United: in a culture dominated by social media…

The New Neo Posted on by

…an airline can’t get off scot-free with this sort of heavy-handed action, which dominated the public chatter today.

United Airlines and many other airlines overbook for perfectly understandable economic reasons. It doesn’t usually cause problems, because they also offer economic incentives—for those passengers who aren’t in such an enormous hurry to get where they’re going—to change their flight. But sometimes it doesn’t work that way, and if an airline is going to drag a passenger off a flight, that airline is going to pay the price in PR, which translates to money in the end.

So the airline should have been smarter, and paid the price instead up-front:

United has confirmed that they overbooked the flight and dragged a passenger off when they didn’t get enough volunteers. United had previously offered money ”” up to $800 ”” for passengers to voluntarily get off the flight. The passengers who needed to be seated were United employees who needed to get to another destination in order to work a flight there, apparently. But when $800 wasn’t enough to get volunteers, they used a computer model to randomly select people for removal. A man seated on his flight with a ticket he paid for was then removed forcibly. Now they’re facing a social media backlash as a result…

United should have simply started offering more money. If $800 wasn’t enough, what about $1,000? If $1,000 wasn’t enough, how about $1,200? They were receiving real-time information about price setting and they weren’t responsive to it. Every passenger has a price point at which he or she is willing to disembark a given plane. For some passengers, they need to get to a funeral and the price will be high. For others, they might not even want to be making the trip and can be bought for much cheaper. United needed to find the passenger with the lowest price point. The way to do that would have been to make incremental offers until they found it. Now they’ll suffer much more through negative public relations and earned bad media. A bit of knowledge of economics might have helped them.

Oh, I think United understands economics well enough (although whoever made this particular decision might not have understood it). After all, economics is what dictates the general policy of overbooking and of compensation for those willing to change. What United doesn’t seem to understand is how much good PR is worth, and the power and ubiquity of social media.

The Rise and Fall

The New Neo Posted on by

Last month I got William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich out of the library.

I had actually read it many moons ago, when I was a teenager. But “read” is a bit of a euphemism. It was so very long—over 1,000 pages—that although I did “read” all those pages, I did so rather quickly, focusing only on the bits that interested me most at the time. I did get an overview, but I was so young that I had no context in which to place that overview.

What I got from the book was more or less “This happened and then this and this and this.” I had so little knowledge or life experience to relate it to that it seemed just a series of inexplicable although terrible events.

It’s seemed to me more recently that I’d be able to bring more to the table if I managed to read it now. But it’s still over a thousand pages long, and there a lot of demands on my time these days. So back it went—mostly unread—to the library when due.

I have a host of books like this, all of which I want to read, and so little time. I was merely middle-aged when I started the blog, but somehow here I am and I’m—well, let’s just call it “older.” Prioritizing my time seems more important now than ever for that reason. But getting and spending we lay waste our powers.

Gotta have some fun, too. Each thing that I do seems important to me as I do it. And I have to eat and shop and cook and clean. I want to see friends, and take in theater or a movie now and then. YouTube is a huge time-sucker, but a lot of what I watch there is cultural, such as looking at dancers or musicians of the past or even the present.

Then there’s paying bills, filing the papers that come with dismaying regularity. Taxes at this time of the year (I’m about 95% finished at the moment). It seems as though getting rid of a lot of old stuff—papers and otherwise—would help, too, but that is incredibly time-consuming in itself. I used to joke to my husband that he’d spent the first half of his life amassing things (especially paper and photos) and might spend the second half getting rid of those things. It’s no joke.

And that first sentence of the paragraph two above this—“gotta have fun, too”—predictably sparked a trip to YouTube. So it shouldn’t be a total waste, I’ll share with you the fruits of that trip:

Suspect in Swedish terrorism attack appears to be another known wolf

The New Neo Posted on by

No surprise here:

The suspect in Stockholm’s deadly beer truck attack is a 39-year-old native of Uzbekistan who had been on authorities’ radar previously, Swedish authorities said Saturday…

There is nothing that tells us that we have the wrong person,” Dan Eliason told a news conference Saturday, but added he did not know whether others were involved in the attack. “We cannot exclude this.”

Eliason also said police found something in the truck that “could be a bomb or an incendiary object, we are still investigating it.”

Prosecutor Hans Ihrman said the suspect has not yet spoken to authorities and could not confirm whether he was a legal resident of Sweden…

[Police] said the suspect had been on their radar before but not recently, and did not explain why authorities apparently had not considered him a serious threat.

