[BUMPED UP] Last day of my asking for money this cycle

The New Neo Posted on by

[BUMPED UP: Scroll down for new posts.]

This is the last day I’ll be asking you for money this time—although of course, you’re free to donate even when I’m not asking.

Please click on my Paypal “donate” button (hint hint: it’s on the right sidebar, above the Amazon widget, which is also a handy and helpful gadget to use). I’ve noticed that a few readers have set up a system for themselves whereby they automatically contribute a certain amount through Paypal each month. Don’t feel at all pressured to do that, but it’s a mighty fine system.

I give a very special thanks in advance to all of you who so kindly donate money to help keep this blog going, and who have already donated money. Even small amounts add up, if enough people contribute. But whether you choose to donate money or not (and I certainly hope you do!), I thank all the readers here, be they lurkers or commenters, sporadic or regular. We have some good times, don’t we, despite the often-troubling state of the world?

Is bird poop canceling out cow flatulence?

The New Neo Posted on by

No, that’s not a joke title. See this:

Between the months of May and September, tens of millions of migratory seabirds converge on the Arctic where they eat, breed and poop.

Over time, the nitrogen in seabird droppings breaks down into ammonia, and it’s estimated that colonies emit some 40,000 tons of it into the atmosphere every year.

Now, researchers believe that has a knockon effect in cloud formation…

‘Our chemical-transport model simulations indicate that the pan-Arctic seabird-influenced particles can grow by sulfuric acid and organic vapour condensation to diameters sufficiently large to promote pan-Arctic cloud-droplet formation in the clean Arctic summertime.

‘We calculate that the resultant cooling tendencies could be large’…

As for cows, the jury is out, but it seems the evidence is mixed for farts (see this) but fairly clear for burps.

The rise of the New Yawkas

The New Neo Posted on by

It was sometimes remarked that the Trump vs. Hillary campaign pitted New Yorker against New Yorker. And unlike Hillary, Trump is a real New Yorker, born and bred the city.

But the bipartisn New Yorker presence continues. Rudy Giuliani is being considered as Secretary of State, and he’s a native New Yorker too, one who spent his entire political life there.

And now Chuck Schumer has been selected by Democrats as their new minority leader in the Senate. He’s a New Yorker through and through.

And let’s not forget Bernie Sanders, who although a 60s transplant to Vermont was a Brooklynite till then.

It strikes me as odd, since until recently the political “wisdom” was that politicians from New York City didn’t appeal to the country at large. But a lot of that sort of “wisdom” turns out to be not so very wise.

The MSM has a transition mission, too: keep the panic going

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s been a mere week since the shocking and momentous election of 2016, and the Trump camp is dealing with the first stages of its transition from campaign mode to governing mode.

But they’re not the only ones making a transition. The public is making a transition from an especially brutal, bitter, and just plain strange campaign year to the idea of the presidency of a man without experience in government, and who also has unusually high unfavorables for an incoming chief executive. A goodly number of people are already in a highly fearful state at the prospect. That contrasts with the jubilation of the pro-Trump camp, and the guarded optimism of people like me who very much want him to do well but have reservations about him and have adopted a hopeful “wait and see” attitude.

And then there’s President Obama and his team. Hillary is dealing with defeat, but the defeat is also for Obama. This isn’t the transition he’d hoped; that’s for sure. He is not only leaving the job he’s held for eight years and the power he’s reveled in, but he’s leaving it not to the heir apparent who would have continued his legacy, but to someone committed to dismantling it.

And yet Obama has been gracious to Trump and counsels acceptance to Americans and the world, at least so far. He’s been a bit less gracious to Hillary, whom he blames for her (and his own) loss. It can’t be the least bit easy for him, but it’s never been easy for him to look in a mirror and find anything the least bit wanting.

But then there’s the MSM, who have a transition to make, too. They emerged from this election year almost totally discredited, and that’s quite a feat for a group that was already plenty discredited enough. Some people think their biggest error was to fail to predict the election results, but I don’t happen to share that notion because the vast majority of people made the same error, including many people who supported Trump but were not optimistic about his winning. No, the MSM’s biggest error was its generally biased pro-liberal political reporting, just as it always is, and this time the bias (once Trump was safely nominated, that is) was especially clear.

