Google engineer who wrote wrongthink memo is Summersed

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t need to go into all the details, because if you follow this link you can get up to speed on them. But the gist of the story is that a senior engineer at Google wrote an internal memo questioning the idea that the reason women were not as numerous as men in tech jobs such as softwear engineering was due to discrimination rather than some more hard-wired differences between men and women.

Well, you can imagine what that sort of heresy unleashed—a firestorm of anger, hurt feelings, and demands (not just from women, by the way, but from a host of outraged SJWs) that he be fired.

And so it came to pass, with Google saying that although they love discussions of all sorts of issues, that particular one violated their dogma (otherwise known as the Code of Conduct).

Chilling, terrible, predictable.

Why did I use the word “Summersed” in the post’s title? It harks back to a topic I wrote about extensively early in my blogging career, the firing of Larry Summers as Harvard’s president. His offense was very similar, although slightly different. He dared to question the idea that female under-representation in the upper echelons of sciences—the pinnacle of achievement—might be due to something more than discrimination, and that the question was at least worthy of study.

For that, he was drummed out. Now, granted, Summers was already an unpopular president at the university for many reasons, so for a lot of people this was just the excuse to get rid of him. But for many others, it was what he said—what he dared to say—that threw them so.

It was a sad thing to realize that in an institution with Harvard’s reputation, such questions were so beyond the pale that they could not be mentioned and certainly not studied—even if true. Maybe especially if they turned out to be true. In the ensuing years the rot has spread to industry, particularly Silicon Valley tech firms such as Google.

Personally, I don’t care if women aren’t biologically as likely to enter tech fields in equal numbers to men. Why should I care, as long as the women who do want to enter, and who can do the work, don’t face discrimination in hiring? I’m sure there are professions for which men—on average, which are all we’re taking about, rather than individual men—aren’t as likely to have the aptitude or interest as women do. Who cares?

Lots of people, apparently.

[NOTE: You can find my Summers posts here and here as well as here.]

ISIS hasn’t been doing so well lately

The New Neo Posted on by

Good news:

Nearly a third of territory reclaimed from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria since 2014 has been won in the past six months, due to new policies adopted by the Trump administration, a senior State Department official said Friday.

Brett McGurk, the State Department’s senior envoy to the anti-Islamic State coalition, said that steps President Trump has taken, including delegating decision-making authority down from the White House to commanders in the field, have “dramatically accelerated” gains against the militants.

It’s rather surprising that the WaPo is reporting on this.

A great deal of the good Trump might be able to do as president could come from non-interference with people doing their jobs. That’s also true of his policies on the border and illegal aliens and ICE, which includes the deterrence involved in perceptions of Trump’s position by those who would otherwise want to come here illegally:

“The number of illegal aliens apprehended in March 2017 was 30 percent lower than February apprehensions and 64 percent lower than the same time last year,” he said.

Vitiello said the combined efforts of the Trump administration have created a “perception” among illegal immigrants that it’s now much harder to stay in the United States, even if they make it across the border.

“Individuals who might seek to enter the country through unlawful channels do not want to invest significant resources only to be turned around at the border or removed soon after they arrive in the United States,” he said. “We have shown that we are serious about border security and enforcing our immigration laws.”

Another sign of success at the border is that the cost of smuggling people into the U.S. has jumped.

Even the NY Times reported that story back in March, although they hedged by using iffy language, with a headline that read (emphasis mine): “Illegal Border Crossings Appear to Drop Under Trump,” and text like this:

The data is likely to please supporters of President Trump and could let him take credit for quickly making good on his promise to clamp down on illegal immigration.

So, is it not likely to please anyone but Trump supporters? And does it only “allow him to take credit”? What about the fact that it might even be true, and that his “taking credit” might be justified?

The McMaster scuttlebutt

The New Neo Posted on by

You may have noticed that I haven’t discussed the brouhaha around White House security advisor H.R. McMaster—you know, the allegations that he’s working against Israel and eager to undermine all of Trump’s foreign policy.

That would seem to be big news, right? So why haven’t I gotten into it?