I have little doubt that some Swedish people are alarmed enough to think that something needs to change in terms of Swedish policy towards immigrants—or migrants, or whatever word you want to use. But these quotes from the article illustrates what I imagine might be the prevailing attitude of acceptance that this is the price Swedes must pay to consider themselves tolerant:

Steve Eklund, 35, who works in an office nearby, said “maniacs can’t be stopped.”

“It’s very simple. Things like this will always happen in an open society,” Eklund said. “Sweden is not a totalitarian society.” …

“We must get through this. Life must go on,” [Swedish Prime Minister] Lofven said Saturday after again laying flowers near the crash site. “We in Sweden want an open society.”

“Open,” that is, even to people who don’t believe in the principles of Swedish society, including its openness (an openness they nevertheless exploit to get their own feet into the door of that society).

Here’s a fact I had forgotten but which that article reminded me of (the following is from an article written in mid-February of 2017):

During a rally in Florida on Saturday, Mr. Trump said “look what’s happening last night in Sweden” as he alluded to past terror attacks in Europe. It wasn’t clear what he was referring to and there were no high-profile situations reported in Sweden on Friday night.

Two days later, there were some riots in Sweden. Now this—which occurred on a Friday, by the way.

If Trump ever does get impeached, or retires, maybe he can go into the fortune-telling business.

Warning: this is not a joke, it’s just feminists gone completely round the bend

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m issuing a warning, and I’m not kidding: If you’re at all sensitive to disgusting stories, you might want to skip the entire rest of this post, and you certainly might not want to click on this link about a new fringey-feminist folly known as free bleeding.

I said it was new because I’d certainly never heard of it before. But it’s been with us for a couple of years, as I discovered from Googling the phrase. Apparently, it started in 2014 as a hoax, and radical feminists fell for it:

So in 2014 ”” inspired by some crazy idea they’d read somewhere on the internet ”” the pranksters decided to fake an even more ludicrous trend designed to discredit the radical feminist movement. ”˜What is free bleeding? It consists of us womyn bleeding with no restriction ”¦ Being able to menstruate is something that is a [sic] undeniably female characteristic. How DARE they try and oppress it,’ read their working notes.

A few helpful tweets later from fake Twitter accounts and ”˜free bleeding’ had become an urgent new cause of radical feminism. Eventually word got out among some women’s interest websites that they’d all been had: ”˜Free bleeding is not a thing,’ warned one. But it appears the memo didn’t get through to everyone. Hence Kiran Gandhi’s marathon [padless] protest.

Unless the entire thing is a hoax—which I first thought when I read about it, but which sadly enough does not appear to be the case—this is an example of how far some people have come in mainstreaming a type of narcissism they’ve been taught that says “any product of my body is wonderful, and any attempt to say otherwise is oppression.”

Parading body effluvia in front of others is almost never, never ever, a good idea. There used to be some sort of complete consensus on that fact, but apparently the fringe of feminism is now an exception.

[NOTE: There is a tiny germ of a little something called a point in all of this, but it’s lost in the offensive obnoxiousness of the result. The tiny germ of a little something is to counter the ancient idea that menstruating women are unclean not just in the sense of needing to use some sort of sanitary product, but in the ritual sense. Those days are long gone in Western society, however—although the free bleed movement could tempt some people to lobby to bring the taboo back.]

McConnell’s moment was a long time coming

The New Neo Posted on by

I want to call your attention to this article by Fred Barnes in the Weekly Standard on how McConnell twisted arms to get the Gorsuch nomination. Some of the usual suspects—Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Bob Corker were extremely hesitant to vote for the nuclear option, the first two because they were afraid that Gorsuch would tip the SCOTUS balance to the anti-abortion side, and Corker out of respect for tradition.

Barnes describes the pressure McConnell brought to bear—and I doubt it’s the whole story of that pressure, either, because what is described in the article seems a lot milder than the (figurative) arm-twisting I suspect happened. But what is clear is that McConnell was resolved to do this.

