The Oscars: gaseous glamour and gigantic gaffes

The New Neo Posted on by

Blame it on Bonnie and Clyde (aka Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty) in their dotage.

Blame it on the Russians, who must have hacked the thing.

Because the f-up at the end of the Oscars—the climax, as it were—was monumental.

But first, the good stuff. Surprisingly, I liked most of the dresses, especially Halle Berry’s, although I think she should go back to her usual short hair because she’s one of the few people in the world who look really really great in that style:

You can find a lot of the other fashions here.

Now for the rest. Jimmy Kimmel was remarkably unfunny, and almost every “joke” he made was political. But he was hardly alone. I expected a lot of liberal self-congratulatory politics from the presenters and from the award recipients. But apparently I underestimated the capacity of Hollywood celebrities to keep up an incessant, repetitive drumbeat of praise for themselves and their devotion to diversity, love of immigration, reverence for freedom, and all those things they have been told that Trump and the right are dead set against. And all of this was delivered as though they were courageously standing up to tanks in Tianamen Square.

Which brings me to the finale of the evening. The monumental error occurred during the announcement of the Best Picture award, and rather than describe it I’ll show it to you. When you watch the video, it helps to know that just a moment earlier, Emma Stone had won Best Actress for her performance in “La La Land,” and also that “for each category, there are two cards waiting in the wings, one on each side”:

In addition to everything else, the award was a Trumpian-magnitude upset, because “La La Land” was considered a shoe-in. As Vox had predicted earlier in the day:

Best Picture

This race isn’t particularly close. La La Land will win, and if the trophy goes to any other film, it will be the biggest Oscar upset ever.

It was YUGE.

At the movies: yearning for romance

The New Neo Posted on by

The Oscars are being held tomorrow. I can understand why a lot of people might not want to watch them: the self-satisfied political posturing, the paucity of good movies, the windy acceptance speeches, and the sleaziness of what passes for glamour these days.

But I plan to watch, although probably not every single moment. I always enjoy the fashions, good or bad. And I’m curious to see if a movie I’ve actually seen—“La La Land”—will set some sort of record for Oscars.

A lot of people have questioned why this movie, which is pretty good but not necessarily one of the all-time greats, has been nominated for so very many awards. Well, one reason might be the lack of quality competition. Another might be that it celebrates the city of Los Angeles and aspiring to be an actor, which after all is the home of most of the people doing the voting and the profession of many of them.

Oh, it has other things to recommend it, too. A hummable score, an opening number that knocks your socks off, popular and attractive leads, bright colors. But I think key to the whole thing is romance. I think that I can say, without spoiling the movie for anyone who hasn’t yet seen it, that one of the most remarkable things about the film is the big big deal it makes of the first hand-holding between the man and woman who are its main protagonists. Hand-holding, a monumental activity, a watershed moment? Yes.

Same for their first kiss. And though we can assume that sex definitely enters into the picture for this couple, it doesn’t really enter into the picture known as “La La Land.” Dancing is the stand-in for it.

I maintain that people are thirsty for that sort of approach, even young people. They’ve been brought up on so much overt and even casual sex in the movies (and in music, and online, and in life) that it no longer has any novelty to watch it being enacted on the big screen.

Ignoring the obvious: there’s been at least one completed act of terrorism in the US by someone born in Somalia

The New Neo Posted on by

The seven countries in Trump’s immigration EO have yielded not only many arrests for terrorism (unbeknownst to the court, apparently), but one completed of act of terrorism that was extremely high profile. It’s puzzling that this one has been so ignored, because it’s so glaringly obvious.

I’m talking about the Ohio State attack from just a few short months ago:

A Somali-born student at Ohio State University injured 11 people, one of them critically, on Monday when he attacked a crowd of pedestrians on campus in an incident one lawmaker said “bears all the hallmarks of a terror attack.”

Authorities said Abdul Razak Ali Artan, 18, plowed a small gray Honda into the crowd outside Watts Hall, an engineering classroom building, just before 10 a.m. ET. Artan then got out of the vehicle and attacked people with a butcher knife before he was shot and killed by a campus police officer.

…Two law enforcement sources told Fox News that Artan came into the United States as a Somali refugee, and was granted status as a legal permanent resident.

Does it not count because Artan didn’t actually murder anyone (although not for lack of trying, with two weapons, car and butcher knife)?

Does it not count because he was never charged with a crime, having been killed at the scene?

Or does it not count because Artan apparently had been naturalized as a citizen in 2014? Perhaps once a person comes here as a refugee from one of the seven countries and later becomes a citizen, and then kills people in an act of terrorism, he no longer counts as someone from that country?

It’s an absurdity to have such distinctions/limitations, of course, but it helps with the denial.

