Your tax dollars, working for you…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and for the Clintons:

Bill Clinton’s staff used a decades-old federal government program, originally created to keep former presidents out of the poorhouse, to subsidize his family’s foundation and an associated business, and to support his wife’s private email server, a POLITICO investigation has found.

Taxpayer cash was used to buy IT equipment ”” including servers ”” housed at the Clinton Foundation, and also to supplement the pay and benefits of several aides now at the center of the email and cash-for-access scandals dogging Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

This investigation, which is based on records obtained from the General Services Administration through the Freedom of Information Act, does not reveal anything illegal. But it does offer fresh evidence of how the Clintons blurred the line between their nonprofit foundation, Hillary Clinton’s State Department, and the business dealings of Bill Clinton and the couple’s aides.

This story is interesting in a number of ways. It’s not that it’s a surprise; it’s not. It’s interesting to me because this is Politico, usually very sympathetic to everything Democratic. It’s also interesting because it shows how it’s possible to do something that feels very wrong and yet not be doing anything that’s technically illegal. And lastly, it’s interesting because of how different things used to be in the days when that “decades-old federal government program” was originally set up:

The Act authorizes the GSA to fund the pensions, correspondence, support staff and travel of ex-presidents. It was passed in 1958 to “maintain the dignity” of the presidency by helping former commanders in chief avoid hard times like those that befell Harry S. Truman.

The Clintons have not fallen on hard times, even without this extra money:

The analysis also found that Clinton’s representatives, between 2001, when the Clintons left the White House, and the end of this year, had requested allocations under the Act totaling $16 million. That’s more than any of the other living former presidents ”” Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush ”” requested during that span.

The program supplemented the income of Clinton’s staff, while providing them with coveted federal government benefits, alleviating the need for the Clinton Foundation or other Clinton-linked entities to foot the bill for such benefits.

The Politico article is very long; read the whole thing for the details.

By the way, Trump’s campaign financing and business mix is convoluted enough that I don’t think he’d be much better on this score, despite his supposedly great wealth.

On Trump’s visit to Mexico

The New Neo Posted on by

Trump has a low bar to clear: all he has to do to go up in the polls is to appear sane, steady, rational. The more he can do that, the more chance he has of actually beating Hillary Clinton.

Yesterday, Mexican President Peé±a Nieto helped him to do just that by treating him not as a lunatic or as a buffoon but as a normal statesman on a normal diplomatic visit. Trump is, of course, fully capable of acting somewhat “normal” in the public eye if he chooses to, at least for short periods of time; we just haven’t seen enough of it (and we’ve seen too much impulsive behavior that alarms people). And it isn’t clear how long he can sustain such conventional steadiness or under what circumstances.

Naturally, the press had to distort what happened and make it seem as though there was some huge disagreement about—not the wall, nor who was going to pay for the wall, but whether the two men had discussed who was going to pay for the wall. Trump is hardly my favorite character on earth, as everyone who reads this blog knows, but this press-generated (in my opinion) brouhaha is somewhat ridiculous:

The two politicians said they talked about trade, immigration, and security, and each stressed their mutual respect. But, according to Trump, they opted not to discuss the most explosive issue on the table: the GOP nominee’s repeated demands that Mexico pay for a wall along the border.

“We did discuss the wall, we didn’t discuss payment of the wall,” Trump told reporters at a brief press conference alongside Peé±a Nieto after their meeting. “That will be for a later date.”

Peé±a Nieto declined to address Trump’s statement from the podium, but his office rushed to counter Trump’s version of events after the press conference ended, creating confusion about the content of their discussions.

“At the start of my conversation with Donald Trump I made it clear that Mexico will not pay for the wall,” Peé±a Nieto tweeted in Spanish from his official account afterwards. “After that, the conversation moved on to other topics and unfolded in a respectful manner.”