Well, in addition to my general all-purpose handy-dandy claim that I’m only one person and can’t cover everything (or even most things), I’ll add the more basic reason that so far I consider this story to be on the level of gossip rather than truth.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t true, of course. It just means that from the start I smelled a rat, and the rat isn’t McMaster. I have come to distrust such “people in the know are saying” reportage that attempts to smear someone, whether the anonymous allegations come from the left to smear the right, from the right to smear the left, or from the right to smear the right—or even from the left to smear the left. At this point, I’m cynical about all such blahbity-blah-blah, until subsequent events make the case stronger.

Today I found this Weekly Standard article summarizing what’s been going on in the McMaster situation:

The Daily Caller published an article the night of August 3 quoting “two former NSC officials” extensively. “Everything the president wants to do, McMaster opposes,” one of the former NSC officials told the Caller. One of the officials said McMaster was “subverting” Trump’s foreign policy and that the “Trumpian view” of Afghanistan was “shut down” by McMaster and his supposed band of Obama-era holdovers.

Several articles at Breitbart, meanwhile, have published what reads like opposition research on McMaster, including an August 6 piece that reported the Army general advised a British national-security think tank that counted as one of its donors the pro-Iran-deal Ploughshares Fund. The front page of Breitbart has featured critical stories about McMaster for several days. Bannon was the chairman of Breitbart before joining the Trump presidential campaign last year.

And blogger Mike Cernovich spends much of his Twitter feed blasting McMaster and NSC aides for their transgressions. Cernovich references many of these aides, who have no public profile, by name. The website McMasterLeaks.com is a collection of links to speculative stories about McMaster’s disloyalty to Trump or undermining of Trump’s agenda. The site also encourages readers to “post your leaks” about McMaster in the comments. Cernovich constantly tweets out links to McMasterLeaks.com and did not respond when I asked him if he’s behind the site.

The onslaught was enough to prompt the White House to issue a statement of support for McMaster from Trump on Friday. “General McMaster and I are working very well together. He is a good man and very pro-Israel. I am grateful for the work he continues to do serving our country,” Trump said.

There is obviously a concerted effort to undermine McMaster. He’s the most recent Trump-appointed aide who’s been targeted this way, and it started rather suddenly. I don’t know what the impetus was for the attack to begin, and although Bannon is a likely suspect I don’t necessarily think he’s the originator, either. I do know that I’m tired of unsourced gossip posing as news, and that some of it is seemingly generated on the right with targets on the right.

The “double effect” of morphine at end of life: reality or myth?

The New Neo Posted on by

The Netherlands euthanasia thread on Saturday generated a fascinating discussion in the comments section about the use of morphine at end of life, so I thought I’d highlight it here and expand on my remarks.

First, a personal note. In the last few years, I’ve seen a few people die who have had their way eased by morphine. Like many and maybe even most people, I’ve long assumed that morphine is given to reduce pain and make it less laborious to breathe, and that it may hasten death as a sort of side-effect but that a quicker demise is not the goal. But a few months ago, when I looked up what medical experts on the subject had to say, I was extremely surprised to learn that my assumption wasn’t true.

The discussion on the euthanasia thread begins around here, with a commenter who wrote about the death of several loved ones, “It was the morphine that suppressed her breathing reflex, not the liver failure that killed her”¦ in both cases, it was morphine that led to respiratory failure.”

I referred that commenter (and anyone else who’s curious about the subject) to this site, one of many that discuss the issue:

When a patient is receiving regular pain medication such as morphine in the final hours or days of life, there is always a “last dose”. To family at the bedside, it may seem like the drug caused or contributed to the death, especially if death occurs within a few minutes. However, this dose does not actually cause the person’s dying. It is simply the last medication given in the minutes or hours before the death naturally occurs…

…[R]esearch suggests that using opioids to treat pain or shortness of breath near the end of life may help a person live a bit longer. Pain and shortness of breath are exhausting, and people nearing the end of life have limited strength and energy…

If a person has never received morphine, the initial doses given are low. They are gradually increased to relieve the person’s level of pain or shortness of breath. After a few days of regular doses, the body adjusts to the morphine. The patient becomes less likely to be affected by morphine’s most serious side effect””the slowing of breathing. It would take a large dose increase over a short time to harm someone. Morphine doses are increased gradually and only as needed to maintain comfort.

The following is especially important to note:

When someone has received too much morphine,…the person’s breathing becomes very slow and regular. Sometimes only one or two breaths are taken in a minute…

In the last few hours of the natural dying process, a person’s breathing becomes shallower and faster than normal.

