Trump’s budget proposal

The New Neo Posted on by

I look on it as Trump’s opening bid in a series of negotiations.

The MSM has predictably wailed about the meanness of it all. If you don’t want to wade through that, I think that Ed Morrissey has a fair summary of what’s in the proposal:

Say hello to the wall, a bigger military, and more robust immigration enforcement. Say goodbye to subsidies for public broadcasting, the arts, and a lot of what the EPA does now. The White House has released its so-called “skinny budget,” and it has winners and losers…

His post goes on to list and describe them, and adds this overview:

Pushing responsibility to states for all these purposes has been Republican doctrine for decades. Many of these programs started as part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society plan, but have produced not much more than stasis in these areas, in part (arguably, anyway) from a lack of accountability. Rather than have states and local authorities keep the resources and deal with problems that they know best, the federal government took over those tasks while taking the resources away, and then tried to apply one-size-fits-all approaches to them.

Republicans face a couple of problems in attempting to implement this paradigm shift now. First, states won’t necessarily get their resources back in the exchange, as the federal government will still need to fund its course of deficit spending, especially with entitlement reform on the back shelf. That leaves the vulnerable without much hope of a safety net. Second, it’s tougher politically to stop a federal program on which people depend than it is to not start it in the first place ”” a dynamic that will apply to entitlement reform too. Finally, while Republicans have talked plenty about deregulation and federalism, they haven’t won too many converts; it took a populist uprising rather than a conservative-federalist uprising to win the White House this time. The irony is that Trump’s budget takes the GOP much farther down that latter road than they’ve dared going themselves since Reagan.

…[T]he budget fight will show whether Republicans decide to fight for their federalist vision…

Morrissey concludes that Republicans will balk somewhat. I agree.

I want to add that cutting money to a department doesn’t inevitably mean gutting it. It can mean streamlining and focusing it. But government isn’t very good at that. The story of government in the last century has been mostly an inexorable increase in what the feds do and how much money they say they need to do it.

Putting aside all the vagaries and problems inherent in Donald Trump’s being the president who happens to be delivering this message right now, would the message itself ever fly? Are Congress and the federal government capable of backing it? Is the American public capable of accepting it? Or does the behemoth inevitably grow?

Two more judges block Trump’s new travel ban

The New Neo Posted on by

It was inevitable that some judge somewhere—or even quite a few judges in quite a few places—would find a reason to to block Trump’s new and very carefully-drafted travel ban.

There are thousands of federal judges in the US, and a very large percentage of them are liberal. There are millions of potential plaintiffs who would be happy to bring a cause of action and lawyers who would be happy to champion them in court, and under the seemingly anything-goes rules that appear to be in effect these days about who has a cause of action and what the reach of the court system can be, there may be no end to such challenges of everything Trump does and no end of judges willing to grant their wishes.

That’s why John Hinderaker of Powerline has called this process a “liberal coup”:

Derrick Watson, a Democratic Party activist who was appointed to the federal bench in Hawaii by President Obama in 2012, has issued a purported injunction barring implementation of President Trump’s travel order. I have not yet read Watson’s opinion, and will comment on it in detail when I have done so. But I have read Trump’s order, and the idea that it somehow can be blocked by a federal judge is ridiculous. The order is absolutely within the president’s constitutional discretion.

What we are seeing here is a coup: a coup by the New Class; by the Democratic Party; by far leftists embedded in the bureaucracy and the federal judiciary. Our duly elected president has issued an order that is plainly within his constitutional powers, and leftists have conspired to abuse legal processes to block it. They are doing so in order to serve the interests of the Democratic Party and the far-left movement. This is the most fundamental challenge to democracy in our lifetimes.

I am in agreement. I also have not yet read the opinion, and I certainly hope that Judge Watson has managed to come up with something other than rationalizations to back up his ruling, and that I will end up changing my mind about the seriousness of what we’re seeing. But I doubt it. People in power tend to want to aggrandize their power, and judges are hardly immune from this.

