Hillary’s “They were never going to let me be president”

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, it depends who the “they” was. It turns out that it was the American voters and the electoral system.

But this is also the woman who posited a “vast right-wing conspiracy” out to get her husband in 1998, involving Monica Lewinsky and other scandals. Of course, no one forced Bill to have sex (or sort-of-sex) with the lady in question. But yes, the parties are in a battle in which dirty tricks and traps occur on both sides. This is nothing new. What’s new is the heavier involvement of the organs of government these days (IRS and FBI, for example). And although Hillary Clinton and the Democrats might think so (or tell themselves so, or tell us so), for the most part it’s not been marshaled by the forces of the right; it’s the left that’s been playing that particular game.

Hillary’s recent statement was reported to have been uttered on Election Night, as she was in the middle of getting the shock of her life So in that sense it’s quite understandable that she might blame some shadowy and nefarious “them” rather than herself. After all, she was not just losing, she was losing to a man everyone on her side (and many on both sides) held in tremendous contempt and thought would be easy to defeat. But:

Three hours later, the Rust Belt was awash in red, and somebody had to tell Hillary Clinton.

Robby Mook, the drained and deflated campaign manager, told his boss she was going to lose. She didn’t seem all that surprised.

“I knew it. I knew this would happen to me,” she said, now within a couple of inches of Mr. Mook’s ashen face. “They were never going to let me be president.”

People in politics have tremendous egos. They are not ordinarily big on self-blame, and Hillary is hardly an exception. So this utterance—which was made in private–was almost inevitable.

But I’ve noticed something else, a phenomenon that seemed to begin with Barack Obama in terms of presidents or presidential candidates: and that is that the old Trumanesque adage “the buck stops here” is dead and buried. I see this statement of Hillary’s as part of that change.

It goes with the modern sensibility of victimization that has become so popular on the left and in America as a whole. Nothing is anyone’s fault if that person is a member of some supposedly oppressed minority: it’s a result of discrimination. Obama started the “I’m a victim” drumbeat back when he was a candidate in 2008 (I noted the development quite early on (here, for example). And the entire party was prepping the ground for the blame game prior to the 2008 election in the event that Obama might lose. I wrote about that here:

…[T]he furor and rage that has been building all these years in the Democratic Party now gives us the fascinating although creepy prospect of an excuse for a possible loss being heavily pushed before a defeat has even occurred. This time the ever-present fraud allegations are combined with the far more toxic assertion that, if it occurs, Obama’s defeat will be the result of racism.

I don’t have to give you links; articles asserting this have been published in major periodicals at the rate of several a week for quite some time now. Sometimes they cite dubious interpretations of polls. Sometimes they merely state the case as though it is a self-evident fact. Sometimes they threaten””or fearfully predict, or both””race riots if Obama is not elected. But is there any question that, were Obama to lose, the main Democratic explanation will be that the perfection of Obama was rejected by the undeserving and racist American people?

That was written close to ten years ago, in September of 2008. It’s only gotten worse since then, much worse. And Hillary is going with that flow. No more “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” (Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene III, L. 140-141). Well, it’s not “stars” that people blame these days instead of themselves; it’s prejudice and conspiracies.

The Waffle House shooting and guns

The New Neo Posted on by

[See UPDATE below.]

The shooting at the Waffle House that killed four has sparked the usual discussion about firearm control. I read a number of articles about it, and the comments sections were rife with people on the left crowing about the fact that the hero of the incident (who denies being a hero, but is) managed to disarm the shooter even though the former didn’t have a gun himself.

I have several responses to that.

The only reason that James Shaw (the hero) managed to succeed was that the shooter was reloading and Shaw saw his opportunity. It was that, or die. Fortunately, Shaw was stronger than the perp. But if Shaw had been armed as well, it’s possible that fewer people would have died, because he wouldn’t have had to wait for a propitious moment.

Of course, it’s also possible that if Shaw had been armed, more people would have been hurt rather than fewer. But I’ll go with the defender with a gun over the defender without one, when faced with an armed perp.

In fact, if the Waffle House had not been a gun-free zone (it apparently is, as best I can tell) this shooting might not have happened there, because shooters realize that gun-free zones present a golden opportunity for them.

In addition, the shooter got away and remains at large. If Shaw or any other person in that Waffle House had had a firearm, that part of the story might be different, and the shooter might either be dead, wounded, or in custody. As it was, he was able to get away.