As Bill Clinton might say (that is, if his wife wasn’t Trump’s opponent), it depends what the meaning of “discuss” is. I say that a discussion needs the participation of both parties in the talk, not just one making a statement and the other listening to it. So I see no disagreement between the two versions. A “discussion” is a back and forth, a negotiation—an attempt to do a “deal,” if you were, or at least commence one or set up the possible parameters for one. A statement of an opening move by one party is not a “discussion,” it’s a statement.

Between now and November, the more times that Trump can create optics that make him seem presidential, or even marginally presidential, the better it will be for him. This represents a very real change in direction for him and his campaign, if (big “if”) he can sustain it and keep these calm photo-ops coming.

Hillary’s problems are different. She has to staunch her own bleeding, the continuing revelations of her violations of the basic rules of security and the evidence of more and more corruption and lies.

Orwell on Tolstoy vs. Shakespeare: the theme and variations vs. the symphony

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I’m not becoming Tolstoy-obsessed, although I’ve written two days in a row on him. However, I think that the topic of both posts is not really Tolstoy per se, but larger philosophical questions about the good life, politics, and art.]

Yesterday, commenter “chuck” linked to a great essay by Orwell on Tolstoy and his virulent criticism of Shakespeare. I’d never before read this work of Orwell’s, and it was a pleasure. I agree with it nearly 100%.

I had vaguely remembered that, back in his curmudgeonly old age when Tolstoy had turned into an esthetic bully, he had put down a lot of writers for being insufficiently didactic (among them, his former writing self). Just as Tolstoy denied himself pleasure for moral and spiritual reasons in his later life, and hoped that others would follow suit, he advocated denial of pleasure in writing—literature now had to be didactic or he hated and despised it.

Shakespeare’s protean nature, his creation of teeming worlds with every manner of being and person in them, was anathema to the moralizing elderly Tolstoy. What’s hard to understand, though, is why Tolstoy says he had always hated Shakespeare (Orwell’s essay discusses this at some length). Perhaps this statement of Tolstoy’s was a form of revisionist history, but I’m going to take him at his word and assume he had in fact always hated Shakespeare. A curious thing in a writer.

In the last half of his life Tolstoy didn’t just renounce his own earlier literary works by turning over the copyrights to his wife (at the same time he was writing fiction that excoriated both her and the institution of marriage). He renounced them by also repudiating them aesthetically. The world continued to love them, though, and continues to this day.

But when I think of Tolstoy’s earlier sprawling novels such as War and Peace, even though it’s fiction, it occurs to me that most of the fictional characters are based very strongly on people he actually knew, such as himself, his wife, and his wife’s family. It occurs to me that it is possible that (unlike Shakespeare) Tolstoy was not really the sort of writer, even when young, who could write well about things extremely “other” than himself and those around him. And in fact the first literary works for which Tolstoy became famous had been an autobiographical trilogy couched as novels, called Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth.

Perhaps his main focus was always himself, a topic on which he worked almost endless variations.

I have long thought that in general fiction writers can be roughly divided into two camps: those who create worlds and those who explore the world they know (or write riffs on it). It’s a form of something I’ve written about before, the theme and variations vs. the symphony:

I’ll let author Milan Kundera take over on the subject now, since he was actually my inspiration in the first place (from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting). Here he is describing his musicologist father who, during the last ten years of his life, had lost the ability to speak:

Throughout the ten years of his illness, Papa worked on a big book about Beethoven’s sonatas. He probably wrote a little better than he spoke, but even while writing he had more and more trouble finding words, and finally his text had become incomprehensible, consisting of nonexistent words.

He called me into his room one day. Open on the piano was the variations movement of the Opus 111 sonata. “Look,” he said, pointing to the music (he could no longer play the piano). And again, “Look,” and then, after a prolonged effort, he succeeded in saying, “Now I know!” and kept trying to explain something important to me, but his entire message consisted of unintelligible words, and seeing that I did not understand him, he looked at me in surprise and said, “That’s strange.”

