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.

China’s population decline

The New Neo Posted on by

Many people probably remember the Chinese policy that limited births per family to one. It officially ended just a few years ago, but the damage was done, as Austin Bay notes:

China’s fertility rate in 2010 dropped to 1.5 children per woman; the zero population growth replacement rate is 2.1 children.

It’s highly probable China will face the same “geriatric” economic conditions that already threaten Japan and several Western European countries: too few workers paying the pensions of retirees as well as shouldering their medical costs. By 2030, the median age in China will rise to 43. In 1980, the median was 23. In 2011, China had 925 million workers. By 2050, China’s working-age population will fall by 225 million, about 23 percent of the projected population. Between 2040 and 2050, 25 percent of the population will be over 65 years old, retired and drawing pensions. The “squeezed” worker cohort must then support both pensioners and dependent young.

No doubt the government’s childbirth-discouraging policy had a lot to do with the decline in childbirth statistics. It certainly had something to do with the preponderance of males in the country, because females tended to be the ones aborted.

But I’m not sure, however, that the decline in births wouldn’t have happened anyway, because it’s somewhat of a worldwide trend:

Wealth exacerbates China’s government-inflicted conundrum. Worldwide, prosperous and educated couples tend to have fewer children. This trend applies to China.

Increasing wealth and personal lifestyle preferences played key roles in the fertility rate decline in Japan and highly developed Western countries. Japan’s fertility rate is 1.4 children per woman. A recent study suggested that circa 2080 the Italian and German populations could decline by 50 percent. The same trend has begun to affect wealthy South Korea.

This is usually considered a problem, and it certainly is a problem when populations are top-heavy with the elderly, and with young males.

But it also occurs to me that in my own lifetime the population of the world has increased dramatically. I vaguely remember being told when I was a child that there were about 3 billion people in the world. Now?

Here are some figures:

200 years ago there were less than one billion humans living on earth. Today, according to UN calculations there are over 7 billion of us.1 Recent estimates suggest that today’s population size is roughly equivalent to 6.9% of the total number of people ever born.2 This is the most conspicuous fact about world population growth: for thousands of years, the population grew only slowly but in recent centuries, it has jumped dramatically. Between 1900 and 2000, the increase in world population was three times greater than during the entire previous history of humanity—an increase from 1.5 to 6.1 billion in just 100 years.

There are many charts at that link. They make for fascinating study. Here’s one, for example, that shows the doubling of the world population (“The fastest doubling of the world population happened between 1950 and 1987: a doubling from 2.5 to 5 billion people in just 37 years”—that’s the time frame I’m talking about, the one I personally experienced:

And in this one you can see how fast the Chinese population was growing, prior to the current slowdown:

Note that in 1950 the population of China was about 550 million. Now it’s about 1.4 billion, approximately triple. Of course, China is also a transformed country in the economic sense.

I’m curious what these birth rate figures indicate, other than averages. Do the averages represent a general decline in births across the board? Or do they affect just certain portions of the population? Are some groups in China having a great many children? Is the low average birth rate through choice, or has there been a marked decline in the fertility rate as well? The two things are not necessarily the same.

There is some evidence that in China—as in many regions of the industrialized world—sperm counts have been declining. If low sperm counts are an issue, they are also somewhat of a mystery. The reading I’ve done on the subject indicates that there are many possible culprits (see this, for example): chemicals, hormones in the water, obesity, lack of activity, alcohol consumption, drug consumption (including marijuana), stress, and even the increasing prevalence of tight underwear.

Brazilian elections: leading candidate Bolsonaro stabbed

The New Neo Posted on by

I was alerted to this news by commenter TommyJay:

The leading candidate in Brazil’s presidential election is in serious but stable condition after being stabbed by an assailant at a campaign rally on Thursday, doctors said, pushing an already chaotic campaign into further disarray.

Far-right firebrand Congressman Jair Bolsonaro, a controversial figure who has enraged many Brazilians for years with divisive comments, but has a devout following among conservative voters, could take two months to fully recover and will spend at least a week in the hospital, said Dr. Luiz Henrique Borsato, who operated on the candidate.

“His internal wounds were grave and put the patient’s life at risk,” Borsato said, adding that a serious challenge now would be preventing an infection that could be caused by the perforation of Bolsonaro’s intestines.

That’s serious. I wrote about Bolsonaro last week, in a post entitled “Brazil’s Trump?” There are certain parallels, but let’s hope this particular incident doesn’t have any parallel.

