Those friends who disappear

The New Neo Posted on by

Today I read this WaPo article by a woman whose best friend stopped communicating with her with no explanation, and how ten years later the author still grieves the loss of their friendship and is mystified by it.

I could relate, because it’s happened to me, only it was someone I’d known and been very good friends with much longer than the woman in the story, who was nineteen at the time it happened. I was about to turn fifty when my friend stopped returning my phone calls, and we had been good friends since the age of eight.

I never really understood what had happened, although I tried to find out. I wrote her a note saying that, although upset, I accepted her decision, but that it would really help me if she could just tell me what had happened, so perhaps I could learn from the experience. She didn’t reply. I called her mother, whom I knew very well from my childhood. Her mother was so upset that she wept, but when she asked her daughter what had happened, my ex-friend refused to discuss it with her, either.

About a decade later, my friend died. And although I had actually encountered her unexpectedly a few years earlier at a class reunion and we had managed a short conversation, when I’d asked her what had happened she gave some cryptic replies. They will have to do, though, and I’m grateful for them, because to have had that conversation was definitely better than nothing. But the meeting occurred by accident.

I still grieve both the end of our friendship and her death.

When I looked at the comments to that WaPo piece, I was surprised at how mean-spirited many of them were, more or less saying “Quit whining; get over it already” and/or “Have you ever wondered what you did wrong to make this happen?”

Well, I think this woman has gotten over it, because she seems to be functioning and going about her business. Does “getting over” something mean one doesn’t bear the scars, or doesn’t think about it very sadly sometimes? Is that our new standard, to wipe all pain from our memory banks in order to prove how stalwart we are? And why would people think the writer hadn’t examined whatever her own role might have been, and searched for an explanation there? Just because she didn’t devote paragraphs to that pursuit in what is meant to be a rather short essay about the effects of a loss of friendship?

As for “quit whining,” I think it’s pretty clear that the writer wanted her article to let other people who’ve had similar experiences know that their strong reactions aren’t that unusual, and to suggest to others who might leave without saying goodbye that perhaps it would be good, when “breaking up” with an old and once-dear friend, to offer a simple word of explanation.

It certainly would have helped me.

I think that people are used to the idea that there’s a lot of grief with a romantic breakup. But friendships—even deep, long-term friendships—are considered more fungible. They’re not, at least not for many people. For many many people, the loss of a friend—especially when the friend doesn’t confront the issue head-on and explain, if only in a relatively perfunctory way (“we’ve grown apart,” “I’m angry at you because…”)—the reaction can be extraordinarily painful, all the more so because there’s little acknowledgement about how painful it can be. Do we have songs about how our best friends drift away? I can’t think of any offhand (maybe you can, though), although there are countless laments about the heartache involved in the loss of a lover, and rightly so.

[NOTE: Some people might say that once a friendship has reached that point, it’s the point of no return and repair isn’t possible, so why not just walk away and make it easy on everyone. But my observation is that although walking away is usually easier on the one who makes the decision to leave, it’s rarely easier on the one who is left, although the leaver may sincerely think it will be. Telling the truth about why you left is almost undoubtedly hard for most people, but it’s much kinder in the end.

I also have had serious fallings-out with good friends that have been repaired—sometimes quickly, sometimes over a number of years. So it can be done, if both people are motivated to do it.]

Amazing air battle

The New Neo Posted on by

I had not remembered this story from 1994, although it’s extraordinarily memorable. I came across it on YouTube the other day and was surprised that it’s not better known.

Watch. It’s unbelievable, and yet it happened:

“Fight For Your Life,” indeed.

Perhaps it’s not more well-known because there were no passengers on the airplane.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s so much news today (much of it depressing, alas) that I’m just going to do something I don’t usually do, a roundup:

Romney on Trump and the future of the GOP.

Clinton operatives crow about how they scared off Chief Justice Roberts.

Big accord signed to limit a greenhouse gas—and it’s not about CO2, it’s about something we’ve heard relatively little about in comparison (hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs) and is regarded as a far more powerful determinant of global warming. It’s also ironic that HFCs were introduced in the 80s as a substitute for ozone-depleting gases.