So, one way to distinguish between the two phenomena is the rate of breathing. When someone is dying of an overdose, the breathing rate slows, and this happens not just in the last few minutes or seconds but over a longer amount of time prior to death. The opposite is true for someone dying naturally. Even with the administration of morphine, breathing is typically shallow and fast, and then towards the very end will often switch to what’s called Cheyne-Stokes respiration that has a different and characteristic pattern (see also this).

It’s understandable that families and other observers often perceive that morphine hastens death in hospitals. But as far as we can tell it is not actually happening that way in the vast vast majority of cases, unless an error has been made in dosage. An even fuller discussion of the subject can be found here. It talks in particular about the myth of this “double effect” of morphine hastening death when administered at end of life. Of particular interest is how that perception relates to the euthanasia debate:

A troubling result of the mistaken belief in the double effect of pain medication is its effect on discussions of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. Giving pain medications is even referred to as indirect euthanasia, “double effect euthanasia,” or “accidental euthanasia.” For example, in one article, the authors stated that “a common example of indirect euthanasia is the administration of large doses of narcotics to a terminally ill patient in unbearable pain” And although the AMA’s Council on Ethical and judicial Affairs, in its “Decisions Near the End of Life,” rejected euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide and endorsed palliative care, the Council stated that the “ethical distinction between palliative care that may have fatal side effects and providing euthanasia is subtle. . . .”

In the past, the underlying theme of most discussions of the double effect of pain medication, even when referred to as indirect euthanasia, was that the administration of pain medications was ethical. Recently there has been renewed interest in “double effect euthanasia,” equating it to, and using it to support, legalized physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia. The argument usually takes one of two forms or some combination of the two. First, because hastening death by drugs is already being done and is ethical, perhaps we should extend medical practice to allow physician-assisted suicide. The second argument is that because physicians are already hastening death, we should legalize it to provide safeguards.

It appears that even many of the doctors who don’t specialize in end of life issues believe—incorrectly—in the “double effect” as a given. This belief in the double effect is also used by people who advocate physician-assisted euthanasia, who bolster their arguments by saying doctor-assisted euthanasia is already happening regularly anyway, just in hidden form.

Much food for thought.

He put his “Bach hat” on…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and lit that fire.

Who’s the “he” who described himself as having put on his Bach hat? Ray Manzarek, who was the inspired and superlative keyboardist for The Doors, and co-founder of the group with Jim Morrison.

Recently it was the 50th anniversary of the monster Doors hit “Light My Fire,” a song made uniquely wonderful by Manzarek’s organ playing. John Hinderaker of Powerline offers up a post for the occasion that features an interview with Manzarek from 1998 that’s well worth listening to, particularly if you’re a fan. That’s where Manzarek talks about his Bach hat.

I can’t seem to embed the interview here, so please follow the Powerline link I just gave and listen to the audio there. In the interview, Manzarek explains how the song was made and then transformed into what we’ve heard for 50 years (Happy Anniversary!) as one of the greatest rock songs ever. It was originally popular in the “short” version, the one that gave short shrift to Manzarek’s solo (although the rest of his playing was still wonderful). A long time ago most people became familiar with the fabulous “long” version in all its crescendo-building glory.

I’ve long been a big Manzarek fan, but I had never heard that interview before. And I certainly never heard any Bach in “Light My Fire”—not that I was looking for it, although now that Manzarek mentions it, it’s pretty easy to spot.

Enjoy.

[NOTE: Here’s my previous post on Manzarek, written on the occasion of his death in 2013.]

The slippery euthanasia slope in the Netherlands

The New Neo Posted on by

Euthanasia has been legal in the Netherlands since 2002, and since then the incidence of such deaths has risen to become 4.5 percent of all deaths. What’s more, the number of people availing themselves of this form of death who are not otherwise terminal has increased, as well.

Unsurprising. Disturbing.

The vast majority – 92 percent – had serious illness and the rest had health problems from old age, early-stage dementia or psychiatric problems or a combination. More than a third of those who died were over 80.

Requests from those who aren’t terminally ill still represent a small share, but have been increasing, Van der Heide said.

“When assisted dying is becoming the more normal option at the end of life, there is a risk people will feel more inclined to ask for it,” she said.

About 8 percent of the people who died in 2015 asked for help dying, the review showed. Van der Heide said about half of all requests are approved now, compared with about a third in previous years.

