Speaking of refrigerators…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and we certainly have been speaking of refrigerators lately—

I read my new fridge’s manual yesterday. I was looking for instructions on how to integrate some little egg holders that came with it: where do they go? What is the little metal gizmo that came in the bag with them?

Alas, the manual was mum on the subject. But it had a lot to say to the people who apparently like to use their refrigerators in unusual ways limited only by the human imagination.

Here are some quotes. I’m going to assume that this first one is directed at children:

“Do not swing from the door or bottle racks on the door.”

And this was really puzzling at first:

“Do not use electrical appliances inside the refrigerator.”

But it was explained—sort of—by this one:

“Do not use a hair dryer to dry the inside of the refrigerator.”

And then we have this:

“Do not place lighted candles in the refrigerator…”

WTF? Lighted candles??? But the rest of the sentence was quite a bit more—illuminating:

“…to remove odors.”

Okay, so somewhere there’s a block of people who put lighted candles in their fridges in an attempt to remove odors. But does that instruction mean it’s okay to place lighted candles in the refrigerator to do something other than remove odors? Inquiring minds want to know.

Then there’s:

“Do not spray volatile materials such as insecticide on any surface of the appliance.”

The need has never come up in my entire life, but I’ll take it under advisement.

Then we have some more practical advice:

“Food consumed daily should be placed on the front part of the shelves. This can avoid unnecessary delays in door opening as well as expiration of the storage period because you forgot to eat it.”

I do often forget to eat food and it goes bad, which makes me very sad. But it’s not food I ordinarily eat on a daily basis and have forgotten to put in the front.

And did you know?:

“Do not store foods with high moisture content in contact with the inner walls. Otherwise the food may freeze to the walls.”

I must say that in all my years of using a refrigerator I’ve never faced that problem, and I bet neither have you.

More advice:

“Some vegetables, for example onion, garlic, ginger, water chestnut and other prismatic foods, can be stored for long periods at normal temperature. There is no need to store them in the refrigerator.”

Prismatic foods? Whaaa?? I looked it up online, and there is no such thing.

Also, there’s a troubleshooting part of the manual in which one of the entries is “Refrigerator is dirty.” The solution they propose is that you clean it. Thank you, manual writers!

Organizing takes time

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m puzzled by the number of things-to-do on my things-to-do list. Many of the tasks are large (“re-do blog template”; “plan vacation”; “write book”) and some seem smaller but end up taking a lot of time anyway (“get present for X”; “do laundry”; “buy a tenkeyless keyboard”—and no, I’m not a gamer, but that sort of keyboard is most comfortable for me).

And there are many, many more things on that list. One of them—“get new fridge”—I’ve taken care of. But like many such tasks, that turns out to not be the end of it. The fridge continues to be great, and it’s much fuller now—

—and I still like it, although every now and then it makes the odd groaning noise that I’m informed is normal, and I’m still getting used to its stylish-but-annoying lack of a handle. However, the acquisition of this wonderful fridge has led to the need to organize the innards of that fridge better, which yesterday led to a trip to Target to get some innards-organizing stuff (you can see the lovely carousel on that top shelf, for example, one of yesterday’s purchases).

This all takes not only money and time, but thought. You may laugh at that—how much thought can it possibly take? But organization of my spatial surroundings doesn’t come naturally to me, although I crave it. I tend to let things accumulate for years, ignoring the clutter which isn’t on a hoarder scale but still is more than I like to see. I’ve got a small place, and my closets and cupboards are brimful of stuff that I put in there long ago and no longer need. I have no idea what at least half of it is—it’s been in there and up there so long, untouched, that I’ve forgotten.

I’m on an organizing kick now. It’s taking far longer than I thought it would, although I’ve been hard at work. But I get up on a stepstool and pick up an object and then stand there, pondering. Do I really need this? That takes a while. Then, if I think I still might want to have it around, where best to put it? That takes a lot longer, and often involves going through a whole other bunch of stuff in another cupboard, in an organizing chain-reaction.

