FISAgate: if you stop and think about it, this is kind of funny

The New Neo Posted on by

We take our humor wherever we can get it these days.

From the Telegraph:

…[Trump] claimed his predecessor ordered a wiretap of the phones at Trump Tower in New York, Mr Trump’s campaign headquarters.

James Comey, the FBI director, asked the Justice Department this weekend to publicly reject Mr Trump’s assertion, unnamed senior American officials told the New York Times on Sunday.

Those “unnamed officials” really get around these days. They spend so much time talking to the press, it’s a wonder they get any work done.

Comey is presently still the head of the FBI. I don’t know how long he’ll remain in that post, but why wouldn’t he issue a public disclaimer that the FBI did anything of the sort, if the FBI didn’t do anything of the sort? So what’s this business with begging a spokesperson to do it?

Then we have this:

A spokesman for the FBI and the spokeswoman for the Justice Department declined to comment, the Times reported. The department has so far not released any public statement.

Hmmm. Next:

Mr Obama has said the allegations were “simply false”. His former intelligence chief also “absolutely denied” the claims. But Mr Trump told a friend: “This will be investigated, it will all come out. I will be proven right.”

I’m not sure who I’d put my money on, but I wouldn’t bet a whole lot of dough against Trump.

Finally, we have the punchline, the part that made me laugh:

Mr Trump offered no evidence and is believed to have based the claims, made in a series of tweets on Sunday, on press reports.

And we all know how much press reports are worth.

That last point is the subject of several pieces today (see this, for example). Here’s one that features a reporter at my favorite rag, The NY Times:

On January 19th and 20th 2017, The NY Times reported that wiretaps of people on the Trump team were passed along to the Obama White House, one of the story’s authors was Michael S. Schmidt. On Saturday that same Michael S. Schmidt was one of the reporters who wrote the story, “Trump, Offering No Evidence, Says Obama Tapped His Phones.” That’s right, the same NY Times reporter who was one of the sources for the President’s claim, said that there was no evidence for the claim.

Ah, but there’s a flaw there, too. Did you catch it? Jeff Dunetz, the author of the paragraph I just quoted, is ignoring how clever the Times can be with this sort of thing. That Times headline doesn’t say there is no evidence; it says that Trump didn’t offer any. That’s the meme that all the Trump critics are using, and as far as I can see it’s absolutely correct that Trump offered no evidence.

Of course, a lot of people will read it as meaning there was is no evidence. But that’s the goal.

It’s not the only meme out there, either. Another is to focus on the word “ordered,” as Ann Althouse points out:

From what I’ve read, “ordered” is the weasel word that allows anti-Trumpsters to make flat statements portraying Trump as out of his mind. But the notorious Trump tweets do not say that Obama “ordered” a wiretapping. They ask if it is “legal for a sitting President to be ‘wire tapping’ a race for president prior to an election?” and refer to what a court had done. Though Trump didn’t precisely say this, any “order” came from the court. He then said “President Obama was tapping my phones,” which isn’t to say that he “ordered” it. I think the story Trump is relying on is that the FISA court granted a warrant (after some funny business to get around a previous denial), not that Obama just “ordered” it. Then, Trump tweeted that Obama had gone “low… to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process.” Trump portrays Obama as doing something, not “ordering” it.

Another word to pick apart is wiretap. You may note that, in his original tweets, Trump put the term in scare quotes. There may or may not have been a reason for that (with Trump it’s hard to be sure), but my guess is that he meant to do it and that his purpose was to use the word in a generic, colloquial sense of “listening to the communications of” rather than the legal sense of a literal wiretap.

If you look at all of this back-and-forth in a certain way, it becomes absurdist. That’s my mood today, anyway.

Alma Deutscher

The New Neo Posted on by

It may be time to get to know the work of prodigy Alma Deutscher. She’s twelve in this video:

I don’t know about you, but I’m certainly impressed.

Here Alma plays excerpts from some of her own compositions:

And here’s a short excerpt from her opera “Cinderella,” written when Alma was eleven. Here she is playing the piano and singing a duet with singing prodigy Amira Willighagen. This one is something very special:

The opera was no fluke; it’s the real thing, as you can see if you read reactions to it:

But Cindrella proves that Deutscher is an extraordinary talent. Prodigy is a much-misused term, but the maturity of her composition would suggest that, for once, it is not mere hyperbole. That a young girl could have the mental energy to compose a two-hour opera and take credit for its full orchestration is staggering; that the end result is a lively, coherent piece of comic opera is exceptional.