Whether there have been a large number of attacks (or thwarted attacks) by people from the seven countries countries is a far more valid subject for debate, of course. But to say there have been none is a blatant falsehood. Another proper subject for debate is what the threshold for tolerance of such attacks should be, past or future (some say zero), before a ban is justified. But no one should be able to get away with saying say that there haven’t been any attacks or aborted terrorist attacks by perpetrators from the seven countries.

Trump hasn’t yet issued a revised immigration EO on the subject. Will he, or will the issue just fade away, to be supplanted by others, or dealt with in some different manner? I imagine that this is one of the things Jeff Sessions has been busy working on.

How we got here: Ben Rhodes on callow youth

The New Neo Posted on by

The other day I was reminded by commenter “AesopFan” of this article from last spring:

“[Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor Ben] Rhodes, 38, said in the article that it was easy to shape a favorable impression of the proposed (Iran) agreement because of the inexperience of many of those covering the issue.

“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.” ”

Old man Rhodes—38 years old when that quote was uttered—knows whereof he speaks. Prior to becoming a mover and shaker in foreign affairs, this was his own resume: born in 1977, majored in English and political science at Rice and graduated in 2000, got an MFA in creative writing at NYU in 2002.

Sort of like the resumes of those kid reporters he’s talking about. He “literally [sic] knew nothing.”

Then in 2002 Rhodes got his big break, one I confess I don’t fully understand even though I’ve read quite a bit about him over the years (his brother was in the news business and later become the head of CBS News, but didn’t hold that position at the time). This is what happened:

In 2002, James Gibney, editor of Foreign Policy, introduced Rhodes to Lee Hamilton, former member of the House of Representatives and director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, who was looking for a speechwriter. Rhodes then spent five years as an assistant to Hamilton, helping to draft the Iraq Study Group Report and the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission.

So, was the 25-year old recent creative writing Master’s recipient Ben Rhodes hired by the Democrat Hamilton (who’d been a member of Congress for about three decades, and had a great deal of experience) on the strength of his writing and editing skills? Even in that capacity he was pretty green. At any rate, the Iraq Study Report that Rhodes helped to author was roundly criticized by just about everyone on the right, for what that’s worth.

What did Rhodes the creative writer, who at that point had never been to the Middle East or studied it as far as I know, a young man of 25 when he began that particular gig, actually contribute to the report? I don’t know, but he made it clear that he didn’t think much of the people he was working with: “When [Rhodes] was a staff writer on the congressionally mandated Iraq Study Group in 2007, Samuels reports, Rhodes concluded most foreign policy decision makers were ‘morons.'”

At that point, what popped into my head was “Holden Caulfield.” And sure enough, the author of that Bloomberg piece (Eli Lake) had much the same thought:

Let’s start with our Holden Caufield character. When Rhodes decided to give up fiction writing and take up foreign policy, he landed his first job at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

Lake doesn’t seem to know much more about what Rhodes actually did there (other than sneer at the moronic old fogies who were in charge) than I do. No wonder Rhodes had a lot in common with Barack Obama, who had much the same high opinion of himself, and for whom experience had little valence.

Here’s more on Rhodes and the Iraq Study Group (although we still don’t know what “Rhodes wrote” means in this context; does it refer to contributing ideas and content, or just to the putting-together of the words in a readable manner?):

When Hamilton was named co-chair of the Iraq Study Group in 2006, Rhodes helped him write that panel’s landmark report as well. Most notably, Rhodes wrote a majority of the chapter advocating direct U.S. diplomatic engagement with Iran and Syria, a recommendation that would have considerable influence on President Barack Obama beginning in 2009. Indeed, Obama ultimately adopted most of the report’s 79 suggestions. Critics have noted that the report’s “expert list” was heavily weighted with pro-Arab apologists who directed a number of rebukes pointedly at Israel. According to the American Thinker, “Some of the experts who were interviewed were appalled by the final written report because they felt it did not reflect facts, their testimony, or reality.”

Then in 2007 at age 30 Rhodes became Obama’s speechwriter and trusted policy advisor. Shortly afterwards, he wrote (among other things) Obama’s famous Cairo speech.

The depth of the irony of this man criticizing those reporters in that interview is immense.

In that same interview [emphasis mine]:

A May 2016 New York Times profile reported that Rhodes was, “according to the consensus of the two dozen current and former White House insiders…the single most influential voice shaping American foreign policy aside from [President Obama] himself; that according to Obama’s chief of staff Denis McDonough, the president and Rhodes communicated ‘regularly, several times a day’; and that ‘part of what accounts for Rhodes’s influence is his mind meld with the president.'”…

Like Obama, Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics but is often quite personal. He is adept at constructing overarching plotlines with heroes and villains, their conflicts and motivations supported by flurries of carefully chosen adjectives, quotations and leaks from named and unnamed senior officials. He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press. His ability to navigate and shape this new environment makes him a more effective and powerful extension of the president’s will than any number of policy advisers or diplomats or spies. His lack of conventional real-world experience of the kind that normally precedes responsibility for the fate of nations ”” like military or diplomatic service, or even a master’s degree in international relations, rather than creative writing ”” is still startling.”

