…that no one has a clue who will win the Alabama special election tomorrow. Polls have become rather useless, and in this case they’re contradictory anyway.

By the way, do you recall why Alabama has to choose a new senator? Because Jeff Sessions became Trump’s AG. A lot of people on the right have been very displeased with Sessions’ performance in that capacity, and if Moore ends up losing tomorrow my guess is that we’ll hear a lot more criticism of Sessions.

[ADDENDUM: More—much more—here.]

I was recently in New York and went to an upscale grocery store of the kind that has lots of samples of food in little displays, with containers of toothpicks nearby for the customer to use to spear the delicacies.

Olives, pickled vegetables, crackers, and infinitesimal cubes of cheese that are so tiny it takes some skill to hook one. But I was determined. I took a toothpick from a plastic container, stabbed a cheese tidbit or two, ate them (they were pretty good, and I was hungry), and then looked for a place to throw out the used toothpick.

It was only then that I noticed a second plastic container just like the first one, only the toothpicks in the second were placed in a slightly more orderly and less haphazard fashion than in the first. Oh-oh! I had apparently taken a toothpick from the “used” bin (nearly indistinguishable from the “unused” bin), and re-used it.

Can I sue?

The killing of Daniel Shaver by a police officer didn’t get much national coverage when it first happened two years ago in Arizona, or even during the trial of the officer. But post-trial, a video of the killing has been released, and it is so shocking that now the case has become national news.

At Red State, Patterico has come up with a theory that defends the police officer, but I don’t think it’s an especially convincing one. I have not watched the video because I have a tremendous reluctance to watch videos of any human being being killed. But I’ve read many descriptions, and it’s evident that the heart of the problem was the incredibly contradictory and nearly crazy instructions given to Shaver (who was drunk at the time), instructions that literally could not be followed:

Brailsford was called to a hotel in Mesa back in January of 2016 on reports that someone had been pointing a rifle out of a window. Daniel Shaver, very drunk at the time, had apparently been messing around with a few pellet guns that he used in his pest control job. Exceedingly stupid behavior on his part, but not deserving of the death penalty. Still, Brailsford and the other responding officers could not have known that they were pellet guns, so it’s understandable that they were on edge.

But this is where it gets not-so-understandable. Shaver emerges stumbling out of his hotel room. He’s told to get on the ground, and he immediately complies. Shaver attempts to follow every instruction shouted at him, but he has difficulty because the instructions make no sense. Here’s a verbatim transcript of everything Brailsford told Shaver to do, as he pointed his rifle at him and threatened repeatedly to kill him: “lie on the ground,” “put both hands on top of your head and interlace your fingers,” “take your feet and cross your left foot over your right foot,” “keep your feet crossed,” “put both hands flat in front of you” (while they’re on his head and interlaced?), “push yourself to a kneeling position” (have you ever tried to push yourself up while your arms are extended all the way in front of you?), “put both hands in the air,” “crawl towards me” (with his hands in the air?), “stop,” “crawl,” “keep your legs crossed” (while crawling?), “put your hands in the air,” “keep your legs crossed,” “crawl” (so he’s supposed to crawl again with his hands in the air and his legs crossed). In the midst of this flurry of hysterical, arbitrary commands, as Brailsford continually reminds Shaver that he’ll die if he “makes a mistake,” Shaver cries and begs for his life.

Then comes the fatal moment. As Shaver crawls, awkwardly and wobbly, trying to keep up with this deadly game of Simon Says, his pants begin to fall down. He reaches to pull them up and Brailsford immediately sprays him with bullets. Shaver followed his ridiculous instructions for five minutes and still wound up dead.

Of course, Brailsford’s defense was that Shavers [sic] reached for his waistband. Fine. But what was he worried about? That Shaver would pull a rifle from his basketball shorts? And even if he did have a gun, how was he going to pull it out and get off a shot from the crawling position?