Alma was lucky in her parents, too, as you can see if you read any of the many many articles about her—she was homeschooled and carefully nurtured, and appears to be extraordinarily well-adjusted. To those who say she’s some sort of throwback to the past, I would answer that she seems to be from a place beyond time.

[Hat tip: commenter “zat”.]

Film about the Holodomor

The New Neo Posted on by

I was surprised the other day to see a TV ad for a film that looked to be about the Stalin-engineered Ukrainian famine (known as the Holodomor). What an excellent topic for a film, and one few people today know much (if anything) about.

Unfortunately, it appears to be a turkey of a movie.

Excellent article on immigration

The New Neo Posted on by

And the article is in the Times, of all places, although it’s not by one of their reporters. It’s an op-ed by economist George Borjas, and here’s an excerpt:

Inevitably, immigration does not improve everyone’s well-being. There are winners and losers, and we will need to choose among difficult options. The improved lives of the immigrants come at a price. How much of a price are the American people willing to pay, and exactly who will pay it?

This tension permeates the debate over immigration’s effect on the labor market. Those who want more immigration claim that immigrants do jobs that native-born Americans do not want to do. But we all know that the price of gas goes down when the supply of oil goes up. The laws of supply and demand do not evaporate when we talk about the price of labor rather than the price of gas. By now, the well-documented abuses of the H-1B program, such as the Disney workers who had to train their foreign-born replacements, should have obliterated the notion that immigration does not harm competing native workers.

Over the past 30 years, a large fraction of immigrants, nearly a third, were high school dropouts, so the incumbent low-skill work force formed the core group of Americans who paid the price for the influx of millions of workers. Their wages fell as much as 6 percent. Those low-skill Americans included many native-born blacks and Hispanics, as well as earlier waves of immigrants.

But somebody’s lower wage is somebody else’s higher profit. The increase in the profitability of many employers enlarged the economic pie accruing to the entire native population by about $50 billion. So, as proponents of more immigration point out, immigration can increase the aggregate wealth of Americans. But they don’t point out the trade-off involved: Workers in jobs sought by immigrants lose out.

They also don’t point out that low-skill immigration has a side effect that reduces that $50 billion increase in wealth. The National Academy of Sciences recently estimated the impact of immigration on government budgets. On a year-to-year basis, immigrant families, mostly because of their relatively low incomes and higher frequency of participating in government programs like subsidized health care, are a fiscal burden. A comparison of taxes paid and government spending on these families showed that immigrants created an annual fiscal shortfall of $43 billion to $299 billion.

Even the most conservative estimate of the fiscal shortfall wipes out much of the $50 billion increase in native wealth. Remarkably, the size of the native economic pie did not change much after immigration increased the number of workers by more than 15 percent. But the split of the pie certainly changed, giving far less to workers and much more to employers.

Please read the whole thing. Borjas came here from Cuba as a child, by the way.

Trump charges that Obama tried to wiretap Trump Tower

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, if I thought I’d have a quiet Saturday in terms of the blog, I was sadly mistaken.

But it’s not about me. It’s most definitely not about me.

What is it about, then? Today’s news is loaded with stories and counterstories about Trump’s recent tweets. First, the tweets themselves:

“Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” Trump said.

“Is it legal for a sitting President to be “wire tapping” a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!” the president added in another tweet. “I’d bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!”

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

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

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

So of course we get articles such as this one in the WaPo by Chris Cillizza, headlined, “Donald Trump was a conspiracy-theory candidate. Now he’s on the edge of being a conspiracy-theory president.” Other articles lean heavily on the idea that Trump offered no proof of these recent allegations.

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

It didn’t take long for people in the know to figure out what Trump was talking about. My go-to guy for this sort of thing is Andrew C. McCarthy at National Review:

To rehearse briefly, in the weeks prior to June 2016, the FBI did a preliminary investigation, apparently based on concerns about a server at Trump Tower that allegedly had some connection to Russian financial institutions. Even if there were such a connection, it is not a crime to do business with Russian banks – lots of Americans do. It should come as no surprise, then, that the FBI found no impropriety and did not proceed with a criminal investigation.

What is surprising, though, is that the case was not closed down.

Instead, the Obama Justice Department decided to pursue the matter as a national-security investigation under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). In June, it sought the FISA court’s permission to conduct surveillance on a number of Trump associates ”” and perhaps even Trump himself. It has been reported that Trump was “named” in the application, but it is not publicly known whether he (a) was named as a proposed wiretap target, or (b) was just mentioned in passing in the application.