I know of course what he wanted to talk about, because it was a question he had been asking himself for a long time. Variation form was Beethoven’s favorite toward the end of his life. At first glance, it seems the most superficial of forms, a simple showcase of musical technique, work better suited to a lacemaker than to a Beethoven. But Beethoven made it a sovereign form (for the first time in the history of music), inscribing in it his most beautiful meditations.

Yes, all that is well known. But Papa wanted to know how it should be understood. Why exactly choose variations? What meaning is hidden behind it?

That is why he called me into his room, pointed to the music, and said, “Now I know!”

And, somehow, Kundera the son finally understood (or thought he understood; the father wasn’t telling) what his father meant:

I am going to try to explain it with a comparison. A symphony is a musical epic. We might say that it is like a voyage leading from one thing to another, farther and farther away through the infinitude of the exterior world. Variations are like a voyage. But that voyage does not lead through the infinitude of the exterior world. In one of his pensées, Pascal says that man lives between the abyss of the infinitely large and the abyss of the infinitely small. The voyage of variations leads into the other infinitude, into the infinite diversity of the interior world hidden in all things.

…Variation form is the form in which the concentration is brought to its maximum; it enables the composer to speak only of essentials, to go straight to the core of the matter. A theme for variations often consists of no more than sixteen measures. Beethoven goes inside those sixteen measures as if down a shaft leading into the interior of the earth.

The voyage into that other infinitude is no less adventurous than the voyage of the epic. It is how the physicist penetrates into the marvelous depths of the atom. With every variation Beethoven moves further and further away from the initial theme, which resembles the last variation as little as a flower its image under a microscope.

Man knows he cannot embrace the universe with its suns and stars. Much more unbearable is for him to be condemned to lack that other infinitude, that infinitude near at hand, within reach….

It is not surprising that in his later years variations become the favorite form for Beethoven, who knew all too well…that there is nothing more unbearable than lacking the being we loved, those sixteen measures and the interior world of their infinitude of possibilities.

The wide-ranging Shakespeare is the symphony, the narrow elderly Tolstoy the theme and variations. And although in his younger writing years Tolstoy appeared for a while to be symphonic (certainly War and Peace appears that way), that was either a short-lived experiment or it was in fact an illusion, and his scope was probably always more narrow and focused and self-referential than it had seemed.

Music lovers—and literature lovers—usually make room for both in their hearts, the theme and variations and the symphony, even if writers themselves tend to specialize in one or the other when they work. In his later years Tolstoy wanted to write universally, but because he wrote didactically he ended up narrowing himself still further. You might say his theme and variations became less varied and less tuneful. But every now and then a melody still broke through.

The leftist president of Brazil is ousted by the Brazilian Senate

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a case of impeachment/conviction:

Brazil’s Senate voted 61-20 to convict Ms. Rousseff on charges that she used illegal bookkeeping maneuvers to hide a growing budget deficit, deemed an impeachable crime in a nation with a history of hyperinflation and fiscal mismanagement. Two-thirds of Brazil’s 81 senators, or 54 votes, were needed to remove Ms. Rousseff from power…

Well before the trial’s final phase opened last week, Ms. Rousseff’s administration had been upended by a brutal recession and a massive corruption scandal at the state oil company that splintered her political base and devastated her popular support. Her departure marks a humiliating end for Brazil’s first female president, and closes 13 years of rule by her leftist Workers’ Party…

Sen. Ronaldo Caiado of the right-wing Democrats party said Ms. Rousseff’s ouster was a repudiation the Workers’ Party and Ms. Rousseff’s predecessor and mentor, Luiz Iné¡cio Lula da Silva, a former metal worker who became president in 2003 and set about expanding social programs to aid Brazil’s poorest citizens.

Without “this populist, Bolivarian and corrupt group,” Mr. Caiado said, “society will be able to breathe easily, even knowing the economic difficulties, the level of unemployment.”

I doubt it.