Meanwhile, Obamacare continues its predictable (and predicted) slide.

Eramo of UVA tells her story

The New Neo Posted on by

In connection with her lawsuit against Rolling Stone for damages done to her as a result of their false UVA fraternity rape story, Nicole Eramo has given an interview:

Eramo told ABC News that she could not discuss her interactions with Jackie beyond what was contained in court documents for her defamation lawsuit against the magazine in order not to violate the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

The trial for Eramo’s $7.85 million defamation civil suit against Rolling Stone is expected to start Monday. The UVA chapter of Phi Kappa Psi, the fraternity named in the article, also brought a defamation suit against the magazine, for $25 million; it is scheduled go to trial in the fall of 2017.

In the article, Jackie claimed that Eramo seemed to discourage her from going public with her allegations because she was worried about the university’s reputation and that Eramo said, “Nobody wants to send their daughter to a rape school.”

Eramo told ABC News that she never said that and she would never make a statement like that to an alleged sexual assault survivor. When asked whether Jackie made up that statement, Eramo said, “I can’t say, but I know I didn’t say it.”

I hope she wins every penny, and I hope the same for the fraternity’s lawsuit.

I wrote about the case extensively at the time, and there is no question in my mind that the periodical and its reporter were at fault and should be held accountable. I also have a dream, perhaps an unrealistic one: that the results of the lawsuit would further discourage other periodicals from being similarly reckless about what they publish in their pursuit of their own political goals.

The October surprise is no surprise

The New Neo Posted on by

An October surprise timed to maximally hurt the Republican candidate is no surprise at all. It is so predictable that the term “October surprise” has become commonplace.

In is no news, either, that the MSM tries to elect the Democrat. No news at all.

In the case of Trump, it was easily seen that he was the candidate the MSM and the Democrats wanted Hillary to face, because he was the weakest candidate. So as soon as they saw his candidacy had some legs and promise (which took a couple of months, because at first they found him a laughing stock), they did what they could to get on board temporarily and build him up, with the near-surety that they had more than enough ammunition to tear him down once he was safely nominated. Oh, the beauty of it!

If you think that’s a case of 20/20 hindsight, it’s not. Nor did it take 20/20 vision to predict it in the first place. It was easy. Here’s what I wrote in December of 2015, in a post entitled “Does Trump own the media or does the media own Trump?” [emphasis mine]:

So who’s using whom?

Rush Limbaugh says that Trump has the media frustrated and wrapped around his little finger:

…[T]hey can’t take him out. They can’t stop covering him. They can’t humiliate him. They can’t embarrass him. They can’t diminish his support. They’re powerless, and this has them in a panic. The media that can make-or-break anybody cannot touch Trump, and every time they try, all they do is make him bigger. They can’t explain this. They are frustrated to no end, and so are both political parties who rely on the media to be the great equalizer in all of this…

There’s no question Trump is getting more coverage than anyone else, by a huge margin. YUUUGE! So perhaps Limbaugh is right, and Trump is having a good laugh on a media that can’t do a thing about him except his bidding, and is instrumental in getting him more and more attention even though they don’t want to do it.

But here’s an alternate theory, one I happen to ascribe to.

I think the media knows that Trump is the story of the election. He’s exciting, people are entertained by watching him. So they get something out of covering him—readers and viewers. Remember, though, that the vast majority of the MSM is on the left, so much of what they do is with the goal of directing their readers and viewers to what’s so dreadful about Trump, and of energizing Democratic voters so that, if Trump’s the nominee, voters feel they must vote for the sane person—who would be Hillary—even if they don’t much like her.

I have believed from the very start of Trump’s campaign that the MSM…would very much like Trump to be the Republican nominee. They believe very strongly that, if nominated, he will lose, and that his chances of losing are greater than that of certain other candidates such as Rubio (polls bear that out).

I think they are correct, although of course I don’t know for sure. But more importantly, they think they’re correct. So for them, covering Trump is win/win. They get ratings. And although they’re not trying to destroy him—not for now—they dearly want him to be the nominee, and they’re confident they can destroy him later, or that he will self-destruct with the majority of Americans.

