Batteries included

The New Neo Posted on by

I purchased a battery-powered implement the other day of a type that’s been proliferating in stores during the last few years: the heel smoother.

You can find a plethora of buffers and scrapers, shavers and grinders, all guaranteeing to pare down those horny heels. And then we have the creams—sticks and tubes and jars, all promising (with photos!) heels as velvety soft as a baby’s bottom.

Riiight.

My particular gizmo was cleverly called “achilles’ heel” and I found it on sale for a pittance at T.J. Maxx, where it beckoned seductively to me—after all, it’s manufactured by a company called “bliss” (and all those lower-case words are not an error on my part; “bliss” seems to have e. e. cummings writing its copy).

But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about the book of instructions that came with my heel buffer. And in that book of instructions, along with such helpful hints as “don’t operate under a blanket; can cause a fire” and “ensure that your hands are dry when operating the controls,” I found the following:

Remove battery promptly if consumed.

If consumed? I know that lawyers create these things nowadays, and they like to cover all possible bases. But, eating batteries? Would anyone really think to do such a thing? Or is it the entire implement (which is not enormous, but certainly a rather large item to swallow) that might be ingested?

And then, how to remove, once down the gullet? The mind boggles at the thought.

Fortunately, as is true of most instructions these days, these came in several languages. Turning the pages to the only other language of which I have even a rudimentary knowledge, I saw that in Spanish the sentence became:

Retire las pilas ré¡pidamente si esté¡n agotadas.

I retain enough high school Spanish to know that must mean something like, “remove the batteries quickly if they are…” and then some verb. If they are eaten? No. If they are chewed? No.

But the internet is a glorius thing, and a search immediately provided the meaning of the verb “agotar”: exhausted; depleted.

If the batteries are exhausted or depleted. It was both a relief and a disappointment at the same time.

London terrorist Masood was a convert to Islam

The New Neo Posted on by

And most likely a prison convert. He’s been identified by several possible birth names and aliases, but the bottom line is that he was born in Britain of non-Muslim parents, had a history of violent crime as a younger man, and converted to Islam (perhaps while in prison).

If Masood’s conversion happened in prison, this would fit into a not-unfamiliar pattern. Religious conversions while serving prison terms are so common as to be a cliche, and they are not limited to Islam. But Islamic conversions have been quite common in prisons for decades. And it stands to reason that a person such as Masood who has already proven capable of violence and who then converts to a radical jihadist form of Islam would have a leg up on becoming a terrorist. Now that person’s violent tendencies would be harnessed in a cause that the person sees as especially worthy and not just selfish.

The most unusual thing about Masood, in my opinion, was his age: 52. That’s somewhat old for a terrorist.

Trump’s threat?

The New Neo Posted on by

Note I put a question mark after the word “threat.”

Here’s the story as it’s being reported:

… a frustrated White House told a group of GOP lawmakers meeting in the Capitol basement Thursday evening that negotiations were “done” and a vote would take place Friday.

If the bill is defeated, Trump threatened to simply leave the current healthcare law in place and move on to other issues, according to a message delivered by the president’s budget chief, Mick Mulvaney, according to Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.).

“The message is tomorrow it’s up, it’s down ”” we expect it to be up ”” but it’s done tomorrow,” Mulvaney said Thursday night.

It remained unclear whether Trump’s extraordinary ultimatum was real or a pressure tactic designed to bringunruly Republicans in line.

What are we to make of this “my way or the highway” pronouncement by Trump through his representative?

First: if it was indeed said that way, it wouldn’t be a surprising example of Trump’s negotiating style, in which he has stated before that one of the tactics is to threaten to walk away.

Second: note the fourth-hand nature of the report: according to a message delivered by the president’s budget chief, Mick Mulvaney, according to Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.). With games of telephone, the message can get garbled. Why do I call it fourth-hand? Well, first we have Trump, then Mulvaney, then Collins, and then the reporter writing the story.

Third: when last I checked, Congress was a separate branch of government than the president, and able to pass or not pass whatever legislation it wants to take up. It doesn’t have to follow a president’s lead, and in fact often presidents are of different parties than Congress. As far as I can see, Congress could pass a bill anyway that differed from the one Trump wants, now or later, and put it before the president—who, in order to make good on his threat, would have to veto it. Is that what Trump is saying? That if Congress passes any bill on health care reform other than his approved bill, he’d veto it? If so, talk about declaring war on Congress, and on the American people and your own voters as well! Of course, if the GOP leaders of Congress agreed with Trump (either because of threats or for any other reason), and failed to allow a vote on any other bill, then Trump would have gotten their cooperation and no vote would occur.