Not only has the press now had to change from campaign mode to “President-elect Trump” mode, but it has had to do so while licking its prodigious wounds. It is no secret that most of the MSM consists of highly partisan Democrats, and the Trump victory—which includes a Senate and therefore Congress in Republican hands, about which predictions were wrong, as well—has to be especially difficult for them.

But I’m happy to report that they seem to be recovering. Unfortunately, their recovery includes reporting that is almost ludicrously critical of Trump for things that in a Democrat would probably not be spun that way, and this occurs at a time when they have squandered whatever lingering credibility they may have had.

This doesn’t mean that no one believes the NY Times when it reports on all the Trumpian transition “turmoil.” Of course many people do believe, and that’s the point. The Times’ target audience is not you and me, it’s the people who are already primed to be very frightened at the prospect of Trump, and I would imagine that they full well believe the Times’ reporting on this. And their numbers are hardly inconsequential; the Times is still the authority to a lot of voters.

Now, everyone who reads this blog knows my opinion of Donald Trump. I certainly have some anxiety about how his administration will play out. I plan to criticize him when he stumbles. The Trump presidency may end up as a fiasco, or it might end up being really really (to coin a phrase)”great.” I’m keeping an open mind, and I’m very much hoping that the ultimate results of this election fall much closer to “great” than “fiasco.”

But I’m planning to wait and see what happens, and I would counsel everyone to do the same.

No doubt an Obama-to-Clinton transition would have gone much more smoothly. But so what? Is there some correlation between transition smoothness and successful governing? What’s more, how do we know there’s any significant turmoil in the Trump transition at all? Whose word are we supposed to take these days? The MSM will criticize (and base its criticism on the reports of Obama officials, by the way, as noted at RedState).

And MSM stories like this one seem almost ludicrous (headline: “As Trump Leaves Press Behind for Steak Dinner, Incoming Admin Already Showing Lack of Transparency”):

In a highly unusual move, President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday night left his Manhattan residence without notifying the reporters covering him or giving any indication of where he was going.

The maneuver seemed to deliberately limit access to the media.

The only way the press eventually ascertained his whereabouts was after a Bloomberg reporter, who happened to be dining at the 21 Club, tweeted a photo of Trump and some of his transition team in the Midtown steakhouse.

Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks later told NBC News. “He is having dinner with his family.”

A week after the election, Trump hasn’t yet held a press conference, the longest any recent president has waited to speak to the press. That continues a weeks-long drought that’s been going on since mid-summer, when Trump last answered questions from the press.

Can anyone blame him?

Imagine if it had been Hillary Clinton. My guess is that the stories about the dinner would be puff pieces about how president-elect Hillary is warmly bonding with her happy family over her well-deserved victory. And I would also guess that those “transition turmoil” pieces would instead be descriptions of how Hillary is thoughtfully trying to get it all just right, and is not afraid to shake up the team when necessary.

However, one thing I’ve noticed the MSM is bipartisan about is its anger at those who would deny it unlimited access. For example, the press actually criticized Hillary’s failure to give press conferences during the campaign.

Biased reporting leaves us all in the dark. But facts are stubborn things. Trump and his administration will either make a lot of errors with dire consequences, or they won’t. And we’ll have to look past the anti-Trump anti-GOP MSM, as well as the biased pro-Trump sources, to try to figure out what’s really happening. It will take quite a while for this to become at all clear, so I caution patience plus alertness.

Trump, hypocrisy, and Schrodinger’s Cat: opening the box

The New Neo Posted on by

The day after the election I was talking to a friend, a political moderate who was a NeverTrumper and who voted for Hillary, but who was feeling surprisingly relieved after the election. However, this person was also vehemently saying that one of the worst things about Trump is that he’s such a hypocrite. I replied (partly as a joke but partly in all seriousness) that one of the advantages of hypocrisy is that it keeps a person flexible.

