Bret Easton Ellis on identity politics

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve never read anything by Bret Easton Ellis before. One reason is that I don’t like fiction all that much unless it’s fabulous, and I definitely don’t like violent fiction, which by all accounts American Psycho (Ellis’s most popular novel) is:

American Psycho…[was] published in 1991. The story is told in the first person by Patrick Bateman, a serial killer and Manhattan businessman. The Observer notes that while “some countries [deem it] so potentially disturbing that it can only be sold shrink-wrapped”, “critics rave about it” and “academics revel in its transgressive and postmodern qualities”.

Most definitely not my cup of tea.

And that was the sum total of what I knew about Bret Easton Ellis until today, when this Rolling Stone interview with Ellis caught my eye.

This is not what I expected to see:

Q: You tweeted that you were done discussing politics with liberals at dinner. Is it because everyone plays the role of knee-jerk shock and outrage?

A: Completely. I live with a Trump-hating, millennial socialist. I am not, as my boyfriend will tell everyone, political. I’m interested in the theater of it, how each side plays the game, and how the media has morphed with it. I have never seen liberals be more annoying than they are now. These last few weeks really were a flipping point for me, with the depression over the Supreme Court and the way the detention centers were being spun by the liberal media. It’s obviously a game. Here’s Rachel Maddow crying on TV, and pictures of Trump detention centers. My stepfather, who is a Polish Jew, had his entire family wiped out when he was an infant. Throwing around words like Nazi, Gestapo and comparisons to Weimar Germany is like, “Really guys? You’re going there?” I’ve had enough. I think there’s a reason why the #WalkAway movement is getting it’s ten seconds of fame, because there’s a real reaction toward the stridency of how Democrats are expressing their disappointment. It’s turning a lot of people off.

Q:As a gay man, what if your right to marry is suddenly taken away? Doesn’t that anger you on a primal level?

A: That is suggesting that I believe in identity politics, and that I vote with my penis. It’s suggesting that immigration, the economy and other policies matter so much less than whether I can marry a man. It’s not something that I worry about, or is on my mind. That’s the problem with identity politics, and it’s what got Hillary into trouble. If you have a vagina, you had to vote for Hillary. This has seeped into a bedrock credo among a lot of people, and you’ve gotta step back. People are not one-issue voters. I am not going to vote as a gay man, and I don’t think the idea of us not being allowed to marry is going to happen. Pence has his issues, but Trump is not an anti-gay president in any way, shape or form. I also have gay friends who support and voted for Trump, based on certain policies. It’s not just about being gay and being able to marry.

Refreshing common sense. But common sense seems much less common these days than it used to be.

I said it wasn’t the sort of thing I expected to see, and that was because although I knew very little about Ellis except a vague recollection of reviews of his book and the movie based on it, I’m so used to people in the arts toeing the complete liberal/left line. He’s in the arts. But he certainly doesn’t toe the line. Nor does he seem to be any sort of Trump supporter, either (although he’s a bit cryptic about that, saying only this: “yes. Bateman [Ellis’s fictional serial killer] adores Trump, and his idol is president.” Doesn’t sound like much of an endorsement, though.

But thinking about it further, maybe that “transgressive” aspect of his work is responsible for Ellis having the “f-you” attitude that allows him to speak his mind without worrying about the PC crowd. As he says in another part of the interview, “My work really rubs people the wrong way, and my social persona has rubbed people the wrong way. I have to be true to myself.”

Interesting.

Well, at least they’re not pretending anymore

The New Neo Posted on by

Thomas Friedman instructs his fellow journalists (I use the term advisedly) on how best to hurt Trump.

It reads like unintentional parody. He thinks the way to best hurt Trump would be to cover him thoroughly, letting America (and especially the moderate Republicans) know just how awful Trump is.

It’s certainly not a bad idea for the press to do its job and cover Trump thoroughly, but for the press to do it because they wish to harm Trump politically is a bit surprising for Friedman to acknowledge. Of course, just about everyone knows that’s what they are in fact trying to do, and that they’re pretty proud of it. But of course, it’s also not as though Americans are unfamiliar with Trump, his tweets, or his rallies at this point.