I think it’s probably a good thing that the leftist president was ousted, and it’s interesting to see that the Brazilian Senate was able to rouse itself to the task. On the other hand (and I have no way of knowing, because not only do I not have my finger on the pulse of Brazil but I don’t have my finger anywhere in the vicinity), my guess is that corruption is very widespread in the country and neither party is the least bit immune.

In fact, here’s a discussion about her successor:

But others say Mr. Temer’s ascension won’t placate a restless public fed up with the political status quo and disgusted by widespread corruption across all major parties. His Brazilian Democratic Movement Party is among those tainted by the graft scandal at Petré³leo Brasileiro SA, or Petrobras, as the state oil company is known. Mr. Temer was loudly booed at the opening ceremonies of the recent Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

“The ”˜throw the bums out’ feeling about politics””that will not be satiated by Dilma’s removal,” said Matthew Taylor, a professor at American University in Washington and an authority on Brazilian politics. “The kind of smoky-room feeling about the way impeachment has proceeded gives a very sort of unsavory taste to the whole impeachment process.”

Indeed, many Brazilians believe Ms. Rousseff’s fall had less to do with official impeachment charges than her mishandling of South America’s largest economy, which moved from 7.6% GDP growth in 2010, when she was first elected, to the worst downturn since the Great Depression during her second term.

Well, we already know that impeachment is less about crimes and more of a political process. And doesn’t that “throw the bums out” mentality sound familiar? It’s an understandable impulse, but it often leads to worse things than what it replaces.

In fact, Rousseff herself was (and this may sound familiar as well) someone who had never held political office before being elected president in 2010. However—unlike some non-politicians we know who are running for the top job as an entrance-level position—Rousseff was an old party hand and loyalist.

Meanwhile, her successor must try to put Humpty Dumpty back together again:

“Impeachment does not change this scenario much,” said Joé£o Augusto de Castro Neves, a Eurasia Group analyst. “It eliminates the risk of Dilma returning, but [Temer] must deal with the real problems of governance.”

In the end, all presidents have to do that as the real world comes crashing in.

Tolstoy on Communism—and a lot of other things

The New Neo Posted on by

Leo Tolstoy lived from 1828 to 1910, and was probably just as famous for his political and religious/social beliefs as he was for his writing (maybe even more so). Tolstoy was a Titan of energy and creativity who later in life attracted many followers and hangers-on eager to surf the wave of the Great Man.

He also gave his wife quite a roller coaster ride, particularly in later life when he became a fanatic of self-denial but still was part of the landed nobility with a large estate and many dependents, a situation over which he and his wife struggled for decades. You can read about the Tolstoys’ astoundingly complex (and literary; both kept voluminous diaries) marriage—one that produced fourteen children, several novels, and lots of angst—here, here, and here.

Tolstoi began early adulthood as a pleasure-seeking aristocrat, fond of gambling and licentiousness, but still (in his very Russian way) mulling over those deeper questions of life and existence. With his marriage in his late 30s to a lovely young woman of 18, he embarked on a passage through husband- and fatherhood, and later in midlife had a serious spiritual crisis and depression from which he emerged a very changed man. From henceforth on, he considered literature that lacked a didactic spiritual massage to be garbage, and a life without self-abnegation and sacrifice and a simple faith was likewise. This is the extremely famous later-life Tolstoy whom many people revered as a near-saint, the one with whom you may be familiar from the many photos taken of him (at first I thought this one was colorized, but according to Wiki it’s the first color photo portrait ever taken in Russia):
tolstoy

Many people seem to think that Tolstoy was a man of the left, and some even blame him for influencing the Russian Communist Revolution. But he was not a statist; he could better have been described as an anarchist with a Christian bent (he is actually considered the founder of something called Christian anarchism). Is anarchy left or right? That’s an ancient and complex argument and I don’t want to mire myself in it right now. Suffice to say that anarchists are not statists; they want the state obliterated, and so did Tolstoy.

