What Khalid Sheik Mohammed revealed

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not sure how much of this book I believe. But it certainly sounds like an interesting read:

The world has heard almost nothing from KSM in the 15 years since the 9/11 attacks, but Mitchell has spent thousands of hours with him and other captured al-Qaeda leaders. Now, for the first time, Mitchell is sharing what he says KSM told him.

Mitchell is an American patriot who has been unjustly persecuted for his role in crafting an interrogation program that helped stop terrorist attacks and saved countless lives. He does not shy from the controversies and pulls no punches in describing the interrogations. If anything, readers may be surprised by the compassion he showed these mass murderers. But the real news in his book is what happened after enhanced interrogations ended and the terrorists began cooperating.

Western leaders: we come to praise Castro, not to bury him

The New Neo Posted on by

The death of Fidel Castro has further exposed the long slow drift of the West towards leaders who lean so far left they are unable to tell the truth about a man who was—as Trump put it—“a brutal dictator who oppressed his own people for nearly six decades.”

Instead, we get a carefully-worded weasel statement from President Obama, for example, from whom never a discouraging word is heard about Castro. But Obama’s statement is practically hard-hitting compared to some of the fulsome [see NOTE *1] praise heard from many other Western leaders. As Marco Rubio said:

Some of these people you’re talking about are people that have never had to live… near him, or anywhere around him or been impacted” by what he’s done, Rubio said. “Others, quite frankly have anti-American sentiments and have always viewed Fidel Castro as a person who stood up to America.”

“And others quite frankly are left-leaning — they just agree with his ideology,” he said.

One of the most over-the-top responses had been that of Canada’s Trudeau, whose remarks about Castro were so positive, and so carefully evasive in their wording, that they have unleashed a Twitter storm of humorous ridicule in which people imagine how Trudeau might have eulogized some of the most evil people in history. Very funny indeed. But there’s nothing funny about what has happened to the West—its moral and political decay, and its contempt for its own citizens who can still see, for the moment, anyway, what their so-called leaders think them unable to see.

It’s not an accident that so many Western heads of state think their people might swallow the idea that Castro was a really nice man who held onto power for over fifty years in Cuba (with his brother taking up the slack after that) merely because he was such a great guy and so excessively beloved. The Western media has been pushing that story for a long, long time, as chronicled here.

Not everything goes back to Donald Trump, even though it may seem so these days. But this story does, because it is hard to not be struck by the contrast between Trump’s response and that of so many of the other Western leaders. It takes a lot to make Trump seem like a breath of fresh air, but they continually manage to do so. This is precisely the sort of thing that has made Trump seem to a lot of people like a welcome relief from the claptrap that emanates from the mouth of so many other heads of state.

That’s not to say that some of his GOP opponents—and in particular I mean Cruz, as well as the previously-quoted Rubio—wouldn’t have been just as frank, particularly on this issue. But they are not going to be president, and Trump is.

[NOTE *1: I mean “fulsome” in its earlier meaning not just of “abundant” but of “offensive.”]

[NOTE 2: The title of this post is a reference to Mark Antony’s funeral oration for Caesar.]

[ADDENDUM: Among all the other things the left conveniently ignores is Castro’s record on gay rights: “it should never be forgotten that [Castro] was also an oppressor, torturer, and murderer of gay people.”]

Neil Sedaka

The New Neo Posted on by

Yes, Neil Sedaka. Why not?

As for the why, I was listening to the song “Breaking Up is Hard to Do” the other day. I hadn’t heard it in a gazillion years, and I got curious about him. So I did some research and discovered that this bubble gum pop singer and songwriter of my youth is still going, still touring, and chirpy and upbeat as ever.

And as with many of those older musicians, his story is more interesting than I had thought:

Sedaka was born in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Mac Sedaka, was a taxi driver and a Sephardi Jew of Turkish origin…

In 1947, he auditioned successfully for a piano scholarship to the Juilliard School of Music’s Preparatory Division for Children, which he attended on Saturdays. His mother wanted him to become a renowned classical pianist like the contemporary of the day, Van Cliburn, but Sedaka was discovering pop music. When Sedaka was 13, a neighbor heard him playing and introduced him to her 16-year-old son, Howard Greenfield, an aspiring poet and lyricist. They became two of the legendary Brill Building’s composers.

