“Credible” allegations, revisited

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve previously written about the problems with believing allegations that are merely “credible,” and I’d like to revisit that for a moment.

Yesterday and today I’ve had on ongoing back-and-forth with commenter “Bill” that you can follow by starting here. My very last comment to Bill in that thread so far is this one:

You might think I’m picking on you. It’s not personal, but this sort of rush to judgment has always made me angry…If that sounds harsh, sorry, but I’ve seen it too many times and I’ve seen it destroy people.

Not just in the political arena by any means. I’m thinking of people such as the Ramseys.

The Ramseys were the parents of JonBenet Ramsey, the little girl who was murdered in Colorado back in December of 1996. The media immediately went into high gear and covered the case obsessively, and for a while it was topic number one in the country. The hype was that the parents had murdered her. Later, they were completely exonerated, but their lives had been ruined not just by the hideous murder of their daughter but by what the media and public did to them.

That’s a far cry from Roy Moore (or any other person accused of sexual harassment), of course. But I bring it up as an example of my reaction to mob judgments fanned by the MSM into a frenzy and based on little evidence and/or suspect evidence.

The discussion I had with Bill in that thread yesterday and today is too long to summarize, but I’ll offer excerpts from a few of my comments here to give you the gist of it:

All “credible” means is that the story might be true—that it’s not incredible.

For example, if I said “John Smith sexually abused me when we were drifting in outer space while flying to Mars under our own power,” that would be an incredible story. Not believable. Literally impossible. But to craft a credible story, all I’d have to do is have a history that involves some proximity to the accused, and do a bit of research as to where he worked, etc.. Stuff that would be easy to find out.

Even better if I’d had some connection to him.

People who are out to get a politician in trouble through false accusations have a lot of information to work with. It also helps if it was long enough ago that there is no way to fact check. For example, with the restaurant where Moore’s accuser Nelson had supposedly met Moore, there is an extreme lack of information about the restaurant itself. Newspapers tried to research it or at least talk to the person who had owned it when the incident was supposed to have taken place, or find a photo to document the layout, and they had no success. The only people who came forward to talk about it said that the layout was not as the accuser described, the hiring practices were such that she would not have been hired at 15 (when she said she started), and no one ever remembered seeing her there or seeing Moore there for that matter. Quite a few people said they worked there or frequented the place and no one remembered him.

Couple that with the controversy about the yearbook signature and inscription and you get, in my opinion, a story that is credible in the sense of possible but a story that I think is most likely a lie.

You don’t convict people or condemn them or think them guilty merely because a story told about them is possibly true. That’s not my standard, and I don’t think it should be anyone else’s.

By the way, Moore has only 2 accusers. The other women have a very different story—that he dated them when they were young but of age, and acted respectfully to them. The fact that the teenage girls who apparently really did date Moore (when they were of legal age) all say he was basically respectful argues against Nelson’s (the yearbook lady) story being true, because his alleged behavior with her was so different.

I believe you are letting your dislike of Moore color your belief about his guilt or innocence. By the way, you are using the word “pedophile” incorrectly. That word is reserved for pre-pubescent children, and even if you accept the allegations about Moore as true they do not involve that group of victims at all. You need to get your terms straight, at the very least, before you make accusations.

Bill had also written this:

Roy Moore can, of course, take legal action against these ladies if he’d like. Won’t get him a Senate seat but might clear his name, if he’s innocent.

I’ve seen that sort of sentiment expressed by many other people, not just Bill. My reply is the following:

Your final paragraph shows a lack of understanding of how the law works. It would be almost impossible for Moore to clear his name in a court of law even if he is 100% innocent. Do you understand that if he were to sue his accusers, that the standard he would need to meet to win his case would be enormously high? Take a look. See also this.

The bottom line is that politicians almost never sue for defamation, and if they do they rarely win. That has nothing whatsoever to do with proving themselves innocent of the allegations, it has to do with the law of defamation against public figures, which works very strongly against them.

Bill also wrote:

An election is not a court trial. How many times does this need to be said? You can vote against someone if you have qualms a bit their character. You don’t have to prove it in court.

Taking Neo’s admonitions above into account, if this is such a slam-dunk conspiracy against Moore he should be able to unmask it.

I never said, nor did I imply, that it was a “slam-dunk conspiracy” against Moore. I am merely saying that there’s a good chance it is a conspiracy, every bit as good as the possibility that his two main accusers are telling the truth. In reply to Bill I wrote:

Now you say that if there’s a conspiracy he should be able to unmask it. Oh, really? Do you really think it’s that easy? Do you really think – once again – that if a person can’t prove his/her innocence, he/she is guilty?

