More on “Trump’s Katrina”

The New Neo Posted on by

The disaster in Puerto Rico as a result of Hurricane Maria has been of mammoth proportions, with much human suffering to go along with the physical destruction. The place is in very dire straits, and will be for a long time to come.

This cannot be fixed overnight. But it does require a huge relief effort under trying circumstances. There is little question that the island’s residents would like to receive as much help as possible, pronto. No matter how much is already being done it can’t really be enough, by definition. The needs are that great.

This would seem to be a situation in which politics shouldn’t rear its ugly head. But it does; oh, how it does. This has been true for all such disasters since at least Katrina (it may have also been the case earlier than that, but I don’t recall it). The MSM is biased towards the Democratic side of things, so the coverage tends to be skewed that way, but each political side has tried to make hay out of the inevitable failings of the opposite side if the opponents are in power.

So good luck on sorting out whether the Trump administration’s response to Maria has actually been good or bad or indifferent in the objective sense. The response can’t possibly enough to satisfy those who are still in trouble, because the situation cannot be fixed adequately in a short amount of time. But has the response of the administration been reasonable, compassionate, typical of what any other administration would have done under the circumstances? Since I have come to profoundly distrust the MSM on these things, it is really really hard to tell. But here’s the memeorandum roundup on the subject, for what it’s worth.

One thing I can say, however, is that I believe Trump’s picking a fight with the mayor of San Juan has been counterproductive and in fact stupid. You don’t start speaking against the people of Puerto Rico at a time like this; you utter soothing platitudes even if you’re pissed at having been criticized.

But that’s not Trump’s style, is it? And this is one PR war I think he’s going to lose. He is tone deaf on this one and comes across as childish and petulant and defensive, not a good presentation during a humanitarian disaster:

“The mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump,” Trump tweeted. “Such poor leadership ability by the mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help.”

“They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort,” he continued. “10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.”

San Juan mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz held an emotional press conference Friday ripping the Trump administration’s efforts to assist the island.

“I will do what I never thought I was going to do. I am begging, begging anyone who can hear us to save us from dying. If anybody out there is listening to us, we are dying, and you are killing us with the inefficiency,” she said.

It is certainly possible that every single word Trump said is true; I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter; it would still be the wrong response from him. The right response would be something like, “My heart goes out to the major and the people of Puerto Rico, and I understand they are feeling desperate and frightened. We are highly aware of the situation and this is what we have done, and what we plan to do….” followed by a list of all the rescue efforts and aid.

The mayor holds all the emotional cards here. Trump holds none. It’s time to be “presidential” rather than petty—which would give a lot of weight to his claims that the administration is doing all it can.

[ADDENDUM: Let me clarify that I am not saying not to fight back and not to defend yourself. In this case, though, Trump’s manner comes off as nasty. There’s a term for what I’m advocating, and it’s called “stroke-kick.” The principle is that first you give the person or persons some praise or compassion or understanding, and it can be quite brief. Then that’s followed by the defense of yourself and/or the criticism of that person. It can be much more effective than leaving out the “stroke” part. The problem with a lot of Republicans in the past is that the “stroke” part””the compassion or the praise””hasn’t been coupled with a spirited-enough “kick” part. Or the “stroke” part has been too long and involved and sounding like some sort of mea culpa.]

[ADDENDUM II: I also want to clarify what I was referring to when I wrote about speaking against the Puerto Rican people.

Trump’s statements can easily be interpreted that way, whatever he actually meant to convey. Here are his words again (and they were in separate tweets, because one wasn’t enough to get the whole message in). I have put the important parts in bold:

Such poor leadership ability by the mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help.”

“They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort,” he continued. “10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.”

Not many people are going to parse those two tweets so carefully as to realize who those unspecified “others” might be. If he was just talking about officials (and I believe he was just talking about officials) he needed to make that crystal clear, because it sure doesn’t sound that way if you read it quickly. “Others” is way too unclear and open-ended. And then the start of the next tweet “They want everything to be done for them” could (and probably will) more easily than not be misconstrued to mean the Puerto Ricans in general.

Will these tweets end up mattering in the long run? No, I don’t think so. But in my opinion they are an unforced error and will cause more negative reactions than positive ones, unlike some of Trump’s other tweets that have also been highly and widely criticized.]

The GOP in the Senate

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “physicsguy” remarks:

I read yesterday that the GOP reps are getting very annoyed with their brethren in the Senate. And, I think they’re correct. Look at where it has all broken down”¦in the Senate. And in particular we can point directly to McCain, and the ladies from Maine and Alaska. Sad how 4 people can totally derail an entire country.

