Dan Rather will teach you how to avoid fake news

The New Neo Posted on by

And who better to do it?

I initially thought that any advice Rather could give on the topic would be utterly ridiculous, given his history.

But actually, his advice isn’t half bad. Is it possible he’s learned something in the meantime?

I’ll believe that when he owns up to his own huge knave/fool role in the Killian memo fiasco.

Here’s some of Rather’s advice:

Number one, understand that trusting a news outlet does not mean they’re perfect. No one is perfect. It means they tell you when they screw up.

Number two, don’t rely on just one news outlet.

Number three: don’t rely on just the news to understand an issue. Read books. Find the experts. Find out how issues are discussed outside of news.

Number four, if you find yourself agreeing with everything your news outlet says, you’re doing it wrong. If your news doesn’t challenge you, challenge your news.

Number five, find a commentator whose politics differ from yours. Intellectually honest, even though their values differ from yours. If you can’t find such a person, maybe the media is not the problem.

Number six: remember that what the news tells you is far less important than what they decide to talk about in the first place. If they focus on personal, salacious and speculative stories, find a new outlet, one that drills in on issues that actually affect real lives, your wallet or pocketbook, health and education, schools, social justice, the environment.

It’s with a subsequent remark of Rather’s that I find myself in disagreement: “The true test of trustworthy journalism isn’t that they never make mistakes. It’s whether they’re willing to challenge the powers that be on behalf of those without power.”

Oh, really? That’s part of what got them into trouble in the first place. Powerful people are not necessarily doing bad, and powerless people are not necessarily out for good. And journalists—who used to be known as reporters—shouldn’t think they are crusaders righting the wrongs of the world. It’s not that they never should expose problems or abuses—of course they should—but their own biases (“powerful=bad; powerless=good”) often get in the way of their judgment.

In fact, journalists are themselves very powerful. At least, they used to be till they lost respect through so much biased, error-laden, and/or purposely misleading reporting. Does being powerful make them bad?

And to Rather: physician heal thyself, and take a look at your own suggestion number one and own up to your own screwup.

It would seem…

The New Neo Posted on by

…that this seat is ripe for Republican pickup. Trump won West Virginia in 2016 by over 40 points, and yet it has a Democrat-lite senator name of Joe Manchin, who is up for re-election this November.

Of course, nothing is a sure thing, especially with the GOP’s predilection for nominating weird and/or deeply flawed candidates, with or without a suspicious past.

Is it time for me to add an “Election 2018” section to my list of categories? Hope not.

Mud time

The New Neo Posted on by

Frost again:

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March…

The water for which we may have to look
In summertime with a witching wand,
In every wheelrut’s now a brook,
In every print of a hoof a pond.
Be glad of water, but don’t forget
The lurking frost in the earth beneath
That will steal forth after the sun is set
And show on the water its crystal teeth…

Apparently, in Russia they call it rasputitsa. Same deal, though.

Down with borders!

The New Neo Posted on by

I had postponed writing about the large caravan of Central Americans (mainly Hondurans, apparently) marching northward through Mexico towards the US border with the plan of entering this country illegally and en masse in order to overwhelm US border officials. I figured that the story would heat up as they either were stopped or not stopped when and if the border was reached, and I’d write about it at that point.

Now things are heating up a little bit, but remain confused. Trump has issued a series of angry tweets over the last couple of days, which included the idea that DACA was finished and that Mexico would see some financial consequences if this group (reported to number well over 1000 people, although the exact number is not known) were not stopped by Mexico before coming here.

Border patrol union leader Brandon Judd told Fox News the way it would work if they were not stopped before entry:

Judd said border patrol agents do not have the ability to stop the migrants at the border even if they only step one foot on U.S. soil.

“Once they [the migrants] enter the country, even if we [border patrol agents] are standing at the border with our hands out saying, ”˜Don’t enter, don’t enter,’ all they have to do is cross one foot into the border and we have to take them into custody,” Judd said. “If they ask for asylum or say I fear to go back to my country, then we have to process them under ”˜credible fear’ which allows them to be released into our country.”

