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.]

The WaPo: leaking with impunity

The New Neo Posted on by

I believe I would have the same attitude no matter which president was the subject of leaks such as the ones published in today’s WaPo involving classified conversations between the president and various foreign leaders (particularly Mexico’s President Enrique Peé±a Nieto)—that it’s something that is absolutely not okay, and possibly criminal on the WaPo’s part.

This sort of leak of classified information, with national security implications, has been going on since the Nixon years (remember that Nixon’s famous “Plumbers” got their name because their original goal was to plug the leaks), and the MSM is swollen with its own self-righteousness and self-supposition that it’s immune from prosecution.

It’s not as though the content here revealed some enormous presidential crime of which the American people have a deep need to be informed, either. Judge for yourself.

Even at an anti-Trump conservative site like RedState you can find comments such as this one: “I say the most important thing about this entire story is that we have a transcript of the conversation in the public domain. How the hell can the President conduct business when all his private conversations are leaked?”

Excellent point, and one the WaPo either hasn’t asked, or (more likely) has asked and answered that Trump being unable to conduct business would be a feature, not a bug. And they believe that they, not the American people, are the proper arbiters of that.

I was curious what a neutral pundit might say, particularly a person with a legal background. I found this at Lawfare, a blog which is not Trump-friendly. I don’t know much about the author’s political affiliation, but this is what he wrote in a public note to the leaker, and it certainly indicates no love lost for Trump:

I get it. You don’t like the President. I don’t either, so I understand. But you, whoever you are, are doing as much damage, if not more, to the United States than he ever will. Really.

I assume you think you are doing the world a favor. I assume you have the best intentions. But stop. Just stop leaking. Really.

Though it may be fun to give the Washington Post transcripts of the President’s calls to foreign leaders, you gravely injure America in incalculable ways by doing what you are doing. For one thing, you are embracing norm-destruction in a way that is no less disturbing than the President’s aberrational behavior. And you don’t even have his excuse that you don’t know better — you do. For another, think of how this plays with other governments — will any foreign leader ever again have a candid phone call with any American President? Why should they assume that this type of leaking with [sic] stop if Trump leaves.

I would say there is a reason they would “assume that this type of leaking will stop if Trump leaves,” and it’s because it is motivated by animus towards Trump and towards the right. An interesting question is whether there would be quite as much leaking if the president were a Republican but just not Trump, and my answer is “maybe not quite as much, but there would be plenty and it would be just as damaging to national security.” If the president were a Democrat, the leaks would be few and far between, and they would only involve things that reflect kindly on that president. I also assume that foreign leaders have noticed the differential, and that they would feel more secure for that reason with a Democrat at the helm.

And perhaps the MSM regards that as a feature rather than a bug, as well.

[NOTE: I just want to make it clear that the transcripts leaked were full, which means that all of Nieto’s remarks were made accessible as well as Trump’s.]

[ADDENDUM: David Frum, who can’t stand Trump, also comes out in the Atlantic against the WaPo’s dangerous action.]

[ADDENDUM II: I happen to think that one of the WaPo’s goals is to drive Trump into a frenzy and cause him to erupt and (they hope) to look even more foolish.]

[ADDENDUM III: Off the top of my head, I can’t think of another instance of the transcript of a phone call between a president and a head of state being leaked. Long long after the fact, some transcripts of presidential phone calls have been published, but that’s a different story—and those transcripts don’t include what the person on the other end said.]

Dental interlude: I’m a little late posting today…

The New Neo Posted on by

…because I spent part of the morning and early afternoon at the dentist’s.

This was my third visit in ten days. I had had an old crown replaced because it was trapping food and causing decay. The permanent crown arrived, I had it fitted, and it just wasn’t right. I kept biting my tongue, over and over and over. So I returned to the dentist, who shaved the crown down a bit (isn’t this fascinating?) and I went home.

But although the problem had improved as a result, it persisted. So back I went today, and because he’d squeezed me into the schedule I had to wait quite a while. He shaved it down some more, and I started to leave. But then, as I was walking out the door, my exploratory tongue encountered a tiny little rough spot on the tooth, a spot I knew my tongue would not be able to resist engaging now and then just to see if it’s still there.