I wondered how it happened, and video indicates that Bolsonaro was in the midst of seemingly unchecked and uncontrolled crowds in the street, very up close and personal. Of course, we don’t expose our presidents to that sort of thing, but presidential candidates—particularly in the early days of a campaign—mix it up with crowds here all the time, and it’s always a danger. I believe that, ordinarily, a presidential candidate only gets official protection here after he or she becomes the nominee of a party, although prior to that many candidates hire their own security.

Here’s the coverage of the Bolsonaro stabbing. The expression on his face reminds me of photographs of two famous people who were wounded in the abdomen: Lee Harvey Oswald and Ronald Reagan, the first fatally and the second near-fatally [correction: Reagan was shot in the rib and lung, and one of his Secret Service agents was shot in the abdomen]:

Bolsonaro’s opponents have condemned the attack. This is what has been revealed so far about the attacker:

Local police in Juiz de Fora confirmed to Reuters that the suspect, Adelio Bispo de Oliveira, 40, was in custody and that he appeared to be mentally disturbed.

Oliveira was affiliated with the leftwing Socialism and Liberty Party from 2007 to 2014, the party said in a written statement, in which it repudiated the violence.

Police video taken at a precinct and aired by TV Globo showed Oliveira telling police that he had been ordered by God to carry out the attack.

“We do not know if it was politically motivated,” said Corporal Vitor Albuquerque, a spokesman for the local police.

I would wager they do know, and that of course it was. In addition, de Oliveira may have been mentally unbalanced, but political motives and mental problems are hardly mutually exclusive.

[ADDENDUM: Bolsonaro was reportedly wearing a bulletproof vest but was stabbed below it.]

[ADDENDUM II: When I originally wrote that Reagan had been shot in the abdomen (rather than the lung, as was correct), I believe I may have been confusing the Reagan assassination attempt with the one on Pope John Paul II:

When the Pope passed through an adoring and excited crowd of supporters, A?ca fired four shots at 17:17 with a 9mm Browning Hi-Power semi-automatic pistol, and critically wounded him. He fled the scene as the crowd was in shock and disposed of the pistol by throwing it under a truck, but he was grabbed by Vatican security chief Camillo Cibin, a nun and several spectators who prevented him from firing more shots or escaping, and he was arrested. All four bullets hit John Paul II; two of them lodged in his lower intestine while the other two hit his left index finger and right arm and also injured two bystanders: Ann Odre, of Buffalo, New York, was struck in the chest, and Rose Hall was slightly wounded in the arm.

I had forgotten (or never knew) that other people were wounded in the attack. I certainly didn’t know that a nun was one of the people who helped subdue the shooter.]

Ruminations on the NY Times’ resistance member in the Trump administration

The New Neo Posted on by

This anonymous NY Times op-ed by a supposed higher-up in the Trump administration has gotten a great deal of attention.

As it was meant to do.

It amounts to an anonymous, uncheckable, unverifiable accusation about the Trump administration—an accusation that fits in perfectly with the anti-Trump narrative that’s been repeated by the MSM and the Trump opposition during Trump’s entire administration so far. This particular op-ed purports to be from a brave official who is part of the self-titled “resistance” of anti-Trump heroes in his administration who are working hard to keep his terrible inclinations in check and thus save the Republic.

Quite a few people have pointed out that what this person is describing, if true, would be sedition (see this, for example). It has also been said (see this, for example) that the proper avenue for this person would be to quit, and that is quite obvious. Our entire system of government (one that has stood the test of time) is that the people elect the president, and that person stays in office and has certain powers, and a president’s removal from office can only come when certain constitututional processes are activated. The main one that comes to mind is impeachment/conviction, and another is the mechanism provided by the 25th Amendment.

Anything else that leads to removal is a coup. But the press, the left, and the never-Trumpers on the right have been setting the country up for a coup for the entire duration of the Trump presidency so far.

Look, I wasn’t a Trump fan; au contraire. Anyone who has read this blog for very long knows that. I’m still not what might be called a Trump fan, but I appreciate many of the things Trump has done as president—he’s been far better than I expected—and I have zero interest in undermining the will of the American people to have him serve as president.

For that matter, although I thought Obama was a terrible and even destructive president, it never occurred to me for a moment when he was president to advocate that someone in his administration work to undermine him. If there were enough votes for impeachment and conviction of Obama, so be it. But there weren’t. So he was president until his terms were up, and I completely accepted that fact, unhappy though I was with many of his actions as president.