The group, spurred on by an organization calling itself People without Borders (“Pueblos Sin Fronteras”), is no doubt well aware of this rule, and is following another rule: Alinsky number 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”

Who runs People Without Borders? If you go to their website, you’ll see the typical leftist jargon and some photos. They are supposedly funded at least in part by the ubiquitous George Soros, which if true would be no surprise at all.

President Trump has called for Congressional action to counter such groups’ ability to exploit our own rules:

Now Mexico has given mixed signals about what it’s going to do (see this). Will the country “disband” the group except for disabled people and pregnant women (whose children, by the way, if born in this country, are automatically citizens). And what does “disbanding” mean, exactly?

Meanwhile, President Trump has stated that there will be troops at the border. Of course, if anyone is hurt in any ensuing clash, it will be endlessly propagandized by the left as a crime against humanity.

That’s a page out of the Palestinian + leftist propaganda playbook. I also noticed this recent story on the “March of Return” organized by Hamas—another organization that doesn’t believe in borders, and believes in the extra-legal right of return—much like the Reconquista movement:

…a term that is used…to describe the vision by different individuals, groups, and/or nations that the U.S U.S. Southwest should be politically or culturally conquered by Mexico. These opinions are often formed on the basis that those territories had been claimed by Spain for centuries and had been claimed by Mexico from 1821 until being ceded to the United States in the Texas annexation (1845) and the Mexican Cession (1848), as a consequence of the Mexican”“American War.

You see how it works? We have no right to our borders, although other nations do. Israel has no right to its borders, although other nations do.

People without borders—when those borders are the borders of the US or Israel.

[NOTE: When Israel was created, by the way, it was done legally, and Israel gained some of its current territory through victory in wars of defense when attacked.]

Thanks!!

The New Neo Posted on by

In all the recent flurry here on the blog about the 3-day crash and then my efforts to locate a developer to help me with the transition to the new site, I forget something very important—to once again offer my heartfelt thanks to everyone who donated during the recent hat-passing.

Thank you, thank you, thank you all!

Post-hoarding, hazard of the blog trade

The New Neo Posted on by

About two years ago I wrote a post about how many blog post drafts I was hoarding. Post-hoarding is a strange phenomenon I seem prone to, and this was my description back then:

I didn’t see this coming – it developed slowly, over many years. Although blogging is not up there with digging ditches in terms of labor, churning out several blog posts a day is nevertheless work. It can be a challenge, but for most bloggers””who usually suffer from or are blessed with a hefty dose of ideophoria””getting ideas for enough posts is not a problem. More often, the problem is getting too many ideas and becoming scattered, or in my case researching posts and writing half of them but then putting them on hold because they become too unwieldy. I assume I’ll go back and finish them later on, but then new events happen, new thoughts come, new articles beckon, and the old ones pile up in a drafts folder that grows and grows and grows.

The upshot is that my old blog has about 150 old drafts still on it, some long and almost finished, and some short and mere sketches of an idea. The other day I noticed that the number of drafts on this blog (which I still think of as my “new blog,” although I’ve been here since 2007) was approaching 600.

That’s ridiculous.

At the time, I got the number down to slightly below 300. But last night I checked again and I was back up to 530. Time for some more weeding.

As before, I found that quite a few of the posts were on topics that had seemed really big at the time but are now passé. Those were relatively simple to put into the dustbin of history, or rather the trashcan of my site. But there were those mysterious others, which tend to fall into three categories, and which I have no intention of deleting.

The first group is the Big Topic posts, in which I tackle broad subjects so big that they take a long time to write, involve a lot of research and thought, and mostly are only about 3/4 of the way done even now. They are about subjects such as the philosophy and history of the progressive income tax, a topic that initially sounded dull to me but which ended up being absolutely riveting, complex, and relevant.

