Blog choices

The New Neo Posted on by

I find that as a blogger I often bite off more than I can chew. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say more than I intended to chew. My estimates of how much time and effort a post will take are usually way off, and yet over and over again I’m fooled. I get an idea for a post and I think oh, this won’t take long at all, and then several hours later I raise my head from my computer, blink, look around me, and don’t understand where the time went.

That happened today. I just put up my first post for the day, and it’s a loooong one. Not only that, but it’s on a topic it would be difficult to justify calling “current,” the history of our involvement in Vietnam.

How on earth did I choose that topic? Something caught my eye in the comments section, as it often does, and I thought I had something I wanted to say about it. I believed it would only take me about a half hour to say it—after all, hadn’t I written extensively on Vietnam before, and couldn’t I draw on those writings? But as often happens, when I researched the topic, I was drawn deeper and deeper into it and into the details, and before I knew it many hours had passed.

Much of what I write isn’t just for my readers, although they (you!) are foremost in my mind. I do it for myself, too, and sometimes I think that learning the history is the really fun part. Or if not exactly fun—sometimes the facts are disturbing and disheartening and downright depressing—then the interesting part. Writing is just assembling the pieces of the puzzle and putting my own idiosyncratic stamp on it.

The kind of blogging I like to do isn’t very popular and it’s even less popular these days than it was when I began. Blogs by a single blogger, such as this one, are much less numerous than they used to be. The blog genre has been outpaced by Twitter and Facebook and a bunch of even newer social media platforms, and though I’ve tried to get into them they just don’t suit me or interest me and that’s that. I like the long form and I like the conversation, and there’s less and less patience for those things.

This article is from 2015, and the trend described has only accelerated since then:

[Ezra Klein writes] “Blogging encourages interjections into conversations, and it thrives off of familiarity. Social media encourages content that can travel all on its own.”…

…Ezra is right about the conversational nature of blogging. There was lots of that in the early days, and very little now. Partly this is for the reason he identified: traffic is now driven far more by Facebook links than by links from fellow bloggers. Partly it’s also because multi-person blogs, which began taking over the blogosphere in the mid-aughts, make conversation harder. Most people simply don’t follow all the content in multi-person blogs, and don’t always pay attention to who wrote which post, so conversation becomes choppier and harder to follow. And partly it’s because conversation has moved on: first to comment sections, then to Twitter and other social media.

Second, speaking personally, I long ago decided that blog posts needed to be standalone pieces, so I’m not sure we can really blame that on new forms of social media. It was probably as early as 2005 or 2006 that I concluded two things. Not only do blog posts need to be standalone, but they can’t even ramble very much. You need to make one clear point and avoid lots of distractions and “on the other hands.” This is because blog readers are casual readers, and if you start making lots of little side points, that’s what they’re going to respond to. Your main point often simply falls by the wayside. So keep it short and focused.

Anyone who reads this blog probably can see exactly how I fail to follow the recommended model. I do try (and have nearly always tried) to write posts that can stand alone. But not rambling? Sticking to one clear point? No, and no, and although I believe I could follow those rules, that’s not the way I want to write and if I had to do it I’d just as soon quit as straitjacket myself that way.

So here I am. One of the dinosaurs who write by myself, and write long and sometimes rambling pieces. I’d like more readers, but I have a decent number and not all of them are “casual” by any means. We have quite a bit of conversation here, too, and it’s not just that I converse and you listen.

Yes, I also write for a group blog at Legal Insurrection, maybe once a week or so. Most of what I write there is an edited version of something I’ve already posted here, and the posts I put up there tend to have a law-related slant or concern topics that I think would be of particular interest to the readers there. I write there in a style that’s a bit more removed and formal and less personal than my style here, and I think that’s appropriate.

This post was intended to be a rumination on the process of selecting and writing a blog post and how much more time it often takes than I think it will—and then, of course, I started rambling (as is my wont) into a related topic. It’s a wonderful thing to be able to choose my own topics and write about them as I please, and to be able to get some sort of audience for it, even if the audience is far from huge. When there’s a big story, of course, I usually try to cover it, but best of all (for me, anyway) are these lengthy, labor-intensive dives into some piece of history that I think is relevant to our times.

Who lost Vietnam?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve spent a lot of verbiage on the Vietnam War over my years of blogging. All you have to do is look at the category “Vietnam” on the right sidebar, and you’ll see that the number of posts on the subject is 84 (soon to be 85 when this one goes up). If you want to see the gist of what I have to say about that war, just start reading there.

But I’m going to add my reaction to this recent comment from “Ariel.” Here’s Ariel, who first quotes “Irv” and then reacts to that quote:

“The lesson that we should learn from the failed wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan is not that we shouldn’t engage in nation building, it’s that when we win a war we should not turn it over to the Democrats to change victory into defeat.” ”“ Irv

Seems to me that Vietnam is not like the others in this statement, given its timeline of dem leadership ”“ from the Start!”

I had no idea Eisenhower was a Democrat. In fact, Eisenhower the Democrat coined the phrase ”˜Domino effect’ specifically about Vietnam. He also warned about the ”˜Industrial-Military’ complex as a threat to democracy around 1961. Damn, friggin’ bleeding-heart liberal Democrat.

We weren’t in Vietnam until that friggin’ Democrat tried to make up for a French failure to recognize an opportunity.