It will be interesting—and important—to see what happens to this case on appeal. If it wins, I fear that our entire judicial system has broken down.

After the 9th Circuit had upheld the injunction on the previous executive order, I wrote a post on the subject. In it, I quoted William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection, who made these prescient remarks:

The Executive Order, as the Trump administration has said it would be enforced (for example, excluding green card holders from its reach), is perfectly lawful and within the President’s power and authority. To accept the 9th Circuit ruling is to accept that the President does not have the powers vested in him by the Constitution and Congress.

This legal dispute no longer is just about the Executive Order. Democrats have made clear that they will fight in court over almost everything the Trump administration does. The 9th Circuit has opened the door to this tactic on an issue that goes to the core of presidential authority.

Yesterday, Professor Jacobson harked back to that earlier discussion, and added:

The net result is that Trump has been stripped of his constitutional and statutory powers to protect the nation through control of who is permitted to enter the country.

I warned about this, and the danger of Trump not seeking Supreme Court review in the first case…

And now it’s playing out…

…[T]he power to control who enters the country is uniquely a presidential power. Not anymore, unless the Supreme Court acts to restore that power.

We are living not just in interesting times, but in dangerous times. But I suppose that’s the definition of “interesting” when the word is used in that manner. I feel as though a judicial Pandora’s box has been opened, and if it isn’t closed soon we are in unfathomably deep trouble.

Joyce Carol Oates, Trump, Twitter, John Lennon, and Jesus

The New Neo Posted on by

Famous author Joyce Carol Oates is known for the number and length of her fiction output. But she’s also a Twitter-user, and yesterday she retweeted this pithy thought:

“I could shoot 24 million people on Fifth Avenue & I would’t lose a vote”–#TheirFuhrer

It seems to have stirred up a predictable tweet-storm. But aside from the “Trump=Hitler” insanity—which is so common now that it’s become a cliché—I wonder what on earth this statement is trying to say and why anyone (even a Trump-detester) with an intellectual and/or literary reputation to uphold would approvingly retweet it.

And yes, that’s a rhetorical “wondering” on my part. I understand that among the intelligentsia, these sorts of statements about Trump and Hitler are regarded as not only acceptable, but true and courageous.

But does a joke in which a person says he could shoot someone (obvious hyperbole), and that even then his loyal supporters would still vote for him, have anything to do with a desire to actually shoot someone? Of course not. We used to say much the same thing about Obama—that he could strangle a puppy on the White House steps and his supporters would figure out a way to defend him. But even those who disliked Obama the most probably didn’t think he was actually into strangling puppies.

It was a joke of Trump’s, people. Not a very funny one, perhaps, but meant to illustrate a point about the devotion of supporters and nothing else. Dinosaur that I am, Trump’s original comment reminded me of all the flap around John Lennon’s 1966 (fifty years ago!) remark that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus:

During an interview, [Lennon] argued that Christianity was in decline and that it may not endure longer than rock music, explaining “We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first ”“ rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity…

When Datebook, a US teen magazine, quoted Lennon’s comments five months later in August, extensive protests broke out in the Southern United States. Some radio stations stopped playing Beatles songs, their records were publicly burned, press conferences were cancelled, and threats were made. The controversy coincided with the group’s US tour in August 1966, and Lennon and Brian Epstein attempted to quell the dispute at a series of press conferences. Some tour events experienced disruption and intimidation, including a picketing by the Ku Klux Klan.

Shortly after the controversy broke, Lennon reluctantly apologised for the comment, saying “if I had said television was more popular than Jesus, I might have got away with it”. He stressed that he was simply remarking on how other people viewed and popularised the band. The events contributed to the Beatles’ lack of interest in public live performances, and the US tour was the last they undertook, after which they became a studio-only band.

Revisiting that Lennon quote just now for the first time in all those years, I notice that his remarks were actually potentially more offensive to Christians than I had known, because he had added:

Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.