Not only is it a slippery slope, but it’s an exceptionally difficult issue involving liberty. Should people be allowed to choose to die, and to have medical assistance in carrying out their wishes? A strict libertarian would probably say “yes.” Most religious people and most religions would probably say “no.”

It troubles me that many of the people doing this in the Netherlands seem to merely be depressed (although depression can be so bad that “merely” really doesn’t seem to be the correct word). We have a situation in which some depressed people are committing suicide with the help of doctors. This seems so clearly wrong to me that I would think it beyond argument, and yet it’s been going on in that country for quite some time.

[NOTE: I know a number of elderly people who had said for years that if they ever came to the point of being very compromised, either in body or mind or both, they would kill themselves. Several owned the book Final Exit and praised it highly (I believe that one even belonged to the Hemlock Society), and at least two had access to enough medication to perform the act without assistance. And yet, when both of them failed (in body more than mind, although there was a moderate amount of memory loss for both) at very advanced ages, neither did a thing to end their lives. Their everyday existence was very diminished, and there was even a fair amount of pain, but both of them elected to let fate determine the hour of their deaths.]

What do the transcripts show us about Trump’s negotiating skills?

The New Neo Posted on by

Ann Althouse performed a task that very few people have taken on: she actually read the WaPo transcript of Trump’s call with Peé±a Nieto and closely analyzed it. What she found may surprise you, but it dovetails with my own impression from my own admittedly not-so-close reading.

The original reaction to the transcripts in the MSM and by Democrats and other Trump-opponents was generally that they revealed him to be stupid and/or clumsy and/or hypocritical. That’s what those readers were looking for, so of course they found it—mainly by fastening on isolated statements of Trump’s such as New Hampshire being a “drug-infested den” (I wrote yesterday about how that statement of Trump’s was true, if not literally, then basically).

Take a look for yourself at Althouse’s close reading of the talk between the two presidents. Here are her final remarks on the subject:

Now, what if anything is there in all of that to use against Trump? Really, the only thing is that he cares about his personal political success and doesn’t mind referring to it directly, even when the other guy insists that it’s all only about the public good. There’s nothing in there about Trump perhaps not really wanting to build a physical wall. He seems dedicated to that. You can’t see him conceding that Mexico won’t pay for the wall. What you see is some complicated, political structuring of a way to get the wall paid for that will probably satisfy the people who heard that promise and wanted it kept. But what can his antagonists grab onto? They can’t very well oppose crushing the drug gangs or better trade deals. So it’s no wonder they went big with Oh! He insulted New Hampshire! And that’s it for the transcripts. Don’t encourage people to actually read them. They might think Trump did just fine.

Indeed, that was my impression, too. Hey, let’s natter on about the nasty thing Trump said about New Hampshire—even though prior to this lots of us were talking about New Hampshire’s enormous opiate problem! Hey, stupidhead Trump doesn’t even know he lost New Hampshire (even though—shhhh!!—what he may have meant or even probably meant was that he won the New Hampshire primary, which he did)!

That’s the way the MSM operates, that’s what most people read, and that’s what many of them remember.

This time, however, I’m not so sure. As I also wrote yesterday, there’s been a lot of criticism of the MSM for publishing the transcripts, even from some normally anti-Trump sources. It’s fairly clear that the WaPo did it solely in an attempt to hurt Trump. There was absolutely no overriding reason the American people needed to know anything revealed in there. There was no smoking gun and really nothing much of note. So the WaPo’s Trump-destructive motives seem unusually transparent. Is it the old “give them enough rope” principle in action?

The content of those leaked Trump phone calls (including New Hampshire, that “drug-infested den”)

The New Neo Posted on by

What struck me initially about the leaked Trump phone calls published by the WaPo was the fact that they were even leaked and published in the first place. So till now, my posts on the subject were all about that.

But there’s something else about the whole brouhaha that I find interesting: the content of the phone calls and how it’s being treated by the press and the Trump opposition. The calls’ content has widely been taken as proof that Trump is just as stupid as they always thought he was—or even more stupid—and just as hypocritical.

I didn’t read the full transcripts. But some of the excerpts I saw quoted as being the best evidence of Trump’s terrible Trump traits didn’t seem that way to me at all. In fact, considering that I’ve never been a Trump fan and was a very active Trump critic for a long, long time (basically, for the entire primary year), I found them somewhat reassuring.