However, the person giving those crazy impossible-to-follow orders was not the guy who killed Shaver. The guy talking was Sgt. Charles Langley, who retired from the police department a few months after the shooting. Both Langley (the officer talking) and Brailsford, the officer shooting, say they feared Shaver was reaching for a gun, but the shooter Brailsford hadn’t issued the ridiculous orders. I believe that it was actually Langley who caused Shaver’s death, but what could he be charged with, since he didn’t do the shooting? Negligent speech? I don’t think there is any crime that meets that description; he wasn’t yelling “fire” in a theater, he was just messing up the instructions to the suspect.

The whole situation is absolutely terrible. And it seems quite clear that Shaver was actually trying to obey the officer’s orders rather than defying him in any way.

One of the reasons we didn’t hear much about this case is that the video was suppressed by the court till after the trial was over, and it’s the video that is so very distressing. It’s also likely that if Shaver had been black the furor wouldn’t have waited for the video release; this could have been an even bigger story than Brown, since Shaver is clearly trying to comply and never attacked any officer.

Had Shaver been black and with the same set of facts, the shooting officer’s actions would have been ascribed to anti-black bigotry. But just because a person is black it does not mean that every error of judgment on the part of an officer, including a fatal error of judgment, is due to bigotry. Everyone in this story was white, as far as I know, and Shaver still ended up dead.

[UPDATE 6:30 PM: It’s come to my attention that MPR may have done this because, when it severed its relationship with Keillor and his companies, it may have lost at least some of its rights to post the material from his shows at its website. See this. Of course, one of the reasons they may have severed the relationship in the first place is that they were eager to divest themselves of all connection with him. It’s not clear what the legal situation actually is in regard to the archives; the message was that MPR does not fully own the rights.]

One of the most fascinating portions of Orwell’s brilliant Nineteen Eighty-Four is Newspeak, an invented language that he presents in his dystopic book as the language of Ingsoc (English Socialism). I read that book when I was about twelve years old and it scared the proverbial crap out of me, but I sure remember a lot about it.

Like the term “unperson”:

An unperson is someone who has been “vaporized”—not only killed by the state, but erased from existence. Such a person would be written out of existing books, photographs and articles so that no trace of their existence could be found in the historical record. The idea is that such a person would, according to the principles of doublethink, be forgotten completely (for it would be impossible to provide evidence of their existence), even by close friends and family.

Mentioning an unperson’s name, or even speaking of their past existence, is itself thoughtcrime; the concept that the person may have existed at one time and has disappeared cannot be expressed in Newspeak.

That’s pretty extreme. But it’s based on the sort of thing that actually happened in the USSR.

And now (except for the actual killing part), it’s apparently happening to Prarie Home Companion’s Garrison Keillor.

Whether you previously liked Keillor or not, let me just say that, although I’ve never been a Keillor fan (I just don’t get “bachelor farmer” humor, for example), and although I disagree with what I know of his politics, what has happened to his oeuvre is really chilling and also sad:

Keillor and his entire body of work from “A Prairie Home Companion” and “Writer’s Almanac” have been effectively erased from the archives of MPR, along with the work of all the other storytellers, singers, poets and production staff who made the shows successful.

..[But] Spacey’s movies still remain available, as are those that Harvey Weinstein produced. If Hollywood were to follow MPR’s Memory Hole model, we would also lose “The Usual Suspects,” “American Beauty,” and “L.A. Confidential.” We would lose “The English Patient,” “Shakespeare in Love” and “Pulp Fiction,” and hundreds of other movies and television shows.

We don’t really want that to happen. The internet is already fragile, brimming with rotten links and ephemeral websites. And when news organizations are bought out or go bankrupt, as was the case most recently with The Gothamist, the work of reporters disappears, a loss to a community’s understanding of its past…

As consumers of news, entertainment and art, we should be able to choose what we want to watch. If you’re uncomfortable with the work of sleazy movie stars, celebrities and producers, then you can ignore them. That shouldn’t be MPR’s call.