And that in Trump’s case, the freedom to back off from some of his most extreme positions could be a good thing.

Now that Trump has been elected president and there’s no turning back, what I called his “mutability” during the campaign could be an advantage. When choosing a nominee or a president, I want someone who tells the truth about his/her beliefs and plans, and is consistent. How else can a voter evaluate what we might be getting into if this person is elected? It’s especially important if the candidate has never held office and therefore has no political track record at all, as was the case with Trump. So during the primaries and in the lead-up to the election, Trump’s volatility, impulsiveness, and the mutability of his promises and beliefs were huge red flags.

Now Trump is the president-elect. Short of some enormous, unlikely, and unforeseen event, he will become the president in less than three months. Now things are starting to happen in the prospective Trump administration, and they’re not just talk. People are being appointed to positions, and each appointment says something about him. He is making statements in a non-combative atmosphere (if any atmosphere around a naturally combative person such as Trump can properly be called non-combative).

Let’s take as an example the subject of immigration. Way back in the summer and fall of 2015, I spent a lot of time explaining how many different points of view Trump had expressed on the subject, including deporting virtually all illegal immigrants, letting people back in, and a history of support for amnesty. I explained that he wasn’t the only one of the candidates with hardline immigration positions, either (see this). I wrote that there are inherent logistical and legal stumbling blocks involved in building a wall that are part of the reason it hasn’t been finished, and that lack of will isn’t the only factor and that Trump or anyone else would have to deal with these impediments, too.

Trump supporters would sometimes say that what Trump said mattered and he would stick to it, and they’d ignore the points I was making. But sometimes they’d say it didn’t matter, because they were supporting him for other reasons: his outspokenness, his feistiness, or even because he would destroy the Republican Party. And at times it seemed as though he would destroy the Republican Party, whether that was his goal or not; that turned out to not be true.

Well, that was then, and this is now. Now we have nothing to decide about Trump anymore except what we think of him as president. There are no more votes for us to cast. Now my task (and I think everyone’s task, too) is to take a look at what he’s saying he will do, the appointments he will make—and then, most important of all, what he really does and what Congress does in cooperation or opposition to him, and what the consequences are in the real world.

Trump was the Shrodinger’s Cat candidate, whose “policies existed in a state of being both pragmatic and radical, all at the same time.” If you recall Schrodinger’s Cat, however, at a certain point the quantum superposition “interacts with or was observed by the external world, at which time the superposition collapses into one or another of the possible definite states.”

In other words, at some point (and that point began in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, November 9), Trump stopped being a candidate who could profess contradictory policies at once, or extreme policies to please his supporters, and started to be a president-elect taking action as such. At first, those actions would be appointments. But soon they will be more, and the cat will be alive or dead, or if alive it will be sickly or well or something in-between.

Michael Totten has some advice for president-elect Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

It can be boiled down to reverse the Obama doctrine*.

Totten doesn’t say that—not exactly, anyway. But his final paragraph indicates it:

All this advice is based on one simple principle””you reward your friends and punish your enemies. It’s the first rule of foreign policy, one that has been with us since antiquity and will survive until the end of time. Presidents who behave as though this rule doesn’t apply to them are as doomed to fail in foreign policy as rocket scientists who ignore gravity. Hubristically declaring that it would not do “stupid shit” like its predecessors, the Obama administration flipped this rule on its head over and over again””with Israel, with Russia, with Iran, and with Turkey””with disastrous results every time.

So turn things around. Again: Reward your friends and punish your enemies. Tattoo that rule on the back of your eyelids if you have to.

Please read the whole thing.

I actually think Trump has the anti-Obama Doctrine principle down pretty well. It’s the details and the execution that’s hard, and all those black swans that threaten to arrive on the scene.

[*NOTE: I can’t say for sure, but I actually believe I may have been the first one to use the phrase “Obama Doctrine” for Obama’s tendency to stroke enemies and kick allies. I first used it in this post from September of 2009.]