They might be right or they might be wrong. But they think they own him in the sense of using him to fit their purposes, not the other way around.

It’s instructive look at the comments section to that December post, too.

Another way in which the MSM orchestrated all of this was described by me in another old post that I wrote a few weeks after the first one and entitled “The hype about how Trump could win: what are the facts?”:

I doubt the motives of the NY Times or Politico or other left-leaning periodicals when they continue to say he will do well against Clinton, in the absence of evidence that he would do any better against her than other Republican candidates, and the presence of evidence that he would actually do worse against her than they would.

It’s also curious to me that none of these articles seem to actually analyze the polls to come to their conclusions. I have looked at the polls, and continue to do so, and have come to the conclusion that, at least so far, they indicate that Trump would be the weakest candidate of the GOP frontrunners in a head-to-head against Clinton…

I can’t escape the idea that the liberal/left press is pushing a Donald Trump candidacy because they feel he’s actually the weakest candidate.

Much of that post of mine analyzes the polls and compares what they actually indicated (no good news for Trump in the general, if he were to become the nominee) versus what the MSM would have had you think they indicated (“Trump has a really good chance of winning the whole thing!). I wrote other posts about that as well, but my voice (and that of others agreeing with me) was drowned out by the tsunami of propaganda from hopeful Trump supporters and the more Machiavellian MSM who were promoting the idea too.

Not that I expected my voice to not be drowned out. I’m not crazy; I know how large or small my audience is (although I love you guys; I really do). And although there were other, louder voices than mine saying much the same thing I was, they were drowned out too, in the wave of Trump-supporters’ hopes, trust, anger, gullibility, frustration, and probably a host of other things as well.

What prompted this post of mine today? This article by Joe Cunningham at RedState, entitled “The Disgusting Media Sat on Sexual Assault for a Partisan Victory”:

Sixteen women as of now have come forward to say they were sexually assaulted by Donald Trump. Sixteen. It is an avalanche of absolutely bad news for the Trump campaign, and it is far too close to the end of the cycle to recover from it. The Trump campaign is finished. However, each and every one of these cases is years old. The tape that showed Donald Trump talking to Billy Bush, the very tape that started this avalanche, is itself more than a decade old. Some of the stories of Donald Trump are older than that. But, we are only now hearing about it. Wikileaks seems to have provided an answer as to why, as well: The collusion between the Media and the Clinton campaign.

I use the term “collusion” on purpose here. While not exactly the proper use, it’s about the closest I can come to describing what’s going on here. The Media is not supposed to be friendly with political campaigns. Their relationship can be ”“ and should be ”“ cordial, but it should never be in bed with one side and actively trying to destroy the other. And, of course, we all know which side is which in this scenario. The Wikileaks releases verify for us what we really already know. The Clinton campaign has relied heavily on not only favorable, but dictated of certain political events in order to orchestrate their victory.

The Media withheld stories about sexual assault until it was convenient for a presidential candidate.

Let me repeat: no surprise, because that’s what the term “October surprise” signifies, and that expression was not coined yesterday.

And it’s interesting to read this comment at neoneocon from “Cornhead,” written back in December of 2015:

Jeb Bush and his super PACs would do the GOP a real service if they rolled out the dirt on Donald.

Just saying Trump is a bully and that he can’t insult himself to the Presidency doesn’t move the needle.

Jeb is an idiot.

Well, Jeb calculated that targeting the others would weaken them, and that he could pick off Trump later or that Trump would self-destruct. Also, he didn’t want to draw more of Trump’s fire than necessary, because he knew how dirty Trump would fight. The others had much the same strategy until it was too late; Rubio tried a bit of the direct attack and it backfired on him.

No one in the GOP dug up the Trump sexual allegations, though. Perhaps they were afraid it would make them look low. Perhaps they tried and just couldn’t find the information because Democrats were guarding it till the right time. Perhaps…

And yes, as I wrote yesterday, the MSM and Democrats would have tried to work some sort of similar propaganda against any other GOP nominee at a carefully selected and strategic time. But none of them were anywhere near as vulnerable as Trump.

