On Churchill’s becoming Prime Minister

The New Neo Posted on by

Churchill became Prime Minister during an extraordinarily difficult crisis early in World War II. This was his mindset:

I was conscious of a profound sense of relief.

Relief? Most people would be terrified and/or despairing. Hitler was engaged in swiftly taking over most of Europe. The British forces were cornered at Dunkirk.

But Churchill was not most people:

At last I had authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.

He welcomed being in control, because he trusted himself. But that trust wasn’t just narcissism; he had reason to trust himself, and he thought the British people had reason to trust him, too:

Ten years in the political wilderness had freed me from ordinary party antagonisms. My warnings over the last six years had been so numerous, so detailed, and were now so terribly vindicated, that no one could gainsay me. I could not be reproached either for making the war or with want of preparation for it. I thought I knew a good deal about it all, and I was sure I should not fail.

He had been ostracized and ridiculed for his dire prognosications and warnings, and had stood virtually alone. And then it turned out he’d been correct all along. This, added to Churchill’s natural confidence, must have increased that confidence immeasurably:

Therefore, although impatient for the morning, I slept soundly and had no need for cheering dreams. Facts are better than dreams.

[NOTE: You can find the quote here, but it’s also in innumerable biographies of Churchill.]

Let me tell you a story about corroborating witnesses

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Boy, I seem to be in a legal mood today. See previous post.]

I hear a lot of people saying that the 14-year-old accuser of Roy Moore must be telling the truth because her mother backs up her story, or because there are other people to back up her story or at least some small part of it. In other words, what’s known as “corroborating witnesses.”

“Witnesses” doesn’t mean “people who saw the act itself.” It can mean—and in this case does mean—-“people who were told the story (or some elements of the story) by the accuser then or later.” Usually it also means “and are willing to testify about it in court,” not just to tell it to a newspaper reporter (and sometimes remain nameless).

Well, let me tell you a little story. Many many moons ago, the divorce law in Massachusetts was pretty strict. No-fault divorce hadn’t yet come to the state. I’ve written about the situation before:

In fault divorces one person was the plaintiff and sued the other, alleging a marital offense; the other often countersued and alleged a different offense on the part of the original plaintiff. .

One of the marital offenses which constituted grounds for divorce in Massachusetts was called cruel and abusive treatment. Ordinarily that meant some sort of physical abuse—in other words, hitting or even pushing. In practice, the way it went was this: the lawyer would ask the client (typically a woman) if her husband had ever hit her. If she answered “yes,” then the lawyer would ordinarily ask whether she had told this to anyone right afterward or had shown anyone the bruises. If the answer was in the affirmative than the lawyer would ask if that person would be willing to swear to this in court.

That was because a corroborating witness was required in order to receive a divorce on those grounds. The woman’s word wasn’t enough.

This potentially made it very difficult to get a divorce, even if it was true that a woman had been physically abused by her husband. How many people immediately race off to show someone bruises, or to tell someone the tale? Many did, but many didn’t, particularly back then.

So women lied. And their friends and relatives lied. Often; very very often. And lawyers indirectly encouraged them to lie by letting them know what was needed.

If the woman initially had said, “No, my husband may have been a rotten bastard, but at least he never hit me,” then the lawyer would tell her that was actually a pity, because if he had—or if he had even so much as pushed or shoved her forcibly—it would constitute grounds for divorce if she had a corroborating witness.

The lawyer hadn’t told her to lie; that would be unethical. But funny how many women suddenly “remembered” a big big shove. And funny how many came up with a mother or sister or aunt or cousin or friend who had witnessed it or seen the bruise or heard the story right after the event.

Funny, but understandable. The motive was to get a divorce.

And there are motives to make a false accusations against public figures and to get a bunch of corroborating witnesses, too. That certainly doesn’t mean the present accusations are false; they may indeed be true, as I’ve said many times. But corroborating witnesses fail to move my truth-meter all that much.

Attempt to clear up some of the legal details connected with the Moore accusations

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Gospace” writes:

[Moore] took ”No” for an answer. That’s the takeaway. No rape, no assault, he understands the meaning of ”No”.

But that’s irrelevant where an underage person is concerned. That’s what the word “consent” in the phrase “age of consent” is all about. As I wrote a while back:

The child cannot consent to that which fails to protect that child; the child’s judgement is colored both by the greater influence of the powerful one [the adult] as well as the fact of the child’s age detracting from a child’s ability to make informed decisions in general.

In the case of the allegations against Moore (ignoring for the moment whether he’s guilty or innocent, and just taking the situation as reported), the 14-year-old girl was under the age of consent in Alabama. Legally, she could neither consent nor refuse; her wishes are irrelevant because propositioning such a person or engaging in any sexual acts with her is an offense. According to her description as reported in the WaPo, here’s what happened:

Moore chatted with [the 14-year-old after meeting her] and asked for her phone number, she says. Days later, she says, he picked her up around the corner from her house in Gadsden, drove her about 30 minutes to his home in the woods, told her how pretty she was and kissed her. On a second visit, she says, he took off her shirt and pants and removed his clothes. He touched her over her bra and underpants, she says, and guided her hand to touch him over his underwear.