There is no question that Eisenhower was indeed involved in the ongoing conflict in Vietnam during the 1950s. You can read about the reasons and the decisions he made here:

The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 convinced many Washington policymakers that the war in Indochina was an example of communist expansionism directed by the Soviet Union.

Military advisors from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) began assisting the Viet Minh in July 1950. PRC weapons, expertise, and laborers transformed the Viet Minh from a guerrilla force into a regular army. In September 1950, the United States created a Military Assistance and Advisory Group (MAAG) to screen French requests for aid, advise on strategy, and train Vietnamese soldiers. By 1954, the United States had supplied 300,000 small arms and spent US$1 billion in support of the French military effort (during the early 1950s), shouldering 80 percent of the cost of the war….

In the end, convinced that the political risks outweighed the possible benefits, Eisenhower decided against the intervention. Eisenhower was a five-star general. He was wary of getting the United States involved in a land war in Asia.

The Viet Minh received crucial support from the Soviet Union and PRC. PRC support in the Border Campaign of 1950 allowed supplies to come from the PRC into Vietnam. Throughout the conflict, U.S. intelligence estimates remained skeptical of French chances of success…

There’s much much more, of course. But the gist of it is that we were involved in Vietnam during the Eisenhower administration as part of our general interest in fighting Communism around the globe during the Cold War. In accord with this goal, we supported the government of the South in various ways, but those ways were quite limited. As a person alive during that time and at least somewhat aware of the news in a very general way, I don’t remember much conversation about Vietnam and our involvement there at all at the time. It must have been reported on, but compared to our commitment in a place such as Korea it was very minimal and relatively non-controversial. And Eisenhower was very much against sending American troops to fight there.

In 1955, Eisenhower sent the first military personnel to train the South Vietnamese military. Here are some statistics:

On October 22, 1957, MAAG Vietnam and USIS installations in Saigon were bombed, injuring US military advisers. In the summer of 1959, Communist guerrillas staged an attack on a Vietnamese military base in Bien Hoa, killing and wounding several MAAG personnel. During this time, American advisers were not put in high-ranking positions, and President Diem was reluctant to allow American advisers into Vietnamese tactical units. He was afraid that the United States would gain control or influence over his forces if Americans got into the ranks of the army. The first signs that his position was beginning to shift came in 1960, when the number of official US military advisers in the country was increased from 327 to 685 at the request of the South Vietnamese government. By 1961, communist guerrillas were becoming stronger and more active. This increased enemy contacts in size and intensity throughout South Vietnam.

So at the very very end of the Eisenhower administration, the number of American military advisors more or less doubled, but the absolute numbers were very very low. This is not what is commonly thought of as the Vietnam War, and I think any argument that the Vietnam War was an Eisenhower enterprise are basically incorrect except in the most technical sense. And yes, we were also involved in helping the South Vietnamese government, just as we were involved in helping anti-Communist governments around the world to resist the inroads of Communism, but that was a standard Cold War approach on a widespread global level and not the nation-building aftermath of a US invasion.

The escalation of the war—the true beginning of the war for Americans. as I recall it having lived through it—was the sending of American ground troops there, which was indeed accomplished by a Democratic administration, LBJ’s (see this), and it was followed by an enormous escalation of the same. In fact, “escalation” became a big word during the 60s.

Military involvement under Kennedy was still very small; about 1600 advisors by the time of his death. His political involvement in the coup against Diem is the sort of thing you can read vastly differing accounts of, but the documentation from the time shows this:

The documentary record is replete with evidence that President Kennedy and his advisers, both individually and collectively, had a considerable role in the coup overall, by giving initial support to Saigon military officers uncertain what the U.S. response might be, by withdrawing U.S. aid from Diem himself, and by publicly pressuring the Saigon government in a way that made clear to South Vietnamese that Diem was isolated from his American ally. In addition, at several of his meetings (Documents 7, 19, 22) Kennedy had CIA briefings and led discussions based on the estimated balance between pro- and anti-coup forces in Saigon that leave no doubt the United States had a detailed interest in the outcome of a coup against Ngo Dinh Diem.

The removal of Diem was the result of a coup by members of the South Vietnamese military who had their own reasons for doing it, but the United States gave them support or at least made it clear they would not oppose them. The evidence also is that Kennedy never even considered what would physically happen to Diem and was shocked at his assassination. This seems naive at the very least.

So in summary we have very minimal involvement and caution from the Republican president (Eisenhower), a modest increase in military involvement from the Democrat (Kennedy) as well as political machinations in the internal affairs of the South, and then a very major increase in all respects (especially the military) from another Democrat (LBJ). After that, we enter what I usually refer to as the Second Act of the war, the Nixon years, featuring a gradual drawdown of our involvement. The postscript to that Second Act was the Ford years and the final abandonment. Both Nixon and Ford were Republicans, but it is important to realize that the withdrawal from South Vietnam was orchestrated by Democrats in Congress. In particular, the unelected Ford was virtually powerless to stop them even had he wanted to.

The main takeaway is that the Democrats both started the war and escalated it in terms of US military involvement, Republicans ended our military involvement but continued our support (fairly successfully, I might add), and then later under Republican president Ford the Democrats spearheaded the final withdrawal of US support for the South Vietnamese and enabled the fall of Saigon. The Democrats’ attitude towards the war represented a huge pendulum swing.

I’ve written extensively about the Second Act of the war here, here, and here.

