The problem with articles like Ronan Farrow’s about Trump’s alleged affair…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is that it apparently assumes we care.

I haven’t read the article and I do not know the details except what I’ve read in a couple of summaries, nor do I have a clue if the allegations in it are true—of an affair in 2006 and a coverup.

But life is short and I have no interest in reading it, so I’ll just stipulate for the sake of argument that it’s all true, and that Trump has had multiple affairs of this sort all his life and engaged in various machinations to cover them up. We certainly know about some of them (Marla Maples, anyone?) and have known for many, many years.

I didn’t care then. If there’s a way to care in negative numbers, that’s how little I cared. Donald Trump mattered not one whit to me and I didn’t waste any time thinking about him.

Well, that last part of the sentence—that I haven’t wasted time thinking about him—is no longer true, is it? I’ve spent a great deal of the last year and a half learning, thinking, and writing about that very same person—Donald Trump—for the simple reason that his run for the presidency upended a race I thought was the GOP’s for the taking, and then in a shocker on Election Night he surprised me by winning the whole shebang. Since then, it’s been fascinating to follow his actions as president and watch the reactions of the Democrats, the Never-Trumpers, the people of the USA, and the world.

But despite all those changes, one thing remains: I have zero interest in Trump’s sexual affairs. That is for two reasons. The first is that this is part and parcel of what we—the American voters—already knew about Trump. It has been factored in. I feel sorry for his wife and particularly for his son, but the women with whom Trump allegedly had affairs, the left, Ronan Farrow, and the New Yorker, have bigger and (in their eyes) more important fish to fry by publicizing such information.

The second reason I don’t care is that I don’t care about politicians’ affairs in general, as long as they are with consenting adults, don’t involve shady shadowy spy- or blackmail-type figures, and the players don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.

And I am consistent. I didn’t care about Bill Clinton’s affairs, either. If he was abusing or raping women then I would care, of course. But I am skeptical about those claims for various reasons (I’ve written about the Broaddrick claims here and here, and somewhere I have notes about the inconsistencies in Paula Jones’ story, although I do think they had a sexual relationship of some sort). And I am consistently skeptical about rape/abuse claims about anyone unless and until proven, although of course I know they might be true and I have empathy for victims.

However, if there’s anyone on earth surprised at this sort of tale about Trump, that person has been living in a cave on the moon. Or maybe on Pluto.

People trying to harm Trump through these reports are handicapped by the fact that most of the public is fully inoculated against caring or being surprised. If it were my husband of course I would care. But the American public isn’t in a marital relationship with Trump. The days when we expected sexual morality and fidelity from our presidents, or the appearance of it, are long gone.

At least—unlike a lot of people, particularly in the press—I’ve been consistent in my position about politicians and extramarital sex. The press certainly hasn’t been consistent, nor have a lot of political partisans. Now the Democrats are dumping Bill Clinton, but that’s only because he and Hillary are very yesterday and have fulfilled their purpose, and dumping him might help them electorally and bolster their self-righteous pose of sincerity.

The new blog site: an unveiling

The New Neo Posted on by

[BUMPED UP: For a few days, I plan to bump this post up. Scroll down for new posts.]

UPDATE: In accord with a few suggestions and my own perceptions, I made the font of the new site a bit bigger and widened the right margin on the main column of text. This combination has the effect of making the lines a bit shorter, which is what I wanted. The original theme had over 20 words in a line, which seemed excessive and eye-tiring to me. With those tweaks, it has between 12 and 15 words per line, which seems good and is only a word or two more per line than my old site. Of course, since the theme is “responsive” on cellphones and the like, the line length will shorten further on a cellphone.]

I’d like you all to visit the new site and poke around. It’s a dummy site because I haven’t transferred the real content yet. But it’s got some sample posts and I’ve put some comments there as well (mostly on one post entitled “Longer test post”).

I don’t have all the bells and whistles up there yet, but I think I have most of them. For example, in the photo I might add “The New Neo” rather than just “Neo,” which is the way it is now.

I ordinarily have an “under construction” sign on the new site while I’ve been working on it, but I took the sign down for now so I could direct you to it. At the bottom of the right sidebar are some extra Amazon widgets; ignore them for now, they won’t remain there.

I’d like you to tell me what you think. You can even make suggestions and I might even respond, although I make no promises.

In a short while I plan to transfer the content and make this URL redirect to that one, so you can use either URL and don’t have to change your old bookmarks. One of the main reasons I want to change over is that the name “neocon” has led to misunderstandings and also that I’m not such a “new” conservative, although I want to keep “neo” because that’s become my nickname. I was also limited in the URLs that were available, but I thought the one I chose expresses the idea, keeps enough of my old identity, and is simple and easy to remember.