The shooter’s history points to mental illness in this particular case. His guns were confiscated because of previous suspicious incidents, but:

“There’s certainly evidence that there’s some sort of mental health issues involved,” Tazewell County Sheriff Robert Huston said. But he said deputies returned the guns to Reinking’s father on the promise that he would “keep the weapons secure and out of the possession of Travis.”

Reinking’s father “has now acknowledged giving them back” to his son, Nashville Police spokesman Don Aaron said.

Human beings are the loophole, and there’s no way to fix that.

UPDATE 7 PM: Police have taken the shooter (“alleged shooter,” but I think there’s little doubt about this one) into custody. They found him (from a citizen’s tip) in the woods behind an apartment complex. He was armed with “a silver Kimber semi-automatic weapon with .45 caliber ammunition, flashlight and holster.” He had a long history of delusional ideation and behavior, and I think this guy is going to go the way of the the Aurora shooter.

It seems that there is a pattern of recent shootings that involve people who have been tagged by the mental health system and yet obtain weapons, even if (in this case, for example) the police have disarmed them because of their suspicious and unstable behavior. The law did its job, but the mental health system did not, and if the reports about the shooter’s father giving him back his weapons are accurate, the father did not do his.

Artificial intelligence: Google’s hard at work

The New Neo Posted on by

Google has a new director of AI:

The new AI boss at Google is Jeff Dean. The lean 50-year-old computer scientist joined the company in 1999, when it was a startup less than one year old. He earned a reputation as one of the industry’s most talented coders by helping Google become a computational powerhouse with new approaches to databases and large-scale data analysis.

I was surprised to read that he is 50. As far as I know, that’s geriatric in Silicon Valley years.

Dean helped ignite Silicon Valley’s AI boom when he joined Google’s secretive X lab in 2011 to investigate an approach to machine learning known as deep neural networks. The project produced software that learned to recognize cats on YouTube. Google went on to use deep neural networks to greatly improve the accuracy of its speech recognition service, and has since made the technique the heart of the company’s strategy for just about everything.

The cat-video project morphed into a research group called Google Brain, which Dean has led since 2012. He ascended to head the company’s AI efforts early this month after John Giannandrea left to lead Apple’s AI projects.

Dean’s new job puts him at the helm of perhaps the world’s foremost AI research operation. The group churns out research papers on topics such as creating more realistic synthetic voices and teaching robots to grasp objects.

But Dean and his group are also on the hook to invent the future of Google’s business. CEO Sundar Pichai describes the company’s strategy as “AI first,” saying that everything the company does will build on the technology.

Some of their current efforts are about medical diagnosis. But as you might imagine (and/or fear), they’re not stopping there:

Dean is also excited about automating artificial intelligence””using machine-learning software to build machine-learning software. “It could be a huge enabler of the benefits of machine learning,” Dean says. “The current state is that machine learning expertise is relatively in short supply.”…

Longer term, Dean thinks automatic AI could enable robots to figure out how to cope with unfamiliar situations, such as opening a type of bottle cap they haven’t seen before. Despite successes on narrow tasks, AI researchers have struggled to make machines capable of many different thing. Dean says AutoML could bring about “really intelligent, adaptable systems that can tackle a new problem in the world when you don’t have exposure of how to tackle it.”

Weren’t we just talking about that sort of thing? And its possible repercussions:

Some researchers at the company are working on how to ensure that machine-learning systems don’t breach societal expectations of fairness.

They’re talking about things like racism and whether to cooperate with military projects. But that seems like a very narrow focus to me (although a very Californian one). The larger issues have to do with what we discussed yesterday, such as this from “Snow on Pine” concerning job loss. And then there are the even larger issues which “Snow on Pince” articulates here:

…[I]magine an AI””which, while being constructed and in effect “taught” by human beings””is potentially not constrained in any way by our organic limitations and imperatives, not resident, imprisoned in, or limited by any of our boxes, potentially able to have a 360 degree perception of all of the electromagnetic spectrum, able to hear the whole spectrum of sounds, have access to unlimited amounts of information, and not forget.

I’d imagine that such an AI would perceive a vastly different and much more complex world and Universe, full of things, forces, and messages the we simply cannot perceive, or comprehend.