But it’s nice to hear someone actually admit the motive of the press is to swing the election to the Democrats. Of course, Friedman himself is an opinion columnist (see? it says so right under his name), so he gets to take sides and to do it openly. But he’s not addressing his fellow opinion columnists; he’s addressing news reporters.

Friedman is also forgetting something. During the 2016 primaries, the strategy of news reporters in the MSM and on cable TV was all Trump all the time, almost from the start of the campaign season. Quite a few of his rallies were televised in their entirety, and his every word was reported as though it were issuing from the mouth of a sort of reverse Delphi oracle. The original idea was to hurt him—actually, to demolish him—with the GOP primary voters. When that didn’t happen (and it became clear almost immediately that it wasn’t happening), the networks and the papers switched to covering him equally assiduously in order to make sure he defeated the other GOP candidates and become the nominee of the pathetic Republican Party.

Oh, what a farce that would be, if Trump were the GOP nominee! What a guarantee of a Hillary win! We all know how that turned out. But the MSM cannot believe the result even now, and they are hoping the very same strategy as back then will do quite the opposite now.

Who knows; perhaps they’re right. I continue to fear a Democrat-controlled House in 2018, and if that happens I know one guy named Friedman who probably would love to take some credit.

Still another Rick Gates post

The New Neo Posted on by

I keep trying to get away from it, but something about this story keeps gnawing at me. So here are some more details of Gates’ testimony against Manafort [emphasis mine]:

On the stand, Gates testified that he and Manafort knowingly committed several crimes. He said that at Manafort’s direction, he didn’t report 15 foreign financial accounts they controlled to the US government, even though they knew that was illegal. He also testified that Manafort directed him to send millions in foreign cash as phony “loans” to his US companies, so he could avoid paying taxes on them…

But the defense team has made its strategy clear: They hope to pin as much of the allegations against Manafort as they can on Gates instead. Defense lawyer Thomas Zehnle focused much of his opening statement last week on attacking Gates, claiming Manafort had merely “placed his trust in the wrong person,” accusing Gates of embezzling, and calling Gates the “foundation of the special counsel’s case.”…

Gates testified Monday that on all these fronts, Manafort knew exactly what he was doing. He testified that to the extent he helped, he was doing so at Manafort’s instruction. And he testified that both of them knew full well that what they were doing was illegal.

Gates is there to testify to Manafort’s state of mind. As far as I know, the rest of the evidence the prosecution introduced as to Manafort’s state of mind consists of tax documents and testimony about those documents (for example, from Manaforts’ accountant), which certainly might lead a person to conclude that Manafort must have known or should have known. But apparently there is nothing other than Gates’ testimony that tells anyone what Manafort actually did know or did intend. Only Gates gives that information, and that information is supposedly necessary in order to find Manafort guilty.

One of the most important facts about Gates is not just that, if what he says about Manafort is indeed true, then Gates is just as guilty as Manafort of the same crimes Manafort is being tried for, although that is true. A more important thing about Gates, IMHO, is that Gates was betraying Manafort by embezzling money from him. That doesn’t just demonstrate that Gates is a liar and a crook, it demonstrates that, despite being Manafort’s partner (and, apparently, his protege), Gates had no reluctance to screw Manafort over. None whatsoever. And that was before Mueller even got to Gates or Manafort. So Gates was a viper in regard to Manafort even before they were caught. How on earth can an objective observer that think Gates would have a single moment of reluctance to lie about Manafort and stab him in the back, now that Gates can get out of a potential 100-year prison term by doing so?

Of course, that doesn’t mean Gates is lying about Manafort. He may be telling the truth. That’s the beauty of it, isn’t it?

This is also quite interesting, although of course its meaning can be interpreted in several ways:

Manafort reportedly stared directly at Gates, while Gates avoided eye contact with Manafort.