Sedaka and Greenfield wrote songs together throughout much of their young lives. When Sedaka became a major teen pop star, the pair continued writing hits for Sedaka and a litany of other artists…

[After several songs of Sedaka’s failed] RCA Victor had lost money on “I Go Ape” and “Crying My Heart Out For You” and was ready to drop Sedaka from their label. But Sedaka’s manager, Al Nevins, persuaded the RCA executives to give him one last chance.

Knowing he would not get another chance if he failed again, and desperate for another hit, Sedaka himself bought the three biggest hit singles of the time and listened to them repeatedly, studying the song structure, chord progressions, lyrics and harmonies””and he discovered that the hit songs of the day all shared the same basic musical anatomy. Armed with his newfound arsenal of musical knowledge, he set out to craft his next big hit song, and he promptly did exactly that: “Oh! Carol” delivered Sedaka his first domestic Top 10 hit, reaching No. 9 on the Hot 100 in 1959 and going to No. 1 on the Italian pop charts in 1960, giving Sedaka his first No. 1 ranking.

The science of songwriting.

Here’s Sedaka singing away, just a few years ago:

And the following clip shows off Sedaka’s Julliard-trained chops as a pianist. Impressive. And equally impressive is the length of those fingers (the actual piano playing starts around minute 5:27, but I left the rest in because it’s kind of fun):

Sedaka looked somewhat Andy-Kaufmanesque back then, didn’t he?

Decorum and respect: who decides?

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “groundhog” asked this question in the “Hamilton” thread:

The same free speech can be trash to one person and treasure to another. The same speech you or I treasure may be considered worthless to others. And although decorum and respect are important, who gets decide when it is important enough to ignore decorum and respect?

Only the speaker, imo. Do you think otherwise?

My answer is that yes, I think otherwise.

The speaker gets to decide something, of course. The speaker gets to decide what he/she wants to say, and when and where.

And then each person who hears or reads those remarks gets to decide what to say and do in response, including his/her opinion on whether the first person was rude or obnoxious or should have kept his/her mouth shut.

There is also usually a very general public consensus within a society, as well as within different segments of that society, on what is okay and what is not. This is not completely uniform, nor is it uniform between subgroups. And it changes over time, as anyone who’s been alive as long as I have can clearly see.

Sometimes there are formal rules for each venue, as there used to be in the school system when I was a student (I assume there still are, but who knows these days?). There are rules in the workplace, as commenter “Kyndyll G pointed out here. There are also rules within each family, as well as general trends, and the trend for many decades has been for more and more permissiveness. There are basic rules for decorum in church, or at a function like a wedding. There are still rather strict rules for behavior in a courtroom; outbursts are not well-tolerated, and there is something called contempt of court. Contempt of court isn’t limited to disobeying a court order (although it can include that), but can also consist of “being rude or disrespectful to legal authorities in the courtroom,” and people may be sanctioned for such behavior by the court.

Earlier in that same Hamilton thread, commenter “groundhog” had also brought up the example of Joe Wilson, the Republican House member who yelled out “You lie!” during a speech Obama made to Congress in September of 2009. You may recall that Joe Wilson faced quite a bit of judgment after his outburst. Who got to decide whether what he did was a breach of decorum? Well, the press, the public, Obama, Wilson himself, and members of the House of which he was a member.

Here’s how it went down:

Then-White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel immediately approached senior Republican lawmakers and asked them to identify the heckler and urge him to apologize immediately. Members of Congress from both parties condemned the outburst. “Totally disrespectful”, said Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) of Wilson’s utterance. “No place for it in that setting or any other and he should apologize immediately.” Wilson said later in a statement:

This evening I let my emotions get the best of me when listening to the President’s remarks regarding the coverage of undocumented immigrants in the health care bill. While I disagree with the President’s statement, my comments were inappropriate and regrettable. I extend sincere apologies to the President for this lack of civility.

Obama later accepted Wilson’s apology. “I’m a big believer that we all make mistakes”, he said. “He apologized quickly and without equivocation and I’m appreciative of that.”