What is it about the exquisite sensitivity of the mouth to any change? A tiny strawberry seed caught in some molar’s indentation can feel like Everest; a little spot of roughness can be perceived as rough sandpaper.

So back I went, and now I think it’s basically okay.

When I got home I had some lunch and noticed, to my shock, that a slight bite imbalance that had made it somewhat uncomfortable to chew on that side for about the last 15 years now seems to be much much better. Serendipity!

I’m really not a dental wimp, although I might sound like it. I’ve had more than the average amount of dental work because of a host of congenital dental anomalies too numerous and tedious to mention. Let’s just say that my mouth is a demo of various dental techniques, and over the years I may have personally financed a few dentists’ vehicles.

Now, back to work.

When your spouse changes—big time

The New Neo Posted on by

When we get married we promise to stick by the spouse for better or for worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health. We marry a particular person for certain reasons—looks, personality, kindness, intelligence, a host of things that we aren’t even necessarily able to list but that go to the heart of the reasons we chose this particular person over others.

And yet we always know—and those vows reflect—the notion that change is part of life and life can be very unpredictable. We can look at the mothers and fathers and grandparents of our spouses to help us imagine the future, but we don’t really know whether our husband or wife will become fat, or disabled, or bald, or depressed, or angry, or have an affair, or suddenly want to live in the country after being a city person, or a host of other possibilities both small and large.

But in the olden days, those vows didn’t include “for man or woman,” because sex (or gender, take your pick on the term) was considered immutable. That’s not true today. Whatever you think of how basic the change is, there’s no question that one can change one’s outsides and take hormones to effect a powerful transformation that could and probably would be very disturbing to most spouses having to deal with it.

Here’s a story of one such modern-day dilemma. I can’t find the original article being described, so I’ll just go with the writer’s report on it, but I think it’s important to remember that although the article is about a couple that was originally lesbian, this sort of thing also happens in relationships that are originally heterosexual (look no further than Caitlyn Jenner’s ex-wife Kris Kardashian, who resolved a similar dilemma by getting a divorce):

I recently read a first-person account by a woman who had been a “proud lesbian” until her partner up and decided she was actually a man. This woman expected to be a Professional Gay Woman for life with all the dual rights and privileges to which she was entitled, and suddenly she finds herself married to a regular old garden-variety MAN like the rest of us non-special heterosexual women.

Not only that, but since it’s verboten to suggest that the transgender person hadn’t ALWAYS been a man, this woman had been with a man all along, thus jeopardizing her status as a lesbian, proud or not. That’s gotta rock your world…

To the woman’s credit, I guess, she tells us that this man is still the same dear partner he had always been and she is going to stay with him. Whatever

That may seem ridiculous or humorous. But to the person it happens to—man or woman, straight or gay—it’s absolutely no laughing matter. It tests the limits of what sort of change a person can endure in a mate.

Trump, college admissions, and racial discrimination

The New Neo Posted on by

One problem—and it’s a big one—with anything the right tries to do is that it can easily be spun as unfair and mean. The left is very practiced in doing this, and the tactic is responsible to no small degree for the left’s success.

The same for this news:

If a report in the NY Times is accurate, the Trump administration is getting ready to take on the most precious of liberal dogmas, the institutionalized racial discrimination in college admissions, aka affirmative action.

The Times reaches the conclusion that affirmative action will be under attack, even though the documents it has obtained for its reporting don’t actually say that.

Of course they don’t actually say that, but that won’t stop the Times or its tut-tutting readers. Republicans bad, Democrats good, white people the worst of all. Various tweets are offered that are indicative of this, such as:

Trump is exactly the white supremacist he showed himself to be during the campaign. Now our tax dollars will defend white rights. Hideous.

The woman who wrote that tweet appears from her photo to be white, and says she is a civil rights lawyer. And yet to her the mere thought that our tax dollars could defend the rights of white people as well as others is “hideous.” Do whites even have rights in her eyes and the eyes of SJWs like her, who have been macerated in the juice of “whites bad, minorities good” ever since they entered school and perhaps before?