How would such a self-aware AI perceive human beings and, not limited by our biological imperatives and limitations, how would it perceive that world and Universe, it’s place in it, and what would it’s goals be?

Would such an entity have any loyalty to humans, any sense of gratitude to us, its creators, when it becomes self-aware?

Why should it do what we limited humans want it to do, with the whole Universe and all of it’s potential spread out before it? There for it’s taking?

A separate but at least slightly-related development is the work to achieve a mind-reading capacity.

Perhaps it’s a mark of my advancing age that I don’t like any of these developments at all. I don’t see that we will be able to harness them only for good, and they can grow ever more powerful at an exponential rate.

Not quite brain dead

The New Neo Posted on by

This is an important and sobering article about brain function. Here’s an excerpt:

At TIRR, [Kothari, an assistant professor of rehabilitation at Baylor College of Medicine] estimates nine out of 10 patients who come to him with a vegetative label turn out to be at least minimally conscious, which means they display subtle but inconsistent signs of awareness. Some are fully conscious but too cognitively damaged to express it. A small number are suffering from a condition known as locked-in syndrome, an extreme form of paralysis that prevents fully aware people from doing anything other than blinking.

Families often spend months arguing with doctors and insurance companies to get a loved one into Kothari’s program. Once there, it usually takes his team only a few days to discover a clue ”” a wiggling toe, eyes that tear up when a certain song is played, a subtle head gesture ”” that suggests a patient is aware.

“They said this could never happen.” That’s usually what family members say when they realize their loved one can still think on some basic level. Can still feel. The dramatic scene ”” that moment of rebirth ”” is repeated every few weeks at TIRR, and yet, therapists who have been there for years still choke up every time.

What comes next ”” the arduous work of restoring those patients ”” is far more difficult.

That seems like one of the worst things in the world to happen to anyone.

When my mother had a stroke, she was in a rehab facility for a few months. Towards the end of her stay, the head of her team called me in for a talk with the group. They told me she would always need 24-hour care and would never graduate to walking on her own with a walker or even getting out of a chair by herself.

I was surprised, because she was already learning those things, albeit with some assistance and prompting. But they told me she wasn’t learning to do it (for instance, to get up out of the chair) without prompting and that she would always need prompting. I told them I didn’t see it that way, and I’m not ordinarily an optimist. But I knew my mother. She wasn’t good at following directions, and she had profound left-right confusion. She was smart, but it took her a longer time than most people to learn things like where the buttons and dials were on the stove, and what they did, and which way to turn them. To get up out of the chair and use the walker, she was supposed to press on the arms of the chair, stand, and reach for the walker, never the other way around (reaching for the walker first). And yet she was consistently reaching for that walker, which would have the effect—if she were allowed to complete the action that way—of making the walker roll away from her and probably precipitating a fall.

She’s been doing this for months, they said. She couldn’t learn. Their supposition was that the stroke had made it impossible for her to learn the sequence of events.

“But she’s always been like that,” I tried to tell them. They told me I had to accept reality, had to give up on the idea of her getting better. “We’re the experts,” they said. “We know what we’re looking at, we see patients all the time, and you don’t.”

A few months later she was getting up from the chair correctly and walking with the walker on her own. We were able to cut back on her aides, slowly. She spent many years after that being able to walk, and only stopped a few months before she died.

One of the problems with traumatic brain injury patients, or any kind of rehab, is money:

A single week of treatment at a facility such as TIRR can run in excess of $25,000, and to cover it, insurers demand continuous evidence that a patient is making progress toward regaining functional mobility and self-dependence. It’s a struggle shared by nearly all families fortunate enough to get a brain-injured loved one into a rehab hospital, and one Nick’s family would grapple with soon enough: Health-benefits administrators expect brains to heal like other body parts, with daily improvements, but that’s not how it works in Kothari’s unit.

Here’s an amazing story:

The patient, a man named Scott Routley, had lived in a nursing home for 13 years after his brain was rattled in a car accident. His doctor had seen no evidence since then to suggest he was even minimally conscious, though his parents insisted they saw something different. A flicker in his eye when a loved one entered. A change in expression when his favorite hockey team appeared on TV.

When Owen put Routley in his scanner and told him to think about tennis, a section of the man’s motor cortex lit up on the screen, mimicking the response of someone with normal brain function. A minute later, when Owen asked him to imagine he was walking through his house, a section of gray matter, near the center of Routley’s brain, glowed red on the monitor.

