The New Neo

Who’s the leaker at the National Security Council?

Posted on March 21, 2018 by neoMarch 21, 2018

Someone (almost certainly from the NSC) has leaked news of Trump’s phone call to Putin, and it’s not the first time a similar type of leak has occurred:

…only a handful of people at the White House…would have access to the notecards, according to two U.S. government officials and a former senior official familiar with the process.

Trump, along with other senior White House staff, believe it was an inside leak and suspect it was coming from National Security Council staff, sources with knowledge stated…

White House officials will investigate the leaks and a senior White House Official told this reporter in a statement, “If this story is accurate, that means someone leaked the President’s briefing papers. Leaking such information is a fireable offense and likely illegal.”

There’s a reason for that, and it really doesn’t matter whether you approve of Trump or his call to Putin, or not.

Here’s someone, for example, who disapproves heartily of Trump and writes about that quite often, and yet is worried about leaks like these.

More and more these days I get an Orwellian vibe from the names of our government institutions coupled with the exploits of those employed within them.

Arthur Jones and the Republican Party

Posted on March 21, 2018 by neoMarch 21, 2018

Why was Arthur Jones allowed to run as a Republican? [see ADDENDUM]

It only gives fodder to the “Republicans are Nazi racist” memes.

I don’t care that it was a foregone conclusion that, because the district is heavily Democratic, the Democratic will win. Someone should have been fielded from the right to oppose him.

Here’s the situation, if you’re not familiar with it:

Arthur Jones, a Holocaust denier described as a Nazi by the Illinois Republican Party, won the Republican primary on Tuesday in the state’s Third Congressional District, a heavily Democratic district that includes part of Chicago and its suburbs, according to The Associated Press.

Mr. Jones, 70, unsuccessfully sought the nomination five times before, and his victory on Tuesday was a foregone conclusion after the Republican Party failed to draft another candidate to enter the race against him…

The Illinois Republican Party has sought to distance itself from Mr. Jones in recent weeks, blanketing the district with campaign fliers and robocalls urging voters to “stop Illinois Nazis,” according to a robocall script provided by the party. Mr. Jones said he had received three robocalls himself.

“Arthur Jones is not a real Republican ”” he is a Nazi whose disgusting, bigoted views have no place in our nation’s discourse,” Tim Schneider, the Illinois Republican Party chairman, said in a statement. He said the party had urged voters “to skip over his name when they go to the polls” and moving forward planned on “vehemently opposing Jones with real campaign dollars.”

A spokesman for the Illinois Republican Party said those dollars would be used to support an independent candidate in the November general election.

I’m in a bit of a hurry for the next hour or two, so I don’t have time to fully research it now, but my question is whether just anyone can run as a Republican. Does the GOP not have a say in the matter? And why, if they’re managing to field someone to run as an independent in the election, couldn’t they have run someone against him during the primary?

[ADDENDUM: In the past, Jones was blocked from running as a Republican. Here’s how it was done, and how he managed to sneak by this time.

Socialist Bernie Sanders ran as a Democrat for the US Senate in 2005 and for US president in 2016 as a Democrat, but he did so having basically received full approval of the Democratic Party back in 2005. You can find the story at his Wiki entry:

Sanders entered the race for the U.S. Senate on April 21, 2005, after Senator Jim Jeffords announced that he would not seek a fourth term. Chuck Schumer, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, endorsed Sanders, a critical move as it meant that no Democrat running against Sanders could expect to receive financial help from the party. Sanders was also endorsed by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Democratic National Committee chairman and former Vermont governor Howard Dean. Dean said in May 2005 that he considered Sanders an ally who “votes with the Democrats 98 percent of the time.”Then-Senator Barack Obama also campaigned for Sanders in Vermont in March 2006. Sanders entered into an agreement with the Democratic Party, much as he had as a congressman, to be listed in their primary but to decline the nomination should he win, which he did.

The problem wasn’t just that Jones ran, but that he ran unopposed. If there had been bona fide opponents, one of them would have almost certainly won instead. That’s why I said the party should always get someone on the ballot, even in heavily Democratic districts, or they risk this sort of hijacking, Personally, I don’t think 603 signatures (what was required of Jones) should be sufficient for getting on the ballot of a party.

