovers from a Dec. 21 operation that removed about half of her left lung, including two cancerous growths.

Ginsburg’s absence from the bench…did not surprise cancer surgeons, who say that based on what is known publicly, the 85-year-old’s recovery appears to be proceeding normally.

Top doctors with experience performing pulmonary lobectomies expect Ginsburg to be back on the bench in less than six weeks, with more than enough time to return for the court’s February sitting.

That said, I will add that RBG is 85 years old. People of that age sometimes bounce back from surgery (my mother did well after a hip replacement at 96, for example), but they are obviously at greater risk of complications than a younger person. What’s more, we don’t really know whether RBG’s lung nodules were primary cancers or metastases from previous cancers. The longer-term prognosis is probably much better if it’s the first rather than the second.

We have a few resident doctors and retired doctors here who might be able to weigh in with more knowledge than I have.

Does the president have the legal authority to declare a crisis and build a border wall?

The New Neo Posted on by

Unquestionably, lawyers and law professors can argue on either side of this issue and make a convincing case. But here are some of the arguments Trump’s side will probably use if it comes down to that:

It’s likely that President Trump is looking at 10 U.S.C. § 284 for authority to build the wall. That allows the Department of Defense to support other agencies of the federal government to counter drug activity and transnational organized crime, using such means as “Construction of roads and fences and installation of lighting to block drug smuggling corridors across international boundaries of the United States.”

Another law, 10 U.S.C. § 2808, allows the president to declare a national emergency and direct the U.S. military to undertake military construction projects using appropriated funds for military construction, including family housing, that have not already been obligated.

Ackerman [a Yale law prof who wrote an op-ed in the NY Times saying that Trump lacks the authority] compares declaring an emergency to build a border wall to President Harry Truman’s attempt to nationalize the steel industry in 1952. That effort was struck down by the Supreme Court. This comparison is ridiculous, because that case involved the president seizing control of private property (i.e. privately owned steel mills).

In contrast, the government has already purchased much of the land needed for the border wall.

Much more at the link, including:

My research did not isolate a particular legal standard for “a national emergency,” so it’s possible Trump’s critics could challenge his action in the courts as insufficient on that basis. There’s plenty of violence taking place on both sides of the border in connection with drug smuggling that Trump could cite to invoke the same justification used by Clinton and Bush.

If Trump is wrong, Congress, as Ackerman noted, would have “the right to repudiate it immediately.” Thus, the question of whether the situation at the border is an emergency is probably more of a political issue for the first two branches of government than it is a legal issue for the third branch.

Whether or not it should be a legal issue for the third branch, it probably will be, if Trump ends up deciding that declaring a national emergency is the way to go for building the wall.

Why is this the hill the Democrats have chosen to die on? It’s clear why it’s so important to Trump—it’s the linchpin of his campaign promises and he feels he must deliver. For the Democrats, it’s really a reverse of that same principle. Their biggest goal is to remove Trump now or at the very least to prevent his re-election. In fact, they might be more comfortable with the second than the first, because removing a president means they can’t campaign against him in 2020, and they see anti-Trumpism as a big big motivator for voting Democratic.

But their opposition to the wall is multiply-determined. They think it makes them look compassionate, which will appeal to their constituents, who can then bask in the glow of their own compassion when they vote for Democrats. In addition, the Party sees illegal immigrants as ultimately leading to more Democratic voters.

Who will win the wall funding standoff? Michael Walsh believes it will be Trump:

…[T]he furloughed public servants are merely suffering delayed paychecks thanks to the Democrats’ refusal to accept the results of the 2016 election, and while the public has not been as deliberately inconvenienced as it was during the dog-in-the-manger Obama shutdown, its effects are nevertheless being felt at such points of intersection as the national parks. Still, life has gone on otherwise pretty much as before — and the longer the shutdown rolls on, the more easily the way we were can be forgotten.

So the longer Donald Trump wrangles with his two superannuated cartoon antagonists, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, the stronger the president’s position becomes. This despite the Democrat Media’s insistence that the shutdown is a terrible thing, costing the lives of (as usual) untold women, children, and minorities.

He makes a certain point, which is that so far the shutdown has mostly been a non-event, hyped by the press of course, but not affecting most people at all. It will get more visible as time goes on, though, and the government workers start not receiving paychecks.

However, there is a certain “boy who cried wolf” perception that may be starting to operate, which is that people become somewhat bored with these recurrent shutdowns because they seem like old stories. We’ve passed this way too many times before, and the empty theater aspects of the process become more and more apparent.

