Which comes first, the duck or the chicken?

The New Neo Posted on by

On the “literally” thread, commenter expat asked a burning question:

Maybe you can help me figure out whether the duck who lives with my cousin’s chickens is literally transspecies. His egg was abandoned by his mother in the creek that is literally 10 feet from the chicken yard. He was hatched by one of the chickens and decided to remain with them despite the fact that he could easily escape back into the creek where his relatives swim by regularly. I haven’t checked for position papers from the LGBT community on transpecieism, so I don’t know where I stand on whether he is literally a chicken.

I long for a simpler life when you could look in a dictionary to find such answers.

Well, I don’t shy from the tough questions, but that one’s really tough. Who can fathom the mind of a chicken?

Expat’s cousin’s duck, of course, has been imprinted, although that doesn’t answer the question. It’s possible that the duck doesn’t feel that it’s a chicken, it feels that the chickens are actually ducks.

Which brings us to the wonderful YouTube, which has video on practically everything. On a hunch, I searched for something about Konrad Lorenz and imprinting. Sure enough, bingo!

And as far as whether we might be able to understand what chickens might think, let’s hear from Neruda (I assume a similar sentiment could be expressed about ducks):

…I’m tired of the harsh sea
and the mysterious earth.
I’m tired of chickens–
we never know what they think,
and they look at us with dry eyes
as though we were unimportant…

Once more, with feeling, in Spanish:

…Estoy cansado del mar duro
y de la tierra misteriosa.
Estoy cansado de las gallinas:
nunca supimos lo que piensan,
y nos miran con ojos secos
sin concedernos importancia…

[ADDENDUM: Then there’s the Churkendoose of my youth. Until I looked it up just now I thought the recording was made by Danny Kaye. Turns out it was Ray Bolger.]

Minnesota terror attack

The New Neo Posted on by

In all the furor over the New York bombings and the capture of the suspect-at-large, let’s not forget the Minnesota mall stabbings:

The man who stabbed nine people at a Minnesota mall before an off-duty police officer fatally shot him has been identified as 22-year-old Dahir A. Adan, federal law enforcement sources and two Somali community leaders who are in contact with Adan’s family said Monday.

Adan went to college in St. Cloud and worked for a private security firm at the time of the attack, the community leaders told CNN.

Shades of Orlando, where the perp had been working in security. Not exactly reassuring.

More here:

St. Cloud, a 67,000-person town about 65 miles northwest of Minneapolis, is home to one of Minnesota’s larger immigrant Muslim communities. In recent years, the community there has faced conflicts with other Minnesota residents, including incidents that have led to damage to mosques and opposition toward at least one new house of worship, according to the StarTribune…

Police and witnesses said the attacker, wearing a private security company uniform, entered Crossroads Mall on Saturday night around 8 p.m. CT. Inside the mall, he made a reference to Allah and asked at least one person if they were Muslim before he attacked…

Though the mall’s security teams were on site, the security officers were not armed.

Of the nine people stabbed, St. Cloud Mayor Dave Kleis said, three people were still hospitalized, including one person who remains in life-threatening condition.

And it’s also not the least bit surprising how Adan was finally stopped:

Amid the chaos, Jason Falconer, an off-duty police officer from nearby Avon, killed the suspect as he threatened other shoppers…

At a news conference Sunday afternoon, the mayor and police chief praised Falconer, a part-time officer and former police chief of Albany, Minnesota, for taking action. Both officials said they had viewed a surveillance tape from Macy’s which revealed details of the confrontation.

“His heroic actions are exemplary of having witnessed what he did as the suspect was lunging at him with a knife,” Kleis said. “Not only did he fire, the suspect went down, came back up on three different occasions. He protected others from being injured and potentially loss of life. Clearly, a hero.”

Clearly, we have an armed hero who was trained to react to a situation like this. It’s very fortunate that the terrorist went for the wrong man—who turned out to be the right man.