So, what did the DOJ actually say it was intending to do?:

The [DOJ] document, an internal announcement to the civil rights division, seeks current lawyers interested in working for a new project on “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.”

The Times characterizes this as a plan for “investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants.” Oh, really? I don’t see the word “white” in that DOJ document at all. Perhaps the Times is ignorant (after all, it’s just the Times) of the fact that for quite a while it’s been predominantly Asians who’ve been suing, alleging that they’ve been discriminated against in favor of other minorities.

In the old fools vs. knaves controversy, I vote for “knaves” in the case of the Times. I suspect they know full well that Asians are the new Jews in the college world—i.e. a group that does a lot better in academia and therefore would dominate if academic merit was the sole criterion used. And yet this fact—that it’s especially a non-white minority (Asians) that is being discriminated against, not just white people (who are fast becoming a minority in numbers, by the way) is discarded by the Times in favor of saying the goal is to protect “white applicants.” The only mention of the word “Asian” in the entire Times article is a passing mention in a quote from one of the defenders of the Trump action.

The Times minimization of the Asian nature of the people who are being discriminated against, and the highlighting of “white people,” is of course a form of propaganda to appeal to people (such as that white civil rights lawyer whose tweet I quoted) who consider white people unworthy of any protection. But in the larger sense, it doesn’t really matter to the merits of the thing whether it’s white people or Asians—discrimination is discrimination is discrimination (or should be, anyway). Has that become a minority point of view?

[NOTE: If you want to see some of the posts I’ve written previously on affirmative action, please see this, this, and this.

See also this and this for the anti-Jewish history of the favoring of “diversity” over strict academic merit in college student admissions.]

Here comes (or goes) the sun

The New Neo Posted on by

Trump the evildoer:

Democrat lawmakers and climate change scientists warn that Trump’s disastrous environmental policies will culminate in the destruction of the Sun on August 21, 2017.

Since taking office, Donald Trump has been rolling back Obama-era policies that curbed climate change on the pretense of liberating business owners from unnecessary job-killing regulations. However we now know that President Obama’s environmental regulations were the only thing keeping the world from being plunged into total darkness.

“Less than a year ago, none of us could imagine a President Trump …,” Nobel laureate Al Gore said while on a tour promoting his new movie An Inconvenient Squeal. “… Now imagine a world without a Sun!”

That’s satire, of course. But satire and reality come closer and closer together these days.

In the real world rather than the satirical one, the Boston Globe had a different and almost equally bizarre take on the coming solar eclipse:

The path of ideal viewing spots for this month’s highly-anticipated total solar eclipse cuts overwhelmingly through places that voted for President Trump in November.

There are about 240 counties roughly along the central path of the eclipse, a 70-mile-wide trail extending across the country where people will be able to see a total eclipse, meaning the sun will appear completely obscured by the moon.

And about 92 percent of those counties swung in Trump’s favor, while fewer than two dozen counties voted for his opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Trump won many of those counties by a wide margin, securing an average of 71 percent of the vote in counties he won along the path. Clinton, by comparison, got only about 56 percent of the vote in counties she won along the eclipse path.

The article has been widely mocked. But when I read it, I suspected it was written with a somewhat tongue-in-cheek mentality.

That’s what I prefer to think, anyway.

[NOTE: Hmmm, this is the second day in a row I’ve used riffs on Beatles songs to title posts. This probably has no significance whatsoever.

Let me add that, when I went to the movies this past weekend, I saw a coming attraction for Al Gore’s new film. At first I wondered what a political ad was doing in the theater, and then I realized what I was actually watching.]

Facial recognition systems at the railway station?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a little tidbit:

German authorities have launched a six-month test of automatic facial recognition technology at a Berlin railway station, which the country’s top security official says could be used to improve security in the future.

More than 200 people volunteered to have their names and two photos stored for the project at Suedkreuz station, where three cameras film an entrance and an escalator.

I don’t know what you thought when you read that, but I know what I thought: it’s a good thing the Nazis didn’t have access to something like that.

I understand the need for security, I truly do. But at what price? And yet I think this is the direction in which we’re headed whether we like it or not.