House Democrats called on Wilson to issue a formal apology on the House floor. Wilson refused, saying in a televised interview that, “I believe one apology is sufficient.” Congressional Republicans agreed, and opposed further action. On September 15, the House approved a “resolution of disapproval” against Wilson, on 240”“179 vote.

The people from Wilson’s district in South Carolina also got to make a decision. They decided to re-elect Wilson, and he’s still a member of the House.

Fidel Castro is dead at 90

The New Neo Posted on by

The news comes as something of a shock—not because Castro has died, but because he was still alive till now and only 90 years old. After all, this was a man who came to power during the Eisenhower presidency, and was thwarted along with Khrushchev by JFK during the Cuban missile crisis that frightened me and my contemporaries so terribly in our youth.

So it seems he should have been a great deal older than 90 by now. But since he took office at the very young age of 32, it makes sense.

Castro began as a much-lauded figure. As the Miami Herald puts it:

Millions cheered Fidel Castro on the day he entered Havana. Millions more fled the communist dictator’s repressive police state, leaving behind their possessions, their families, the island they loved and often their very lives. It’s part of the paradox of Castro that many people belonged to both groups.

It’s not really such a paradox; revolutionaries and their revolutions often have a habit of betraying those who supported them, once the transition is safely over. And then they have a way of digging in.

Castro was exceptionally well-dug-in:

As he changed the face of Cuba, he remapped South Florida as well, transforming it from the southernmost tip of the United States to the northernmost point of Latin America. The suffering of the refugees he sent pouring into Miami eventually turned to triumph as they forged economic and political success.

He was a spellbinding orator who was also a man of action. His tall and powerful build was matched by an outsized ego, boundless energy and extraordinary luck that carried him to victory as a guerrilla leader in 1959 against nearly impossible odds, then helped him survive countless plots hatched by his countless enemies.

Every newspaper will have an article (or several) today on Castro’s life, and this will probably continue for quite a while to come. He was one of the 20th Century giants, and I don’t mean that in a good way. As the Miami Herald writes, Castron was “provocative” on the world stage.

Fellow dictators and leftists tended to love him; those interested in liberty and human rights to hate him. And they’re dancing in the streets today in Miami:

“We’re not celebrating the death of a person. That would be morbid,” she said. “We’re celebrating the beginning of the end of a dictatorship, of a genocide.”

That was a common theme for many dancing in the streets on Saturday. They know that Cuba won’t suddenly change overnight, that Cuban President Raéºl Castro remains in charge and that the powerful communist government the brothers put in place will not suddenly topple.

But Joseph Valencia said Fidel’s death was the first crack, the first tangible sign of hope that communism could end in Cuba and a new era of democracy could finally take hold.

Let us hope.

Black Friday: don’t forget Amazon and neo-neocon

The New Neo Posted on by

[BUMPED UP: Scroll down for new posts.]

It’s the day after Thanksgiving, otherwise known as Black Friday. The day to wait patiently in store lines for bargains—in-between bites of turkey salad sandwich, doses of Tums, and the ritual of making turkey carcass soup.

But neo-neocon readers needn’t wait in those lines if you (act of shameless self-promotion coming up) just use neo-neocon as the portal for your Amazon holiday gift purchases. Click on any of the Amazon widgets in the right sidebar (or go here if for some reason the widgets aren’t showing), and everything you buy during that visit will send a tiny bit of money my way, and it won’t cost you one extra cent.

So now it’s time to relax and enjoy eating those leftovers to your heart’s content.

amazon.jpg

[NOTE: This post is a slightly edited version of a previous post.]

Climate change blog

The New Neo Posted on by

I know I’ve recommended Judith Curry’s blog before, but I want to do it again because of what she’s written since the election on the issue of Donald Trump and AGW. Curry is one of the most objective and reasonable of the major climate scientists writing today, in an atmosphere in which objecitivty is no mean feat and requires no small amount of courage.

As for Romney…

The New Neo Posted on by

…there are reports that “some” in the Trump camp think he should be required to apologize to Trump before becoming his Secretary of State. The “some” that the article names is Mike Huckabee:

“There’s only one way that I think Mitt Romney could even be considered for a post like that and that is he goes to a microphone in a very public place and repudiates everything he said in that famous Salt Lake City speech, and everything he said after that,” Huckabee said, referring to a famous anti-Trump speech Romney gave in March.