In Illinois, these seem to be the rules:

Established political party candidates, new party candidates, and independent candidates must file nomination papers with the Illinois State Board of Elections in order to qualify for placement on the ballot. These nomination papers must be filed during the designated filing period.

If you read that link I gave previously, you’ll see that Jones filed on the very last day, and got enough bona fide signatures (the requirement is for 603). Here are the rules:

According to the Illinois State Board of Elections, it took 786 valid signatures to get on the March 20 Democratic primary ballot; 603 signatures for a Republican; and between 14,559 to 23,293 signatures to be on the ballot as an Independent, and 14,559 signatures to run from a new party.

What made Jones an “established political party candidate”? He certainly wasn’t the “established candidate” of the GOP. My guess is that the definition of “established political party candidate” is anyone who files as a candidate from a particular political party that’s already been established as a political party. So Jones was able to chose the GOP (an established party), filed at the last minute, made sure his hundreds of signatures could not be challenged, and filed in a district that had no other candidate. If he had filed as an Independent he couldn’t have gotten enough signatures, because far more were required.

It seems to me that that loophole should be tightened up, but in some way that still allows bona fide candidates and challengers to file. Or, if that’s not possible, parties should make sure there’s a bona fide nominee in every race. That would take time and effort, of course, and perhaps they ordinarily figure it’s not worth their time because ordinarily there are no Arthur Joneses. But I suspect there will be more of this sort of thing in the future.]

The Austin bomber has detonated himself

Posted on March 21, 2018 by neoMarch 21, 2018

Found and cornered by Austin police, the bomber who had terrorized Austin in recent weeks killed himself by setting off an explosive device in his car.

Mark Conditt, 23 years old, was traced and located by police through a series of methods initially involving the old-fashioned device of looking at store receipts, seguing to more recent technology: accessing the person of interest’s Google searches, some post office video surveillance cameras, and a final tracking down through his cellphone location. His car was then staked out and followed:

Police followed him as he drove on the service road along I-35, whizzing by the various restaurants, gas stations and hotels. Then the vehicle came to a stop in a ditch. A SWAT team cautiously approached.

Boom! Conditt detonated a device inside his vehicle. The blast from the explosion knocked down and injured one officer, while another fired a shot at the suspect.

Conditt, who suffered “significant injuries,” died in the blast.

No one seems to have a clue as to motive. Not all that much as known about the suspect at this point; you can find some information here. From what I can see so far, one of those “quiet loner” types.

Was this terrorism or serial murder? If there was a political motive, it would be terrorism; otherwise, I’d say serial murder. At first it was thought there was a racial motive because the first two victims were black, but that appears to have been a random element because later victims were not.

The blog is still working, and…

Posted on March 21, 2018 by neoMarch 21, 2018

…I’ve reactivated the comment edit function, which had somehow gotten lost in the crash.

Let me know whether anything else here isn’t working properly for you (or anything at the new site, for that matter).

One person said that the RSS feed for this blog wasn’t working for him/her. Is anyone else having a problem like that? I’m not sure how to fix it, but this is the URL to get RSS feeds for this blog. If you look at the form it takes—http://www.neoneocon.com/feed/—you can see that all you would have to do to get a feed of the new blog is to type in that URL at the beginning and follow the instructions: https://www.thenewneo.com/feed/ .

I’m not especially knowledgeable about this sort of thing, but that’s the way it seems to work.

In addition, on the new blog (not on this one, however), if you scroll down a bit and look on the right sidebar, you see this:

Do we need to increase the number of psychiatric beds?

Posted on March 20, 2018 by neoMarch 20, 2018

For quite a wile, psychiatric hospitalizations have been on the decline.

New drugs are responsible for a lot of this; what used to be untreatable is now often controllable. In addition, there is Szaszian PC mental-illness-is-a-myth thinking, which began to take hold in the early 1970s.

But many patients don’t take meds and/or remain in dire straits despite meds. In addition, because of the decline in psychiatric beds, many people don’t get a chance to become stabilized in the first place. The reduction in beds has been extreme:

…the number of public psychiatric beds available has plunged, to 11 per 100,000 people from 360 per 100,000 in the 1950s, according to Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center, which lobbies for more investment in psychiatric beds for people with severe mental illness.