And here is President Ford’s plea to Congress to increase aid to South Vietnam before it fell. It makes for very sad reading, and is correct about the precedent being set. An excerpt:

Two years ago…we had succeeded in negotiating an Agreement that provided the framework for lasting peace in Southeast Asia…Unfortunately, the other side has chosen to violate most of the major provisions of this Accord.

The South Vietnamese and Cambodians are fighting hard in their own defense…

At a time when the North Vietnamese have been building up their forces and pressing their attacks, U.S. military aid to the South Vietnamese Government has not been sufficient to permit one-to-one replacement of equipment and supplies used up or destroyed, as permitted by the Paris Agreement. In fact, with the $700 million appropriation available in the current fiscal year, we have been able to provide no new tanks, airplanes, trucks, artillery pieces, or other major equipment, but only essential consumable items such as ammunition, gasoline, spare parts, and medical supplies. And in the face of the increased North Vietnamese pressure of recent months, these supplies have not kept pace with minimally essential expenditure. Stockpiles have been drawn down and will soon reach dangerously low levels.

Last year, some believed that Cutting back our military assistance to the South Vietnamese Government would induce negotiations for a political settlement. Instead, the opposite has happened. North Vietnam is refusing negotiations and is increasing its military pressure.

I am gravely concerned about this situation. I am concerned because it poses a serious threat to the chances for political stability in Southeast Asia and to the progress that has been made in removing Vietnam as a major issue of contention between the great powers.

I am also concerned because what happens in Vietnam can affect the rest of the world. It cannot be in the interests of the United States to let other nations believe that we are prepared to look the other way when agreements that have been painstakingly negotiated are contemptuously violated. It cannot be in our interest to cause our friends all over the world to wonder whether we will support them if they comply with agreements that others violate.

Ford requested a modest increase in financial aid. Congress refused. Here’s a bit more background:

In the fall of 1974, Nixon resigned under the pressure of the Watergate scandal and was succeeded by Gerald Ford. Congress cut funding to South Vietnam for the upcoming fiscal year from a proposed 1.26 billion to 700 million dollars. These two events prompted Hanoi to make an all-out effort to conquer the South. As the North Vietnamese Communist Party Secretary Le Duan observed in December 1974: “The Americans have withdrawn”¦this is what marks the opportune moment.”

The NVA drew up a two-year plan for the “liberation” of South Vietnam. Owing to South Vietnam’s weakened state, this would only take fifty-five days. The drastic reduction of American aid to South Vietnam caused a sharp decline in morale, as well as an increase in governmental corruption and a crackdown on domestic political dissent. The South Vietnamese army was severely under-funded, greatly outnumbered, and lacked the support of the American allies with whom they were accustomed to fighting.

The NVA began its final assault in March of 1975 in the Central Highlands…

…Thieu angrily blamed the US for his decision, saying, “If [the U.S.] grant full aid we will hold the whole country, but if they only give half of it, we will only hold half of the country.” His decision to retreat increased internal opposition toward him and spurred a chaotic mass exodus of civilians and soldiers that clogged the dilapidated roads to the coast. So many refugees died along the way that the migration along Highway 7B was alternatively described by journalists as the “convoy of tears” and the “convoy of death.” On April 21, President Thieu resigned in a bitter televised speech in which he strongly denounced the United States. Sensing that South Vietnam was on the verge of collapse, the NVA accelerated its attack and reached Saigon on April 23.

A bit more here:

Congress places a $1 billion ceiling on military aid to South Vietnam for fiscal year 1974. This figure was trimmed further to $700 million by August 11. Military aid to South Vietnam in fiscal year 1973 was $2.8 billion; in 1975 it would be cut to $300 million. Once aid was cut, it took the North Vietnamese only 55 days to defeat the South Vietnamese forces when they launched their final offensive in 1975.

To summarize once again: our initial involvement in Vietnam was fairly small and part of our general Cold War strategy. and not especially controversial or partisan. Escalation began under the Democrats and reached enormous proportions under the Democrats. There was a strong political backlash and a Republican administration, with a hugely Democratic Congress, orchestrated the removal of our ground troops. Then the Democratic Congress pulled the financial rug out from under the South Vietnamese over the objections of the (unelected) Republican president, and enabled the final takeover by the North.

I think that a great deal of what has happened since the Vietnam years is a reaction to Vietnam. The Democrats are still reeling from their own initial role in the increase of our involvement there from minor to major. Everything else—including our financial withdrawal from South Vietnam in the 70s, and the Democrats’ current position on Iraq—is part of that Democratic backlash. Their steady movement to the left has occurred ever since Vietnam as well, caused not just by Vietnam but by multiple factors.

[ADDENDUM: In the comments section, several people have mentioned Walter Cronkite’s coverage of the war. For those of you interested in learning the more complete story of Cronkite and Tet and the war, please read this and this.]

Judge dismisses Palin defamation lawsuit against Times

The New Neo Posted on by

Sarah Palin’s defamation suit against the NY Times has been thrown out of court:

This is a case where the NY Times Editorial author James Bennet claimed to be so ignorant, so uninterested in doing any research, and so oblivious to his surroundings, that his ignorance turned into legal bliss.

[From the Opinion]:

Nowhere is political journalism so free, so robust, or perhaps so rowdy as in the United States. In the exercise of that freedom, mistakes will be made, some of which will be hurtful to others. Responsible journals will promptly correct their errors; others will not. But if political journalism is to achieve its constitutionally endorsed role of challenging the powerful, legal redress by a public figure must be limited to those cases where the public figure has a plausible factual basis for complaining that the mistake was made maliciously, that is, with knowledge it was false or with reckless disregard of its falsity…

We come back to the basics. What we have here is an editorial, written and rewritten rapidly in order to voice an opinion on an immediate event of importance, in which are included a few factual inaccuracies somewhat pertaining to Mrs. Palin that are very rapidly corrected. Negligence this may be; but defamation of a public figure it plainly is not.