“I wanted it over with ”” I wanted out,” she remembers thinking. “Please just get this over with. Whatever this is, just get it over.” Corfman says she asked Moore to take her home, and he did.

So had she been 16 and we could speak meaningfully of whether she “consented” or not, she consented to give her phone number, consented to date him, consented to go to his home, consented to kiss him, and then consented to have another date. On that second date, it is unclear whether the disrobing was consensual, but it’s quite clear that at some point during the touchings, it became nonconsensual and she conveyed that to him and he complied with her wishes.

But as I said, with a fourteen-year-old consent cannot be given or withheld. The very acts themselves are an offense because the older person has a responsibility to not engage in sexual acts with a person of that age whether they are consensual or not.

It seems that what Moore is alleged to have done would have been actionable both civilly and criminally, had it been reported at the time or in a timely fashion, but it was not. You can find a definition of the crime involved here (although I have no idea whether this was a crime in 1979, when it is alleged to have occurred, and I have no idea whether if it were to be tried today the 1979 laws or today’s laws would be operative, although my guess is that it would be 1979’s):

Section 13A-6-69 (Enticing child to enter vehicle, house, etc., for immoral purposes) It shall be unlawful for any person with lascivious intent to entice, allure, persuade or invite, or attempt to entice, allure, persuade or invite, any child under 16 years of age to enter any vehicle, room, house, office or other place for the purpose of proposing to such child the performance of an act of sexual intercourse or an act which constitutes the offense of sodomy or for the purpose of proposing the fondling or feeling of the sexual or genital parts of such child or the breast of such child, or for the purpose of committing an aggravated assault on such child, or for the purpose of proposing that such child fondle or feel the sexual or genital parts of such person.

In addition, based on these allegations it is possible that he could have been charged with sexual abuse in the second degree:

Section 13A-6-67 (Sexual abuse in the second degree)…being 19 years old or older, subjects another person to sexual contact who is less than 16 years old, but more than 12 years old…

(Again, it’s not clear whether this was actionable in 1979, but my guess is that it was).

Note, however, that I wrote it’s possible that “sexual abuse in the second degree” might apply. Why might it not apply? Because I can’t find an Alabama definition of “sexual contact,” so I’m not certain whether clothed fondling (that is what was alleged) would apply, or even it has to be something more extreme.

There’s also a potential problem with the charge of “Enticing child to enter vehicle, house, etc., for immoral purposes.” Does that statute apply to only naked touching of genitals, or does it include clothed touching?

Let’s say, though, for the sake of discussion, that the alleged acts were indeed actionable then. But would they be actionable now, after all these years? In other words, has the statute of limitations run out? I believe that, based on this, someone who had committed the alleged acts in 1979 could be charged even today [emphasis mine]:

Although the civil SOL [statute of limitations] is very short, Alabama gives prosecutors a lot of time to file violent or childhood sexual abuse [criminal] charges. The criminal statutes of limitations vary depending on the severity of the offense. The criminal statutes of limitations include (although again, it depends on the finer points of the definitions of things such as “sexual abuse”):

No statute of limitations: rape, violent sexual abuse, sexual abuse with the threat of violence, and any sexual abuse of a victim under the age of 16,
Other felony sexual abuse: three years, and
Misdemeanor abuse: one year.

So there you have it.

This, of course, only has to do with the courts—the actual courts, not the court of public opinion, which seems to have quite different standards.

On the Koreas and China

The New Neo Posted on by

Is this meaningful, or just more blah-blah-blah?

But it sounds encouraging, anyway:

The leaders of South Korea and China on Saturday agreed on the need to manage the security situation on the Korean peninsula in a stable way and to resolve North Korea-related tensions peacefully after a summit meeting, the South’s presidential office said.

Xi told Moon that he encouraged South Korea to resume dialogue with North Korea and re-engage with them for reconciliation and de-nuclearisation, state news agency Xinhua reported…

Beijing has said it is complying with United Nations Security Council sanctions and doing all it can to curb the isolated state’s provocative actions.

During Saturday’s summit, Moon and Xi also agreed to quickly normalize bilateral exchanges in all sectors, Yoon added, repeating what was said in the agreement announced last month when the two countries agreed to end a year-long standoff over the deployment of a U.S. anti-missile system.

Mere verbiage? Or signs of more pressure to come on North Korea?

The Roy Moore sex allegations

The New Neo Posted on by

The accusations against Alabama’s Republican candidate Roy Moore are the talk of the day.

First let me get this out of the way: I’m not a Roy Moore fan and never have been. But this story is particularly disturbing to me, and for the same reason I’m often disturbed by sexual allegations against candidates of all stripes and persuasions. It’s especially true of sexual allegations that are raised long after the fact—in the Moore case long long after the fact—and that are raised in the heat of a political race or political appointment.