The upshot is that it’s taking more time to do this than I ever thought it would, my place is a mess at the moment and has been for a week or two, and yet my cupboards and closets are looking a lot better. And all this despite the fact that I haven’t even touched the stuff—mostly photos and scrapbooks and paper—I brought to my place when my mother died five years ago. I did some preliminary weeding and filing back then, and after that I just shoved the remnant into a few boxes where they still sit in an obscure and difficult-to-see corner.

I’m in awe of people who are always organized and whose homes are always clean. How do you do it, folks? And yes, I’ve read how-to-declutter books. But clutter isn’t really my problem; I don’t have so much stuff, I just have a small space and not that much storage.

Know-nothing McCabe

The New Neo Posted on by

Andrew McCabe works for the FBI. He was the deputy director beginning in February of 2016, then from May to August he was the FBI’s director, and now he’s the deputy again.

On Wednesday McCabe was called in front of the House Intelligence Committee and questioned for seven hours:

On a number of occasions, when asked about what in the [Trump] dossier had been corroborated by the FBI, McCabe gave answers such as ”” these are not precise quotes ”” I can’t answer that, or I don’t know how to answer that. Indeed, that was McCabe’s answer when he was asked for the most important piece of information in the dossier that the FBI had been able to verify.

At one point, McCabe was reminded that another top FBI official had months ago told the House that the bureau had not been able to corroborate the dossier. McCabe’s response was noncommittal.

After the questioning established that McCabe would not verify any substantive allegation in the dossier, he was asked if he stood by its veracity. McCabe said he did.

All this information about McCabe’s testimony comes from leaks, by the way, because it’s a closed-door session. From what I’ve read, it’s not clear to me whether McCabe was saying he just didn’t know the answers or whether he was saying he didn’t feel it was right to offer the answers. If he thought that his responses were unlikely to remain a secret, one can understand why. But if that was it, why not say so?

Here’s a little more:

When pushed for examples of what was verified in the anti-Trump dossier, McCabe was only able to identify the fact that Trump campaign advisor Carter Page traveled to Moscow ”” McCabe could not even verify anything about the meetings that Page supposedly had.

“The sources said that when asked when he learned that the dossier had been funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, McCabe claimed he could not recall ”” despite the reported existence of documents with McCabe’s own signature on them establishing his knowledge of the dossier’s financing and provenance.”

Clear as mud.

Never trust a man over 30

The New Neo Posted on by

The saying became a cliche (see above), but the idea that you shouldn’t trust anyone over 30 was coined during the Berkeley Free Speech movement of the mid-1960s. Those who said it, and believed it, have now been untrustworthy (over 30, that is) for many a long year.

I was reminded of the saying when I saw the headline to this article about Jodie Foster’s recent comments on the sexual harassment accusations in Hollywood and elsewhere:

“It’s every industry,” the actress said Wednesday. “It’s not just one socioeconomic bracket or one complexion. Pretty much every man over 30 has to really look and start thinking about their part. And I guarantee, lots of it is unconscious. When you’ve been in a privileged position where you haven’t had to look at your part, you didn’t 100 percent understand you were in a bubble. It’s an interesting time for men.

Oh, it’s an “interesting” time, all right.

And why the exception for those under 30? Foster added:

“I have two sons (ages 16 and 19), and I know their perspective,” the 55-year-old told the newspaper. “They go to a great school that has put them through the wringer about what consent is, what is humanism, what’s integrity. I just wish my generation had the benefit of that, and that everybody had the benefit of that.”

Perhaps some day we all will have the “benefit” of being “put through the wringer” of PC education or re-education. Till then, though, we’ll have to rely on our moral betters such as Foster.

And yes, yes, Foster is a lesbian. But I don’t think that’s so strong a factor here. What Foster said is non-controversial—maybe even mild—compared to the more strongly anti-male statements of some women who are quite heterosexual.

And then there other factors unique to Foster that may have been more relevant. I happen to basically like Foster as an actress, and remember her as an exceptionally talented (and precocious) kid actress. And because I remember her as a kid actress, I wonder what things she was subject to back then.

