Millennials discover mid-level cities

The New Neo Posted on by

It doesn’t surprise me.

I never wanted to live in New York, although I grew up there and most of the people I knew wanted to stay there the rest of their lives—and have done so.

Not me. I always felt overwhelmed by Manhattan. Not in the sense that I couldn’t find my way around (I could); it was the vastness of it and in particular the crush of people and the idea of trying to claw my way up towards the top of a very huge and simultaneously-clawing heap.

I loved the Broadway theater (back then; not so much now) and the dance and all the other cultural choices possible. But I knew it wasn’t going to be the place I’d be staying as an adult.

These days, with home and apartment prices having skyrocketed, I can understand why more and more young people have decided that first-tier cities with enormously expensive real estate markets are not where they’re going to settle and raise a family.

Enter, places like Indianapolis and Louisville:

After a decade of investment in parks and greenspace, homegrown tech hubs, and downtown redevelopment, many small and mid-size metros are seeing more signs of life and increased migration, according to a recent Brookings Institution analysis of U.S. Census data. This comes at a time when larger superstar cities are seeing slower population growth and an uptick in domestic out-migration.

Cities such as Madison, Wisconsin, and Indianapolis, Indiana, have thrived due to the growing tech scenes, including headquarters for large companies such as Epic and Salesforce, respectively, as well as investments in public infrastructure, such as the Indianapolis Cultural Trail and Madison-area bike trails. Silicon Valley investors see possibility in the Midwest. AOL founder Steve Case’s Revolution’s Rise of the Rest seed fund plans to invest $150 million in new companies in the region, especially in sectors such as health care, agriculture, transportation, finance, and manufacturing.

Louisville has made similar strides in recent years, investing millions of dollars in an expansion of its Frederick Law Olmsted-designed park system, adding a new convention center and a pair of hotels to the recently coined NuLu neighborhood, and building new apartments downtown. Mayor Greg Fischer brags about $12.5 billion in economic development in the region.

It’s happening to smaller cities, too. One of the problems with it all, though, which the article doesn’t mention, is that as smaller cities or large towns become more gentrified (which is actually what the article is describing), the lower economic tier of the population starts having to leave for less-discovered towns.

I’ve seen it happen many times in New England. A sleepy town with lots of housing and economic variety gets discovered and heats up in terms of the housing market, and the rise and then the exodus begins.

“Unfettered power”

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember the Paul Manafort case? The judge there (T. S. Ellis, a Reagan appointee) is not pleased with the Mueller crew:

“You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort,” U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III told Mueller’s team. “You really care about what information Mr. Manafort can give you to lead you to Mr. Trump and an impeachment, or whatever.”…

The Reagan-appointed judge asked Mueller’s team where they got the authority to indict Manafort on alleged crimes dating as far back as 2005…

“We don’t want anyone with unfettered power,” he said.

Mueller’s team says its authorities are laid out in documents including the August 2017 scope memo ”“ and that some powers are actually secret because they involve ongoing investigations and national security matters that cannot be publicly disclosed.

[Judge] Ellis seemed amused and not persuaded.

He summed up the argument of the Special Counsel’s Office as, “We said this was what [the] investigation was about, but we are not bound by it and we were lying.”

He referenced the common exclamation from NFL announcers, saying: “C’mon man!”

The judge also gave the government two weeks to hand over the unredacted “scope memo” or provide an explanation why not — after prosecutors were reluctant to do so, claiming it has material that doesn’t pertain to Manafort.

“I’ll be the judge of that,” Ellis said.

That last sentence indicates that Judge Ellis seems to have a considerable amount of wit.

The WaPo is covering the story as well.

I became curious about Judge Ellis himself. All that the article mentioned about him was that he was a Reagan appointee. Looking him up in Wiki (the only profile I could find), I see that he has a very Ivy-League-ish resume:

Born on May 15, 1940, in Bogoté¡, Colombia, Ellis graduated from Princeton University where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Engineering in 1961. Ellis served in the United States Navy as a Naval aviator from 1961 to 1966. Ellis earned a Juris Doctor, magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 1969. Harvard awarded Ellis a Knox Fellowship for study in England. He then received a Diploma in Law in 1970 from Magdalen College, Oxford University. Ellis then entered private practice with the law firm of Hunton & Williams (now Hunton & Williams LLP), located in Richmond, Virginia, where he remained until 1987.

