Republicans of New Hampshire (one of the whitest states in the US) nominate a black former police chief for US Congress

The New Neo Posted on by

Last night Eddie Edwards won the GOP nomination for US Congress from the 1st Congressional District of New Hampshire:

Eddie Edwards, who was endorsed by Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, defeated six Republican opponents in the 1st Congressional District, which covers the eastern half of the state. A Navy veteran who also served as enforcement chief for the state liquor commission, Edwards is the second African-American to be nominated to a U.S. House seat in New Hampshire.

The NY Times, which I so often criticize, got it right about this one:

New Hampshire is set to elect either its first openly gay member of Congress or its first black representative…

In the 1st District, Executive Councilor Chris Pappas won Tuesday’s 11-way primary race for the Democratic nomination, beating a former Obama administration official who had raised more money than the other 10 candidates combined…

Pappas, who is gay, is a former state lawmaker who is serving his third term on the governor’s Executive Council, runs a family restaurant in Manchester and has the backing of key Democrats including the state’s two U.S. senators. He told supporters Tuesday evening his campaign will be about decency, unity and progress…

Eddie Edwards, who was endorsed by Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, defeated six opponents on the Republican side. A Navy veteran who also served as enforcement chief for the state liquor commission, Edwards is the second African-American to be nominated to a U.S. House seat in New Hampshire.

One thing for sure is that this election will break the all-female lock on New Hampshire representation in Congress. New Hampshire is a tiny state, not only one of the smallest in the nation (population about one and a third million people) but one of the whitest at 95% (exceeded only by its more liberal sister states, Maine and Vermont) and one of the least black at 1.22%. I would wager that most of the black population of New Hampshire is Democratic rather than Republican, although I certainly don’t know.

And yet Edwards won handily, getting 48% of the vote (almost half) in a crowded race. That’s impressive. Edwards was helped by the fact that Giuliani endorsed him, which makes him Trump-backed by proxy.

Don’t you think that if Edwards had been a Democrat, this event would be getting more publicity?

Here’s Edwards’ bio. And here’s Edwards:

Edwards has a chance of winning, but I don’t know how big a chance. The 1st Congressional District of NH (there are only two in the entire state, by the way) has been traded back and forth between Democrats and Republicans for many election cycles. His Democratic opponent is a young man who grew up in New Hampshire and is from a prominent restaurant-owning family in a big population center in the state.

I hope a lot of money gets put into this race by the GOP national organization. It might pay dividends.

Another changer sparked by 9/11

The New Neo Posted on by

I was going to put up a post about Serena Williams’ meltdown at the US Open, and the reaction to it. But I think I’ll wait till tomorrow, because I want to stick to the topic of 9/11 and its aftermath.

I’ve already written my reflections on the 17th anniversary of the day. But commenter “Matthew” has kindly referred me to this eloquent essay by another political changer who found the events of 9/11 to be the beginning of the process for her.

Annika Hernroth-Rothstein is not even an American. Born in Sweden, she explains that at the time of 9/11 she had just returned to Sweden from living in Paris for a year, a year in which she had happily functioned as a leftist radical.

Here’s what she has to say about what happened to her on 9/11 and beyond:

I [had] identified as an intellectual and as a political thinker with a critical mind. What I failed to acknowledge at the time was that my country [Sweden] was a controlled environment and that the spectrum on which political analysis took place was limited…

During his speech on September 14, 2001, President Bush said that adversity introduces us to ourselves. Well, on that day I was introduced to who I had been and who I truly was. I saw my own place in the context of history, and how the ideas that I helped promote, the accusations I had met with silence, all had a part in shaping the world I now saw burning before me.

It wasn’t a game. I had played it, but it was never a game.

In the weeks that followed, I watched the American news with one eye, and its European counterpart with the other. It was like seeing the slow shifting of the tectonic plates, dividing the world through op-eds and analysis. On September 12, 2001, the headline of the largest Swedish newspaper read, “We Are All Americans.” A few weeks later, that beautiful creed had already been forgotten. The one time my country could side with the U.S. was when America was on its knees, but when it refused to stay down it quickly went back to the smug relativism of World War II, the icy efficiency of a country never having to fight for either ethics or its existence.