Yes, it is “still startling.” That’s why I’m still writing about it, in addition to the fact that our present world has been shaped by it, particularly our relations with Iran. But it makes perfect sense that Rhodes was chosen by Obama for such an influential position (and that for the most part, the MSM didn’t challenge that choice). Obama is and was all about the narrative, the smooth appearance, the words. Rhodes is and was all about the same thing; perhaps even more so.

No wonder they are so often described as having had a “mind-meld.” No wonder they led us into such a mess. And no wonder so many people were hypnotized by them.

That WaPo article I linked to at the outset goes on to detail how Rhodes’ fingerprints were on almost every bad decision that Obama made (well worth reading the whole thing)—including the Benghazi coverup. But let’s not blame Rhodes overly; Obama did what Rhodes said not because he liked to listen to someone else’s advice, but because Rhodes’ opinion was the same as Obama’s opinion (mind-meld). It was a reassuring Obama-echo that spoke in another’s voice.

One of Rhodes’ last official acts was to attend the funeral of Castro as Obama’s representative. How very fitting.

The mystery is not so much how Rhodes got to be Obama’s right-hand man: neither man had any respect for experience, both are interested in convincing through words, both have the foreign policy attitude of sophomores in college, and both think they are the smartest people in the room. The puzzle to me with Rhodes remains those first big jobs, the 9/11 report and then the Iraq Study Group authorship.

I’ll let that mystery rest for now and ask what is our boy wonder doing these days? After all, he’s not yet 40, and has all that great experience behind him. Well, for one thing, Rhodes is currently under Congressional investigation:

Ben Rhodes…is under scrutiny in the wake of disclosures he was declined interim clearance status by the FBI in 2008, when the administration was moving into the White House…

Lawmakers are now concerned that Rhodes’ access to the top levels of government””including its diplomacy with Iran””is inappropriate due to the FBI’s concerns about his past…

The FBI was to complete a full review into Rhodes after the transition. It remains unclear what they concluded…

Rhodes was granted full security clearance before Obama’s 2008 inauguration, [a] source disclosed…

“For the FBI to evidently find something in Mr. Rhodes’ background that led it to potentially deny him a security clearance only to have Mr. Rhodes work at the highest levels of the Obama administration shakes the entire clearance process to the core,” the lawmakers wrote. “Mr. Rhodes has working in the White House for the past seven years and is the architect of the Iran deal ”˜echo chamber,’ as he recently described himself.”…

The lawmakers also are seeking to learn if the Obama administration applied political pressure to the FBI in order to obtain a security clearance for Rhodes.

With Rhodes, you never quite know whether what he’s saying is just shooting the breeze (as Holden Caulfield might say), or if he’s being sincere. But I think I’ve found a recent quote of Rhodes’ (from an interview he gave during the transition to the Trump administration) in which Rhodes tells why Obama hired him and put him in a position of such power, at least how Rhodes saw it. To me, this has the ring of truth:

Third, I guess I’m just young and a different profile and I know that that upsets people, but I always felt that I represented the people who elected President Obama, who were young people and they should have a voice and their worldview is our worldview. They think it’s stupid not to engage people. They don’t know why we wouldn’t make a deal with Iran.

I read that quote after I had already written that Rhodes and Obama share “the foreign policy attitudes of sophomores in college.” But that’s basically what Rhodes is saying here. Now, there’s nothing wrong with sophomores in college. But they’re still in college for a reason, not at the helm of the ship of state.

In that same interview, Rhodes answers another question of mine—what he plans to do now. The mind-meld continues:

I’ll write some form of a memoir, one that will also be an argument on behalf of what we were doing. And I’m going to be a senior adviser to the president on his international work, including at his foundation.

Ben—go forth, be happy, write your memoir, leave us alone. Please.

[NOTE: Those who criticize Donald Trump for lack of experience probably didn’t have any problem with Rhodes at the time. I must say in Trump’s favor that, despite Trump’s inexperience, he certainly hasn’t chosen people with a similar lack of experience in foreign affairs.]

Got an idea for the design of the border wall?

The New Neo Posted on by

If you do, you can enter the competition, which begins soon:

The Dept. of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) intends on issuing a solicitation in electronic format on or about March 6, 2017 for the design and build of several prototype wall structures in the vicinity of the United States border with Mexico. The procurement will be conducted in two phases, the first requiring vendors to submit a concept paper of their prototype(s) by March 10, 2017, which will result in the evaluation and down select of offerors by March 20, 2017. The second phase will require the down select of phase 1 offerors to submit proposals in response to the full RFP by March 24, 2017, which will include price. Multiple awards are contemplated by mid-April for this effort. An option for additional miles may be included in each contract award.