“There’s simply nowhere to put people with severe mental illness to stabilize them,” Dr. Torrey said.

“No one seemed to care enough a generation ago, when so many become homeless,” he added. “Now that they’re going to prison, well, these are horrendous tragedies, and if there were beds available, you wonder how many of these tragedies could be avoided.”

Dr. Torrey estimated that more than 90 percent of people with psychosis could be stabilized and discharged within a few weeks or so ”” that is, with short-term or acute care. This is a clinical point on which both sides of the debate generally agree: Many people with psychosis need acute care in a hospital, finding the treatments that help before returning to their families. The loss of psychiatric beds means less care of this type is available in many areas.

Dr. Torrey parts ways with opponents of asylums in that he favors longer-term institutionalization for the 5 percent or so who do not improve with acute care, along “with continual, unannounced inspections” to prevent abuses.

Seems reasonable to me. Just because there were some really bad abuses in the past doesn’t mean it would have to continue that way. Deinstitutionalization and homelessness have gotten out of control. Is the current policy really doing anyone any favors? I’m generally somewhat inclined towards the libertarian view of things, but it can easily be taken to extremes, and I think those extremes have been reached.

Of course, there’s the financial end of it, too. Who would be paying for these hospitalizations? Or is it a question of paying now, or paying later?

Now “women” is a forbidden word at women’s college Mount Holyoke

Posted on March 20, 2018 by neoMarch 20, 2018

Mount Holyoke is one of the few all-women schools left.

But that sentence needs to be revised, because of this:

The Supporting Trans and Non-Binary Students guide was created by officials at the college, which touts its legacy as an all-women’s college, in an effort to promote a “gender neutral” classroom environment.

“When discussing the student body, say ”˜Mount Holyoke students’ rather than ”˜Mount Holyoke women,’” it instructs professors. “Avoid making statements like ”˜We’re all women here…’, or referring to ”˜…the two genders…’”

The guide claims that “many students spend the first day of class braced against various types of disrespect,” such as “professors who mispronounce their names, call them by the wrong name entirely, misgender them, and so on.”

If you recall, this is the sort of thing that Jordan Peterson objected to in Canada—although it wasn’t just a recommendation there, there was a law (Bill C-16) that could prosecute people who used the wrong (that is, non-preferred) pronouns, and he said he would not be forced to do so:

…[Peterson] stated he would not use the preferred gender pronouns of students and faculty as part of compelled speech, and announced his objection to the Canadian government’s Bill C-16, which proposed to add “gender identity or expression” as a prohibited ground of discrimination under the Canadian Human Rights Act, and to similarly expand the definitions of promoting genocide and publicly inciting hatred in the Criminal Code.

He stated that his objection to the bill was based on potential free speech implications if the Criminal Code is amended, as he claimed he could then be prosecuted under provincial human rights laws if he refuses to call a transsexual student or faculty member by the individual’s preferred pronoun. Furthermore, he argued that the new amendments paired with section 46.3 of the Ontario Human Rights Code would make it possible for employers and organizations to be subject to punishment under the code if any employee or associate says anything that can be construed “directly or indirectly” as offensive, “whether intentionally or unintentionally”.

There’s no law backing up Mt. Holyoke’s policy; we haven’t yet “caught up” with Canada’s speech police, thank goodness. But what would happen if a Mt. Holyoke professor objected to compelled speech, just as Peterson has? Or perhaps there are no professors left at the school who still care about freedom of speech, or who would be willing to stir up controversy by saying publicly that they care.

There’s also an explicit hierarchy by which students are to be classified according to categories designated as privileged and non:

The college also released a companion guide on “Intersectionality in the Classroom,” which encourages professors to take an “intersectional approach” in the classroom by “becoming aware of the multiple forms of oppression and privilege each individual faces and how they interact with one another.”

This is the current trend on college campuses, one that seems to be getting more and more difficult for parents and their college-age children to avoid.