That doesn’t mean such allegations are false. But it certainly doesn’t mean they’re true, either. I’ve never been one to subscribe to the belief that there are no false accusations. Unfortunately, there are plenty of them, although I tend to think that the majority of allegations are true. Problem is that in the absence of evidence, we are left with he-said/she-said situations (or sometimes same-sex allegations, but you get the idea). And there is ordinarily very weak or no evidence in these cases.

The closer in time the offense occurred to when it was reported to authorities and/or made public, the more likely it is to be true (and the likelier that the recollections of the parties are not tainted by the passage of time). But timing is hardly definitive, either. The farther away from an election or appointment an accusation is made the more likely it is to be true, also. In the case of Moore, the accusations fall flat on both those points. Which doesn’t mean they’re false. But it certainly doesn’t mean they’re true.

Politics is a dirty dirty business. People lie—and not just in politics, but the stakes are particularly high in politics. In the current climate, sexual allegations of any sort (the ones against Moore involve things like kissing, but they also involve one underage child of 14) are exceptionally volatile and potentially powerful.

At this point, just about any woman who’s ever had contact with a politician has the power to destroy him (I use “woman” and “him” because that’s the usual case, but it’s hardly limited to that combination of sexes, nor is it limited to politicians although they’re an especially visible example).

I detest this situation, and I’ve detested it for years. During the Anita Hill hearings, I was a Democrat. I didn’t want more SCOTUS justices who were conservative, but I was nevertheless uneasy about the hearings. I didn’t buy that Hill was lying, but I realized that the potential was there and there was no evidence she was telling the truth, either.

Legal proceedings guard against these sorts of excesses because the rules of evidence require that accusations be backed up. There’s a reason for that—our legal system prefers that a guilty person go free rather than that an innocent person be imprisoned, although it also is constructed with the belief that the system is the one most likely to arrive at the truth of the matter and the goal of only imprisoning those who should be imprisoned. Trial by rumor or newspaper (or even by extra-judicial hearing, as with Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas) doesn’t cut it.

It’s bad to let perpetrators go free because people are afraid to speak up. But it’s bad to give all accusers this kind of power to destroy someone outside of a court of law. And it’s bad for people to withdraw from a race even if innocent.

In this, I believe that Donald Trump has gotten it correct:

Like most Americans, the President believes we cannot allow a mere allegation, in this case one from many years ago, to destroy a person’s life.”

“The President also believes that if these allegations are true, Judge Moore will do the right thing and step aside,” she said.

I have one disagreement with that statement, however—I would replace the word “will” with the word “should.”

[NOTE: By the way, the fact that some accusers get other people to say that the accuser had told them about the abuse long ago isn’t definitive, either, although it helps to indicate that the accusations are more likely to be true. But I have seen how often people can get friends and family to corroborate lies, if all are motivated towards a certain desired end.]

[NOTE II: In the case of Roy Moore, the allegation that seems to matter most is the one about the 14-year-old. The age of consent in Alabama is 16, and the other accusers say that Moore tried to date them or kiss them at ages that varied from 16 to 18. The allegations from the then-14-year-old (Moore was 32 at the time) are more significant in terms of what is alleged to have happened, but also of course because of her age.

I’ll add that in Moore’s case it’s very curious that the accusations didn’t come out earlier during Moore’s long and controversial public career, or even earlier during this particular 2017 campaign. The timing is such that he cannot now be forcibly removed from the ballot because the September 27th deadline has passed. The only remedy would be a write-in campaign, but that runs the risk of splitting the GOP vote in Alabama.]

Heart of darkness: the baby killers

The New Neo Posted on by

What state of mind allows a person to purposely target babies for killing, up close and personal?

I ask the question because of reports that the Texas church attacker did exactly that:

The gunman who killed 26 people at a small-town Texas church went aisle to aisle looking for victims and shot crying babies at point-blank range, a couple who survived the attack said…

…he entered the church yelling “Everybody die!” and resumed “shooting hard” at helpless families, Solis said.

The gunman checked each aisle for more victims, including babies who cried out amid the noise and smoke, Ramirez said.

There is really no “why” here, nothing rational except a psychopath who wants to do evil and to be known for performing actions he considers most repellent to ordinary sensibilities.

There were two especially dangerous signs that indicated this gunman was fully capable of such actions, although he’d never killed anyone before. One was the fact that while in the Air Force he had assaulted not only his then-wife, but her son, the latter badly enough to fracture his skull. And yet he only received a penalty of one year (the lightness of that sentence puzzles me, but I’ve not seen any explanation).

The other extreme danger sign for this man was the fact that he had apparently been cruel to an animal:

Kelley was cited for animal cruelty in El Paso County on August 1, 2014, according to The Denver Post. Numerous witnesses saw him in a yard, jumping on top of a husky and beating it in the head and neck.

