Dianne Feinstein accuses Brett Kavanaugh of having f***ed a pig in high school

The New Neo Posted on by

[See UPDATE below]

Did you know that somebody told somebody who told Dianne Feinstein something about something really bad or at least sort of bad that happened to somebody somewhere at the hands of Brett Kavanaugh sometime a long time ago?:

“I have received information from an individual concerning the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court,” Feinstein said in her surprise statement. “That individual strongly requested confidentiality, declined to come forward or press the matter further, and I have honored that decision. I have, however, referred the matter to federal investigative authorities.”…

According to a report by The Intercept, the letter was relayed to lawmakers by an individual affiliated with Stanford University and concerns an incident involving the 53-year-old Kavanaugh and a woman while they were in high school. According to two officials who spoke anonymously with the New York Times, the incident involved possible sexual misconduct between Kavanaugh and the woman…

Two sources familiar with the matter tell Fox News that Feinstein has had possession of the letter regarding Kavanaugh since July. Feinstein met privately with Kavanaugh on August 20 and also questioned him repeatedly in open and closed session during the Judiciary Committee hearings on his nomination last week. There is no indication that the matter came up in either the private meeting or the closed committee session.

The FBI has declined to investigate.

Feinstein’s move is the old LBJ rumor ploy (a perhaps apocryphal story about LBJ), minus the specificity:

Every hack in the business has used it in times of trouble, and it has even been elevated to the level of political mythology in a story about one of Lyndon Johnson’s early campaigns in Texas. The race was close and Johnson was getting worried. Finally he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumor campaign about his opponent’s life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his own barnyard sows.

“Christ, we can’t get away with calling him a pig-fucker,” the campaign manager protested. “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.

“I know,” Johnson replied. “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”

By the way, for those who think Trump is coarse, they should study LBJ. He was protected by the press for the most part, though. We didn’t learn about most of his salty sayings till much much later.

I don’t know whether this one really happened, but if so it’s a doozy:

President Lyndon B. Johnson was rather blunt when confronted by the Greek ambassador, who opposed a plan to split the small island of Cyprus between Greece and Turkey.

“Fuck your parliament and fuck your constitution,” said the 36th president of the United States. “Cyprus is a flea. Greece is a flea. If these two fellow continue itching the elephant, they just might get whacked by the elephant’s trunk.”

If Feinstein’s allegation isn’t LBJesque, it’s certainly Kafkaesque.

At least when the late Senator Ted Kennedy was borking Bork, he made some actual accusations (although absurd ones) in a public speech.

UPDATE 12:07 PM:

I just noticed that Ronan Farrow claims to have some of the details of the allegation:

The allegation dates back to the early nineteen-eighties, when Kavanaugh was a high-school student at Georgetown Preparatory School, in Bethesda, Maryland, and the woman attended a nearby high school. In the letter, the woman alleged that, during an encounter at a party, Kavanaugh held her down, and that he attempted to force himself on her.

She claimed in the letter that Kavanaugh and a classmate of his, both of whom had been drinking, turned up music that was playing in the room to conceal the sound of her protests, and that Kavanaugh covered her mouth with his hand. She was able to free herself. Although the alleged incident took place decades ago and the three individuals involved were minors, the woman said that the memory had been a source of ongoing distress for her, and that she had sought psychological treatment as a result.

No man is safe from this kind of garbage. Of course, entering public life as a Republican puts a person more at risk.

And no one should be surprised at this sort of thing, because in the past such accusations have worked—not necessarily to block nominations (although it certainly worked to defeat Roy Moore, for example, as well as others), but to taint the person nominated (Clarence Thomas, for example) and offer opportunities for future accusations that the party supporting that person is defending woman-abusers.

I have been consistent in saying that, whoever is the accused, these ancient accusations that are completely unprovable, but also completely impossible to defend oneself against (“make the sonofabitch deny it”) are pernicious and should be ignored and/or condemned. But unfortunately they will continue to occur as long as they are rewarded—and human nature being what it is, they will almost certainly continue to be rewarded.