What’s also important to remember is that McConnell’s actions were a two-parter, and occurred over a period of a little more than a year. Justice Scalia died in February of 2016, and Gorsuch could not have been nominated and confirmed without McConnell and the GOP in the Senate stonewalling the Garland nomination. In some ways that was the more precedent-breaking move; the nuclear option for SCOTUS nominations merely restored the Senate’s tradition of approving a president’s qualified nominees, and Gorsuch is eminently qualified:

When I [Barnes] interviewed McConnell shortly after Gorsuch was confirmed, he wanted to talk before I asked a question. He had plenty to say. It’s rare there are things “you can say you did on your own.” One was his snap decision to bar the Senate from taking up a Supreme Court nomination until a new president took office. Only the majority leader could do this. “It is the most consequential decision I ever made,” McConnell said.

And it turned out the open seat was an “electoral asset” for Trump. Voters didn’t like him or Hillary Clinton. But once filling the seat became the “principal issue,” Trump had the advantage. Everyone knew she would dump Garland, a moderate, for someone further to the left.

“We didn’t know if the president would be a conservative or not,” McConnell said. However, he had promised to pick a nominee from a list of 20 conservative jurists. (McConnell had advocated such a list.) “This reassured conservatives.”

Note that little sentence that’s slipped in there, parenthetically: McConnell had advocated such a list. Trump may not have been McConnell’s choice to win the nominations—in fact, I very much doubt he was his first choice or even his second or third. But nevertheless, McConnell may have been instrumental in helping Trump beat Hillary Clinton, once it was clear that Trump would be the nominee (Trump released his first list in May of 2016 and his second in September of 2016).

McConnell has an interesting history that might shed a little light on this:

…McConnell graduated from the University of Kentucky College of Law, where he was president of the Student Bar Association…

…McConnell was an assistant to Senator Marlow Cook (R-KY) and was a Deputy Assistant Attorney General under President Gerald R. Ford, where he worked alongside future Justice Antonin Scalia.

For McConnell, finding Scalia’s replacement may have been both political and personal.

I have a question for people who hate the GOPe

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday the Senate GOP did something a lot of people thought they’d never do: used the nuclear option in order to clear the way for the confirmation of Gorsuch.

I’m certainly not going to defend all the actions of the GOP in Congress; I’ve criticized them plenty myself. But I’ve also defended them on many occasions too numerous to mention, pointing out that a great many people on the right expected them to do things that just were not possible, and were incredibly angry at them as a result, and that in some cases it was those people who were being unreasonable.

I’m not going to re-fight those battles now, or even link to them, but anyone who reads this blog probably knows what I’m talking about.

What I’m wondering now, though, is this: did some of you think the GOP wouldn’t have the cojones to do this? Were you surprised that they did? Are you willing to give them any credit for it? Does it change your general opinion of them at all?

Truck terror attack in Sweden

The New Neo Posted on by

There has been a truck attack on a crowd in Sweden. The modus operandi indicates that it almost certainly is jihadi terrorism. Truck attacks have become favored because they are lethal and frightening (two goals of terrorists),and cheap and easily available to the free-lancer.

Here is a report on security in Sweden that was written before the attack. It wasn’t hard to predict the following:

There hasn’t been a terror attack on Swedish soil since two bombs exploded in Stockholm in 2010, killing only the attacker himself, and Sé¤po thinks the biggest threat of a future terror attack now lies with lone actors: that is to say, a single person planning and carrying out an attack, rather than one orchestrated by a larger organization…

Sé¤po analyst Ahn-Za Hagstré¶m pointed out that Islamic State meanwhile has changed its strategy from encouraging people to travel abroad and join them, to encouraging them to carry out attacks in their homeland in Europe. That can mean an increased threat to Sweden, and the consequences can be seen in recent attacks on nearby European nations, she noted.

Choices in Syria and the world: crossing lines, red and otherwise

The New Neo Posted on by

After the Syrian gas attack, President Trump had a choice: do nothing or do something. It’s a choice all presidents face, because sooner or later they will be tested—usually sooner, and not just once but many times and in many ways in many places.

When faced with similar circumstances in Syria, Obama declared the existence of a red line and then ignored it. This is one of the worst response/nonresponses possible. It indicates indecision and lack of resolve, a president who talks tough but his threats means nothing and can be safely ignored.

Trump’s reaction was, if not the opposite, something like the opposite. After sending out some signals that he was going to be less interventionist about Assad’s regime in general, he acted more boldly when challenged. His actions—speaking louder than words—would be par for the course for most presidents in a similar situation. They only seem unusual at this point because we’ve grown accustomed to Obama’s post-bluster inaction.