According to the report, Kelley called for the brown and white dog to come. When it didn’t, he ran over to it, tackled it, held it down with his knees, and punched it four to five times. The dog got up to run away, and when Kelley caught up with it, he picked it up, threw it to the ground and dragged it by its neck.

Authorities came and found the dog undernourished and took it to a vet. Kelley claimed that he was trying to restrain the dog from acting aggressively. Kelley received a deferred probationary sentence, paid fines totaling $448.50, and the charges were dismissed.

Abusing animals is often like a gateway drug for violent criminals. Of course, not all animal abusers go on to be violent to humans, and not all people violent to humans precede it with animal abuse, but the connection is very strong nonetheless and psychopaths in particular are very partial to abusing helpless creatures.

Babies are especially helpless creatures, as well.

What to do with a person like the Texas shooter before he goes on his rampage? There are two problems, of course. The first is that we cannot predict who will do this; we can only say who is more likely than others to do it. And the second is that until someone actually acts, we cannot detain that person preventively because that would be depriving them of liberty without cause.

My only suggestion would be that, after a crime (even a relatively minor one), it is necessary to look at the entire history of the perpetrator, and that a history of things such as violence against children and/or animals should weigh very heavily during the sentencing portion of the legal proceedings. But even then there’s a limit to how long such a person can be held, and that limit would be the maximum possible penalty for the offense.

When that person gets out of prison, watch out.

And if you know someone who has been violent towards animals or children, run the other way. Do not get into a relationship with this person, and advise your loved ones to do the same.

I have a philosophical and religious question about the nature of evil. I believe that we have free will, but I also believe that psychopaths are at least partly born and partly made. I am fairly sure (and have done a bit of research on this, but found nothing definitive enough to link) that most Western religions would say that despite the fact that psychopaths may have some inborn tendencies in that direction and that they may have suffered abuse in childhood that exacerbated those tendencies, they are nevertheless responsible for their actions. I tend to agree with this. But there is something so “other” about psychopaths’ makeup, so Bad-Seedish, that it remains hard to see them as people like other people with the same choices as other people.

I suppose that’s the nature of evil.

The Texas church shooter seems to be pure evil when we look at his actions during the attack (and at many times earlier in his life), but obviously some people loved him: his wives (at least initially), and perhaps the father he called in his last moments to say goodbye:

Based on evidence at the scene, investigators believe Kelley died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after he was chased by Willeford and another man and crashed his car.

The 26-year-old shooter also used his cellphone to tell his father he had been shot and did not think he would survive, authorities said.

I wonder if we’ll ever hear much about the contents of that call, or the characteristics of their relationship. Was it a bad relationship? What was the emotional tone of the call? Was the shooter capable of some sort of love? And does any of that matter in deciding whether that means he freely and voluntarily chose to do evil?

Philosophers and ethicists have been debating those issues (all you have to do is Google something like “are psychopaths responsible for their crimes?” and up will pop a host of viewpoints). See this, for example.

My own opinion (which happens to coincide with the legal point of view) is that psychopaths are morally responsible despite whatever deficits they’re born with, and we must treat them as such. Law only exempts people with certain very discrete and extremely serious mental illnesses from criminal responsibility, and these are illnesses that make it impossible for the person to tell right from wrong and/or to distinguish reality from fantasy. Psychopathy is not a mental illness, and psychopaths are well aware of what is right and what is wrong; they just think that the rules don’t apply to them.

[NOTE: I am leaving out of this discussion the killing of babies and children for political reasons, or in war as collateral damage (the latter of which is not the deliberate targeting of babies). These people are—or at least can be—somewhat different from the type of baby killers I’ve been discussing in this post. It’s a very big and complex topic—for example, among the Nazis you had quite a few sadistic psychopaths who enjoyed their work, but that was not everyone even among Nazis.]

Effects of the military draft

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Ymarsakar” writes:

The draft is a [Democrat] strategy. They kept trying to reinstate it after Nixon, because without it they cannot use fear to create anti war protests on demand.

I would say “yes, but only in recent years; the draft had a very different purpose prior to Vietnam.”

I wrote about a typical event during the “recent years” part of it in 2006. The proponents of a bill to reinstate the draft back then were very up-front about their purposes:

It seems to me that Representative Charles Rangel’s suggestion to reintroduce the draft should get some sort of prize for cynical ploys in Congress. Granted, he’s got a lot of competition, but this one is designed to offend almost everyone, including the vast majority of his fellow Democrats, and even Rangel doesn’t think for a moment that his proposal has a chance of passing…

What’s motivating Rangel, besides the desire for publicity? He says he thinks a draft would make future administrations more wary of going to war in the first place; no doubt he’s studied the Vietnam years and knows that the war protests were at least partly fueled by the understandable self-interest of the youth of America, who were reluctant to be drafted into a far-off war that seemed both unwinnable and strategically unnecessary. But Rangel also says he wants the army to be more socioeconomically even-handed; he believes it’s the poor who are exploited by the present system.