It should be interesting to see what emerges.

But that’s not the first “design a wall” competition that’s been held, although I do believe it’s the first sponsored by the government. However, an alternative wall contest was sponsored by these folks:

… a group of architects, designers and artists to initiate thought-provoking and meaningful competitions that are of an interdisciplinary nature…

The announcement of the Competition sparked considerable controversy. Many assumed it endorsed then presidential candidate Donald Trump’s call to build a border wall to keep out illegal immigrants. Its purpose, however, was to elicit serious discussion about the very idea of a border wall. One of the questions proposed by the challenge: “Is the idea patently ridiculous on a purely practical and moral basis?” Entrants were invited to contemplate the deeper issues of a border wall and, indeed, even propose alternatives.

The winners got cash prizes. A sampler of the proposals:

1st Prize (Tie)””Anticipating the eventual exhaustion of the essential resource of water along the U.S.-Mexico border, an “irrigation wall” would draw water from the Gulf of Mexico, the Sea of Cortez and the Pacific Ocean, desalinate it and flow it into a channel running the length of border. Possible benefits could include re-vegetation of the desert, creation of agricultural operations on either side of the channel and new bilateral treaty governing the distribution and use of the water between the two countries.

1st Prize (Tie)””Rejecting the current wall as “a fetishized object,” Inflatoborder is a system of flexible bubbles that perform a variety of functions meant to bring communities on either side of the existing wall together. Air pressure is adjusted according to need””creating a canopy, for instance, that shelters roadside markets where it runs through agricultural lands, or creating “play area” enclosures for families and children in densely populated urban centers straddling the border.

2nd Prize””Also rejecting the idea of a fixed wall that divides nations and people, this plan proposes a bi-national park running the length of the border that is “a symbol against difference” where people from both sides can camp, hike and engage in other outdoor activities.

3rd Prize””This proposal, called “Across,” was inspired by Paul Rudolph’s Manhattan Expressway and builds “on architecture’s more social and humanistic intentions” by creating “a flexible membrane which has the capacity to take on programs that are both needed and shared by the inhabitants on either side of the border.”

I am pretty certain that the designers were well aware that these projects won’t come to fruition. They are exercises in imagination (“imagination” in the John Lennon “Imagine” sense). Unrealistic, of course.

Artists might say that our dreams help to create reality. I say that there’s very much of a limit as to how far that can go in the real world, before it meets up with—a wall. To pretend that the situation doesn’t exist, and that problems can be wished away by “symbols against difference” is something pretty rampant on the left. I’m not sure whether the entrants in that contest really believed this, or whether it’s just an exercise in showing what wonderful people they are in addition to what wonderful designers.

The last design competition I remember paying much attention to was the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in DC. The design that was chosen—initially controversial—really did end up having a healing, “bringing together” effect. But the architecture of memorials is a very different proposition, utterly symbolic in nature. A border wall is not a memorial. It is functional, although the functional can be designed with esthetics and psychology in mind, too. But my guess is that whatever ends up being approved will be primarily practical—although remember that Trump himself said that the wall will be “beautiful.”

We’ll see.

Marijuana warnings, detective novels, and song

The New Neo Posted on by

Today I happened across this article featuring an interview with Harvard psychiatry professor Staci Gruber, who issues some warnings about the legalization of marijuana:

There is an awful lot that we don’t know. What we do know primarily comes from studies of chronic, recreational marijuana users. There is still a lot left to learn about the effects of less frequent, casual use. Also, there are a number of differences between recreational and medical marijuana use. Recreational and medical users very often differ quite strikingly with regard to what they use, how they use, etc. Some of the products may overlap but the indications for use and what they expect to get out of using marijuana are usually very, very different…

When we think about legalization we always like to have science inform policy. In this particular case, it seems to me that policy has outpaced science. These products are widely available but to date, we have no studies on the direct impact of concentrates versus flower products on our recreational or medical users ”” which is important, especially given concerns for our youngest users.

That seems both reasonable and of concern. Gruber has also been instrumental in doing some of the previous research that indicates regular marijuana use by teens can be damaging in the cognitive sense:

“Our data suggest that the earlier you begin smoking, the more marijuana you smoke and the more frequently you smoke,” she said. “That’s an important finding.”

Gruber said the findings are particularly critical today when legalization of marijuana is being considered in a number of states.

“We have to be clear about getting the message out that marijuana isn’t really a benign substance,” she said. “It has a direct effect on executive function. The earlier you begin using it, and the more you use of it, the more significant that effect.”