Soon enough, the narrative was clear. The end of the story had already been written: The U.S. was unjustly acting as the world police, once again. Bush was a moron and a puppet. America was killing innocent people for oil. It went on and on, and all I could think was that if I know that these things are not true, then what other lies have I accepted as truth throughout my life?

So I pulled at the thread of my ideology, and it all unraveled before me.

Except for that fact that I’m not European, I was never much of an activist, and never a leftist, this fits my own experience, particularly the words “if these things are not true, what other lies have I accepted as truth” and “I pulled at the thread of my ideology, and it all unraveled before me.”

It didn’t happen so quickly for me. It probably didn’t happen all that quickly for Annika, either; after all, she’s writing a brief essay and has to summarize. I got to tell my story in longer form.

But the basics are very similar: acceptance of the views of those around me, and of the tale told in the MSM, without too much question. A sudden jolt, leading to research and more thought, and a discovery of lies and misunderstandings and incomplete truths that raise so many questions.

The sleeve unravels, slowly or quickly. The house of cards falls. The sand shifts.

And one day you wake up and enough has changed that you realize you have moved to a different place, and discover that a lot of people you love don’t understand what has happened to you.

9/11: Seventeen years

The New Neo Posted on by

Seventeen years is a long time. A long time.

It means that there are plenty of young adults who don’t clearly remember a time before 9/11. The attack is just part of the background music of life, just as Pearl Harbor was for me when I was growing up. As a child, I couldn’t quite understand what the big fuss was all about; it was history, after all.

But even for those of us who were fully adult—maybe even old—at the time of 9/11, it was a long while ago, and although I can only speak for myself I think that for the most part the event has been fully incorporated (as much as humanly possible, that is) into our view of the world. It is no longer so shocking as history.

That doesn’t mean it’s still not shocking on the occasions when we fully contemplate it. It’s just that we rarely do, although an anniversary like today would be a good time to do it. It also doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be very shocking if something similar were to ever happen again (heaven forbid). But it does mean that 9/11 is part of our view of the world, a view that has had a full seventeen years to form. And a great deal has happened since then.

But I still remember the fear, dread, grief, and anger I felt that day. Here’s what I wrote about it in 2005, when the memory was still quite fresh. Any photos of the many people who died at the hands of the perpetrators that day still move me; all those innocent lives snuffed out, many in their prime.

There were heroes that day such as, for example, the Flight 93 passengers, the firefighters and police, the ordinary people in the WTC who stopped to help assist others to get out (some of whom lost their own lives in the process), those on the planes who phoned to say a last goodbye to loved ones or to give information about the hijackings—all are heroes to me. RIP, and let us never become blasé about what happened.

I would have wished for more unity of purpose among Americans and the Western world in the aftermath. That was most definitely not to be. We are more divided than ever, I think, although it’s a cliché to say so. Much of what is happening today doesn’t seem related to 9/11, but much of it is. Forces were unleashed that day that still reverberate, sometimes in unexpected ways.

One of the most unexpected was my own small personal story of political change that began on that day but really had been in the works for a long time without my even being aware of it, and which took a couple of post-9/11 years to actually be completed.

I suppose it’s still a work in progress, and this blog is part of it.

Cutting a corn cob into smaller pieces

The New Neo Posted on by

That was my task last night.

I was making some of this, and as you can see the recipe requires that the ears of corn be cut into quarters, or at least into rather small pieces. I know how to halve corn—you just hold it on each end and break it—but that tends to create one smaller piece and one longer and thicker one. Holding that bigger piece and trying to break it the same way yielded a singular lack of success.

The recipes were no help. They just assumed the corn was already cut in small pieces. When I Googled “how do you cut corn cobs?” I got nothing but instructions on how to cut corn kernels off the cobs.

I wouldn’t think anyone would need any instruction for that. But instruction there was, and plenty of it.

So I tried something like “how do you cut a corn cob into smaller pieces?” I still got things like this video, which is called “How to chop corn” but only shows a person breaking corn cobs in half, boiling them, and then cutting the kernels off the cobs with a knife, or other recipes like this one from Martha Stewart which unhelpfully says, “Using a sharp knife, cut each ear of corn into 3 or 4 pieces, each about 1 1/2 inches long.”