Of course, Rangel is ignoring the evidence that indicates the composition of today’s armed forces do not at all correspond to his vision [the original article had a link to an American Heritage post that is no longer at the URL]. Perception is all, after all. Not to mention the fact that the highly specialized nature of today’s military does not lend itself to a draft.

However, in the United States prior to the post-Vietnam era, the draft was most definitely not prompted by Democratic desire to ramp up antiwar protests. In fact, the drafts prior to 1940 were all wartime drafts, and their purpose was to man the military to fight those wars. The 1940 peacetime draft was the first peacetime conscription, and it was instituted with the knowledge that war was abroad and that we would probably have to fight in the not-too-distant future, and the majority of people seemed in favor of the draft:

By the summer of 1940, as Germany conquered France, Americans supported the return of conscription. One national survey found that 67% of respondents believed that a German-Italian victory would endanger the United States, and that 71% supported “the immediate adoption of compulsory military training for all young men”. Similarly, a November 1942 survey of American high-school students found that 69% favored compulsory postwar military training.

There was some opposition, but it didn’t amount to all that much.

Vietnam was very a different situation. The massive antiwar protests against that particular war ended with the end of the draft (1973) (and the end of our direct involvement), not the end of the war itself, and therefore the draft was often seen as instrumental in having fueled those protests; it had made the far-off war a very personally threatening thing. Nixon was aware of this:

Nixon also saw ending the draft as an effective way to undermine the anti-Vietnam war movement, since he believed affluent youths would stop protesting the war once their own probability of having to fight in it was gone. There was opposition to the all-volunteer notion from both the Department of Defense and Congress, so Nixon took no immediate action…

Instead, the Gates Commission was formed, headed by Thomas S. Gates, Jr., a former Secretary of Defense in the Eisenhower administration. Gates initially opposed the all-volunteer army idea, but changed his mind during the course of the 15-member commission’s work. The Gates Commission issued its report in February 1970, describing how adequate military strength could be maintained without having conscription. The existing draft law was expiring at the end of June 1971, but the Department of Defense and Nixon administration decided the draft needed to continue for at least some time…

…Meanwhile, military pay was increased as an incentive to attract volunteers, and television advertising for the U.S. Army began. With the end of active U.S. ground participation in Vietnam, December 1972 saw the last men conscripted, who were born in 1952[66] and who reported for duty in June 1973…

Since then, although the Selective Service mechanism has remained largely in place in case a draft is needed once again, we’ve had no draft. For the most part, we’ve just had showboaters such as Rangel talking about reviving it as a scare tactic.

If a draft were to be reinstated, it would almost certainly meet with a very different attitude on the part of the population than during WWII. It would of course also depend on the nature of the conflict, but unless this country were to be directly and seriously threatened I think a draft would indeed meet with fervent opposition that would make the Vietnam era protests seem minor. The idea of risking one’s life for one’s country—or its allies—is now confined to a smaller segment of society.

However, the peacetime draft had some interesting side effects. One was that it forced people who lived in homogeneous enclaves (for example, urban vs. rural, Northern vs. Southern, Democrat vs. Republican) into close contact with each other and therefore forced them to learn about each other (and sometimes to stop demonizing each other, if that had been their previous tendency). Another effect was that people from all walks of life were forced to learn something factual about weapons and the waging of war, so that they were less likely to operate in a mental vacuum about those topics and less likely to fill in that vacuum with fantasy.

Spengler on Jewish humor

The New Neo Posted on by

Spengler uses the abominable and extremely unfunny joke of Larry David on Saturday Night Live recently as a springboard for a discussion of the special qualities of Jewish humor—the kind of Jewish humor that is funny, and is characteristically Jewish: “All characteristically Jewish humor has a profoundly religious foundation: It stems from the absurdity of the encounter of finite humanity with infinite divinity.”

I especially enjoyed this one, which I’d never heard before I read his piece:

During the Days of Awe before the Day of Repentance, Yom Kippur, the rabbi is meditating in the synagogue. He prays, “Lord, what is man, that thou takest knowledge of him! Or the son of man, that thou makest account of him! Man is like to vanity: his days are as a shadow that passeth away. Lord, I am as nothing in thy sight.” The cantor is moved, and he also prays, “Lord, what is man, that thou takest knowledge of him! Man is like to vanity: his days are as a shadow that passeth away. Lord, I am as nothing in thy sight.” And the janitor hears, and he is moved, and he starts to pray: “Lord, what is man, that thou makest account of him! Man is like to vanity: his days are as a shadow that passeth away. Lord, I am as nothing in thy sight.” The cantor nudges the rabbi and says, “Look who thinks he’s nothing in the sight of God!”

I told an old Jewish joke at the end of this post:

In the olden days, pharmacies often had soda counters, too. An elderly woman walked into that kind of pharmacy and goes up to the pharmacist, and asks (best done with a Yiddish accent), “Do you do test the pee here?” The pharmacist answers (best done with a generic American accent), “Yes, we do urine analysis.” Then she asks, “And do you test the spit, too?” He answers, nodding, “Yes, we do sputum analysis.” Then she asks, “And how about the kaka? Do you test that, too?” He nods and solemnly says, “Yes, we do fecal analysis.”