Also, see this.

When I was young, we used to have a lot of discussions about which was more likely to come true in the future: Orwell’s or Huxley’s dystopian fantasies. Now I’m thinking we may be headed towards some hybrid of the two.

I read the news today, oh boy

The New Neo Posted on by

And I think I’m going to ignore it.

I may succumb later, though; you never know.

But sometimes these days, when I look at news aggregator sites like memeorandum or this, for example), or here.

But every now and then I take a break from adding my voice to the news and news-digesting clamor.

Which doesn’t mean I’m going to shut up; not even today.

Today I had a bunch of chores and errands to do, and (as often seems the case) they took about three times longer than my estimates of how long they’d take. It also seems sometimes that every chore or task completed has a little task prologue and then a post-task echo that goes along with it.

For example, yesterday I bought new tires. Simple, right? Just order them, have them installed, and get out your credit card. But that leaves out the 15 or more hours I spent obsessively researching tires and the people who install them, determined not to just follow my usual lackadaisical method and get whatever the guy at the nearest tire place suggests. Well, fifteen hours of internet reading later, I picked a variety of all-season tire that’s supposed to be especially good in snow, a very salient characteristic as far as I’m concerned. When I told the guy at the tire place that’s what I wanted (I’d already checked to make sure they had it, and I knew the price), he tactfully told me that some customers had been a bit disappointed in that tire because it’s quite noisy.

Now, that was something I hadn’t really thought about. He suggested a different one that was actually a trifle less expensive, and said that it had all the characteristics I was looking for. So I caved, and that’s the tire I got.

Then last night I was out driving and I noticed that my automatic car lock (you know, that thingee on the key that you press) wasn’t working too well. Did the tire guy inadvertently do something that made it less functional? Is that even possible? Do I need to get it fixed?

Not to mention my brand new cell phone that today suddenly started taking stealth photos like some sort of spy camera. No, it wasn’t on a timer, but every time I took a picture it would then go on to take another and another and another at about 15-second intervals, until I changed the screen.

Why? Why? Do I now have to take it to the cellphone place?

I’ll not bore you with the rest of my day so far, or you may end up getting ennui, too.

Scaramucci, we hardly knew ya

The New Neo Posted on by

And what we knew, most of us didn’t like.

It turns out that Trump—or John Kelly, or some combination of the two—didn’t like him much either, because after about 10 days as communications director, Scaramucci is out on his ear:

Scaramucci was expected to announce his new communications team Monday afternoon, but he was instead informed of the decision to remove him that morning in Kelly’s office. Scaramucci was not present when senior staff were told of the change, a White House official said. Another senior aide said the move came after discussions over the weekend. There was “no way” Scaramucci could work with Kelly, the senior aide said.

I would certainly have liked to have been the proverbial fly on the wall for that little discussion, or series of discussions. I wonder if Scaramucci knows where any of the bodies are buried, and plans to take revenge.

It also occurs to me that Scaramucci may have been brought in temporarily, for a specific task—to drive out Sean Spicer and Reince Priebus—and that when those things were accomplished, the plan was that it would be time to oust him. That’s pretty Machiavellian, but it’s certainly a possibility.

Scaramucci has had a run of bad luck recently. In addition to this firing, his second wife filed for divorce after only three years of marriage (which starts looking like a long time compared to his tenure at the White House), and even the Harvard Law School directory has offed him (by mistake, apparently). To top it all off, his estranged wife just gave birth one week ago, which would ordinarily be considered good news for him but could be bittersweet coming in the middle of a divorce.

Other than that, not much happening in Scaramucci’s life.

His story reminds me a bit of those fairy tales about genies and wishes—you know, the ones with the moral “be careful what you wish for.” Sacramucci may have wished to be a mover and shaker in the White House under Trump, but perhaps he forgot to add that he wanted to hold the position longer than 10 days before he was the one shaken and moved.

I’m happy to see him leave that position, though. His short tenure appeared to be a disaster in a job for which he had neither aptitude nor skills. His sole function (other than the aforementioned push out the door for Spicer and Priebus) may have been to make Trump looks sober and controlled and tactful in contrast.