[ADDENDUM: I also recall that during the primaries many Trump supporters argued that Trump had been impervious to MSM smears and would continue to be so. Many of us responded that this argument was a case of confusing the primaries with the general, and that the dynamics in the general are different. That argument was dismissed, but so far that is what has been coming to pass.

But I don’t discount the possibility of a black swan—or two or even three of them—before this election is over. Right now, however, I would describe Trump’s chances of winning as very, very, very, very distant.]

[ADDENDUM II: Oh, and CNN’s president Jeff Zucker gave me a sarcastic chuckle when he said that “it was a ‘mistake’ [for CNN] to air so many Trump rallies ‘and let them run’ in 2015, giving the candidate an unfettered platform.”

Riiiight Jeff, of course it was a mistake. Mistaken like a fox.]

Post Office pets

The New Neo Posted on by

I was at the post office today and bought a set of stamps. The choices I was offered consisted of the basic one, and then a set of trucks versus a set of pets.

trucks

pets

Pressed for time, with a line behind me which precluded asking for further alternatives and lengthy deliberation, I went for the pets instead of the trucks as the image I preferred to present to my bill collectors (the only use I seem to have anymore for stamps). Some of you might have chosen differently, no doubt.

But here’s my question: hermit crabs?? People keep hermit crabs as pets?

The post office wants you to know that people do keep hermit crabs as pets:

crab

Well, why not? People keep turtles and iguanas, too (they each have a stamp devoted to them, as well, although the post office calls the former “tortoises“).

Intrigued by the hermit crab news, what did I do? Why, Googled it, of course, and found this (from PETA, naturally), which lists seven reasons you shouldn’t buy a hermit crab as a pet, with the following summary:

Never, ever buy a hermit crab. They are not “starter pets” or trinkets. Crabs are complex, sensitive animals who want to live in the wild, not in a cage. Even the most well-meaning person who purchases crabs will never be able to give them the life that they deserve.

If you or someone you know already has a hermit crab, check out this hermit crab care guide for helpful tips on keeping crabs happy. Hermit crabs need companionship, plenty of climbing room, substrate to bury themselves in for molting, humidity, warm temperatures, extra shells, fresh and salt water (dechlorinated aquarium salt only), and much, much more! Never release a captive crab back into the wild.

That’s a lot more trouble than I would want to go to for the dubious pleasure of caring for my very own hermit crab. So I don’t have to be talked into not buying one. But I wonder why anyone would want one (I wonder that about a lot of pets, actually, although not dogs or cats). I’m not sure I buy the sales pitch on this site promoting exactly what PETA is railing against, the idea of hermit crabs as “starter pets”:

Hermit crabs have their own personalities and are fun starter pets for families and classrooms. They are easy to care for and their crabby antics, like climbing, digging, molting and shell switching, as are entertaining as they are educational.

How entertaining and educational is that, though?

More fall photos

The New Neo Posted on by

More photos from Fall 2016 in New England, taken by me with nothing more fancy than my cell phone camera.

This one could be any season (except winter), although the leaves on the ground are a giveaway, I guess:

fall-oct-2016-059

It not all about the light. But a lot of it’s about the light:

fall-oct-2016-083

These pumpkins already glow without being turned into Jack O’Lanterns:

fall-oct-2016-089

And the sumac’s ready for its closeup, Mr. De Mille:

fall-oct-2016-025-001

Another great Frost quote

The New Neo Posted on by

This one:

”We go to college,” [Frost] wrote, ”to be given one more chance to learn to read in case we haven’t learned in high school.” He dropped out of both Harvard and Dartmouth, and married his high-school sweetheart with few career prospects other than a fresh, unconventional talent for teaching children English and Latin. (The way to read a poet, he maintained, is ”to settle down like a revolving dog and make ourselves at home among the poems, completely at our ease as to how they should be taken.”)

