Late posting today

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I’m late posting today because I was phoned by a friend whose husband (also a friend of mine) just got a “very bad” cancer diagnosis. We talked about it over lunch.

Is there any “good” cancer diagnosis? No. And yet some really are much better and some really are much worse. This is one of the “worse” ones.

Getting older requires that we deal more and more often with grim announcements like this. I tried to comfort my friend as best I could, but there’s no way around it: it’s devastating news for her and for him, and upsetting news to me too.

Spring and Fall
By Gerard Manley Hopkins

to a young child

Mé¡rgarét, é¡re you gré­eving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leé¡ves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! é¡s the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wé­ll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sé³rrow’s spré­ngs é¡re the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It é­s the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

That’s a photo I took a couple of weeks ago, up north.

Another Peterson rant

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Now that I’ve been listening to Jordan Peterson, you’re probably going to see quite a few excerpts here from his talks.

How does he get the ability to speak so fast and so long while hardly pausing for breath? This video features seven rants, but I’ve cued it up to show just one of them, on the topic of equality of outcome:

Male breast cancer

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Here’s a man who wants to publicize the fact that males get breast cancer, too.

I think this is important information for men to know. I alluded to it in passing in this 2013 post, and included the fact that one in a hundred breast cancer cases are in men. That’s a lot more than most people would think.

But now I’ll add that one of the reasons I’ve long been aware of that fact is that a very dear male friend of mine died of breast cancer almost twenty years ago, after suffering from it for about ten years. He was only in his late forties when diagnosed. His mother had had the disease but lived to a ripe old age, and I am convinced he had the BRCA2 gene although I’ll never know.

Andrew C. McCarthy on the Obama/Clinton Uranium One deal

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I’ve been waiting for Andrew C. McCarthy to weigh in on the Uranium One Obama/Clinton deal (the scandal that so far isn’t, according to most of the MSM). McCarthy has written a scorcher of an article on the subject in National Review.

McCarthy is someone whose opinion I’ve come to trust. For the most part, he tends to be reasonable and not to imagine things, and he’s also had a tremendous amount of prosecutorial experience.

He’s very very concerned about Uranium One. Rather than quote from his article, I suggest you read the whole thing.

Republican Like Me

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This piece in the NY Post by former NPR CEO Ken Stern caught my eye. The title is “Former CEO of NPR opens up about liberal bias.” It is about that, but it’s actually about something a good deal more than that:

Spurred by a fear that red and blue America were drifting irrevocably apart, I decided to venture out from my overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhood and engage Republicans where they live, work and pray. For an entire year, I embedded myself with the other side, standing in pit row at a NASCAR race, hanging out at Tea Party meetings and sitting in on Steve Bannon’s radio show. I found an America far different from the one depicted in the press and imagined by presidents [see *NOTE below] (“cling to guns or religion”) and presidential candidates (“basket of deplorables”) alike.

Mock him if you will; it’s easy to do. After all, why did it take him all these years to learn something about Republicans? And what is he, an anthropologist, learning the arcane customs of some exotic far-off people? Note that the places he went—NASCAR races and Tea Party meetings—didn’t give him much variety in terms of Republicans, and played into certain stereotypes. But maybe that was just as well, because moderate and/or “country-club” Republicans probably wouldn’t have had as much of an impact on Stern.

However, I give him credit. Rather then continuing to demonize people he didn’t know, he set out to learn something, and his mind was open enough for some of his preconceptions to be changed. That’s not very common; it’s unusual for people to be able to change their minds and admit it, as I’ve said many times:

None of my new hunting partners fit the lazy caricature of the angry NRA member. Rather, they saw guns as both a shared sport and as a necessary means to protect their families during uncertain times…

I also spent time in depressed areas of Kentucky and Ohio with workers who felt that their concerns had long fallen on deaf ears and were looking for every opportunity to protest a government and political and media establishment that had left them behind. I drank late into the night at the Royal Oaks Bar in Youngstown and met workers who had been out of the mills for almost two decades and had suffered the interlocking plagues of unemployment, opioid addiction and declining health…To a man (and sometimes a woman), they looked at media and saw stories that did not reflect the world that they knew or the fears that they had.

Over the course of this past year, I have tried to consume media as they do and understand it as a partisan player. It is not so hard to do. Take guns. Gun control and gun rights is one of our most divisive issues, and there are legitimate points on both sides. But media is obsessed with the gun-control side and gives only scant, mostly negative, recognition to the gun-rights sides.