[NOTE: It occurs to me that someone, somewhere, may read the title of this post and get the idea that I’m calling Kavanaugh’s nameless accuser a pig. No, I’m not. The reference is to the LBJ story, and the commonality between the two is a charge involving sex that cannot be proved or disproved, but is unsavory.]

The power of Google

The New Neo Posted on by

A video has emerged that tells us what we already knew—that the heads of Google follow the ethos of the left:

Someone leaked to Breitbart an hour-long video of an “all hands” Google meeting that was held just after the 2016 election. The video features Google’s co-founder, Sergei Brin, its CEO, Sundar Pichai, and numerous other high-ranking “Googlers” speaking in turn about the election’s tragic outcome. It is stunning.

All of the speakers express grief over Donald Trump’s election. All of the speakers assume that every Google employee is a Democrat and is stunned and horrified that Hillary Clinton–the worst and most corrupt presidential candidate in modern history–lost. There is much discussion about what Google can do to reverse the benighted world-wide tide exemplified by Brexit and Trump’s election.

Well, there was at least one Google employee who didn’t get with the program: the leaker. But you can bet that person was a huge exception.

More here

Private monopolies can do whatever they want. I mean, sure it’s illegal to use a dominant market position as leverage to advance another business product — Microsoft was sued for using its dominance in operating systems to try to give its Netscape browser an advantage over competitors — but our well-paid-off “conservative” shills will tell us it’s no problem for an outright monopoly to scheme to use its power to squelch some businesses and competitors and an entire political movement.

The question has never been what political persuasion the Google majority hold, or their willingness to use their clout to act on it. The question is whether Google is a monopoly and whether antitrust legislation can be used to change that. The question is discussed here, here, and here, just to cite a few of the many articles on the subject.

But it’s not just about conventional antitrust laws. It’s about whether Google (and Facebook, and Twitter) can be considered ordinary companies, or whether they are neutral platforms for speech:

So far, in the courts, Google has successfully argued that its decisions about what to rank, the ordering of its rankings, what ads to run, what videos to allow on YouTube and who will see them are all analogous to a newspaper editor’s decisions about what op-eds to run. And since a newspaper editor’s decisions are protected speech under the first amendment, so, Google argues, are its search engine decisions.

That Google compares itself in these cases to a newspaper editor might come as a surprise, given that Google, Facebook, Twitter and others often make the contrary claim to users and governments that they are neutral platforms, mere conduits for information.

Mark Zuckerberg made that claim explicitly when Facebook was under fire from critics who were accusing the platform of suppressing conservative content in its “Trending Topics” news feed. Google still makes that claim on its support page under “search using autocomplete”, disclaiming: “Search predictions aren’t the answers to your search. They’re also not statements by other people or Google about your search terms.”

But disingenuity aside, are these companies’ practices of privileging certain information really analogous to what newspaper editors do, and therefore similarly protected by the first amendment? The answer is no.

Making decisions about what and how information is conveyed does not automatically make one an editor entitled to first amendment protection. That is what the supreme court decided, for example, in Rumsfeld v Forum of Academic and Institutional Rights (Fair), when a group of law schools argued that it could bar military recruiters from recruitment fairs for its students…

…the court [in Packingham v North Carolina] called cyberspace and social media “the modern public square”. If the court means what it says and sticks with the modern-square analogy, then it’s these companies that become vulnerable to first amendment challenges by users.

There are also other analogies to draw with what Google is doing (eg providing users information) that would not entitle it first amendment protection.

Much more at the link.

We also have the release of a movie entitled “The Creepy Line.” It’s about Google:

I found that trailer on YouTube, by the way—which is owned by Google.

Nazis and socialism: straight from the horses’ mouths

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s a long-running argument, online and elsewhere, about how socialist the National Socialists (otherwise known as Nazis, whose full name was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party [*see NOTE below]) were.