Now, all bets are off with the anti-Trump crew. They keep screaming “constitutional crisis,” but they don’t ordinarily specify a way in which Trump has actually violated the Constitution, and they themselves advocate doing things that go against some of the most basic assumptions on which the previous stability of our form of government and our trust in it has depended—for example, “don’t work for a sitting president while at the same time secretly undermining him or his agenda.”

And yet they consider themselves heroes, appropriating the word “resistance,” as though they should be compared to those who resisted the Nazis during WWII at the risk of their lives and their families’ lives. This is a travesty and an outrage. But they would love to have us see Trump as a Hitler, although there are no points of similarity. They probably are aware of that, actually, but rhetoric demands that they assert otherwise.

The resistance against Hitler was justified because of his enormous evil, and a significant proportion of the Wehrmacht was involved in it. In fact, it was from that source—the German army—that many of the attempts to assassinate Hitler originated.

It is not hyperbole to suggest that that is the subtle goal of many of these anti-Trump stories—to puff people up with self-righteousness at being part of the anti-Trump resistance, and perhaps even to justify and/or motivate Trump’s assassination by one of the more fringe elements of that “resistance,” because Trump is just as evil as Hitler or at least close to it.

I’m not saying that an assassination will happen; I’m merely saying it would not surprise me if it did happen, and I think many people would like it to happen (I recently wrote a post about the prevalence of the anti-Trump assassination rhetoric that I’ve personally witnessed, and although it was not serious it was vicious and heartfelt, as well as oft-stated).

Obama was beloved by the press, and when he told Russia’s Medvedev (accidentally picked up by a hot mic) that he’d have greater flexibility after the election, what did he mean? He meant that the will of the people—the great unwashed, sometimes stupid American people—had to be taken into consideration prior to an election, when he had to pretend to want to do what they wanted in order to win. But after an election victory he would be freed from the constraints of having to listen to the people, and would be able to do what he, the smarter wiser Obama, wanted to do.

It’s interesting that the press generally didn’t criticize him for that. But not surprising, because it was in accord with what they believe, too: that he, and they, are the wise ones, and we the people are the great unwashed.

Another interesting thing, however, is that in representative government our elected officials don’t have to do what they promised or what the people want. They are free to exercise their own judgment, and we elect them to do just that. The people can vote them out of office (or encourage other elected officials to remove them through impeachment and conviction), and that’s the recourse for the people if the people don’t like what a president is doing.

However, the idea of trust comes into it. Politicians running for election or re-election are not supposed to purposely lie to the people about what they plan to do. Obama was caught on tape doing a version of that—saying, in effect, “I’m planning to fool the stupid American people in order to be re-elected, but afterwards I can do what I really want, which you [Medvedev] will like a lot better than the false pose I’ll be affecting till then.”

Trump voters are perceived as the great unwashed (literally; they smell of Walmart). Voters are a mere mechanism to power. In order to attain power, one must placate enough of them to be elected, and then to be re-elected. But after that, all bets are off.

So now, with Trump in office, the so-called “resistance” is not just an anti-Trump movement but an anti-populist one as well. The people elected Trump [*see NOTE below], but the people are stupid, and it’s up to the elites to destroy him.

As for the Times op-ed article itself, it seems somewhat ironic to me in terms of its timing, which roughly coincides with John McCain’s death and the anti-Trump McCain funeral orations so prominently featured in the news. In death, McCain was declared the bipartisan peacemaker he sometimes aspired to be, and the media and so many others fell all over themselves proclaiming how wonderful McCain was in comparison to the awful Trump.

But not so on the part of the NY Times, back when McCain was aspiring to the levers of real power, running for the presidency against Obama in 2008. This situation was a no-brainer for publications such as the Times, which set out to destroy McCain’s chances if they could.

One of the mechanisms for that attempted destruction was an article appearing in the Times in February of 2008. To refresh your memory:

On February 21, 2008, in the midst of John McCain’s campaign in the 2008 Republican presidential primaries, both The New York Times and the Washington Post published articles detailing rumors of an improper relationship between John McCain and lobbyist Vicki Iseman.

According to The New York Times story, McCain, who was a member of the Senate Commerce Committee during the period when Iseman was lobbying the committee, developed a close personal relationship with Iseman. The New York Times came under intense criticism for the article because of its use of anonymous sources and its timing.

Anonymous sources—why, of course.

