As if things weren’t bad enough—I’m asking you for money again

The New Neo Posted on by

[BUMPED UP—scroll down for new posts.]

passhat.jpg

I figured, why not do this before the election instead of after? My assumption is that people might be feeling even grumpier and more depressed after.

But perhaps not. All presumptions and assumptions seem to be off this year.

Anyway, this seemed as good a time as any to pass the hat, because it’s that time again.

Please click on that Paypal “donate” button (hint hint: it’s on the right sidebar, above the Amazon widget, which is also a handy and helpful gadget to use, and the holidays are coming). I will be deeply grateful to every single one of you who does decide to contribute. Every bit— large or small, lump sum or monthly increments—adds up, and helps me a great deal in continuing the blog.

I give profound thanks to all of you in advance. I will probably repeat this notice by bumping it to the top of the blog for the next week, the equivalent of jiggling that cup/hat. And it’s a lot better than those fund-raising drives they have on NPR, isn’t it? No interruption of the scheduled programming.

Hillary: it’s the chaos, stupid

The New Neo Posted on by

James Comey’s letter informing Congress of new and possibly relevant emails in the Hillary Clinton investigation was most likely at least one of the reasons the polls have tightened during the last few days.

Polls usually tighten anyway close to Election Day, but it’s hard to escape the idea that the Comey announcement has at least something to do with the development this year. There is absolutely no way to tell who will win this election, but my sense is still that—in part due to the Electoral College breakdown—Clinton remains on track to become the next president, although it is indisputable that Trump’s chances have improved significantly.

If that sounds hedge-y, so be it. I don’t know what will happen, you don’t know what will happen, even Nate Silver doesn’t know what will happen.

For a very long time, Trump supporters have been trying to convince people in the middle and on the right who are very hesitant to vote for him—or are even against voting for him—that there’s a very good reason to vote for Trump despite their huge reservations, and that reason is named “Hillary Clinton.” Their argument usually goes like this: we know what Hillary will do, and it’s bad; we may not know what Trump will do, but there’s at least some chance that it will be better. That’s one of the more convincing arguments to vote for Trump, but for many listeners it has had a fatal flaw, which is that it doesn’t take into account what I would call the chaos factor.

In general, different people have very different tolerances for unpredictability and possible chaos. Some thrive on it and others would choose predictability and stability, even of a negative sort, over what they see as the possibility of a chaotic and perhaps even worse result. During the past year I’ve talked to and/or read the opinions of a great many people who are politically in the middle or on the right who would ordinarily have voted for the Republican candidate this year (or perhaps any other year), but who’ve been having extreme difficulty wrapping their minds around voting for Trump, because they don’t accept the premises of that pro-Trump argument I just described. They are put off and even frightened by the possibility of greater chaos around the world if Trump is elected president.

You don’t have to agree with them to understand the idea. For these people, “burn it down” is not a reassuring slogan. Nor do arguments such as “well, if Trump is elected and he does something really awful, he can always be impeached and convicted” help a bit. That sounds to them like a recipe for chaos and upheaval and uncertainty, as well.

And of course, such reasoning is even greater among liberals, who very often see Trump as equivalent to a madman or a Hitler, and as a potential agent of enormous chaos and change. They were unlikely to vote for any Republican in the first place, but they might have accepted the victory of any of them with relative equanimity. But the prospect of Trump terrifies them, and this terror is very real, whether you think it justified or not.

How does this relate to the polls, and to the tightening of the race lately? One of Hillary’s major selling points in the past has been stability versus what are perceived as Trump’s erratic qualities, and she tailors many of her political ads around this idea. But the Comey announcement introduces a significant element of instability and possible chaos into the notions people have about what a possible Clinton presidency would look like, even for some people who might have otherwise turned to her as an alternative to the possible chaos they envision with Trump. The vagueness of Comey’s letter in terms of what the new information might be is not reassuring; it may even increase this feeling of uncertainty about Hillary rather than decrease it.