Well gee whiz, Martha, I tried that. In fact, I tried every knife I own, serrated and non, and some of them are very sharp. But they didn’t make a dent.

I also found this discussion about the problem, where the participants seem equally divided between those who say “just use a sharp knife” and those who say “that doesn’t work.” It seems to hinge on the degree of sharpness. Or maybe something about the size of the corn. Or perhaps it’s the muscle of the cook; maybe I’m deficient in that area.

But I did find this video, which shows you how to break corn into three pieces rather than two. Quite clever, and perhaps sufficient to conquer the problem. I’ll have to wait till next time, though, because before I saw it I finally had given in and just made the recipe with halved corn cobs, broken by hand into a smaller piece and a larger piece.

Collecting the oceans’ plastic

The New Neo Posted on by

I hope this invention is a great success:

The project is the creation of Boyan Slat, a 24-year-old Dutch college dropout who raised more than $30 million on a five-year quest to build an ocean-cleaning machine. His inspiration dates to a holiday diving trip in Greece he took as a teenager, where he encountered so much plastic, he decided to make cleaning up the ocean his mission. Back home in the Netherlands, he quit his aerospace engineering studies at the Delft University of Technology and founded the nonprofit Ocean Cleanup, where he is now CEO with a staff of 65 engineers and scientists…

Plastic trash accumulates in ocean gyres, which are large systems of circular currents. The Pacific Garbage Patch, which collects in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, is the largest and best-known assemblage of floating trash. It’s more plastic soup than patch, however; there is no solid surface on which to stand. Most of it is made up of microplastics, plastics ground down into tiny bits by sunlight and wave action. Slat’s team of scientists say the garbage patch also contains an estimated 79,000 tons of abandoned fishing gear…

Physically, the device consists of a high-density polyethylene pipe 4 feet in diameter and 1,969 feet long. It will rest on the ocean surface in the shape of a U, with a screen skirt that hangs below the surface. It moves slowly through the water, driven by currents and winds, and can capture plastics on the surface, as well as debris almost 10 feet below the surface. If the device performs as designed, 60 additional booms will be deployed.

If everything goes as planned, it should collect 100,000 to 150,000 pounds of garbage in the first year. The full fleet of 60 devices—which will be larger—will collect more than 30 million pounds a year, Slat estimates…

As plastic is collected, it will be picked up by a ship and transported back to California and then on to Europe to the Ocean Cleanup’s customers, Slat says.

I read the entire article, which goes into the pros and cons, and also mentions prevention as highly important. One thing it does not mention, however, is that the source of the plastic in the ocean is not generally the first world. It’s the third world.

[NOTE: I wondered whether China is still considered a third world country. The answer is “more or less.”]

Resist the term “Resistance” for anti-Trumpism…

The New Neo Posted on by

…writes Roger Simon.

I strongly agree.

An excerpt:

I would call it the most appalling, morally reprehensible example of cultural appropriation imaginable. Why? Well, think what is being appropriated — the Holocaust.

Making your extreme dislike for Donald Trump and his policies equivalent to battling the Nazi murder of six million Jews and countless other people — when the original Resistance came into being and got its name — is beyond absurd and completely despicable. At that time, innocent people were being shot in cold blood, incinerated in gas chambers and often buried alive by the thousands. Donald Trump makes intemperate remarks on Twitter while supporting some conservative policies and judges. Are those things even remotely the same?

Not only is this an insane comparison, it is also wildly anti-Semitic. That some Jews participate in this abominable exploitation of their greatest tragedy gives those same Jews a lot to atone for during these coming Days of Awe. They should think about what they are doing for ten seconds.

I would add that the original Resistance during WWII was certainly about that, but it wasn’t wholly about that by any means. It was about resisting the Nazis and Hitler in general as well as in the specific case of the Holocaust.

There were many many reasons to resist Hitler, and the Holocaust was most definitely one of them. But there was also the murder and/or enslavement of other groups of people: for example, gypsies and Slavic peoples. There was the occupation of so many countries in Europe under Nazi rule, countries that wanted to be free. There was a desire to end the war of aggression waged by Germany.