I’m not sure who the 4 people are. I only count 3: McCain, Collins, and Murkowski (Olympia Snowe used to be another, but she’s long gone from the Senate). But anyway, it doesn’t matter if it’s 3 or 4 (although in a tight race, that small difference can make all the difference in the world); the principle is the same.

The GOP reps aren’t the only ones getting annoyed. This annoyance has been going on for as long as I’ve been blogging, and probably longer. I share it.

However, I also see it somewhat differently, at the same time. I know, for example, that Maine is a purple-to-blue state. Every now and then there’s a big surprise from Mainers—that Paul LePage ever became governor there is a total shock to most Mainers I know, for example. I truly doubt anyone to the right of Collins could be elected senator there, but whether I’m correct or not about that theory (LePage’s governorship argues that I might be wrong), Susan Collins and Maine have been joined at the hip for twenty years. In 2014 she was re-elected with over 68% of the vote; in 2008 her total was over 61%. In other words, unless she wants to retire from the Senate, Collins isn’t going anywhere. She apparently suits the people of Maine quite well.

So although Collins—and McCain of Arizona, and Murkowski of Alaska, are indeed moderate Republicans, or RINOs, or mavericks, or back-stabbers, or whatever you want to call them, they represent an actual wing of the GOP and the desires of their constituents. But—and here is the actual point of this post—one of the main reasons these people wield so much power is that the GOP margin in the Senate is so small.

A fifty-two vote majority isn’t much in the Senate. It means that to prevail without Democratic votes (and usually the GOP must function without the help of any Democrats) there must be near-unanimity in the party. Even a couple of moderates (or any sort of outlier) are going to have a great deal of power because the GOP majority is so tiny. And senators love power, and most of them are going to milk that power for all it’s worth, trying to get concessions for their states and basking in the glow of their fame. After all, going along with the pack doesn’t get you many headlines, does it? And these people—especially Collins, with whom I’m most familiar—really are moderate politically, so it’s not as though they’re compromising many of their own principles to vote against the more conservative wing of the GOP.

If the GOP wants to avoid this problem, the only solution is to get a bigger majority in the Senate. That’s the reality as I see it.

Take a look at the history of party control of the Senate. I arbitrarily chose a starting date of 1951, the 82nd Congress, and studied the composition of the senates after that. The pattern is crystal clear. Democrats controlled the Senate far more often, sometimes widely and sometimes narrowly. They also controlled it widely far more often, and with far greater margins. For many years, for example, during the entire decade of the 60s and for much of the 70s, their margins were huge (often over 60 and even close to 70).

Not only has the GOP been the minority party in the Senate far more often than the Democrats have, but the GOP majorities (already few and far between) have been far smaller than those the Democrats have enjoyed. A big big majority for the Republicans—the biggest since 1951, as far as I can see—has been 55. And that august figure was achieved by the GOP only a few times.

The GOP in the Senate is frustrating for a number of reasons. The first is that their numbers have usually been small. The second is that even when they have a majority it’s been a small one, subject to pressure by “mavericks” and moderates. The third is that even when in power, the leaders don’t seem to be able to effectively pressure those mavericks and moderates right back (one suspects the Democrats would somehow be able to do it if the situation were reversed).

The fourth frustration isn’t really about the GOP in the Senate, it’s about the Senate itself. The Senate is a place of many rules—some of which seem designed to stifle the passage of legislation—and it is also a place of many swelled heads. The reasons for the latter aren’t always clear, but they have something to do with the smaller size of the Senate relative to the House, the fact that senators are elected from larger areas (the state) than members of the House, and that they stay for a much longer term. Therefore they have much less need to be responsive to the people. This was by design of the Framers, but they also said that senators should be elected by state legislatures rather than by popular vote. In 1914 that was changed to the present system, which seems to me to represent the worst of both worlds.

Meanwhile, Trump marches on

The New Neo Posted on by

Reuters has noticed something:

Over his first nine months, Trump has used an aggressive series of regulatory rollbacks, executive orders and changes in enforcement guidelines to rewrite the rules for industries from energy to airlines, and on issues from campus sexual assault to anti-discrimination protections for transgender students.

While his administration has been chaotic, and his decision-making impulsive and sometimes whimsical, Trump has made changes that could have far-reaching and lingering consequences for society and the economy. Some have grabbed headlines but many, no less consequential, have gone largely unnoticed amid the daily controversies and Twitter insults that have marked Trump’s early months in office…

The Trump administration has withdrawn or delayed more than 800 Obama-era regulatory actions in its first six months. Proposals for new rules, including those to delay or rescind existing rules, dropped 32 percent from the same period in 2016 under Obama, and are down from similar six-month periods under presidents George W. Bush, a Republican, and Bill Clinton, a Democrat, according to the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute.