Assad may have calculated that nothing whatsoever would happen, not just because of recent comments by the Trump administration but because of recent history:

Dr. Monzer Khalil, Idlib Province’s health director, said such extreme tactics aimed to demonstrate the government’s impunity and to demoralize its foes.

“It makes us feel that we are defeated,” said Dr. Khalil, whose gums bled after he was exposed to scores of chemical victims on Tuesday. “The international community will stay gazing at what’s happening ”” and observing the explosive barrels falling and rockets bombing the civilians and the hospitals and the civil defense and killing children and medical staff ”” without doing anything.”

“Militarily, there is no need,” said Bente Scheller, the Middle East director of the Berlin-based Heinrich Bé¶ll Foundation. “But it spreads the message: You are at our mercy. Don’t ask for international law. You see, it doesn’t protect even a child.”…

By showing it puts no limits on the tactics it uses, Mr. Yazigi [an opposition Syrian economist] wrote, “the regime shows to the world the West’s impotence and weakness.”

“The West’s impotence and weakness” started even before Obama. We may not like being the world’s policeman (Trump has certainly made many statements to that effect). But if not us, then who? And if no one is the world’s policeman, what then?

That’s the dilemma in a nutshell. It’s the same dilemma that led to the rise of the foreign-interventionist group of neocons who have been so reviled in recent years. But the dilemma remains.

Liberal Democrats used to be more inclined to applaud such interventions, as well. But in recent years they’ve adopted a simple way of reacting that goes like this: anything a Democrat does is good whether it be isolationist or interventionist, and anything a Republican does is bad.

Nor is it the case that Trump’s action in bombing the Syrian air base will heavily undermine Assad’s power. That would take a lot more—something like the Iraq War, which I am virtually certain is not in the cards. But Trump’s action does send a message that a new policeman is in town—and that now there are indeed limits and red lines, and costs for crossing them. And that is worth something.

[NOTE: Some of Trump’s alt-right supporters don’t like this move:

President Trump’s surprise decision to launch 59 missiles at a Syrian airfield, and his call for “all civilized nations to join us in seeking to end the slaughter and bloodshed in Syria,” angered some of his staunchest supporters ”” paleo-conservatives, noninterventionist libertarians and the self-identified members of the “alt-right” nationalist movement.]

A little nuclear option history

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a bit of nuclear option history:

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., was smugly looking ahead to the presidency of Hillary Clinton last October and the possibility that Senate Republicans might dare to filibuster the new president’s Supreme Court pick.

“[I]t’s clear to me that if the Republicans try to filibuster another circuit court judge, but especially a Supreme Court justice, I’ve told ’em how and I’ve done it, not just talking about it,” he told Talking Points Memo in an interview published that month. “I did it in changing the rules of the Senate. It’ll have to be done again.”

More than five months later, the filibuster is on the other foot.

Please read the whole thing.

The current fight over SCOTUS nominees that led to this move today was started with the Democrats’ blocking Reagan nominee Robert Bork, led by Joe Biden and Ted Kennedy. Here is Kennedy’s attack on Bork at the time:

Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.

Sound familiar? Absurd hyperbole—but it worked, and Bork was not seated. In fact, it really really worked, because the judge who ultimately became a SCOTUS justice instead of Bork was Anthony Kennedy, the current swing justice on the Court.

Which brings us to more recent history:

When Republicans filibustered some of Obama’s judicial picks in 2013, Reid and the Democrats changed the rules.

Then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., warned them at the time: “I say to my friends on the other side of the aisle, you will regret this, and you may regret it at lot sooner than you think.”

It’s four years later. However, I doubt the Democrats regret it at all. They knew this would probably happen if the GOP ever got the Senate and the presidency back—they just didn’t think that would happen, so they thought they were safe. In other words, they don’t regret the nuclear option, they regret the election results of 2016. Another reason they don’t regret what they did in 2013 is that going nuclear allowed them to complete their takeover of the federal courts, which during Obama’s tenure went from being somewhat conservative to being controlled by liberals. This has already paid off in a host of ways for the Democrats, based on recent federal court decisions by Obama appointees.

As I said, what the Democrats deeply regret is losing the 2016 election, which put the GOP in charge and able to take advantage of the nuclear option themsevles. Republicans are now poised to make their own federal judge appointments as well as this present SCOTUS appointment. What goes around does indeed come around.

Here’s a question, though: if the Democrats had not gone nuclear in 2013, would the GOP have done it now? I don’t know the answer, but my gut feeling is “no.”