If you read this, too, it really appears that Gates was handling the bulk of Manafort’s paperwork, supposedly (according to Gates) doing all the shady stuff only at Manafort’s request.

I think that this headline summarizes it rather nicely: “Rick Gates says he lied for years at Paul Manafort’s request and stole from him in the process”:

In his first hour on the witness stand, Gates catalogued years of crimes, saying most of his wrongdoing was committed on behalf of his former boss, Paul Manafort, while other crimes were for his own benefit, including the theft of hundreds thousands of dollars. Gates also made clear he was testifying against Manafort in the hopes of receiving a lesser prison sentence, having pleaded guilty in February as part of a deal with special counsel Robert Mueller…

For most of his testimony, Gates did not look at Manafort, while the defendant stared intently at his former business partner…

Gates, 46, testified that he had embezzled from other employers as well and that he volunteered that information to investigators once he began cooperating.

So Gates is a habitual liar and criminal, defrauding multiple people (not only Manafort) and not at Manafort’s request. And yet certain crimes—the ones for which prosecutors wish to convict Manafort—Gates says only committed at Manafort’s direction.

One could certainly conclude, though, that Gates needed no such encouragement or direction.

And I think that this is really the heart of the matter [emphasis mine]:

Manafort’s lawyer, Kevin Downing, tried to undercut the prosecutors’ case by getting Laporta [the accountant] to concede that Manafort’s finances were complicated, and that Gates was deeply involved in the process.

How Manafort’s New York properties were classified on his taxes changed some years, and she agreed that keeping track of those changes was “difficult to follow.”

How much control did Gates have over the process? How “deeply involved” was he, and how involved was Manafort?

Gates was a habitual criminal. Do we have any indication Manafort was a habitual criminal, doing things like this even before he met Gates? I don’t think so; at least, I’ve never read anything to that effect (and failing to register as a lobbyist does not count in terms of habitual criminality).

In conclusion,I have to say that Gates reminds me a bit of Uriah Heep in David Copperfield, minus the ‘umbleness:

Uriah Heep’s scheme is this: he is a law clerk for Mr. Wickfield. But he knows that Mr. Wickfield is depressed over his wife’s death and has a severe drinking problem. So, Uriah Heep encourages the drinking. Slowly, he takes over more and more of Mr. Wickfield’s daily affairs, until Mr. Wickfield relies on Uriah Heep completely (even though Mr. Wickfield never really likes or trusts him – he feels that he has no choice).

To make the trap even harder to get out of, Uriah Heep starts showing Mr. Wickfield receipts for crazy investments and loans with Mr. Wickfield’s name attached to them. Mr. Wickfield can’t remember signing them, but he also can’t explain the evidence of his own financial wrongdoing that Uriah Heep has shoved in his face.

So, Uriah Heep blackmails Mr. Wickfield into signing Uriah Heep as a partner of his law office…

It certainly doesn’t match perfectly, but Uriah is what comes to mind for me.

Notice anything new at The New Neo?

The New Neo Posted on by

[BUMPED UP—scroll down for new posts.]

Like maybe, a new neo?

Photo, that is.

That’s just one of the new photos I took. I’ve had some fun with this, including some rather wild ones (wild by my standards, that is).

I’ve also found that when you adjust the lighting a bit and shrink the photos way down like that in order to fit on the sidebar, it hides a multitude of sins. The apple hides most of the rest.

I may mix it up and put different photos on the blog now and then, and you can let me know which ones you like best and maybe I’ll keep the most popular one as the main one.

Or maybe not. I’ll keep you guessing.

More on Mueller’s folly: Rick Gates’ testimony

The New Neo Posted on by

I know I’ve already written recently about the Manafort trial and Rick Gates’s testimony but I feel the urge to link to this post by streiff at RedState because it contains some tweets with details of the courtroom shenanigans that are mind-bogglingly awful, even knowing what we already know about Gates. He’s one of those people of whom you can safely assume that every word out of his mouth is a lie, including “and” and “the.”