Tolstoy’s own anarchy seems to have been rooted in his personal crisis, which seems in turn to have been activated (at least in part) by his very strong sense of guilt. Here’s an excerpt from the book Married to Tolstoy (Sonya was the name of Tolstoy’s wife):

But how, without government, could civilization survive? wondered Sonya, who had no more hope than Turgenev of what he called “Christian Nihilism.”…Tolstoy must have known that there were appalling slums in Moscow, but because [during his crisis] for the first time he had been to look at them, he was so much shocked by social injustice that all of a sudden he couldn’t even bear to see his family enjoying their meals—the kind of meals at which he himself habitually ate far more than anyone else. And his personality was so strong that in his presence no one could be so little sensitive as to suffer from his disapproval, even if it remained unvoiced. Everyone developed a sense of guilt and became miserable. Why, indignantly asked Sonya, should innocent children suddenly be made to feel in disgrace for living in the way in which their father had himself been brought up? Did Leo assume that people who behaved normally were necessarily indifferent—that no one but himself was capable of compassion?

The ever-mercurial Tolstoy wasn’t always in such a bad mood, even during that period. But the self-denying strain in his personality become more marked as he got older, and disciples came to visit and at times to live with the family at the country estate where they spent most of their time. Tolstoy did not live to see the Revolution, although his wife (who outlived him by nine years) did. But he showed his prescience by writing in 1904 (also from the book Married to Tolstoy):

The greatest enemy to mankind is this Social Democracy [the Bolshevik Party]. It is preparing for new slavery. It teaches a future good without a present betterment. It promises golden streets without the bloody Gethesmane. It will regulate everything. It will destroy the individual. It will enslave him. It will make chaos out of cosmos, breed terrorism and confusion, which only brute force will be able to destroy.

I think you could safely say he was not a fan.

[NOTE: I put this post in the category “literary leftists,” a series of mine. I don’t think it fits, exactly, because I don’t think Tolstoy was a leftist. But I put it there anyway because as an anarchist he occupied a sort-of-leftist sort-of-rightist gray area. He was also a political changer, too, although not of the conventional sort.]

Is there evidence for a “monster” Trump vote?

The New Neo Posted on by

A reader kindly sent me a link to this article at American Thinker by Thomas Lifson, which gives some hope to Trump supporters that the so-called “Monster vote” for Trump may be emerging. Lifson bases his piece on this post at the admittedly and unabashedly pro-Trump Conservative Treehouse.

Lifson writes:

The principal electoral strategy of Donald Trump has been the bet that non-voters in recent elections will turn out, with some of them registering to vote for the first time. This is jokingly known as the “Monster Vote,” both because of its size and because the elites look down their noses at many of this demographic cohort. Existing models of the electorate used by most polls do not account for these hypothetical voters, which is the comfort Trump supporters offer one another in the face of unceasing negative news and media attacks.

This “Monster Vote” hope is another sign of a campaign that’s behind (in addition to the signs I’ve already described here). But just because a hope is hopeful doesn’t mean it’s not true and won’t pan out, and I suppose this one could. And the Conservative Treehouse piece indicates there is actual evidence that it might indeed be true, based on the fact that a great many of the voters in the upcoming Florida primary are people who have never before voted in a primary.

Here’s what the Treehouse has to say:

Throughout this entire year there have been indications the “Monster Vote” is very real, but you have to look carefully to see them ”“ and, obviously, you must inoculate yourself from conformational bias…

It’s a tenuous discussion because everyone wants to belittle anyone talking about it…

Well, the left-leaning Tampa Bay Times has just dropped a big bit of data which seems to also confirm the existence of this phenomenon:

“More than 25% of the inbound mail-in or absentee ballots in the upcoming primary, have NEVER VOTED BEFORE“:”¦

The article goes on to say that if this holds true for other states, it’s encouraging for Trump and the Monster Vote. The information in the Treehouse piece is in turn based almost entirely on this article in the Tampa Bay Times. Here are some quotes that the Treehouse offers from the Tampa Bay article [emphasis the Treehouse’s]:

“This is huge,” said Marian Johnson, senior vice president of political strategy for the Florida Chamber and one of the foremost experts on Florida campaigns and politics. “I can envision election night when the votes are counted that certain people win that nobody thought had a chance, and that being attributed to this trend.”