Ah, but the erasure of history is a thing now, don’t you know? Remember the tearing down of the monuments?

Sometimes I think people have gone mad in their race to show who’s the most righteous of all in pursuing and destroying the witches of our age.

[NOTE: By the way, although MPR has never said what the charges were except that they involved “sexual misconduct,” which covers a multitude of sins, we do have Keillor’s description. If the following is actually the gist of Keillor’s alleged offense (and we have no way to know if it is or isn’t; there certainly might be lot more, but the silence from MPR is odd), the punishment seems way out of line:

“I put my hand on a woman’s bare back,” he told Minneapolis’ Star-Tribune, “I meant to pat her back after she told me about her unhappiness and her shirt was open and my hand went up it about six inches. She recoiled. I apologized. I sent her an email of apology later and she replied that she had forgiven me and not to think about it. We were friends. We continued to be friendly right up until her lawyer called…

Keillor adds:

If I had a dollar for every woman who asked to take a selfie with me and who slipped an arm around me and let it drift down below the beltline, I’d have at least a hundred dollars. So this is poetic irony of a high order.

So, is he alleging that women are regularly feeling him up in the genitalia while taking selfies? A hundred women? Garrison Keillor? Forgive me if I find this a trifle difficult to believe.]

[ADDENDUM: In the comments, it’s been pointed out to me that maybe Keillor is saying the 100 women groped him in the butt rather than the genitals. On reflection, I think that may be it. I’m not in the habit of feeling men up when I’m not already in a very intimate relationship with them, so I may not be up on my technique. When I read the word “around” I took it literally, as in “all the way around.” But I see that that’s not a reading justified by the text, as they say.

So if it’s the butt, I still wonder about 100 woman. But maybe.]

[NOTE: I’ll be announcing this quite a bit until Christmas is over, just as a reminder.]

Clicking on the Amazon widget on my right sidebar to get there is the best way to order from Amazon, although if your adblock is on you won’t see the widget. But just disable your adblock on my page and it will appear.

Or you can go here. I’m not 100% sure that will work as effectively, however.

Thanks to everyone who orders through neo-neocon. Each time you order, I get a small percentage as well, and at no extra cost to you. Thanks again!

Peter Martins has been accused of sexual harassment in his capacity as long-time director of the New York City Ballet and teacher at the company school. Martins has headed the company since the death of its founder George Balanchine in 1983—first as co-director with Jerome Robbins, and since 1990 as sole director.

That’s a long time to be in charge, and a lot of power. In fact, at this point Martins has directed the company for approximately the same amount of time as Balanchine did.

But Martins is no Balanchine (to be fair, nobody is). Balanchine was a master choreographer who changed the face of ballet and was extraordinarily prolific, and was also a strong and unique personality. Martins was primarily known as a dancer of cool classicism and chiseled strong-jawed blond good looks. Here he is in his dancing heyday, as he was when I saw him dance many times:

Martins has also choreographed quite a few dance works, and I’ve seen several of them—and detested every single one. They’re disjointed, boring, and difficult, and I’m hardly alone in saying that. For example, from an article in the NY Times in 2013:

Mr. Martins has long been castigated as a choreographer. All too many of his pieces are both heartless and sketchy.

On the other hand, I almost always enjoyed Martins’ dancing. There are basically two kinds of dancers, Dionysian and Apollonian, and Matins was an excellent example of the latter type.

But the scuttlebutt about him that I came across in the dance world (many years ago, I might add) was that he wasn’t a warm fuzzy guy, to put it kindly. That’s not an unusual phenomenon in ballet for directors and/or teachers, who tend (or tended; again, my information is rather out-of-date) towards the autocratic, although there were many exceptions. Ballet may look airy, but many of its stellar lights have been hard as nails. It used to be thought almost necessary; perhaps it still is.