And yet, he’s not just the star witness for the prosecution, he’s apparently the only evidence they’ve got. [ADDITION: to clarify—the only evidence for Manafort’s state of mind, that is, which is a vital element of the charges. There is certainly evidence of financial wrongdoing, but it is Gates who provides the necessary evidence of Gates’ awareness and intent.]

Let that sink in: the only evidence [clarification: of Manafort’s state of mind] is the testimony of this incredibly mendacious person who’s been embezzling from Manafort and is testifying in order to substantially lighten his own sentence.

Manafort may be guilty as the day is long (I have no idea if he is or isn’t), but on the basis of this trial he should be freed and receive an abject apology from Mueller.

That won’t happen, of course.

If you follow that link and read the trajectory of the trial and the testimony of Gates, it is an admission of financial crime after financial crime, fraud after fraud, and lie after lie (including lies to the investigators). A regular sociopath of the finance world (which is perhaps, unfortunately, not altogether unusual). He also can’t seem to recall much of anything till he’s confronted with his own prior statements to authorities. What a witness, what a guy.

Here’s one of my favorite parts, if “favorite” is the right word:

This guy gives corruption a bad name.

[NOTE: Although I used the term “Mueller’s folly” in the title of this post, that doesn’t mean I’m saying Mueller will lose the case. I’m saying the case is so bad he should lose it.]

[ADDENDUM: In a somewhat related Mueller matter, Rudy Giuliani hints that America will soon discover some bombshell information about the collusion investigation that will completely discredit it and Mueller in a major way. I have my doubts; we’ve heard that sort of thing before.]

[ADDENDUM II: Whatever happens in this Virgina-based case against Manafort—the tax fraud and bank fraud case—there is a second case Mueller has planned for him, concentrating on money laundering and failure to register as a foreign agent, and due to take place in DC. This post is about the present case only.]

Facts vs. feelings: “Sarah Jeong’s tweets and blog posts are just a marker of the world we already live in”…

The New Neo Posted on by

…writes Heather Mac Donald in National Review. Mac Donald also points out that Jeong holds opinions on white people that are typical of what passes for thought in academia these days. They are not unusual at all:

…[Jeong’s] tweets are not imitative of anything other than the ideology that now rules the higher-education establishment, including UC Berkeley and Harvard Law School, both of which Jeong attended. And that ideology is taking over non-academic institutions, whether in journalism, publishing, the tech sector, or the rest of corporate America. Sarah Jeong’s tweets and blog posts are just a marker of the world we already live in.

The key features of Jeong’s worldview are an obsession with whiteness and its alleged sins; a commitment to the claim that we live in a rape culture; and a sneering contempt for objectivity and truth-seeking. These are central tenets of academic victimology. From the moment freshmen arrive on a college campus, they are inundated by the message that they are either the bearers of white privilege or its victims. College presidents and the metastasizing diversity bureaucracy teach students to see racism where none exists, preposterously accusing their own institutions of systemic bias.

It’s all “whiteness studies” all the time now. That’s hyperbole, of course, but not by all that much.

Mac Donald discusses something else that I haven’t seen talked about much before in regard to Jeong’s oeuvre:

Jeong’s magnum opus of academic victimology is a long 2014 blog post on the Rolling Stone campus-rape hoax. Written after the Rolling Stone had retracted its sensational and wholly fictional story on a gruesome fraternity rape at the University of Virginia, Jeong’s post tortuously and often incoherently explains why it is imperative to continue believing the pseudo-victim, Jackie. The effort to discredit the Rolling Stone story (a process otherwise known as belated fact-checking) represents the patriarchy’s campaign to deny the existence of rape culture, she writes.

The credo of the campus rape movement is: “Believe unconditionally,” as New York University’s Wellness Exchange puts it. Jeong takes that credo to heart. “The more I see these ‘inconsistencies’ and ‘discrepancies’ [in the Rolling Stone story] touted as evidence of falsehood, the more convinced I am that Jackie is not lying,” Jeong writes. She sneers at such “mundanities” as dates and times that refute Jackie’s narrative, a remarkable stance, one might think, for a journalist.