At the same time, Trump has limited new federal regulations by requiring agencies to cut two rules for every new one they create. He has asked each agency to name a regulatory reform officer to take aim at unneeded rules.

Please read the whole thing.

Oh, and there’s also this from Powerline:

But President Trump is winning big on judicial nominations. He’s nominating outstanding men and women, and most of them seem destined to be confirmed.

Social justice warrior looks a gift Dr. Seuss in the mouth

The New Neo Posted on by

It began with a seemingly-innocuous gift:

To celebrate “National Read a Book Day,” the first lady [Melania Trump] had sent out a collection of 10 Dr. Seuss books to one school in each state across the nation. The titles included: “The Cat in the Hat”; “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish”; “Wacky Wednesday”; “Green Eggs and Ham”; and “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!”

She followed in the footsteps of her predecessor, Michelle Obama, who often read Dr. Seuss books to children. Former first ladies Hillary Clinton and Barbara Bush also read to children at Dr. Seuss-themed educational events.

So far so good, right? One would think that this would be a relatively non-controversial, non-political act—with bipartisan agreement, as it were, since Dr. Seuss seems to have been given the Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton seals of approval—but if one thought that, one would think wrong.

Enter snippy, condescending social justice warrior Liz Phipps Soeiro:

Liz Phipps Soeiro, a librarian at a public school in Cambridge, wrote a letter to the first lady, which was then published on The Horn Book blog, notifying Mrs. Trump that her school would “not be keeping the titles” for their collection, explaining that her school didn’t have a “NEED” for the books, due to her school and library’s “award-winning” status.

“I work in a district that has plenty of resources, which contributes directly to ”˜excellence,’” Soeiro wrote. “My students have access to a school library with over nine thousand volumes and a librarian with a graduate degree in library science.”

Might that highly-degreed librarian be none other than Ms. Soeiro herself? What a terrible insult from Melania Trump! And that’s not all; oh no, Soeiro was just getting warmed up:

Soeiro went on to slam the White House and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos for not gifting the books to “underfunded and underprivileged communities,” which she suggested “continue to be marginalized” by DeVos’ policies.

But Soeiro seemed to be the most offended by the books themselves.

In what way do these Dr. Seuss books offend? Ms. Soeiro explains:

Dr. Seuss’s illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes,” said Phipps Soeiro in her letter to the first lady, calling Seuss “a bit of a cliché, a tired and worn ambassador for children’s literature.” “Open one of his books (”˜If I Ran a Zoo or And to Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street,’ for example), and you’ll see the racist mockery in his art.”

I’ve read many a Dr. Seuss book in my day, and loved them (although I’m not familiar with those two; my favorites were and are Horton Hatches the Egg and Happy Birthday To You, as well as Hop on Pop and Green Eggs and Ham). My son loved them, too.

For the most part, his illustrations are wonderful flights of fancy. Most of the characters in Seuss’ drawings don’t really have much resemblance to persons living or dead, or to persons of any race—they are creatures, creatures the likes of which have never been seen in a natural history museum. His characters—non-human and human—are uniformly goofy-looking, too. So if his illustrations in general are steeped in anything, it’s in fantasy and mildly humorous silliness.

I read at least five articles about this incident, but couldn’t find an image of the racist illustrations that so offended this librarian in her campaign against the Four Olds. But I finally located this post from a few months ago that discussed Seuss’ racist drawings in some detail, the bulk of which seem to have been anti-Japanese cartoons from WWII (which do not appear in his children’s books), plus a few black characters and some Asian characters in a few of his children’s books that appear in extremely minor roles and are described as being subservient to the white child who is the main character (bringing him things, for example) and are said to have been drawn in a stereotypically racist way. Since none of these illustrations are shown, I can’t judge them for myself, and I don’t own those particular books and never even read them to my child.

Here’s what turned up when I Googled, under “images,” “black characters in if i ran the zoo.” In other words, what you get is a lot of creatures, and a protagonist who’s a cartoon version of a human child. No doubt there are some black characters in the book, too, but good luck in finding them online. (As a side note, the superior librarian Ms. Soeiro refers to the title of this book as If I Ran a Zoo, but it’s actually If I Ran the Zoo.).

I think the goal of SJWs such as Soeiro is—in addition to criticizing everything Trump or any other GOP member (or spouse or family of such members) might do—to take all the joy and whimsy out of children’s lives and replace it with strictly PC didacticism. That eventually would probably have to involve doing away with anything that was written before, oh, say 1995.