Terrorist suspect in New York and New Jersey bombings captured

The New Neo Posted on by

Ahmad Khan Rahami, a man suspected in connection with the recent New York and New Jersey bombings, has been captured after a shootout with police in New Jersey:

The FBI had earlier released a wanted poster for the 28-year-old Rahami, who was said to be operating a 2003 Blue Honda Civic bearing NJ registration D63EYB. He may be related to five people who were taken into custody for questioning by the FBI in connection with Saturday night’s bombing in Chelsea…

The governor of New York now says it looks like Manhattan bombing could be act of terrorism with foreign connection…

“This was an intentional act, but we do not know the motivation. That’s what we have to do more work on,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio. “We know there was a bombing. We will be very careful and patient to get to the full truth here.”

There are, of course, many questions. The five people were taken into custody after a “traffic stop of a vehicle of interest in the investigation.” What made this vehicle “of interest”? My guess is that either there was a surveillance video that identified a car or person (and then that person’s vehicle) in connection with the bombing, or perhaps this was a person or cell already known to police.

As for motivation, initial disclaimers that this was not a terrorist act seems to have been incorrect; we’ve seen this sort of revision often. We still don’t know for absolute certainty—as de Blasio is careful to note—but one can safely conclude, as the governor seems to have done, that it is highly, highly likely it was an act of terrorism. And not just terrorism; Islamist terrorism, either perpetrated by an official cell of a terrorist group or by a bunch of sympathizers (or perhaps just one).

Rahami is an Afghan refugee and naturalized citizen:

His last known address was in Elizabeth, N.J., the city where authorities found pipe bombs in a garbage can Monday morning.

The FBI raided the Elizabeth address in the morning. The apartment is above a restaurant run by Rahami’s father, called First American Fried Chicken.

How ironic.

The article goes on to say that Rahami junior was considered by customers to have been “a chilling presence” in the restaurant.

Here’s how the initial bombing in New Jersey unfolded, and it’s clear things might have been worse:

An explosion blew apart a garbage can along the route of a planned 5K charity race to benefit U.S. Marines and sailors that drew thousands of runners. If the start of the race had not been delayed due to a vast amount of participants, authorities said the blast would have gone off as the area was filled with runners. But the explosion occurred when few people were in the area, and no one was injured

The race was canceled after the blast, and authorities quickly determined that the explosion was more than a prank because of the sophistication of the device which had multiple pipe bombs wired together, though only one went off.

Shades of the Boston marathon, with a military connection.

The later explosion in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, thought to be connected, was more successful (at least from a bomber’s point of view). It injured 29 people.

[NOTE: As everyone except those who’ve been living under a rock for the past year knows, we have an election coming up in about seven weeks. In terms of politics, the person I can imagine this incident helping is Donald Trump.]

[ADDENDUM: As often happens, there’s a lot more detail in this British report, including the following:

The backpack was discovered in a wastebasket near Elizabeth Station by two men at around 8:30pm, Elizabeth Mayor Chris Bollwage said, adding: ‘They took the package out of the wastebasket because they thought it was of some value to them.’

Seeing wires and a pipe, the men then dropped the bag and called police – who dispatched a robot to disarm the devices.

However, footage from the scene shows the robot accidentally cutting the wrong wire on one of the IEDs, causing a huge explosion. One of the robots was damaged, but no one was hurt in the blast.

Also at 8.45pm, FBI agents in New York detained five New Jersey men on the Belt Parkway near the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in Brooklyn.

Their car was said by authorities to contain a weapons stash and bomb-making equipment. The men, who were believed to be heading to an airport, were taken to Federal Plaza in Manhattan for questioning.

Officials said the men were from the same family, that there could be more suspects at large, and that a terror cell may be operating in the area.

So if all of this is true, we learn that the men were all members of the same family, they were carrying explosives in the SUV, and the NJ wastebasket bomb was discovered by people scavenging around in the trash for something of value and finding, to their consternation, the makings of a bomb.