Now the very real possibility of a post-election indictment cannot be dismissed, and it puts us in uncharted waters. How would this work for a president, before or after inauguration? Would it involve the necessity of impeachment as well? What other revelations might be forthcoming, and how serious would they be? What do we really know about the workings of a woman many people already didn’t like, but at least thought they knew? How does all of this stack up with what we know or don’t know about Donald Trump, and what many people fear from him?

Do you watch TV news anymore?

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t.

Ann Althouse succinctly states my take on this election:

To me, the election is a horror show, and it doesn’t matter whether I go down into the cellar or jump out the window. A monster will grab me. I can’t have the fun of enjoying Trump crushing it on Fox or Clinton basking in presumed victory on CNN.

Some time last winter, without planning it or thinking much about it, I suddenly stopped watching all news shows. That includes all networks and cable networks, all talk shows, all radio talk shows—the entire kit and kaboodle. This happened spontaneously and came from the gut mostly; I found I simply could not bear to watch anyone. The election year that had begun with such high promise had already turned into a horror show for me, and I couldn’t stand the smug gloating or the doom and gloomers or the distortions and lies and spin or really much of anything about it.

Of course, I’ve always much preferred to get my news in print, so I hadn’t been a heavy TV news consumer anyway, and stopping wasn’t a hardship at all.

My question is: what about you? Do you watch a lot of TV news or listen to radio talk shows? Did you used to watch more? Or are you just drinking it up?

I’ve seen a lot of commentary on blogs this year from people who’re saying “Pass the popcorn, I’m enjoying this so much!” Hey, party pooper me isn’t having fun at all. I consider this election tragic for the country, and although I suppose it has its ironic and schadenfreude-ish and even comic aspects, I ain’t laughing and I’m not even smiling.

It’s the Clinton Foundation, stupid

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s a lot of news coming out, and much of it concerns the fact that the Comey announcement was really about the FBI’s renewed focus on the Clinton Foundation as a pay-for-play scheme.

Here’s an article by Andrew C. McCarthy. It’s a bit complex, but please read the whole thing.

Also please see this at the WSJ. Here’s an excerpt:

Secret recordings of a suspect talking about the Clinton Foundation fueled an internal battle between FBI agents who wanted to pursue the case and corruption prosecutors who viewed the statements as worthless hearsay, people familiar with the matter said.

Agents, using informants and recordings from unrelated corruption investigations, thought they had found enough material to merit aggressively pursuing the investigation into the foundation that started in summer 2015 based on claims made in a book by a conservative author called “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” these people said…

The roots of the dispute lie in a disagreement over the strength of the case, these people said, which broadly centered on whether Clinton Foundation contributors received favorable treatment from the State Department under Hillary Clinton.

Senior officials in the Justice Department and the FBI didn’t think much of the evidence, while investigators believed they had promising leads their bosses wouldn’t let them pursue, they said…

Amid the internal finger-pointing on the Clinton Foundation matter, some have blamed the FBI’s No. 2 official, deputy director Andrew McCabe, claiming he sought to stop agents from pursuing the case this summer. His defenders deny that, and say it was the Justice Department that kept pushing back on the investigation.

The author of that first article, Andrew C. McCarthy, has been my go-to guy for this kind of legal issue for a long, long time, and is one of the clearest and most reliable writers in the field. He’s been pretty much writing an article a day since the Comey announcement broke nearly a week ago (one of the longest weeks of Hillary Clinton’s life, most likely). Today McCarthy speculates on why the FBI never discovered the existence of the Weiner/Abedin computer before. It is also worth reading, and McCarthy concludes with this:

The reports of the FBI’s investigation that have been made public indicate that there could be dozens of computers and other communications devices which may be storing classified information, but which the FBI has neither seized nor made plans to try to obtain. If that is true, it is inexplicable..

…Is the Abedin/Weiner laptop the last one? Or will late discoveries continue to rock Camp Clinton and roil our politics?