Another reason for the change is a very technical one. My theme is very old and outdated and almost impossible for me to tweak for various reasons. New ones are more versatile, and now that I’ve sort of learned the ropes of setting up the blog myself (rather than having someone else do it for me) I should be able to make more changes myself as other possibilities or problems crop up. With the old theme, it’s hard or impossible for me to do that. The new themes are also what’s called “responsive,” which means they display on a tablet or cellphone in a way that’s more user-friendly and automatically adjusts to fit the instrument being viewed. These days a great many people view blogs on tablets or cells, so that helps.

If you have a moment, I’d like for you to view it on as many screens as possible: desktop, laptop, tablet, cell, whatever you might be inclined to use from time to time. Let me know how well it works on all of them.

Here are some questions for you, but feel free to comment in any way you’d like. You can even comment on the new blog:

(1) Do you like the darkness of the main text?

(2) On the photo, is the minimalist “Neo” good, or would “The New Neo” be better?

(4) The theme has the ability to have nested or non-nested comments. Right now I’ve set it so that they are not nested. Is that your preference?

(5) Right now the comments have double timestamps. This is a glitch I am trying to fix. It occurred because the original theme (and all new WordPress themes, as far as I can see) has the date on posts but no timestamp, and I wanted to add one. I got instructions on how to add timestamps successfully to posts. But it turned out that that operation also affected the comments, which already had had timestamps. The new instructions added one to the comments, too, so now there are two timestamps on each comment. I’m trying to eliminate that problem and keep the timestamps for the posts, but if I can’t, I’ll have to take out the timestamps for the posts in order to eliminate the doublt timestamps on the comments. That’s complicated, but the question is: do you care if there are timestamps on posts or not? The dates will remain, and timestamps on comments will remain.

(6) I put a “like” button on comments. You can see if it works properly.

(7) Do you like fonts and colors and that sort of thing?

(8) When you write a comment there’s a box you can check for email notification of follow up comments or new posts. Is that an option you want, or do you think it should be removed? I can probably figure out a way to remove it.

(9) I can add an option for people to use Facebook or other social media outlets in order to comment. It won’t eliminate the regular way to comment. Is this desirable?

(10) On the first post there, I have put two versions of the same video. In the comments afterwards, you can say which one you prefer.

Thanks, and enjoy!

Shoes for neo

The New Neo Posted on by

Don’t you think they’re perfect?

But how do you get your foot in them when the apple’s already there?

[NOTE: In case you’re not familiar with the reference, see this. See also this.]

[NOTE II: By the way, for reasons that are not completely clear (although I have my suspicions), the program won’t let me post the complete photo, which is of the entire shoe. I’ve been posting photos at this particular site and resizing them for over a decade, and every now and then I come across this problem. You can see the full shoe here.]

More McCarthy: what did Comey tell Trump?

The New Neo Posted on by

I keep linking to Andrew C. McCarthy, but that’s because this former prosecutor has been the best at covering the Russia collusion/Fusion story.

His latest is no exception. It’s entitled “What Did Comey Tell President Trump about the Steele Dossier?” The topic of his article (and you need to read the whole thing, because it’s a bit complicated) is the CYA Susan Rice email to herself, and what it might signify:

That is what Rice’s email is really about: not sharing with the incoming Trump administration classified information about the Trump-Russia investigation, such as the basis for seeking a FISA warrant on Carter Page.

The dilemma was that the Obama administration had placed “the incoming team” ”” in particular, President-elect Trump ”” under investigation…

[The day after the Obama meeting] President-elect Trump was briefed by agency leaders on the intelligence community’s Russia report, Comey met privately with Trump to brief him on the Steele dossier. But is that what happened? I don’t think so. I believe Trump was briefed only on a sliver of the dossier.

Remember, the Obama administration presumption was: “We cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.” When we scrutinize Director Comey’s carefully crafted Senate testimony from last June, and when we consider the panoply of what a full briefing on the Steele dossier would have entailed ”” the breadth of the Trump”“Russia corruption allegations, the FISA warrant applications and their heavy reliance on the dossier, the fact that the dossier was a Clinton campaign project ”” it is manifest that Comey did not give Trump the full picture of what the dossier was and how it was being used by the FBI and the Justice Department. Certainly, President Trump was not informed to the same extent President Obama was. The main purpose of counterintelligence operations is to keep the president informed; but when it came to the incoming president, law-enforcement leaders treated the Russia investigation like a criminal probe in which Trump was a suspect.

There’s much, much more at the link. It’s speculative, but it makes sense. McCarthy knows the law, and he knows investigations, and he knows how prosecutors think.

The partisan divide: these charts may not say it all…

The New Neo Posted on by

…but they say a lot.