Not to mention a journalist for the NY Times. That’s a bit of sarcasm on my part, because unfortunately the Times has a history of ignoring (that’s a kind word for it) a great many inconvenient facts, if said facts refute their narrative.

Jeong will fit right in. I cannot imagine that the people at the Times who hired her didn’t see a long blog post of hers, if that post is still up there.

After I wrote that, I decided to try a little harder to find it. It’s been deleted, but someone archived it here, so you can read it if you’re interested. I was interested. Jeong’s basic point is that she believes Jackie on some gut level despite everything; and that gut feelings like hers trump evidence (she doesn’t deal with the evidence that Jackie had fabricated her own cellphone texts from a fictional boyfriend and invented the rape to make a guy she had a crush on jealous, but in all fairness to Jeong, when she wrote that article I don’t think those facts had yet been revealed, although plenty else had been revealed to discredit Jackie’s claims).

The sad thing is that belief in guts over evidence is by no means an idiosyncrasy of Jeong’s. As Mac Donald correctly points out, it’s rampant in academia and is not at all unusual in journalism. But one of the things in Jeong’s essay that especially caught my attention was this statement (recall as you read it that Jeong is a graduate of Harvard Law):

In law school, after all, we learned that due process is what we get in lieu of justice. And what’s due process besides a series of rules that are meant to keep things as predictable as fucking possible?

Ah, so that’s what they’re teaching at Harvard Law these days. When I was in law school—in the Dark Ages—we learned that due process is a series of rules meant to get as close to achieving actual justice as we can in a world that can never really achieve it entirely. Due process protects every single one of us, including Sarah Jeong (I’ll refrain here from bringing up the Devil Speech from “A Man For All Seasons” once again). But thanks to postmodernism and in particular something called Critical Legal Studies—which started taking over law schools not too long after I left law school—we have an army of Sarah Jeong’s out there ready to tell us all what’s really what.

I first noticed something very very strange happening in academia when I went back there nearly thirty years ago, after a pause of nearly thirty years. I could not ignore what I saw; things had not gotten quite as extreme as they are now, but they were far more than halfway there. The younger students who were half my age were so different in their focus, so steeped in the idea that they were all victims or perpetrators or potential victims or perpetrators of sexual harassment or racism (or of just a word or two that didn’t quite sit well with them or someone else and therefore had to be eradicated and the perpetrator punished) that I did not recognize it as the world I knew.

Nor did it seem like a world that was going to lead to a better world. Not at all.

Would you believe Rick Gates?

The New Neo Posted on by

I certainly wouldn’t—not unless there was convincing corroborating evidence of the truth of what he is saying.

And really, that wouldn’t be believing Gates—it would be believing the corroborating evidence.

Here’s the situation as it now stands:

Manafort’s former business associate and star witness for the prosecution…Gates testified that Manafort “was good at knowing where the money was and how to spend it.”

[Judge] Ellis interjected, saying, “he wasn’t that great at it” if Gates was able to steal money from Manafort without him noticing.

Gates has testified he embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars from Manafort when he was working for him. He said the extra cash was used for “bonus money” and “family money” to pay off an American Express credit card – without Manafort’s knowledge.

Mueller dropped numerous bank and tax fraud charges against Gates after he struck a plea deal and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.

Prosecutors earlier had suggested they might not call Gates to the stand, but Ellis told them they “can’t prove conspiracy without him.”

And IMHO they can’t prove anything with him, except what a smarmy rat he is.

Gates and Manafort were both indicted in October 2017 on charges related to their consulting work with pro-Russian political figures in Ukraine. Additional charges were filed in District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on February 21, 2018, however these charges were withdrawn on February 27, 2018, without prejudice, as agreed to in his plea bargain with Robert S. Mueller III.