She says, “Okay, then – vash your hands and make me a chocolate malt.”

I’m not one of those people with a huge storehouse of set jokes in my head. I know maybe five, and I can tell maybe one of them effectively. But I’ve heard plenty, Jewish and otherwise, and I disagree that “all characteristically Jewish humor has a profoundly religious foundation.” I see the joke I just related as characteristically Jewish, and it seems to me it has little to no religious foundation, as do many of the jokes I can think of. Some of them have to do with foolish people. Some have to do with self-deprecation. This one has to do with the joys of complaining:

A tall man,6’3”, somewhat overweight, is attempting to get comfortable in the small space of an upper-birth Pullman Sleeper on a train between Chicago and New York. He turns on his right side, then on his left, then on his stomach, then on his back. He plumps his pillow. Finally, the clackety-clack of the tracks begins to put him to sleep when from the other end of the sleeper car he hears a female voice: “Oy, am I thirsty! Oy, am I thirsty!” Over and over, at regular but all-too-short intervals, the voice calls out, “Oy, am I thirsty! Oy, am I thirsty!”

The man, realizing that sleep will be impossible if this woman’s thirst isn’t slaked, climbs out of his sleeper, puts on his bathrobe, and walks to the end of the car, where there is a water cooler and paper cups, one of which he fills. Following the sound of the voice – “Oy, am I thirsty! Oy, am I thirsty!” – he walks to the other end of the car and knocks gently. An older woman pulls back the drape that encloses her sleeper.

“Excuse me, Madame,” the man says, “I couldn’t help overhear that you were thirsty, and I thought perhaps this cup of water might help.”

“You, sir,” the woman says, “are a real gentleman. Thank you so much.” She takes the cup, and closes the drape.

The man climbs back into his own sleeper. Once again he struggles to find a comfortable position, turning and twisting every which way. Once again he plumps his pillow. Once again the rhythmic clacking of the tracks works its hypnotic spell and he is about to fall asleep when he hears the same voice call out: “Oy, was I thirsty! Oy, was I thirsty!”

I know a much longer and more elaborate version of that joke, one I think is superior. But it can only be told really successfully orally, because it relies in part on accents for its humor. In this version, instead of one man trying to sleep in another berth on the train and hearing the complaining woman, it involves a group of men playing poker in an adjacent club car. They hear the woman moaning about being thirsty (Brooklyn accent: “Oy, am I thoisty!). The joke-teller is supposed to draw it out much longer; they hear her over and over in an ever-escalating wail, from a soft moan to finally a really annoying yell (the joke teller must demonstrate this), over a period of a half-hour or so. Finally, one of the guys takes the cigar out of his mouth and yells back, “Lady, I’ll get you a drink if you just SHUT UP!” and he gets her the drink of water. She thanks him. A half-hour passes peacefully. And then they hear the low moan, “Oy, VAS I thoisty!”

This became a running joke between me and my husband and our son. Whenever something (mildly) unpleasant happened, and we were thinking back on it and about to say something about it, it was fun to preface it with “Oy, vas I thoisty!”

The Commentary challenge was to connect the joke with some Talmudic wisdom. I don’t know what it would be, but perhaps something to do with remembering Biblical travails so that we don’t forget our deliverance by God?

Sure enough, when I looked up the winning response, that was the gist of it. Along with another very funny joke:

Three rabbis, meeting over lunch, are discussing problems in their respective synagogues: gossip, fundraising, the fees for guest speakers.

“Excuse me, gentlemen,” one of the rabbis interjects, “I hope you won’t think this too trivial, but our synagogue has of late had an infestation of mice, which has been very disturbing, especially for our female congregants.”

The eyes of the other two rabbis light up, and each admits that his own synagogue has had the same problem. One asks the first rabbi what he has done about it.

“I arranged through our shammes to set more than 75 mouse traps throughout the synagogue. But it didn’t work out. The traps would sometimes go off during services, which was most distracting. The net result was that we caught four mice and still have the problem.”

“I called in Orkin, the exterminators,” says the second rabbi. “They caught a dozen or so mice and charged us $1,100. But we, too, still have mice in the synagogue. Most unpleasant.”

“Gentlemen,” announces the third rabbi, “I don’t mean to brag, but I was able completely to solve the mice problem in our synagogue, and at minimal cost.”

The first two rabbis eagerly ask how.

“Very simple,” the third rabbi says. “What I did was buy a 25-pound wheel of Chilton cheese, which I set on the bima. Lo, in no time at all, 243 mice appeared. I bar-mitzvahed them all, and, gentlemen, they never returned.”

If you don’t get that one, I’ll explain (although explaining a joke does not generally enhance it; you either get it or you don’t). For many American Jews, they take religious instruction until their Bar or Bat Mitzvahs and never again return to the synagogue.