George W. Bush, portraitist

The New Neo Posted on by

I find George Bush’s continuing dedication to painting to be quite fascinating. I like his paintings and think he’s improved since he began. Now he seems to be concentrating on portraiture; this is what an art critic has to say:

They are (Chaim) Soutine-like portraits, thickly painted in what I would call “high-amateur” mode by someone who has clearly studied a little art history and worked with an art teacher…

Beyond Soutine, they also remind me of (paintings done by) a number of emerging artists in New York like Erik Hanson. His portraits are remarkably similar (to these). If I walked into some Chelsea gallery and saw this as a precocious 24-year-old Yale graduate (and saw these paintings), I’d say: “Oh, this is an interesting take on portraiture in 2014. Nothing wrong with that at all.”

Here are a few examples of Bush’s portraits of world leaders, as well as some paintings of his from a new book he’s put out to benefit veterans: Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief’s Tribute to America’s Warriors.

bush-olmert

bush-bush

bush-threesome

bush-bush-ii

bush-veterans

Trump and Priebus and Bannon

The New Neo Posted on by

By now you’ve probably heard that president-elect Trump has announced some appointments:

The president-elect announced Sunday that he has selected Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus to serve as chief of staff in his incoming administration.

In the same announcement, Priebus’ appointment shared top billing with the news that Trump campaign CEO Stephen K. Bannon will serve as chief strategist and senior counselor to the president.

“I am thrilled to have my very successful team continue with me in leading our country,” said Trump said in the emailed statement. “Steve and Reince are highly qualified leaders who worked well together on our campaign and led us to a historic victory. Now I will have them both with me in the White House as we work to make America great again.”

The dual selections are likely to send two separate signals to those closely watching Trump’s transition into power.

Indeed. For people who are scrutinizing the Trump appointments for indications of Trump’s ideological and practical intentions (that would be most of us at this blog), this tells us that for now he’s keeping the team of strange bedfellows that brought him here, with the more establishment representative (Priebus) elevated over the hard-hitting alt-rightish guy, but only slightly elevated.

Some people are going to be disappointed and/or fearful/angry about one of these appointments. Some are less than enthused about both. I’m not a big fan of Priebus but I have no real objection to him and I hope he’ll have a grounding and tempering influence on Trump, whereas Bannon raises red flags for me. However, I’m happy that Bannon was not named as Chief of Staff but instead drew the strategist position, which tends to be filled by a political operative good at the messaging part of the equation rather than the setting of policy itself. However, I’m not so naive as to say that such a person doesn’t ever have an effect on policy, though; I would imagine that he/he does.

Who is Bannon? See this for his Wiki: interesting facts in his background include naval officer and then Goldman Sachs investment banker (a similar Goldman Sachs background for Heidi Cruz was considered anathema by many in the Trump wing during the campaign). You can see at Wiki that there are allusions to Bannon’s possible anti-Semitism, and of course there’s his characterization as supporter of the alt-right. But to get to the bottom of those accusations and how much reality there is behind them in terms of the existence or degree of Bannon’s own bigotry as well as his ties to the more extreme white-supremacist wing of the alt-right is a very daunting task at this point.

So for the moment, the Bannon appointment remains a troubling warning sign that may or may not end up meaning anything dire.

One thing we can be pretty sure about is that Trump will have no trouble firing someone with whom he becomes displeased.

Et tu, Oprah?

The New Neo Posted on by

Almost as soon as the Trump win had occurred, I began noticing that, among former Trump opposers left and right, it was shaking down into two camps: the optimists and the pessimists. The optimists were saying some version of “wait and see.” The pessimists were saying that the political apocalypse was coming soon or was already here.

The question of what causes a person to fall into each group could provide prodigious fodder for several doctoral dissertations in political science. Although I don’t know the answer, my guess is that it’s some combination of the person’s degree of liberalism versus leftism, as well as general personality traits on the optimism/pessimism continuum, whether the person belongs to a group that is likely to feel especially threatened (for example, Muslims) and/or is close to a member of such a group, as well as how open the person might be to changing his/her mind about something.