The left never rests and never tires in its push to revolutionize the way we think and act, and they realize that college students and their professors are especially fertile ground in this march. Compelled speech is very much a part of it, as Orwell knew.

While it’s still working, let me just say…

Posted on March 20, 2018 by neoMarch 20, 2018

…that at the moment I can post.

At the moment.

I haven’t heard yet this morning from the people at my host who’ve been hard at work on fixing the problem, so I don’t know whether this is a temporary fix or a permanent one. But at the moment, I’m going to take advantage of it and try to throw a few posts up here.

Over the next day or two, I suggest you check both places for posts, until you (and I) get definitive word on what’s going on. But I’m encouraged at the moment.

The new blog can be found here. It is http://thenewneo.com . Please bookmark!

Please donate to neo-neocon

Posted on March 16, 2018 by neoMarch 16, 2018

[BUMPED UP: Please scroll down for today’s new posts. I’ll bump this up through the weekend, and then retire it.]

Of course, you can donate any time, but twice a year I make a special plea, and I hope you’ll decide to give.

I try not to ask too often, but all donations go to help neoneocon continue on. I would be deeply grateful if you decide to click on that Paypal button on the right sidebar and contribute, whether it be a penny or quite a few dollars. Every single bit adds up, and you’d be surprised at how much it helps. I thank you all in advance.

This blog is a labor of love, but it also takes time. However, I very much doubt I’d be doing it without you, the commenters. Thank you, thank you, thank you all!

Update on the new blog format

Posted on March 16, 2018 by neoMarch 16, 2018

So, where’s that new blog format I promised?

I realize most of you have not been sitting on a hot stove waiting, but you might be wondering.

It may come as no surprise that I hit a little snag when I came to what’s known as the “migrating” process—that is, the transfer of my old content to the new site. I had been assured by person after person at my host, as well as a WordPress advice group I paid some money to in order to get live help, that the migration part would be a piece of cake and that my host would do it.

But when I actually got to that point the story changed: “Oh, no, we don’t do that.” So then I had to do some research about how to go about making the transfer, which is somewhat complicated by the fact that I have an enormous amount of content to transfer.

Without bothering you with the details, I’ll just say it will take more time than I thought. I hope it will be done some time in the next couple of weeks, but I’ll keep you posted. The way I think it has to go, based on knowledge gleaned in my research so far, is that I will have to transfer this blog (with the neoneocon.com URL) to my new theme first. After that, the migration will happen. So if all goes well, first you will see the new format on this blog and then later at the new URL, with a redirect from this older URL.

I still want to do this because I think there are many advantages—getting rid of the old outdated “neocon” moniker, a format that works better on cellphones and pads, and some new features like drop-down menus for archives and most-recent-comments highlighted. After the migration, there will be some further tweakings and additions such as spotlighting the “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series.

That’s the plan, anyway.

What studies of altitude sickness on Everest can tell us about saving people in ICUs

Posted on March 16, 2018 by neoMarch 16, 2018

The extreme conditions of climbing Mt. Everest, and the risks involved, hardly seem worth it to us regular folks who can’t even imagine voluntarily subjecting oneself to such an ordeal:

Just ahead of them, a man from another party was in trouble, staggering around and gasping for air. His body had became hypoxic and his oxygen-starved brain began to swell. His team buzzed their doctor at a camp below on a two-way radio, who reassured them that he would be OK. Grocott, an expert in high-altitude sickness, had a different opinion: it was clear to him that the man was dying. “It often happens,” says Grocott. “If you’re a doctor on a mountain, you expect to be called on to help people.”

As the light began to fade and the temperature dropped, the man’s condition worsened. Vijay Ahuja, a medical student in Grocott’s team, insisted they get involved. The stricken man’s colleagues conceded there was a problem, but it was now too dark to take him down to safety. Recognising the seriousness of the situation, one of the doctors on Grocott’s team, Dan Martin, began treatment. Martin worked through the night, managing to keep the seriously ill climber alive until dawn, when the patient’s team were able to transport him down the mountain.