Hey, let’s get rid of the Star-Spangled Banner!

The New Neo Posted on by

Not for the reason you might think we should get rid of it—that it’s nearly unsingable.

No, the reason is because the third verse—the one virtually no one had ever heard of before, much less sung—is supposedly racist. Maybe or maybe not. After all, the NAACP of California says it is, and that the whole anthem should therefore be jettisoned.

Historians differ greatly on the matter, and if you care to see their arguments, read this and this, for example.

I’m pretty old, and I still remember learning the song in school—not all four verses (which no one ever sings), but the first and fourth, which I still can sing from memory. Not only that, before yesterday I can’t remember having even heard or read verses two and three (the latter being the one with the disputed meaning), and I would wager most people have never heard them either.

So I have a novel idea. If the third verse offends, then how about cutting it from the song? No one would have even noticed without the big brouhaha. But this is about proving America is an irredeemably racist country, steeped in racism, macerating in racism, and for penance the anthem can’t be expurgated; it must be expunged.

I’ve not seen an article that suggests what should replace it. I’ve long been rather partial to “God Bless America,” but that’s out for obvious reasons. “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” is really “God Save the Queen,” so that won’t do. And then there’s always “America the Beautiful”—but its lyrics mention the deity as well.

Hey, let’s just do away with a national anthem. We don’t really deserve one, do we?

Montreal bagels

The New Neo Posted on by

A while back I sang the praises of the Montreal version of the pastrami sandwich, sampled on a recent visit to that city. Sublime.

I’d heard similar over-the-top praise for the bagels there. Now, bagels are one of those things that come in many different styles, and unfortunately their extreme popularity has led to the proliferation of a sort of cakey soft type in the US rather than the chewy toothsomeness of the original (and best!) kind. Even in the fairly Jewish city of Los Angeles, the softish cakey kind are pretty much the only kind you can get—or the only kind I’ve been able to find.

Bagels have also grown remarkably in size, like so many modern food items.

So I was looking forward to the Montreal version, rumored to be authentic and authentically modest in size. After walking about five miles to get to the very best bagel place in the city (don’t remember the name), I was initially encouraged. They looked good; they looked right. And the method, boiled and then baked, was correct. But they were cakey, like most US bagels in supermarkets, albeit with a hard chewy crust and a nice irregular shape, and not swollen to gargantuan proportions like so many modern-day bagels. They were also sweetish.

Bummer. I threw the remainder of mine out.

Anyone had a good bagel lately in Montreal? Or anywhere?

On the phenomenon of racist graffiti in schools

The New Neo Posted on by

Another one bites the dust:

An Air Force Academy cadet candidate once thought the victim of racial slurs at the preparatory school on campus was actually the vandal who scrawled the threatening messages across the note boards outside his room and the dwellings of classmates.

The academy confirmed that finding Tuesday afternoon, and stood by a stern speech given by its top general in the wake of the incident. Lt. Gen. Jay Silveria gathered cadets and staff members for a speech that has gone viral in videos posted across the internet. He said that those who can’t respect others “need to get out.”

“Regardless of the circumstances under which those words were written, they were written, and that deserved to be addressed,” Silveria said in a Tuesday email. “You can never over-emphasize the need for a culture of dignity and respect – and those who don’t understand those concepts, aren’t welcome here.”

I’ve noticed over the years that nearly every incident of racist graffiti at colleges and universities gets a huge amount of attention and outrage and turns out to be self-perpetuated, a kind of racism Munchausen’s syndrome. I guess the perpetrators consider that it’s worth the publicity and works as propaganda, and maybe it does. It’s certainly long been a favorite ploy of the left. After all, how many people hear only the initial report and never get the memo on the correction?

However, I am certain that racism exists and that there are racists on college campuses. They come in all races, and some are obviously going to be white people who are racist towards black people. But most of them are not scrawling racist graffiti in public places, whatever might be going on in their secret heart of hearts.

It has gotten to the point where every time I hear one of these stories about graffiti, and hear administrators solemnly lecture their student bodies about it, I think “Wait and see.”

In this case, the student involved (who is unnamed) may have been…:

…[acting] in a bizarre bid to get out of trouble he faced at the school for other misconduct. The prep school offers a year of training for academy prospects who need academic help. The school is primarily used to fill athletic rosters for the academy’s 37 NCAA teams.

This is not the only problem at the school:

Several players and coaches from the academy lacrosse team were suspended last month for unspecified misconduct.

Additionally, the school is investigating 13 freshmen accused of cheating on a test of basic military knowledge. The test includes simple questions, some asking cadets to recite quotes and name key military leaders.

This is very disturbing. The rot seems rather widespread. The Air Force is not having a good week otherwise, either, having been implicated in negligent mishandling of the reporting of offenses committed by the Texas church shooter while in the service, thereby failing to stop him from legally purchasing a gun when he should not have been able to do so. It also follows major problems at West Point.

What’s going on here? I’d say the Gramscian march is going on.