The Nazis certainly weren’t conventional socialists, if there can be said to be such a thing. But they were indeed some sort of socialist—as briefly described in this previous post.

Now we have this article at the Federalist, which tackles the question once again and answers that the Nazis were indeed socialists, and certainly on the left side of the political spectrum. Here are some excerpts:

From the moment they enter the political fray, young right-wingers are told, “You own the Nazis.” At best, the left concedes it owns communism. This comforts a little, because even if far higher in body count, communism supposedly rebukes the scourge of racism. But it’s all a lie…

… The right consists of free-market capitalists, who think the individual is the primary political unit, believes in property rights, and are generally distrustful of government by unaccountable agencies and government solutions to social problems. They view family and civil institutions, such as church, as needed checks on state power…

The left believes the opposite. They distrust the excesses and inequality capitalism produces. They give primacy to group rights and identity. They believe factors like race, ethnicity, and sex compose the primary political unit. They don’t believe in strong property rights.

They believe it is the government’s responsibility to solve social problems. They call for public intervention to “equalize” disparities and render our social fabric more inclusive (as they define it). They believe the free market has failed to solve issues like campaign finance, income inequality, minimum wage, access to health care, and righting past injustices. These people talk about “democracy”—the method of collective decisions.

By these definitions, the Nazis were firmly on the left. National Socialism was a collectivist authoritarian movement run by “social justice warriors.”…

As Hayek stated in 1933, the year the Nazis took power: “[I]t is more than probable that the real meaning of the German revolution is that the long dreaded expansion of communism into the heart of Europe has taken place but is not recognized because the fundamental similarity of methods and ideas is hidden by the difference in phraseology and the privileged groups.”

Nazism and socialism competed with the Enlightenment-based individualism of John Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, and others who profoundly influenced the American founding and define the modern American right at its best…

Much much more at the link.

It is true, however, that Communists were among the most fervent anti-Nazis, both in Germany and elsewhere. But—as the Federalist article points out—this does not change the fact that both were primarily on the left. They were definitely different (as could be seen, for example, by the distinction between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR). But it was in part a turf war. Both were devoted to statism vs. individualism, and both believed in government control of business as well:

The Nazi charter published a year later and coauthored by Hitler is socialist in almost every aspect. It calls for “equality of rights for the German people”; the subjugation of the individual to the state; breaking of “rent slavery”; “confiscation of war profits”; the nationalization of industry; profit-sharing in heavy industry; large-scale social security; the “communalization of the great warehouses and their being leased at low costs to small firms”; the “free expropriation of land for the purpose of public utility”; the abolition of “materialistic” Roman Law; nationalizing education; nationalizing the army; state regulation of the press; and strong central power in the Reich…

In “Mein Kampf,” he states that without his racial insights National Socialism “would really do nothing more than compete with Marxism on its own ground.” Nor did Hitler eschew this sentiment once reaching power. As late as 1941, with the war in bloom, he stated “basically National Socialism and Marxism are the same” in a speech published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs.

Nazi propaganda minister and resident intellectual Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary that the Nazis would install “real socialism” after Russia’s defeat in the East.

Very few people in this country are aware of these facts. The left’s propaganda machine has been teaching that Hitler was a man of the right for a long, long time, and for the most part that propaganda has been successful.

[ * NOTE: To get the exact name for the Nazi Party—I knew it was more than “National Socialists,” but I wasn’t 100% sure what it was—I went to Wiki, as evidenced by the link I offered in the text of my post. However, as though to demonstrate the point in the last paragraph of my piece, this is the way the Wiki entry begins [emphasis mine]:

National Socialism (German: Nationalsozialismus), more commonly known as Nazism…is the ideology and practices associated with the Nazi Party – officially the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP) – in Nazi Germany, and of other far-right groups with similar aims.

Far-right groups? The article goes on to describe the socialist roots and socialist aims of Nazism, without seeing the irony there.