The German Resistance had the additional motive of wanting to erase the stain of Hitler and the Nazis from the German people. I’ve written a number of posts about the German resistance (see for example this, this, and this), particularly the attempts to assassinate Hitler.

What motivated the most famous of the Nazi would-be Hitler assassins, Claus von Stauffenberg? There’s some disagreement about it, but here’s the take of well-known British historian Richard Evans:

…Stauffenberg was much more than an action hero driven by the kind of simple moral imperative that suits Hollywood’s desire to portray everything in terms of starkly opposed opposites of good and evil. He found moral guidance in a complex mixture of Catholic religious precepts, an aristocratic sense of honour, Ancient Greek ethics, and German Romantic poetry. Above all, perhaps, his sense of morality was formed under the influence of the poet Stefan George, whose ambition is was to revive a “secret Germany” that would sweep away the materialism of the Weimar Republic and restore German life to its true spirituality. Inspired by George, Stauffenberg came to look for a revival of an idealized medieval Reich, in which Europe would attain a new level of culture and civilization under German leadership. A search of this kind was typical of the Utopianism that inhabited the wilder shores of Weimar culture – optimistic and ambitious, but also abstract and unrealistic. It was ill-suited to serve as the basis for any kind of real political future.

Such influences set Stauffenberg apart from many of the longer-standing members of the military resistance, whose multifarious projects and plans to overthrow Hitler dated from as early as 1938, and were driven above all by a belief that the war the National Socialists were aiming for was unwinnable. To launch it, they believed, would cause incalculable harm to Germany. It was this, rather than any fundamental opposition to National Socialism as such, that motivated the leading members of the military-aristocratic resistance in the late 1930s and at the beginning of the 1940s.

Like the few other army officers who were critical of the conduct of the war in the east, therefore, Stauffenberg at first took a stance that was motivated more by military than by moral considerations. In the course of 1942, however, Stauffenberg realized that such atrocities were not just counter-productive by-products of a brutal policy of waging war, but formed the very essence of the German war effort. Hitler and the National Socialist leadership were betraying Germany, not merely preventing the realization of the true spiritual values of the “secret Germany” but actually negating them. They were perverting military values and implicating the Armed Forces in terrible crimes that went against all the most fundamental principles by which Stauffenberg and his fellow-officers lived; had he survived the war, this realization that the army itself was being turned into an instrument of criminality would no doubt have made him impatient with those who would claim that it remained untainted by the murderous spirit of National Socialism. It was this moral conviction, arrived at when Germany was still absolutely dominant in Europe, that set Stauffenberg apart from the more instrumental views of some of the other conspirators, who sought above all to rescue Germany from the total defeat that stared it in the face after Stalingrad. These beliefs, combined with his energetic personality, were also what led him to act where many other members of the military-aristocratic resistance still hesitated.

As you can see, it was complicated.

But none of this has any parallel with the self-named, self-aggrandizing, overly-dramatic “Resistance” to Trump, who is neither murderous nor an aggressive warmonger. Mere disagreement (however intense and heartfelt) with someone’s relatively ordinary and non-murderous political policies doesn’t merit the title, and it is a travesty for the current Trump opposition to use it.

Facial recognition at the airport

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t know about you, but this news gives me a cold chill:

Some international travelers can leave their boarding passes and passports in their pockets when flying out of Dulles International Airport thanks to a new facial recognition boarding technology that went into operation Thursday.

The new veriScan system developed by the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority—with guidance from U.S. Customs and Border Protection—scans the faces of travelers approaching the gate. The system then compares the photo to a gallery that includes images of that person—either their passport photo for U.S. citizens or the photo taken of foreign nationals when they entered the country. The process eliminates the need for an airline employee to manually check every boarding pass and passport while boarding a plane.

The scan takes fractions of a second and has shown to be 99 percent accurate during testing…

There’s something about the expanding power of government to pin you down that offends the libertarian in me. All of these technical advances help with crime control (I seem to recall that some criminals and some terrorists have been identified and caught that way), assisted by the surveillance cameras that have become nearly-ubiquitous in public places. That the up side.