On the other hand, Trump seemed to be sticking to the subject of his popularity and the extreme loyalty of his supporters. Trump’s comment was uttered in January of 2016, over a year ago, so why it’s being recycled now I have no idea. But as relatively unfunny as Trump’s original joke was, multiply that by ten and that’s how unfunny and/or unwitty and/or illogical the retweet of Oates’ is.

How does Trump’s “I could shoot someone…” joke get translated into the mass murder of millions? And is this retweet a comment on Trump, on his followers (are they all supposedly intent on mass murder, too)? Or on both?

These also are obviously rhetorical questions, because the answer is that it doesn’t matter to those who love to tweet or retweet this sort of thing. And although I shouldn’t be the least bit surprised at the intellectual pretensions of those who do love to retweet this sort of thing (Oates, after all, was a Princeton professor for 36 years), sometimes I am surprised.

What kind of milk do you drink?

The New Neo Posted on by

Or do you drink it at all?

I don’t. It’s part of my generalized dislike of any flavored beverage (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, take a look here). But for milk I reserve a special repugnance. The last time I can remember liking it, or at least thinking I might like it, I was around two years old. After that it became a gummy, icky sort of thing, and I’d watch in bafflement as others swilled it down and sang its praises.

As a young adult, I also discovered I was lactose intolerant. I forget why they decided to test me, but in those days the definitive test was to fast overnight, have your blood drawn to measure your blood sugar, and then drink a vat of lactose (actually, about 12 ounces, which is a pretty big swig) in liquid form. That’s much much more than you’d ordinarily get in a serving of milk. Then every half hour they’d draw blood again, for about three hours or so.

A normal milk-digesting person’s blood sugar would rise somewhat and then start falling in predictable fashion. And the person would be feeling okay in the meantime, although a bit like a pincushion. As for me, my blood sugar never responded to the drink at all, which meant that my body was completely unable to digest the milk sugar in it. I was told that there are degrees of inability to digest lactose, and I exhibited the highest degree possible: 100% lactose intolerant.

Which was no sorrow to me, since I never had any inclination to drink milk in the first place. I still seem to do fine with yogurt and cheese, which contain a lot less lactose.

But that test—oh, that test! I got so sick within about a half hour of drinking that vile concoction that I spent most of the next five hours or so in the bathroom. It was a highly unpleasant day, one I hope to never repeat. And I’m not sure anyone else will ever have to repeat it, because I heard that years later they invented a much kinder, gentler test that didn’t involve a huge lactose challenge like that.

Which brings us to this article about problems with certain proteins in milk versus problems with lactose (milk sugar):

But, according to Miller [who is a dietician], compelling scientific research suggests people may not be reacting to lactose, but to a protein found in milk called A1.

‘As cows’ milk protein allergy can be diagnosed relatively easily and doesn’t tend to last into adulthood, the traditional view is that people with continued problems with milk are lactose intolerant.’

‘There are two major proteins in milk, whey and casein. Within the latter, there are two subtypes called A1 and A2. These are natural genetic variants that occur in cows’ milk.’

‘While human breast milk, goat’s milk, sheep’s milk and all other mammalian milks only contain A2 type protein; the A1 protein seems to be only found in European dairy cows,’ says Miller.

And the push for diversity aside, American cows are basically European cows in terms of their protein.

This is not a new issue, although it’s new to me. Here’s Wiki on the evolutionary history:

Scientists believe the difference originated as a mutation that occurred between 5000 and 10,000 years ago””as cattle were being taken north into Europe””when the proline at position 67 was replaced by histidine, with the mutation subsequently spreading widely throughout herds in the western world through breeding.

The percentage of the A1 and A2 beta-casein protein varies between herds of cattle, and also between countries and provinces. While African and Asian cattle continue to produce only A2 beta-casein, the A1 version of the protein is common among cattle in the western world. The A1 beta-casein type is the most common type found in cow’s milk in Europe (excluding France), the USA, Australia and New Zealand. On average, more than 70 percent of Guernsey cows produce milk with predominantly A2 protein, while among Holsteins and Ayrshires between 46 and 70 percent produce A1 milk.