By the way, there is a Wiki talk page that discusses the Nazi right/left issue, although “discusses” is really not the right word. Here’s what it says under FAQs:

Why does this article say that the Nazis were right wing?

Because that is the consensus of reliable sources, in this case historians and political scientists.

But the word “socialist” is right in their name!

The word “socialism” has different meanings in different contexts. The phrase “national socialist” as used by the Nazis referred to a nationalistic view that the German people should prosper at the expense of others, or more specifically, that the interests of the German people were the paramount concern of the party. The meaning of “socialist” was not “communal ownership of property” as it is generally used to mean today, but “of or pertaining to a society” in the more general sense.

There’s much much more in which the Wiki folks firmly reject the “Nazis are leftist” arguments. I don’t have time to read all the links, but if any of you feels like tackling it, I encourage you to do so. My guess is that they reject all sources (including one contemporary to the Nazis, such as Hayek, or the writings of Goebbels—hey, what did Goebbels know about Nazism?), and pay attention to historians and social scientists many of whom are invested in leftism and have their own motives for disowning the Nazis.

Wiki does add this:

But what if I find a large number of very reliable sources all claiming that Nazism is left wing?

Then you will be more than welcome to show them to us, so that we can see that they are very reliable and that they assert that Nazism is a left wing ideology. If they are, then we will change the article.

Get it? They have to be very reliable, and anyone on the right is probably considered to be inherently unreliable. But I would suggest that anyone who wants to put in a little bit of work should research those Wiki links that point to previous discussions of the issue, and see how Wiki has handled it in the past, and try again to introduce this information.

One thing that is actually less relevant is what the Nazis called themselves. The “Socialist” in the name is far less important than what the Nazis did.]

John Kerry, diplomat…

The New Neo Posted on by

…up to his old tricks:

Kerry, in an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt to promote his new book, said that he has met with Iranian Former Minister Javad Zarif—the former secretary’s onetime negotiating partner—three or four times in recent months behind the Trump administration’s back.

“I think I’ve seen him three or four times,” Kerry said, adding that he has been conducting sensitive diplomacy without the current administration’s authorization. Kerry said he has criticized the current administration in these discussions, chiding it for not pursuing negotiations from Iran, despite the country’s fevered rhetoric about the U.S. president.

This sort of thing is an old story with Kerry:

Kerry met with representatives from “both delegations” of the Vietnamese in Paris in 1970, according to Kerry’s own testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971. But Kerry’s meetings with the Vietnamese delegations were in direct violation of laws forbidding private citizens from negotiating with foreign powers, according to researcher and author Jerry Corsi, who began studying the anti-war movement in the early 1970s.

According to Corsi, Kerry violated U.S. code 18 U.S.C. 953. “A U.S. citizen cannot go abroad and negotiate with a foreign power,” Corsi told CNSNews.com.

By Kerry’s own admission, he met in 1970 with delegations from the North Vietnamese communist government and discussed how the Vietnam Warshould be stopped.

Almost fifty years ago.

Kerry: old dog, old tricks.

Serena the un-serene

The New Neo Posted on by

Although I don’t follow tennis as closely as I used to, I certainly heard and read about the big brouhaha at the US Open involving Serena’s being penalized by an umpire, and ultimately losing in the finals to relative newcomer Naomi Osaka:

Williams was handed the third game penalty for verbal abuse, after calling the umpire Ramos a ‘thief’ and demanding that he issue an apology.

The interaction came after he issued a warning for a code violation relating to receiving coaching, which is prohibited in Grand Slam matches.

Williams insists she did not know her coach was giving her instructions, saying she had “never cheated in her life”.

“I don’t cheat to win. I’d rather lose. I’m just letting you know,” she said in protest to Ramos’ decision.

In frustration during the changeover, Williams smashed her racquet, earning another code violation and a one-point deduction.

“You’re attacking my character. Yes you are. You owe me an apology,” she said.

“You will never, ever, ever be on another court of mine as long as you live. You are the liar.