Right now, the bill is being debated. Whether it will be voted on today is anyone’s guess.

Whatever the truth or falsehood of Trump’s reported message is, I am of the firm opinion that pushing this bill today is a bad move. There’s no all-fired rush, and a week or two more of negotiation and fine-tuning certainly would make sense.

[ADDENDUM: As I’ve said before, Trump will be judged by results (by most people, anyway). If a bill passes and it ends up being a good one for the vast majority of people affected, he’ll get credit. If it isn’t and it doesn’t, both he and the GOP will lose favor.]

Will there be a vote tonight on health care reform?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not even going to bother to put up any links because the situation is so fluid and changing that nothing anyone says is worth much in terms of prognostication.

Will the House vote this evening on repeal/replace? That’s the question, and the answer (drum roll, please) is: maybe. Right now the vote is scheduled to take place, as far as I can tell.

But my guess is that it will be postponed, because they don’t have the votes right now to pass it. I also don’t really see what the big all-fired rush is.

That’s my opinion. What’s yours?

Shorter Dana Milbank…

The New Neo Posted on by

…on Gorsuch: he’s too retro and sort of folksy.

What sort of idiocy is this column by Milbank in the WaPo? It sounds like junior high school gossip:

No fewer than eight times [Gorsuch] punctuated his testimony with “Leave It to Beaver” exclamations of “goodness” ”” “goodness, no!” “oh, my goodness!” ”” and, though only 49 years old, spoke in archaic phrases: “since I was a tot,” “a fair and square deal,” “doesn’t give a whit.”

Perhaps Milbank would prefer it if Gorsuch had said “doesn’t give a shit”? Would that have been modern and edgy enough?

At the scene of yesterday’s terrorist attack in London [with UPDATE]

The New Neo Posted on by

[See UPDATE below.]

I had never seen this statue before. But I noticed it in a photo taken at the site of the terrorist attack yesterday:

Churchill’s expression is apropos, I think. I doubt he’d be the least bit pleased with the way the Western world has been behaving lately. Here’s a better photo of the statue:

The perpetrator of the attack has yet to be identified by name, but the latest report is that he was British (does that mean British-born?) and a known wolf who had fallen off the surveillance radar.

UPDATE 1:45 PM:

The perpetrator has now been identified as Khalid Masood, a 52-year old British-born Muslim and career criminal:

Masood, who was born in Kent and had been living in the West Midlands region of central England, had previous convictions for violence but not for terrorism offenses, police said. His most recent conviction was in 2003 for possession of a knife.

But he was not the subject of any recent investigations and there was no intelligence about his intent to mount an attack, the Metropolitan Police said. May said he was not part of the “current intelligence picture.”

One of the victim’s of Masood’s attack was an American from Utah named Kurt Cochran:

US citizen Kurt Cochran was in London celebrating his 25th wedding anniversary with his wife Melissa, who suffered a broken leg, broken rib and cut to her head, her brother Clint Payne posted to social media.

Wrong place, wrong time. RIP.

More:

UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson led the UN Security Council in a moment of silence Thursday for the victims of terror in London and elsewhere.

“There are victims in London from 11 nations, which goes to show that an attack on London is an attack on the world,” he said. “And I can tell you from my talks here in the United States, with the US government and with partners from around the world, that the world is united to defeat the people who launched this attack, and to defeat their bankrupt and odious ideology.”

That “bankrupt and odious ideology” that many people (including our former president) say Must Not Be Named. What is it? “Terrorism”? Is that an ideology? Or is it radical Islamic terrorism?

However, Theresa May managed to name it:

Since 2013, police, security and intelligence agencies have successfully disrupted 13 separate terrorist plots in Britain, [May] said. “We know the threat from Islamist terrorism is very real. But while the public should remain utterly vigilant they should not — and will not — be cowed by this threat.”

Let’s make a deal: health care reform

The New Neo Posted on by

So, who’s bluffing? Will conservatives (and even some moderates who oppose the bill) prove correct when they say they have enough votes to block the current version of GOP health care reform on Thursday? Or will Trump be able to use his famous deal-making skills to rally the troops for the bill’s passage?