As of Thursday morning, more than 855,000 primary ballots had been cast by mail. More than a quarter of those votes came from Floridians who had not voted in the last four primaries and another 20 percent from people who voted in just one of the last four primaries.

In other words, these are not “likely voters” surveyed by most pollsters or targeted by sophisticated political campaigns. The trend applies to Democrats and Republicans alike and across the state, said Johnson, who was shocked when she first spotted the trend developing weeks ago.

Well, I did something pretty novel—I read the entire Tampa Bay Times article. And I discovered quite a few things that the Treehouse had left out.

First of all, notice that these are people who haven’t voted in the last four primaries. There are plenty of people who vote in general elections who don’t ever vote in primaries; primary turnout is generally a lot lower than in the general. So this could easily be tapping into the phenomenon of people who regularly vote in regular elections but not in primaries.

And in fact, the Tampa Bay newspaper article actually states that fact, and I quote: “The vast majority of these ‘new’ primary voters are regular general election voters already, Johnson said.”

Let me repeat: the newspaper article stated that the vast majority of these new primary voters are not new voters at all, they are merely new to the primaries in Florida.

Secondly, these are both Democrats and Republicans (this is something the Treehouse piece does acknowledge). They could be every bit as motivated to vote against Trump as for him.

Thirdly, they are voting in a state primary that has little or nothing to do with the presidential election. The Florida primary involved is being held on August 30 (that’s today), and it is a state primary emphasizing state offices, as well as for nominees to the US Congress, and has nothing to do with the presidential race. This is another fact that would be easy to miss from the Treehouse piece, which indicates that the primary is a Florida primary, but doesn’t say what the primary is deciding.

Fourthly, there are several simple explanations for the upsurge in registrations of voters in the state primary in Florida. They are stated in the Tampa Bay newspaper article, and are also left out of the Treehouse piece. Here’s the quote from the newspaper:

The Republican-leaning chamber started targeting these infrequent primary voters several weeks ago…[L]ocal elections supervisors increasingly are promoting and encouraging people to vote by mail. It’s more convenient for voters, less expensive to manage than in-person early voting, and the more people who vote before election day, the less likely polling places are to be overwhelmed.The combination of Floridians automatically receiving mail ballots and the media focusing constant attention on the presidential election seems to be prompting more people to weigh in on the primary elections that usually generate far lower turnout than the general election.

It really doesn’t seem to be much of a mystery what’s going on here. The state has been targeting and encouraging voters to participate in primaries more than they have before (primaries so far have generally been very low turnout), as well as sending them ballots in the mail to facilitate the process. So it makes perfect sense that more of them are going to decide to vote in the primaries who may not have done so before. Plus, keep remembering that these are new primary voters, not new voters in terms of the general.

You can draw your own conclusions about why Treehouse left out this information. I think it’s one of two things. Either they are aware of the information and are hiding it, or it’s a form of what they themselves warned against: confirmation bias. People sometimes stop reading an article once they’ve found the evidence they think backs up their own point of view and their own hopes, and they miss the information that would go against what they want to believe.

As for Lifson, who is a writer I respect, my guess is that he was reading the Treehouse piece and reporting on it.

At any rate, as far as the Monster Vote goes, I started out by saying it could happen, and that’s still true. But it’s a construct based on hope, with little or no evidentiary foundation at this point.

Penrose: intelligence and consciousness, artificial and otherwise

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve had many an argument—um, discussion—with my son on the topic of artificial intelligence. How far can it go? Could it ever include consciousness? Suffice to say we have not answered the question.