But doctors are studying what’s going on here, and it can be helpful to people who would never think of ascending anything other than a small hill. That’s because there’s something about altitude sickness that’s very mysterious—it doesn’t just strike those in bad condition. In fact, it appears to strike rather randomly:

Health and fitness have no bearing on human oxygen efficiency: Xtreme Everest has taken 70-year-old civilians up the mountain with no problems, but fit, young military personnel have had to turn back. The issue is genetic, and for the last ten years Xtreme Everest has been trying to identify the specific genes concerned, which in turn might allow scientists to develop drugs that would mimic oxygen-efficient physiology. About 325,000 people are treated in ICUs in the UK each year, and Britons have a one in five chance of ending up in one at some point. Around 80,000 British people die from oxygen-related problems in ICUs every year.

In 2007, the following experiment was conducted. It was quite elaborate:

Sixty scientists, medics and researchers were recruited; 198 members of the public would trek to Base Camp, making themselves hypoxic in the process, and be tested. There would be 60-odd tests on most members of the party, with 15 climbing on to the 8,850-metre-high summit, where they would set up a lab and take the highest-altitude, lowest-oxygen blood samples in history. The simple aim: to discover the key difference between the bodies of the people who coped with the drop in oxygen and those who did not.

Results of the experiment indicated the difference was in the mitochondria. Later studies (published in 2017) of Sherpas—the people who guide expeditions, live in the area, and whose bodies have evolved over time to cope with the altitude—found something astounding:

The Sherpas were not only using oxygen to make ATP more efficiently than lowlanders, but also while the energy levels in the muscles of lowlanders drop at altitude as oxygen becomes scarcer, the energy levels in Sherpa muscles increases. “It is an extraordinary finding,” says Murray. “They need oxygen like we do, but in that low-oxygen environment, they produce not just more energy than us lowlanders, but they themselves have more energy than they do at sea level. In other words, as they climb upwards into the environment where they have adapted for thousands of years, they become healthier.

This can guide researchers who are attempting to produce drugs to help ICU patients and others with hypoxia.

On the Gina Haspel torture story: fake, but inaccurate

Posted on March 16, 2018 by neoMarch 16, 2018

In still another example of the sad and sorry and downright dangerous state of journalism today, the tale of Gina Haspel’s (Trump’s new pick to head the CIA) involvement in overseeing the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah in Afghanistan in 2002, published in February of 2017 by ProPublica, is now being retracted as false.

The Democrats’ response to Haspel’s nomination was to accuse her of being a torturer overseer on the basis of these stories.

Similar accusations also had been raised on a story in the NY Times in Feburary of 2017:

The New York Times reported that in 2002 Haspel oversaw the torture of terrorists Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and her name was on the cable ordering the destruction of the videotapes of their interrogations, although the CIA stated that it was Haspel’s boss at the time, Jose Rodriguez, who was the head of the CIA’s clandestine service, who ordered the tapes destroyed.

Here’s an excerpt from ProPublica’s retraction of its own 2017 story:

On Feb. 22, 2017, ProPublica published a story that inaccurately described Gina Haspel’s role in the treatment of Abu Zubaydah, a suspected al-Qaida leader who was imprisoned by the CIA at a secret “black site” in Thailand in 2002.

The story said that Haspel, a career CIA officer who President Trump has nominated to be the next director of central intelligence, oversaw the clandestine base where Zubaydah was subjected to waterboarding and other coercive interrogation methods that are widely seen as torture. The story also said she mocked the prisoner’s suffering in a private conversation. Neither of these assertions is correct and we retract them. It is now clear that Haspel did not take charge of the base until after the interrogation of Zubaydah ended.

Extraordinary. Or maybe the most extraordinary thing about it is that it was ultimately retracted, because such errors (if they are errors rather than deliberate falsifications) are not unusual. How did these intrepid journalists get it wrong? As they tell the story in their retraction article:

Our account of Haspel’s actions was drawn in part from declassified agency cables and CIA-reviewed books which referred to the official overseeing Zubaydah’s interrogation at a secret prison in Thailand as “chief of base.” The books and cables redacted the name of the official, as is routinely done in declassified documents referring to covert operations.

The Trump administration named Haspel to the CIA’s No. 2 job in early February 2017. Soon after, three former government officials told ProPublica that Haspel was chief of base in Thailand at the time of Zubaydah’s waterboarding.