They’re from an article by David French in National Review entitled “How Progressive Radicals Move the Country Left, and Right”:

Election results are decided in that gray middle, by the way, which is getting smaller and smaller. It may not be long before a Venn diagram will have no overlap at all.

French writes:

…[T]he notion that one Overton community will govern the other is increasingly infuriating and even terrifying to the losers of national political contests. That’s why ”” even if control in narrowly divided houses of Congress changes hands ”” true “waves” will be hard to find. As the midterms move closer, that’s a key reason why the margin in the generic congressional ballot keeps narrowing.

I believe that is true, at least so far. The fear, however (of both sides) is that the other side will achieve perpetual dominance.

I don’t think this guy has much cause for intellectual pride about being a high-level thinker

The New Neo Posted on by

But then again, people are very strange. This is what it’s come to:

Last month, a teacher at El Rancho High School in Pico Rivera, Calif., was captured on video telling his history class that members of the military are “the lowest of our low,” and insulting troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We “have a bunch of dumbs”“”“”“s over there,” Gregory Salcido told his students. “Think about the people who you know who are over there. Your freaking stupid Uncle Louie or whatever. They’re dumbs”“”“”“s. They’re not like high-level thinkers, they’re not academic people, they’re not intellectual people. They’re the lowest of our low.”

He probably hates Donald Trump, too, for bringing such coarseness to our national dialogue.

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

School shooting in Florida: 17 dead

The New Neo Posted on by

Another terrible act of violence, this time at a high school in Parkland, Florida. Today’s shooter did not kill himself, however. He’s now in police custody:

The shooting suspect was identified as Nikolaus Cruz, a U.S. official told The Associated Press…

Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said the suspect was taken into custody “without incident” and was “not a current student” at the school…

High school junior Noah Parness, 17, told The Associated Press that the fire alarm went off for the second time of the day about 2:30 p.m. He said he and others calmly went outside for a fire drill when he suddenly heard several pops.

I’m not finding many details yet. As usual, there is a certain fog that descends, and misinformation is often rampant.

The shooter appears to have been a student there at some point in the past:

According to other students, Cruz was the subject of jokes from other kids. A student told WFOR-TV that other students “knew it was going to be him.”

“A lot of people were saying it was going to be him. A lot of kids threw jokes around saying that he was going to be the one to shoot up the school,” the student said. “It turns out that everyone predicted it. That’s crazy.”

Seventeen-year-old junior Matthew Walker spoke to ABC News, saying Cruz was known to show off knives and guns on his social media accounts.

“He was going class to class just shooting at random kids,” he said. “Everything he posts [on social media] is about weapons. It’s sick.”

If that was true, who among the teachers and administration were aware of all of this? What interventions were tried with this young man? Is there anything that might have been done differently and more effectively? Each time there’s an incident such as this, I’ve written about those issues in the aftermath, and although each situation is different the remedies are rarely clear—although politicians try to make use of the tragedy to advance their own simplistic agendas.

RIP to all the students who came to school this morning expecting a normal day, and instead became victims of a violent killer.

Love among the finches

The New Neo Posted on by

Of course, I’m not sure it’s appropriate to call it “love,” but on Valentine’s Day what else can I call it?

Nature is absolutely extraordinary:

Dr. Woolley’s lab has been looking into the acoustic systems of zebra, bengalese and long-tailed finches to see how their brains take in and process sounds ”” learning, performing and analyzing different parts of them to make sense of songs.

A male’s system is designed to recognize the songs of other males and copy his father’s. If he doesn’t learn, perfect and memorize his father’s song within the first 90 days of life, when his brain is especially malleable, he never will. He still sings, but “he sings a disaster,” said Dr. Woolley. “And the females want nothing to do with him.”

When a female’s brain is young and malleable, she tunes into her father’s song, memorizes it and then stores it as a template for evaluating a mate’s song later. This example reminds her that she didn’t die, and her father helped ensure that. Perhaps something similar will work for her offspring.

Females tend to prefer elaborate songs with more syllables.

I prefer a good sense of humor. But maybe that’s another type of “elaborate song.”

Dr. Woolley adds, in what I think is a bit of a leap and quite an oversimpllification: “The way that people fall in love, is talking to each other.” There’s no doubt that’s a good part of it. But there’s a reason that “love at first sight” is called love at first sight. And a man and a woman (or to be PC about it, any sort of potentially-romantic couple) can be really really really good friends and talk up a storm without being in love.

I’ve had the experience of love at first sight and I’ve had the experience of clicking with a potential good friend right away, and they’re very very different. For me, though, the initial impression of love (through the visual and a gazillion other signs and signals we’re constantly picking up on) has to be followed up by a lot of verbal rapport, too. And I find that, at least in my life, love is a rare and precious commodity.