The second group concern things that caught my attention but seemed very small and simple at the time, and yet ended up being complex—such as, for example, an observation I wanted to make about the Sorcerer’s Apprentice segment from the Disney feature cartoon “Fantasia.” I initially thought it would take just a few minutes to write, but it ended up growing and growing and growing when I discovered the Goethe text on which the cartoon is based—yes, you read that right, the Goethe text—as well as the ancient origins of the Goethe story. So there are tons of those types of posts, almost-finished but not quite finished, huge and unwieldy and fascinating to me but maybe not to you or anybody else.

The third group of drafts consist of the ones that are too emotional, too tender, too personal, too something-or-other to release into the cold, sometimes-cruel world. I love them too much to let them go. Putting them out there in public feels somehow like a loss, even though I know it’s not.

Pretty strange, I know. But then no one ever said bloggers weren’t strange.

Last night I weeded those 530 drafts down and sent the round number of 100 of them to the trash bin, which leaves me with a slightly-more-manageable 430 (this draft makes 431, but soon it will end up in the “published” category). My goal is to clean house and publish more of them, slowly but surely. That should be even more satisfying than clearing out the closets.

Some students seem to want rigor and the classics in the humanities

The New Neo Posted on by

As this article relates [hat tip: Powerline]:

…[U]ndergraduates…vote with their feet. If an English department’s chairman tells the dean, “We’ve got to hire someone in this new area of ____,” the dean replies, “But you can’t even get your existing courses half-filled.” If, however, a parent calls and grumbles, “I’m paying lots of money, and my daughter can’t get into any of the English classes she wants,” well, that calls for action.

…But right now, nothing is more crucial than the preferences of 19-year-olds.

And as humanities enrollments have slipped, in some places precipitously, instructors have felt pressure to make their courses more relevant and less rigorous. The typical student searching for a course of study won’t be attracted by syllabi filled with old plays and 400 pages of reading each week. Contemporary and multicultural materials, more media, less reading and fewer writing assignments, and definitely no poetry ”” that’s the prescription for building enrollments.

However, a group of professors at the University of Oklahoma decided to buck that trend and offer a course with a more traditional approach. And there were a surprising number of students who choose to enroll and tackle the offerings of a bunch of dead white guys:

When enrollment opened last semester, the unexpected happened. The course filled up within minutes. Harper had already warned his students, “This is the hardest class you will ever take.” The syllabus was posted online in advance, so that students knew exactly what they were getting into. The course meets a general-education requirement at Oklahoma, but so do many other courses with half the workload. To accommodate the unexpected demand, the class was expanded from 22 to 30 students, the maximum number that the assigned classroom could hold.

Now, 30 students at a state university is not a whole lot. But still, it’s more than was expected, enough to be viable, and probably doesn’t represent the maximum who were interested.

There are other indications that a significant number of students are hungry for such things. One of them is the popularity of Jordan Peterson, and I don’t mean just his self-help books or his politics, but his actual courses and their actual content. Of course, he is an especially riveting lecturer (and very telegenic) and that helps, too. But it does seem as though a goodly number of students would prefer to be challenged and are not shying away from a more traditional type of subject matter in the humanities.

By the way, back when I was in college I probably wouldn’t have numbered among them. I entered the university at a time when what was then known as Western Civ courses were being eliminated, and I was relieved that I never had to take one. That said, I voluntarily took a few courses more or less in that ballpark (for example, one in what was called Old Testament, and one in general political history and theory), and I already had a background in quite a few classical works from high school. In those days, the honors programs in an ordinary New York high school such as mine made its students read a surprising number of heavy-duty works of the Western Civilization variety.

That magnetic pole reversal: what’s the cause?

The New Neo Posted on by

A great many people know that earth has a North and South pole, and that the poles are not just geographic but magnetic as well. Fewer (but probably still a great many) are aware that the geographic and magnetic poles for each hemisphere, although close to each other, are not in the same identical spot.