Much of the previous brouhaha about health risks seems to have been about things like cancer and diabetes, and there’s no scientifically-accepted indication that A1 milk is any more harmful in terms of those diseases than A2 milk is. But what about GI discomfort, as reported in the Daily Mail article to which I linked? Perhaps, but the evidence is weak.

All of this is just a way to segue into this question: do you like milk? Do you drink it regularly? If so, is it just with cereal (that, even I can understand)? Or do you chug down a huge glass of it with meals?

Rachel Maddow’s clickbait

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, it wasn’t exactly clickbait, because it was on TV rather than online.

But Maddow’s promise to reveal Trump’s tax returns was the sort of thing you see on the internet all the time, an ad that promises some amazing game-changing revelation but turns out to be very much ado about nothing.

Maddow’s teaser that she’d obtained Trump’s tax returns did have some mild news value in that the particular return she featured (2005) showed that he’d paid more taxes in the year in question than many people would have thought.

Here’s Slate—not ordinarily a bastion of Trumplove and Maddowhate—on the subject:

TV is a ratings game, but an entire episode about highly damaging tax returns is just as likely to get you great ratings as milking the possibility that you have highly damaging tax returns and less likely to get you compared to Geraldo. Maddow even went so far as to hold the tax returns back until after the first commercial break, as if we were watching an episode of The Bachelor and not a matter of national importance””because we weren’t, in fact, watching a matter of national importance, just a cable news show trying to set a ratings record…

The form revealed that, rather than not paying taxes and making no money, Trump paid $38 million on $150 million in income. Maddow promised to pull a sordid revelation out of a hat and instead plucked out ”¦ Trump’s credibility?

The author of that Slate piece, Willa Paskin, seems very disappointed in Maddow. It’s easy to see why. Maddow is no TV neophyte, and must have known her revelation was more inclined to help Trump than hurt him. Paskin writes that rumor is that Trump himself leaked the returns, based on the fact that they are favorable to him. I’d rather that were the case than that they were obtained illegally, but I believe the latter is far more likely.

[NOTE: By the way, regarding Paskin’s dig at “The Bachelor”—say what you will about the show (and I’ve said my piece here)—the “Bachelor” directors certainly know how to entice an audience into eagerly anticipating something. In fact, a great many viewers make a sport out of deciphering what the promos really indicate about what happens versus what they purport to indicate.]

Sen. Tom Cotton on health care reform and the GOP

The New Neo Posted on by

Tom Cotton is interviewed the Hugh Hewitt show:

I think the CBO report provides useful information, but at the same time, the CBO director is not Moses. He’s not walking down from the mountaintop with stone tablets. And we should evaluate that useful information with a critical eye. You know, we should examine the evidence and the conclusions they reach, and see if those are justified. We should also examine their history with health care estimates, which pretty consistently overestimated, for instance, the coverage that Obamacare would provide. They seem to just have some challenges getting right the influence of a healthy individual insurance market. All that said, I think the Congressional Budget Office is directionally correct. They’re right that coverage levels will go down in the coming years under the House bill. They’re also right, I’m afraid, that insurance premiums will continue to go up in the near term, for three to four years, before they start perhaps falling in the long term. However, I suspect that the political consequences of those near term changes means that the long term will never actually arrive. That’s why I believe it’s so important that the House take a pause and try to fix some of these fixable problems in their committees, which is the easiest place in Congress to fix them, whereas the Senate floor is the hardest place to fix them…

I think the Rules Committee might be the place where some of these changes happen. What kind of changes do we need?…

He goes on to try to answer that question.

As usual with the topic of health care reform, the answers are complex. I’m not sure how his proposals would work out, but I very much respect Cotton and think he deserves attention on this.

Medicare, Obamacare, GOPcare: penalties and taxes

The New Neo Posted on by

The current discussion of GOP healthcare reform proposals feels almost like a stroll down memory lane. And not an entirely pleasant stroll, either.

Well do I remember going on and on and on about penalties vs. taxes, and what the Obamacare tax/penalty was (see this and this if you want to revisit some of that “going on and on and on”).