If I had to bet, it would be on the former rather than the latter. Which is fine with me. This bill needs to change:

Critics of the measure, mainly conservatives who say the bill doesn’t go far enough to gut Obamacare and slash premiums for their constituents, insist they have more than enough support to kill the measure. Already, 27 members of the Freedom Caucus are firmly or leaning against the plan, known as the American Health Care Act.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), one of those conservatives, told Breitbart Radio that he had “personally spoken to 29 colleagues, conservative colleagues” who continued to oppose the GOP health plan late Tuesday. That doesn’t count the half-dozen other Republicans who have publicly signaled their opposition.

“We think the negotiation starts when one party says no. That’s why we’re going to say no,” he said. “This is worse than Obamacare and we’re going to own it. We’re going to own it lock, stock and barrel.”

It would have been nice had the GOP decided on their favored Obamacare replacement prior to the 2016 election. But it’s not surprising that they didn’t. There are huge problems inherent in any effort on health care reform, as I’ve described before. Nor was the particular balance of moderate and conservative Republicans the same in the previous Congress as it is now. And it’s now that matters.

Terrorist attack in London

The New Neo Posted on by

There has been a terrorist attack in London today. The death toll is unclear (at the moment, I’m reading between 2 and 4 dead). But here are the facts as they’ve emerged so far:

More than 12 people were said to have been hit by a vehicle on Westminster Bridge today after a Hyundai i40 drove into pedestrians and cyclists before crashing into the gates of the Houses of Parliament. An intruder described as ‘middle-aged and Asian’ then managed to break into Parliament’s grounds and stabbed a police officer before he was shot. One woman victim is dead and the police officer who was stabbed is also thought to have died. An hour after the attack, paramedics removed one person from the scene after extensive CPR. Another body appeared to have been left on the ground covered by a red blanket. The attack came exactly one year after 32 people were killed in suicide bombings in Brussels.

By the way, I learned years ago that the British use the word “Asian” to include groups such as Pakistanis.

This Fox report says that four people have died, including the assailant:

“Sadly, I can confirm that now four people have died. That includes the police officer who was protecting Parliament, and one man that we believe to be the attacker who was shot by police fire at the scene,” he said.

He added: “We are satisfied at this stage that it looks like there was only one attacker. But it would be foolish to be overconfident early on.”

So we have the two most popular recent terrorist methods for killing: knife and vehicle. Fox reports that many of the victims of the vehicular attack have what is described as “catastrophic” injuries. The sequence appears to be first the vehicular attack on Westminster Bridge, and then the assailant got out near Parliament, killed the officer, and tried to enter. He was shot and killed by security at that point.

Trump and credibility

The New Neo Posted on by

The WSJ has published an editorial excoriating Trump for being a liar. For some reason I can’t get to the whole thing in the usual manner—Googling the title of the piece and the paper’s name—so I can’t report on the details of what was said there.

But I can find lengthy excerpts here. And what’s more, I’m not even sure they’re needed, because the gist of the idea is simple: Trump lies, and that destroys his credibility.

Well, duh.

That “duh” of mine doesn’t mean those things are unimportant. On the contrary, it’s something I (and many others) wrote a great deal about during the 2016 campaign. It’s something anyone who took even a cursory look at Trump’s lifelong habits of speech and behavior and his conduct during that campaign that led to the presidency would have naturally noticed. That includes his supporters, who calculated that it was okay because (a) Trump’s heart was in the right place, pro-America and anti-progressive (b) his lies were strategic and would help him win; and (c) he was running against an even greater liar.

“C” was indeed the dilemma we faced at the end. Once the other GOP candidates had fallen by the wayside, it was liar vs. liar, and most people on the right chose the liar who at least had their backs rather than the one determined to stab them in the back. I don’t fault anyone for that.

After Trump had been elected, some of us who had always been worried about Trump were left to reflect that his presidency would rise or fall on his actual accomplishments in the real world rather than his words. I still believe that, because I think that most people (although perhaps not the editors of the WSJ?) had already factored lies, exaggerations, weird tweets, and bizarre accusations into the Trump mix.

Now, however, Hillary has faded into the woodwork (for the moment) and Trump stands alone as president, with no reminder of what the terribly awful alternative would have been.

Trump is fully capable of acting sober and presidential, but not 24 hours a day, and no one has been able to take away his Twitter privileges. And yes, sometimes he uses the Twitter medium very very effectively. But not always.

The WSJ editors write:

Mr. Trump is doing to his Presidency with his seemingly endless stream of exaggerations, evidence-free accusations, implausible denials and other falsehoods.

