For the Fourth: He’s a Yankee Doodle Dandy

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a slightly-edited repeat of a previous post.]

I saw that film on TV maybe 30 times when I was a child. Loved it, and in particular loved the idea that James Cagney—whom I already knew as a tough old gangster—could dance. His dancing fascinated me because it was so non-balletic and idiosyncratic—the strutting, graceful/ungraceful, artful/artless uniqueness of his movement. In particular I recall the wall-climbing part at the end, which delighted me then and still does now.

Cagney wasn’t just an actor and hoofer, although he certainly was both. He was also a political conservative and changer. Excerpts from his Wiki page:

He was sickly as a young child—so much so that his mother feared he would die before he could be baptized. He later attributed his sickness to the poverty his family had to endure…The red-haired, blue-eyed Cagney graduated from Stuyvesant High School in New York City in 1918, and attended Columbia College of Columbia University where he intended to major in art…

Cagney believed in hard work, later stating, “It was good for me. I feel sorry for the kid who has too cushy a time of it. Suddenly he has to come face-to-face with the realities of life without any mama or papa to do his thinking for him.”

He started tap dancing as a boy (a skill that eventually contributed to his Academy Award) and was nicknamed “Cellar-Door Cagney” after his habit of dancing on slanted cellar doors. He was a good street fighter, defending his older brother Harry, a medical student, when necessary. He engaged in amateur boxing, and was a runner-up for the New York State lightweight title. His coaches encouraged him to turn professional, but his mother would not allow it…

In his autobiography, Cagney said that as a young man, he had no political views, since he was more concerned with where the next meal was coming from. However the emerging labor movement of the twenties and thirties soon forced him to take sides…He supported political activist and labor leader Thomas Mooney’s defense fund, but was repelled by the behavior of some of Mooney’s supporters at a rally. Around the same time, he gave money for a Spanish Republican Army ambulance during the Spanish Civil War, which he put down to being “a soft touch.”…He also became involved in a “liberal group…with a leftist slant,” along with Ronald Reagan. However, when he and Reagan saw the direction the group was heading in, they resigned on the same night…

Cagney was accused of being a communist sympathizer in 1934, and again in 1940. The accusation in 1934 stemmed from a letter police found from a local Communist official that alleged that Cagney would bring other Hollywood stars to meetings. Cagney denied this, and Lincoln Steffens, husband of the letter’s writer, backed up this denial, asserting that the accusation stemmed solely from Cagney’s donation to striking cotton workers in the San Joaquin Valley. William Cagney claimed this donation was the root of the charges in 1940. Cagney was cleared…

After [WWII], Cagney’s politics started to change. He had worked on Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidential campaigns…However, by the time of the 1948 election, he had become disillusioned with Harry S. Truman, and voted for Thomas E. Dewey, his first non-Democratic vote. By 1980, Cagney was contributing financially to the Republican Party, supporting his friend Ronald Reagan’s bid for the presidency…As he got older, he became more and more conservative, referring to himself in his autobiography as “arch-conservative.” He regarded his move away from liberal politics as “…a totally natural reaction once I began to see undisciplined elements in our country stimulating a breakdown of our system… Those functionless creatures, the hippies … just didn’t appear out of a vacuum.”

Cagney: hoofer, political changer. An original all the way.

Happy Fourth to you all!

To liberty: Happy Fourth of July!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post. It was written in the springtime quite few years ago, during a visit to New York.]

I’ve been visiting New York City, the place where I grew up. I decide to take a walk to the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, never having been there before.

When you approach the Promenade you can’t really see what’s in store. You walk down a normal-looking street, spot a bit of blue at the end of the block, make a right turn–and, then, suddenly, there is New York:

brookheights2.jpg

And so it is for me. I take a turn, and catch my breath: downtown Manhattan rises to my left, seemingly close enough to touch, across the narrow East River. I see skyscrapers, piers, the orange-gold Staten Island ferry. In front of me, there are the graceful gothic arches of the Brooklyn Bridge. To my right, the back of some brownstones, and a well-tended and charming garden that goes on for a third of a mile.