And no, your proof doesn’t have to rise to the level of courtroom proof to believe someone is probably guilty. But credible accusations doesn’t cut it and shouldn’t cut it. Persuasive accusations would be better. What “persuades” you sure doesn’t persuade me.

Bill also wrote:

What you are suggesting is a conspiracy among several women to “take down” Roy Moore. There’s been plenty of condemning of Nelson, Corfman and the others, largely based on arguments from silence, even though he had a pattern of trolling underage girls. Not sure why any woman would want to come forward, ever, against a politician because she’s going to get dragged through the mud.

My reply was this:

I’m not suggesting a conspiracy of “several women” to take Moore down. I’m suggesting a political tactic by which the opposition (on the left in particular) conspires to find people willing to take Moore down. And if you don’t believe that sort of thing occurs, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn and several other things I’d like to sell you.

There are two women we’re talking about, by the way. The others merely seem to be alleging that he dated them with their mothers’ permission when they were of age but young. So what? What happens is that the operatives follow rumors, spread the word about what they’re looking for, find the women. They already knew their were rumors about the dating of the legal-aged teens (rumors I believe are true), and they start with that and then spread the word around that they’re looking for people who can say even more than that. The women’s motives are varied, but fame is a potent one, actually. Politics could be another (saying you’re a Trump voter doesn’t make it so). Still another is this (Lisa Bloom is Allred’s daughter, by the way, and I have read – don’t have time to find the source now – that this is a tactic of Allred’s as well):

A well-known women’s rights lawyer sought to arrange compensation from donors and tabloid media outlets for women who made or considered making sexual misconduct allegations against Donald Trump during the final months of the 2016 presidential race, according to documents and interviews.

California lawyer Lisa Bloom’s efforts included offering to sell alleged victims’ stories to TV outlets in return for a commission for herself, arranging a donor to pay off one Trump accuser’s mortgage and attempting to secure a six-figure payment for another woman who ultimately declined to come forward after being offered as much as $750,000, the clients told The Hill.

Women who do this sort of thing have often have led chaotic and troubled lives (sometimes they have also made multiple accusations against different people), and they have plenty of reason to need financial help.

Let me reiterate that I’m not trying to pick on Bill. But this sort of rush to judgment presses my buttons and always has. As I’ve said many times, I don’t like Moore, and was displeased when he won the primary, even before the allegations came out. It doesn’t matter to me, though, in terms of the issue of the allegations of sexual misconduct.

Nor does any of this mean I think the women are liars. As I’ve also said many times, they may indeed be telling the truth. But women and men lie at times, for many reasons, and it’s not even all that unusual. Sometimes they lie very credibly. Sometimes they lie while demonstrating a lot of emotion. I’ve seen it many times; so have you. Sometimes they even believe their own lies—or come to believe their own lies. I think we should be very very careful about coming to conclusions unless the evidence for something is very powerful.

The MSM: Obama? Iran? Cocaine? Hezbollah?

The New Neo Posted on by

Never heard of em.

Crickets chirping.

The MSM shapes the news in two ways. It shapes it by what it decides to cover. For example, any rumor about Trump raging about someone or something, reported by anonymous sources, is good for headlines. But a lengthy article with named sources in a respected media outlet is deep-sixed if it reflects poorly on Obama. If they are forced to cover it because the clamor of a story becomes too loud to safely ignore, they turn themselves into pretzels trying to debunk it and/or minimize it.

We’ve seen this before, over and over and over. Don’t think it doesn’t work as a propaganda technique, either. It does.

Other papers have covered this story about Obama, but they are sources on the right such as the New York Post (the Post has covered it pretty heavily, actually, here, here, and here).

Outlets on the left know their readers rarely read people on the right (Faux News and all that), and so they know that they often can protect their readers from dangerous news (“dangerous” in the sense of being harmful to the cause of the left) by simply ignoring it.

That’s why it was somewhat puzzling that Politico broke the Obama/Hezbollah story in the first place. Politico is a bit hard to characterize, because it sometimes does publish something that would seem to be more simpatico with the right although its basic orientation seems to be towards the left.

Let’s see whether the regular MSM (such as the Times et al) ever decides that this story is news. I wouldn’t sit on a hot stove till it happens. If it was Trump (or anyone else on the right) who had done what Obama is alleged to have done vis a vis Hezbollah, you can be sure the MSM would be on it immediately, loudly, prominently, and repetitively.

Obama, Hezbollah enabler

The New Neo Posted on by

Politico has issued an in-depth report on how the Obama administration put the kibosh on a task force against Iranian-backed Hezbollah’s cocaine operation, as part of its efforts to make a nuclear deal with the Iranians.

It’s a complex story, better read than excerpted. But here are a few quotes, to give you an idea:

The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.