Understand the significance of this: Only the Justice Department litigates before the FISA court; this was not some rogue investigators; this was a high level of Obama’s Justice Department – the same institution that, at that very moment, was whitewashing the Clinton e-mail scandal. And when Justice seeks FISA surveillance authority, it is essentially telling that court that there is probable cause to believe that the targets have acted as agents of a foreign power – that’s the only basis for getting a FISA warrant.

In this instance, the FISA court apparently found the Obama Justice Department’s presentation to be so weak that it refused to authorize the surveillance. That is telling, because the FISA court is generally very accommodating of government surveillance requests. Unwilling to take no for an answer, the Obama Justice Department came back to the FISA court in October – i.e., in the stretch run of the presidential campaign. According to various reports (and mind you, FISA applications are classified, so the leaks are illegal), the October application was much narrower than the earlier one and did not mention Donald Trump. The FISA Court granted this application, and for all we know the investigation is continuing.

So if you go back and look at those Trump tweets I quoted above, they clearly refer to this exact set of circumstances, although a person has to be aware of the circumstances before that person could make the connection. Getting back to Cillizza’s piece, we see that Cillizza makes a reference to the Breitbart and Mark Levin stories about this, so he’s obviously familiar with that story (and he even quotes them). But his analysis of their charges is limited to the following: “The problem here, of course, is that what Levin – and Breitbart – use as evidence for these claims are a series of seemingly unconnected events – from FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court requests to Trump joking about the Russia email hack…”

Cillizza and his fellow reporters don’t seem to want the public connecting any dots on this, although they certainly want the public to connect other dots in certain other stories they push that imply that Trump is some sort of Russian tool.

The oddest thing of all might be this tweet by Jon Favreau, who was one of Obama’s speechwriters:

I’d be careful about reporting that Obama said there was no wiretapping. [Obama’s] Statement just said that neither he nor the WH ordered it.

Well, of course Obama didn’t do so personally. And it’s certainly possible that the Obama DOJ did this all on its lonesome. It hardly strains credulity, however, to think that Obama was behind the push, although I strongly doubt he left his fingerprints on it.

I would have much preferred that Trump had written “Obama’s DOJ” in those tweets rather than Obama himself. These accusations are very explosive stuff, as Trump no doubt intended. One of the many interesting things about what’s happening today is that it seems to be based on information that was already known, although Trump refers to it as something he “just found out.” I don’t know whether that means there really is some new information, or whether he really didn’t know till now (which I doubt), or whether it’s hyperbole on his part.

One thing that does occur to me is that it’s a way to not only get the heat off Sessions, but to show the opposition that if you want to play the innuendo game, then two can play at this game.

Press bias by omission

The New Neo Posted on by

Some of the worst press bias goes under most people’s radar for the simple reason that it’s accomplished by omission. To spot an omission, you have to be aware of what is omitted, and that can only come from knowledge gleaned from other news sources (or in some cases, from your own experience).

But if people are only reading the MSM, and tweeting in an echo chamber, how would they ever learn what’s missing? It’s less of a problem on the right, for the simple reason that since so much of the MSM skews to the left, it’s harder for the right to avoid what the left is covering. However, it’s very easy for people on the left to avoid stories on the right.

Today we find two discussions of recent examples of how the press has shaped opinion by leaving things out: this piece at RedState, and this one at Ace’s. I recommend both.

Hobbes knew—but a lot of philosophers didn’t

The New Neo Posted on by

I found the following quote from Thomas Hobbes in a Powerline post discussing the curious fact that so many renowned philosophers over the years have gotten entranced with tyrannical forms of government. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here’s the quote:

[B]etween true science and erroneous doctrines, ignorance is in the middle. Natural sense and imagination are not subject to absurdity.

Nature itself cannot err; and as men abound in copiousness of language, so they become more wise, or more mad, than ordinary.

Nor is it possible without letters for any man to become either excellently wise or (unless his memory be hurt by disease, or ill constitution of organs) excellently foolish.

Actually, I don’t know about that last sentence. I think it’s highly possible to become excellently wise or excellently (that is, exceedingly) foolish, even without the help of “letters.” After all, there is some wisdom to be found in many pre-literate oral traditions, and no shortage of fools the world over.