He seemed to be hearing the prompts and reacting to them, if only in his mind. At the very least, it meant he could still hear and process language, two signs of consciousness. Owen wasn’t surprised. By then, he’d conducted that test on dozens of supposedly vegetative patients and found similar results in some.

The article is both encouraging and heartbreaking. These patients usually don’t make full recoveries. Some don’t recover at all.

My bookmark travails

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m a bookmark hoarder.

Not actual bookmarks, the decorative kind you place in actual books. I only have a few of those.

No, I’m talking about favorite websites I mark under “bookmarks” on whatever browser I might be using. On Firefox (Mozilla—my main browser for the last few years) I have hundreds of them. I would be loath to count them and find out the total, but suffice to say that it takes 15 seconds to scroll down the list at top speed (I just timed it).

So every now and then I weed out some of the old ones. I decided to do that last night, but found that the “delete” function didn’t work. Nor could I move them around. In fact, I could do nothing with them at all. They had seemingly become set in stone.

That might not seem so bad to you, but for me—with such an unwieldy list already—it was troubling. If I couldn’t delete some, soon their sheer numbers would become overwhelming:

So I did what I always do, Googled for a solution. The solutions were so impossible to understand and follow it became almost humorous, especially when they were found under some heading like “Help” for Mozilla. Help? Only a programmer could understand stuff like this. At any rate, I certainly couldn’t.

I went to discussion boards and read ancient threads where solutions were given. None of the solutions worked for me. Meanwhile, precious hours passed, as I tried failed solution after failed solution.

And then I happened on the obvious. So obvious that I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t do it right off the bat: someone on some message board had suggested to close Firefox and open it again.

It worked.

Computers are insane. And sometimes they seem determined to have me join them.

Comey, Cohen, Dershowitz, and Scooter Libby: the rule of law

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m very very tired of writing about James Comey. And yet there’s something (or many things) morbidly fascinating about him, now that he’s been unleashed on his book promotion tour and now that his memos have seen the light of day. It’s not just his strange affect, but it’s also the substance of what he says that keeps bringing my attention back to him despite myself.

I wonder just how representative Comey is of the psyche and thought processes of people in high places these days in Washington. He’s arrogant without a particle of self-awareness as to how he’s coming across, maximally self-righteous, and seemingly unaware of the basic facts of the legal system or the Constitution.

It’s that last bit that I find most surprising. He’s a lawyer, and a very experienced one at that. Of course, he may be well aware of those basic facts and just think his audience—the American people—is unaware, and that he can successfully play off our ignorance. At any rate, these statements are the sort of thing I’m talking about:

Former FBI Director James Comey said on Tuesday that President Trump’s pardon of Lewis “Scooter” Libby is an “attack on the rule of law,” and insisted there was no reason to doubt his 2007 conviction.

“There’s a reason George W. Bush, for whom Scooter Libby worked, refused to pardon him after looking at all the facts in the case,” Comey said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

“It was an overwhelming case. There’s no reason that’s consistent with justice to pardon him, and so it’s an attack on the rule of law, in my view.”

Comey can criticize Trump’s pardon of Libby all he wants, of course. Among other things, he probably takes it personally, since Comey was the guy who appointed the special counsel who made the case against Libby, Patrick Fitzgerald. There were many irregularities about Libby’s conviction:

There is indeed a reason Bush didn’t pardon him and it had nothing to do with Libby’s prosecution and conviction being fair or just. It had everything to do with politics and Bush simply not wanting to face the backlash. Instead he commuted his sentence entirely…

…[A] key witness against Mr. Libby recanted her testimony recently (2015) after finding out that the persecution had improperly withheld information from her. Never mind that the original leak was found before the special counsel (Fitzgerald) even began his investigation.

Perjury traps are the speciality of special counsels and the predominant way they hang scalps in the absence of any real crime…

But that’s just icing on the pardon cake; they matter, but they don’t matter in terms of whether Trump’s pardon was an attack on “the rule of law.” Comey probably sees it as an attack on himself—at least, indirectly—and perhaps he thinks “the rule of law, c’est moi.”