Although a Trump critic for a long time, I’ve never considered Trump either an idiot or a buffoon. I’ve always argued that he’s smart, although the very opposite of an intellectual (and I don’t care whether a president is an intellectual or not, because I see no particular advantage to that trait in the presidency). In the transcripts of these phone calls, Trump comes across as fairly wily, and certainly no dummy. If you see the phone calls as an exercise in schmoozing plus attempts at persuasion and cajoling with a soupé§on of warning and threat thrown in (and that’s how I see them), then they’re not half bad, although not especially effective. Allahpundit (who’s also not been a Trump fan) nevertheless observes:

Trump doesn’t even concede that Mexico won’t pay for the wall. The most damning thing he says is the bit about how the wall is the “least important thing that we are talking about” but politically the most important. That implies that he sees the wall less as an essential deterrent to illegal immigration than an essential component of his strongman persona ”” which it is, of course. He can tolerate an arrangement in which Mexico doesn’t pay for it, or all of it. But telling the press that they won’t? Nuh uh. That’s bad for his image…

If Trump had told Turnbull that he privately had no problem with accepting the refugees but had to put on a tough-guy facade for his base, that arguably might have been newsworthy enough to justify a limited leak. The president doesn’t believe in his own immigration policy! But he sounds here exactly like he did during the campaign. He doesn’t want the refugees, warning at one point that they could produce another pair of Boston bombers, but he agrees to accept them reluctantly to show that the U.S. will honor its commitments. The only “news” is that he did in fact have a pissy conversation with a close U.S. ally. Which we’ve known about for ages, even though Trump denied it on Twitter at the time.

Allahpundit adds:

[Trump] also told Pena-Nieto regarding illegal drugs coming into the U.S. from Mexico, “I won New Hampshire because New Hampshire is a drug-infested den.” Whether that description is accurate or not, he, er, did not win New Hampshire last year…

No, Trump didn’t win the general election in that state—Hillary won by a very small margin (.3%)—but he won the NH primary by a huge margin. That was a big big deal at the time, and gave him his very first primary win after a defeat in Iowa. New Hampshire made him legit, as it were, and if he’s bragging about his primary win there, it would make a lot more sense than talking about winning (or losing) New Hampshire in the general, where its paltry four electoral votes hardly matter.

Allahpundit questions whether that description of New Hampshire as “a drug-infested den” is accurate or is hyperbole. But although “den” is perhaps a bit colorful, it is accurate in terms of the seriousness of the drug problem that has come to plague the state.

Predictably, New Hampshire’s Democrats are up in arms about what Trump said about their state. But let’s take a look at some facts:

According to data provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, New Hampshire ranks No. 2 in the nation behind West Virginia for the number of opioid-related deaths relative to its population. New Hampshire also ranks No. 1 in fentanyl-related deaths per capita…

From February to June 2016, the opioid-related emergency department in New Hampshire saw its visits increase by a whopping 70 percent.

New Hampshire Manchester Fire Department Chief Daniel Goonan told the publication that about half of his job is now dedicated to dealing with the opioid outbreak.

And let’s take a trip back in time, shall we? In January of 2016, a month before the NH primary, PBS and some NH Democrats were singing this tune:

JUDY WOODRUFF: But, first, say New Hampshire, and most people in the political world think first-in-the-nation primary, coming up February 9.

But, these days, there’s another, more disturbing distinction for the Granite State, the expectation that last year’s fatal drug overdoses will hit a record 400 deaths.

Today, presidential candidates and state political leaders gathered for a forum to tackle addiction and the growing heroin crisis.

I traveled to New Hampshire last month to get a firsthand look at the epidemic and its repercussions…

GOV. MAGGIE HASSAN, D-N.H.: The opioid epidemic is really our most pressing public health and public safety issue right now.

DONNA SYTEK, Former New Hampshire House Speaker: Drug abuse has always been a challenge for New Hampshire, but, with the opioid crisis, it has reached epic proportions.

There’s much much more, including the startling statistic that among NH’s population of about 1.3 million people, 100,000 are in need of drug treatment, and the state is next to last in the nation in terms of access to help.

“Drug-infested den” doesn’t seem like such an inaccurate description.