But I do think there’s a very special kind of foolishness that can occur with a too-strong emphasis on the heady rather than the experiential. A great many of these philosophic Don Quixotes followed a tyrant who sounded good, and they needed the Sancho Panzas to ground them, but they didn’t even know it. Recall, too, that it was books that led the Don into his utopian fantasyland:

The story follows the adventures of an hidalgo named Mr. Alonso Quixano who reads so many chivalric romances that he loses his sanity and decides to set out to revive chivalry, undo wrongs, and bring justice to the world…

And as Orwell said:

There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.

Orwell himself was no slouch in the intellect department, and he was also a man of letters. But he had lived a life of experience out in the world rather than academia. It is instructive, though, to note that the brilliant Orwell was a socialist who never abandoned socialism (I discuss the possible reasons here).

I’ll close with one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite authors, Milan Kundera (from his book Immortality):

”¦[C]ommunists used to believe that in the course of capitalist development the proletariat would gradually grow poorer and poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe workers were driving to work in their own cars, [the communists] felt like shouting that reality was deceiving them. Reality was stronger than ideology. And it is in this sense that imagology surpassed it: imagology is stranger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving when people at home had nothing to eat. My Paris neighbor spends his time an an office, where he sits for eight hours facing an office colleague, then he sits in his car and drives home, turns on the TV, and when the announcer informs him that in the latest public opinion poll the majority of Frenchmen voted their country the safest in Europe (I recently read such a report), he is overjoyed and opens a bottle of champagne without ever learning that three thefts and two murders were committed on his street that very day.

”¦[S]ince for contemporary man reality is a continent visited less and less often and, besides, justifiably disliked, the findings of polls have become a kind of higher reality, or to put it differently: they have become the truth. Public opinion polls are a parliament in permanent session, whose function it is to create truth, the most democratic truth that has ever existed. Because it will never be at variance with the parliament of truth, the power of imagologues will always live in truth, and although I know that everything human is mortal, I cannot imagine anything that would break its power.

Even moderates are complaining to the Times about bias

The New Neo Posted on by

Although this piece by the public editor of the Times, Liz Spayd, was written in the summer of 2016, I just came across it. It’s worth reading, because it constitutes a small admission by the Times that it’s been getting flak from people who describe themselves as moderate politically (and even some liberals) who are complaining about the left-wing bias of the paper:

I have been here less than a month, but already I’ve discovered something that surely must be bad for business if your business is running The New York Times. It comes via the inbox to the public editor, from people like Gary Taustine of Manhattan, who writes: “The NY Times is alienating its independent and open-minded readers, and in doing so, limiting the reach of their message and its possible influence.”

One reader from California who asked not to be named believes Times reporters and editors are trying to sway public opinion toward their own beliefs. “I never thought I’d see the day when I, as a liberal, would start getting so frustrated with the one-sided reporting that I would start hopping over to the Fox News webpage to read an article and get the rest of the story that the NYT refused to publish,” she says.

And here’s an interview between Tucker Carlson and Spayd not long after the election. I found it quite fascinating. Spayd seems like an earnest, well-meaning, competent journalist of a more old-fashioned sort. It’s not that she’s not making some excuses for the Times’ bias (she is). But she’s making a lot fewer than I would have expected:

Today’s tempest: Sessions and the Russians

The New Neo Posted on by

In their continuing quest to find a nefarious connection between Trump and Russia, the latest report has to do with Jeff Sessions talking to the Russian ambassador during the campaign and then not disclosing it to Congress.

You can read all about it here if you care to. The left keeps thinking it’s found a smoking gun (or many successive smoking guns); the right finds there’s no there there:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions met with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. before the presidential election last year, his spokeswoman confirmed, raising questions about whether he misled senators who inquired about the Trump campaign’s ties to Moscow.

Sarah Isgur Flores told NBC News that Sessions did have a conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak last year. The meeting was first reported by The Washington Post.

But she said “there was absolutely nothing misleading about his answer” because Sessions was asked during the hearing about “communications between Russia and the Trump campaign” and not about meetings he took as a member of the Armed Services Committee.

According to his spokeswoman, Sessions’ meeting with Kislyak was just one of 25 conversations with foreign ambassadors in his role on the committee.

“Recuse yourself!” Democrats and much of the MSM shrieks. Or better yet, “Resign!”

I really wonder what the average not-so-very-politically-involved reader thinks on reading about this story and the way it’s being presented in the MSM.