Talk about motives for lying! And it’s ironic that, in this particular case, the witness has to also admit he defrauded the person he’s testifying against. Thus, he implicates himself in order to exonerate himself in terms of the length of the prison term he might face.

When I say “smarmy rat,” that’s hardly hyperbole:

During the trial, Gates testified that he and Manafort carried out an elaborate offshore tax-evasion and bank fraud scheme using offshore shell companies and bank accounts in Cyprus, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and the United Kingdom to funnel millions of dollars from their political consulting work in Ukraine. Gates admitted to concealing the accounts and the income from U.S. tax authorities by disguising the income as loans by falsifying bank loan documents. During testimony, Gates also admitted that he embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars from Manafort, some of which was used to fund an extramarital affair conducted out of high-end hotels and a secret apartment he kept in London where he often stayed while en-route to Kiev on business trips. Manafort’s defense attorney, Kevin Downing, accused Gates of embezzling millions of dollars from his former boss, a much higher amount than Gates later admitted to during testimony. Under cross examination, Gates also admitted to a previous extramarital relationship approximately a decade ago that involved first-class flights and trysts in luxury hotels, but denied that this affair was funded with money stolen from Manafort.[

But hey, we should trust his testimony implicating Manafort, right?

It’s hard to make me feel sorry for Manafort, but this just might do it.

I’ve heard rumors like this for decades

The New Neo Posted on by

This one may even be true:

Two completely drug-resistant versions of the venereal disease [gonorrhoea] have been found and identified – with fears rampant unprotected sex could rigger an epidemic.

Doctors have been unable to treat patients with antibiotic ceftriaxone and azithromycin.

And sufferers have been left with a gonorrhoea – also known as the clap – infection that causes extreme pain during urination.

Australia’s federal government has issued a report warning of the risk of the “continuing threat of antimicrobial resistance by dangerous bacteria”.

Officials added another five strains of gonorrhoea have been found which have “high level resistance” to treatments.

Scary.

Microbes and antibiotics have been at war ever since the invention of the drugs, and resistance is one of the main weapons in the kit of the bacteria.

There’s also this, which doesn’t surprise me in the least:

A common ingredient in toothpaste and hand wash could be contributing to antibiotic resistance, according to University of Queensland research.

A study led by Dr Jianhua Guo from UQ’s Advanced Water Management Centre focused on triclosan, a compound used in more than 2000 personal care products.

Dr Guo said while it was well-known the overuse and misuse of antibiotics could create ‘superbugs’, researchers were unaware that other chemicals could also induce antibiotic resistance until now.

“Wastewater from residential areas has similar or even higher levels of antibiotic resistant bacteria and antibiotic resistance genes compared to hospitals, where you would expect greater antibiotic concentrations,” he said.

Triclosan is banned in the US:

The antibacterial compound triclosan, already banned in the U.S. from consumer soaps, will no longer be allowed in antiseptic products used in hospitals and other health care settings. The U.S. Food & Drug Administration on Dec. 20 [2017] deemed triclosan and 23 other antiseptic ingredients to not be generally recognized as safe and effective.

“There was a lack of sufficient safety and efficacy data” for the 24 affected chemicals, explains FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb.

I remember years ago when these antibacterial soaps came into vogue. I was suspicious of them from the start, because it seemed to me to be (quite literally) overkill. Washing hands properly gets rid of some surface bacteria, but the idea that in normal life our hands can ever be especially free of bacteria seemed preposterous.

And how many people don’t wash their hands at all after using the toilet? Plenty (you can look it up). But when they do wash their hands and use these particular agents, I am pretty sure their hands are repopulated quite quickly.

And it stands to reason there would be some sort of bacterial resistance developing to these chemicals. That’s the nature of the struggle for existence, and bacteria have such a short life and exist in such huge quantities that natural selection can operate to allow the most resistant to survive.

And then, on to the next weapon in our arsenal.