McCarthy is basing his speculation about the thoroughness of the FBI’s questioning on this report:

The FBI requested all the computers that were used in conjunction with Hillary Clinton’s private server, but a new report states the former secretary of state’s top aides were never asked to turn over their computers or smartphones.

“No one was asked for devices by the FBI,” an anonymous source familiar with the investigation told Politico late Tuesday.

Since aides did not turn over their devices, their attorneys were instead the ones guiding investigators in their search despite their looking out for their clients’ best interests.

However, I had read earlier that Huma Abedin was asked (under oath, but apparently not by the FBI) if there was any other computer she had used that might have had the Hillary emails on it, and she denied that she had any:

On June 28, 2016, Abedin said under oath in a sworn deposition that she looked for all devices that she thought contained government work on them so the records could be given to the State Department. (These records were subsequently reviewed by the FBI.)

Also, even now Abedin says that she has no idea how the emails got on her husband’s laptop and that she had never used it:

Huma Abedin’s lawyer has thrown new confusion into the Clinton email probe – saying she never used the laptop seized by the FBI where the messages were found.

In a dramatic development, Abedin’s newly-hired attorney claimed that the laptop was solely in the possession of the Hillary Clinton aide’s ex-husband, pervert Anthony Weiner.

The claim on Abedin’s behalf deepens the mystery of how emails relevant to the Clinton server investigation could be found on his laptop.

Initial reports had suggested the device was shared by Abedin and Weiner before their estrangement.

But Karen Dunn told Politico the computer belonged to Weiner alone.

We’re dealing in a fog of war (metaphorically speaking) situation here, apparently. However, it seems to me that if this is true, the FBI would not have had the authority to seize Weiner’s computer, even if they had asked Abedin all the relevant questions. My question is: when a person is being investigated, how do the authorities determine which are the computers used by that person’s aides, and which computers to ask for legal access to?

World Series thread

The New Neo Posted on by

Oh boy.

All tied up, seventh game, ninth inning.

It looked like the Cubs had it, but then the Indians came back. The fat lady has not yet sung.

Is this a metaphor for something or other?

11:55 PM: Yikes! Beginning the 10th, now there’s a rain delay.

This is almost like an old-fashioned Red Sox type of World Series.

12:21 PM: Cubs take a one-run lead in the tenth.

12:39 PM: Cubs one out away. It can be a looong out.

12:44 PM: One-run game now. Change of pitchers.

12:48 PM CUBS WIN!

And Theo Epstein is a friggin genius. He did it for the Red Sox, and then he did it for the Cubs. With some help, of course.

Hey, I’ve got an idea: Theo Epstein for president!

Why the right splintered but the left united

The New Neo Posted on by

I was very much looking forward to reading this article with that title. It’s an issue I’ve written about myself, and one that interests me greatly.

But alas, the article disappointed me. The author’s main thesis seems to be:

Legutko’s brilliant book suggests that progressives and left-liberals unite more effectively because they are in harmony with contemporary liberal democracy’s liberationist and egalitarian drift””in other words, its tendency to dismantle inherited authorities and pursue equality of result. By contrast, conservatives find much of what they cherish under assault by government’s relentless expansion into areas””such as family, faith, and speech””that were once commonly held to be largely beyond state supervision. Scrambling to resist the ambitious efforts of partisan politicians, government bureaucrats, and courts to entrench progressive norms as default positions, conservatives increasingly lock horns over where to draw lines and what is most urgently in need of preserving…

Progressives””especially progressive elites””can come together in support of Hillary Clinton because of their confidence that for all her baggage she shares their liberationist and egalitarian understanding of liberal democracy and will fortify their grip on the commanding heights of politics and culture. Donald Trump is not the cause but a symptom of division and disarray among conservatives, who have been rattled and thrown on the defensive by a culture and governing institutions that have taken the other side in a partisan battle over the future of freedom.