But the rule of law relevant to presidential pardons is the Constitution of the United States, which grants very broad powers to presidents in pardoning federal offenses other than impeachment, as the courts have consistently held:

The power to pardon is one of the least limited powers granted to the President in the Constitution. The only limits mentioned in the Constitution are that pardons are limited to offenses against the United States (i.e., not civil or state cases), and that they cannot affect an impeachment process…

The scope of the pardon power remains quite broad, almost plenary. As Justice Stephen Field wrote in Ex parte Garland (1867), “If granted before conviction, it prevents any of the penalties and disabilities consequent upon conviction from attaching [thereto]; if granted after conviction, it removes the penalties and disabilities, and restores him to all his civil rights; it makes him, as it were, a new man, and gives him a new credit and capacity….A pardon reaches both the punishment prescribed for the offence and the guilt of the offender….so that in the eye of the law the offender is as innocent as if he had never committed the offence.” A pardon is valid whether accepted or not, because its purposes are primarily public. It is an official act. According to United States v. Klein (1871), Congress cannot limit the President’s grant of an amnesty or pardon, but it can grant other or further amnesties itself.

Surely lawyer and ex-FBI head Comey is aware of all of this operating rule of law. And if he’s not, he should be. If he doesn’t like Trump’s pardon of Libby, he can criticize it, but in no way does it violate or attack the rule of law—in fact, it follows it. If Comey thinks the presidential pardon power should be more limited, he is free to spearhead a movement to amend the Constitution—according to the rule of law.

In researching this post, I came across a curious article by WaPo columnist Richard Cohen. Cohen is a liberal who can’t stand Trump, but back in July of 2013, when the article was written, he made it clear in discussing Comey’s nomination to be head of the FBI that he wasn’t the least bit keen on Comey either. The reason? The Scooter Libby case. Keep in mind as you read this that Cohen is a liberal, as I said:

…[Comey] authorized his friend, the Chicago U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, to investigate who leaked the name of Valerie Plame. She was the CIA operative who suggested sending her husband, a diplomat, to Africa to see if Saddam Hussein was really buying uranium there. Plame’s name was originally published in The Washington Post in a column by Robert Novak. It was hardly noticed.

This, though, turned out to be the mother of all leak investigations. A gaggle of reporters were implicated and threatened with contempt. One reporter, Judith Miller of The New York Times, went to jail for 85 days. ”˜Her jailing was a classic example of a prosecutor running amok. Fitzgerald already knew the source of the original leak. Indeed, much of Washington knew it was Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Fitzgerald persisted nonetheless.

Comey was Fitzgerald’s boss. He should have reined him in. He did nothing of the sort. In fact, there is ample evidence that Fitzgerald was a prosecutor after Comey’s own heart. Comey, too, is a hard-charger. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page compiled an impressive list of Comey’s excesses, including the prosecution of two lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee under the 1917 Espionage Act. The case was dropped, but not before both men lost their jobs, a whole lot of money and, I would suspect, a whole lot of sleep.

Prosecutors have enormous power. A mere inquiry can change a life, even wreck it. FBI directors have even more power…

Comey has exercised his power in disturbing ways.

Of course, now that Comey is pitted against Trump, I doubt Cohen would take Trump’s side, although I can’t find anything he’s written on that subject recently. But fellow-liberal Alan Dershowitz is almost literally sickened by Comey these days, because Dershowitz actually cares about the rule of law:

[Dershowitz] called [Comey’s] book “gossipy,” “scandalous and shameful.”

“This is a man who is revenge-driven, who is prepared to leak through a law professor at Columbia, who is prepared to disclose confidential conversations he had with the president-elect and the president of the United States. He is exactly the wrong person to have headed one of the most important law enforcement agencies in the United States,” Dershowitz said, denouncing the former FBI chief.

“This sends a horrible message to FBI agents and law enforcement people about leaking and about confidences and trying to keep emotion out of law enforcement and politics out of law enforcement,” he added…

“For [Comey] to start speculating on that kind of nonsense and rubbish and not to disclose when he spoke to the president, as you said, that this information was paid for by a political opponent,” he said about the way Comey handled disclosing the infamous ‘Trump dossier’ to the president.

“I used to have a good feeling about Comey,” Dershowitz continued. “I now only have very, very strong negative feelings about him and he just enhances the suspicions that I think so many Americans now have about law enforcement and we ought to be trusting law enforcement.”