The new news normal

The New Neo Posted on by

Ben Shapiro writes about news coverage these days:

You’ve heard the phrase over and over again: “This isn’t normal.” We’ve heard it about President Trump’s rhetoric, and his Twitter usage. We’ve heard it about his attacks on the media, and we’ve heard it about his legislative ignorance. We’ve heard it about his running commentary on the Mueller investigation, and we’ve heard it about his bizarre stream-of-consciousness interviews…

All of this “non-normality,” however, has resulted in … a relatively normal situation. The economy’s booming. We’re on more solid foreign-policy ground than we were when President Obama was in office — by a long shot. The Constitution hasn’t been torn asunder. The structures of government are still in place. Trump may be toxic rhetorically, but his presidency hasn’t annihilated the norms that govern our society.

The same can’t be said, however, of the media institutions that seem so consumed with saving the republic from the specter of Trump. Like self-appointed superheroes so intent on stopping an alien monster that they end up destroying the entire city, our media are so focused on stopping Trump that they end up undermining both their credibility and faith in American institutions.

Agreed. And although that “credibility” of the media was in the cellar anyway even prior to the Trump phenomenon, it has sunk even further.

About two years ago I stopped being able to stomach the news as presented on TV. That wasn’t such a loss for me because I wasn’t especially fond of it to begin with and it was not my main source: print journalism and the internet (a few blogs) were. But at a certain point (and I’m not sure exactly when it hit me) I simply found TV news to be a worthless hive of repetitive and inaccurate garbage mixed with obvious bias, and I stopped watching it at all.

Now something similar has happened for me with print journalism. There’s long been a tendency in that direction but somehow a tipping point was reached, and it happened during the Trump administration. Nearly everything is opinion with an agenda, and that agenda is as York writes in that quote, and/or a social justice warrior type of identity politics and trashing of many principles I hold dear (“Anglo-American legal system,” anyone?). Mob rule, vigilante revenge, slur and rumor—and even the prevalence of those things in the MSM or public life were blamed on Trump (he’s hardly innocent but certainly not the cause).

I still read the news because I have to follow what’s happening, and it’s still possible to discern some of that through the fog. But I read less of it than I used to and I skip the most biased sources or fisk them. I’ve come to rely on a few relatively trusted individuals to give me more insight into the news if that’s what I’m looking for. And I try to focus on the more pleasant things in life.

Our Anglo-American legal system

The New Neo Posted on by

CNN reports:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Monday brought up sheriffs’ “Anglo-American heritage” during remarks to law enforcement officials in Washington.

“I want to thank every sheriff in America. Since our founding, the independently elected sheriff has been the people’s protector, who keeps law enforcement close to and accountable to people through the elected process,” Sessions said in remarks at the National Sheriffs Association winter meeting, adding, “The office of sheriff is a critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcemen.”

Big yawn, right? Of course not:

Sen. Brian Schatz (D. Haw.) led the charge. He tweeted:

“Do you know anyone who says ‘Anglo-American heritage’ in a sentence? What could possibly be the purpose of saying that other than to pit Americans against each other? For the chief law enforcement officer to use a dog whistle like that is appalling. Best NO vote I ever cast.”

Schatz was educated at Punahoe (Obama’s private school alma mater) and then went to Pomona College and majored in philosophy. He’s been in politics since the age of 25.

And yet somehow, despite his academic credentials, an education has managed to elude him (I’m being kind here, because the jury’s out on the fool/knave question). Just about everyone who knows anything about our legal system either uses or is aware of the suitability of the phrase “Anglo-American heritage.” But Schatz would apparently rather accuse others of divisiveness (while being divisive himself, a neat trick but a common one) than to learn anything about that system.

One person he could have learned something from is the pre-presidential Obama of old, who is quoted as having said the following in 2006:

The world is watching what we do today in America. They will know what we do here today, and they will treat all of us accordingly in the future””our soldiers, our diplomats, our journalists, anybody who travels beyond these borders. I hope we remember this as we go forward. I sincerely hope we can protect what has been called the “great writ”””a writ that has been in place in the Anglo-American legal system for over 700 years.

It’s no accident that Schatz is either ignorant of the Anglo-American foundation of our legal system or ignores it. One of the pillars of that system is that people are treated as individuals rather than groups by the legal system. Schatz’s politics would pit group against group, and use the legal system to do it, and to stir up anger by talking about “dog whistles” that aren’t even there.

Our Anglo-American heritage is a shared one open to all who come here. Is it flawed? Of course. But I believe it’s the best legal system possible and the most protective of the individual.

[NOTE: Also please see this from Bill Murray. Yes, that Bill Murray.]