There’s also this on how Rahami was located, after police had announced he was a suspect and released his photo:

He was spotted sleeping in the doorway of a bar called Merdies on Elizabeth Avenue in Linden, New Jersey, not far from his home in the town of Elizabeth.

Bar owner Harry Barnes initially told him to move out of the doorway in Spanish, as he didn’t want the man to be injured on broken glass lying on the ground.

When Rahami replied in English and looked up, the owner realized who he was and ran across the street to another business he owns to call 911.

After police arrived, Rahami pulled a gun on them and began shooting. One officer was hit in the hand and another in his vest. Rahami himself was shot in the shoulder and subsequently arrested.

And then, in another touch that (if true) will probably come as no surprise, we have this:

An investigation by Dailymail.com revealed Monday that the Rahamis had filed a complaint against local police, whom they said persecuted them, forcing the family to close their restaurant earlier than necessary on evenings.

The suit also said that locals had met them with racist language and told them Muslims do not belong in the area.

It was dismissed with prejudice – meaning that it cannot be resubmitted to court – in 2012.

This was a very serious terrorist attempt that fortunately went mostly wrong. That bomb (or actually, bombs) at the Elizabeth, NJ train station could have injured or killed large numbers of people but was found and detonated before rush hour began.

Thinking about it, and noting how much of the action centered in New Jersey, I’m wondering whether this whole group wasn’t already generally suspect and then the location of some of the bombs gave police an idea they might be the culprits.]

On the Flight 93 election article

The New Neo Posted on by

By now many of you have probably read the “Flight 93 Election” essay by Publius Decius Mus, a piece that’s gone viral. It was recommended to me by a great many people, and among them are no small number of people I respect—even people I respect very very deeply.

So of course I read it, with that sort of recommendation. And I also very much expected to like it—why wouldn’t I? I didn’t expect to agree with everything in it, of course; that would be rather odd, although possible. But I certainly expected to agree with the basic premises.

So I was surprised when I did not. And since people have continued to praise it so highly, I figured I’d better write about it.

Near the beginning of the essay, Publius states what appears to be the foundation of much of his argument, that the election is like Flight 93:

…[C]harge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You””or the leader of your party””may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.

Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

This is the old familiar argument with a Flight 93 twist, which is the only new thing about it. Otherwise, it’s the idea of sure death versus Russian roulette, one we’ve argued again and again on this blog, and with which I disagree as an analogy. My most detailed discussion of the argument occurred in this post, so just go there and read if you want to refresh your memory.

But if it’s Flight 93—as Publius says—and the voters are the passengers (the country is the plane, I suppose), who are the hijackers? I assume he thinks it’s Hillary and the left. Where is Trump? Is he one of the passengers? Is he waiting on the ground for a safe landing , to take over afterwards? Is he in the cockpit with the hijackers, battling it out, too?

To continue the Flight 93 metaphor, however, Democrats and leftists who are voting for Hillary think Trump is the hijacker trying to crash the plane, and Hillary and the left are on the other side fighting to rescue it. And many people on the right who have a lot of trouble voting for Trump think that Trump and Hillary are battling it out in the cockpit as hijackers and that each will crash the plane (whether they want to or not), but that they’ll take it to somewhat different places to crash it. And they think that perhaps Trump will take it to a place that will cause even more casualties and more suffering than Hillary would.

Publius doesn’t seem to consider this thought. Now, you don’t have to agree with it to need to at least consider it, rather than pretend it doesn’t exist as an argument. But right at the outset of the essay, I noticed that and was troubled by the omission.

Then Publius went on to his next theme. This quote summarizes it best, I think, and can be found in paragraph five and in a couple of paragraphs that follow:

One of the paradoxes””there are so many””of conservative thought over the last decade at least is the unwillingness even to entertain the possibility that America and the West are on a trajectory toward something very bad…

If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed “family values”; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere””if they are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe””mustn’t they?””that we are headed off a cliff.