I do know that the WaPo and the left have been busy as beavers in their unrelenting effort to find further angles on the “Trump is Russia’s puppet” meme. I also know that they will dredge up any fact, however small, and blow it up as much as possible, framing even the ordinary as something extraordinary, and that a substantial number of people won’t question that framing.

Of course, this Sessions story fits into the prior narrative about Flynn, and shows why Flynn’s resignation (supposedly because he failed to disclose to Pence, not because of anything he actually did) only encouraged the left and gave them the template for the present brouhaha:

Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, resigned last month after it was disclosed he misled Vice President Mike Pence and other senior officials about his communications with Kislyak.

Same ambassador. Same idea of non-disclosure, although the details are different.

Here’s Sessions:

In a statement Wednesday night, Sessions said: “I have never met with any Russian officials to discuss issues of the campaign. I have no idea what this allegation is about. It is false.”

Sessions obviously did not think that the questions he was being asked in his hearings—which had to do with whether the campaign, or people affiliated with the campaign, met with Russian officials—applied to his more ordinary contacts with the Russian ambassador in the course of his position in the Senate. I wish he had interpreted the questions even more broadly and said that yes, as a member of the Senate and as a member of the Armed Services Committee, he had talks with many foreign officials including the Russian ambassador. But in the hearings he was focused on the issue of campaign contacts, and it’s possible those two meetings didn’t even cross his mind.

It’s very clear that the Democrats and their allies in the MSM are going to continue with this sort of thing—the drip drip drip of stories that really don’t have much content but that are loaded with innuendo. If they seek, they will find. For Obama, they did the opposite and played cover-up.

[ADDENDUM: There’s much much more detail here about what Sessions was actually asked during his hearing, and what he answered. See also this, as well as this on what certainly appears to be an actual, bona fide lie by Sen. Claire McCaskill about the subject.]

Van Jones feels the wrath of Twitter

The New Neo Posted on by

In a NOTE at the end of this post from yesterday, I mentioned that Van Jones (a leftist attorney who had served in the Obama administration) had praised Trump’s SOTU speech, saying of Trump, “If he finds a way to do that over and over again, he’s going to be there for eight years.”

Actually, Jones said a great deal more than that about Trump’s speech:

Asked by Anderson Cooper for his reaction to the standing ovation for the widow of a Navy Seal killed in action during Tuesday’s address to Congress, Jones said: “He became President of the United States in that moment, period.”

Jones went on to add that Trump “did something extraordinary,” and that people who wanted POTUS to remain a “divisive cartoon” should be worried after the speech.

“There are a lot of people who have a lot of reasons to be frustrated with him, to be fearful of him, to be mad ”” but that was one of the most extraordinary moments you have ever seen in American politics,” Jones said of Trump honoring Carryn Owens, whose husband Chief Petty Officer William “Ryan” Owens was killed in a recent Yemen raid.

Those statements from Jones seem to be descriptive of what happened, as well as containing a warning to people who want Trump to remain a “divisive cartoon” that they shouldn’t keep barking up that particular tree because Trump’s behavior might discredit them. Jones’ remarks do not signal approval of Trump or his policies; they just state what Jones observed happening in that SOTU speech and in the mainstream reaction to it.

And yet—if you read the tweets listed in that article—you’ll see how very angry people on the left have gotten at Jones. Also, quite a few of the tweets use the word “normalize,” which seems to be the new way to express the idea that since we all know that Trump is really an inhuman monster of depravity, any statement that indicates that he might be a relatively normal human being or a somewhat normal president is anathema to us, and if you utter a single word that could lead a person to those conclusions you are the enemy as well.

Jones strayed from that party line, which is not allowed, even to utter an unwelcome truth. Perhaps especially if uttering an unwelcome truth.

Research on virtue-signaling

The New Neo Posted on by

The researchers don’t call it that, but that’s what it appears to be. And they found something very interesting:

Why do people express moral outrage? While this sentiment often stems from a perceived violation of some moral principle, we test the counter-intuitive possibility that moral outrage at third-party transgressions is sometimes a means of reducing guilt over one’s own moral failings and restoring a moral identity. We tested this guilt-driven account of outrage in five studies examining outrage at corporate labor exploitation and environmental destruction. Study 1 showed that personal guilt uniquely predicted moral outrage at corporate harm-doing and support for retributive punishment. Ingroup (vs. outgroup) wrongdoing elicited outrage at corporations through increased guilt, while the opportunity to express outrage reduced guilt (Study 2) and restored perceived personal morality (Study 3).