The context in which Trump made the remarks published in the WaPo transcripts about New Hampshire was in speaking to Mexican president Nieto about the problem of drugs supplied by Mexico:

“We have a massive drug problem, where kids are becoming addicted to drugs because the drugs are being sold for less money than candy,” Trump said. “I won New Hampshire because New Hampshire is a drug-infested den.”

That’s basically the same opinion of New Hampshire’s drug woes that Trump demonstrated during his 2016 campaign when speaking in that state and elsewhere. This was from January of 2016:

Donald Trump got personal on Friday in answering a father’s question about stopping the rampant heroin epidemic.

“I lost my son two years ago to a heroin overdose,” a man told Trump at a rally in Urbandale, Iowa, his first event after Thursday night’s debate.

Trump asked whether the man was from Iowa; he responded that he was from Owego, New York, an upstate town in the center of the state that has been no stranger to the influx of heroin in recent years.

“Well, you know they have a tremendous problem in New Hampshire with the heroin. Unbelievable. It’s always the first question I get, and they have a problem all over. And it comes through the border,” the GOP presidential candidate said. He then repeated his most famous pledge: “We’re going to build a wall, number one, we’re going to build a wall, and it’s going to be a real wall.”

And here’s Trump speaking in Farmington, New Hampshire shortly before that state’s primary:

Speaking to a capacity crowd of 1,000 at Farmington High School, Trump said his signature proposal, to build a wall across the country’s border with Mexico, would stem the flow of illicit drugs into the state.

“The question I get just about number one when I come up to New Hampshire: the drugs that are pouring in,” Trump said. “They’re coming across the Southern border and we are going to stop it.”

Three days before the primary, Trump was hammering away at the theme:

Donald Trump on Saturday again vowed to build a wall along the Mexico-U.S. border — this time arguing that it would help stem New Hampshire’s “drug epidemic.”

“New Hampshire has a tremendous drug epidemic,” Trump says. “I am going to create borders. No drugs are coming in. We’re going to build a wall…”

Shortly before the general election, Trump was still hammering away:

Trump said he specifically heard concerns about the drug epidemic from residents in New Hampshire when he was campaigning during the primary.

Trump said the state holds a special place in his heart because it handed him his first victory.

Trump told the crowd that “New Hampshire, more than any other place, taught me about the flow of drugs into this country. I never knew it was so bad.”

Trump noted his shock at the state’s drug issue given its beautiful scenery.

“You look at the beautiful little roadways, lakes and trees, and everything is so beautiful, the trees, you say, how could they have a drug problem here, it doesn’t fit,” he said.

“If I go all the way, we are going to stop the inflow of drugs into New Hampshire and into our country,” Trump said.

In Trump’s remarks to Nieto, he was completely consistent with his remarks during the campaign. People are incensed either because they forgot, or because they want to pretend to forget because it suits their purposes. To me it was obvious he was talking about a win in the primary, not the general—do people really think he has no idea which states he won in the general? The primary was a big big deal to Trump, and it’s inextricably tied into the state’s drug problem, which is inextricably tied into his talk about Mexico and the wall.

Oh, why do I care at this point? Over and over I find myself in the somewhat odd position of defending Trump. I absolutely hate what the MSM is doing right now, not only on the level of ignoring national security concerns, but also on the level of spreading misleading and manipulative propaganda. And yes, I know that this has been going on for a very long time.

Backlash to the leaks

The New Neo Posted on by

Even some Democrats have been critical of the recent leaks of transcripts of talks between President Trump and various foreign leaders, stating national security concerns.

Not enough Democrats have condemned it, in my book. But that there are any at all shows how far the WaPo went, and how perniciously the paper ignored the security implications for us all.

As for the question of who might have leaked the transcripts, we have this:

The notes were likely taken by a National Security Council official, who then put the conversations into a memorandum of conversation which is then sent through an editing and approval process by senior officials on the NSC.

The memorandum is then logged and registered as the official U.S. record of the meeting and kept on file either at the NSC or State Department.

It can be distributed, sometimes as a hard copy, to relevant officials at the Department of State, Department of Defense, CIA, Office of the Director of National Intelligence and other agencies within the intelligence community.

Those with appropriate clearances can also view the memorandums at the repositories where they’re kept. Along the way, there are scores of opportunities for the classified documents to “jump the gap.”

Seems that there’s a tremendous amount of vulnerability there. It also makes it more surprising that such leaks haven’t happened far more often—when a Republican is president, of course. And yet I can’t recall this sort of leak ever occurring before.