The Susan Rice unmasking timeline and motives

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday “The Other Chuck” had several questions, and this was one of them:

There are several things about the unmasking by Rice other than the political angle that bother me. If it was motivated purely by politics, surely she would snoop in on communications of other Republican candidates. And if not, why Trump who was a long shot at best in 2015 when this started?

I believe that this is the wrong timeline of the Susan Rice involvement. There are varying reports from different sources and I’m not sure which is correct, but the ones that seems to be from the most trustworthy sources I can find indicate that when the surveillance began Rice does not appear to have been involved, and that people connected with the Trump campaign were initially eavesdropped on as part of an ongoing investigation of other people, but not as targets themselves.

The pattern of Rice’s requests was discovered in a National Security Council review of the government’s policy on “unmasking” the identities of individuals in the U.S. who are not targets of electronic eavesdropping, but whose communications are collected incidentally. Normally those names are redacted from summaries of monitored conversations and appear in reports as something like “U.S. Person One.”

It appears to have only been later—after Trump had already been elected, but while Obama was still president—that Rice got involved (again, there are somewhat varied reports on this timeline, but from my reading of it this is the best summary we have of the scenario). After Trump’s election, her actions were to request that the identities of people connected with Trump who had been incidentally surveilled be revealed although they were not the targets.

This request by Rice was later spotlighted by a different investigation:

In February [2017] Cohen-Watnick [the person at the National Security Council conducting the review] discovered Rice’s multiple requests to unmask U.S. persons in intelligence reports that related to Trump transition activities. He brought this to the attention of the White House General Counsel’s office, who reviewed more of Rice’s requests and instructed him to end his own research into the unmasking policy.

The intelligence reports were summaries of monitored conversations — primarily between foreign officials discussing the Trump transition, but also in some cases direct contact between members of the Trump team and monitored foreign officials. One U.S. official familiar with the reports said they contained valuable political information on the Trump transition such as whom the Trump team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for the incoming administration.

So that indicates that Rice’s activities in connection to this unmasking incident occurred between Trump’s election and his inauguration—the so-called transition time.

“The Other Chuck” has another question:

It seems obvious that they wanted this stuff to leak out, as McCarthy suggests. But was the reason solely political or did they actually believe there was collusion between the Russians and certain Trump operatives?

These contacts were initially uncovered through surveillance of the Russians, so at the beginning it seems that nothing was suspected about Trump or his operatives and their possible connection to the Russians. Certainly that was not the reason for the eavesdropping. However, once the contacts with Trump’s people were uncovered, I suppose the government (I believe it would have had to have been the Department of Justice rather than Susan Rice) could have taken a look at the situation and sought further investigation of the Trump people as targets, on that basis. But they would have had to have met a certain burden of proof to do that, and follow certain procedures (more on that topic later in this post). However, that doesn’t appear to have happened.

At any rate, none of that has anything to do with Rice and the unmasking. Rice is not tasked with investigating such things (see this Andrew McCarthy article). The unmasking was done at Rice’s request, however. Since she was not investigating, the motive for her unmasking request could only have been one of two things, or both: (1) to learn the names of the contacts for further action of some sort or other (2) to let the names filter down to other people so that they could be leaked to the press. That latter part—which is what actually happened—is the real scandal.

Andrew C. McCarthy is my go-to guy on this story. Here he further explains:

The sole purpose of foreign intelligence collection is to understand the actions and intentions of foreign powers and their operatives. If the government’s purpose is to understand the actions and intentions of American citizens, there are two proper ways to go about that: (a) conduct a criminal investigation in which the American citizens can be targeted for court-authorized surveillance based on probable cause of a crime, or (b) conduct a FISA investigation in which the American citizens can be targeted for court-authorized surveillance based on probable cause that they are acting as agents of a foreign power.

If neither of those two alternatives is chosen, then the American citizens are not supposed to be the subject of the intelligence collection effort ”” they are supposed to be protected. The snooping to which they are subjected is an incidental byproduct (i.e., an unintentional albeit inevitable consequence) of snooping on foreign powers. The incidental snooping deprives them of privacy protections rooted in law ”” the requirement that the government obtain a judicial warrant before seizing and eavesdropping on their communications. The law allows this to happen, but only if post hoc safeguards are applied. That is why, as Director James Comey testified before Congress, the FBI is “obsessive” about concealing the identities of Americans. That is why unmasking is a big deal.

Please read the whole thing.

[NOTE: See also this.]