Oprah Winfrey turns out to be in the first camp, falling among the optimists:

The TV host tweeted on Thursday a picture of Donald Trump at the White House with President Barack Obama with the caption ‘Everybody take a deep breath! Hope lives.’

She also told Entertainment Tonight that seeing President Obama and President-elect Trump together had ‘given her hope’.

Predictably, some of Oprah’s fellow celebrities do not like her for this, and refuse to share her sentiments. Some responses that are rather typical:

Celebrities have turned against Oprah Winfrey after she expressed hope in the wake of the election…

Heather Matarazzo wrote: ‘Oprah, you can take a deep breath and hold it while the rest of us literally fight for our lives right now. #smh.’

Grace & Frankie’s June Diane Raphael also urged Oprah not to ‘normalize this man’.

‘Minority children are already being targeted,’ she tweeted.

One leftist approach is starting to shape up, and it will be (as one might have expected) to attribute every bigoted act that occurs in America during the Trump years (and some that don’t; see this) to Trump.

Has the number of such acts actually increased? I don’t know; maybe yes, maybe no. However, it stands to reason that they may have. Most of the people at this blog are aware that there is cause for concern that the more bigoted wing of the alt-right (and its hangers-on) will feel greatly empowered by Trump’s win. And when you’re talking about school children, there’s also a kind of imitative fallout from some of Trump’s own worst behavior and/or speech, and it stands to reason it would bear some fruit (I’m talking about things like kids threatening to grab a girl by the you-know-what). I’m sure schools will crack down hard on the latter sort of behavior, if such things occur, and I’m equally sure that the left will make hay of any incident it can.

This would be the same left that seems unable (actually, unwilling) to connect the dots on—just to take one example—the increase in crime in many urban black neighborhoods known as “the Ferguson effect,” and to connect it to the left’s own behavior:

When officers disengage, the result is not a boon for black lives, as the Black Lives Matter movement would predict. Rather, criminals become emboldened, leading to this year’s bloodbath, whose victims have been almost exclusively black and, far too often, children and innocent bystanders.

Oprah is not alone among former Hillary-supporters in trying to inject a post-Trump note of patience and guarded optimism. But there are others who either are unable at this point to join her (I’ve already discussed them here), or (among the more activist and leftist) who have an investment in continuing to fan the flames of discord.

Leonard Cohen: he was ready

The New Neo Posted on by

After giving us the gift of his music for nearly fifty years, Leonard Cohen has finally gone home:

His son issued this statement on his father’s death:

“My father passed away peacefully at his home in Los Angeles with the knowledge that he had completed what he felt was one of his greatest records,” Cohen’s son Adam wrote in a statement to Rolling Stone. “He was writing up until his last moments with his unique brand of humor.”

I’ve written so many pieces on Leonard Cohen that I’ve probably said most of what I want to say about his life and his work. His death was expected, but it leaves a hole in the world. His music fills some of that hole. Although music is incorporeal, it is very real.

Here are some YouTube offerings from Cohen. I’ll do this in chronological order. First, one of my absolute favorites—the younger, handsome, melancholy, resonant Cohen of the Famous Blue Raincoat:

A few years later, we have Cohen on the Tower of Song. Some of the lyrics that seem especially poignant today:

Now I bid you farewell, I don’t know when I’ll be back
They’re moving us tomorrow to that tower down the track
But you’ll be hearing from me baby, long after I’m gone
I’ll be speaking to you sweetly
From a window in the Tower of Song

Here is the elderly Cohen, his voice deeper and deeper still—impossibly deep—from an album that just came out (like David Bowie, he released a swan song). The word “hineni” is Hebrew for “Here I am.”

You can go to YouTube and keep going for days listening to the Cohen oeuvre and watching the documentaries and interviews with a man who was always humble, always thoughtful, usually humorous, and often wise. This one focuses on what I call the Dustin Hoffman years (yes, when Cohen was young he was a ringer for Hoffman):

What can I say? If anyone tried to get ready, Leonard Cohen did. Here is part of his last interview:

RIP Leonard Cohen.