But it’s quite obvious that conservatives don’t believe any such thing, that they feel no such sense of urgency, of an immediate necessity to change course and avoid the cliff.

I’m going to be uncharacteristically blunt here and say that my reaction to this was “WTF??” Because I barely recognize what he’s talking about, and I spend a lot of time—a lot of time—interacting with conservatives both on this blog and elsewhere.

Oh, there’s definitely a group like that, a strain like that (and hey, maybe they’re even correct). But as far as I can see, the main adherents to that point of view is a small group of pundits—both well-known and not so well-known. At any rate, those are the people Publius goes on to criticize in his essay, some of them by name such as Matthew Continetti, on whom he spends a great deal of time.

Excuse me but, once again, WFT? I’m sure Matthew Continetti has his following, but for the rank and file conservative he’s hardly a blip on the radar screen. In the eleven-plus (!) years I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve mentioned him three times in passing. But I don’t mean to pick on Continetti (although Publius does); it’s true for me of the lot of them. And I think mine is a common attitude among a great many conservatives.

As I read Publius’ essay, it seems to me that this “what, me worry?” pundit class has really got his goat, and it also seems to me that he way over-emphasizes both their influence and how many people on the right share their views. Because, from my sojourn here in the blogging and blogosphere trenches, I can say that it’s not the prevailing sentiment. The prevailing sentiment has been we’re in a heap of trouble, and have been for years—desperate desperate trouble. That point of view is hardly confined to Trump supporters.

The disagreement is over the remedy for that trouble. I could write a book (literally!) about some of the questions I will merely touch on here, but I’ll summarize by saying that the main disagreement is whether voting for Trump has any chance of changing that. A great many people who cannot stand Trump (note that I don’t say “neverTrumpers,” because that’s a much much much smaller part of the group I’m referring to) and will either not vote for him at all or will vote for him with fear, trembling, and a sense of hopeless foreboding, cannot stand him precisely because they think that although we are in very desperate straits he will not help at all and is even somewhat likely to make the situation worse. Again, to write all the scenarios they see as possible would necessitate that book of which I spoke, but for now I’ll just say there are myriad ways in which many people on the right foresee that they could happen. Agree with them or disagree with them, but Publius has ignored them and acted like they don’t exist.

Actually, if many of the readers here and on many other blogs I read regularly are at all representative, they feel such a sense of urgency and danger to this country that they feel it may be too LATE to avoid the cliff; that we may be already in free fall. But even more importantly, they just don’t (for the most part) think that Donald Trump will stop that fall or change that trajectory; au contraire. They think he is both a symptom of liberty’s death throes and an instrument for hastening its death just as much as Hillary Clinton is, or perhaps even more (just a different kind of death).

So it’s hard for me to read the article with approval when the author makes a mistake so glaring and so basic it leaps out at me at the outset. To me, the Publius article does not address what’s really going on except among a smallish and very elite (pardon the expression) group of people. I’m not sure what circles Publius runs in, but they are very very different ones from mine.

There’s more in the article, though–much more (and I will not get to all of it here—because aforementioned “book”). He writes that “All of Trump’s 16 Republican competitors would have ensured more of the same” (“open borders, lower wages, outsourcing, de-industrialization, trade giveaways, and endless, pointless, winless war”). Now, I don’t know what the author of the piece was doing during the primaries of 2016, but I was busting my butt researching a great many of those 16 people, and that’s just not true. The parts I particularly object to are “open borders”(Ted Cruz?? No! Fiorina? No) and “endless, pointless, winless war.” Also, the Iraq war was a success by 2011, and only Obama’s abandonment made it a “failure.” One can argue about whether the Iraq war was worth it and whether it should have been begun, but it wasn’t winless except for the premature and complete retreat, and I certainly don’t see a hunger for more of the same in many of those sixteen GOP candidates.