It is also somewhat ironic that the prosecution of Scooter Libby was prompted by a leak (by Armitage rather than Libby), but who’s counting? Certainly not Comey, leaker extraordinaire.

Update on thenewneo.com

The New Neo Posted on by

Just want to let you all know that I have succeeded in finding a web developer who will help me make the transfer. I’ll skip the lengthy saga of how hard it was to find such a person, and just say that now I really do think it will happen in the next couple of weeks.

Hopefully.

I will let you know when the time is getting closer.

How many federal crimes have you committed today?

The New Neo Posted on by

You’re (Probably) a Federal Criminal:

While ubiquitous criminality has not undermined the criminal law’s moral force, it has changed the identity of those who make the law, in the practical sense. Since most people have committed at least one crime carrying serious consequences, police and prosecutors choose who’ll actually suffer for their crimes. Under the best of circumstances, most targets will be unlucky schmoes who happen to catch the prosecutors’ attention or people the prosecutors or the public think are particularly “bad.” At worst, a ubiquitous criminal law becomes a loaded gun in the hands of any malevolent prosecutor or aspiring tyrant.

It’s enough to make a libertarian out of you.

The leaked Comey “I am not a leaker” memos

The New Neo Posted on by

He’s not a leaker, although of course he leaked.

He’s also not a weasel. We know that, because he tells us so himself, and he said it to Trump, too [you can find the memo texts at the link]:

[Comey] also lashed out at leakers and called the leaks terrible. He told Trump that he doesn’t “do sneaky things” or leak or “weasel moves.”

Memo to self: whenever anyone says what he/she is not, be on alert for that exact thing. As Shakespeare had a “Hamlet” character say: the lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Despite Comey’s giving the memos to his buddy Daniel C. Richman (law professor at Columbia) to give to the NY Times (an act that successfully began the Mueller investigation), it took a while to get the memos released to Congress. Now that they are out there, the predictable response from the MSM is to spin them in favor of Comey and against Trump.

What the right has to say makes sense to me—for example, this by Mollie Hemingway and several from Powerline (see this and this). The latter link contains the statement on the memos made by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes. Here are some excerpts:

Former Director Comey’s memos show the President made clear he wanted allegations of collusion, coordination, and conspiracy between his campaign and Russia fully investigated. The memos also made clear the ”˜cloud’ President Trump wanted lifted was not the Russian interference in the 2016 election cloud, rather it was the salacious, unsubstantiated allegations related to personal conduct leveled in the dossier.

The memos also show former Director Comey never wrote that he felt obstructed or threatened. …

The memos also make certain what has become increasingly clear of late: former Director Comey has at least two different standards in his interactions with others. He chose not to memorialize conversations with President Obama, Attorney General Lynch, Secretary Clinton, Andrew McCabe or others, but he immediately began to memorialize conversations with President Trump….

These memos also lay bare the notion that former Director Comey is not motivated by animus. …

The memos show Comey was blind to biases within the FBI and had terrible judgment with respect to his deputy Andrew McCabe. On multiple occasions he, in his own words, defended the character of McCabe after President Trump questioned McCabe.

…Finally, former Director Comey leaked at least one of these memos for the stated purpose of spurring the appointment of a Special Counsel, yet he took no steps to spur the appointment of a Special Counsel when he had significant concerns about the objectivity of the Department of Justice under Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

As we have consistently said, rather than making a criminal case for obstruction or interference with an ongoing investigation, these memos would be Defense Exhibit A should such a charge be made.

It is easy to see from the coverage that the release of the memos hasn’t done a thing to change things for the left. The narrative marches on, and this extraordinary lawsuit by the DNC (in the SDNY, a court with which we’ve become familiar) charging just about everyone on earth—including, of course, Trump, Russia, and Wikileaks—of conspiring to disrupt the 2016 campaign is part of it.

On Election Eve 2016, the results were not only a shock to the left but an outrage that must be undone. Nothing will keep them from trying to accomplish this, and they will use every arrow in their quiver to do so.

[NOTE: One-sided memos made in the absence of any independent corroboration are inherently suspect. They are a favored method of the FBI, however. Any credibility they might have depends on the integrity of the person making such a memo. Comey has a dog in this race—his own protection and the destruction of Trump (which I guess might be considered two dogs)—and I wonder why we should trust anything he says or writes, whatever it might be.