Interpreting special elections is not an easy task

The New Neo Posted on by

There was another special election yesterday, this time for the US House member from the 12th District of Ohio. At this moment, Republican Troy Balderson retains a very narrow lead. But, consistent with other special elections since the 2016 regular election, the news was far from good for the GOP because even the victories have been way closer than one might expect in these areas:

Consider contests in Kansas, Georgia, Montana and South Carolina. Democrats came close to winning them all – but didn’t. Democrats finally won a special election on GOP turf in late March. Rep. Conor Lamb, D-Pa., emerged victorious – but barely.

In other words, Democrats are making things close lots of places that shouldn’t be close. That bodes well in the midterms as Democrats need to flip 23 seats to claim control of the House. But Democrats cannot continue to repeatedly make races close and lose. That’s certainly not a recipe for victory in the House.

I’ve heard a lot of explanations. They may even be true. One is that these are called special elections for a reason; turnout is generally low, and that means that the more enthusiastic motivated party will do better. Democrats are highly motivated, to say the least.

But I’m not sure why Republicans aren’t similarly motivated. Trump’s popularity is very high among GOP voters, for example, and I can’t imagine that they don’t realize they have to keep the House for his agenda to have even a chance to be realized. I think the explanation may be a combination of the long-standing hatred of the GOPe, which I often see in blog comments (particularly at certain blogs), and perhaps the less-than-charismatic personality of many Republican nominees. People vote with their politics, but a magnetic personality can go far, too, just on the strength of that (they don’t call it a “winning” personality for nothing).

And then there are the Independents. They may have been the most influenced by the propaganda put out by our friends in the MSM, and are therefore leaning Democratic.

The article I linked earlier in this post goes on to analyze what the Democrats have to do to get control of the House in November, something I consider a very real possibility (of course, I tend to be a pessimist):

But for O’Connor to knock out Balderson means the Democrat needs to win just a few more votes in rural parts of the district.

This is something Democrats need in districts across the board this fall if there is to be any chance of a “blue wave.” Democrats appear to show more traction in these regions. But is it enough? Not yet.

Here’s something else we learned: President Trump makes a difference in these races…on both sides of the ledger. If Balderson’s lead holds, one could plausibly argue that Mr. Trump’s campaign rally in Newark, OH over the weekend may have been just enough to propel the Republican candidate to victory.

But “Trumpism” cuts two ways. This seat should have never been anywhere on the radar for the Democrats. Republicans may have had to pour millions of dollars into this contest just to hold the seat – for a few months. President George W. Bush won the district by 36 points in 2000. The President carried the same district by a little more than half as much two years ago.

President Trump certainly energizes some Republicans and gets them to the polls. But the President’s presence also electrifies Democrats and even swing voters. That induces them to support Democratic candidates. That could be a big liability for Republicans in any district which has a chance of electing a Democrat this fall. However, the prevailing question is whether Mr. Trump’s aura simply boosts Democratic voting or if it helps fuel Democratic wins?

That question will not be answered until Election Day, 2018.

(I guess this means I need to start a new category on my sidebar for Election 2018.)

There are hailstorms, and then there’s this hailstorm

The New Neo Posted on by

Two animals were actually killed and people were injured in a hailstorm yesterday at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs:

Five injured people were taken to a hospital and nine more were treated on the scene and released, said Brian Vaughan, public information officer and fire captain for Colorado Springs Fire Department.

A 13-year-old caped vulture named Motswari was killed in the storm along with a 4-year-old Muscovy duck known as Daisy, Koch said. A third animal — a vulture — was initially reported dead, but later turned out to be severely injured.

The zoo is now closed, assessing the damage.

I was in a hailstorm the other day but I was sitting in a car. There were tornado warnings at the time—we have them now and then in New England. The hail was the size not of golfballs but of blueberries, and because my older car had been pock-marked from another hailstorm long ago I was worried more about my vehicle than anything else.