I walk down the promenade looking first left and then right, not knowing which vista I prefer, but liking them both, especially in combination, because they complement each other so well.

All around me are people, relaxing. Lovers walking hand in hand, mothers pushing babies in strollers, fathers pushing babies in strollers, nannies pushing babies in strollers. People walking their dogs (a preponderance of pugs, for some reason), pigeons strutting and courting, tourists taking photos of themselves with the skyline as background, every other person speaking a foreign language.

The garden is more advanced in time than gardens where I live, reminding me that New York is really a southern city compared to New England. Daffodils, the startling blue of grape hyacinths, tulips in a rainbow of soft colors, those light-purple azaleas that are always the first of their kind, flowering pink magnolia and airy white dogwood and other blooming trees I don’t know the names of.

In the view to my left, of course, there’s something missing. Something very large. Two things, actually: the World Trade Center towers. Just the day before, we had driven past that sprawling wound, with its mostly-unfilled acreage where the WTC had once stood, now surrounded by fencing. Driving by it is like passing a war memorial and graveyard combined; the urge is to bow one’s head.

As I look at the skyline from the Promenade, I know that those towers are missing, but I don’t really register the loss visually. I left New York in the Sixties, never to live there again, returning thereafter only as occasional visitor. The World Trade Center was built in the early seventies, so I never managed to incorporate it into that personal New York skyline of memory that I hold in my mind’s eye, even though I saw the towers on subsequent visits. So what I now see resembles nothing more than the skyline of my youth restored, a fact which seems paradoxical to me. But I feel the loss, even though I don’t see it. Viewing the skyline always has a tinge of sadness now, which it never had before 9/11.

I come to the end of the walkway and turn myself around to set off on the return trip. And, suddenly, the view changes. Now, of course, the garden is to my left and the city to my right; and the Brooklyn Bridge, which was ahead of me, is now behind me and out of sight. But now I can see for the first time, ahead of me and to the right, something that was behind me before. In the middle of the harbor, the pale-green Statue of Liberty stands firmly on its concrete foundation, arm raised high, torch in hand.

The sight is intensely familiar to me—I used to see it frequently when I was growing up. But I’ve never seen it from this angle before. She seems both small and gigantic at the same time: dwarfed by the skyscrapers near me that threaten to overwhelm her, but towering over the water that surrounds her on all sides. The eye is drawn to her distant, heroic figure. She’s been holding that torch up for so long, she must be tired. But still she stands, resolute, her arm extended.

#WalkAway

The New Neo Posted on by

You may have heard of the #WalkAway movement. That’s a Twitter hashtag for a group that’s right up my alley: people who recently have switched from liberal to—well, if not conservative, at least to non-liberal, or have become non-Democrats.

It’s unclear how big or important the movement may be. A group of a few thousand people may not make much of a difference unless it grows significantly. Remember the PUMAs of 2008, disgruntled Hillary supporters who supposedly were turning on Obama and might end up handing the election to the GOP? Hardly anyone else remembers them, either, because as a force that were much smaller than the hype.

But perhaps #WalkAway is something more. They are vocal, and they seem to be reaching a lot of other people. Time will tell. My impression is that these people are predominantly young but it’s not limited to the young. Their change seems to have begun as something non-ideological for the most part. It’s more of an emotional revulsion at the level of vitriol doled out by the Democrats these days, the emphasis on division and specially favored groups and the dissing of white men in particular, although quite a few of the #WalkAway spokespeople are black people or women or members of other groups that have traditionally been firmly in the Democrats’ camp.

Here’s more about the movement. It also reminds me somewhat of the “red pill” group, people who (like the #WalkAways) have made a great many YouTube videos (see this and this).

The #WalkAways also seem like somewhat of a variant on the famous old saw, “If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. if you are not a conservative at 35 you have no brain.” Perhaps this is just a normal evolution for the people in question, something that would have happened anyway even without Trump and the rabid left.

But all I can say is that it feels a bit different than that, and people are reporting that it is fueled by the hate campaign on the left. It makes sense, too, that if a person was initially attracted to the left because he or she thought it was peace/love, that person’s got another think coming on seeing so much hate directed at people who just happen to think differently from the left.