Unless, of course, that something was sanctioned by President Obama (from a presidential proclamation made in 2016):

The moment we persuade a child to pick up a book for the first time we change their lives forever for the better, and on Read Across America Day, we recommit to getting literary works into our young peoples’ hands early and often.

March 2 is also the birthday of one of America’s revered wordsmiths. Theodor Seuss Geisel — or Dr. Seuss — used his incredible talent to instill in his most impressionable readers universal values we all hold dear. Through a prolific collection of stories, he made children see that reading is fun, and in the process, he emphasized respect for all; pushed us to accept ourselves for who we are; challenged preconceived notions and encouraged trying new things; and by example, taught us that we are limited by nothing but the range of our aspirations and the vibrancy of our imaginations. And for older lovers of literature, he reminded us not to take ourselves too seriously, creating wacky and wild characters and envisioning creative and colorful places.

Somehow I doubt that Ms. Soeiro saw fit to write a chiding letter to President Obama at the time, despite the fact that she takes herself very seriously indeed. Ah, but that proclamation of Obama’s was so 2016, anyway. Now, in the Brave New World of 2017, Dr. Seuss is “a bit of a cliché, a tired and worn ambassador for children’s literature.”

I’m sure Ms. Soeiro could write something far better than Seuss’s outdated and hackneyed output. I look forward to reading her efforts.

[NOTE: By the way, Soeiro is not alone. She is merely reflecting a wave of “Seuss is a racist” sentiment that’s been going on for a while. In her letter to the First Lady, she references the racist nature of the Cat in The Cat in the Hat, based on this sort of thing. There is a sort of racism treasure hunt being undertaken, and it doesn’t matter that Soeiro herself dressed as the Cat and celebrated Seuss (photos here) back in March of 2015.

Ah, but that was two and a half years ago, aeons in the world of the social justice warrior, who can’t be expected to know how the worm is going to turn. That was before Seuss and the Cat were declared racist, after all. The seminal text in the campaign (Was the Cat in the Hat Black?) was only published in August of 2017, so Soeiro couldn’t have known the racist nature of her activity back in March of 2015 when she dressed up as the Cat.

But I do expect Soeiro to denounce herself shortly.]

All hail the Tango apple

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve sung the praises of the Jazz apple, still a great favorite of mine. But recently I’ve been hard-pressed (hard-pressed, get it?) to find any in my local stores, and so I’ve been forced to try other varieties.

Most of my experiments have been failures. I prefer very hard apples, and most aren’t hard enough. And I prefer apples with a complexity of sweet/sour flavor. The Jazz has both of these characteristics, and what’s more the Jazz batches don’t differ too much in quality from each other.

But I’m happy to say I’ve found a new contender: the Tango (is it an accident or not that both have names that are musical and dance references?). The Tango is very crisp, and the taste is very aromatic, almost like roses (or like I’d imagine roses would taste). Love it.

The Tango was first marketed in 2009 and has been widely available only since 2013, although my first encounter with it was just the other day. It’s a cross between a Honeycrisp and a Zestar (interestingly enough, I just had my first Zestar about two weeks ago, and although it had a good taste it was too soft for me):

The name SweeTango is a brand name of the ‘Minneiska’ apple, and is a registered trademark owned by the University of Minnesota. Like the ‘Honeycrisp’, the ‘Minneiska’ has much larger cells than most apples, which shatter when bitten to fill the mouth with juice.

Indeed. About that taste:

The ‘Minneiska’ has a texture similar to ‘Honeycrisp’ with a slightly tart and citric quality. The name “SweeTango” is a portmanteau of the words sweet and tangy.

There’s that complexity of taste I look for.

Here’s an article from the 2011 New Yorker:

Like Honeycrisp, SweeTango has much larger cells than other apples, and when you bite into it the cells shatter, rather than cleaving along the cell walls, as is the case with most popular apples. The bursting of the cells fills your mouth with juice. Chunks of SweeTango snap off in your mouth with a loud cracking sound. Although a crisp texture is the single most prized quality in an apple””even more desirable than taste, according to one study””crispness is more a matter of acoustics than of mouthfeel. Vibrations pass along the lower jaw and set the cochlea trembling. Biting into a really crisp apple, one feels, in the words of Edward Bunyard, the author of “The Anatomy of Dessert,” “a certain joy in crashing through living tissue, a memory of Neanderthal days.”…

By the time of the Civil War, there were many kinds of apples growing across the United States, but most of them didn’t taste very good, and as a rule people didn’t eat them. Cider was cheaper to make than beer, and many settlers believed fermented drinks were safer than water. Everyone drank hard cider. President John Adams drank a tankard before breakfast. Babies drank it before going to bed. At the end of the nineteenth century, when Carry Nation took up her axe in the service of the temperance movement, she likely employed it on apple trees as well as saloons. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the apple had a serious public-relations problem.