Take for instance the issue of the legitimate defensive gun use (DGUs), which is often dismissed by the media as myth. But DGUs happen all the time…

Reading this, you might well ask: and it took you how long to be aware of the point of view of the right, something that shouldn’t have required a year of total immersion because all you had to do was read a bit on the right and you would have seen it decades ago? As CEO of NPR, why didn’t it behoove you to become marginally well-informed about the other side?

These are valid questions, and I’d love to have a chat with Stern and hear his answers. It would be a friendly chat, because I tend to be kindly disposed to thoughtful mind-changers. He has written a book, however, and perhaps he deals with some of these questions in the book. It’s called Republican Like Me: How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned to Love the Right, and it’s due to come out tomorrow.

No, Stern didn’t end up a Republican. His title doesn’t refer to a political conversion; it is a riff on the book Black Like Me, which came out in the 1961 and was written by a white journalist who had darkened his skin and passed for black in the Deep South of the segregated era.

[*NOTE: This is probably nitpicky of me, but when Obama made his “bitter clinger” remark he was not yet president, he was a presidential candidate. That Stern makes the error of indicating Obama was president at the time (at least, that’s how I read what Stern wrote) surprises me, because this was a memorable moment in the campaign. Stern was the NPR CEO beginning in 2007 and held the post for eight and a half years, so he had that position at the time Obama made the statement.]

Joyce Carol Oates: marriage, memoir, and disclosure

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Joyce Carol Oates has been writing short stories and novels ever since the early 1960s. As a writer, she reminds me of Meryl Streep as an actress—that is, skillful, highly praised, prolific, versatile, and not especially appealing (to me, anyway).

A few years ago, Oates wrote a controversial memoir about her grief after becoming widowed. I haven’t read the book, although I’ve read a very long excerpt from it and I’ve read plenty about it. By all accounts she’d had a happy and companionate marriage for nearly 50 years until her husband passed away from pneumonia. Her memoir chronicles the first year of her widowhood.

Why do I say the book was controversial? Because of this curious omission:

Joyce Carol Oates has defended herself against Julian Barnes’s accusation that her failure to mention her remarriage a year after her husband’s death in her memoir of widowhood will cause some readers to feel “they have a good case for breach of narrative promise”.

A review by Barnes of Oates’s A Widow’s Story, which chronicles the 12 months after her husband of 47 years, Raymond Smith, died in February 2008, is largely generous…

But “there is something unhappy” in the prolific American novelist’s omission to mention the fact that she was remarried in March 2009, writes Barnes, with Oates only hinting “rather coyly on the last page” about her new husband’s existence. “She is writing about a year that began on February 18, 2008; we know from her own mouth (in an interview with the London Times) that she met her second husband in August 2008, they started going on walks and hikes in September, and were married in March 2009,” writes Barnes, whose own wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, died in October 2008.

That certainly does seem to be a startlingly large and important omission. People have taken sides on this issue, as you might expect. But I see it as two issues that are very different. Continue reading →

New teeth shed light on the origins of humans?

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Two teeth may not seem like a lot, but these teeth could wind up being an important clue in the history of human development:

At a press conference announcing the discovery, the mayor of Mainz said: ‘I don’t want to over-dramatise it, but I would hypothesise that we shall have to start rewriting the history of mankind after today.’

I wonder what he’d be saying if he was wanting to over-dramatize it.

In September 2016, researchers from the Mainz Natural History Museum in Germany discovered the set of teeth near the town of Eppelsheim.

In their study, published on ResearchGate, the researchers, led by Dr Herbert Lutz, wrote: ‘Both teeth, the crowns of an upper left canine and an upper right first molar, are exceptionally well preserved and obviously come from the same body of unknown sex.’

The molar was found to share characteristics with other species, including Lucy ”“ a 3.2 million-year-old skeleton of a human ancestor found in Ethiopia.

But the canine revealed potentially hominin qualities, which have never been seen in teeth discovered in Europe or Asia.

This raises questions about whether humans originated in Africa, as is commonly believed.

That sound like a potential powder keg. But fascinating.

Dueling headlines

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Seen at memeorandum:

Datelined yesterday, a Politico article headlined “Trump Likely to Block Release of Some JFK Files.”