The study included 33 chronic marijuana smokers and 26 control subjects who did not smoke marijuana. They were given a battery of neurocognitive tests assessing executive function, including the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, which involves sorting different cards based on a set of rules given. During the test, the rules are changed without warning and subjects must adjust their responses to the new rules.

The findings showed habitual marijuana users made repeated errors even when told that they were wrong. Users also had more trouble maintaining a set of rules, suggesting an inability to maintain focus. Early-onset users and those who used the most marijuana had the most trouble with the test, making more than twice as many errors and fewer correct responses than later-onset smokers.

Of course, there might have been something different about that early-user population even before they began their drug use. But still, very worrisome.

I also noticed the name “Gruber,” which of course made me think of Jonathan Gruber, ye olde architect of Obamacare, and I wondered whether he might be a husband or a brother of Staci’s. I have no idea about the “brother” part (can’t find a thing about it). But he’s certainly not her husband. And therein lies another tale, one totally unrelated but quite fascinating in its own right.

Staci Gruber is actually the spouse of crime/thriller novelist Patricia Cornwell, who is mega successful in her field and a byzantine story herself:

Patricia Cornwell has sold over 100 million books, owns an upscale apartment in Boston, a private helicopter, and has a personal fortune somewhere north of $75 million. So, naturally, she is telling me about her money worries.

”˜There will always be a financial incentive to write because, honestly, the way I grew up, a part of me is always afraid I’m going to wake up poor,’ says the author, who won $50 million in damages last year after suing her former finance company for mismanagement.

I won’t even bother to summarize her life story, but let’s just say it features many ups and downs, including political change (in her case, right to somewhat left, with pockets of right remaining).

You never know where the internet and Google will lead you. One other thing I discovered is that Staci Gruber got a BS in psychology in 1991 from Tufts, which is not the least bit surprising considering her later career trajectory. But she was awfully busy at the time, because in 1991 she also received a BMus in Jazz Studies/Vocal Performance from New England Conservatory of Music.

Trump’s presidency: two different worlds

The New Neo Posted on by

“Two Different Worlds” was a love song from the 50s about lovers from different backgrounds who were going to beat the odds and make it work. Looking at the news lately, the phrase pops into my head—but not in the optimistic way of the song.

Remember Obama’s 2004 DNC speech? Well, I don’t—remember it, that is, because I didn’t watch it back then (not particularly into watching speeches at all). But I’ve certainly read about its effect on people, and the lines that apparently resonated most were—well, I was going to quote him, but I thought it might be more instructive to see and hear him once again:

It’s painful to look back and reflect that one of those “who, even as we speak…are preparing to divide us” seems to have been the speaker himself, Barack Obama. He did a mighty fine job of it too, although he certainly wasn’t alone; he had plenty of help in that endeavor.

Which brings us to now. Every day I open my phone or my computer and check out the news and I see that division quite starkly. Memeorandum.com, which I’ve long used as one of my sources for the most talked-about topics and articles of the day, features links to pieces that are uniformly, predictably, and almost unrelievedly not just anti-Trump but profoundly so. And Memerorandum is quite typical rather than unusual in that respect. Meanwhile,, for the most part periodicals and pundits on the right soldier on in a different world, one in which Trump is making many excellent appointments, giving some good speeches, and generally going about the business of setting up his presidency while the stock market climbs (for now, anyway).

Two different worlds, we live in two different worlds. And never the twain shall meet—at least, hardly ever.

I did have one interesting experience the other day, though, talking to a liberal friend of mine who is not especially political or especially extreme in her politics. She most definitely doesn’t like Trump, but not in any rabid or irrational way. She mentioned that she had watched part of Trump’s recent press conference, the one where he’d been giving the press what-for, and she’d noticed in particular three things. The first was that some of what he said made sense. The second was that he predicted the press reaction when he said, “Tomorrow, [the press] will say, ‘Donald Trump rants and raves at the press.’ I’m not ranting and raving. I’m just telling you.” She agreed that she hadn’t seen him “ranting and raving” during that press conference, and she also noted with some surprise that Trump had predicted correctly, because that was exactly and precisely the spin the press gave his performance.

How common is that sort of reaction in a liberal watcher? I doubt very; but I report at least one, anyway. What difference will it make? I don’t know; perhaps little or none. But the farther the press goes with the extremity of its negative spin, the more some people who are paying attention are bound to notice that something is amiss.

Politico trolls the right on Obamacare

The New Neo Posted on by

This report in Politico plays on the right’s fears that the GOP Congress will never do much about Obamacare:

Former House Speaker John Boehner predicted on Thursday that a full repeal and replace of Obamacare is “not going to happen.”

Boehner, who resigned in 2015 amid unrest among conservatives, said at an Orlando health care conference that the idea that a repeal-and-replace plan would blitz through Congress is just “happy talk.”