Ellis was appointed by Reagan in 1987, and is now 77 years old. He also appears to be African American [see NOTE* below]. I would imagine he has an interesting life story, but I can’t seem to find much about it. For example, is his name—T. S. Ellis—some sort of reference to T. S. Eliot, or is that a coincidence? And what’s the Bogota angle?

[NOTE*: I was busy all day and evening yesterday, so it took me a while to get to the point of being able to check on that race question. But it turns out that the photo I saw earlier—the photo that was with Ellis’s profile, was captioned “T. S. Ellis”, and looked like a black man—was actually of former Louisiana Rep. William Jefferson, whose trial Ellis presided over.

For example, if you use Firefox and Google “T. S. Ellis,” as I did yesterday and did just now, look to the right of the page. You’ll see the beginnings of a profile of Ellis, but the photo is of Jefferson. Strange.]

Dershowitz is hopping mad

The New Neo Posted on by

I wouldn’t want to tussle with an angry, fired-up Dershowitz. The MSNBC guys in this video (don’t know their names) try to counter with their talking points, but to no avail.

Of course, this interview occurred before NBC had to eat crow and take back the story that Cohen was wiretapped, so the whole “if they’re wiretapping him there must have been a really serious offense!” argument on the left is now moot. But Dershowitz’s anger isn’t moot; he’s absolutely correct about the wrongness of finding an available crime in order to “get” the target, rather than the other way around. It’s especially bad when the target is the president of the US and you are his political enemy:

I love the irony of the reference to Tom Winter at the end there, called in to “clear this up.” Winter is the guy who broke the story and then had to walk it back.

There are more things in heaven and earth…

The New Neo Posted on by

…than are dreamt of in your philosophy:

The individual galaxies in galaxy clusters are held together by dark matter, according to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. During the universe’s first few million years, dark matter (and normal matter) began to collect into larger concentrations, eventually creating galaxy clusters. Some clusters are thought to contain up to thousands of galaxies.

To study the formation stage the protocluster was exhibiting, researchers ran observational data from the ALMA telescope through computer simulations. The two teams found that what they were witnessing occurred less than 1.4 billion years after the big bang. However, existing theoretical and computer models suggest that a protocluster as large as SPT2349-56 should have taken much longer to evolve.

“How this assembly of galaxies got so big, so fast is a mystery,” Tim Miller, a doctoral candidate at Yale University and lead author of one of the papers, said in the statement. “It wasn’t built up gradually over billions of years, as astronomers might expect. This discovery provides a great opportunity to study how massive galaxies came together to build enormous galaxy clusters.”

[NOTE: Hamlet said it.]

NBC does an Emily Litella on the “Trump’s lawyer was wiretapped” story

The New Neo Posted on by

That video is one of my favorites, and I’ve had occasion to use it over and over—and over and over—in the 13 years I’ve been blogging. And just about always, the reference is to something the MSM has done.

This time it’s the story in the post right below this one, that the feds wiretapped Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer, and even listened in on one of his calls with Trump. When I wrote that post I expressed some skepticism about the report’s truth, and based that on a quote by Giuliani (who’s knowledgeable about the governing law), my own recollections (admittedly ancient) from my law school career, mistrust of the MSM, and a gut feeling.

NBC must have been pleased as punch to break this story, but they probably weren’t quite as pleased to retract—I mean “correct” it just a few hours later:

NBC News issued an on-air correction to their bombshell story Thursday reporting that a federal wiretap was placed on Michael Cohen’s phone. NBC said federal authorities were “monitoring” phone calls of President Trump’s lawyer, but not listening to them as previously reported. Authorities obtained a log of Cohen’s phone calls, known as a “pen register,” NBC quoted three senior U.S. officials as saying.

I happen to have been in my car doing errands this afternoon, and I also happen to have been doing something unusual at the same time—listening to talk radio for a few minutes. It was Howie Carr, who’s often very sardonically funny, and he’d just been saying that maybe it was a pen register instead of a wiretap, when Bam! The correction came in.

He mentioned that when he was a young reporter he had to cover the local police beat, and that’s where he learned about things like wiretaps vs. pen registers. But young reporters today are “journalists,” and most of them have no idea about the world outside of journalism, and therefore they don’t know when they should be smelling something fishy.