The key legal standard here is the definition of “reckless disregard” of a statement’s falsity. I’ve skimmed the entire Opinion, and it seems to rest on that element alone. Continue reading →

Stilettogate

The New Neo Posted on by

Just to prove how trivial the Twitter conversation can be, we have Stilettogate over this fashion choice of Melania Trump’s on the way to board a plane to view the floods of Texas:

Personally, I’m in extreme awe that Melania can walk in them at all, even on dry land.

But, unfortunately for the liberal/leftist wags of Twitter, Stilettogate’s scandals turned into the much more humdrum Sneakergate when Melania did the unthinkable and actually (gasp!) changed her shoes on the airplane:

That is one good-looking lady, by the way. If I were to wear that outfit, I sure wouldn’t look like that.

But the Melania critics of Twitter hardly missed a beat. Next it was her hat that upset them:

If you care to spend time reading any more about it, you can take a look at this piece by the sniffingly disdainful Robin Givhan in the WaPo. Givhan’s niche is the intersection of fashion and culture and politics, and she sees Melania is an empty artifact full of shoes and frocks, signifying nothing [emphasis mine]:

Melania Trump is the kind of woman who travels to a flood-ravaged state in a pair of black snakeskin stilettos. Heels this high are not practical. But Trump is not the kind of woman who has to be practical…

…[S]ometimes pretense is everything. It’s the reason for the first lady to go to Texas at all: to symbolize care and concern and camaraderie. To remind people that the government isn’t merely doing its job, that the government is engaged with each and every individual. Washington hears its citizens. That’s what the optics are all about…

And for her trip to Texas, the first lady offered up a fashion moment instead of an expression of empathy.

Observers were baffled by her shoes in particular. Those shoes. Those shoes. Good Lord, those shoes…Heading off to Texas, she looked dressed to view a natural disaster from a distance, from on high, not up close. Her ensemble implied that people’s personal stories would be ferried to her after they had been vetted and tidied up. There was no suggestion that Trump would be flat-footed in the muck, hearing their truth in messy, tearful open-ended confusion.

By the time Trump landed in Texas she had changed. She was still wearing black trousers, but they were paired with a white shirt and sneakers. She still had her sunglasses, but her hair was pulled into a ponytail. She also was wearing a black baseball cap that said “FLOTUS” in white letters. The cap was like a hedge against her blending into the crowd. A defense against any possibility that for just a split second she might seem regular. She is not like you, or you, or you, it says. She is the first lady.

I don’t know about you, but that article kinda makes me want to barf. I like to analyze and nitpick with the best of them (or the worst of them), but to me this just expresses cattiness and emptiness on the part of the writer, not on Melania’s part.

And in regard to the portion I’ve bolded, how on earth does Givhan suppose that Melania Trump could have offered up “an expression of empathy” through her clothing while walking towards an airplane? Perhaps wearing something of this nature would have been sufficient?

Would Givhan have preferred that Melania also give a speech as she stepped onto the tarmac? Does Givhan think that empathy and fashion are mutually exclusive? Did it not ever occur to Givhan that Melania might get into something more comfortable while on the airplane (she’s changed on airplanes before, by the way, and since even I know that, I’d expect the fashion editor Givhan to know it)? Does she think that Melania will go mum once in Texas and fail to express empathy through her words and interactions with victims or officials? Does she think that Melania might indeed conjure up some empathy later in the visit, but that her stilettos (and hat) have canceled out any empathy she might show during her time there, and branded it preemptively as false?

Harvey and anthropogenic climate change

The New Neo Posted on by

AGW is the gift that keeps on giving. Its supposed effects are protean enough that almost anything can be blamed on it. Both its adherents and its critics are often tremendously fervent, and I’m not going to go into that argument right now.

But when a scientist says that any particular weather event (such as Harvey) is caused or worsened by global warning, beware. Because each weather event is a single data point that cannot be pinned on a theory such as AGW, even if AGW is true in a more general sense.

In other words, scientists know that weather and climate are different. The former gets our temporary attention (and can be exploited for political purposes), but it’s the latter that has more impact in the end.

I would be highly suspicious of any scientist who tries to talk about Harvey and relate that particular storm to climate change in general. That sort of talk is basically propaganda, but of course that doesn’t mean we’re not going to hear it even from some scientists. So of course you’re going to get this sort of article at Politico, entitled “Harvey Is What Climate Change Looks Like: It’s time to open our eyes and prepare for the world that’s coming”:

Climate change is making rainstorms everywhere worse, but particularly on the Gulf Coast. Since the 1950s, Houston has seen a 167 percent increase in the frequency of the most intense downpours. Climate scientist Kevin Trenberth thinks that as much as 30 percent of the rainfall from Harvey is attributable to human-caused global warming. That means Harvey is a storm decades in the making.

While Harvey’s rains are unique in U.S. history, heavy rainstorms are increasing in frequency and intensity worldwide. One recent study showed that by mid-century, up to 450 million people worldwide will be exposed to a doubling of flood frequency. This isn’t just a Houston problem. This is happening all over.