Over the next eight years, agents working out of a top-secret DEA facility in Chantilly, Virginia, used wiretaps, undercover operations and informants to map Hezbollah’s illicit networks, with the help of 30 U.S. and foreign security agencies…

But as Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy, Obama administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way, according to interviews with dozens of participants who in many cases spoke for the first time about events shrouded in secrecy, and a review of government documents and court records. When Project Cassandra leaders sought approval for some significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, officials at the Justice and Treasury departments delayed, hindered or rejected their requests…

“This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” said David Asher, who helped establish and oversee Project Cassandra as a Defense Department illicit finance analyst. “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.”…

“The closer we got to the [Iran deal], the more these activities went away,” Asher said. “So much of the capability, whether it was special operations, whether it was law enforcement, whether it was [Treasury] designations ”” even the capacity, the personnel assigned to this mission ”” it was assiduously drained, almost to the last drop, by the end of the Obama administration.”…

As a result, the U.S. government lost insight into not only drug trafficking and other criminal activity worldwide, but also into Hezbollah’s illicit conspiracies with top officials in the Iranian, Syrian, Venezuelan and Russian governments ”” all the way up to presidents Nicolas Maduro, Assad and Putin, according to former task force members and other current and former U.S. officials…

… the damage wrought by years of political interference will be hard to repair.

For Obama-watchers and those who followed the Iranian deal and the years-long leadup to it, there is nothing surprising here. The Obama administration was focused on the Iranian deal from the start, and were doing everything they could to be nice to the powers that be in Iran and not ruffle their feathers. If it took winking at Hezbollah, that would have been considered to be a very small price to pay for the wonderful wonderfulness of the deal.

I haven’t yet read the entire article; it’s very long. In fact, I believe it’s one of the longest articles (if not the longest) ever to appear in Politico. It’s certainly the longest I can ever recall. Politico is not a right-wing site, and not a Trump-supporting one. It leans far more to the left, and yet every now and then it puts up something that isn’t the usual Democratic party line. This would certainly be one of those things, and I wonder why so much time and effort was put into it.

Whatever the reason, it’s always refreshing to see something in a publication that goes against the usual talking points. When I see something like that I think it has more of a tendency to be true, because of what the editors and/or authors had to overcome to decide to publish it.

I have little doubt that Obama-supporters will brush it off with assertions that the deal was worth it—or, alternatively, that the report’s a lie.

[ADDENDUM: More here:

While [according to the Politico article] it looks like the Obama administration neutralized efforts to stop a terrorist group from funding its operations through criminal enterprises in the United States ”” which should be a major scandal itself ”” according to Josh Meyer’s source-heavy reporting, it also decided to let a top Hezbollah operative named Ali Fayad, who had not only been indicted in U.S. courts for planning to kill American government employees but whom agents believed reported to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a key supplier of weapons to Syria and Iraq, to skate free.

You can, I’m sure, imagine what the reaction would be if this story had Trump’s administration rather than Obama’s secretly released Putin’s Middle East arms dealer?

This story should be highlighted in every newspaper, as it would be if it concerned Trump. I did a search at the site of the NY Times, and nothing showed up. When I did a Google search to see who was talking about the article, only sites on the right (and RealClearPolitics, which showcases both sides) appeared.]

What are the odds of Franken actually leaving the Senate?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not sure what the odds are, but I do think that with the defeat of Roy Moore (remember him?), they’ve become a great deal less than they were before.

Franken’s resignation always seemed to be motivated by the need to get Moore—to make him less likely to be elected, and/or to make him easier to censure or toss if elected. If Moore had won, Franken would have had to be sacrificed for the Cause.

But now, maybe not:

At least four senators are urging Al Franken to reconsider resigning, including two who issued statements calling for the resignation two weeks ago and said they now feel remorse over what they feel was a rush to judgment.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who urged Franken not to step down to begin with ”” at least not before he went through an Ethics Committee investigation ”” said the Minnesota senator was railroaded by fellow Democrats.

“What they did to Al was atrocious, the Democrats,” said West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin in an interview…

Franken’s unusual timeline ”” in his departure announcement he said he’d go “in the coming weeks,” without setting a date ”” has fed the fleeting hopes that there’s still time to reverse course. However, Tina Smith, Minnesota’s Democratic lieutenant governor, was named last week as his appointed successor.

People familiar with Franken’s plans said he has not changed his mind and intends to formally resign in early January. He praised the selection of Smith and has begun working with her on the transition.