Fewer still are aware that the magnetic poles wander. For example:

The North Magnetic Pole moves over time due to magnetic changes in the Earth’s core. In 2001, it was determined by the Geological Survey of Canada to lie west of Ellesmere Island in northern Canada at 81.3°N 110.8°W. It was situated at 83.1°N 117.8°W in 2005. In 2009, while still situated within the Canadian Arctic territorial claim at 84.9°N 131.0°W, it was moving toward Russia at between 55 and 60 kilometres (34 and 37 mi) per year….

And then there’s the startling reality that poles sometimes reverse entirely:

Based on the magnetic fingerprints locked into ancient rocks, we know that over the last 20 million years, magnetic north and south have flipped roughly every 200,000 to 300,000 years (this rate has not been constant over the planet’s lifetime, though). The last of these major reversals occurred about 780,000 years ago, although the Poles do wander around in between these larger flips.

These changes have to do with variations in the earth’s core, and are poorly understood. But we have known for quite some time that in terms of averages we seem overdue for another flip. Recently it was predicted that such a change might be imminent, which caused a flurry of commentary online, with some articles such as this one being particularly alarmist about it, and others attempting to soothe.

We all know that predictions don’t always come true. But this one did. It seems that last night, shortly after midnight, the predicted magnetic pole reversal occurred.

And yet here we are, still around, with hardly any noticeable difference. That’s a relief, or course.

But the blame game goes on nonetheless. And who is getting the majority of the blame? Why, Donald Trump, that’s who, at least from the left. After all, isn’t he responsible for the ever-increasing polarization of politics and of American life in general? According to some people (although I think it’s a rather preposterous and downright foolish accusation), that political and social polarization has somehow affected the core of the earth and caused this magnetic flip.

I say it’s just a coincidence. But hey, the left blames everything on Trump, so why not this?

Trump himself has decided to react with humor. He’s tweeted, “I’m powerful, it’s true. But I’m not all-powerful. Lighten up, folks.”

And DC Council member Trayon White Sr., who recently attributed snowstorms in that city on climate manipulation by “the Rothschilds…to create natural disasters they can pay for to own the cities,” has not been heard from yet on the subject of the magnetic pole reversal. But stay tuned.

Happy Easter!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repost from Easters past. But it still works for me.]

Happy Easter to all my celebratory Christian readers, and to all those who just enjoy the holiday as well!

One year when my son was little, I spent the week prior to Easter blowing out eggs and dying them. Now that he’s grown and away, the eggs are packed away in boxes and stored in parts unknown. If I could get my hands on them I’d photograph them for you, because even all these years later they are beautiful, with dyes both subtle and unsubtle, interesting etched patterns and rainbow effects—definitely one of my finest crafts hours (to tell the truth, I didn’t have so many fine crafts hours, although there was also a gingerbread house we made that was stored in the attic and alas, eaten by small creatures–and not human ones, at that.)

Blown-out eggs are well worth the trouble, and why? Because they last. And nothing eats them. You only have to make them once, and you’re all set. They are a bit fragile, but not so very.

So here’s my Easter present to you (not that you couldn’t find the information yourself)—some instructions for blowing eggs, from a link that has disappeared since I first wrote this post:

First, you’ll need to make a tiny pin hole on each end of the egg. A pin works well, or a wooden kitchen skewer or even the tip of a sharp knife. Gently work the tip of the pin/skewer/knife in a circular motion until a tiny hole appears. Repeat on the other side. Then insert the pin or skewer (the knife will be too big here) far enough into the egg to break the yolk. Use your mouth [blow] to expel the contents of the egg.

And here is a more complex–but perhaps better–way, for those obsessive-compulsives among us.

These aren’t mine, but they’ll have to do as substitute:

Anti-Semitism on the rise in Germany

The New Neo Posted on by

Muslim anti-Semitism, that is. And it even is occurring at the kindergarten level.