Sounds convincing, right? But wait a minute:

Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann said Sunday that, while global warming didn’t cause Hurricane Harvey, it surely “worsened” the effects of the storm through higher sea levels and increased atmospheric moisture.

Mann’s explanation, however, goes against the prevailing evidence of global warming’s measured impacts on storms. Many climate scientists have been careful not to tie individual weather events to manmade warming.

“I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear people blaming Harvey on global warming,” climate scientist Judith Curry wrote in a recent blog post. “How unusual was Harvey? Well, it will definitely be in the record books for ending the 12 year drought of major hurricanes striking the U.S.”

“Anyone blaming Harvey on global warming doesn’t have a leg to stand on,” Curry wrote.

What’s a poor layperson to do?

This poor layperson has been very impressed by the writings of Curry, as I previously mentioned. She’s my basic go-to person on the subject, one of the very few who doesn’t seem to have an agenda but who goes wherever her devotion to facts and truth might lead her. Here’s an example of something she wrote a couple of weeks ago:

Sea level rise is the central issue for both cases. Jim Hansen states:

A reasonably stable seashore, our nation’s Founders would agree, is an asset that should not be stolen from young people.

Well, good luck with that one. Sea level has been overall rising since the last ice age, with some ups and downs. Sea level has been rising for the past 200 years. The rate of sea level rise during the period ~1925-1960 is as large as the rate of sea level rise the past few decades. Human emissions of CO2 became large after 1950; humans don’t seem to be to blame for the early 20th century sea level rise, nor for the sea level rise in the 19th and late 18th centuries. Humans are not going to stop sea level rise on the time scale of a few centuries by ceasing emissions of CO2…

We need to learn to live with continuing and possibly accelerating sea level rise. The solutions lie in land use policy and engineering/technology.

If you want to read more of Curry’s sensible approach to the question, read the whole thing and follow the links there. I also suggest regular visits to her blog.

Trump is America’s Netanyahu…

The New Neo Posted on by

…says Caroline Glick.

Or perhaps Netanyahu is Israel’s Trump.

I happen to think a lot more of Netanyahu than of Trump. Netanyahu has a history of physical and mental courage in a lengthy military career, as well as a great deal more political experience than Trump. But I think the points Glick makes are good ones, and food for thought.

An excerpt:

Netanyahu has never enjoyed a day in office when Israel’s unelected elites weren’t at war with him.

From a comparative perspective, Netanyahu’s experiences in his first term in office, from 1996 until 1999, are most similar to Trump’s current position. His 1996 victory over incumbent prime minister Shimon Peres shocked the political class no less than the American political class was stunned by Trump’s victory. And this makes sense. The historical context of Israel’s 1996 election and the US elections last year were strikingly similar.

In 1992, Israel’s elites, the doves who controlled all aspects of the governing apparatuses, including the security services, universities, government bureaucracies, state prosecution, Supreme Court, media and entertainment industry, were seized with collective euphoria when the Labor Party under the leadership of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres won Israel’s Left its first clear-cut political victory since 1974. Rabin and Peres proceeded to form the most dovish governing coalition in Israel’s history…

The 1996 election was the first opportunity the public had to vote on the Oslo process. Then, in spite of Rabin’s assassination and the beautiful ceremonies on the White House lawns with balloons and children holding flowers, the people of Israel said no thank you. We are Zionists, not post-Zionists. We don’t like to get blown to smithereens on buses, and we don’t appreciate being told that victims of terrorism are victims of peace…

n 1996, the Israeli elite greeted Netanyahu’s victory with shock and grief. The “good, enlightened” Israel they thought would rule forever had just been defeated by the unwashed mob. Peres summed up the results by telling reporters that “the Israelis” voted for him. And “the Jews” voted for Netanyahu. His followers shook their heads in mildly antisemitic disgust.

Their mourning quickly was replaced by a spasm of hatred for Netanyahu and his supporters that hasn’t disappeared even now, 21 years later.

Please read the whole thing.

Houston…

The New Neo Posted on by

…in trouble:

There is no indication the water will stop rising anytime soon. Swollen rivers in east Texas aren’t expected to crest until later this week, and federal officials are already predicting the deadly Tropical Storm Harvey will drive 30,000 people into shelters and spur 450,000 victims to seek some sort of disaster assistance.
And yet, forecasters say, more rain is coming. Lots more.

The death toll so far is reported to be seven. Each death is tragic, but that’s relatively low for a disaster of such magnitude, and it could rise as time goes on. I haven’t written about this story so far, but it’s a big one:

The average annual rainfall in Houston is 50 inches. The city has seen 25 inches of rain in two days. Another 25 could fall by Saturday.

That’s shocking.

Here are some dramatic photos. And here’s a piece on the mechanism of flooding in cities:

Under normal circumstances, rain or snowfall soaks back into the earth after falling. It gets absorbed by grasslands, by parks, by residential lawns, by anywhere the soil is exposed. Two factors can impede that absorption. One is large quantities of rain in a short period of time. The ground becomes inundated, and the water spreads out in accordance with the topography. The second is covering over the ground so it cannot soak up water in the first place. And that’s exactly what cities do””they transform the land into developed civilization…

The natural system is very good at accepting rainfall. But when water hits pavement, it creates runoff immediately. That water has to go somewhere. So it flows wherever the grade takes it. To account for that runoff, people engineer systems to move the water away from where it is originally deposited, or to house it in situ, or even to reuse it. This process””the policy, planning, engineering, implementation, and maintenance of urban water systems””is called stormwater management…

Houston poses both a typical and an unusual situation for stormwater management. The city is enormous, stretching out over 600 square miles. It’s an epitome of the urban sprawl characterized by American exurbanism, where available land made development easy at the edges. Unlike New Orleans, Houston is well above sea level, so flooding risk from storm surge inundation is low. Instead, it’s rainfall that poses the biggest threat.