Nor have scientists, although there is no lack of theories and discussion. Most of those theories are (to coin a phrase) over my head. But since consciousness is something we all possess, it is tempting to believe we all have something worthwhile to say about it.

Along the way I came across the theories of eminent physicist Roger Penrose, who doesn’t think there will ever be a scientific way to explain consciousness or a way to create it artificially because it is some sort of quantum rather than analog process. Many many other scientists disagree:

There have been scientific attempts to explain subjective aspects of consciousness, which is related to the binding problem in neuroscience. Many eminent theorists, including Francis Crick and Roger Penrose, have worked in this field. Nevertheless, even as sophisticated accounts are given, it is unclear if such theories address the hard problem. Eliminative materialist philosopher Patricia Smith Churchland has famously remarked about Penrose’s theories that “Pixie dust in the synapses is about as explanatorily powerful as quantum coherence in the microtubules.”

That latter bit—about the microtubules, not the pixie dust—is Penrose’s description, which really doesn’t seem to explain a whole lot except to say “it’s a mystery.”

While I was reading about all of this and trying to comprehend at least some parts of it, I became interested in Penrose himself, who sounds like an interesting guy with a protean mind. How’s this for an impressive heredity (and if you click on the link to each name, you’ll find even more—what a family tree!)?:

Roger Penrose is a son of psychiatrist and mathematician Lionel Penrose and Margaret Leathes, and the grandson of the physiologist John Beresford Leathes. His uncle was artist Roland Penrose, whose son with photographer Lee Miller is Antony Penrose. Penrose is the brother of mathematician Oliver Penrose and of chess Grandmaster Jonathan Penrose.

It might have been interesting to be a fly on the wall and have listened to some conversations at their house while Penrose was growing up.

This is puzzling to me, though:

Penrose is an atheist. In the film A Brief History of Time, he said, “I think I would say that the universe has a purpose, it’s not somehow just there by chance … some people, I think, take the view that the universe is just there and it runs along ”“ it’s a bit like it just sort of computes, and we happen somehow by accident to find ourselves in this thing. But I don’t think that’s a very fruitful or helpful way of looking at the universe, I think that there is something much deeper about it.”

Now, maybe there’s something I’m not understanding here (in addition to everything else I’m not understanding here), but it seems to me that someone who claims to believe that the universe has a purpose cannot also call himself as an atheist. An agnostic, perhaps, but atheist? What would that purpose be, if not something that could be described under the general category of “religion”? The religion could be something like a form of Taoism—but still, a religion nonetheless? One doesn’t have to believe in a personal, continually-interventionist-being type of deity to not be an atheist, but to believe in some form of religion.

[ADDENDUM: For those interested in the topic of how atheism or religious belief might relate to science, I highly recommend The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions.]

News of the day, fashion of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

Terrible presidential candidates continue to do terrible things.

Anthony Weiner has another Weiner incident, and his wife Huma says she’s finally leaving him (for now, anyway).

Everybody talks about it all.

That’s about it.

Oh, and then there’s the really important news, lead story on Yahoo home page today: this lovely fashion which appeared at the MTV Awards on some pregnant person named Laura Perlongo, who is the fiancee of some actor/producer named Nev Schulman who was the somewhat hapless focus of the movie “Catfish”:

Perlongo

If you are asking “who on earth is Laura Perlongo?” the answer is pretty much “Nev Schulman’s pregnant fiancee who dispensed with her shirt at the MTV Awards.” And if you’re asking “who is Nev Shulman?” the answer is pretty much “the Catfish guy whose pregnant fiancee…etc. etc..”

And if your real question is “why the **** should I care?”, my answer is that maybe you shouldn’t. And if your question is “Then why are you featuring it?” my answer is that (a) it’s better than talking about Trump and Hillary every single day; and (b) it’s another symptom of the decline in societal standards of propriety, as well as the ascent of a bizarre sort of body narcissism.