The down side is that a tool the government can use to help you the government can use to harm you, or at least to curtail your liberty. If a government wanted to find you, track you, keep tabs on you, for more nefarious reasons, it certainly could do so.

When I was traveling to Europe recently—something I hadn’t done in over ten years—I was amazed at how the passport scanning worked. It was mostly automated, although at certain points I did have to show my passport to an actual human being. My passport photo doesn’t even really look like me, by the way—the hair color is my old dyed dark brown, and my face looks funny (at least to me). But the machines had no trouble matching it.

The way it worked was that I was supposed to look in a camera, which took a photo and compared that photo to the photo from my passport, which had been placed face down (literally) in a scanner. If you travel abroad a lot you probably already know about this procedure (I’m assuming it’s standard, and not just at Rome and Boston). But I didn’t.

Roman pizza, then and now

The New Neo Posted on by

When I was in Rome recently, I ate a lot of pizza.

A lot.

It was a good thing to grab for fuel during on-the-go sightseeing. My main meals were in the evening, but a piece of pizza could be found in the middle of the day on nearly every street while walking, and it was uniformly very tasty.

But for dinner, I found that the menus didn’t vary all that much. Granted, I didn’t go to the five-star places, but I went to some restaurants that Yelpers seemed to like and the menus were remarkably repetitive: pizza again, and pasta.

Now, I’m not complaining too much. Pizza and pasta, what’s not to like? But I was surprised at the sameness of the restaurants. It was true not only of the ones I ate at, but also of the ones I passed, looking briefly at the posted menus. They were all nearly interchangeable.

I’ve mentioned that I’ve been in Rome once before, when I was fifteen. You do the math to figure out when that was; I’m not going to assist you. But it was obviously a long long time ago. And I remember something quite different back then.

Actually, I remember a lot of things were quite different back then. For example, even in Rome, back then there were a lot of teenage girls who didn’t shave their legs or armpits. Not so today!

I also remember teenaged girls in Italian cities walking around in small groups of twos and threes and holding hands. Not so today, unless they’re making some lesbian statement (I didn’t see that, but I suppose it happens).

There also used to be—and perhaps this might explain why the girls went around in groups—a lot of groping by young men as they passed the girls by. I was a teenage girl myself, on a tour with other teenagers, and we went around in groups too, for that reason. There was strength in numbers. In fact, there was one guy on our trip who was some sort of brother—“brother” as in, religious orders—and he had a kind of monkish outfit that he sometimes wore. He was a friend, and we often palled around with him, asking him to wear the outfit, in an attempt to discourage the worst of the gropers. It seemed to work.

I’m not a teenage girl anymore, and not the natural target for gropers, but I didn’t even witness any of that behavior anymore by the men of Rome. And there were plenty of young girls walking around, often alone, often in skimpy clothing.

And the previously-ubiquitous glove shops? Gone, gone, gone.

But back to pizza. When I was in Italy as a teenager, my recollection is that pizza was nearly unheard of. We kids would sometimes inquire about it, and we were told that it was a very regional dish (I forget from what region, but this article seems to indicate that it was Naples, where I did not go as a teen) and that it rarely appeared in any restaurants, and often had thick crust and was squarish. So we gave up looking.

The transition appears to have been complete. Italy is now loaded with pizza places.

Does anyone else remember it that way, or is my memory playing tricks on me?

Are Nike’s sales up, post Kaepernick?

The New Neo Posted on by

The headlines certainly indicate it—for example, this article in Fortune, with the headline “Colin Kaepernick Campaign Gives Nike a Big Sales Boost” is rather typical. But looking at several of these articles, I noticed that only sometimes do their headlines also mention what all the articles indicate in the main text, which is that they’re talking about online sales rising:

Nike’s selection of Colin Kaepernick as one of the new faces of the company has certainly brought media attention and controversy, but it’s also having a noticeable effect on the bottom line.

A new report from Edison Trends says Nike’s online sales grew 31% from Sunday through Tuesday of Labor Day weekend this year. That’s notably better than last year’s 17% seasonal increase.

“There was speculation that the Nike/Kaepernick campaign would lead to a drop in sales but the data does not support that theory,” the company said in a statement.

And then the article adds this:

The report does not factor in brick-and-mortar sales.