It certainly was an “unusual” timeline. But when Smith was picked to succeed him, it seemed to me that this was really going to happen. Now, I wouldn’t bet on it. And you may recall that I didn’t think Franken should resign. Here’s what I wrote when Franken gave his sort-of-resignation speech:

It’s difficult to escape the sense that Al Franken is resigning under pressure from the Democratic Party due to their hopes that they can occupy the sexual assault high ground vis a vis Roy Moore, and also expunge the ghosts of Ted Kennedy and Gary Stubbs (for those with long memories, which most people don’t have), not to mention Bill Clinton…

I can’t stand Al Franken as senator (although I happened to like some of his comedy bits on SNL many a long year ago). I can’t stand his politics and a lot else about him. Looking at the accusations, if I had to bet, I’d say most of them are true, or at least enough of them are true to establish him as a slyly opportunistic sexual scumbag of a minor sort.

Note that characterization: minor sort. I believe in proportionality, and even if all the allegations against Franken are true they don’t rise to a very high (or very low) level. If they are true, the proper remedy is a hearing and possibly censure (or expulsion, if that’s the decision), IMHO, and then if the people of Minnesota don’t want to re-elect him (or he doesn’t want to run again) when his term is up, that’s their decision. I’m uncomfortable with forcing people out because of allegations without any sort of due process at all””and I do believe in having at least some sort of official forum in which the allegations are heard and evaluated.

I also believe that those Democrats who supported his resignation and now feel “remorse” don’t feel a particle of remorse. They feel that since Moore lost there’s no more need for Franken to resign.

Baby, It’s Unplayful and Ahistorical Outside

The New Neo Posted on by

The song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” was written in 1944 by the brilliant Frank Loesser, composer and lyricist for the musical masterpieces “Guys and Dolls,” “The Most Happy Fellow” (performed less frequently because of its operatic requirements, but absolutely gorgeous and tremendously touching), and the lesser (pun, ha ha) but still great “How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying.” He also wrote the songs to the movie “Hans Christian Anderson,” a favorite in my youth.

Note that Loesser wrote the music and lyrics to all those musicals and to “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” as well. That’s quite unusual, although not completely unique: Irving Berlin and Cole Porter come to mind as composer/lyricists, too.

And speaking of lyrics—no doubt you’ve heard about the current drive to ban “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” for being insufficiently PC in the sexual assault/harassment realm. After all, the song tells the tale of a man who is trying to persuade a woman to stay for the night, and he uses the cold weather outside as an excuse. But if you actually look at the lyrics, it’s clear that the woman wants to stay, and that her protests are merely for the sake of propriety, and that the whole thing is a flirtatious little game of seduction. In her objections she keeps mentioning what other people will think, not her own feelings. So you might say she’s striking a blow for autonomy and throwing off fusty old custom when she acquiesces at the end.

The entire exchange described in the lyrics is reflective of a previous era when reputation was a big big thing, causing quite a few women to say “no” when they were thinking “yes” and could be persuaded by men who were reading their wishes correctly—as is the man in the song. For young women today, that’s not a description of their mothers’ era, and maybe not even their grandmothers’ era—it’s their great- or great-great grandmother’s era. But that’s the way it often was.

When I was a child—pre-internet, of course—my friends and I used to amuse ourselves in various archaic ways. We not only listened to musicals on a primitive record player that played scratchy 33s, we also played the piano. That is, my friend (who went to Julliard at a very young age and was an excellent player and sight-reader) played the piano, and we both sang. Her family had copies of the Fireside series of songbooks, and so I learned a lot of songs that were considerably older than “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” In one of the Fireside Books (I think this one) you could find this song, written in 1897 (performed here by Johnny Cash):

That’s history, too.

Frank Loesser used to perform “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” with his wife at parties. Here’s the story:

Loesser wrote the duet in 1944 and premiered the song with his wife, [the singer] Lynn Garland, at their Navarro Hotel in New York housewarming party, and performed it toward the end of the evening, signifying to guests that it was nearly time to end the party. Loesser would introduce himself as the “Evil of Two Loessers”, a play on the theme of the song, trying to keep the girl from leaving, and on the phrase “lesser of two evils”. This was a period when the Hollywood elite’s chief entertainment was throwing parties and inviting guests who were expected to perform. Garland wrote that after the first performance, “We become instant parlor room stars. We got invited to all the best parties for years on the basis of ‘Baby.’ It was our ticket to caviar and truffles. Parties were built around our being the closing act.” Garland considered it their song and was furious when Loesser told her he was selling the song. Garland wrote, “I felt as betrayed as if I’d caught him in bed with another woman.”

Well, that was a foretaste of things to come, because while working on “The Most Happy Fella” (1956), Loesser took up with the show’s leading lady Jo Sullivan and left Garland (as told by his daughter Susan):

My mother did a lot of the casting for “The Most Happy Fella.” She was co-producer with Kermit Bloomgarden, and when she heard Jo sing, she said, Boy, this is a voice – this is a voice and a personality Frank would just love.