And the following really rings a bell [emphasis mine]:

The New York Times and Washington Post reported that unnamed staff members began a campaign to “save McCain from himself” by restricting Iseman’s access to McCain during the course of the 2000 presidential primary. According to the Washington Post story published the same day as The New York Times story, Weaver met with Iseman at Union Station (Washington, D.C.) to tell Iseman not to see McCain anymore. Weaver, who arranged the meeting after a discussion among campaign leaders, said Iseman and he discussed “her conduct and what she allegedly had told people, which made its way back to us.” Weaver heard that she was saying “she had strong ties to the Commerce Committee and his staff” and told her this was wrong and for it to stop. No discussion of a romantic involvement occurred because, according to Weaver, “there was no reason to”.

Iseman confirmed she met with Weaver, but disputed his account of the conversation.
Supposedly, an unnamed campaign adviser was instructed to keep Iseman away from McCain at public events, and plans were made to limit her access to his offices. It was reported that campaign associates confronted McCain directly about the risks he was taking with campaign and career. McCain allegedly admitted he was behaving inappropriately and promised to distance himself from Iseman. Concerns about the relationship eventually receded as the campaign continued.

The theme is somewhat similar to that of the recent anonymous op-ed about Trump. Not just the part about the anonymous source, but the idea of heroic aides “saving him from himself” when the GOP politician shows bad judgment.

The Wiki article states that “A McCain campaign adviser added that the [Times] report ‘reads like a tabloid gossip sheet’.” That was ten years ago, and it’s only become more true over time. The Times counts on its readers having short memories, or not caring about the truth or journalistic standards in their eagerness to applaud the “resistance.”

[ * NOTE: The people elected Trump, but part of the function of the Russian collusion story is to say that they really didn’t elect him at all, they were tricked into it by the Russians. This gives the anti-Trump forces the defense that they’re really not against the will of the people at all. Or, they can always cite the fact that Hillary won the popular vote.]

[NOTE II: See also this.]

Haidt’s latest offering

The New Neo Posted on by

This new book by Jonathan Haidt seems very promising. It’s entitled The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.

Now, I’m not sure the people coddling the American mind have such good intentions. But this is from a review of the book:

“The authors, both of whom are liberal academics — almost a tautology on today’s campuses — do a great job of showing how ‘safetyism’ is cramping young minds. Students are treated like candles, which can be extinguished by a puff of wind. The goal of a Socratic education should be to turn them into fires, which thrive on the wind. Instead, they are sheltered from anything that could cause offence. . . Their advice is sound. Their book is excellent. Liberal parents, in particular, should read it.”

I have a great deal of respect for Haidt, who’s done some great work. He is, among other things, one of the founders of Heterodox Academy, and he’s got some excellent videos on YouTube. Some of his biggest strengths are his calm and evenhanded tone, his clarity of thought, and his liberalism (or previous liberalism; he’s somewhat of a middle-of-the-roader now, as far as I can tell). The liberalism gives him some extra bona fides among liberals, an important audience to reach.

I haven’t read the new book, but I bet it’s good. Its title is of interest, too, in its echoes (deliberate, I’m almost certain) of Allan Bloom’s masterwork Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students.

Undereye concealer in 29 languages

The New Neo Posted on by

I bought a new stick of my favorite undereye circle concealer yesterday, Benefit Boi ing Hydrating Concealer. It’s pricey, but it’s one of the few that don’t emphasize all the lines and crevices by sinking into and highlighting them, and it lasts a long time.

The package had a little folded paper insert explaining how to use it. What’s to explain? You put it on under your eyes, and then you pat it in. That’s pretty much what the instructions say.

In 29 languages. I counted them. I have no idea what most of the languages are, but Benefits really wants to make sure that everyone—and I mean everyone—knows that you put undereye concealer under your eyes and pat it in.

By the way, note that second sentence in this post: “It’s pricey, but it’s one of the few that don’t emphasize all the lines and crevices …”.

I struggled with that. There’s a tension between the “one” in “one of the few” and the “few” in “one of the few.” “One” would require “doesn’t,” as in “one of the few that doesn’t emphasize.” But “few” would require “don’t,” as in “one of the few that don’t emphasize.”

So, which is it? I researched it, and the bottom line is that the verb should be plural. Which is what I had decided on my own, but it didn’t seem quite right to me. But apparently it is.

And while we’re at it, take a look at the end of paragraph 4: …”it’s one of the few that don’t emphasize all the lines and crevices …”. Note the ending. It’s a quotation that ends with three dots, and it’s also the end of the sentence. So, do you add that final period as I did, and do you do it after the close quotation mark? I say “yes.” But who knows?

These folks purport to know. But I can’t make head or tail of their answer. Can you? Help me out here.

These are the questions that give bloggers undereye circles.