I dunno, Mike. I think a great alternative would be for Trump sycophants such as yourself to form a line and run Romney through the gauntlet, and then place him in the stocks. After that, make him swear fealty to his lord on bended knee. A hairshirt might be a nice touch, too.

It’s unclear who Huckabee is speaking for, except Huckabee. But I doubt he’s alone. The question is whether he’s freelancing, or doing this at the behest of a group, or whether Trump is also involved in the message. It’s a sort of virtue-signaling (I hate that term, but sometimes it’s appropriate) to Romney-haters and the most avid and nasty group of Trump supporters (not all Trump supporters by any means) that even if Romney is chosen he will be humbled for his perfidy in speaking against The Leader. It’s a bit ironic, since one of the ideas behind choosing Romney as Secretary of State would be to mend fences and unify the Party. So does the Huckabee stance mean the Romney thing is off? Or is it meant as a fish thrown to the Romney-haters prior to choosing Romney, against their wishes?

Your guess is as good as mine.

The obligatory “the electors should vote for Hillary” articles

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s one by law prof Lawrence Lessig in the WaPo, and here’s some backup from Martin Longman in the Washington Monthly, with a bit of quibbling on the details.

What are these articles about? After all, it’s pretty much a certainty that there won’t be a revolt by an enormous group of rogue electors. And it’s pretty much a given that most electors have always been free to go their own way (except in the states that forbid them to do so, although Longman seems to think those laws forcing them to comply with their state’s decision wouldn’t stand up in court—see more on that question here).

Electors ordinarily comply with the wishes of their states, and certainly not enough of them have ever defied those wishes to make a particle of difference. The phenomenon is known as that of the “faithless elector”:

Despite 157 instances of faithlessness as of 2015, faithless electors have not yet affected the results or ultimate outcome of any other election for President and Vice President of the United States.

The Electoral College mechanism and the peculiar phenomenon of faithless electors provided for within it, was, in part, created as a safety measure not only to prevent a scenario of tyranny of the majority, but also to prevent the use of democracy to overthrow democracy itself. American founding father Alexander Hamilton writing to Jefferson from the Constitutional Convention argued of the fear regarding the use of pure direct democracy by the majority to elect a demagogue set out to harm the minority rather than work for the benefit of all citizens…

Twenty-one states do not have laws compelling their electors to vote for a pledged candidate. Twenty-nine states plus the District of Columbia have laws to penalize faithless electors, although these have never been enforced. In lieu of penalizing a faithless elector, some states, such as Michigan and Minnesota, specify the faithless elector’s vote is void, though no state has yet had cause to enforce such a provision.

As a commenter to the Longman article points out:

First, the party that wins the state sends its electors to the electoral college, so you’d be asking Republicans to reject their own victor, and I don’t think there’s much hope of that happening. Secondly, doing this would break the system, and would justify relatively extreme counterreaction by Trump supporters. Whether that would rise to level of civil war or not, I do not know, although it is certainly the sort of thing that would have set off a civil war during Roman history.

Not gonna happen, and I submit that the authors of both articles know it’s not gonna happen. So what’s the point of writing them? To stir up anger, hope, and turmoil among Democrats who are eager to delegitimize Trump as president, and also to discredit the institution of the Electoral College, which liberals and leftists tend to believe works against them and the pure democracy they believe would favor them.

That same commenter I already quoted went on to say that “the electoral college is a horrible institution with no redeeming values, and the system is now broken.” That’s a common point of view among Democrats, and it’s absurd. The system is not broken and the Founders did not intend it to be a pure democracy.

The Electoral College was meant to do exactly what it has done: keep a few large population centers from dominating a national election and protect the power of the states as entities. Those who want to abolish the Electoral College should be consistent and abolish the Senate as well, because it is run on a very similar philosophy. Actually, the Senate is even more non-representative of population density than the Electoral College, since in the Senate each state is given exactly the same number of senators (offset by the House, run on the opposite lines), whereas the number of electors from each state in the Electoral College represents a sort of compromise between equality for states and balancing their power along the lines of their actual populations.