So she sent Jo to audition for my father, sealing her fate. It was a very hard time for everybody. I – my brother and I were uprooted from our California suburban lifestyle and brought to New York City. We at first stayed with friends and then moved to a small apartment.

My mother was not happy and was drinking more and more, and I had never lived in such close quarters with her before, and that was when I began to see that she was – she had big problems.

Everything changed for all of us. My father was living across Central Park in an apartment of his own and having his affair with Jo, and everybody was – he wasn’t real happy either. It was a very – a time full of turmoil, although for him, I think, it was mitigated a great deal by the great success of “The Most Happy Fella.”

If you ever get a chance to see a decent production of “The Most Happy Fella,” run, don’t walk—before the entire Loesser oeuvre gets erased by the Thought Police.

[NOTE: Here’s a song by Loesser with very clever lyrics, one I’d never heard before. It was written during WWII. In it, the female singer is assuring her boyfriend who’s overseas in the military that she’ll be faithful, because the guys who remain behind are slim pickings:

…I’m either their first breath of spring
Or else, I’m their last little fling
I either get a fossil or an adolescent pup
I either have to hold him off
Or have to hold him up
The battle is on, but the fortress will hold
They’re either too young or too old.

Would it pass muster today?]

The similarities between Obama and Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

I have long thought that this sort of thing may be true (the link is to a piece by Rich Lowry):

But every indication is that Obama and Trump are similar in that their modes of operating work much better for them than their parties.

Both pioneered a different way of doing presidential politics, and built a new coalition for victory. But no one could replicate Obama’s model, and so far, no one has shown any signs of successfully adapting to, let alone copying, Trump’s…

As a result, the only Democrat left standing after the Obama years was Obama himself. Trump could be creating a similar dynamic.

Lowry goes on to criticize the Bannon approach:

This gets to the idiocy of Steve Bannon’s project to try to run Trump-like insurgents everywhere. Bannon is trying to recapture the magic of 2016, without the one indispensable ingredient ”” Trump himself.

I agree about the similarity between Trump and Obama in this respect. But I disagree with Lowry in that I don’t see it as really being about Trump or about Obama. I believe that the election of each of these untested newcomers (Trump even more of a newcomer than Obama) to the highest office in the land was a symptom of a change that had already happened in the US and in the electorate itself.

“We are more polarized now” is a cliche. But it’s true, and it didn’t just happen—it’s been building and building for at least two decades (and almost certainly longer that that). I would add that we are more cynical now, more conspiracy-minded, more disgusted with institutions that used to be more admired: the press, Congress, the FBI, and the “establishment” of both parties. The entire system by which party leaders came up through the ranks and were at least somewhat respected is broken; the electorate isn’t buying it, for the most part. Outsiders and/or charismatic extremists are elected, and then they are found wanting and the pendulum swings to someone seen as an outsider and/or charismatic extremist on the other side.

Obama and Trump (and Bannon, for that matter) didn’t cause this—they are the results of it.

Cornhead and McCarthy on Strzok and company: the FISA warrant is key

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Cornhead” (aka lawyer Dave Begley) often comments here. He also has an intermittent blog, and is a very prolific commenter and sometime poster at Powerline. You may remember that during the 2015-2016 campaign he took on the exceptionally daunting task of seeing all the candidates speak and writing his impressions of their appearances, mostly for Powerline. Cornhead started out disliking Trump but ended up being an enthusiast some time before the election.

But perhaps Cornhead’s greatest claim to fame—here, anyway—was his on-spot prediction on Election Day itelf. When he wrote this comment at 1:21 PM on Election Day, I thought the stress had gotten to him and he’d gone off the deep end. But no:

I am predicting a slim DJT win. He wins NC FL IA MI OH PA WI.

Enthusiasm makes the difference.

He called it, when few others did.

In that comment, Cornhead added, “The Republic is saved.” The jury’s still out on that one.

So with that intro I refer you to an esssay Cornhead/Begley has written on the stopic of the Strzok revelations. In it, he advances some interesting speculative theories as to what went on. Here’s an excerpt:

The key to understanding this matter, in my opinion, is Peter Strzok, bitcoin and shaving points…

So, in my opinion, this is what happened. FBI agent Peter Strzok and other unnamed Clinton friends in the FBI and DOJ were in the right spots in the Deep State. They first tried to get a FISA warrant on the Trump campaign and it was turned down. That is a rare event.

So the DNC and the FBI paid former British spy Christopher Steele money in order to develop a completely fake dossier on Donald Trump. That dossier was probably used in the application for another FISA warrant. The American people need to see that second application. Absolutely critical.