Here are some quotes from the movement’s originator, gay man and would-be actor Brandon Straka:

“I was afraid of losing all my friends. As I began posting about these things on social media, people started attacking me and unfriending me.

“But I thought, ‘You know what, this is too important.’ Maybe it’s the fact that I’m a gay man and I’ve already been through this—people making up lies about what it means to be gay and trying to shame me. I was like, ‘I’m not doing it. I’m not doing this twice.’

“The more resentment I received, the stronger I got. Finally, I thought, ‘To hell with it. I’m just going to blow the lid off this whole thing and make this video.’”

The video has garnered 1.3 million views on his Facebook page and has been shared on many other popular pages. It is estimated to have reached some 5 million viewers so far.

There are some 27,000 followers of the Facebook group, with new people posting both video and text testimonials every day. Straka calls them “the patriots.”

“Initially, my focus was on the gay community because I was so angry at how they were [being terrorized],” Straka said. “Then I thought, why should I limit it to just us? They’re doing the same thing to black people. And Hispanic people. And frankly, they’re doing the same thing to everybody in one way or another.

Brave man.

I wish them all luck—welcome to the club!

Immigration and the Holy Family: department of incorrect metaphors

The New Neo Posted on by

A church in Indianapolis has mounted the following protest:

An Indianapolis church has placed statues of Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus in a cage of fencing topped with barbed wired to protest the Trump administration’s zero tolerance immigration policy.

The statues were erected Tuesday morning outside Christ Church Cathedral on downtown Indianapolis’ Monument Circle and surrounded by the fencing.

The Episcopalian church’s dean and rector, the Rev. Stephen Carlsen, says the display that’s part of the church’s “Every Family is Holy Campaign” condemns the nation’s immigration policy that’s holding families in detention centers at the U.S.-Mexico border.

He says the Holy Family was “a homeless family with nowhere to stay” and that the Bible says “we’re supposed to love our neighbors as ourselves.”

I wonder whether Rev. Carlsen would be willing to take some of the families who are being held and house them in his own home’s stable, as it were.

But the strangest thing about his statement is that I assume that he, as a Christian clergyman, would be aware of the story of Mary and Joseph and their journey to Bethlehem, and know that they were neither migrants nor homeless, nor were they illegal immigrants. Au contraire.

You (or Rev. Carlsen) can find the actual story in many places online. The basics are that the Holy Family was traveling from their home to their ancestral home in order to comply with a law directing them to do so for a census.

Some details:

Mary and Joseph had to go to Joseph’s ancestral home due to Roman taxation policies. From time to time, the Romans conducted a census not merely to count people but also to find out what they owned so that they could be taxed. It was decreed in the year Christ was born (5 B.C.) that such a taxation census would be taken of the people.

1. Now it happened in those days that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus (the first true Roman Emperor who ruled from 27 B.C. to 14 A.D.) that all the world should be registered. 2. (This registration first occurred when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.) 3. Then all went to be registered, each to his own city. 4. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, to the city of David which is called Bethlehem, because he was from the house and lineage of David (Luke 2)

It couldn’t be further from the situation of the illegal immigrants of today whose detention the Reverend is protesting. Mary and Joseph were obeying a law that directed them to temporarily go from their home to another place where they had roots, and that’s why they were without a place to stay.

A while back I wrote this post on the attitude of Christianity towards immigration. I’m going to quote from it now:

A great many Christians seem to be arguing that we Westerners have a duty to accept all the refugees coming from war-torn countries such as Syria, or those in economic distress such as illegal immigrants from Mexico, whether the “we” be individuals here or in Europe. I’ve read many such arguments on blogs in posts and comments, and have seen them offered by talking heads on TV.