We also found an online posting by John Kiriakou, a former CIA counter-terrorism officer, who wrote that “It was Haspel who oversaw the staff” at the Thai prison, including two psychologists who “designed the torture techniques and who actually carried out torture on the prisoners.”

So the original claim seems to have been based on the reports of some people who weren’t necessarily there and who remain unnamed and whose positions are unspecified. And fact-checking the most simple fact—when was Haspel posted to the Thai prison and did it coincide with the timeline of the waterboardings—seems to have been beyond the capacity of the Times or ProPublica.

That’s the way reporting goes these days; lots of mistakes. However, have you ever noticed that the errors seem to mostly go in one direction only, the direction that favors the left’s “narrative”? How can that be, since we all know reporters are oh-so-objective?

I don’t think most reporters outright lie knowing they are lying, although I have little doubt that some do. I think that stories like this one are mostly a case of the expression “too good to fact-check.” If you want something to be true it is easy to fail to doubt it sufficiently, and if you haven’t been rigorously trained in the idea that it is in that sort of situation that you must fact-check the most carefully of all, then you’ve set yourself up for errors like this one.

In addition, there are ordinarily no bad consequences for your mistake. Hey, you got a ton of clicks, didn’t you? The story is out there, isn’t it? And most people will believe it and therefore it does its ideological task rather well, even if later debunked. And you’ve covered yourself by printing the disclaimer. Win, win, win…

I’m not familiar with ProPublica, so I don’t know whether they generally do good work or not. But I found this description of their self-described goals on their “about” page:

ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force. We dig deep into important issues, shining a light on abuses of power and betrayals of public trust ”” and we stick with those issues as long as it takes to hold power to account.

With a team of more than 75 dedicated journalists, ProPublica covers a range of topics including government and politics, business, criminal justice, the environment, education, health care, immigration, and technology. We focus on stories with the potential to spur real-world impact. Among other positive changes, our reporting has contributed to the passage of new laws; reversals of harmful policies and practices; and accountability for leaders at local, state and national levels.

So they are engaged in uncovering abuses of power with the goal of sparking change. Those are the first two paragraphs, and it’s clear that that is their main goal. If I were to guess, I would wager that the vast majority of them are to the left of center.

Only later, towards the end of paragraph three (and towards the end of the description) do they get around to saying, “We are committed to uncovering the truth, no matter how long it takes or how much it costs…” To me this indicates that “truth” is subordinate to the reformist agenda, and therein lies the problem.

In its retraction, ProPublica also wrote this concerning its original 2017 article and the research they did for it:

…[W]e approached the CIA’s press office with an extensive list of questions about the cables and Haspel’s role in running the Thai prison, particularly her dealings with Zubaydah.

An agency spokesman declined to answer any of those questions but released a statement that was quoted in the article, asserting that “nearly every piece of reporting that you are seeking comment on is incorrect in whole or in part.”

The CIA did not comment further on the story after its publication and we were not aware of any further questions about its accuracy until this week.

Wasn’t that response question enough to motivate the reporters to make absolutely sure they were fact-checking this story with great vigor? And if not, why not? In their defense, they did include that quote from the CIA spokesman in their original article (the article is reproduced in the story retracting it). But it didn’t seem to stop them from blazing ahead with those inaccuracies.

The Ides

Posted on March 15, 2018 by neoMarch 15, 2018

I just noticed that today is the Ides of March:

Shakespeare (in “Julius Caesar”—“Beware the Ides of March”) may be the reason why the line is famous today, but the Ides of March — a date on the Roman calendar that coincides with March 15 — has been significant long before Shakespeare’s early 1600s play…

…[T]he phrase actually means “middle of the month,” which falls on the 15th day of the month in March, May, July and October and the 13th day of the other months…

In the olden days, the Roman calendar was divided into three parts — the “Calends,” “Nones” and “Ides” — to identify special lunar events.

The “Calends” signified the “start of the new moon cycle” on the first day of the month, according to online calendar Time and Date. “Nones” came next, about a week into a new month, to mark the half moon. Lastly, “Ides” marked the full moon.

It really seems to have no significance anymore, except as a saying.