Instead, he said changes to former President Barack Obama’s signature legislative achievement would likely be relatively modest.

“[Congressional Republicans are] going to fix Obamacare ”“ I shouldn’t call it repeal-and-replace, because it’s not going to happen,” he said.

Boehner’s comments come as Republican lawmakers across the country are facing angry constituents at town halls worried that Obamacare will be yanked away without a suitable replacement.

I have a few things to point out. The first is that we don’t have a transcript of Boehner’s remarks, and I distrust articles like that which use a few quotes to characterize what a person said.

The second is that, when last I checked, Boehner was not in charge of this, so although he’s entitled to his opinion it’s just his opinion.

The third is that Politico is not the right’s friend, and the author is probably well aware of the cynicism and anger on the right towards the GOP, and is attempting (successfully, I think) to exploit that distrust to further split and dishearten the right.

The fourth is that we are mostly talking about semantics here, at least so far. I have never had much doubt that some of the elements of Obamacare would remain in place even if it’s repealed and replaced, although others will (hopefully) be changed. The exact mechanism by which that is accomplished—a full repeal of the act and passage of a full replacement that retains some elements (coverage of pre-existing conditions, for example) and changes others, or a series of moves changing it piece by piece—is still undetermined. I prefer repeal/replace. But the important thing is something better, designed with more liberty to choose and less cost, and based more on market principles.

Now, I’m not saying the GOP is going to be successful. I don’t even know how hard they will try. There’s certainly reason to be skeptical. We’ll see. But I don’t credit reports like Politico’s, and I don’t like to see people on the right fall for this game when it is in the realm of propaganda (concern-trolling, to be exact) at the moment rather than facts.

The “death” of the NY Times

The New Neo Posted on by

This article by Lee Smith seems to be about two things that are loosely related. The first is the likelihood that, with the “Trump is Russia’s puppet” story, there’s no there there. But it’s the second I want to write about, the larger story of what Smith (or whoever wrote the article’s headline, “Wayne Barrett, Donald Trump, and the Death of the American Press”) refers to as the death of the American press.

It’s a long article, and I waded through it rather quickly. I must say that although that topic is one of intense interest to me, Smith’s article puzzles me. I have little doubt that Smith knows more about the inner workings of the press than I do, but what are we to make of paragraphs like this one?:

Trump adviser Steve Bannon calls the media the opposition party, but that’s misleading. Everyone knows that the press typically tilts left, and no one is surprised, for instance, that The New York Times has not endorsed a Republican candidate since 1956. But that’s not what we’re seeing now””rather, the media has become an instrument in a campaign of political warfare. What was once an American political institution and a central part of the public sphere became something more like state-owned media used to advance the ruling party’s agenda and bully the opposition into silence.

That leaves me scratching my head. Smith says that what Bannon says is “misleading.” But the rest of the paragraph seems to completely back up the stated Bannon thesis that the media is indeed the opposition party, and a rather vicious and unaplogetic one at that. So, how is Bannon misleading us?

What’s more, I have other problems with that paragraph of Smith’s. His statement “everyone knows that the press typically tilts left” is not just not literally true (of course, “everyone” doesn’t know any such thing), but I bet if I polled twenty acquaintances of mine on that subject, at least half and maybe even more of them would say that the Times is an objective purveyor of truth that doesn’t lean any particular way at all, and that it’s just that the dogged pursuit of truth and fairness happens to lead to backing the Democrat every time. After all, don’t they themselves do the same thing?

As I said, I have little doubt that Smith knows more about what the press thinks and how it works than I do. But I doubt he knows more about what the garden variety everyday liberal out there in the big wide world thinks than I do; we’re probably at least even on that. And not only does “everybody” not know what he says they know, but I would wager there’s a substantial number of people who would actively disagree with him.

Which brings us to something else about that paragraph. In that last sentence I quoted, Smith harks back to an earlier time when the media was “an American political institution and a central part of the public sphere.” Let’s take the example of the NY Times. I was raised thinking exactly what Smith says; I respected the Times greatly. But my later political transformation was fueled in part by the realization that, even back when I saw it that way, the Times had often been unworthy of that sort of respect. Perhaps they were more subtle in their cheerleading and bias, but that bias may have been all the more insidious for that. And they were already getting their facts wrong; we just had fewer ways to discover that.

I’ve written some of the details in my “a mind is a difficult thing to change” story, but right now I’ll just refer to some of them (in particular, MSM coverage of the Tet offensive). Smith rightly says that, with the advent of the internet and the plummeting of the ad revenue that used to be a major part of the financial underpinnings of the newspaper business, the MSM had to cut back drastically:

As the old Chinese saying has it, the first generation builds the business, the second generation expands it, and the third spends it all on Italian shoes, houses in the Hamptons, and divorces. For the most part, the people inheriting these media properties didn’t know what they were doing. It took The New York Times more than a decade to settle on billing consumers for its product””after giving it away, charging for it, giving it away again, then billing for “premium content,” etc. By then, it was too late. Entire papers went under, and even at places that survived, the costliest enterprises, like foreign bureaus and investigative teams, were cut. An entire generation’s worth of expertise, experience, and journalistic ethics evaporated into thin air.