Martins—like Balanchine and Barishnikov—was also heterosexual, which is hardly unknown in ballet but is certainly not a given. For Martins (as for Balanchine and Barishnikov), that meant that there were a number of romances and/or affairs and/or relationships with the female dancers around him. Martins has been married to star ballerina Darci Kistler since 1981 (after a shorter first marriage), and although they’ve had a few rough patches—including an allegation of physical abuse that was later withdrawn—they’ve remained together.

Their romance was a union of two people who were both already stars, however; Martins had little to nothing to do with her rise in the company, which had occurred during the Balanchine years. So it’s safe to say that Kistler became a star without much or even any help from Martins—in fact, I believe she was the last favorite of Balanchine (and he was so elderly and already starting to become ill), and she had such extraordinary physical prowess as a dancer that I think she probably did it on the strength of her dancing. Kistler herself has stated that she “didn’t have a deep personal relationship” with Balanchine, and I believe her. But she also said that Balanchine had taught her “how to live life” and that “all the things he said to me, echo.” Ballet directors (and even some ballet teachers) tend to have that total-immersion quality.

So, what about the harassment charges against Martin? It’s very unclear; all we know so far is that someone wrote an anonymous letter to the company stating nonspecific accusations of sexual harassment against him, and the company has taken the precaution of removing him from his teaching duties for the moment. If that description of what’s happened is correct, then of all the allegations of sexual offenses I’ve heard in the last couple of months, that just might be the most Kafkaesque.

But the story started me thinking about ballet and its relation to sexual harassment/abuse/assault. Ballet differs from other arts (and certainly from politics or broadcasting or even acting) in that the body is completely the instrument, the mechanism by which that art is expressed. There is nothing else, not even talk (as in acting). Not only that, but the way the body looks is nearly as important as the way it moves, or at least inextricably connected with it. It’s no exaggeration to say that virtually every dancer in the professional dance world is a physically beautiful person with an extraordinarily beautiful body. And even the older directors (such as, for example, Martins) have an aging version of the same, and often a personal magnetism and power that cannot be denied. It was part of the reason they were stars, although not all directors were once performers or stars.

But it all seems like a recipe for sex, doesn’t it?

The themes of ballet often involve love, as well—romantic, sexual, some combination of the two. So there’s no getting away from it.

What’s more, there’s often a lot of interaction and touching in the choreography and in the studio, even during class. Teachers touch their students all the time—that’s how they convey what’s needed—adjusting a hand, helping the dancer bend in the right direction by giving a little push, turning the head just so. Partners touch their partners all the time, and the communion between partners can be extraordinarily intimate. It can also lead to an actual romance (and of course sex) in real life—what little the dancers have of real life, that is, after the rigors of taking class and rehearsals and performances and shoe preparation and all the rest.

Company directors (the heterosexual ones, that is; I know less about the habits of the gay directors, but I’m assuming the story is not too different) often sleep with their dancers. They even sometimes marry them; Balanchine, for example, was famous for this, having married (and divorced) a whole series of them.

So the idea in ballet is not to eliminate the sex or the touching—I think that would be impossible—but to eliminate the harassment. How would “harassment” be defined in a world like that? Unwanted touching? Touching that goes beyond what’s required for the class or the choreography or the correction? Whether there is a quid pro quo for the sex: “sleep with me and I’ll make you a star”?

Even with all the sex that goes on there’s not usually an explicit quid pro quo in ballet—at least, that isn’t the way I’d always heard or read that it worked (no personal experience here, by the way). I believe what tends to happen more often is that the choreographer or director is attracted to the better dancers, the ones who already inspire him (or I suppose inspire “her”; for example, modern dance pioneer Martha Graham married one of her dancers, and “Men invaded her company – and her life – from time to time; but in her choreography they had a tendency to remain as sex objects, often scantily clad and explicitly animal”—but that’s a subject for another day). After all, if a director promotes a bad dancer, the problem will be revealed when she just can’t perform the choreography, because you can’t fake ballet technique.