Although I suppose that’s true, it’s not the main reason (or reasons) for the differences, IMHO. I do agree that Trump is not the cause of the dissension—there’s a long history of it going back to the Rockefeller days and even earlier, although the dissension has been exacerbated greatly during the frustrating Obama years—and I also agree that Trump is at least partly a symptom of problems already present.

However, Trump is not a conservative, while Hillary is a liberal. In some ways, Trump is actually anti-conservative. That’s a problem for a lot of conservatives and makes it hard to unite behind him and easier for liberals to unite behind her.

Trump is also a person with no history of political office at all, whereas Hillary is a seasoned political person with a long track record of devotion to liberal causes. That’s a problem for a lot of conservatives and makes it hard to unite behind him and easier for liberals to unite behind her.

Trump is an offensive personality on the personal level of ordinary decorum. That’s a problem for a lot of conservatives and makes it hard to unite behind him.

Trump is an impulsive personality and is seen as a loose cannon who might actually be dangerous in the presidency, whereas Hillary’s corruption is something liberals are used to and that hasn’t especially harmed them (at least, in their opinion it hasn’t). That’s a problem for a lot of conservatives and makes it hard to unite behind him and easier for liberals to unite behind her.

And now we come to what is perhaps the biggest reason of all: the conservative movement has a tendency to attract and contain higher numbers of rugged individuals among its ranks, people who very much pride themselves on their rugged individualism and orneriness, and their tendency to go against the pack. Liberals are much more often collectivists who go with the group in the political sense and consider it in their best interests. That’s a problem for a lot of conservatives and makes it hard to unite behind him and easier for liberals to unite behind her. But it also has nothing to do with Trump, and is a political problem in general on the right and makes the right much more likely to split and the left much more likely to pull together.

That’s a generalization, of course; the left has its bitter disputes, as well. But the left has its ways of getting people into line.

Did you ever wonder how Vietnamese immigrants to the US got into the nail salon business?

The New Neo Posted on by

Appraently it was due to Tippi Hedren, the actress who starred in Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” and the mother of Melanie Griffith.

Yes, that Tippi Hedren:

“The Vietnamese just happened to be the immigrant group that was willing to do anything, that was new to this country,” Osborne says.

Actress Tippi Hedren was instrumental in helping Vietnamese immigrants to California get started in the nail industry.
Kent Gavin/Getty Images

“And the suggestion for them to see this niche actually came from a Hollywood actress.”

That actress was Tippi Hedren, an elegant blond who starred in several of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies in the 1960s.

When she wasn’t onscreen, Hedren was an international relief coordinator with the organization Food for the Hungry. After Saigon fell, she was working with Vietnamese women in a refugee camp near Sacramento when several admired her long, glossy nails.

Hedren had a manicurist named Dusty at the time and asked her if she would come to the camp to meet with the women. Dusty agreed, and Hedren flew her up to Camp Hope every weekend to teach nail technology to 20 eager women…

Le and her sister manicurists have transformed the nail business, which is projected to pull in some $7.3 billion this year. Today, affordable manicures have become so synonymous with the Vietnamese that Nails magazine offers a Vietnamese-language version.

Le says the constant demand for affordable manicures has given a steady stream of Vietnamese nail technicians work across the country ”” and the globe.

Even, ironically, back in Vietnam. “If you look around, you see they go everywhere ”” and they start from California!” Le says, laughing.

I thought I’d also put up a clip of Hedren in “The Birds.” But the one I watched was just too too creepy.

Notes on blogging and this election (and more on the phenomenon of “oversampling”)

The New Neo Posted on by

I will be extremely unhappy with the results of this election, no matter who wins.

But one thing I will be extremely happy about is that the election will finally be over. Finally, after what seems like years.

Short of a 2000-type brouhaha, that is.