In the WaPo this morning we find: “Trump Authorizes Release of JFK Assassination Documents Despite Concerns from Federal Agencies.”

Those documents will keep the conspiracy buffs very very busy.

[NOTE: I’ve already weighed in many times on my own opinion on the assassination, in particular here and here, as well as this, which is that Oswald was the sole assassin. Some of the arguments go on in the comments section of those posts as well.]

Out-of-court settlement of sexual harassment suits: what does it mean?

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That’s a topic that’s certainly been in the news lately. Harvey Weinstein’s company apparently factored it into his contract and instituted a stepped series of penalties Weinstein would have to pay for for sexual harassments lawsuits that were settled.

And now comes the news that Fox News signed a contract with Bill O’Reilly shortly after O’Reilly had settled a $32 million lawsuit:

Although the deal has not been previously made public, the network’s parent company, 21st Century Fox, acknowledges that it was aware of the woman’s complaints about Mr. O’Reilly. They included allegations of repeated harassment, a nonconsensual sexual relationship and the sending of gay pornography and other sexually explicit material to her, according to the people briefed on the matter.

To most people, these contracts seem unconscionable, a winking at the predations of men who prey unashamedly on women and take advantage of their own positions of greater power. And perhaps they are, particularly the Weinstein contract because—although we cannot know for sure because no one has ever published the exact language of the contract—it is rumored to have been operative even if Weinstein was found guilty by a court, as opposed to mere out-of-court settlements.

But I would remind everyone that out-of-court settlements are not admissions of guilt, although they’re popularly thought to be. Sometimes, of course, they are, and if a person is accused over and over in a pattern that seems to be similar enough to establish an m.o., it’s reasonable to think that all that smoke is indicative of a pretty big fire as well. But maybe not; one can ‘t be sure. And that’s why companies are not necessarily winking at sexual abuse if they are keeping someone on who has settled such an agreement out of court, or if the company itself does so.

False accusations do occur—although we have every reason to believe they are not occurring in the cases of Weinstein and O’Reilly. Just to balance things out even more, I’ll add the case of Bill Clinton and Paula Jones, to whom a settlement of $850K was paid in 1998. And remember Herman Cain?:

Back in the 90s, a few women employees accused GOP contender Herman Cain of sexual harassment, and his employer settled with them. Cain, while insisting his innocence, has claimed he wasn’t aware of the settlements or didn’t remember them. Does that mean he was guilty?

For many of us, the thought that we might be accused of something illegal and immoral terrifies us. If that happened to us, we’d remember every detail, and furthermore we wouldn’t settle with anyone. We would demand our day in court to prove our innocence. That, however, doesn’t reflect the real world.

I make no pretense of knowing what actually went on in the Cain case. But as a former human resources manager, I find his story plausible.

The article goes on to describe the process that can lead to the settlement of a dubious lawsuit:

Companies are focused on minimizing costs and retaining their best employees. They aren’t focused on anything else. It’s not about, truth, justice and the American way; it’s about money.

If you are accused of harassment, HR will investigate. If the HR team determines that you are guilty, there are two real possibilities:

1. The slap on the hand. This goes for minor offenses…

2. Firing. This happens if you’ve done something really bad…and you’re not a high performing, high level employee.

So, where does a settlement with the accuser come into play?

…impact on the company is…taken into consideration. So, if you’re a junior analyst and the other person involved is the VP of Strategy, who has a stellar performance record, it’s most likely going to be you that goes. But, they’ll offer you a settlement of some sort. It will most likely be done along the terms of a severance package…

Now, if HR has determined that there was no illegal harassment, why not just defend yourself in court? Because fighting a lawsuit costs money. Lots and lots of money. Estimates are usually between $50,000 and $250,000 just to fight. (Although some of those estimates say they include potential payout, the costs are high even if you win. Even if the jury/courts declare that the accusing employee was a vengeful liar who purposely set out to destroy someone’s life, the company still pays a boatload to the lawyers.)

The Weinstein and the O’Reilly settlements weren’t small potatoes, though—especially the O’Reilly figure, which was big bucks if the report is correct. so it’s hard to believe a lawsuit judgment would have been even more. But O’Reilly was worth a lot more than that to the company–hiw show was exceedingly popular.

A settlement in and of itself tells you nothing about guilt or innocence, unfortunately. The motivation for a false accusation is there. The motivation for a coverup of a real offense (or multiple offenses) is there. The truth is difficult to know, although repetitive patterns tell us something over time. Sometimes women and/or men both lie and sometimes they tell the truth, both on the offense and on the defense.