A series of slow-moving rivers, called bayous, provide natural drainage for the area. To account for the certainty of flooding, Houston has built drainage channels, sewers, outfalls, on- and off-road ditches, and detention ponds to hold or move water away from local areas. When they fill, the roadways provide overrun. The dramatic images from Houston that show wide, interstate freeways transformed into rivers look like the cause of the disaster, but they are also its solution, if not an ideal one. This is also why evacuating Houston, a metropolitan area of 6.5 million people, would have been a terrible idea. This is a city run by cars, and sending its residents to sit in gridlock on the thoroughfares and freeways designed to become rivers during flooding would have doomed them to death by water.

Much more at the link.

As commenter “Bill” writes:

…for those of you who pray, please pray for Houston. It is unbelievable here. For myself and my family, we are still for the moment unflooded, but so many friends have lost their houses to the waters and have had to wait for boat rescue, taking just what they can carry.

Never, ever seen anything like this.

The WaPo and the AP decide (for the moment, anyway) that maybe Antifa aren’t such freedom fighters after all

The New Neo Posted on by

Take a look at the headlines: “Black-clad antifa attack peaceful right-wing demonstrators in Berkeley,” and “Black-clad anarchists swarm anti-hate rally in California.” The first is from the WaPo and the second the AP; the first is more critical of Antifa than the second, but both seem to represent somewhat of a switch from the coverage Antifa has gotten so far.

This is from the AP article:

Berkeley Police Chief Andrew Greenwood said officers were told not to actively confront the anarchists. He applauded officers’ restraint, saying it forestalled greater violence. Six people suffered injuries, including two who were hospitalized, and one officer was injured while making an arrest and several others were hit with paint.

There were 13 arrests on various charges including, assault with a deadly weapon.

“The potential use of force became very problematic” given the thousands of peaceful protesters in the park, Greenwood said. Once anarchists arrived, it was clear there would not be dueling protests between left and right so he ordered his officers out of the park and allowed the anarchists to march in.

What’s up with that last sentence? It’s patently absurd as a defense of the police. A large number of anarchists with a violent history crash a previously peaceful demonstration, and it’s then that the police leave? And we’re not supposed to think the police winked at the violence on Antifa’s part that was inevitable at that point?

There’s much much more there, although it’s a bit hard to sort out because the article isn’t very well-written. What I’ve gleaned from it, though, is that there were two planned demonstrations by the right billed as anti-Marxism protests. The first had been originally set for Saturday in San Francisco in Crissy Field, and it was organized by Joey Gibson, leader of a group called Patriot Prayer. It was canceled due to concerns over deficits in the planned security arrangements by police. According to the article, Gibson is Japanese-American:

…[and has] consistently denounced racism. In a video he posted on Patriot Prayer’s Facebook page, Gibson said he is a person of color and so if he was in favor of white nationalism “I’d have to punch myself in the face.”

That information was offered rather late in the article.

A second demonstration had been planned by the right for Sunday in Berkeley, and it was also canceled:

The anti-Marxist rally in Berkeley was organized by Amber Cummings, a transsexual supporter of Trump. Citing the potential for violence, she canceled the event but said she would show up on her own. She was not seen there, though Gibson vowed to come and when he did anarchists set upon him.

They pepper-sprayed him and chased him as he backed away with his hands held in the air. Gibson rushed behind a line of police wearing riot gear, who set off a smoke bomb to drive away the attackers.

It was this second demonstration at which the violence occurred. It wasn’t much of a demonstration on the part of the right, because very few people showed up. But the ones who did were completely peaceful, and Antifa was violent. This wasn’t a case of “both sides were…”. The violence was completely one-sided.

The reporters who were there seem to have been a bit shocked by what they saw, although they shouldn’t have been; Antifa has shown its propensities long ago. Perhaps something about witnessing armed (with sticks and shields) people attacking peaceful demonstrators got the reporters’ attention—or perhaps it was the fact that some reporters were menaced as well.

It remains to be seen whether the MSM will continue this line of coverage in the future. I happen to doubt it, but I could be wrong.

I would think this experience, and the Berkeley police response to it, would be very very empowering for Antifa. Demonstrations on the right canceled: check. Police back down when Antifa arrives: check. Mission accomplished.

[NOTE: Here is some background on how the Saturday San Francisco rally came to be canceled:

Californian leaders, including House minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D), have adamantly opposed a rally organized by the Patriot Prayer group on the grounds that it is “alt right” and “white supremacist.” The problem, however, is that of the speakers scheduled to speak, only one was white. Indeed, the group’s leader is neither white nor “alt right.”

Please read the whole thing.]

Amazon takes over Whole Foods and cuts prices

The New Neo Posted on by

I figure that when Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos and he chose the name of the company, he must already have had big plans. You don’t call something “Amazon” and expect to stay small.

Sure enough:

On July 5, 1994, Bezos incorporated the company as Cadabra, Inc. Bezos changed the name to Amazon.com, Inc. a few months later, after a lawyer misheard its original name as “cadaver”. In September 1994, Bezos purchased the URL Relentless.com and briefly considered naming his online store Relentless, but friends told him the name sounded a bit sinister. The domain is still owned by Bezos and still redirects to the retailer. The company went online as Amazon.com in 1995.