I wonder: How many Jews are there in Germany these days? This 15-year-old article (2003) reports that, back then, there were about 150,000, most of them emigrants from Soviet Russia or their descendants. There seem to be fewer Jews than that in Germany today (see this), as one might expect, considering the general rise of anti-Semitism in Europe lately.

Germany is now a country of about 83 million people, by the way.

In the 1950s there had been about 20,000 Jews left in Germany, and my guess would be that they consisted mainly of people such as diarist extraordinaire Victor Klemperer who’d managed to survive the war because of marriage to a non-Jew, combined with a bit of luck.

But in fact there were never very many Jews in Germany, even in their relative heyday in that country. I’ve written previously about the surprising (to most people, anyway) fact that the Jews of Germany in 1933 comprised 0.75% of the population of that country. And yes, that’s a decimal point after the zero and before the 7.

As for the common criticism of pre-WWII German Jews—that they failed to leave the country in a timely fashion because they ignored their peril and/or didn’t take it sufficiently seriously—that simply is not true. The majority of the Jews of Germany left, and most of the ones that stayed were unable to leave:

Overall, of the 522,000 Jews living in Germany in January 1933, only 214,000 were left by the eve of World War II.

Most of those were subsequently murdered. No doubt a certain number of the Jews who had remained in Germany did so due to naivete or optimism, but it is unlikely that was true of many of them. In most cases emigration required cunning, connections (including visas, issued by very few countries), and money, and even then it often failed. Although at the moment I can’t locate where I read it, a while back I learned that most of those who stayed were either the poor, the very old or ill, or those taking care of the very old or ill.

On blacks, whites, income, and families

The New Neo Posted on by

Recently there was a lot of talk about a study comparing the incomes in adulthood of black men and women to their white counterparts who grew up in similar economic circumstances. Here were the basic findings:

…[B]lack boys are much less likely to realize the American Dream ”” economically speaking ”” as they move into adulthood, compared to white boys; by contrast, black girls are much more likely to do well economically as young adults, compared to white girls.

In covering this study, a number of media outlets, scholars, and commentators argued the new research showed that family structure did not have much to do with the racial gap in mobility between black and white boys.

W. Bradford Wilcox has written this critique of that point of view of what the study actually shows. The article is worth reading, but here are its main points:

In sum, when it comes to assessing the impact of family structure on the racial gaps in economic mobility between black and white boys, this new study suggests that (1) family structure at the neighborhood level influences economic mobility for black boys, (2) family structure at the household level influences economic mobility for black boys (if you don’t control for their family income growing up), and (3) family structure in adulthood influences black boys’ household income as adults. So, the new Chetty et al. study actually offers further evidence that family structure seems to play an “important role” in the racial gap in economic mobility in America ”” including the gap between white and black boys as they move into adulthood.

One of the main determinants of “family structure” is the presence of absence of a father.

[NOTE: I have not yet had time to read the study, so I’m not reporting on my own impressions, although I may do so later. I know that one of the first things that came to my mind, however, on reading about the study is whether differential rates of incarceration affected the outcomes. In this interview with the lead author of the study, I noticed that he mentions the topic and says:

The reason we focus on black men is when we look at certain outcomes like the probability that they have a job or their odds of being incarcerated or their chances of completing high school, they do look like an outlier relative to all the other groups. Black men are significantly less likely to be employed than black women, they are significantly more likely to be incarcerated, they’re significantly less likely to complete high school. And so it does seem like there are a special set of challenges confronting black men…

…the takeaway from that is not that schools are not important or that having lower-poverty, lower-crime areas are not important; all of those things would help black kids and white kids as we’ve shown in our prior work.

My more specific question is whether the study goes into the incarceration rates for black men raised in families with high incomes as compared to white men raised in families with similar incomes. When I have a bit more time I plan to check the study out on that. The PDF on it is over 100 pages long, and as I indicated, I’m in a hurry at the moment.]