To me as a non-Christian, it is a puzzling argument. To me it seems that the prescription to give to charity, to help the needy, never requires that one help all the needy to the point of beggaring yourself. Nor does it require putting yourself in personal jeopardy. In other words, although Christianity has long admired the saintliness of martyrdom, it does not require it of individuals and certainly not of societies…

Another principle to remember is that generally any behavior that is rewarded will increase in frequency. So, issue an open invitation to your house saying that all who come will be fed and clothed there and given money, and see what happens if you broadcast it throughout the entire world…

I am not completely familiar with the tenets of Christianity, to be sure. But I can’t imagine that it requires such self-destruction in the name of good. To me, it seems that limits are necessary, and the proper topic for debate is the question of where to draw those limits.

Governments all over the world make rules about who can live in their country and who cannot, and while things are being sorted out, people are regularly detained. There is really no other way to do it except anarchy. There are certain groups—and religious groups and people are prominent among them—who don’t believe in any limits, or who would set the limits in such a way as to exclude almost no one.

[NOTE: One more thing—I wonder how the decision was made to erect the protest statues. Was it by the reverend himself? Or was some sort of board of directors involved as well? I very much doubt the entire congregation voted on it, although I suppose that’s possible.]

Undoing Obama’s affirmative action directive for schools

The New Neo Posted on by

When something is done by administrative order, it can be undone by administrative order. That’s been happening a lot lately.

The most recent example is this:

The Justice Department will scrap seven guidance documents issued by the Education Department under the Obama administration that called on school superintendents and colleges to consider race when trying to diversify their campuses, the New York Times reported. The administration will restore George W. Bush-era guidance that “strongly encourages the use of race-neutral methods” in admissions, the Times said.

The administration has given this explanation:

“The executive branch cannot circumvent Congress or the courts by creating guidance that goes beyond the law and — in some instances — stays on the books for decades,” Justice Department spokesperson Devin O’Malley told CNN in a statement. “Last year, the Attorney General initiated a review of guidance documents, which resulted in dozens of examples — including today’s second tranche of rescissions — of documents that go beyond or are inconsistent with the Constitution and federal law. The Justice Department remains committed to enforcing the law and protecting all Americans from all forms of illegal race-based discrimination.”…

Last year, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that he was ending the practice of the Justice Department issuing “guidance documents” that have the “effect of adopting new regulatory requirements or amending the law,” without going through the formal rulemaking process. As a result, 25 documents were rescinded in December…

Tuesday’s reversal also does not affect what a school decides to do on its own within the confines of current Supreme Court precedent, but civil rights groups swiftly reacted with disappointment.

You can bet they did.

I think they’re also scared of what will happen with the current lawsuit against Harvard brought by Asians alleging discrimination against them in admissions based on race. Affirmative action designates winners and losers, and is one of many attempts at fairness that introduces a different sort of unfairness.

The left is redefining free speech

The New Neo Posted on by

The United States is one of the strongest bastions of free speech in the world, and perhaps one of the last. Even Europe doesn’t have anything like our protections for free speech, nor does Canada. Both have hate speech laws, for example.

On US campuses in recent years, however, we’ve seen an erosion of the devotion to freedom of speech. It is common to hear assertions that speech that hurts feelings, is bigoted, or is otherwise offensive isn’t just metaphorical “violence” but actual violence.

It’s not just campuses, either. More law professors have been getting into the act as well. Their goal is justice—and by that they don’t mean what used to be meant by the word. They mean social justice or what Thomas Sowell calls cosmic justice (equality of outcome), impossible to create on earth and dangerous to attempt.

But it sounds so good to the left, and they’re just the ones to accomplish it, right?:

“When I was younger, I had more of the standard liberal view of civil liberties,” said Louis Michael Seidman, a law professor at Georgetown. “And I’ve gradually changed my mind about it. What I have come to see is that it’s a mistake to think of free speech as an effective means to accomplish a more just society.”

To the contrary, free speech reinforces and amplifies injustice, Catharine A. MacKinnon, a law professor at the University of Michigan, wrote in “The Free Speech Century,” a collection of essays to be published this year.

“Once a defense of the powerless, the First Amendment over the last hundred years has mainly become a weapon of the powerful,” she wrote. “Legally, what was, toward the beginning of the 20th century, a shield for radicals, artists and activists, socialists and pacifists, the excluded and the dispossessed, has become a sword for authoritarians, racists and misogynists, Nazis and Klansmen, pornographers and corporations buying elections.”