For example, you may remember (I certainly do) that Foster played a child prostitute in the 1976 film “Taxi Driver.” The prostitute was supposed to be twelve years old, and (unlike with many such situations, where the child is played by a somewhat older actor or actress) Foster herself was only twelve years old at the time.

That seemed like a bad idea then and it still seems like a bad idea now. Foster appeared to be a tough and mature kid, but twelve is twelve. It may have made for a better film, but (according to something I found by Googling it just now), Foster says it was very uncomfortable during the making of that film:

“They were very uncomfortable about my character. Nobody knew how to direct me.

“Scorsese would say something like ‘unzip his fly’ and just start laughing and not know what to do so he would hand it over to Robert De Niro and then Robert would tell me what to do.

“And he was even more ‘Robert De Niro’ then, even quieter and more strange.”

Just to be clear—this was all done in service of the script, not as some private exchange. The men seem to have been uncomfortable with it, too, and yet in the atmosphere in the 70s (this was roughly the same era as the Polanski rape, for example), it probably seemed tame and harmless enough. But I think the role itself was a form of institutional child abuse of a mild sort.

Child actors have been exploited in Hollywood for a long time—just look at the life of Judy Garland if you aren’t aware of it. But the roles they used to play back in the 30s and 40s and 50s were squeaky-clean. That certainly wasn’t true by the time Foster was acting.

Foster also was the target of another incident that must have been confusing and terrifying, at a still-young age. You may recall that Hinckley, Reagans’ would-be assassin, became obsessed with Foster in that movie:

Hinckley was suffering from erotomania and his motivation for the attack was born of his obsession with actress Jodie Foster. While living in Hollywood in the late 1970s, he saw the film Taxi Driver at least 15 times, apparently identifying strongly with Travis Bickle, the lead character portrayed by Robert De Niro. The arc of the story involves Bickle’s attempts to protect a 12-year-old child prostitute, played by Foster. Toward the end of the film, Bickle attempts to assassinate a United States Senator who is running for president. Over the following years, Hinckley trailed Foster around the country, going so far as to enroll in a writing course at Yale University in 1980 after reading in People magazine that she was a student there. He wrote numerous letters and notes to her in late 1980. He called her twice and refused to give up when she indicated that she was not interested in him.

Hinckley was convinced that he would be Foster’s equal if he became a national figure. He decided to emulate Bickle and began stalking President Jimmy Carter. He was surprised at how easy it was to get close to the president””he was only a foot away at one event””but was arrested in October 1980 at Nashville International Airport for illegal possession of firearms.

There’s much more—but the gist of it is that Hinckley turned his attention to Reagan and was nearly successful in killing him. What effect this all had on Foster can only be imagined; at the time, because Reagan and others were so gravely injured, it was not the focus of the story. In addition, Foster hasn’t spoken much about it publicly, and here she suggests that she has had to employ some survival techniques to stay grounded.

I would imagine that’s very true; she’s been through a lot. But blanket statements about whole swaths of men probably shouldn’t be one of those coping mechanisms, and it’s always a bad idea to think you know all that much about what’s going on inside a teenager’s mind, boy or girl.

The tax bill propaganda

The New Neo Posted on by

If you read Democratic reactions to the tax bill just passed by Congress, you’d think it orders that poor people and the middle class be shot at dawn. If you read Republican reactions, you get a spectrum of reactions from “pretty good although somewhat flawed” to “good.”

In other words, they’re analyzing the provisions of the bill and the effects of those provisions on the economy and segments of the population very very differently.

What are we, the American people supposed to think? How are we to evaluate the actual effects of the actual bill? After all, this may not be rocket science, but it certainly isn’t easy to look at something as complex as our tax code and as iffy as how it will actually play out in the real world and know the effects of this legislation. That’s one of the reasons I don’t do my own analysis and tend to rely on experts. I pick my experts carefully, though, based on previous track records of those experts and my own perceptions of their relative objectivity.