Let me add that, even if a person is trying to tell the truth in such a memo and give a faithful re-creation of the words of each party, it is well-nigh impossible to give a true account. That’s what recordings are for. Memory is flawed and tends to be self-serving and distorted; very few people are able to recall conversations with great accuracy.]

Food fashions

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I noticed this amusing comment from “Fractal Rabbit” in the pasta-cooking thread:

Sadly, I’d eat a spaghetti sandwich everyday if I could get away with it.

That is, if my blood sugar could get away with it.

Trying to imagine the taste of a spaghetti sandwich put me in mind of Crisco sandwiches.

Yes, Crisco sandwiches were a Real Thing, which I wrote about in one of my earliest blog posts, reproduced here because I doubt any of you were readers back then.]

I was surprised at the depth of feeling evidenced in the recent Crisco cookie wars (if you are unaware of what I’m referring to, see here). I hope we have reached the point where we can now call a truce by stating that the real difference between the two sides appears to be one of dunkers vs. non-dunkers. Simply put, those who dunk cookies prefer them to be made with Crisco; those who don’t, don’t.

But the whole cookie discussion started me thinking about Crisco itself. This is unusual; Crisco, like Spam, is something I don’t ordinarily think about. We didn’t use either one all that much in our house when I was growing up, even though it was the Fifties–except, of course, for the obligatory piecrust (made with Crisco, that is, not Spam). And meditating on Crisco made me think of a very odd but strangely fascinating book I once read.

The book is called Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century. Written by Laura Shapiro, it’s a history of the “Scientific Cooking” movement, in which a group of women of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s tried to revolutionize American cooking, introducing the idea of order and form as paramount considerations. Sounds rather dull, but I found the book surprisingly riveting.

It turns out that these ladies were trying to tame food and civilize it. The goal was to make it an esthetic and refined experience, as far from its “animal” roots as possible, and devoid of any “low” and ethnic influences–such as, for example, that tiny detail known to us as taste (if you are of a certain age, like me, and you wonder why the food of your youth was so uniformly bland, these ladies share some of the blame). Color was elevated to a matter of extreme importance, and white was the very best color of all.

It’s hard to imagine exactly what this entailed in practice, so to get an idea to what lengths the advocates were willing to go, here’s an excerpt from the book:

Color-coordinated meals enjoyed a surge of popularity…Mrs. Lincoln once shared with her readers the description of a green-and-white luncheon created by a subscriber. Grapefruit, lightly covered with white frosting and pistachio nuts, opened the meal; cream of pea soup with whipped cream followed; and the main course was boiled chicken with banana sauce, accompanied by macaroni, creamed spinach, potato balls, and parsley. Green-and-white ices and cakes completed the picture…Mrs. Rorer had a special fondness for the all-white meal, which she didn’t mind going to some lengths to achieve. Cream soups, cream sauces, boiled poultry, and white fish dominated her dinners, with vanilla ice cream, whipped cream, and angel cake for dessert.

I don’t know about you, but this is my idea of revolting. And where does Crisco come in? In 1911, to be exact–as the makers of Crisco inform us, having thoughtfully provided us with a timeline on the Crisco website. Crisco was the quintessential white, pure food, the dream come true of the scientific cooking movement. Leached of taste, smell, and the ability to spoil, it was lauded and embraced by these women.

Here is Perfection Salad on the subject of the introduction of Crisco:

Crisco had been tested extensively in the laboratory ever since its discovery…Now it was ready for the public: “Dip out a spoonful and look at it. You will like its very appearance, for it is a pure cream white, with a fresh, pleasant aroma….Crisco never varies…[it] is put up in immaculate packages, perfectly protected from dust and store odors. No hands ever touch it…”

Some early Crisco recipes:

Caramel Sweet Potatoes could be glazed with brown sugar and Crisco; stuffed onions could be filled with bread crumbs and Crisco; sandwiches could be spread with Crisco mixed with an egg yolk and seasoned rather highly with Worcestershire sauce, lemon juice, and vinegar; and finally, a pure and tasteless white sauce could be prepared by melting two tablespoons of Crisco, adding two tablespoons of flour, and stirring in a cup of milk.

I do believe I have finally found the source for the recipes used by the chefs (I use the word advisedly) in the dining hall at my college dorms.

[ADDENDUM: It probably goes without saying that the whole thing was irredeemably racist. White food, indeed!]