Now, because the GOP health care reform proposal includes a 30% penalty when buying insurance after a period of lack of coverage, some of that discussion about penalties has been revived (the penalty was discussed in this comment thread, for example). So I’m going to tackle this penalty topic, albeit more briefly.

If you have a plan that requires insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions, that inevitably sets up the problem of how to avoid people waiting until they’re sick before they buy coverage. People will act in their own self-interest (ordinarily, anyway), and if there’s no downside to it, why not wait to buy coverage and then buy it only when you need it? It’s pretty obvious why letting that happen would probably be fatal—not to the patient, but to any health coverage scheme (by the way, I’m calling it “coverage” rather than “insurance,” because traditionally insurers cannot be forced to cover pre-existing conditions.)

Obamacare “solved” the problem with the individual mandate and its penalty/tax. But the problem exists in any scheme that forces coverage of pre-existing conditions, and Americans want that coverage. Prior to Obamacare, it was dealt with in one of two ways: most states had a state-subsidized high-risk pool; others (a much smaller number of states, by the way) had no coverage for such people. A high-risk pool—and I was in one for several years, so I know something about this—was still usually very expensive and ordinarily offered only catastrophic coverage with a high deductible. And the money had to come from somewhere to subsidize those with low incomes (and actually, even to reduce premiums for those with higher incomes from what those premiums would have been with individual underwriting). This was ordinarily done through general public taxation rather than directly penalizing the people with the pre-existing conditions.

Medicare faces the same problem of near-universal coverage of a potentially sick population, and Medicare has long dealt with it by placing a penalty on the premiums of those who wait. It goes like this for Part B:

In most cases, if you don’t sign up for Part B when you’re first eligible, you’ll have to pay a late enrollment penalty. You’ll have to pay this penalty for as long as you have Part B. Your monthly premium for Part B may go up 10% for each full 12-month period that you could have had Part B, but didn’t sign up for it. Also, you may have to wait until the General Enrollment Period (from January 1 to March 31) to enroll in Part B. Coverage will start July 1 of that year.

Ten percent a year can really add up. And it’s a penalty you pay forever; it never expires.

Something similar happens with Part D (the drug benefit under Medicare). It’s a way to force people onto the drug plan even if they don’t need it, because some day they may need it and by then the premiums could be much higher for them because of the penalties.

The current GOP proposal is more like those penalties than it is like the Obamacare individual mandate and penalty/tax, in that (like the Medicare penalties) it is tacked on to insurance premiums rather than the tax code. It involves a higher initial amount than the Obamacare penalty/tax or the Medicare penalties, but it’s strictly time-limited:

Under the GOP bill [insurers] can…charge 30% higher premiums for one year, regardless of health status, to those entering the individual market who didn’t have continuous coverage, which is defined as a lapse of coverage of 63 days or more over the previous 12 months.

So it seems that this would involve a one-shot deal, just for the first year. To my way of thinking, that makes it less onerous over time than the Medicare penalties, particularly if a person waits a long time before buying coverage (as many young people probably would). Think of how much money a person would save each year by not buying insurance at all, versus that one-time 30% penalty. In fact, the penalty is so relatively mild (particularly for a young person who has deferred buying coverage for many years) that I wonder whether it actually would act as much of a deterrent at all to indefinite postponement of buying health coverage.

[NOTE: During the time that Obamacare was being proposed and voted on and then discussed, I often wondered why Obamacare didn’t go with a Medicare-like penalty scheme. It would have avoided any possible constitutional problems. I figured that the Democrats calculated that such a scheme might have made the bill more difficult to pass, but I’m not sure if this was the motivation.]

Yep, it’s a blizzard

The New Neo Posted on by

No doubt about it.

The weatherman (woman? person?) was correct. High winds and enough snow to reduce visibility a great deal. A day for hunkering down, which is fine as long as the power holds out.

Mid-March snowstorms are not the least bit unusual here. In fact, I consider March and much of April to be winter, whatever the calendar may say.