Nor, perhaps, do they care, as long as they get the clicks or the views.

I’m not sure how old Tom Winter—who broke the story and then had to correct it—is. But his LinkedIn site indicates someone around forty or early forties. That’s old enough to know better, but his background doesn’t seem to include covering a police beat as a reporter, or covering anything as a print reporter at all. It all seems to be broadcast news.

He describes himself this way:

I am an energetic, aggressive, responsible, and driven journalist. Specializing in breaking news, creativity in live production, and knowledgeable of the business of broadcasting.

“Specializing in breaking news”—that means speed is of the essence. “Aggressive” and “driven”—likewise. “Responsible”? Not so much, I’m afraid. Why didn’t he interview those “three senior U. S. officials” first, not later?

But I’m not going to be too hard on Tom Winter. He’s just a person who came up in an environment that values speed rather than accuracy, and that’s so focused these days on getting Trump that it’s “driven” to break any story that might reflect badly on him. Winter’s just one of the crowd, and his bosses probably don’t care. In fact, this story may have been purposely aired before it was fully checked, because it was sure to get a lot of publicity and readers.

As a blogger, I have to write very very quickly. I don’t have access to sources, either, except for open sources. I try to be accurate, careful, and cautious—I’ve learned that I must be very very cautious.

I’ve made a few mistakes so far, and I’ll probably make more, but considering everything I think my track record of accuracy vs. skepticism is quite good. But it galls me that the MSM still finds it necessary to hold themselves out as so much more trustworthy than mere bloggers. I wonder how many people believe that these days.

Reports are that the feds tapped Michael Cohen’s phone…

The New Neo Posted on by

[See UPDATE above.]

…and that at least one call with President Trump was recorded.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders referred questions about the wiretap to the President’s outside counsel.

One of Trump’s attorneys, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, told The Daily Beast that he doesn’t believe the reports of a wiretap, adding if it did turn out to be accurate, the wiretaps would be “totally illegal.”

“Us lawyers have talked about it, we don’t believe it’s true,” Giuliani told the publication. “We think it’s going to turn out to be untrue because it would be totally illegal. You can’t wiretap a lawyer, you certainly can’t wiretap his client who’s not involved in the investigation.”

That’s why I said “reports are.”

I have no idea whether this is true or not. So many things reported by the MSM have turned out to be untrue. If true, it’s unprecendented (as far as I know) to tap a president’s personal lawyer’s phone and record calls with that president.

But a lot of unprecedented things have been happening lately, haven’t they? It’s lawfare, Jake.

Oh, and the anti-Trump group are saying that of course, since it’s so difficult to get such an order, that must mean that the crime they were investigating was really awful, because they had to follow all these highly stringent safeguards.

Like with the FISA court and the Steele dossier.

More thoughtcrime

The New Neo Posted on by

It started with the judicial decisions that put a stay on Trump’s “Muslim ban”-that-was-not-a-Muslim-ban because the courts decided his real intent—based on some much earlier campaign statements—was to institute an actual Muslim ban.

I wrote back then:

In other related news, the legal reasoning several judges used to invalidate Trump’s immigration EOs””that his campaign statements were extremely relevant and indicated his supposedly discriminatory intent in issuing the orders as president””leads inevitably to preposterous conclusions such as these:

ACLU lawyer Omar Jadwat, arguing today before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, told the court that President Trump’s travel order “could be constitutional” if it had been written by Hillary Clinton”¦

The last part of the audio is rather funny. Jadwat, asked whether the order on its face is valid, says No. Why? “I don’t think so, Your Honor, because the order is completely unprecedented.” To which one of the Fourth Circuit judges replies, with astonishment that seems mostly genuine: “So the first order on anything is invalid?”

In his post, John Hinderaker calls that kind of legal argument “lawless nonsense.” But such lawless nonsense follows directly from the judicial decisions handed down against Trump’s EO. As the rulings were issued it became clear””because of the liberal judges’ reliance on Trump’s supposed thoughtcrime, as evidenced in some of his campaign statements””that no subsequent EO of Trump’s on immigration that involved any majority Muslim country would ever be held constitutional by these judges, no matter how carefully and fairly drafted. Trump had committed the original sin during the campaign, and all the perfumes of Arabia cannot sweeten that little hand.