And the dancer generally sleeps with the director because she’s genuinely intrigued by him, too—his power or his artistry or his looks or his grace or some combination of these qualities. There would ordinarily be no need for “harassment” of the usual sort; the sex happens as part of the big picture that draws these people together in the first place: their art and the spell it casts, and the realization that they can help further each others’ careers.

I’m pretty sure I’m not describing the way it works all the time. I would assume there are exceptions and scheming people who use sex to promise advancement or to get roles (or with the thought that they’ll get roles). It often doesn’t end well, either. But from what I recall hearing, the sex tends to come after the first big roles. And as far as Martins goes, I have no idea—zero—whether he sexually harassed anyone or not.

[NOTE: In the process of writing this post I watched some videos, and one of them features an interesting story told by a retired dancer about her coming-up years. Her mentor and director was Barishnikov, who plucked her out of the corps and promoted her. There seems to have been no sex of any sort involved in that process. The events she describes in this clip began when she was 18:

I’ve seen every single person she mentions in that video perform. Brings back good memories. At 22, Yaffe married—a conductor, not a dancer.]

Just now:

My new tires, purchased for a pretty penny and reputed to be all-weather tires that are good in snow, managed to climb the hill that had defeated my their worn-out predecessors.

Today’s appears to be a report that Trump watches TV 4 hours a day or more, according to the trustworthy insider informants at the NY Times. And this, despite the fact that he claims he doesn’t watch much TV:

The Times reports that Trump begins each day around 5:30 a.m. by turning on CNN before quickly flipping to Fox News’s “Fox & Friends.” He occasionally watches MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” because it works him up, Trump’s friends told the Times.

Trump’s favorite programs include “Fox & Friends” as well as Fox News primetime shows from Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Jeanine Pirro. Trump sometimes “hate-watches” CNN host Don Lemon, according to the report.

The Times also reports that the only people allowed to touch the remote control for the White House television are Trump and White House technical support staffers.

During his trip to Asia last month, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that he doesn’t watch much television at the White House because he’s busy “reading documents.”

“Believe it or not, even when I’m in Washington or New York, I do not watch much television,” Trump said. “People that don’t know me, they like to say I watch television — people with fake sources. You know, fake reporters, fake sources.”

If you read that in light of yesterday’s CNN blooper/whopper (take your pick as to which it was, error or lie), it’s actually rather amusing. The dilemma for the reader is: who do you believe, Trump or the NY Times? I tend to believe my own observations, which tell me that Trump seems to get a lot of work done. If he’s watching that much TV and gets as much accomplished as he seems to, more power to him.

I’ve never been keen on these “the president is an idiot!!” stories, even when I was a Democrat and they were about Republican presidents or candidates whom I disliked. Reagan seemed smart enough to me, rather than an “amiable dunce,” although I never voted for him. So did Bush in 2000 (didn’t vote for him then; voted for him in 2004). I watched Bush, I listened, and I saw someone who wasn’t the most articulate person on earth but who had plenty of native intelligence and got his point across, even though I didn’t like his points.

Trump is more unusual, to say the least. But I’ve never seen any indication he isn’t plenty smart, although not in a conventional “academic” way—at least, he certainly doesn’t express himself that way. Whether his popular touch is an affectation or the way he just is (I think more the latter than the former), it’s worked awfully well for him so far.

[NOTE: By the way, I haven’t read the NY Times story to which the link refers (the link I offered is to a story in the Hill based on it). The Times is behind a firewall and I refuse to pay, and I’ve already used up my stories for this month. But the Times story, listed on memeorandum, is apparently headlined “Inside Trump’s Hour-By-Hour Battle for Self-Preservation.” That’s another meme of which the MSM is fond, which might be called the “Trump is on his last legs” meme. This has been the subject of article after article for most of Trump’s presidency, but so far I see no sign of it being true—which doesn’t seem to stop it from being a perennial favorite of the MSM and its readers.]

[BUMPED UP]

It’s getting closer!