When I first read that, for a split second I saw the phrase as “revolving door.” But “revolving dog” is great, and I know just what he means. So does this guy, who tells us everything you always wanted to know (or didn’t want to know) about the behavior:

And this guy has more to say about dogs’ pre-poop spinning. They have research on this, folks:

Today’s meme: “Any GOP candidate would have been slimed by the MSM and the Democrats”

The New Neo Posted on by

You see it on this blog among some commenters, and you see it from highly esteemed conservative bloggers such as John Hinderaker at Powerline: the argument that the current attacks on Trump are much like attacks on previous GOP candidates such as McCain and Romney (although somewhat different in content for Romney), and that much the same would have happened (and will happen) to any GOP nominee:

Did Romney and the GOP get credit in the press for the candidates’s outstanding character? No. Romney, who helped to create tens of thousands of jobs at Bain Capital, was denounced as a “vulture capitalist” and blamed, absurdly, for one woman’s developing cancer. The Washington Post made a front page story of the fact that 50 years earlier, when he was in high school, he and others had cut a classmate’s hair. Oh, and Romney was a racist, too. Does anyone remember why? I don’t.

The cycle before that, GOP voters nominated John McCain. McCain is a great patriot, a man of extraordinary character and courage who survived years of torture and abuse as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Did the liberal media give Republicans credit for nominating such a hero? No. The New York Times, to its everlasting shame, peddled a false rumor that McCain had an affair with a lobbyist. (Bill Clinton would have done that before breakfast.) It also berated McCain for failing to release his medical records”“which, actually, he did, unlike Bill Clinton and Barack Obama…

What’s the point? I’m not really sure. I certainly am not in favor of nominating candidates of poor or marginal character. But the hypocrisy of the liberal media is galling…

What is the point of nominating someone of extraordinary moral stature, like Mitt Romney, if the political press will not only unanimously refuse to acknowledge the fact, but worse, join in a campaign of deception to smear Romney in the eyes of voters?

Hinderaker further links the MSM perpetual war against Republican candidates as causative in the decline of our political culture.

And I would say all of this is true. Very true. Extremely true. And also somewhat irrelevant this year.

As I’ve said in the comments section, Romney didn’t lose because of those attacks. They sure didn’t help, but here are some reasons he lost that were much more important:

(1) He was running against a rather popular incumbent. Not popular with you or me, but still pretty popular with a lot of people. That counts for a lot.

(2) He had a manner that was seen as distant, stiff, and patrician.

(3) The “47%” remarks that were leaked.

(4) Some people think Hurricane Sandy was a big factor in giving Obama a moment to shine, right before the election.

(5) Some conservatives didn’t vote for him because he was considered a RINO. No one knows how many did this, or whether it would have made a difference, but the election was relatively close and it might have.

Those were the ones that came to mind for me. There were more offered by commenters “geokstr” and “Spiral” here and here.

What’s more, George Bush won despite the attacks on him. Remember those last-minute stories about his drunk driving? That was an attempt to administer the coup de grace, but it didn’t work. The election was close, of course, but I don’t think it was because of those smears.

Same for McCain. He did not lose because of some last-minute accusations of infidelity. Of that I am nearly certain.

As I’ve said many times (and as Hinderaker also acknowledges), Trump was and is uniquely vulnerable. These attacks are working because they are congruent with what we already know of his character. They are plausible, whether or not they are true, and so they hit home. What’s more—and this is important—they began with the words of the candidate himself as the lead-in to the later revelations by the women.

And he already was losing, before these attacks. He was already a highly unpopular candidate. So much that, although the attacks may deal Trump a (metaphorical) death blow, he was already (metaphorically) ill in the sense of appealing to voters in the general. In that sense, they are more the equivalent of the anti-Goldwater Daisy ad than anything else, even though the subject matter is very different. Goldwater, a very upright and moral man, was already losing without that ad, but it got traction (and those of us alive back then remember it today) because many people already saw him as a wild extremist politically. If that had not been the case, and if LBJ hadn’t been extremely popular at the time, the ad wouldn’t have mattered one whit.