The latest example is Mr. Trump’s refusal to back off his Saturday morning tweet of three weeks ago that he had “found out that [Barack] Obama had my ”˜wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory” on Election Day. He has offered no evidence for his claim, and a parade of intelligence officials, senior Republicans and Democrats have since said they have seen no such evidence.

One of the most interesting—and saddest—things about all of this is that Obama was a liar extraordinaire, a slick and savvy one. The difference between him and Trump isn’t just the style of their lies, though—it’s the opposite political sides they’re on. Obama’s lies were backed by the full force of the MSM, which is still a formidable player in shaping public perceptions, including those regarding truth or falsehood. In contrast, Trump’s lies or near-lies or maybe-lies or ambiguities or even some of his truths will always, always, always be attacked by the MSM as lies of a particularly nefarious type and magnitude, and used as examples of his basic mendacity.

That’s the situation Trump faces, and the situation we face. We can bewail it all we like, but it’s the reality. It’s not new, and it should not be a surprise. It was never realistic to think that this aspect of Trump would change, or that the MSM would cut him any slack whatsoever.

When Trump made his “wiretapping” accusation, I wrote the following:

The Trump we knew during the campaign made a host of wild allegations against his opponents. That was one of the things about him that dismayed me. I like a fighter as much as the next person, and a hard-hitting one at that, but trying to somehow tie Ted Cruz’s father to the Kennedy assassination was so far beyond the pale that it should have worried even Trump’s most fervent supporters.

We often say that the Democrats have cried wolf on Trump so many times that they’ve lost all credibility. But Trump was a champion wolf-crier as well, especially during the campaign.

That does not mean he’s making up a story here. It does not mean he’s gone of the deep end and is swimming in the waters of paranoia. But what it does mean is that his opponents are going to spin it that way, and that the wildness of some of Trump’s prior accusations have made the spin more plausible…

…launching such a serious accusation in a tweet is both pure Trump and feeds into the idea that he is reckless. I think it’s pretty clear that if a president is going to make an accusation of that sort against a former president, he’d better have his ducks in a row before he does, and make it in a forum other than Twitter. But that’s most definitely not Trump’s style.

So here we are. I continue to think that Trump will be judged as president by his deeds rather than his words. It’s early yet. Let’s see what gets accomplished.

[ADDENDUM: One thing I want to reiterate is something I said at the outset of Trump’s “wiretap” tweet, which is that the problem with that tweet was it was exaggerated. The use of the word “wiretap” (even in scare quotes), and Trump’s saying that President Obama himself had done it, gave Democrats plausible deniability to Trump’s charges.

It seemed clear that, in making those tweets, Trump was relying on reports in the MSM about surveillance, and that much if not all of the surveillance in question was done through NSA data-collection and/or surveillance of non-Trumpian targets rather than an actual wiretap involving Trump himself (or Trump Tower itself), or something ordered specifically by Obama.

Now we see this:

The U.S. Intelligence Community collected ‘incidental’ information about President Donald Trump’s transition team ”“ and possibly about Trump himself ”“ during the three months following the 2016 election, according to House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes.

Nones told reporters that the information collected was ‘legally collected’ pursuant to a warrant issued by a FISA judge in a federal court, and concerned ‘foreign’ surveillance…

Based on Nunes’ evaluation, the surveillance would have occurred while Obama was still president. Nunes said he has seen no evidence that Trump Tower was surveilled, which was one of Trump’s contentions…

…”This is normal incidental collection, at least from what I was able to read.”

I believe that this was the kernel of truth in Trump’s allegations. ]

This is your brain on satnavs

The New Neo Posted on by

First, I learned a new word today: “satnavs,” for satellite-guided navigators.

Next, this is exactly what I intuitively sense when I use my navigator to help with driving directions:

”˜Our results fit with models in which the hippocampus simulates journeys on future possible paths while the prefrontal cortex helps us to plan which ones will get us to our destination.

”˜When we have technology telling us which way to go, however, these parts of the brain simply don’t respond to the street network. In that sense our brain has switched off its interest in the streets around us.

’The findings build on previous research by UCL that the hippocampuses of London cabbies expand as their knowledge of streets increases.

The current study suggests drivers following satnav directions do not engage their hippocampus ”“limiting the learning of the city street network.

How did we all manage without them? Well, I used to regularly get lost in a city such as Boston. Then again, I still do, because satnavs get very confused there and sometimes go on strike or give impossible directions, such as to go the wrong way down a one-way street.

If a person has too many experiences like that, satnavs lose their effectiveness because people start distrusting them. And if you don’t trust your satnav, you don’t do what it says.