The thing that is astounding to me as a lawyer is that a DOJ lawyer may well have presented a knowingly false document in order to dupe a federal judge and get a court order to spy on American citizens…

Interestingly enough, just today Andrew C. McCarthy has written a piece saying that Americans must see the FISA warrant on which the investigation was based:

To summarize, it is entirely possible that a surveillance warrant for Page was obtained based on no information from Steele, or at least no information the FBI had failed to corroborate independently.

Alas, an alternative theory has gathered momentum due to the drip, drip, drip of disturbing new disclosures, coupled with the fact that the Obama administration was in the tank for Trump’s opponent. The Clinton campaign generated the Steele dossier through lawyers who retained Fusion GPS. Fusion, in turn, hired Steele, a former British intelligence agent who had FBI contacts from prior collaborative investigations. The dossier was steered into the FBI’s hands as it began to be compiled in the summer of 2016…

McCarthy then goes into a possible scenario (too lengthy to present here, but please read what he has to say). The point is that if the dossier was presented as the basis for the warrant and the FBI knew the information in it was false or at least unverified and/or suspect in origin, that is an extremely grave matter.

But back to Cornhead’s post. He discusses the Clinton email investigation and the role of Strzok, and compares it to a point-shaving scheme in sports:

Point shavers make their in-game play look like they are performing at their best. Even when shaving points, they can win the contests. But if a team is projected to win by 7 but the actual win is by 3, who is to say that a free throw or three-point shot was missed on purpose? The beauty of a point shaving scheme is that it only takes one or two players to pull it off…

To my knowledge, the full power and effectiveness of a federal grand jury was not used in the Hillary Clinton private server matter. To the extent search warrants and subpoenas were used, they were not used on a timely and aggressive basis. Point shaving.

Reportedly immunity was given to many witnesses, including Cheryl Mills. But what did DOJ receive in exchange for immunity? Little, if anything of value. Point shaving…

Again, it’s too long and complex to summarize, but the dossier and the FISA warrant figure prominently in it as well. His essay ends with a plea for an Elliot Ness-like figure to restore the rule of law within the FBI.

We don’t know what actually happened, but these speculations need to be answered. To do that we need much more information, and a good start would be seeing the basis on which the FISA warrant was granted.

Sexual harassment, the distaff side

The New Neo Posted on by

It was only a matter of time before the shoe would be on the other foot:

Andrea Ramsey, a Democratic candidate for Congress, will drop out of the race after the Kansas City Star asked her about accusations in a 2005 lawsuit that she sexually harassed and retaliated against a male subordinate who said he had rejected her advances.

Multiple sources with knowledge of the case told The Star that the man reached a settlement with LabOne, the company where Ramsey was executive vice president of human resources…

“In its rush to claim the high ground in our roiling national conversation about harassment, the Democratic Party has implemented a zero tolerance standard,” Ramsey said in a statement Friday. “For me, that means a vindictive, terminated employee’s false allegations are enough for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) to decide not to support our promising campaign. We are in a national moment where rough justice stands in place of careful analysis, nuance and due process.”

Man or woman, Democrat or Republican, the principles are the same—at least on this blog. Settlements are not admissions of guilt; sometimes they’re just a company’s way of making the problem go away. People lie, both men and women, and they certainly lie about sexual harassment, which tends to involve he-said/she-said competing yet unprovable stories. Did Ramsey sexually harass this man? Maybe. I don’t know enough to judge. We don’t know enough to judge. But that’s true of the majority of these accusations, although every now and then we do have enough evidence to feel confident that we know.

But I wonder—I just wonder—what Ramsay said about Clarence Thomas, or about Herman Cain or Roy Moore (I Googled it and couldn’t find anything). I bet it wasn’t “We are in a national moment where rough justice stands in place of careful analysis, nuance and due process.” But she’s correct; we are, and it does.

The new arrival at neo’s

The New Neo Posted on by

I have a small kitchen, and the space for the fridge is very small indeed. Until today I had a conventional freezer-above refrigerator. But it was configured in such a way that the bulk of the food was low. The food was hard to see and harder still to remove, particularly the fruits and vegetables in the two little bins at the very bottom.

I got tired of bending low and almost needing to stick my head in that fridge to see any shelf except the top one, and tired of all the food that rotted in the back of the shelves because I forgot it was there. And so I decided to spring for a new one with the freezer below, but it had to fit that narrow space.

I discovered that there are quite a few really expensive European ones that would do the trick, but I didn’t want to spend that kind of money. No side-by-side could fit, so it had to be a freezer-below type. But I’m pleased to say that the one I finally ordered arrived today, and it’s not tremendously expensive and is quite handsome. Here ’tis (and I got it for a significantly better price than this):

One of the odd but great things about this fridge is that, although it has fewer cubic feet of room in the refrigerator part than my old one did (11.1 for the new, 11.6 for the old), it’s designed in a way that is so much more efficient that I find that there’s far more room now for my food.