It’s that “order Amazon through the neo portal” time of year again

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s that time. Again.

Christmas, Chanukah, and whatever other holiday might suit your diverse fancies are all coming up sooner than you think. So I’m encouraging you to feel their hot panting breaths on your neck, and to solve all your gift-giving dilemmas by turning to that online colossus, Amazon.

And if you use those widgets on my right sidebar to click through for all your Amazon purchases (now and at any other time of year) you will also be giving a small but still not insignificant gift to neo-neocon (it adds up, folks), and all without spending any extra money yourself. What could be more wonderful?

I thank you all in advance, and I thank all of you who’ve already done your shopping through my blog. I’ll be bumping this up and/or re-posting it every now and then until Christmas.

[NOTE: In case you have ad blocker or something of that sort, and the Amazon widgets don’t show up on your computer, go here. You can also click on any Amazon book link within a post and anything you order during that click-through gets credited to me. I believe it’s true even for things you put in your cart but don’t order till a bit later, although there’s a time limit on how long they can be there and still get credited when ordered (I’m not sure what that limit is, though, so best to order sooner rather than later).]

Happy Thanksgiving!!

The New Neo Posted on by

freedomfromwant

I happen to like Thanksgiving. Always have. It’s a holiday for anyone and everyone in this country—except, of course, people who hate turkey. There are quite a few of those curmudgeonly folks, but I’m happy to report I’m not one of them. Even if the turkey ends up dry and overcooked, it’s nothing that a little gravy and cranberry sauce can’t fix. And although the turkey is the centerpiece, it’s the accompaniments that make the meal.

My theory on turkeys is that they’re like children: you coax them along and just do the best you can, but as long as you don’t utterly ruin or abuse them, they have their own innate characteristics that will manifest in the end. A dry and tough bird will be a dry and tough bird despite all that draping in fat-soaked cheesecloth, a tender and tasty one will withstand a certain amount of abuse.

One year my brother and I were cooking at my parents’ house and somehow we set the oven on “broil,” an error that was only discovered an hour before the turkey was due to be done. It was one of the best turkeys ever. Another time the turkey had turned deep bluish-purple on defrosting and was so hideous and dangerous-looking it had to be abandoned. Another terrible time, that has lived in infamy ever since, my mother decided turkey was passe and that we’d have steak on Thanksgiving.

Since I like to eat, I am drawn to the fact that Thanksgiving is a food-oriented holiday with a basic obligatory theme (turkey plus seasonal autumnal food) and almost infinite variations on that theme. Sweet potatoes? Absolutely—but oh, the myriad ways to make them, some revolting, some sublime. Pie? Of course, but what kind? And what to put on it, ice cream, whipped cream, or both?

For me, there are three traditional requirements—besides the turkey, of course. There has to be at least one pecan pie, although eating it in all its sickening sweetness can put an already-sated person right over the top. The cranberry sauce has to be made from fresh cranberries (it’s easy: cranberries, water, and sugar to taste, simmered on top of the stove till mushy and a bright deep red), and lots of it (it’s good on turkey sandwiches the next day, too).

The traditional stuffing in my family is non-traditional: a large quantity of cut-up Granny Smith apples cooked in fair amount of sherry as well as a ton of butter till a bit soft; and then mixed with prunes, almonds, and one Sara Lee poundcake reduced to crumbs by crushing with the hands.

Thanksgiving is one of the few holidays that has a theme that is vaguely religious—giving thanks—but has no specific religious affiliation. So it’s a holiday that unites. It’s one of the least commercial holidays as well, because it involves no presents. It’s a home-based holiday, which is good, too, except for those who don’t have relatives or friends to be with. One drawback is the terribly compressed travel time; I solve that by not usually traveling very far if I can possibly help it.

The main advantage to hosting the day is having leftovers left over. The main disadvantage to hosting the day is having leftovers left over.

This year I’m thankful for many things. The fact that I’m still alive and not too decrepit. Family and friends. America’s chance to take a deep breath and set itself on a better course, if we can.

I wish you all a wonderful Thanksgiving Day, filled with friends and/or family of your choice, and just the right amount of leftovers!

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post, somewhat edited.]