Bezos selected the name Amazon by looking through the dictionary; he settled on “Amazon” because it was a place that was “exotic and different”, just as he had envisioned for his Internet enterprise. The Amazon River, he noted, was the biggest river in the world, and he planned to make his store the biggest in the world.

“Relentless” would have been nicely descriptive as well.

Now Amazon has swallowed Whole Foods whole. And somewhere in the process of digesting the meal Amazon decided to cut prices, at least some prices, in an effort to make Whole Foods more accessible to those people who may not want to walk out of the store with quite as big a hit in their wallets.

I use Amazon a fair amount myself. It’s tremendously convenient. You can find just about anything there, and if you’re a Prime member (I’m not right now, but I have been at times in the past) you can have nearly-instant gratification of every desire in the material world you can afford, and on Amazon the prices are such that you can afford quite a bit. These things drive Amazon’s sales, because most people appreciate comprehensiveness, convenience, speed, and savings.

And yes, I’ve got those Amazon widgets on the blog, too, and so I’m an Amazon promoter as well. I get a small percentage of everything you buy through my blog when you click on one of those widgets or an Amazon link in the body of a post. Small, but it adds up, and every little bit helps.

But I confess to having mixed feelings about the homogenization of the marketplace and the dominance of huge companies over the local ones which can’t compete in terms of prices. Whole Foods was already a huge company, of course. And Whole Foods’ prices used to be so high that that fact was a joke with most people: “Whole Paycheck” and all that. But it seemed to me that Whole Foods knew what they were doing with those prices, which was to appeal to the (mostly liberal) urbanites who didn’t mind paying a premium for a shopping experience that was not only esthetically and gustatorially pleasing but that made them feel vaguely virtuous and “clean.”

That was Whole Foods’ niche, at least as I saw it. Trader Joe’s—which has a smaller selection of products but with good quality and lower prices—has had its foot firmly in the middle-of-the-road everyone-is-welcome door, whereas Walmart (and locally Market Basket, my own favored supermarket) has the reputation of being for the proles among us (I shop at Walmart for quite a few things, although not usually groceries).

Will Whole Foods now attract more people, lured by the lower prices (which are dropped for some items, but my guess is that Whole Foods will remain on the expensive side)? Or will the special appeal of Whole Foods—that je ne sais quoi—be lost?

Back to the Woodstock garden

The New Neo Posted on by

Nope, I wasn’t at Woodstock—one of the only members of my generation who wasn’t, to hear most them tell it.

And I don’t romanticize the 60s and look back on them nostalgically, although many people my age do. I think the 60s were the root of a lot of wrong turnings the aftermath of which we’re dealing with today, although what happened during that era certainly wasn’t all bad and some of it was good (the early civil rights movement, for example).

And the music was pretty great.

Now, I never was a fan of the song “Woodstock,” but it’s certainly familiar to me. I came across “Woodstock” the other day—I forget why, but it had something to do with searching for the Joni Mitchell song “Tin Angel,” which I highly recommend. I love the ability YouTube gives us to compare and contrast, and to track the passage of time and the changes in artists’ interpretations (and their voices) through the passing years.

So here we have the achingly young Joni Mitchell of the high angelic voice, performing her original concept of “Woodstock” (a song she actually wrote, although it was Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young who popularized it in a very different version). Mitchell wasn’t at Woodstock either; if you want to skip her story about that and just go straight to the song, start after one minute:

Years later Mitchell finally made it to Woodstock, somewhat the worse for wear. Here’s the same song, with Mitchell older and deeper of voice:

And here she is around 70 years of age, with the voice ever deeper:

Now listen to the much more well-known (and very different) version sung by Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young. It’s probably the one you already know quite well if you’re Of A Certain Age:

“We” never did get back to that garden, did we? Maybe because a flaming sword bars the way.

[NOTE: Speaking of The Garden, I think this is mighty interesting.]

Presidents and lies

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Big Maq” asks a question:

If it were obama or clinton who made such claims [that he had passed more bills in his first seven months than most presidents had in that time] in the same circumstances, would we still be arguing that either is “substantially right”?

I highly, highly doubt so. I’d bet my retirement on it, and I’m not a big gambler.

Well, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to talk about it all that much because that sort of lie (or misstatement, or exaggeration, or puffery) wasn’t my big concern with Obama. I had major concerns about other sorts of lies, as you will see.

I did write about Obama’s bragging in general and his narcissism, just as I have with Trump, in terms of his character and personality. One exploration of these traits of Obama’s—written during the 2008 campaign—can be found here. I’m going to quote from it at some length:

Self-confidence is an internal state that guides behavior. A self-confident person believes that he/she is capable of weighing situations, making good choices, and taking productive actions. Self-confidence can be conveyed by a calm demeanor, an air of knowledge and authority, the ability to make decisions and stick with them but to remain flexible if facts and situations change (not merely for political expediency).

Arrogance is not an internal state. It’s an external manifestation of an internal state that may or may not include authentic self-confidence. While it’s possible to be truly self-confident and yet not have enough sensitivity to the perceptions of others to curb overt and sometimes offputting expressions of arrogance, it’s also very common for the deeply insecure to convey an impression of arrogance to cover up that deficit (even from themselves, or maybe especially from themselves).