“When are you going to give me my apology. You owe me an apology. Say it. Say you’re sorry. … And you stole a point from me. You’re a thief, too!”

Williams claimed the discretion [in penalizing her a game at that point, which is when she was already down in the second set] used by umpire Ramos was sexist…

“There’s a lot of men out here that have said a lot of things, but because they’re men that (punishment) doesn’t happen to them … Because I’m a woman, you’re going to take this away from me? That is not right.”

After the game, Williams said Ramos had never deducted a game from a male tennis player for calling him a thief…

“I’m here fighting for women’s rights and for women’s equality and for all kinds of stuff,” she said.

“For me it blows my mind…This is outrageous.”

All kinds of stuff—like the right to be abusive and infantile when things don’t go her way. Continue reading →

Kavanaugh, Kamala Harris, and Hillary Clinton: A lie gets halfway round the world…

The New Neo Posted on by

…especially if it’s told by Kamala Harris and then retweeted by Hillary Clinton:

California Senator and likely presidential candidate Kamala Harris spread a misleadingly edited video of Brett Kavanaugh’s hearing testimony, falsely claiming Kavanaugh views birth control as the equivalent of abortion. From that, the argument goes, if Kavanaugh voted against Roe v. Wade, birth control would be banned…

Harris’ perpetrated this fraud by editing out the first part of Kavanaugh’s statement, which made clear that he was quoting what litigants in a case had claimed…

Harris’ falsehood was widely shared on social media, so much so that both Politifact and WaPo felt the need to fact check it. Both ruled it false…

Enter one Hillary Clinton today on Twitter, after all the evidence was in that Harris’ claim was false, including the Politifact and WaPo fact checks.

Hillary repeated Harris’ false accusation in a Twitter thread. This clearly was a planned out series of tweets by Hillary, not just a retweet…

Not only is it a lie, they know it’s a lie, too. Harris doubled down on the “dog whistle” remark after she was informed of the context of Kavanaugh’s words. And Clinton certainly should have known, after the WaPo gave Harris’ original lie four Pinocchios and Politifact rated it false.

Why do Harris and Clinton do this? They do this for a simple reason, and that reason is embodied in the title of this post, which is a shortened version of an old saying about falsehood vs. truth. The saying has several forms and has been attributed to a variety of people:

Metaphorical maxims about the speedy dissemination of lies and the much slower propagation of corrective truths have a very long history. The major literary figure Jonathan Swift wrote on this topic in “The Examiner” in 1710 although he did not mention shoes or boots…

[Swift wrote] as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…

Let me just pause here and say boy, they really used to know how to write.

More from the same link:

The phrasing and figurative language used in these sayings have been evolving for more than three hundred years. In 1787 “falsehood” was reaching “every corner of the earth”. In 1820 a colorful version was circulating with lies flying from “Maine to Georgia” while truth was “pulling her boots on”. By 1834 “error” was running “half over the world” while truth was “putting on his boots”. In 1924 a lie was circling the globe while a truth was “lacing its shoes on”.

From a 1787 sermon by Thomas Francklin:

Falsehood will fly, as it were, on the wings of the wind, and carry its tales to every corner of the earth; whilst truth lags behind; her steps, though sure, are slow and solemn, and she has neither vigour nor activity enough to pursue and overtake her enemy…

Much much much more at the link.

The point, of course, is that lies work. They are juicy, they often are uncritically accepted because of motivated reasoning, and in this day and age they spread even faster than in the past.

Of course, the same methods of speedy dissemination can help spread the truth. But somehow, truth often lags behind, as in days of yore, and therefore Harris and Clinton can rest secure in the knowledge that their lies will almost certainly have the desired effect.

Of course, where Kavanaugh is concerned, what Harris and Clinton say will not stop him from being confirmed. But that’s not their goal right now. Their goal is to fire up the troops to think his confirmation is a huge outrage and that he will abolish abortion, all the more reason to go out and vote Democratic in 2018 and beyond.

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.”]