One year later: Trump the unlikely populist

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Today is the one-year anniversary of the 2016 election, so I thought I’d repeat a post I wrote about Trump in August of 2015, when it was beginning to dawn on me that he was a very serious contender.]

I watched Trump’s speech in Mobile last night without ever planning to do so. I was flipping around looking for something to watch on TV (in the background while I was doing some cooking) and noticed that CNN was showing it with comprehensive, wall-to-wall coverage, as though it was of the same importance as a State of the Union message.

That in and of itself got my attention. Not only that, the commentary at CNN seemed surprisingly respectful and even serious—not a lot of mocking and derision. So I watched, despite the fact that (as regular readers here know) I don’t like to listen to political speeches.

Of course, Trump giving a political speech is not like anyone else giving a political speech. He’s in his element in front of a crowd. And even in Alabama, the New York shtick that you would think wouldn’t play so well there seems to be something they love when Trump does it. People are really really really sick of feeling impotent as Obama has thumbed his nose at them and lied to them, as the GOP has either disappointed or outright betrayed them, and as PC thought has taken over our values, education, the press, some churches, and many novels and movies.

Trump seems immune from PC considerations and also from the ubiquitous need to be beholden to conventional donors. He has the advantage of his familiarity to the public and his relaxation in front of the camera gained from years of being a showman and a TV personality. Trump has a populist appeal—you could see it very clearly during his speech—but he’s a rich-as-Croesus populist who doesn’t trash the rich as so many populists do; au contraire. Nor does he apologize for being mega-rich himself; he brags.

Trump has mastered not just the “art of the deal” but the art of giving a speech that sounds like ad-libbing stream-of-consciousness but is not. As he went along it occurred to me that what he is doing is cheerleading for America, reiterating over and over what he would do for America and what he would do for the people he is speaking to, and fitting his words to their desire that America be what it once was. It’s the flip side of Obama’s hope and change: they hope that he can change things back to a time when America was great, and that’s his explicit message and the slogan on the very flyover-country-looking hats he wears and sells. This is a guy who knows marketing, and it’s no accident that the slogan is also pretty much what Reagan used in 1980 (Reagan put the word “let’s” at the beginning of the phrase, but otherwise it was exactly the same).

Trump is a happy warrior, or at least talks like one. “I will rebuild the military so it’s so strong and so powerful that we’ll never have to use it. No one will ever mess with us” is a typical utterance. He lists stuff—trade, health care, women’s health issues—and says “we’re gonna fix it.” And I guess people believe him, or at least believe he’s sincere about trying. How he’ll get around the impediments that stand in the way is unclear, but people don’t want clarity. They like his style. They like his spirit

“We have a great lack of spirit,” said Trump, and he’s right; and he’s out to provide it, and he does. He says he had thought Obama would be “a great cheerleader,” (hmmm, I thought; I just perceived him as a cheerleader a moment ago, and now he’s using the word). Instead, Obama is “a great divider.” But Trump? “I am going to make this country bigger and stronger and better and you’re gonna love it, and you’re gonna love your president…and you’re gonna be so proud.”

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I’m not a Trump supporter, but that I also get his appeal. Watching him speak at length, I “got” it even more. He makes all other politicians look boring and stilted (hey, many of them are boring and stilted). He makes it all sound so simple—just as Obama did, but in a completely different direction and with a completely, and I mean completely, different style. Populist appeal is a neat trick in a man who’s a multi-billionaire and who grew up in enormous wealth and graduated from Wharton. But he’s got it, and although I’m sure he carefully nurtures it he manages to make it look natural.

From the start of Trump’s rise in the polls I’ve taken him very seriously as a phenomenon. I haven’t understood those who casually asserted “He’s never going to win the nomination.” I’ve long thought he could, because the force of that appeal is obvious, and he’s somehow made himself immune to being criticized for anything he says. His niche is “the more outrageous, the better,” and the more extreme his utterances the more his supporters seem to like him—although not all of what he says is extreme, of course, and some is just common sense.

If I were one of the other Republican candidates I’d be very very scared. And if I were one of the Democratic candidates I’d be scared, too.

ADDENDUM, November 8, 2017:

The Trump victory was nevertheless unexpected, and it was accompanied by GOP control of the US Congress. Since then, the GOP has not managed to unite and the Democrats—though also warring between their own (leftist) “establishment” wing and their (even more leftist) Sanders/Warren wing—seem more united at the moment than the GOP. Trump gives the Democrats something to hate, and hatred is a great unifier.

I wonder whether Trump’s victory last year was merely a function of his very idiosyncratic personality and qualities, plus a backlash to eight years of Obama as well as the unusual dislikability of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. Can a lasting GOP trend be built on that? I don’t think so; the GOP probably won’t find such a combination of favorable factors again. I am very worried about the results of yesterday’s legislative elections in Virginia, and what they might portend for the future. That Gramscian and demographic march of the left does not seem to have abated, and the GOP doesn’t seem to know how to fight it.

Sorry to be so pessimistic.