The left believes that different liberties should be accorded the “powerless” and good (as they define them) compared to the powerful and bad (as they define them). Free speech apparently is one of those differential liberties.

As for Seidman—well, we’ve heard from him before. The following is from a post I wrote about him in 2013, based on an op-ed by him published in the Times:

But author Seidman is a well-known professor of constitutional law at Georgetown, one of the most elite law schools in the nation…

Seidman writes:

As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions…

Imagine that after careful study a government official — say, the president or one of the party leaders in Congress — reaches a considered judgment that a particular course of action is best for the country. Suddenly, someone bursts into the room with new information: a group of white propertied men who have been dead for two centuries, knew nothing of our present situation, acted illegally under existing law and thought it was fine to own slaves might have disagreed with this course of action. Is it even remotely rational that the official should change his or her mind because of this divination?

Read the whole thing if you can stomach it, just for the flavor, and the exposure to the strangely tortured logic (and lack of historical accuracy) of this particular law professor. Seidman not only shows a lack of knowledge (actual? or strategic?) of the true position of most of the Founders regarding slavery, he also expresses the typical leftist position that we should throw away the wisdom of the past (wisdom? how can that be; they’re just a bunch of propertied white guys—just like Seidman, by the way) because we want to do something, and that pesky old white-guy document stands in our way…

As for why the Times decided to publish this piece right now [January 2013], one can only conclude they see the time as ripe for delegitimizing the Constitution in order to further the leftist agenda, and seek to use Seidman’s credentials to make the argument from authority. The ground has been well prepared for this by our president [Obama], the MSM, and our educational system, so their calculations may indeed be correct.

The left keeps testing the waters and waiting for the time to be ripe to destroy our liberties. They must think that anti-Trump sentiment is a good wave to ride in order to attack freedom of speech for those they consider the enemy (not for themselves—of course). Despite the ground having been prepared, particularly by our educational system, I don’t think Americans will buy what they’re selling at this point. I hope I’m right about that.

[NOTE: If you want to read an excellent book that explains how radicals like MacKinnon and Seidman got traction and influence as professors in law schools, read Beyond All Reason. It was published in 1997, which tells you how long ago the phenomenon had taken root.]

Mexico chooses leftist, populist hope and change

The New Neo Posted on by

As predicted, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador won an overwhelming victory in this weekend’s Mexican election. He’s a leftist who made a lot of promises: clean up corruption and illegal drugs, improve the economy, help the plight of the poor.

So, is Mexico poised to go the way of Venezuela? Maybe. Is there any chance he can deliver on any of his promises, much less all of them? I strongly doubt it. But I can understand why Mexicans decided to give it a try. The country’s a mess and they’re desperate. Who wouldn’t want to end corruption and help the economy?

One thing AMLO (that’s what he’s called for short) is not is a newcomer to the political game. He’s sixty-four years old and has been in politics and/or public office for over 40 years (mostly politics rather than office)—in other words, he seems to be a career politician, who’s been involved in a dizzying array of parties. He’s got a Wiki entry a mile long.

Nor is this the first time he’s run for the presidency. In 2006 he almost won:

López Obrador resigned the Mexico City headship in July 2005 to enter the 2006 presidential election, representing the Coalition for the Good of All, which was led by the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and included the Citizens’ Movement party and the Labor Party. He received 35.31% of the vote and lost by 0.58%. López Obrador subsequently alleged electoral fraud and refused to concede, leading a several-months-long takeover of Paseo de la Reforma and the Zócalo in protest.

López Obrador was a candidate in the 2012 presidential election representing a coalition of the PRD, Labor Party and Citizens’ Movement. He finished second with 31.59% of the vote. He left the PRD in 2012 and in 2014 he founded the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), leading that party until 2018.