Other things in the article that practically made my blood boil–Republicans “help ratify” single-payer? Excuse me? Not a single Republican even voted for Obamacare. And I bet that guy never read this post of mine (which is not about single-payer; just about Obamacare and the GOP more recently).

And Trump, a guy who even fairly recently had praised socialized medicine (something not one of the other candidates has ever done)—HE’S the only one who can stop this; the others couldn’t have? What is Publius smoking?

The American phenomenon Publius is actually talking about as the big problem, the one that has made people on the right (and not just Trump supporters!) desperate is what people in the blogosphere generally know and have been aware of for years–the Gramscian march of the left through institutions such as education, the press, religion, TV, film. People who don’t support Trump are of the opinion that Trump will not change that, but most of them don’t disagree that it’s not only a problem, it’s the problem.

A President Cruz would not have changed that, either, by the way. Only activism (hi, Eric! see just about any of his comments on this blog) will change that, if indeed anything can change it at this point. As Breitbart—the real Breitbart, not the Trump acolytes who’ve taken over the blog that bears his name—said, politics is downstream from culture, and boy is it ever true.

Trump’s birtherism, past and present

The New Neo Posted on by

For some reason, this story, which is the talk of the internet right now, doesn’t interest me enough to write about it. More Trump blah blah blah, and then more blah blah blah about the Trump blah blah blah.

Trump rode the birther controversy for a while—particularly when Trump was thinking of running for the presidency in 2011-2012 but dropped out very early. And then he mostly dropped it. Now he’s really dropped it and said he thinks Obama was born in the US. That’s the summary version, without any of the details.

But it occurs to me that you may want to talk about it. So here’s your opportunity.

Or you can consider this an open thread to talk about anything you want.

The subject matter of my blog drafts

The New Neo Posted on by

In the post yesterday in which I mentioned that I’ve got 400+ drafts on this blog and about 100 on my old blog, reader Tom Murin asked: “How many of the drafts are about dance or makeovers?”

Some are, but it’s about the same percentage of the whole as you find in the posts on the blog. The subject matter of the drafts is just as varied as the posts—really all over the place in topic. But I thought it might be interesting to mention a few random ones that might be coming down the pike—some day:

Blue-green confusion
Swimming and the old man
History of shotgun weddings
Nuclear decisions and the chain of nuclear command
Taking religious texts literally
Are blacks disproportionately shot by police?
Two Emilys and one Robert
Early Communist: William Godwin
When the right falls for the left’s spin
How to vet immigrants without banning Muslims

I’ll stop there, but obviously I could go on. Four hundred is a lot of drafts. There’s quite a range of things that have grabbed my interest enough to write something about them, but they’re often such large topics that I don’t quite finish them and thus they end up in that drafts folder. Or, I write a post and I decide it’s kind of meh and I’m dissatisfied with it; not really quite good enough to pass muster, but I figure I’ll get back to it some day and improve it. Often I never do get back to it, knowing how way leads on to way.

Tomorrow I’m planning on posting that Flight 93 discussion

The New Neo Posted on by

Sometimes I just get overbooked. I’ve got my piece on that viral Flight 93 essay half written, but there are other things I need to do right now.

Including a few frivolous ones.

I plan to post it tomorrow. Right now it’s in my voluminous drafts folder, where much of my greatest wisdom resides 🙂 :

It turns out that I’m a hoarder of post drafts. I didn’t see this coming””it developed slowly, over many years. Although blogging is not up there with digging ditches in terms of labor, churning out several blog posts a day is nevertheless work. It can be a challenge, but for most bloggers””who usually suffer from or are blessed with a hefty dose of ideophoria””getting ideas for enough posts is not a problem. More often, the problem is getting too many ideas and becoming scattered, or in my case researching posts and writing half of them but then putting them on hold because they become too unwieldy. I assume I’ll go back and finish them later on, but then new events happen, new thoughts come, new articles beckon, and the old ones pile up in a drafts folder that grows and grows and grows.