How many people see the shutdown that way? I don’t know, but I would guess that if I were to poll most of my friends on the subject—which I am not planning to do—the majority of them would start saying how awful it is and how the Republicans are at fault. But whether they are representative of the country at large I do not know.

So far, however, polls indicate that they are:

Nearly half of voters, 47 percent, say Trump is mostly to blame for the shutdown, the poll shows, while another 5 percent point the finger at congressional Republicans. But just a third, 33 percent, blame Democrats in Congress.

The article doesn’t have a link to the poll, so I wasn’t able to see how the questions were phrased, which tends to be highly important in interpreting the meaning of polls. It was also conducted prior to the president’s speech on Tuesday, which makes it even less meaningful than usual.

In a quick search I was unable to find any polls taken after Tuesday. But it’s only over time that this story will play out, and Trump’s only just begun to fight.

Alternative fact-checking from the self-appointed self-annointed truth-tellers of the MSM

The New Neo Posted on by

Even before Trump delivered his short speech Tuesday night, the MSM had decided on its theme/meme of the evening: Trump will lie and we will tell you about his lies and correct them. I discussed the situation prior to the president’s speech here, and shortly after the speech the fact-checkers went to town and did their thing:

The Democrats’ theme for the evening was “facts, not fear.” Many major media also adopted the same theme. The coordinated talking point began hours if not days before the speech even aired, with CNN’s Alisyn Camerota saying yesterday morning, “Fact-checkers are eating their Wheaties and getting extra rest since they will be working overtime tonight to separate fact from fiction on this border situation.”

As soon as the speech ended, White House press corps mascot Jim Acosta recited his rather groan-inducing rehearsed line that Trump’s address “should have come with a Surgeon General’s warning that it was hazardous to the truth.”

But when it came time to back up this talking point about factual inaccuracies, the media whiffed. Most of the alleged “fact” “checks” were instead critiques of opinions. Many critiqued things not included in Trump’s speech. And sometimes the “fact” “checks” dinged Trump for saying completely true things.

Please read the whole thing (also see this and this).

Some of the fact-checking was inadvertently funny in a sad sort of way, such as when “CBS “Fact-Check” Finds That Trump’s Claim About Women Migrants Being Raped Wasn’t Exaggerated But Was Understated, But Then Deletes Its Own Fact-Check as Insufficiently Helpful to the Cause.”

But it all revealed once again—not that we needed any more evidence—that the MSM is now the mouthpiece of the Resistance, and proud of it.

The 2016 election: the crime and the coverup

The New Neo Posted on by

Jed Babbin, writing in the Spectator, notes:

Since Watergate, the Washington wisdom has always held that it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup that sinks a politician. But that’s only the case when the coverup fails.

But what if the coverup succeeds?

It’s horribly simple. The crimes are never uncovered and the perpetrators are never brought to justice no matter how serious their crimes may be. That is precisely what has happened because of the FBI and Justice Department’s coverup of their abuses of power and illegal actions during the 2016 election.

In this case, the FBI and the Justice Department have succeeded in the most significant coverup in American political history. The abuses of power and crimes they have succeeded in covering up are not only against the law: they are crimes against our system of law and government. They were perpetrated by employees of the government, under color of law, with the intention of affecting the outcome of an election.

I disagree, at least somewhat. I think we political junkies on the right do know quite a bit about the crimes and the coverup; the information is out there for those who are interested. But there’s a secondary coverup by the MSM, which is how most Americans still get their news. And there’s another coverup (or rather, minimization) of sorts by Democrats who say it didn’t happen that way and/or it’s been exaggerated and/or you shouldn’t care.

The Spectator article also mentions the stonewalling in which the FBI and DOJ have been engaged, withholding information from multiple Congressional investigations. That’s part of the picture.

But still, we already have enough information to be outraged, and my sense is that most people are not outraged. They don’t care and/or they are partisan Democrats and applaud it and/or they don’t read the information or follow it and/or or they don’t understand what it means.

The article also points out something I was dreading before the midterms when I realized the Democrats were highly likely to win in the House: the investigations mounted by the GOP-controlled Congress have stopped.

[NOTE: A mystery is why Trump never declassified some of the relevant documents, particularly before the 2018 midterms. However, it’s not hard to generate some theories on that—for example, they were just too sensitive. Or they reflected poorly on him or on the GOP in some way. Or he’s saving them for a more important time. None of those seem all that convincing to me.]