His present party is a coalition of the left and right:

The alliance has received criticism as it is a coalition between two left-wing parties (MORENA and the PT) with a formation related to the evangelical right (PES). In response, the national president of MORENA, Yeidckol Polevnsky, mentioned that her party believes in inclusion, joint work to “rescue Mexico” and that they will continue to defend human rights, while Hugo Eric Flores Cervantes, national president of the PES, mentioned that “the only possibility of real change in our country is the one headed by Andrés Manuel López Obrador” and that his party had decided to be “on the right side of history.”

Some of the US coverage plays up a “Trump critic” angle for AMLO, but that doesn’t seem to me to be a particularly important part of his appeal, which is more oriented towards ending corruption and helping the economy, and certainly long predated the rise of Trump. He and Trump exchanged cordial words after his victory, although those cordial words don’t really tell much about the future.

Personally, I get a Peron vibe from him. Populist, hard to pin down, charismatic, appealing to the poor. I Googled his name together with Peron’s, and got this, which is translated from the original Spanish:

From the ideological point of view it is difficult to pigeonhole, although often he is called a leftist politician…After having lost in the elections of 2006 and 2012, in the current campaign he moderated his speech to attract sectors that previously distrusted and slipped more towards the center…

The critics of López Obrador say that he is a populist caudillo and they compare him with the American president Donald Trump [!!] and with the Venezuelan Nicolás Maduro , something that the protagonist rejects…

For the writer and analyst Jorge Zepeda Patterson , López Obrador is more like the personal leadership of Juan Domingo Perón than other leaders with whom he is associated. To me, however, it makes me think of Perón, every proportion saved: his ideological ambiguity, his ability to float above definitions or to summon the most divergent political fractions and his ability to negotiate with the existing union structures remind the figure of the Argentine leader, “he wrote in his column in the newspaper El País .

So apparently I’m not the only one.

Prior to AMLO’s election, there was a big brouhaha about some remarks he made concerning immigration to the US.

Here’s the quote in Spanish:

Y ya pronto, muy pronto, al triunfo de nuestro movimiento vamos a defender a los migrantes de todo el continente Americano y todos los migrantes del mundo que, por necesidad, tienen que abandonar sus pueblos para buscar la vida en Estados Unidos, es un derecho humano que vamos a defender,” El Universal quotes López Obrador saying in a speech on June 19.

My high school Spanish was never very good, and by now I’ve forgotten a great deal of what I knew back then, but even I can translate that pretty well all by myself (I think, anyway). What he seems to have said is that soon “our movement” will triumph and will defend as a human right the migrants who, through necessity, have to abandon their homes (towns?) in order to seek a life in the US. No surprise there.

And how will this defense be mounted? Will it be any different from his predecessor and his attitude towards the “migrants”?

More here:

Mexico runs a NAFTA-protected $70 billion trade surplus with the U.S…The architects of NAFTA long ago assured Americans that such a trade war would not break out, or that we should not worry over trade imbalances, given the desirability of outsourcing to take advantage of Mexico’s cheaper labor costs.

A supposedly affluent Mexico was supposed to achieve near parity with the U.S., as immigration and trade soon neutralized. Despite Mexico’s economic growth, no such symmetry has followed NAFTA. What did, however, 34 years later, was the establishment of a dysfunctional Mexican state, whose drug cartels all but run the country on the basis of their enormous profits from unfettered dope-running and human-trafficking into the United States. NAFTA certainly did not make Mexico a safer, kinder, and gentler nation.

In addition, Mexican citizens who enter and reside as illegal immigrants in the U.S. are mostly responsible for sending an approximate $30 billion in remittances home to Mexico. That sum has now surpassed oil and tourism as the largest source of Mexican foreign exchange. That huge cash influx is the concrete reality behind Obrador’s otherwise unhinged rhetoric about exercising veto power over U.S. immigration law…

Why the U.S. government does not tax remittances and why it does not prohibit foreign nationals on public assistance from sending cash out of the country are some of the stranger phenomena of the entire strange illegal-immigration matrix.

Promises to be—interesting.

Pocket thinks I’d like a NY Times article entitled “How to Clean Your Filthy, Disgusting Laptop”

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m insulted.