In other words, the order itself was probably perfectly fine, but it was Trump’s prior campaign statements that made the judges suspicious of it. Thoughtcrime.

So now Robert Mueller is intent on finding more Trumpian thoughtcrime [emphasis mine]:

A president should not be subjected to prosecutorial scrutiny over poor judgment, venality, bad taste, or policy disputes. Absent concrete evidence that the president has committed a serious crime, the checks on the president should be Congress and the ballot box ”” and the civil courts, to the extent that individuals are harmed by abusive executive action. Otherwise, a special-counsel investigation ”” especially one staffed by the president’s political opponents ”” is apt to become a thinly veiled political scheme, enabling the losers to relitigate the election and obstruct the president from pursuing the agenda on which he ran.

That is what we are now witnessing…

The list of [Mueller’s questions for Trump] elucidates that Mueller is pursuing the legally suspect theory that legitimate exercises of presidential prerogatives can become prosecutable obstruction crimes if undertaken with an arguably corrupt motive. This theory is specious on at least two grounds.

First, it would empower a subordinate executive official (an unelected bureaucrat who serves at the president’s pleasure) to second-guess the chief executive’s every action and judgment ”” not just to investigate a patent, serious crime but to question what the president was thinking even when his actions were within his constitutional authority. The president is answerable to peer branches and to voters, but not down his chain of command. If an order is lawful, it is not the captain’s place to question the general’s motives.

Second, the corrupt-motive theory is factually meritless as applied to Trump. Whatever pressure Trump may have brought to bear regarding Flynn’s investigation, it had zero impact. Comey has testified that the FBI disregarded Trump’s comments. The Flynn investigation proceeded without a hitch, and Mueller ultimately charged and convicted him. Trump could have ordered the investigation to be shut down, but he let it continue…

We have, at most, a politicized, hyper-technical claim of obstruction that rests on a suspect legal theory and a dearth of evidence that anyone was impeded in the slightest. Those are frivolous grounds for an investigation that compromises the president’s capacity to govern. The criminal law inquires into intent when actions patently violate criminal statutes; its purpose is not to manufacture crime by speculating about the intent behind apparently lawful actions.

But even before the Mueller questions made it clear that that manufacturing crime on Trump’s part is what Mueller is trying to do, the courts already were manufacturing—if not a crime, then a claim of unconstitutionality based on the speculative intent behind apparently lawful actions. So, that horse has already left the barn, unless a SCOTUS decision puts it firmly back in again. And as far as I know, the Supreme Court has never ruled on the merits of that aspect of the lower courts’ decisions.

Collusion: getting the dossier word out

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the things about the dossier/collusion imbroglio is that its complexity makes it difficult (or at least labor-intensive) for people to follow. I doubt that most people take the trouble to do so, and therefore the MSM has the opportunity to shape perceptions through slanted and simplistic headlines.

But here’s a succinct summary (hat tip: commenter Barry Meislin):

CNN has never disclosed the close relationship between Evan Perez, one of the reporters on the Jan. 10, 2017 story, and his former Wall Street Journal colleagues who went on to start Fusion GPS, including the company’s founder Glenn Simpson. Nor did the Merriman Smith prize committee acknowledge how the dossier on which the leading lights of the news business have again staked their institutional credibility was disseminated to the public.

That story is now coming into focus with the recent release of seven government documents that together detail a working partnership between spy agencies and the press that helped a political attack meme go viral, even though the evidence on which it was based was demonstrably false. While this type of relationship””let’s call it collusion””may be routine in Third World countries, it does not bode well for the health of the American press, or our democratic institutions.

No it does not. But if this is happening, it’s best we learn about it.

…[T]housands of articles on the Trump-Russia collusion story have been spoon-fed to a pliant digital press by cabals of political operatives and ex-spooks. Lies, innuendo, wild conspiracy theorizing, and the insistent assumption of guilt have replaced old-fashioned rules of sourcing, objectivity, and basic plausibility. While the social cost of this radical departure from these century-old norms is likely to be high, it has acquired two main forms of justification, the twin pillars of the new press.