I’ve noticed recently that things have heated up, both on the internet and in the non-cyber-world, during this past week especially. Everyone seems testy and on edge. My liberal friends in particular are terrified that Hillary might lose, because even if they don’t like her (and many don’t like her), they feel Trump is a very dangerous man. And on this blog and others, sniping in the comments section between people on the right has increased even more than before.

There’s a general weariness that is almost palpable. I feel so weary of discussing the pros and cons of Trump vs. Hillary that I could scream.

And as I wrote that last sentence, it occurred to me that “the cons and cons” would be a much better phrase to use.

So forgive me—or thank me, as you wish—if I don’t post my near-daily Trump/Hillary discussion today. The next week promises to be a lulu, and that’s about all I’ll say right now on that score.

I also find myself spending more time lately in the comments section here, responding to various people. Often the research I do for those comments requires as much time as the research I do for a main post, and yet far fewer people see a comment than see a post.

So now I’ll take the opportunity to offer the gist of one of those previous comments in order to give you more information I found on the topic of “oversampling” (as discussed previously vis a vis the Podesta emails). Hope this will clarify things even further.

“Oversampling” is a technique that is sometimes used in certain types of polls and research in general to study small groups. Here is an explanation of what it actually means.

Oversampling is the practice of selecting respondents so that some groups make up a larger share of the survey sample than they do in the population. Oversampling small groups can be difficult and costly, but it allows polls to shed light on groups that would otherwise be too small to report on.

This might sound like it would make the survey unrepresentative, but pollsters correct this through weighting. With weighting, groups that were oversampled are brought back in line with their actual share of the population ”“ removing the potential for bias…

. When we are interested in learning about groups that make up only a small share of the population, the usual approach can leave us with too few people in each group to produce reliable estimates. When we want to look closely at small groups, we have to design the sample differently so that we have enough respondents in each group to analyze. We do this by giving members of the small group a higher chance of being selected than everybody else.

A good example is a Pew Research Center survey from June of this year, in which we wanted to focus in depth on the U.S. Hispanic population. In the previous survey from March, there were 291 Hispanic respondents out of 2,254 total respondents, or 13% of the sample before weighting. This is pretty close to the true Hispanic share of the population (15%), but we wanted to have more than 291 people responding so we could do a more in-depth analysis. In order to have a larger sample of Hispanics in June, we surveyed 543 Hispanics out of 2,245 total respondents, or 24% of the unweighted sample. This gave us a much larger sample to analyze, and made the estimates for Hispanics more precise.

If we just stopped here, estimates for the total population would overrepresent Hispanics. Instead, we weight them back down so that when we look at the whole sample, the share of Hispanics falls back in line with their actual share of the population. This way, we still have more precise estimates when looking at Hispanics specifically, but we also have the correct distribution when looking at the sample as a whole.

That’s an explanation from Pew Research of what the technique is and how it’s used in polling.

So it does not mean biased sampling or skewed polls in an attempt to fool anyone. Also, these polls Podesta was talking about were not polls that were released to the public. They were internal polls that had the purpose of studying certain small subgroups in certain areas, so that the campaign could learn more about them.

It’s possible to think, because that article by Pew that I just quoted was written after the Podesta emails came out, that it was just some sort of ex-post-facto made-up excuse. So I refer you to articles about oversampling in small populations that were written significantly before this election cycle, and therefore are not responses to Podesta and aren’t trying to make any political points at all.

Here’s an article about using oversampling in small groups, written quite a while ago (the comments there date from 2015, but according to my Google search the article was written in 2012).

Here’s some information about oversampling in small populations that was written in 2010.

Here’s an example of some type of study from 2011 that used oversampling (it’s not about politics).

There are other examples of research that uses oversampling as a technique to study groups that are a small fraction of a population. This information is easy to obtain, and has been in the public domain for a long time.

Once you are aware of what the technique of oversampling of minority populations is, you understand the Podesta emails better. His emails fit into the framework of what is being described here, and do not appear to have anything to do with faking data or deceiving anyone.