Let’s take that last sentence first. I have two problems with it. The first is that, even in the golden olden days when those foreign bureaus and investigative teams were in place (say, during the Vietnam War), the papers were often getting the first draft of history wrong. An excellent example was the Tet Offensive (take a look at this book or this article summarizing the book), which the press got completely wrong, and that fake story greatly influenced subsequent events. Another turning point that occurred during the Vietnam years was the mixing of opinion journalism with straight reporting, a move I discussed in this two-part series on the role of Walter Cronkite.

I have some other quarrels with that paragraph of Smith’s. He seems to be saying that newspapers reacted to the challenge of the free content of the internet by giving their own content away too, but had they realized from the start that the way to survive was to charge for content, then perhaps they would have been financially okay. But earlier, he had emphasized the importance of classified ads in the earnings of newspapers. The internet did challenge newspapers by providing free content, but the importance of the classifieds was something the internet also helped to destroy, and how was charging for content supposed to get around that?

What’s more (to the best of my recollection, anyway), those “foreign bureaus and investigative teams” were actually greatly reduced by the time I got on the scene as a blogger twelve years ago. It seems to me that the Times’ back-and-forth experiments with charging for content and then not charging for it were conducted after they’d already cut way back and hired a bunch of youngsters.

I think that the MSM has indeed died—at least in my eyes, and the eyes of most people on the right. But I know a lot of people (liberals rather than leftists) who still read the Times every day and trust that they are getting the truth. I also think the Times’ demise, or illness, or whatever you want to call it, was very long in coming, and that its state was unnoticed by many people prior to the internet. The internet not only challenged the Times and its fellows by offering an alternative way to advertise and to obtain content on the right, but in addition it provided easy access to things such as full transcripts of speeches to which the Times might have been referring and quoting in a misleading and/or truncated way.

Not everyone availed themselves of these sources. But for those who did, their respect for what we now call the MSM plummeted.

Success and single-minded obsession

The New Neo Posted on by

Obsession may be a necessary but not sufficient requirement for success in the arts (and perhaps even elsewhere).

I know quite a few people who later became famous—some a little famous, some more famous. Having known these people in childhood and/or adolescence, I’ve noticed that they all had something in common: obsessive focus on one exclusive interest, and usually that focus began in childhood.

Why am I writing about this now? After seeing the film “La La Land” the other day, I was reading about its writer/director, who was only 30-31 when he made the movie. His extremely youthful age got me to wondering how on earth he could have gotten so far so fast in the movie-making biz. I took in a bunch of articles about him (none of which will be linked here, because I was reading them for fun and didn’t take any notes), all of which indicated that Damien Chazelle (that’s his name) has known since earliest childhood that he wanted to make films.

That’s true despite the fact that Chazelle is smart enough to get into Harvard (his alma mater), and so he must have had a lot of choices. But as he describes it, he knew—practically as a toddler, when he was watching old Disney stuff like “Cinderalla,” the sort of thing just about every kid views—that what he wanted to do with his life was to make films.

That is a highly unusual choice at that age. A lot of teenagers and college students decide they want to make films, but I don’t know of many 5-year-olds see Bambi and think “I want to create something like that.” However, Chazelle was a student of film and film technique from the start, so in a way you could say that by the age of 30 he’d been apprenticing for about 25 years.

In addition, Chazelle met another similarly focused (from early early childhood, that is) young man while at Harvard, composer Justin Hurwitz. And away they went, thinking about the films they’d be creating together, which is exactly what came to pass. I remember reading in some interview or other that Hurwitz was so focused—as a six-year-old—on composing that he’d be up every night for hours doing it, and that his parents had to impose limits on his composing in order for him to get enough sleep even as a young child.

So it’s no accident that the films of Chazelle and Hurwitz (the other film they are known for is “Whiplash”) are about this very thing: focus on a goal in the arts, and the perils and costs of that focus. Although the two have been wildly successful, of course the vast majority of such dreamers are not successful. The musical “A Chorus Line” got that just about right.

Here are two brave teenagers

The New Neo Posted on by

Two promising chess-playing siblings [from Iran] have been banned from [national chess] tournaments…after the sister failed to wear a hijab and her brother played an Israeli.

Dorsa and Borna Derakhshani, two of the country’s leading youth chess players, were told they can no longer be part of the national team.