The solution, as Michael Pollan relates in his book “The Botany of Desire,” was to promote the eating of apples as a healthy snack. J. T. Stinson, a fruit specialist, first used the phrase “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” at the St. Louis World’s Fair, in 1904. (He adapted the slogan from the traditional English proverb “An apple before going to bed keeps the doctor from earning his bread.”) Many cider-makers had long prized the chance seedlings, discovered in their fields and orchards, that yielded unexpectedly delectable eating apples.

I happen to like pursuing these so-called heirloom apples. But Tango isn’t an heirloom; it’s relatively new.

That New Yorker article goes into the story of how supermarket apples had devolved (by the time of my youth) into the mediocre Big Three (or two, depending on how you count): Macintosh, and red and yellow Delicious. Although yellows could sometimes be very good if crisp, I stopped eating apples a long time ago because I found the taste and texture of the supermarket apples of the time to be bad. But now we have an embarrassment of apple riches, not just at farmstands but in the supermarkets, and not just at fancy markets such as Whole Foods but at our local neighborhood chains.

According to the article, it was the Granny Smith that turned the tide. My trademark.

[ADDENDUM: And here’s a job I think I’d like:

In the fall, during the apple harvest, Bedford tastes apples from blossom times past, up to five hundred apples a day, in the hope of finding that one apple in ten thousand that will be released as a commercial variety. I spent an afternoon with him in early September, walking through long rows of young trees, and tasting apples of every imaginable size, shape, hue, and flavor, from musky melonlike apples to bright lemony apples and apples that tasted like licorice. “We don’t actually swallow, and we don’t really even have time to spit,” Bedford explained. “You just kind of hold a bit in your mouth for a while, until you get the flavor, and then let it fall out.”

If a tree produces exceptionally good apples for several years in a row, it achieves élite status and is awarded a number. Four clones are made from the mother tree’s wood, and those trees are grown in another orchard on the property, under commercial conditions. To evaluate the élite trees, Bedford carries a field notebook with twenty categories on a page, which, in addition to the “organoleptics”””all the sensory stuff, like flavor, texture, and color””include tree size, shape, and yield. He scores each category from one to nine. He generally continues these yearly evaluations for a decade or longer, in order to subject the trees to a representative range of extreme summers and winters and drought and flood, and in the hope of ferreting out all the quirks that apple trees are heir to. Some are wild in their youth but eventually settle down, while others bear fruit every other year; some bear smaller fruits as the trees age, while others drop their apples before they’re ripe.

Finally, a truly outstanding apple is named, the tree is patented, and clones are released to nurseries, where thousands of copies of the trees are made and sold to growers, for which the university collects a royalty of around a dollar per tree during the life of the patent. Large color posters of the five apples released during Bedford’s time at the agricultural station decorate his office, their swollen flesh glistening with beads of moisture, like centerfold pinups in a mechanic’s shop.

Much, much more good stuff at the link.]

Blogger burnout

The New Neo Posted on by

Don’t worry. This post isn’t about me—or at least it’s not primarily about me. I’m not planning to quit blogging, and I’m not fishing for comments that beg me to stay.

But every now and then I think about quitting, because blogging takes its toll. It is a ridiculously time-consuming activity for the amount of money I get. And for most bloggers—at least, most bloggers who aren’t among the few extremely successful mega-bloggers—it remains for the most part a labor of love (or of obsessive-compulsive disorder).

But I can identify with what Jim Treacher has written about why he’s quitting his post as blogger for the Daily Caller:

Daily blogging can be a fun job, but it can also be a grind. Living on the Internet 24/7 has turned out to be kind of a bad idea. It seems to have driven everyone utterly insane. Everyone except me, of course! But spending every waking moment online, for years at a time, has taken its toll on me. Wading nostril-deep through the endless hostility and madness and dishonesty, being expected to have an instant “take” on every single thing that happens, every minute of every day, is exhausting.

I’m tired. Aren’t you tired?

I plan to keep writing, because otherwise I’ll need to get a real job. But I just can’t maintain the manic, unrelenting pace required to keep a blog viable in 2017. At the beginning of the year I was told to go from three posts a day to five (I did), on the theory that it would boost my traffic (it didn’t). I just don’t know how else to get more clicks. Recently I was given a month to do so, but I can’t crank out even more posts in a day, day after day, without sacrificing the minimal level of quality my readers expect.