I’m not even going to link to most of the Democratic analysis, because unless you’ve been living under a rock recently, you’ve seen it. Here’s a roundup of those saying it’s “theft,” just as an example. And here’s one link about the “People will die!” folks. A counter to that appeared in the WaPo, of all places. And of course periodicals on the right have a host of articles that try to explain why the bill will be good (see this, for example).

But bills like this play out on two levels: their practical financial consequences and their political consequences. And right now the perception the majority of Americans have has been formed by the Democrats and they believe it will hurt them:

According to a recent CNN poll, only 33 percent of Americans support the GOP bill, while 55 percent oppose it, a figure that has grown by ten points since early last month. Several other major polls have put approval ratings for the tax plan in the same low ballpark.

One obvious reason for this unpopularity is our almost equally unpopular president. Donald Trump’s approval rating hovers around 37 percent, unprecedentedly low for a president just a year into his first term. And because the tax-reform bill is a GOP initiative, it is inextricably tied to our GOP president, which means that Americans who dislike Trump are automatically inclined to dislike the GOP tax-reform effort.

But another crucial component of the bill’s stunning lack of popularity surely stems from the amount of misinformation floating around about the substance of the bill, perpetuated by biased media outlets. Just this morning, for example, the New York Times opinion newsletter called the bill “a huge handout to corporate America,” completely ignoring the fact that the bill will lower taxes for a shocking 80.4 percent of Americans, according to the left-leaning Tax Policy Center.

Ah, but once the bill goes into effect, won’t people revise their opinions? Maybe. (That’s the sort of reasoning that those who passed Obamacare used, by the way.) It really depends on how positive the effects of the bill are, and how easily people can perceive those effects and connect them to the changes enacted by the bill. Perhaps (as Bill Clinton used to say) it all comes down to the economy, stupid. But I’ve been very impressed in recent years by how powerful propaganda is, and how it can shape perceptions even in the face of reality.

And of course it all depends on the effects of the bill actually being good for people in the real world. Another factor is when people might actually notice those effects. Some have taken place already; see this. Some are delayed, and some are very delayed—till after the 2018 election takes place. It’s complicated, like almost everything connected with our federal tax laws —and those complications make the entire topic especially ripe for propaganda.

Best movie dance sequence ever

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a rousing demonstration of dance as male competition. As part of 1954’s “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” (which has a plot that would never, never fly these days) it features actors who were mostly dancers, and thrills and chills via daredevil stunts. Stick with it—it just builds and builds and builds, and the risks they take are phenomenal.

Choreographer Michael Kidd was a genius. But without the virile energy of Tommy Rall (red shirt) and Matt Matox (yellow shirt) in particular (both of whom I’ve seen on Broadway in later roles) it wouldn’t be nearly as successful. Russ Tamblyn’s (blue shirt) acrobatics are wonderful as well, and Marc Platt (purple) is excellent but not as acrobatic. Some of the townie guys are no slouches, either. The great ballet dancer Jacques D’Amboise (green shirt) is underused; it’s really not quite his genre, I guess. You may notice that the guy in the orange shirt (Jeff Richards) barely dances. That’s because he’s not a dancer, so he’s shoved to the back or way on the side or off-screen. (More here.)

Enjoy:

Choreographer Kidd is the smaller dark-haired guy dancing in this next video.. I’ve searched and searched, but couldn’t find whether he choreographed this number or whether it was Kelly:

I’m getting nervous about 2018

The New Neo Posted on by

New Year’s Eve is coming up. But it’s not that transition I’m talking about.

I’m talking about the election of 2018. Every single day when I look at the news I see the articles about how well-positioned the Democrats are for the next election—how they are poised to take over both houses. I have no idea whether that will happen or whether this is just more of the relentless propaganda we see in the MSM. November is many months away, and there are a lot of events that could intervene—including a soaring economy, which could make people more favorably-disposed to the GOP by then.