A California lawmaker thinks this is a good idea:

A California lawmaker said Wednesday she will introduce legislation to ban secret settlements in sexual harassment cases, taking aim at a practice that for decades prevented the surfacing of harassment and sexual assault allegations against disgraced studio mogul Harvey Weinstein.

State Sen. Connie Leyva, D-Chino, told Variety she will introduce legislation early next year that prohibits the type of settlements Weinstein paid women that required them to sign nondisclosure agreements.

“We really need to remove the curtain of secrecy about what’s happening,” Levya said in an interview. “Ultimately that’s what hurts victims and enables perpetrators to continue to do this and remain hidden.”

I don’t support this. It’s true that the secrecy sometimes does just that—hurts victims and enables perpetrators to continue their pattern of destructive behavior. But eliminating it gives even more ammunition to those who would falsely accuse someone in order to damage that person’s reputation. Sometimes I think we’re fast approaching the time when we can eliminate the court system altogether and just have Twitter decide.

It’s not that I have a solution to the problem; I don’t. But I refuse to say that either sex is the bad one, or that either sex is the invariable virtuous truthteller. It’s just not the case, and I’ve been around long enough to know.

The magical “undo” command

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Today I was trying to write a post and somehow, when I tried to cut and paste something, an entire paragraph and a half that I’d previously written suddenly disappeared. And yet all I had to do was click on “undo” and magically it all reappeared, just as before.

What a fabulous invention. The genius who thought of it should be commended.

It’s hard not to wish for an “undo” button to correct our errors in life and go back to the way it was before we made what we believe to be our mistakes. That’s the premise of certain movies—“Peggy Sue Got Married” is one that comes immediately to mind—and the message usually is to be careful what you wish for. You might think it would be an excellent idea to undo some decision in your life that led to sorrow. But would it be? What were the consequences of that same decision that you might not want to reverse or erase? And if you had it to do over again, might not the same forces compel you to make the same decision, even knowing what you know now?

And what do you know now, versus what you think you know now?

Those without regrets may not identify with this whole topic. But I’m not one of those people.

Even Nicholas Cage’s awful performance couldn’t ruin the movie for me.

The effect of police body-cams

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It’s nil, at least according to this study of Washington DC police:

Having police officers wear little cameras seems to have no discernible impact on citizen complaints or officers’ use of force, at least in the nation’s capital.

That’s the conclusion of a study performed as Washington, D.C., rolled out its huge camera program. The city has one of the largest forces in the country, with some 2,600 officers now wearing cameras on their collars or shirts.

“We found essentially that we could not detect any statistically significant effect of the body-worn cameras,” says Anita Ravishankar, a researcher with the Metropolitan Police Department and a group in the city government called the Lab @ DC.

“I think we’re surprised by the result. I think a lot of people were suggesting that the body-worn cameras would change behavior,” says Chief of Police Peter Newsham. “There was no indication that the cameras changed behavior at all.”

Perhaps, he says, that is because his officers “were doing the right thing in the first place.”

Maybe. Maybe not.

But I always thought that the purpose of wearing cameras—at least, from the police’s point of view—was to use them as evidence when mistreatment or brutality is alleged. That’s what DC Police Chief Newsham seems to think has happened:

In his view, the cameras have helped his department enormously after contentious encounters like a recent one on Christmas, when police officers fatally shot a man who was brandishing a knife. Some had suggested the man was not armed, but Newsham says the video shows otherwise.

“I think it’s really important for legitimacy for the police department,” says Newsham, “when we say something to be able to back it up with a real-world view that others can see.”

Sometimes I think that in the future we’ll all have cameras implanted on our bodies, taking continuous ongoing video of all our interactions. Just think how valuable that might be in spousal arguments!

Actress Mayim Bialik feels the wrath of social media for stating basic Orthodox Jewish thought…

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…and recants. [Hat tip: Instapundit]:

In [a NY Times] op-ed Friday, written [by Bialik] in response to allegations of sexual assault against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, the observant Jewish actress said she has long made decisions that she considers “self-protecting and wise.”

“I have decided that my sexual self is best reserved for private situations with those I am most intimate with,” Bialik wrote. “I dress modestly. I don’t act flirtatiously with men as a policy.”