In addition, self-confidence can be objectively justified by a person’s behavior and skills, or it can be misplaced…

Certainly Obama is supremely self-confident; no doubt about that. But does his capacity for leadership match his high assessment of his own abilities? He is fortunate in that his demeanor, his voice, and his smooth speaking style have engendered the confidence of others for much of his life, and therefore they feed his own faith in himself. But his actual record of accomplishment””as has been pointed out time and again””is remarkably thin.

Only time will tell whether Obama can actually do the job well in the event of his election to the Presidency. But that’s true of all presidents. At the moment it’s only possible to say that there is good reason to doubt that his self-confidence is justified…

…Obama’s arrogance now is… symbolic and rhetorical and tone deaf. The redesign of the seal. The “rise of the oceans”¦” speech. The premature triumphant World Tour. The dismissing of valid questions as being unworthy of his time and trouble. The inability to admit to having been wrong.

Some of this may sound familiar. And in fact it is the latter quality””inability to admit having been wrong””that opponents of George Bush often cite as one of his major flaws.

Arrogance has most definitely been one of Bush’s drawbacks””never more so, I believe, than in his showboaty landing on the USS Lincoln. That panoply of macho swagger was fun for a moment, but in the end it did him no good at all. Nor did his famous “bring them on!” statement, which to his credit, Bush ended up publicly regretting.

Presidents often skirt the fine line between self-confidence and arrogance. But it’s always a bad idea to cross it, although a transgression can be forgiven now and then if it doesn’t become a habit and things are otherwise going well.

In line with the analysis I offered there, I submit that Trump is both self-confident and arrogant, although with a very different style of arrogance than Obama had. Trump’s arrogance involves a more conventional type of bragging. Not only that, but (unlike Obama) his bragging is a very obvious and open part of his personality, something even most of his admirers concede. In contrast, Obama’s demeanor was that of a judicious, laid-back, professorial guy, and yet he still said things that were astoundingly over-the-top in terms of bragging (those oceans) without even blinking. Trump is a much “hotter” personality, and his braggadocio is overt and obvious and a big part of what we already know about him. It’s been discussed—and acknowledged for the most part by both sides—so much for so long that it isn’t something that I would think needs a whole lot more discussion.

In other words, it’s a given.

But bragging of that sort is not lying. Those who call it “lying” are characterizing it in a way that doesn’t fit, and didn’t even fit for Obama. I don’t think I ever referred to Obama’s self-aggrandizement as “lying.” I don’t think I would have liked it if people had done so, either, although I can’t find a post where I discuss this. I did find this post where I described my annoyance at the political use of “gotcha gaffes” on both sides, cases in which mistakes or slips of the tongue are made much of by the opposition. Sometimes I use humor to deal with those incidents of this nature that I consider not all that important. Note, for example, that I used humor just yesterday to deal with Pelosi’s “wolf in a theater” remark, which I consider a gaffe—and I used the term “faux pas” to refer to it.

If you want an example of the way I looked at Obama’s slips of the tongue and/or ignorance of historical facts, take a look at this post from May of 2008 [emphasis added, and Big Maq, please take note of the parts I’ve bolded]:

…[N]ot all of Obama’s errors are created equal. Some fall into the category of slips of the tongue””after all, even his enemies don’t really think Obama believes there are 57 states.

Obama’s most recent error””which concentration camp his uncle (actually, great-uncle) helped liberate””has been blown way out of proportion. As soon as I heard the story, I was nearly certain it was basically true but that he’d gotten the camp wrong.

This is not a case of “lying,” as some have charged, nor of course did Obama’s uncle serve in the Russian Army, as some tongues-in-cheek have suggested. But still, the mistake is a bit more disturbing than his “Heinz 57 states” error. The latter was a slip of the tongue. The former was a sloppy case of ignorance of a detail of history, Obama relying on his memory rather than fact-checking.

There’s much more after that, but the reason I’m referring to it is that I think it demonstrates how reluctant I am to use the word “lie” to refer to an error that comes from campaign hyperbole or ignorance. If it’s ignorance, I’ll criticize the ignorance, not a “lie” that isn’t really a lie. And I try to do the same for each side.

Lies are different, and I come down much more heavily on them. For example, here’s what I wrote about Obama’s whopper “you can keep your doctor,” because it was a deliberate lie and a material lie about government policy.

Much later in the Obama game—February of 2014—I wrote this post about the sort of presidential lies from Obama that bothered me the very most of all. The title is “All Presidents lie”:

I suppose most of them””or at least many of them””do.

About sex.

About any number of things”“usually minor things, or self-serving face-saving things when caught in error, or about things like smoking marijuana.

They also make errors: Bush on WMDs would be a good example, or Bush I’s promise not to raise taxes.

But I can think of no president who has lied in the way Obama has: about the fundamentals of who he is politically. About his plans for the United States. About the most basic details of a huge program he’s promoting, knowing he’s lying even as he’s promoting it.

That’s why I get so angry when I hear Obama supporters excusing him by saying “all presidents lie.” Not like Obama, they don’t.

About that most fundamental thing—his political points of view, and his plans for the country as president—Trump (at least so far) appears to have been telling the truth. Which is sort of funny, because during the campaign a lot of us suspected he might have been lying and had no intention of trying to do most of the things he said he would try to do. If during his campaign Obama seemed more trustworthy than he actually turned out to be (although I don’t think I was fooled; see this post), than Trump as president so far has been more trustworthy in that respect than he seemed to be during the campaign.