My laptop isn’t that filthy and disgusting. Just a little bit filthy and disgusting.

It gets a lot of use. I blog standing up because of my bad back/arms; it’s much more comfortable that way. I stand on a little rug. The laptop is raised to just the right height with an edifice of books (I could buy something nicer-looking, like one of those electrically adjustable stands, but have never bothered). I use a mouse—can’t stand the wheel, it hurts my hands and arms. I wear very comfy clothes; not pajamas, but the sort of clothes that mean I have to get changed if I want to go out in public.

My laptop is basically my keyboard and mother ship, but the whole thing is attached to a larger monitor so I don’t have to squint to see it. The monitor is up on a stand (actually, it’s a little wooden footstool my son made in shop class in junior high, many a long year ago) so that I don’t have to look down much to view it. That protects my neck from kinks and also I have a notion that it keeps me from getting quite as much of a double chin as I’d be getting if I was looking down umpteen hours a day.

Is my laptop filthy and disgusting? Depends how sensitive you are to such things. It looks relatively clean to me, and I swipe it down periodically but hardly obsessively. But sometimes when I’m traveling and I take it out in a very bright light I notice it’s a bit more disgusting and filthy than I had thought.

Anyway, I read the Times article. It’s very big on those compressed air things, but I’ve never found them to be all that effective. Have you?

I also took special note of this:

If your laptop is particularly old, you may not be able to get rid of the shine on the keys; some of us may type like the Incredible Hulk and have worn down the top layer of plastic.

I’ve gotten much teasing about the fact that I’ve done just that. In particular, the “a,” “s,” “m,” and “n” have been completely obliterated. I understand why the first two; after all, my default typing stance has my left pinky and ring finger resting on them. But the last two? I have no idea.

The Democrats are eager to re-live the borking of Bork

The New Neo Posted on by

Ah yes, the Bork hearings—one of the Democrats’ finest hours. Ruth Marcus, among others, would dearly love to revive it:

…[T]his must be another Bork moment — insisting on a nominee that is, to invoke the language of the Bork debate, within the broad mainstream of judicial thought.

And one who, like swapping Kennedy for Powell, will not radically alter the balance of the court.

Can you imagine Marcus and others on the left arguing something like that if Hillary Clinton had gotten the chance to nominate Kennedy’s replacement? Sure thing—they would no doubt be arguing for a swing justice who leaned mostly conservative, in order to preserve the Court’s previous balance.

Riiiight.

And by the way, conservative justices such as those on SCOTUS right now are in fact part of the “broad mainstream of judicial thought.” That’s what the word “broad” means.

Among other things, Marcus mischaracterizes what happened with Bork. It wasn’t a “moment”; it lasted from July to October of 1987. Bork himself actually was a fairly extreme jurist, but of course the opposition didn’t stick to talking about his actual views. Hyperbole and lies about him abounded, and many peopole consider that those hearings marked the beginning of the political hyper-partisanship that has grown so familiar (and so very intense) now.

Ted Kennedy was instrumental in the borking of Bork:

…[H]ere is…[part] of the speech [Kennedy gave]:

Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is — and is often the only — protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy… President Reagan is still our president. But he should not be able to reach out from the muck of Irangate, reach into the muck of Watergate and impose his reactionary vision of the Constitution on the Supreme Court and the next generation of Americans. No justice would be better than this injustice.

First, a fact-check, courtesy of my Times colleague Ethan Bronner, who covered the hearings for The Boston Globe.

Kennedy’s was an altogether startling statement. He had shamelessly twisted Bork’s world view — “rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids” was an Orwellian reference to Bork’s criticism of the exclusionary rule, through which judges exclude illegally obtained evidence, and Bork had never suggested he opposed the teaching of evolution…

More troubling to Bronner, and to many other Americans any time a seat opens on the Supreme Court bench, was the precedent being set.

The speech was a landmark for judicial nominations. Kennedy was saying that no longer should the Senate content itself with examining a nominee’s personal integrity and legal qualifications…. From now on the Senate and the nation should examine a nominee’s vision for society … the upper house should take politics and ideology fully into account.