Had Cruz or Rubio or Fiorina been nominated, you can bet your bottom dollar that they would have been smeared. For Cruz it would have been religion (and more of the type of stories Trump winked at during the primaries, involving Cruz and affairs, although that was absurd). For Rubio, probably more stuff about the Gang of 8, in order to turn conservatives even further against him. For Fiorina, Hewlett-Packard. And although the stories might have succeeded in harming their chances, I don’t think they would have, in the end—especially and most particularly for Rubio, who has the most attractive personality of the three. We have no way to know for sure, of course. But I strongly strongly suspect it.

It’s moot now. As many have pointed out, Trump is the nominee. But it’s something to keep in mind in the future. There are those who say there is no future for the right. I disagree, although I agree that its future looks very very shaky right now. But the right won’t get anywhere nominating candidates with such major personal negatives.

Another wonderful makeover

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t even recognize this woman from her “before”:

I guess I can’t stop at just one. Here’s another; she’s recognizable, but such a difference, and so happy!

And this woman started out beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. You think beautiful can’t be made more beautiful? Just watch:

Further musings on a bunch of assorted things

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember back when Trump was running in the primaries, and how his supporters excoriated Romney—particularly after Romney spoke out against Trump—for having been such a loser in 2012? I wonder if those same people are now rethinking how easily they put down Romney, and how much they underestimated how difficult it is to fight the Democratic coalition of politicians and press?

Yeah, it’s a rhetorical question. I doubt that many of them are in fact rethinking it. I think they either comfort themselves with the notion that Trump is still poised to win (which I believe is wishful thinking—but hey, stranger things have happened on this earth), or they praise Trump’s pugnacious style of fighting over its efficacy.

When Romney made that speech last March, I wrote:

…[D]oes anyone on earth think Hillary doesn’t have her own attack on Trump already planned, and that Romney’s will pale compared with hers? Let me assure you, of one thing I am certain, and that is that Hillary doesn’t need Romney to do her opposition research.

I think the truth of that is certainly obvious.

And I repeat, just for the sake of emphasis: yes, there would have been vicious attacks mounted on any GOP member who might have been nominated instead. And those attacks might have worked. But I don’t think so, because Hillary Clinton is a much much weaker opponent in 2016 than Barack Obama was in 2012. In addition, Trump was uniquely vulnerable, not just to sexual charges, but to a host of things based on his history and embarrassing videos (for example, they haven’t ever really used one topic that I thought they would use—his nasty personal and snobbish remarks that were part of his attempts to evict people in Scotland and Atlantic City). There’s so much to hit him with that it could go on every day for years and the supply wouldn’t be exhausted, and they wouldn’t even have to make stuff up or distort it; just show Trump being himself.

I was driving home from the market last night and turned on my radio. A talk show was going on—I have no idea whose it was—and I listened to about five minutes of it. It featured a woman railing against Trump, and then the host said to her, “So, you’re with Hillary, right?” “Wrong!” she practically yelled out, with great conviction.

Then she went on to say how bereft she felt, how she had no candidate to vote for at all. And the host agreed, and said, “Yes, there are a lot of us this year.” They briefly talked about writing someone in, and it struck my once again that if there could be a concerted campaign for one alternative write-in person, that person might actually have a chance.

But it’s not going to happen. Too hard to organize, too hard to get traction.

And I thought—not for the first time—how much this election reminds me of a Greek tragedy. You watch the play knowing it’s inevitable, but wanting to somehow intervene and stop it. The ancient Greeks felt that knowing the plot didn’t make the tragedy less keen; it made it more kenn.

The analogy breaks down, of course, because we certainly don’t know the details of the outcome. But we know we are caught in a terrible, somewhat-foreseeable mess, one that no one seems capable of stopping.

The reaction of a lot of people is to wash their hands of it all and retreat to private concerns and private pleasures. Others plot some sort of rebellion. Some cling to hope. I think it’s rather sad, however, that some reluctant Trump supporters consider the notion that Trump would be impeached if he overreaches to be a hopeful and comforting thought. It’s a thought I don’t happen to share, however—I don’t think it would happen. But I very much understand the need to take our comfort where we can, even if it’s cold comfort.