Is it GOPcare or Trumpcare?

The New Neo Posted on by

Whatever you call it, Trump and the GOP seem to be on the same page.

From Trump:

The House plan follows the guidelines I laid out in my recent address to Congress ”“ expanding choice, lowering costs, and providing healthcare access for all.

This plan is part of a three-pronged reform process. In concert with the plan in front of Congress, I have directed Dr. Tom Price, our Secretary of Health and Human Services, to use his authority to reduce regulations that are driving up costs of care.

We are also working on reforms that lower the costs of care, like allowing Americans to purchase health insurance across state lines. You’ve heard me say that many, many times during the debates.

And from Paul Ryan:

We are going to repeal and replace Obamacare and we’re going to do it with a three-pronged approach…

That’s called reconciliation. That’s the American Health Care Act. There are only so many things you can do in that bill because of the Senate floor rules for reconciliation. You can’t put everything you want in that legislation because if you did, it would be filibustered and you couldn’t even bring it up for a vote in the Senate.

Number two, administrative action. This law, Obamacare, has 1,442 sections or instances that gives the secretary of HHS enormous amounts of discretion to administer health care, meaning I don’t think Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid when they crammed this bill through ever thought Donald Trump would be president and Tom Price would be the secretary of HHS.

So, number two in our three-pronged approach, administrative action where the health and human services secretary deregulates the marketplace and allows more choice and more competition to come in the marketplace.

Number three, and this is where I think there’s a lot of confusion all over the map — additional legislation that we feel is important and necessary to give us a truly competitive health care marketplace. So, think of things like interstate shopping. That’s a reform that we’ve long believed in; that we think is really important to get regulatory competition to give people even more choices.

Those of you who think the feds should get out of the health care reform business will not be pleased by any of this.

Those of you who think the GOP consists of a bunch of liars and charlatans will not be pleased by any of this.

Those of you who think there’s no way back to total lack of federal involvement, and who think the GOP in Congress includes a significant number of people (although hardly all!) who are competent and mean well, should be reassured that the proposed bill is just the beginning of the process.

What is that I often say? We’ll see.

Boycotts and the law of unintended consequences

The New Neo Posted on by

Boycotts can seem to be potent political tools. But they’re not an all-purpose tool; in organizing a boycott, the target gets a lot of free publicity. But although the intent is negative publicity, the word reaches both sides. And the opposition has buying power, too.

So if you want to boycott something and the two sides are roughly equal numerically, you might want to rethink that, because the result can just as easily be a spike in sales. This is particularly true when both sides are also equally energized in the political sense.

Thus we have this phenomenon being reported:

[Ivanca Trump’s] fashion line was famously dropped by several department stores, and some of the many foes of her father organized a boycott of her goods. The result is a remarkable spike in sales ”” to near record levels, according to her company…

“For several different retailers Ivanka Trump was a top performer online,” the brand’s spokeswoman says, “and in some of the categories it was the [brand’s] best performance ever. A lot of people support Ivanka, even across both political parties.” The publicity revealed to many shoppers that Ivanka had a shoe line, and a handbag line, and they bought those items, too.

Ivanka’s perfumes have become top sellers on Amazon.com. One of them sold all of its stock. Customer reviews online show that many of the buyers were persuaded to buy by the controversy, and many of them wanted to show support for Ivanka.

Now, I suppose it’s possible that some of this is hype. Has it been independently verified? However, it’s a phenomenon that’s been seen before in boycotts.

The question of whether boycotts work, and if so under what conditions, is treated here, in an article that analyzes some of the most successful (supposedly) boycotts in US and even world history. The issues involved were a lot different than in the boycott of Ivanka Trump’s clothing line, but even then it’s not easy to know whether the boycotts actually were “successful” or not:

The [Montgomery 1955] bus and [1960s] grape boycotts were not representative because why? For starters, these were boycotts that fed into an established movement, with many existing layers of activism and support. And, maybe most important, these were boycotts with good historical timing. Change was happening, and the boycotts reflected the appetite for that change. So did the boycotts cause the change? As Daniel Diermeier says:

DIERMEIER: It’s difficult to disentangle that…

…So what was the net effect of the [2012] Chick-fil-A boycott ”” at least the financial net effect? Did boycott plus buycott equal less than or more than zero, as measured by whatever rough measures you want to use ”“ quarterly revenues, share price, etc.?