So what does the news actually mean? We know that the stock has dropped—that news is in the public domain—but what of the sales in general? The company would obviously prefer that investors and the public think that sales are up overall, but they’re not reporting the data on that.

I don’t know. But I bet Nike does.

So, who buys Nike shoes online? And does most of Nike’s online sale activity consist of selling shoes, or is other gear prominent? If it’s mostly shoes, are the majority of those sales to repeat customers who already buy Nike shoes? After all, don’t shoes usually need trying on, unless it’s a replacement pair? So, does this online surge represent people who already support Nike deciding this would be a good time to reorder?

I don’t know. But I bet Nike does.

One thing I researched just now is how much of Nike’s sales occur online compared to the company’s sales as a whole. I found this data from last year:

Nike Inc. continues its big growth curve on the web. The footwear giant says it reached $2 billion in annual online sales in its most recent fiscal year, or 30% more than the year prior and double the amount of two years ago…

To reach its goal of $7 billion in online sales by 2020, Nike is working on several companywide initiatives in Nike stores, via its mobile apps and through other channels to reach consumers with its products in a more direct and personalized way…

The brand is focused, for example, on building customer retention through personalized features of its mobile apps, increasing membership to its Nike+ loyalty program (most of whom interact with Nike via its mobile apps), and providing those members with perks that keep them coming back to purchase Nike products from Nike directly.

So we know that Nike has been steadily building its online sales, and many of its customers online are repeaters, and one would have expected that online sales this year would exceed online sales last year at the same time.

So, what percentage of Nike’s business is in online sales (online sales through the Nike site are more profitable for the company than brick-and-mortar sales, by the way, according to the article)? Here’s the answer, at least from a year ago:

For fiscal 2017 ended May 31, Nike reported: Total sales of $34.35 billion, a 6.2% increase compared with $32.34 billion last year.

So Nike’s online sales last year were about 6% of the whole.

We still don’t know what really happened—or will happen over time—to Nike’s bottom line as a result of the Kaepernick campaign. But so far the media isn’t helping us learn all that much, nor is Nike.

[NOTE: By the way, apropos of almost nothing, I couldn’t help but notice that Kaepernick’s last name is almost the same as that of the astronomer Copernicus. “Copernicus” was a Latinized version of the scientist’s birth name, which comes from “a village in Silesia near Nysa…[which] been variously spelled Kopernik, Copernik, Copernic, Kopernic, Coprirnik, and today Koperniki.” Or, I would guess, Kaepernick.]

The long effort to undermine the Trump administration

The New Neo Posted on by

One of Trump’s strengths is his willingness to do and say the unexpected.

Sometimes that’s his weakness, too. But often it’s his strength.

So I love this comeback of Trump’s:

President Donald Trump struck back hours after former President Barack Obama spoke out against his administration, in the opening remarks of his Friday speech in North Dakota.

Trump remarked that when he was asked about Obama’s speech during an interview, he replied, “I’m sorry, I watched it, but I fell asleep. I found he’s very good. Very good for sleeping.”

That’s actually not only somewhat witty (albeit in a rather juvenile way—but hey, humor’s often juvenile, and it made me laugh), it’s an example of the use of Alinsky’s Rule #5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”

It goes without saying—but hey, I’ll say it anyway—that Obama was violating the traditional rule for the behavior of ex-presidents, which is to keep their mouths shut and refrain from criticizing their successors. But no one on earth should be surprised at the fact that Obama just can’t stay away, and he can’t stand not to be part of the Resistance. He’s been trying to undermine Trump since before Trump even took office.

I’ve been around a long time, and can’t recall anything similar happening in the US in my lifetime.

While we’re at it, let’s take a stroll down more recent memory lane. Remember this sort of thing (written February of 2017, a scant couple of weeks after Trump was inaugurated)?:

When former President Barack Obama said he was “heartened” by anti-Trump protests, he was sending a message of approval to his troops. Troops? Yes, Obama has an army of agitators — numbering more than 30,000 — who will fight his Republican successor at every turn of his historic presidency. And Obama will command them from a bunker less than two miles from the White House.