The first reason, popular on both the left and among the Never Trump coterie on the right, is the assertion that Trump is a dangerous fascist who is on the verge of overthrowing the rule of law in America, an emergency that, if real, might indeed call for extreme measures, like throwing the principles of evidence-based reporting out the window. The problem with this argument being that however obvious and galling the man’s flaws are, no evidence for the thesis that Donald Trump intends to do away with Congress and the courts and rule by his own Trumpian fiat exists, at least not on planet earth. The assertion that such evidence does exist is the province of lunatics, and of people who find it useful to goose them on social media, or take their money.

But powerful people looking to “cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil” nearly always justify their activities by saying they are dealing with a desperate emergency that requires desperate measures.

Not your father’s Boy Scouts

The New Neo Posted on by

A new name, a new policy: “Scouts BSA”:

The parent organization will remain the Boy Scouts of America, and the Cub Scouts ”” its program for 7- to 10-year-olds ”” will keep its title as well.

But the Boy Scouts ”” the program for 11- to 17-year-olds ”” will now be Scouts BSA.

The organization has already started admitting girls into the Cub Scouts, and Scouts BSA begins accepting girls next year.

Surbaugh predicted that both boys and girls in Scouts BSA would refer to themselves simply as scouts, rather than adding “boy” or “girl” as a modifier.

As far as I can tell, the reasons aren’t just the usual PC stuff, although of course that’s operating—as it seems to be everywhere. Are there any unisex enclaves available anymore? But behind this move also seems to be the fact that both Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts have been losing membership in recent years. Hardest hit (potentially, anyway) by this Boy Scout rebranding is the Girl Scouts, as one might expect.

Given the choice of a co-ed experience or an all-girls’ experience, I’m not sure what girls (or their parents) will choose. When I was a kid, of course, there was no such thing, and I wouldn’t have wanted it, particularly at an early age. By the time I was a teenager my scouting days were long past me. To tell the truth, the only reason I ever had joined—first at the Brownie level, then as a Girl Scout—was that just about all my friends were members, plus the uniforms.

But mostly, the uniforms. I confess it. We used to meet once a week after classes—at school, not at a parent’s house—and we got to wear our uniforms to school all day. My uniform made me feel very very snazzy. The rest of it I remember as a total bore, except the songs we sang. I was not really Scout material.

The uniforms have changed considerably, but this is what we wore:

I never got up to sash level.

Maxine Waters tells Kanye West to shut up

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, not in so many words. But that’s exactly what she’s saying—and in doing so she comes close to calling him “boy” or perhaps “stupid.” Imagine if a white person had said this:

“Kanye West is a very creative young man who has presented some of the most revolutionary material in the African-American community,” she replied. “But we also think that sometimes Kanye West talks out of turn and perhaps sometimes he needs some assistance in helping him to formulate some of his thoughts.”

She said West should think about the impact of his words and “maybe not have so much to say.”

“We don’t think that he actually means to do harm,” she added, “but we’re not sure he really understands the impact of what he’s saying, at the time that he’s saying it and how that weighs on, particularly the African American community ”” and for young people in general. … And I think maybe he should think twice about politics, and maybe not have so much to say.”

Physician, heal thyself.

I actually think that West has thought at least twice about politics. And I really do think that he clearly “understands the impact of what he’s saying.” At least, the potential impact.

And I think Waters understands it, too, and is absolutely terrified that “the African American community—and young people in general” might start thinking a bit differently and questioning leaders like Waters.

Interesting times; interesting times.

[Hat tip: Juliette Akinyi Ochieng (baldilocks).]

[NOTE: Apparently, Trump has been mentioned in quite a few hip/hop songs for many years, even prior to his presidential campaign:

Trump’s name first appeared in hip hop lyrics during the 1980s when the business mogul became an icon of the ultra rich. Among the earliest mentions of Trump in rap lyrics was the Beastie Boys’ 1989 track “Johnny Ryall”, in which they pit Donald Trump alongside his homeless alter-ego, Donald Tramp.

While many rappers praise Trump’s wealth, usually comparing their own financial aspirations or success to that of the billionaire businessman, others have used their music as a platform to criticize Trump’s practices and politics….

ESPN’s political site FiveThirtyEight documented that between 1989 and 2014, 19% of song lyrics about Trump were negative while 60% were positive.

Later the mentions were more frequently negative, as one might imagine.]