DIERMEIER: I don’t know of any kind of serious empirical work that looked at that.

…Now, remember, the Chick-fil-A boycott was a bit of a special case. But let’s ask another basic question: how well does this kind of boycott usually work?

IVO WELCH: Boycotts almost surely will never work…

Not only did the [1970s-1980s] South Africa divestment movement not seem to have played much of a role in ending apartheid, Welch says it didn’t even really hurt South African companies.

WELCH: So if you think about somebody who holds stock of a South African company, if they decide to sell their shares, it will take about a microsecond before there’s another buyer to be found in the public markets. So it’s very, very easy ”” the demand, supply of shares in the stock market is extremely elastic. And your decision to boycott ”” that is, to divest yourself of the shares ”” isn’t going to make a difference. Now, if you could make it so that everybody in the world who wanted to hold South African stocks wouldn’t have bought any shares from South Africa anymore, it would have made a difference. However, that wasn’t the case. In reality, in real life, there were just too many people that were willing to hold the shares, and they immediately snapped up all the shares that people were willing to sell.

So despite a coordinated global effort by activists and institutions, Welch and his colleagues found that South African firms were essentially unharmed by the boycott.

It’s a long article (it’s actually a transcript of a radio program) and I haven’t yet read the whole thing. But what I have read is fascinating, and contains quite a few surprises.

The news cycle: FISAgate so far

The New Neo Posted on by

By Andrew C. McCarthy:

So, we will never have resolution on whether there should have been an investigation. And in any event, the suspicion that was under investigation ”” namely, the “Russia election-hacking” plot, in which Trump allegedly conspired ”” was not reality…

In effect, it is entirely possible to conduct a “counterintelligence” investigation that quite intentionally accesses intercepted communications of an American without obtaining a FISA warrant that singles out that American for wiretapping. Consequently, the question is not merely whether Trump or his associates (or both) were the targets of FISA applications or warrants. It is whether the intelligence agencies took active steps to access and analyze their intercepted communications ”” whether through targeted FISA warrants, non-particularized FISA authorizations, or other foreign-intelligence-gathering streams.

Assuming that there are such intercepted conversations, as the New York Times has reported, the question is whether people in the Trump camp just happened to be incidentally monitored because they were dealing with some Russians of interest to the intelligence community, or whether they were targeted to have their communications monitored or at least analyzed after the fact.

It is a fascinating question. And as with the other fascinating questions, we will probably never get a definitive answer. What you’ll get is this: The Russians tried to meddle in the election, but the Russians did not “hack the election” or affect its outcome. As for the rest of it, nothing to see here, move along.

Please read the whole thing.

It’s that final sentence of McCarthy’s that has me nodding. I’ve noticed—how can a person fail to notice?—that with Trump, both before his election and after, there have been a succession of Big Stories that break like waves upon a beach. Did you ever watch waves? They come in a certain rhythm, one after the other. And on any given day at a certain time of day, they all have a similar magnitude. Oh, there’s a bit of variation—one wave might be somewhat higher or lower than another wave. But they generally resemble each other, and all tend to break harmlessly on the shore.

It’s a rare rare day that brings a tsunami. Fortunately for shore-dwellers.

The Trump-accusation waves have been somewhat like that: a day at the beach. We see them crest, and then the wave breaks, and then the next one forms.

Each wave is touted by the MSM as being The Wave of the Century. This is indicated in part by the suffix “-Gate” that’s often hopefully added. I say “hopefully,” because, although Watergate took a while to fully reveal itself, it ended up washing away the presidency of a Republican man the MSM hated.