This is probably more information than you want about my buying habits (and I should have taken a “before” photo of my old fridge jammed to the gills), but here’s the inside of my new one. Plenty of room to spare, whereas this same amount of food had overwhelmed the old one:

I think the door is key. A lot of the stuff that goes in here had to be in the main part of my old fridge:

Those of you with jumungous refrigerators may find my elation about this new and rather tiny one quite odd. But I think I’ll enjoy it a lot.

Simple pleasures.

Bariatric surgery: poorly understood, highly effective

The New Neo Posted on by

We don’t understand much about why bariatric (weight-loss) surgery works, but it does. It’s actually highly effective at helping the obese to lose weight where conventional methods such as dieting and exercise fail. Not only that, but the weight tends to stay off:

The public, on the other hand, generally believes obesity is caused by a lack of willpower, and that it can be fixed with gym memberships and trendy diets. In one 2016 survey of more than 1,500 Americans, 60 percent of the participants said dieting and exercise were even more effective than surgery for long-term weight loss.

Here’s the thing, though: Weight loss surgery is far and away medicine’s best treatment for severe obesity.

The medical case for bariatric surgery has grown much stronger in recent years. High-quality studies on the long-term health outcomes of people with obesity who got surgery show, on average, that they’re able to lose dramatic amounts of weight, and even reverse or prevent their obesity-related health conditions, like diabetes and high cholesterol. A new study out in JAMA Surgery demonstrated this once again.

It doesn’t really surprise me. Bariatric surgery seems like a big deal, and the complications loom large in people’s minds although apparently the health risks for the obese who would qualify for the surgery are greater if they remain obese. But the idea of changing the anatomy of your digestive system is such a drastic one that it gives people pause, and they’re been told for so long that it’s just a matter of willpower to lose weight by dieting that they believe if they only were strong-willed enough it would finally work.

Bariatric surgery must feel like a desperation move, and I think it is. But it usually works wonders.

Here’s more:

The majority of bariatric procedures in America today involve the gastric sleeve and the Roux-en-Y gastric bypass….

With the sleeve, which now makes up more than 50 percent of weight loss surgeries in the US, surgeons staple off and remove about 80 percent of the stomach, transforming the organ from a wide football shape into a slim banana (or sleeve) shape….

With the gastric bypass, surgeons use staples to make the stomach smaller by creating a small pouch, which can only hold about an ounce (or walnut’s worth) of food. Next, they reconnect the small intestine to a hole in the new pouch, so food flows into the pouch, bypassing most of the stomach, and then into the latter part of the small intestine, bypassing the first half of the intestine…

But an additional reason both the sleeve and gastric bypass surgeries lead to long-term weight loss is likely because of the changes in hormones that occur after these procedures. The sleeve, and especially the bypass, seems to suppress hormones that affect hunger and satiety, like the “hunger hormone” – ghrelin – something no diet will ever do.

Eating is an emotional activity, and it’s instructive to see (for example, I’ve watched some TV programs that follow people who’ve had the surgery) how difficult the post-surgery adjustment period can be. What they’ve experienced all their lives—how they feel when they eat and how much food they can take in—has changed dramatically, often to the point that they feel no hunger at all and have to be forced to eat, and feel full after just a couple of bites. There’s nothing normal about it, and yet usually they adjust and later are able to eat more, and appreciate being freed of the burden of the fat they’ve lost.

Those of us who are fortunate enough to have only ten or fifteen pounds we perennially want to lose (me), and who don’t eat all that much to begin with (me again), and who have always had a setpoint higher than their desired one (yep, me), are well aware of how vigorously the body defends a certain weight almost no matter what we do. These surgeries (which are not available to someone like me) seem to work to change that setpoint:

In a 2014 study, published in the journal Obesity, researchers compared participants from the Biggest Loser reality TV show who had gone on crash diets and exercise programs to rapidly lose as much weight as possible to people who had gastric bypass surgery….The bypass surgery patients saw their metabolisms normalize within a year, to a rate that matched their new body size, while the TV show contestants saw their metabolisms slow down and stay that way – even six years after losing the weight and, on average, regaining much of it back.

Researchers suspect this is because surgery may reset the “set point,” or the body’s habit of vigorously defending a certain weight range. Once a person gains weight and keeps that weight on for a period of time, the body gets used to its new, larger size. When a person loses weight, a bunch of subtle changes kick in – to the hormone levels, the brain – increasing appetite and slowing the metabolism, all in a seeming conspiracy to get back up to that set point weight.

Amazingly, surgery seems to lower the set point, and even weaken the body’s desire to defend it. And that seems to make keeping weight off a little easier.