This Colorado storm must have been pretty frightening, though:

Freedom of speech is under attack from the big cybertech companies

The New Neo Posted on by

As Glenn Reynolds writes:

Note that I say “free speech” and not “First Amendment.” The First Amendment only limits government, but “free speech” is — or at least until very recently was — a broader social value in favor of not shutting people up just because we don’t like their ideas or politics. As for the “private companies can do what they want,” well, that’s not the law, or the custom, and hasn’t been for a long time. It’s especially not true where the companies have, as these companies have, affirmatively represented to users and shareholders that they don’t discriminate based on viewpoints.

It’s a tricky question, because although I do believe that shutting down speech—even “hate speech”—cuts into the free flow of ideas so vital to liberty, I also believe in private companies having the right to control what appears on their site. Just as an example, I ban people and/or erase comments that I find especially offensive (not just somewhat offensive). I have no obligation to provide a platform for garbage.

But this seems like an ominous development. Roger Simon describes it:

I’ve spent about ten minutes of my life on InfoWars [note from Neo: that’s about 10 minutes more than I’ve spent there] and think Alex Jones is a boring blowhard of little interest except to those who want to spend their lives worrying about whether there was a second gunman on the Grassy Knoll.

Nevertheless, the group censorship of Mr. Jones, led by our friends in Cupertino, the makers of the ubiquitous iPhone…is one of the scarier developments of our time, if not potentially the scariest.

Apple is one hypocritical organization banning the puny Jones. They — the first trillion-dollar company — are the people who are genuflecting to the Chinese, kowtowing (that is definitely the proper word) to Xi Jinping and Co., and making all kinds of accommodations to that totalitarian regime for access to their giant market.

From Glenn Reynolds again:

(1) This is absolutely the first stage in a coordinated plan to deplatform everyone on the right. It’s not really about Alex Jones at all. (2) Aside from its free-speech implications, which are serious indeed, this also looks like an antitrust violation: Media companies, which compete with Jones for eyeballs, colluded to get other media companies to shut him down. Were I Jones, I’d file an antitrust suit. This is more than arguably conspiracy in restraint of trade (and possibly a conspiracy to deprive him of civil rights).

And from Roger Simon again:

…[W]hat Apple is doing picking on the basically irrelevant Jones is a form of corporate virtual signaling, a particularly dangerous form if you believe in the Bill of Rights.

Yes, I know they’re a private company not subject to government restrictions, but they are bigger, richer, and more powerful than almost every government on the planet, maybe more, which leads me to their noxious and equally powerful comrade-in-tech-arms…. FACEBOOK.

The Internet behemoth — lest they be humiliated, I suppose, and not seen as politically incorrect — immediately followed in Apple’s footsteps, deleting all things Jones. They were joined rapidly by half a dozen others including Google and, bizarrely, Spotify. Did anyone have Alex Jones on his playlist?

But remarkably, only a few days before, Facebook’s founder, my fellow Jew (yes, it’s relevant) Mark Zuckerberg, had announced he was allowing Holocaust deniers on FB. From CNET:

He said content from Holocaust deniers should not be taken down from the platform because “I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong,” he said.

“It’s hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent,” he continued. “I just think, as abhorrent as some of those examples are, I think the reality is also that I get things wrong when I speak publicly.”

Yes, it’s hard to impugn intent. Maybe the intent of all these social media powers is perfectly great. “Intent” usually is. That’s why we tend to focus on process, the rule of law, and the defense of the freedom of speech even of those with whom we disagree. Tyrannies always cite their own good intent, as well. No one (or very few people) ever said “I’m going to censor that person, or I’m going to jail that person without due process, because I have bad intentions towards them.”

[NOTE: I’m writing this post rather quickly because the power company just kindly called with a recorded message saying that in a couple of minutes they’ll be turning off the power for about an hour. And here I was just about to do my laundry!]

[ADDENDUM: Democratic Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy believes that the survival of our democracy depends on these bannings:

This from a US senator? I think maybe the word “democracy” doesn’t mean what he thinks it means. By the way, I wonder why he didn’t use the word “republic” instead (that’s sarcasm on my part; I certainly know why he didn’t).]

[ADDENDUM: Double standards. Of course.]