As I’ve stated before, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t attempts to deceive, either with polling or in other ways. It merely indicates that there’s no “there” there in these particular charges about Podesta and the use of oversampling.

Does socialism inevitably lead to Communism?

The New Neo Posted on by

Every now and then there’s a discussion in the comments section I want to highlight.

Such as this one from yesterday, beginning with this from Geoffrey Britain:

Progressive’ socialism’ inescapably evolves into communism. It’s incrementally happening in Europe as we speak.

That socialism must incrementally evolve into communism is not just my assessment. George Orwell, Ludwig von Mises, Vladimir Lenin and Nikita Khrushchev all declared that to be their assessment as well. This is so because socialism is an unsustainable economic system. To maintain it, gradually all thought, speech and behavior is declared to be either forbidden or mandatory.

Then there’s “OM’s” reply:

If that is so why are the Swede’s backing away from the socialist path? Why did the eastern european Warsaw pact “states” leave the blessed Soviet orbit or not continue even after the fall of USSR? Why indeed? Predictions, by any authority are just that, predictions, history and what has happened is often something else. Don’t trot out the “in the fullness of time” argument.

And here’s what I had to say in response to Geoffrey Britain’s original remark:

I know that’s a common theory, but I don’t think it bears out in practice.

I do think that socialism tends more often than not to evolve in the direction of more statism and less liberty, more PC thought, and more control of the individual by the group. But the totalitarian Communist countries I can think of did NOT evolve from a Swedish type socialism; they pretty much went the whole hog right away (Russia, China, Cuba, North Vietnam, etc.). And a place such as Sweden, which started being socialist around the 1970s, has in recent years been retreating from socialism, and when I last checked the gulags had yet to arrive. My sense of the possible future of Sweden does not include Communism, and its actually more likely that its devotion to PC thought will allow a sharia takeover than a Communist one.

…Hillary is more along the lines of European socialism, just as Obama was. I’m not in favor of it and I’m not voting for it, but I don’t think it inevitably leads to Communism. I just don’t see that when I look around me, theories of brilliant thinkers notwithstanding.

That does not mean, of course, that such a transition from European social welfare state to Communism is impossible. It certainly could happen. I just don’t see it as anything like an inevitable or even very likely progression.

And Geoffrey Britain responded this way:

European societies do not march in lockstep, Sweden among others is simply at the end of the socialistic spectrum. It’s partial retreat from socialism is temporary. But yes, Islam’s invasion of Western Europe may well derail the Left’s socialistic evolution of Europe into a theological tyranny.

The Eastern European nations today reject socialism because communism was forced upon them. Call socialism’s end result”¦ communism, bureaucratic tyranny, 1984 or any other label that resonates. What they all have in common is the collective standing upon the individual’s neck.

It occurs to me, reading all of that back right now, that part of the disagreement might come from a more narrow definition of Communism (mine), and a broader one from GB—“bureaucratic tyranny” included, for example. Well, if you include that (and I think it’s wrong to do so; “Communism” is a word with a very specific meaning), we’re already there, and have been for quite some time. The idea of reversing that particular trend is one of the main attractions of the libertarian party, when it’s not spinning off into the stratosphere.

Hello in there

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a very sweet and touching story for you, amidst all the gloom. I’ve noticed, though, that between the time I first read it late last night and now, they’re eliminated one sentence in the story, which is that the little girl first approached the elderly man by saying something like, “Hello old man, it’s my birthday!”

Reminds me of this song:

By the way, John Prine, who wrote and sings that song, has an interesting human-interest story, too:

In the late 1960s, while Prine was delivering mail, he began to sing at open mic evenings at the Fifth Peg on Armitage Avenue in Chicago. Prine was initially a spectator, reluctant to perform, but eventually did so in response to a “You think you can do better?” comment made to him by another performer. Chicago Sun-Times movie critic Roger Ebert heard him there and wrote the first review Prine ever received, calling him a great songwriter. He became a central figure in the Chicago folk revival..