Insurance pays for surgery for those who need it, but few who need it seek it and have it. But can you imagine the effect on the health care system if all 20 million people started demanding the surgery and insurance had to pay for it? On the other hand, it might save at least some costs down the line, if the positive effects on health are really that dramatic.

Spurlock denounces himself

The New Neo Posted on by

I suspect we’ll be seeing more of this sort of thing—a guy publicly confessing his sexual offenses and vowing things will be different.

Morgan Spurlock—whom I’ve never heard of before—is a 47-year-old “documentary filmmaker, humorist, television producer, screenwriter, playwright and political activist, best known for the documentary film ‘Super Size Me.'” In his essay he confesses to having sex that was ambiguous as to the woman’s desires but later labeled by the woman as rape, and jokingly calling a female assistant “hot pants” or “sex pants.”

Here’s his self-denunciation:

You see, I’ve come to understand after months of these revelations [of sexual acting-out by men], that I am not some innocent bystander, I am also a part of the problem.

I’m sure I’m not alone in this thought, but I can’t blindly act as though I didn’t somehow play a part in this, and if I’m going truly represent myself as someone who has built a career on finding the truth, then it’s time for me to be truthful as well.

I am part of the problem.

He repeats several times that he’s part of the problem. I’m not sure what this public confession is supposed to accomplish other than getting it off his chest before he’s the next person accused, but what caught my eye was that, despite the fact that he seems to indicate he’s only just realized that he’s done wrong, he also says this (quite a bit later in his essay):

I have been unfaithful to every wife and girlfriend I have ever had. Over the years, I would look each of them in the eye and proclaim my love and then have sex with other people behind their backs.

This stopped me in my tracks. Now, that’s not the least bit ambiguous and that’s not just a tasteless office joke. And that’s the sort of thing we’re meant to understand this man has just realized is wrong, as a result of Weinstein and the others? What sort of amoral wasteland has he previously inhabited? (That’s a somewhat rhetorical question, by the way, but not even to have previously realized his compulsive infidelity was wrong seems rather odd.)

This is of a completely different order of magnitude than calling an assistant “hot pants.” This is being an equivocal scumbag, liar, and sexual betrayer.

He goes on:

But why? What caused me to act this way? Is it all ego? Or was it the sexual abuse I suffered as a boy and as a young man in my teens? Abuse that I only ever told to my first wife, for fear of being seen as weak or less than a man?

Is it because my father left my mother when I was child? Or that she believed he never respected her, so that disrespect carried over into their son?

Or is it because I’ve consistently been drinking since the age of 13? I haven’t been sober for more than a week in 30 years, something our society doesn’t shun or condemn but which only served to fill the emotional hole inside me and the daily depression I coped with. Depression we can’t talk about, because its wrong and makes you less of a person.

And the sexual daliances? Were they meaningful? Or did they only serve to try to make a weak man feel stronger.

I don’t know. None of these things matter when you chip away at someone and consistently make them feel like less of a person.

I am part of the problem. We all are.

We all are? Does Spurlock mean to lump all of his behavior together, the minor with the major? Does he really think every single person (or every single man, or whoever he’s referring to when he says “we”) acts like him? I beg to differ.

He offers his sad childhood and his drinking as excuses/explanations and then says they don’t matter. So why bring them up in the first place?

As I said, expect more of this sort of thing. I think most of Spurlock’s confession should be between him and his therapist. But since he’s put it out there, I’m reacting to it.

[NOTE: And whatever his guilt or innocence, this suicide is just sad:

On Tuesday, Johnson held a press conference at his church on Bardstown Road, where he denied the molestation allegations. According to court documents obtained by the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting, the alleged molestation took place on New Year’s Eve in 2012. The alleged victim, who was 17 at the time, told authorities that she was staying in a living area of the Heart of Fire City Church where Johnson was pastor, when Johnson, who had been drinking a lot, approached her, kissed her and fondled her under her clothes.

Johnson (who was a state representative in Kentucky) killed himself, leaving a note protesting his innocence.]

FCC ends net neutrality

The New Neo Posted on by

The FCC has voted to rescind the net neutrality rules promulgated during the Obama adminstration.

I reacted to the original rules here, but I must confess I’ve had enormous difficulty deciding on what side I stand on this issue. Each side has good arguments, and evaluating policies on net neutrality involve technical questions and hazy prognostications. So far the best article I’ve found that presents both sides of the question is this one (see also this and this for more).

From that first piece I linked:

I don’t think there is room (or patience) left for serious policy discussion in this area, even among “serious people.” This is largely because “net neutrality” has become a token representing different, broader, social values that are quite separate from the technical, legal, economic, &c, issues implicated by regulation of how ISPs handle data traversing their networks.

That’s true of an awful lot of issues, isn’t it?