Sometimes that narcissism is combined with a focus on the nastily-named “baby bump” as a kind of trophy to display (I wrote about the phenomenon here, and also about post-preganancy baby “bumps” here).

And if you think there’s some connection between all the things in this post, you’re probably right.

[NOTE: By the way, about the grammar of that last sentence—yes, I know that “between” is used for two and “among” for more than two. But it seemed to me that after the word connection, “among” doesn’t quite work. I tried to look it up and didn’t find a definitive answer. So I went with my gut—as it were.]

The greatest makeovers

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m here to announce another vice. This is a new one, although it also involves an old one—YouTube video chain-watching.

Chain-watching is when you go from one video on a topic to another, sort of like eating a bagful of potato chips. Suddenly you look up from your computer and it’s 3 AM.

My latest discovery is a guy who does makeup and hair makeovers, mostly of middle-aged women, although some are older and some younger. Now, this may not sound very interesting to most of you, but it’s more interesting than it seems, truly. And it’s very interesting to me—not only because I’m a woman of a certain age, but because I’ve always loved makeovers. They’re part of my fascination with change, be it of mind or emotions or body. The first type of change, mind, explains my fascination with political change. The second, emotions, is probably what drew me to training to be a therapist. And the third involves things like these makeovers.

Even as a teenager I had a strong interest in hair and makeup. I don’t think my parents knew what to make of it in such a bookish child, although I had other strong interests as well that vied with my academic bent—dance being one of them, of course. But I was so into hair and makeup that I used to cut out photos from magazines and make a little scrapbook, the only scrapbook I can ever remember making, and in high school and then in college I had a small side business of making up my friends and cutting their hair, for special occasions.

My parents discouraged me, but I persisted. Now with YouTube, the field has greatly proliferated, and these makeover videos are part of the fruit. The ones I’ve been watching are by someone called The Makeover Guy, and every now and then I may present some of my favorites here. The thing about these videos is that the physical transformation is only a small part of it. The truly gripping aspect (to me, anyway) is the transformation in these women’s affect. You can see them come to life and bloom before your eyes. It’s not just about vanity, either. It’s about people treating them like they matter, and about them getting a sense of heretofore undreamed-of possibilities.

I also find that most of the women in the videos are really, really likeable as people. The videos have the advantage of being quite short, too (the better to chain-watch, my dear):

Winning at Monopoly

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an article that purports to tell you how to win at Monopoly. It has a lot of stuff that anyone who’s played much Monopoly already knows: orange and green properties are good, for example, and nobody lands on Boardwalk much.

How that transfers to strategy I’m not sure. It’s not like anyone shuns owning the orange properties, do they? But you can’t always get what you want, in Monopoly as well as life or Rolling Stones songs.

I used to play a great deal of Monopoly when young. A great, great deal—when we weren’t playing cards or hopscotch or jacks or engaged in jumping rope. That’s what we did—oh, and also that bouncy ball game girls play that went “A my name is…”. In those days, when the internet was hardly a gleam in anyone’s eye and even TV had just a few channels (and in the after-school afternoons they were devoted mostly to soap operas—BORing!), we played games and those were our favorites.

I used to play these games with a neighbor—we’ll call her “Sue”—who was about my age. Actually, she was five months older, as she used to tell me archly and often because it conferred some sort of superiority on her. Sue always won at Monopoly. You may think that to be hyperbole—always? Surely not always!

Yes, always. She had her own never-fail formula. I used to wonder what it was; I still don’t know. Others suggested it involved cheating. But if it did I never detected a particle of it. As far as I could tell it involved unbounded confidence in herself, a confidence that was displayed in every other aspect of her life and which I didn’t share about myself. Can the conviction that you will always win every game you play be responsible for actually winning every game? Even in a game such as Monopoly, that is mostly chance?

Dunno. I merely report: Sue always won. She later became a bigshot lawyer, and I think she usually wins there, too. We’re still friends, but we don’t play Monopoly anymore.