Social media users said that Bialik was insinuating she had not been sexually harassed or assaulted due to her choices and that she was contributing to victim blaming. The op-ed was published as countless women around the world recounted their instances of sexual harassment and abuse using the hashtag #MeToo.

On Monday, Bialik defended her column in a Facebook Live video event with the Times. But on Wednesday she changed course, writing on Twitter that she was “very sorry.”

“What you wear and how you behave does not provide any protection from assault,” Bialik wrote, “nor does the way you dress or act in any way make you responsible for being assaulted…I support…women as we seek out and demand accountability from the only ones responsible for for assault and rape: the people who perpetrate those heinous crimes. I am truly sorry for causing so much pain, and I hope you can all forgive me.”

I doubt that will be sufficient groveling for Bialik to earn forgiveness from the mob.

Unfortunately, I’ve already read my allotted NY Times articles this month and so the full text of Bialik’s op-ed is behind a paywall for me. Therefore I can’t read the whole thing, as I usually like to do if I write about something. But with that caveat (and helpful quotes from various articles about the brouhaha) I’ll soldier on.

Bialik is an actress who has described herself as an “aspiring” Modern Orthodox Jew as well as a feminist. What she has stumbled on here is an old, old issue that has to do with much more than Harvey Weinstein or the conditions faced by Hollywood actresses who were assaulted by him. The issue is whether there is anything women themselves could or should or can or cannot do that would make them less likely to be sexually harassed and/or sexually assaulted.

The answer to that question has changed over time, and is also different in different societies. There are—as even those women who were angry at Bialik must be aware—societies on earth today (mostly Muslim) in which women are supposed to cover themselves in shapeless sacks with only slits for their eyes, in order both to demonstrate their own modesty and to refrain from inflaming the desires of men who might pass them on the street. There are also nudist camps (existing in very different societies), with rather different rules. And there is just about everything in-between, including the mores of my own youth, in which about 50% of the women walking around today would have been considered to be dressed in a very provocative manner.

I suspect that many modern feminists would answer the same question by saying that any woman should be able to walk down the street naked at high noon and run no special risk—with nary a criticism either—and that Hollywood actresses should be able to appear nearly-naked in public and trade frankly on their sexuality in terms of getting roles, without anyone ever getting the wrong idea and hitting on them.

And that would be nice, too, but it’s not the way life works. At least, not 100% of the time.

That said, it’s obvious that any man who rapes or otherwise assaults, or acts as Harvey Weinstein did, bears 100% of the responsibility for his actions. Funny thing, though, Bialik actually stated as much in her original op-ed, the one that caused all the furor:

While she acknowledged that “nothing””absolutely nothing””excuses men for assaulting or abusing women,” she also continued to suggest, “We can’t be naé¯ve about the culture we live in.” And in an especially self-righteous line: “As a proud feminist with little desire to diet, get plastic surgery or hire a personal trainer, I have almost no personal experience with men asking me to meetings in their hotel rooms.”

So Bialik is actually saying two things. The first is that a man (or any person, actually) is responsible for whatever rapes and/or assaults he commits. The second is that if you look like Bialik (who is not your average Hollywood babe, and who dresses modestly as well), you’re not going to get propositioned all that much by the Hollywood executives.

These are actually quite separate thoughts, and both are true. But the second one is apparently unconscionable to modern feminists. I don’t see why. Are they actually suggesting that Weinstein’s attacks were completely random, and had zero to do with age or attractiveness? And do they really think that Bialik was saying that if you dress modestly you’ll never be attacked? Of course not.

A great many feminists wish for a certain a world, a world in which human sexuality and male aggressiveness bends to their will. It lies quiet and remains peaceful when they want it to be quiet and peaceful (that’s what civilization is all about, after all, and I’m all for it, too). But they want it to be activated on their behalf when they summon it up, when it’s desired by them and they give the signal (that sounds like a good idea, too, and I second the motion).

But funny thing, humanity isn’t at our beck and call, and sometimes glitches occur. I wrote about the yetser ha-ra yesterday, and I urge you to read what I wrote if you haven’t already. In just about every society that ever existed, both sexes have standards of behavior that attempt to harness the awesome power of human sexuality so it does the least harm while retaining enough of its driving force so that such a society remains viable. The rules are sometimes very rigid and restrictive and sometimes rather lax, and sometimes they fall more heavily on one sex and sometimes on another. But they always exist, and they exist for both sexes.