Yep, I’m often tired. One of the things I’m tired of is the amount of junk that so often passes for news in the MSM and elsewhere, the same-old predictable and transparent propaganda. So much is a tempest in a teapot, or unreliable, or opinion journalism masking itself as objective. I’m tired of feeling the need to monitor all of that verbiage and sort out the wheat from the chaff.

One thing I believe is going on with Treacher is that his bosses seem to think that quantity is the answer to getting more clicks. Of course, I’m probably not the world’s authority on how to get more clicks; my traffic is steady but moderate. But from what I’ve observed around the blogosphere, going from three to five posts a day isn’t going to change a thing. These days blogs are considered somewhat passe; the dogs have barked and the caravan moved on to social media, and no doubt will move on to other platforms someday soon. Bloggers, the hot new commodity when I started out, are the old dinosaurs now, especially individual bloggers. Group blogs are really the only way to generate a lot of content—which people seem to want, because the most popular blogs these days are generally group blogs.

I’m pretty sure that there have been big news days on which I’ve put up as many as five posts. More often it’s three, and even that’s pushing it. To regularly churn out five posts a day, as Treacher was asked to do, would either require the “living on the Internet 24/7” to which Treacher refers, or the content of each post would pretty much have to shrink to a sentence with a link in it and then maybe a short quote. That’s fine if that’s the type of blog a person wants to run, but anything much longer than that and it becomes very labor-intensive to produce a large volume of commentary by oneself.

As I said, I have no plans to quit. But sometimes I think that maybe, perhaps, I should try to actually write that change book I thought I’d write many years ago. To do that, I’d probably have to take the number of posts I write a day down to one, with more posts than that only on big news days, with a few more hours each day devoted to the book.

I have no intention of being chained to my computer 24/7, although some days it may seem as though I already am. But that way lies madness.

Scalise is back

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s so much bad news I thought I’d highlight some good news—Rep. Steve Scalise returned to the House today:

…Scalise, flanked by staff and U.S. Capitol Police, emerged from a room off the House floor and slowly made his way through the speaker’s lobby. He leaned heavily on two canes at each arm but seemed cheerful. When someone greeted him, he responded over his shoulder: “It feels good to be back!”

The chamber erupted with applause when Scalise walked through the door. Rep. Ryan Costello (R-Pa.) wiped away tears, as did multiple other members. Rep. Cedric Richmond, a Democrat and longtime Scalise friend from Louisiana, walked over to the Republican side of the chamber to clasp hands with his buddy.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) came over from the Senate to see Scalise. He sat in the front row on the edge of his chair for much of the address.

Though he’s been absent from Congress, Scalise has worked the phones to try to help the House prepare for a hectic fall agenda.

Scalise’s office said he will be resuming his work at the Capitol, while also completing an extended period of out-patient rehabilitation over the coming months.

In case you don’t remember, Scalise was shot and nearly killed last June by a Republican-hater while Scalise and others were practicing for a Congressional baseball game.

Jerry Brown and the troglodytes

The New Neo Posted on by

Almost two weeks ago Jerry Brown came up with this lovely gibe: “You should check out the derivation of ”˜Trump-ite’ and ”˜troglodyte,’ because they both refer to people who dwell in deep, dark caves.”

And I say Brown’s supporters are Elois.

So there.

The Time Machine:

…[T]he Time Traveller [in Wells’ The Time Machine] tests his device with a journey that takes him to A.D. 802,701, where he meets the Eloi, a society of small, elegant, childlike adults. They live in small communities within large and futuristic yet slowly deteriorating buildings, doing no work and having a frugivorous diet. His efforts to communicate with them are hampered by their lack of curiosity or discipline, and he speculates that they are a peaceful, communist society, the result of humanity conquering nature with technology, and subsequently evolving to adapt to an environment in which strength and intellect are no longer advantageous to survival.