Oh, and naturally some news commentators have floated the idea that the leaker was the Trump White House itself. The motive? To make the press look bad.

What to do about college students who aren’t prepared to do the work?

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s a growing problem:

When I started teaching at Long Beach City College in fall of 2000, fully one-third of students enrolled came from a traditional white working-class background. I thought that was minuscule at the time, but now the number’s down to about 13 percent white students.

There’s nothing wrong with the diversity. In fact, Latinos at my college are more than half of the student population, and they’re totally fine. Many, though not all, are indeed very outstanding. On the other hand, I’m having more and more students —- including many Asians —- who literally do not speak English. I don’t know how they expect to succeed. But they’re here and this is the reality in California.

I can think of a number of possible “solutions”—I put the word in scare quotes because I don’t really see a solution that can be implemented in the political sense and that also would fix the problem.

The first is to put a screeching halt (or huge slowdown) to immigration of all sorts, legal and illegal. That wouldn’t change the immediate problem, although it would curb the growth of the problem. I don’t think it will be done, for political reasons. Plus, I don’t think the problem is limited to immigrants. There are a lot of young people who speak English—even as their first language—but lack the skills to deal with college courses. And yet they are in college.

Which brings us to our next “solution,” which is to improve grade school and high school education and also emphasize the need to learn and use English. Good luck with that.

The third “solution” is one that’s been tried, remedial courses at the college level. But according to the article I linked at the beginning of this post, the Cal State system has found that solution wanting. When you wade through the reasons given, it seems that the argument is that these courses subject the students involved (40% of those in the Cal State system!) to extra time and added expense, and the results are not particularly good. Looked at that way, why bother?

Which leaves us with the next “solution,” the one that the powers that be at Cal State have decided to implement:

…Cal State students will be allowed to take courses that count toward their degrees beginning on Day 1. Students who need additional support in math or English, for example, could be placed in “stretch” courses that simultaneously provide remedial help and allow them to complete the general math and English credits required for graduation.

Faculty are also encouraged to explore other innovative ways to embed additional academic support within a college-level course. A few other states have experimented with these approaches, and the results so far are encouraging, administrators said.

The conclusion is that students will stop dropping out because there won’t be as much extra time and expense for them as before, and the results will be just as good. I would imagine the first part of that equation is true, but I doubt that last part will be.

On the other hand, it’s so bad now that maybe it won’t get any worse. Because it seems obvious that the university will either have to suddenly figure out a way to condense many years of learning (that had failed to “take” before) into a few short college courses, or reduce their rolls, or dumb things down considerably.

Stephen Miller found his calling early

The New Neo Posted on by

In case you haven’t seen the topic du jour—-Stephen Miller’s put-down of Jim Acosta—here it is:

Miller is a bulldog there, relentlessly on message and completely unafraid. This made me curious about him, and so I looked him up.

First of all, he’s only 31; I thought he was much older. But he’s an old pro; he’s been doing this pretty much since high school. And he had a political change experience back then, which doesn’t surprise me. That’s pretty early in life, so in some ways it doesn’t really qualify as a change experience because his political identity hadn’t yet been fully formed. Since then, though, he’s exhibited a laserlike focus:

Though his parents were Democrats, Miller became a conservative after reading Guns, Crime, and Freedom, a book by National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre. While attending Santa Monica High School, Miller began appearing on conservative talk radio. In 2002, at the age of sixteen, Miller wrote a letter to the editor of the Santa Monica Lookout, criticizing his school’s pacifist response to 9/11 in which he stated that “Osama Bin Laden would feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School.” Miller invited conservative activist David Horowitz to speak, first at the high school and later at Duke University, and afterwards denounced the fact that neither of the centers would authorize the event. Miller was in the habit of “riling up his fellow [high school] classmates with controversial statements” and telling Latino students to speak only English.

In 2007, Miller received his bachelor’s degree from Duke University, majoring in political science. Miller served as president of the Duke chapter of Horowitz’s Students for Academic Freedom and wrote conservative columns for the school newspaper. Miller gained national attention for his defense of the students who were wrongly accused of rape in the Duke lacrosse case.

There’s much much more at the link. The guy has essentially been debating politics in a fairly aggressive way for his entire life.

[NOTE: Oh, and by the way, about the poem to which Acosta is referring—if you read its history, you see how accurate Miller was.]