One interesting thing about that quote from Bronner, who wrote for the Globe and later the Times, is that it’s hard to imagine the Globe or Times publishing anything like that today, isn’t it?

The Democrats were fortunate in having Bork to bork. He may have been brilliant, but he was perceived as off-putting and arrogant during his hearing, and lost some Republican support as a result. But subsequent SCOTUS nominees have learned a great deal from his borking—to answer pleasantly and in a bland, general way. Trump will almost certainly choose someone from his previously-approved list who is well aware of the need to appear affable and reasonable.

The stakes are similar then and now, though. In 1987, much of the argument turned on fears that Roe v. Wade might be reversed if Bork was allowed to be seated on the Court. The same fears are being voiced at present.

But what would really happen if Roe were reversed? That’s a big topic that I’ll save for another post in the not-too-distant future.

A modern twist on stalking

The New Neo Posted on by

Stalking isn’t funny; it’s serious and frightening. And this University of Central Florida professor who stalked a PhD student sounds remarkably obsessive about it:

Ali Borji, a 39-year-old assistant professor in the school’s Department of Computer Science, was arrested at his on-campus office Thursday night. He faces two charges of stalking — both misdemeanors.

The victim met Borji last June while she was working on her Ph.D. She told police that Borji reached out to her on Facebook to help with her studies. They went on a few dates before the victim told him that their relationship needed to remain professional, authorities said.

That’s when the trouble began. It ended with Borji’s arrest on two misdemeanor stalking charges and his dismissal from his position at the university.

Note that Borji is an assistant professor of computer science. Two of the facts about his stalking that caught my eye are related to that. The first is that he apparently sent his lady love about 800 texts a day. My guess is that he may have used his computer skills to set up a program to do that automatically rather than manually. After all, if he’s awake 16 hours a day, that would be almost one a minute for every waking hour.

Borji also informed her: “Be happy that somebody likes you this much to stalk you,” which is quite a bit of spin, not to mention chutzpah. But his most creative and really creepy taunt was this one:

He told her that he could create an artificial-intelligence facsimile of her and “do anything he wanted,” according to a police report.

There’s a feeling in the air: hope and change on the right

The New Neo Posted on by

Obama may have commandeered the phrase, but it’s the one that comes to mind at the moment: hope and change.

It has to do with the federal judgeships, and in particular the possibility of a sea-change on the Supreme Court. It’s been an incredibly long time since the Court had a conservative majority, as I mentioned yesterday, probably since before FDR. The right has gotten used to this, and so has the left.

In fact, the right has gotten used to having its victories (Reagan, for example, or Gingrich’s Contract with America) be short-lived. And the left is used to executing the Gramscian march inexorably and successfully. If it doesn’t work today, it will work tomorrow, thinks the left. On the right, it’s more like even if it seems to work today, tomorrow it will stop working.

Or, as Professor William Jacobson has succinctly put it at Legal Insurrection:

We are used to losing institutions. The left is not. They are waking up to the possibility that the judiciary may be restored to the neutral role it should play, and would no longer serve as a liberal super-legislature.

Indeed.

That is one of many reasons that their reaction is so intense. These developments are as much a surprise to them as the election of Donald Trump itself, or their failure to drive him out so far, or his rising public approval rating. But the Supreme Court, which they thought would be theirs for the foreseeable future on Hillary Clinton’s election to the presidency, appears to be escaping their grasp. And it may escape it for a long, long time.

Google glitch?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m having a weird thing with Google right now. On my computer, it is working perfectly on Chrome, but when I try to do a Google search on Firefox, nothing happens.

Nada. Zip. Zilch. Sometimes the Google page itself (which is my home page) doesn’t even load. Meanwhile, for all other sites, Firefox is working perfectly and loading promptly.

So, is it just me, or is anyone else out there having a similar problem? Does anyone have a clue what might be going on? I certainly don’t.

UPDATE 5 PM: It’s all better—for now. But it’s happened several times before, although never this seriously. I still haven’t a clue why it’s happening and just affecting that one function.