Returning to the site where he arrived, the Time Traveller is shocked to find his time machine missing and eventually concludes that it has been dragged by some unknown party into a nearby structure with heavy doors, locked from the inside, which resembles a Sphinx. Luckily, he had removed the machine’s levers before leaving it (the time machine being unable to travel through time without them). Later in the dark, he is approached menacingly by the Morlocks, ape-like troglodytes who live in darkness underground and surface only at night. Within their dwellings, he discovers the machinery and industry that makes the above-ground paradise possible. He alters his theory, speculating that the human race has evolved into two species: the leisured classes have become the ineffectual Eloi, and the downtrodden working classes have become the brutal light-fearing Morlocks. Deducing that the Morlocks have taken his time machine, he explores the Morlock tunnels, learning that due to a lack of any other means of sustenance, they feed on the Eloi. His revised analysis is that their relationship is not one of lords and servants but of livestock and ranchers. The Time Traveller theorizes that intelligence is the result of and response to danger; with no real challenges facing the Eloi, they have lost the spirit, intelligence, and physical fitness of humanity at its peak.

There’s much more at the link, of course. In case you haven’t read the book, it’s not a real cheerer-upper about the fate of humankind.

Hugh Hefner dies at 91

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not sure what to say about the life of Hugh Hefner, who has died at 91.

In some basic way, Hefner’s world never interested me, although I couldn’t help but notice it. Many of the Hefner obituaries talk about how he revolutionized the way people looked at sex, and give him credit (or blame) for much of the sexual revolution, or at least for sparking it.

I never got that impression, although I got the impression that he wanted to give that impression. The way I looked at it was that he was a marketing and publishing genius, who invented a brand and pushed it brilliantly, riding the wave of the sexual revolution for many decades and fading out only in recent years when his prime was past. Yes, he probably helped the so-called sexual revolution along in many ways too. But I believe it was a phenomenon that would have happened anyway without him, although perhaps not in the same exact way.

Hefner didn’t invent the marketing of sex, after all, or the girlie magazine. But he knew America was ready for a different kind of girlie magazine, a more mainstream one with nudity that featured what looked like the girl next door and wasn’t frankly pornographic but skirted on the edges.

That wasn’t all the magazine was about, although it was the main attraction. I was one of those people who really did sometimes read Playboy for the articles (the interviews in particular). But I obviously wasn’t Hefner’s target audience, to say the least.

Hefner described himself as having been proudest of this accomplishment:

That I changed attitudes toward sex. That nice people can live together now. That I decontaminated the notion of premarital sex. That gives me great satisfaction.

Hefner had described his childhood home as a puritanical one where sex was never mentioned. It’s not so surprising he might rebel against that and be proud of striking a blow for sexual freedom, but not only do I not think that he played that big a role in “decontaminating the notion of premarital sex,”—as I wrote earlier, I think he was just one part of a big movement that was bound to happen—but I don’t know why he’d be so very happy about it, given the societal negatives of out-of-wedlock children and social instability that have gone along with it.

Hefner always seemed an overgrown boy to me—albeit a boy who functioned very well indeed in the business and PR world. It turns out that he very much agreed:

“I’m never going to grow up,” he said in a CNN interview when he was 82. “Staying young is what it is all about for me.

“Holding on to the boy and long ago I decided that age really didn’t matter and as long as the ladies … feel the same way, that’s fine with me.”

Hefner was in some ways a boy who liked to play—at adult games. Unlike many playboys, however, he also liked to marry (three times in all), and when married he professed to be faithful to his wives.

RIP. I’ll leave it there.

On anthems and demonstrations: remember the 1968 Olympics?

The New Neo Posted on by

Being as old as I am, the bended-knees of the NFL immediately brought this incident to mind:

For those of you who weren’t around back then or who’ve forgotten, here’s what it was all about.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. There’s a lot of rhyming between the late 60s/early70s and now, isn’t there? One big difference, though, is that Smith and Carlos acted during a time when the struggle for black civil rights still had quite a way to go (for example, the landmark Voting Rights Act had only been passed in 1965). Another difference is that they were disciplined heavily by the Olympics as a result. Still another difference (and one that I doubt most people remember; I didn’t) was that they had some specific things they were protesting, and some specific demands, in addition to their more general complaints about racism:

As people railed against Apartheid in South Africa and racial segregation in the United States, Smith and Carlos raised their fists to show solidarity with people fighting internationally for human rights. They were booed and forced out of the Games by the president of the International Olympic Committee at the time, Avery Brundage. The third man on the podium, a white Australian named Peter Norman, was vilified by his home nation for wearing his OPHR badge in solidarity.

As a member of the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) he originally advocated a boycott of the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games unless four conditions were met: South Africa and Rhodesia uninvited from the Olympics, the restoration of Muhammad Ali’s world heavyweight boxing title, Avery Brundage to step down as president of the IOC, and the hiring of more African-American assistant coaches. As the boycott failed to achieve support after the IOC withdrew invitations for South Africa and Rhodesia, he decided, together with Carlos, to not only wear their gloves but also go barefoot to protest poverty, wear beads to protest lynchings, and wear buttons that said OPHR.