In what’s shaping up to be a highly unusual post-presidency, Obama isn’t just staying behind in Washington. He’s working behind the scenes to set up what will effectively be a shadow government to not only protect his threatened legacy, but to sabotage the incoming administration and its popular “America First” agenda.

He’s doing it through a network of leftist nonprofits led by Organizing for Action. Normally you’d expect an organization set up to support a politician and his agenda to close up shop after that candidate leaves office, but not Obama’s OFA. Rather, it’s gearing up for battle, with a growing war chest and more than 250 offices across the country…

Obama is intimately involved in OFA operations and even tweets from the group’s account. In fact, he gave marching orders to OFA foot soldiers following Trump’s upset victory.

“It is fine for everybody to feel stressed, sad, discouraged,” he said in a conference call from the White House. “But get over it.” He demanded they “move forward to protect what we’ve accomplished.”

“Now is the time for some organizing,” he said. “So don’t mope.”

Well, they’ve done a bit of moping. But mostly they done a lot of organizing in the year and two thirds since then.

And then there was this, written right around the time of Trump’s inauguration [emphasis mine]:

As one of his first acts Monday, Trump signed an executive order freezing most federal hiring. His team is also fine-tuning plans to shrink several agencies focused on domestic policy, according to sources close to the transition.

Now, the president is about to find out how much power these maligned workers have to slow or even short-circuit his agenda.

Disgruntled employees can leak information to Capitol Hill and the press, and prod inspectors general to probe political appointees. They can also use the tools of bureaucracy to slow or sandbag policy proposals — moves that can overtly, or passive aggressively, unravel a White House’s best-laid plans…

…[M]any federal workers admit they are freaked out — demoralized by their portrayal as part of the DC “swamp” and anxious about being asked to dismantle rules and regulations they’ve labored over for years.

“What I am hearing from federal employees is a degree of apprehension that I have not heard since the Reagan transition,” said Jeffrey Neal, who ran human resources for Homeland Security’s 190,000 employees in the last job of his 33-year-long government career.

And this Foreign Policy piece from after the election and right before the inauguration cautions public servants not to sabotage the Trump administration but instead to quit if they find the demands irreconcilable with their consciences. I can’t recall anything like that being written during the transition for previous administrations, although of course I might have missed it.

And shortly after the inauguration there was this big article in the WaPo with the headline “Resistance from within: Federal workers push back against Trump”:

Less than two weeks into Trump’s administration, federal workers are in regular consultation with recently departed Obama-era political appointees about what they can do to push back against the new president’s initiatives. Some federal employees have set up social media accounts to anonymously leak word of changes that Trump appointees are trying to make.

And a few government workers are pushing back more openly…

At a church in Columbia Heights last weekend, dozens of federal workers attended a support group for civil servants seeking a forum to discuss their opposition to the Trump administration. And 180 federal employees have signed up for a workshop next weekend, where experts will offer advice on workers’ rights and how they can express civil disobedience.

At the Justice Department, an employee in the division that administers grants to nonprofits fighting domestic violence and researching sex crimes said the office has been planning to slow its work…

“You’re going to see the bureaucrats using time to their advantage,” said the employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. Through leaks to news organizations and internal complaints, he said, “people here will resist and push back against orders they find unconscionable.”

When the op-ed article by “Anonymous” appeared recently in the NY Times, I wrote about it here. But I can’t say I was surprised at the piece or its publication by the Times, because I had read several of those earlier reports at the time they were written, indicating that there was a widespread “resistance” within the federal government itself, and that part of the plan was to leak their stories and dissatisfaction to the press. The story by Anonymous was just an example of someone who supposedly is placed higher up in the administration, although the Times is careful not to tell us who it is or how high up that person might be (my guess is not as high as they’d like you to think).

No surprise at all, however.

And Obama’s recent entries into public speaking of the anti-Trump kind are not at all surprising either. As I already said, he’s been busy working to undermine Trump from the start. He may believe that now, right before the 2018 midterms, would be a good time to step up the pressure and the rhetoric and fire up the troops.

Look at the Steele dossier and the Russia collusion brouhaha in that light. It’s all part of a seamless whole, otherwise known as the “soft coup.” You’re not paranoid if people really are out to get you.