It was their moment of greatest glory, when reporters were heroes and had movies made about them with the main characters played by the likes of Redford and Hoffman. The MSM is eager for a repeat, with themselves in the roles and the hated Trump the new target. But the public has outrage fatigue, there are too many other competing sources of news and opinion, and the MSM’s reputation has suffered so much in the ensuing years that the public no longer trusts them, either.

Erythromelalgia: hotfoot [Part II]

The New Neo Posted on by

[If you haven’t read Part I, you probably should take a look.]

When I suddenly began to exhibit symptoms of erythromelalgia I was in my early forties, and it was just one of many mysterious and distressing things that were happening nearly simultaneously to me. I had hurt my back badly, with radiating sciatic pain into both legs. I had nerve injuries in both arms from the swimming that was supposed to help my back but didn’t. And then on top of that the puzzling hot and bright-red feet.

The doctors (and there were a series of them—orthopedists and neurosurgeons and neurologists in particular) suspected I might have a systemic disease because I had so many symmetrical symptoms in so many places, and so on top of everything else I was terrified that was the case when they started testing me for MS and a host of more obscure illnesses.

Fortunately, I didn’t have any disease, although it took several months of angst (my angst, that is) for them to come to that conclusion. The doctors concluded that I’d had a series of near-simultaneous injuries, several of which were expressed in burning pain, and one of which (the hot feet) was especially mysterious and rare.

This occurred in the early 1990s, before the internet was all that active. So I felt completely alone in this because I had no way to find other people with the problem, if such people existed. I didn’t even have a name for it. In addition, when I went for a consult with a big big back specialist on the west coast, he said he’d had patients with foot pain from their backs (of course), he’d never seen anyone with hot and burning feet. Visibly hot feet, I might add.

This further frightened me. If one of the biggest back specialists in the world had never seen it, what on earth was going on with me and why?

In those days there were also fewer medications for nerve pain, and since no one was offering me any relief, I located a behavioral psychologist specializing in chronic pain. This was also a relatively new field at the time. He had me listening to visualization tapes, including one that quickly became my favorite. I was supposed to relax different parts of my body till I was very mellow (not easy when you’re in that sort of pain) and then imagine a beautiful beach—waves, sand, warm weather, the works.

And then I was to visualize walking towards the ocean and stepping into the water—the cold, lovely water. I was supposed to imagine how this would feel. It was actually the middle of a New England winter, and this summertime fantasy was a pleasant thing to think about on several levels. But it was especially wonderful to think of those gentle waves lapping at my feet and cooling them off.

I listened to that tape every day for many months. And then the real summer arrived, and some friends from the west coast came to visit. One day while they were in town we decided to go to the beach. This would mark the first time I’d actually been to the ocean in the physical sense since I’d hurt myself, and I was excited at the thought. I was especially energized by the idea of really honestly and truly putting my feet into the cold water (the ocean is really cold in New England).

And so I did. The sand was not too hot, and the walk was not too long. But still, by the time I got to the water, I knew something was very very wrong. The abrasive sand had stirred up my nerve-damaged feet, and the water—although certainly very cold—had an almost knife-like quality that added to the burning pain rather than subtracting from it.

I stood there for a couple of minutes, waiting for the bad feelings to subside. They didn’t. And so I walked back to where we’d set up our chairs and towels, and I waited some more.

It felt like someone had turned up the dial on my feet and forgotten to turn it down. It was about two months before my feet went back to feeling the way they had before that day at the beach, which was hardly “normal” but at least was better than this.

Some time during those two months I took that beach visualization tape and threw it across the room. And then I put it in a drawer and never listened to it again. In fact, after that incident I had trouble doing any relaxation or visualization at all, although I tried it several times over the years. I felt betrayed, and even though I knew this was unreasonable, I couldn’t shake the feeling.

I knew that visualization is fantasy, and walking on the sand and actually putting your feet in the water is reality. The first was a mental exercise; the second a physical one. But I was angry. I was depressed. And I was frightened.

[To be continued in the grand finale, Part III.]