Some people…(particularly IOC president Avery Brundage) felt that a political statement had no place in the international forum of the Olympic Games. In an immediate response to their actions, Smith and Carlos were suspended from the U.S. team by Brundage and voluntarily moved from the Olympic Village. Brundage, who was president of the United States Olympic Committee in 1936, had made no objections against Nazi salutes during the Berlin Olympics. The Nazi salute, being a national salute at the time, was accepted in a competition of nations, while the athletes’ salute was not of a nation and so was considered unacceptable.

A mere four years later, in 1972, there was a similar protest by two American athletes, sometimes called “The Forgotten Protest.” They went a bit further than Smith and Carlos:

The 1972 Olympics Black Power Salute was a political protest by two US Olympic runners Vincent Matthews and Wayne Collett…

Both runners refused to stand for the US National Anthem. They subsequently stroked their beards, and twirled their medals as they left the stadium. The crowd booed both runners for their display.

The Associated Press noted that the casual behavior of Matthews and Collett during the playing of the anthem as “disrespectful”…

The pair were banned from future Olympic competition by the IOC; since John Smith had pulled a hamstring 80 meters into the final while leading and had been ruled unfit to run, the USA were now unable to field a team in the 4 é— 400 m relay and were forced to scratch from the event.

The visuals:

These sorts of displays ended; I’m not sure when, but I think some time during the 1970s. In recent years, black athletes have stood tall and proud while accepting their medals. I haven’t done research on whether there might have been some isolated protests during the ensuing years, but I don’t remember any of note until Colin Kaepernick decided to revive the genre and change the body language into a kneel.

Here’s some trenchant commentary on today’s NFL goings-on:

[NOTE: Of course, there were other much more sobering events at the Olympics of 1972 that grabbed headlines from Matthews and Collett].

Wishful thinking: hoping for the Trump Katrina

The New Neo Posted on by

The MSM can hope for a Trump Katrina equivalent, can’t it? It can also try its level best to create one. There have been no shortages of natural disasters this year, after all. Maybe Puerto Rico will be the charm:

Monday evening, Trump began tweeting about Puerto Rico, talking about its poor infrastructure and financial problems from before the hurricane hit. Naturally, Leftists weren’t happy, and the media was again able to attack Trump for his tweets being “not well received.”

Because, apparently, the only thing Trump does is tweet.

Article after article condemned Trump for focusing on the NFL (in tweets) instead of Puerto Rico (in tweets). Leftist after leftist also began claiming the damage in Puerto Rico would be Trump’s “Katrina,” in reference to the hurricane that devastated the Gulf Coast during President George W. Bush’s administration…

As it turns out, it was the media ignoring Puerto Rico””not Trump.

PBS’s John Yang spoke to Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello about the help he has received from the states. Rosselo immediately said he was “very grateful for the administration” and that “they have responded quickly.”…

More at the link. And if you want to see a sampling of “Puerto Rico is Trump’s Katrina” articles and/or discussions, go here.

Puerto has been very hard hit indeed by Hurricane Maria. It will take a long time to recover, and they are in need of help. It would be wonderful if these things weren’t politicized by the MSM and those with an interest in doing so, but this has been going on for a long time.

Moore wins Alabama GOP primary

The New Neo Posted on by

Roy Moore has won the GOP Senate primary in Alabama.

There’s lots of coverage of the result that characterizes it as a defeat for Trump, who backed Moore’s opponent, Strange. And on that level, it is a defeat for Trump. But Moore’s history and personality indicates that, as the anti-establishment candidate, he is also a more natural ally of Trump. It seemed to me—and I did not follow this race all that closely—that Trump only supported Strange out of some sense of duty, and he is more temperamentally and even somewhat philosophically allied with Moore.

So I’m not sure what the results mean, except that (a) the right in Alabama is sick and tired of the GOP senators who aren’t doing what they want them to do; and (b) Moore himself is a very popular and idiosyncratic figure in Alabama.

The real question, for me, is who will win the general election. The impression I get from reading the MSM is that Strange would have had an easy go of it and for Moore it will be somewhat harder. That’s concerning to me, if in fact it’s true.

It’s the old old question as to whether candidates who are further to the right, who tend to appeal to party members in the primary, can appeal to the broader public in the general. In that last link I offered, it calls Democratic nominee Doug Jones’ chances of victory “newly competitive” now that Moore rather than Strange is his opponent. I haven’t seen any polls on this yet, but since polls have become more and more untrustworthy lately, I probably wouldn’t give them all that much weight, particularly this early in the game.