Dorsa, an 18-year-old student in Spain, was banned after she did not wear a head covering during the Tradewise Gibraltar Chess Festival earlier this month.

Her 15-year-old brother, Borna, who still lives in Iran, was told he couldn’t compete after playing a match against Israeli chess player Alexander Husman during the same tournament.

As I said, brave. Here is Dorsa:

The following is apropos of nothing, but she somehow reminds me of pre-Raphaelite paintings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti such as this one:

Milo Yiannopoulos and the age of consent

The New Neo Posted on by

Milo Yiannopoulos has been uniformly excoriated for some remarks he made about sex between older men and teenage boys, in which he indicated that in some cases consent is possible. He’s lost a book deal, a speaking gig at GPAC, and has resigned from Breitbart as a result.

You can find a transcript of his remarks here. Judge for yourself what he said and what he meant, keeping in mind that Yiannopoulos is gay, and that he also claims (and I have no reason to doubt him on this) to have been sexually molested by an older man or men when he was a young teen.

Some have interpreted his remarks as actually advocating cross-generational sex. Such a thing is hardly unheard of (see NAMBLA). But I would instead characterize Yiannapoulos’ remarks as excusing or condoning cross-generational sex under certain circumstances rather than actively advocating it.

Yiannopoulos has claimed that he deplores pedophilia, but that term is defined as the abuse of (and sexual attraction to) children who are not sexually mature, and Yiannopoulos seems to exclude teens (or at least some teens) from that category. In this he shows a failure to appreciate the reason that the law against child abuse includes teens as victims in the crime of sexual abuse, and why physical sexual maturity has little to do with the law of child abuse.

There are several categories of sexual crimes having to do with consent. Rape is probably the first one that comes to mind. Child sexual abuse is certainly another, but it’s for a different reasons than with the rape of an adult: a child by definition cannot give consent. Even a sexually mature teenager cannot give consent to sex, although he/she can say “yes,” and even want sex physically. For teens—especially teenage boys, as most teenage boys can attest—if you stimulate the body, the body can certainly want something, and quite insistently at that. But children, including teens, are at the mercy of powerful adults—and by “powerful” I also mean psychologically powerful—who can manipulate and use them, cajole them and convince them, and therefore exploit them for their own pleasure. And that exploitation can be present even when the child or teen is actually saying “yes.” It can even be present when the child or teen thinks he/she is giving consent.

That’s why sexual contact between two fourteen-year-olds is not defined as child abuse, but sexual contact between a 25-year-old and a 14-year-old is. The key is the power differential combined with the inability of a 14-year-old to give consent.

Yiannopoulos said:

The law is probably about right, [the age of consent is] probably roughly the right age. I think it’s probably about okay, but there are certainly people who are capable of giving consent at a younger age, I certainly consider myself to be one of them, people who are sexually active younger. I think it particularly happens in the gay world by the way. In many cases actually those relationships with older men”¦This is one reason I hate the left. This stupid one size fits all policing of culture. (People speak over each other). This sort of arbitrary and oppressive idea of consent, which totally destroys you know understanding that many of us have. The complexities and subtleties and complicated nature of many relationships. You know, people are messy and complex. In the homosexual world particularly. Some of those relationships between younger boys and older men, the sort of coming of age relationships, the relationships in which those older men help those young boys to discover who they are, and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable and sort of a rock where they can’t speak to their parents.

As an abuse survivor, Yiannopoulos thinks he can say that consent can be given in such a case, apparently because he thinks he gave it. But that shows one of the problems with sexual abuse, and it’s not just the problem of an adult exploiting a child sexually. It’s the problem of an adult messing with a child’s mind. Because the relationships Yiannopoulos describes are actually betrayals of the child/teen in the guise of “helping” the child, betrayals that may even feel good to the child/teen in certain circumstances but exploit the child/teen’s psychological, emotional, and physical vulnerability.

In other words, if an adult wants to give a child or teenager “security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable and sort of a rock where they can’t speak to their parents,” then that adult should stay away from them sexually. Be a counselor, be a buddy, be a mentor, be any sort of helper you want. But don’t think you’re helping that child by using him or her sexually. That’s one of the oldest tricks—the oldest excuses—in the book.

I have a fair streak of libertarianism in my nature, but not about this topic.

[NOTE: And I’d prefer that the comments section here not turn into some sort of gay-bashing festival. I deplore sexual abuse of children and teenagers, and there’s plenty of blame to go around about such both in the gay world and in the heterosexual world. I’ve done a lot of reading on the question of whether gay adults are more likely to be child molesters than straight adults (which is of course not the topic of this post, but my guess is that the subject will come up in the comments), and in my opinion the jury is still out on that. If you want to read about the question in depth, I suggest this article for the “yes, they are more likely” side, and this article for the “no, they’re not more likely” side.]