You might ask why I care—after all, the GOP in Congress hasn’t exactly been a shining example of what I’d want to see. Nevertheless, I believe that a Democratic-run Congress would be far worse. Of course, we still have a Republican president who is more disposed than I thought he would be to promote and sign conservative laws (and, perhaps more importantly for this discussion, to veto liberal ones). But he’d better be quick at appointing more and more judges (and Congress had better be quick about approving them) because if Congress falls into the hands of the Democrats that entire process is likely to shut down.

A great many people on the right don’t seem to care what happens in Congress and/or to actively wish to punish the GOP members of Congress by not voting for them. But the right only hurts itself that way and one only has to think of the judges to realize that. This is an old argument we’ve had on this site for years (probably over a decade), and I’ve never changed my mind about it at all.

President Trump can veto any bill passed by a Democratic Congress—until 2020, that is, when all bets are off for the presidential election. He can also go about continuing to dismantle some of the more onerous examples of Obama’s executive orders, and Trump can do it by executive order. But that’s not the same as passing legislation, and then there are those all-important judges.

But the larger question—the one that troubles me—is the phenomenon of these wide swings in the behavior of the electorate. I still consider that we’re moving in a leftward direction. Each seeming victory by the right seems more temporary than ever, and the stock of the left keeps rising. The Gramscian march continues apace, and has been mostly victorious, as the young people who are the product of our educational system and a propagandist MSM grow to voting age.

Maybe I’m just having a gloomy day, which often happens at this time of year. But there’s good news—we’ve passed the day of the earliest sunset, and the sun is setting a tiny bit later each and every day. Hope.

Baby, it’s not cold outside anymore

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Hat tip: Instapundit.

The title of this post’s a riff on my recent piece about the Frank Loesser song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” But this topic is very different.]

It was a long and frozen wait—twenty-four years, to be exact:

A Tennessee woman gave birth last month to a baby girl who was frozen as an embryo in 1992, when her mother was just a year old.

Tina and Benjamin Gibson became the proud parents of Emma Wren on Nov. 25. Emma weighed a healthy 6 pounds, 8 ounces and measured 20 inches long.

According to staff at the University of Tennessee Preston Medical Library, Emma holds the all-time record for the longest-frozen embryo to come to birth.

In case you’re confused by the way that was written (some of the commenters at the site certainly were), Emma is not the Gibson’s biological child. Emma (who was not yet “Emma”) was conceived twenty-four years ago when her biological parents underwent treatment—most likely for infertility—that resulted in extra embryos that were frozen for possible future use and never implanted, and then apparently donated. In the case of Emma, this meant that her non-biological mother Tina Gibson (who, as far as I can tell, can now be called Emma’s birth mother, since she did give birth to Emma) happened to have been eighteen months old herself when Emma was originally conceived and frozen.

Freezing of unused embryos is a relatively common thing during the process of in vitro fertilization, and the frozen embryos present a dilemma:

IVF doctors must try to find a balance between retrieving enough eggs to give a couple a reasonable chance of obtaining a pregnancy and running the risk of potentially creating so many embryos that many are destined to remain unused by the couple that created them…

Hence, infertile couples are often faced with the dilemma of what to do with their remaining frozen embryos. Unlike England, where a deadline for storage of frozen embryos was implemented, the United States has no criteria for disposal…

There are 5 options to be considered by couples:

Keep the embryos frozen because you intend to use them in an IVF transfer sometime in the future.

Discard them

Donate them to another recipient

Donate the embryos to research

None of the above

At the link you can find a fairly lengthy discussion of some of the practical, legal, ethical, and philosophical considerations for each move. One also wonders whether there are medical ramifications of the long storage process. The frozen egg dilemma is an enormous responsibility that most couples undergoing infertility treatments have probably not considered before they start the process, and it’s one I’m glad I never had to face.

The embryo that developed into Emma was taken out of storage by a faith-based group called the National Embryo Donation Center. Couples such as the Gibsons have taken a leap of faith, as well. I wish them and Emma the best.

“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.]