The upshot is that my old blog has about 150 old drafts still on it, some long and almost finished, and some short and mere sketches of an idea. The other day I noticed that the number of drafts on this blog (which I still think of as my “new blog,” although I’ve been here since 2007) was approaching 600.

I wrote that post about two and a half years ago, and I did succeed in weeding out quite a few, enough to cut the number in half. It’s crept up again, though, to around 420. My file cabinets and closets do the same thing—creep, creep, creep, necessitating the periodic and much-needed weeding.

The debate gatekeepers close the door on Gary Johnson and Jill Stein

The New Neo Posted on by

Neither Gary Johnson nor Jill Stein has met the threshold for the first debate and therefore will not be allowed to particpate:

One of the criteria was that all candidates needed to be polling at 15 percent in these five polls as of Thursday.

Among those polls Hillary Clinton was at 43 percent, Donald Trump was at 40.4 percent, Johnson had 8.4 percent and Stein averaged 3.2 percent.

I realize that some sort of limits must be set if we don’t want to have a bunch of extraneous candidates on the stage. But 15% seems too high a bar for a third-party candidate. Gary Johnson is drawing a very significant number of votes, and barring him from debates means that he has little chance of drawing any more, because a debate would give him a tremendous amount of publicity and visibility.

By the way, the consensus is that Johnson probably draws votes more or less equally from Hillary and Trump. Stein draws them more from Hillary.

Why people use the word “literally” incorrectly

The New Neo Posted on by

I just noticed that a commenter here has used the word “literally” incorrectly in a recent thread. I won’t call attention to who it was; the error is so common that it pretty much could have been anyone.

But why is this particular error so very common? Why do otherwise erudite and grammatically correct people sometimes slip up on its correct use?

One reason is that the word has a somewhat counter-intuitive meaning, or at least a counter-intuitive penumbra. “Literally” is the opposite of “metaphorically”—“literally” means actually, in cold hard literal fact. However (and this is the point), the word “literally” also somewhat sounds as though it might mean something like “in literature; in the literary sense.” In other words, metaphorically. I think that is the first confusion that might throw people off.

The second confusion arises from people’s desire to add emphasis to a point they are making (see, I did it just then with italics, a device I tend to overuse). How to emphasize something? You can use a word such as “really,” but that sounds sort of weak. Literally somehow manages to sound like an even stronger version of “really.” Only trouble, is, that’s not what it means at all.

Literally.

As Trump rises…

The New Neo Posted on by

…it occurs to me that Democrats are now experiencing what a lot of people on the right experienced during the primary season: the sense that they don’t know how to stop him, that he just might keep coming and coming like some sort of strangely-coiffed Energizer bunny or Terminator (depending on the pop reference you prefer).

As Trump’s poll numbers go up, the fear rises. Here’s another interesting piece on a way that Trump might have a path to victory, but there are plenty of such pieces lately. The shock is palpable, and it’s a shock those of us who preferred a different GOP candidate (and our numbers are legion) have already been through, including some of the stages of grief.

Some have reached acceptance. Some have not. I sometimes think I still may be in the “bargaining” phase. I’ve said many times I’m not a NeverTrumper, but I’m not sure how to characterize myself except to say this has been a rough year politically, and that both prospects (Hillary or Trump) fill me with despair and arouse anxiety for the future. In order to vote, I will have to quantify that despair and anxiety and decide which is a greater burden: voting for Trump and being responsible in part for what he does, or abstaining (or voting third party) and thus helping to enable the election of Hillary (I will not vote for her).

Many Democrats are now probably wishing they had a Hillary replacement. The problem was always that none seemed to surface. It’s no accident that the field was so small; there just wasn’t much new blood there. In the GOP there was plenty of new blood, but Donald Trump managed to beat it with his brand of Geritol.