Chanukah begins Tuesday evening. Christmas is only two and a half weeks away—yikes!

Please use my Amazon portal for your holiday gifts. Clicking on the Amazon widget on the right sidebar is the best way to do it, although if your adblock is on you won’t see it. But just disable the adblock on the page and it will appear.

Or you can go here. I’m not 100% sure that will work as effectively, however.

Thanks to everyone who orders. It gives me a small gift, as well, and at no extra cost to you.

[NOTE: I’ll be announcing this quite a bit until Christmas is over, just as a reminder. Thanks again.]

It’s hard to keep up with this sort of thing:

Correction: This story has been corrected to say the date of the email was September 14, 2016, not September 4, 2016. The story also changed the headline and removed a tweet from Donald Trump Jr., who posted a message about WikiLeaks on September 4, 2016.

This is not a minor correction. The date (incorrectly alleged to have been before the Wikileaks news dump) was the entire story. Interestingly, it was the WaPo that pointed out the problem with CNN’s reporting.

Brian Ross doesn’t work for CNN, so he can’t be re-suspended. But Emily Litella has something to say:

[ADDENDUM: Ace points out that the correction left out the significance of the change, and that it took five hours for the correction to be issued:

[CNN’s] correction does not seem to alert the reader that, with the correction, there is literally nothing left to this story. A rando sent Donald Trump, Jr. a link that millions of people were sending — that’s it.

In their eagerness to get the goods on Trump and his aides, several news organizations are only making Trump’s Fake News accusations seem more apropos rather than less.]

Many fires have been raging throughout California, and they have destroyed a large number of homes already and continue to threaten others. You can read a lot of coverage (with maps) here, if you’re interested in the details.

Some of the coverage of the fires has featured words such as “Armageddon” and “apocalyptic.”

I’ve lived in the Los Angeles area. I still have friends and relatives there, and I visit a lot. I’m familiar with several of the places where there have been recent fires and people have evacuated their homes, and I hope for the best. I’ve seen huge wildfires in different parts of California in the past, and probably will in the future. I have a friend whose luxury home burned to the ground years ago, leaving only a brick hearth and some ashes where a mansion used to be.

Los Angeles (and much of California) is a fire zone. Fires spread fast there; I’ve seen that happen, too. I’ve driven on the freeway past a very small fire that was about six feet by six feet, arrived home in two minutes flat, and turned on the TV to see a video of the entire hill in raging flames while I heard multiple helicopters overhead.

This time the Santa Ana winds have been fierce, and they’ve been responsible for spreading many of these fires especially quickly. I wonder whether arson was initially involved in any of them, as it sometimes is, but I haven’t seen a word about this. What I do see discussed is the fact that the heavier-than-usual rains earlier in the year fed the growth of a larger-than-usual amount of vegetation, and now that it’s dried out and the winds are strong there’s plenty of extra fuel to be burned. Here’s a photo of the sort of thing people driving on the freeway have been seeing; I know this area well (on 405 near the Getty):

Frightening.

This should send a chill down your spine. It’s the Wisconsin Attorney General’s report on the Wisconsin John Doe investigations, which I covered earlier here.

Everything we already knew about the abuse of power that went on during these fishing expeditions was bad, but the full story is even worse. Just a few excepts (and by the way, the acronym GAB stands for the Government Accountability Board, one of those Orwellian titles):

Attorney General Brad Schimel is asking for disciplinary action against nine people following his investigation into the leaking of documents collected during a now-closed probe of Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign.

As this report describes in detail, the systemic and pervasive mishandling of John Doe evidence likely resulted in circumstances allowing the Guardian leak in the first place, and now prevents prosecutors from proving criminal liability beyond a reasonable doubt. Moreover, DOJ is deeply concerned by what appears to have been the weaponization of GAB by partisans in furtherance of political goals, which permitted the vast collection of highly personal information from dozens of Wisconsin Republicans without even taking modest steps to secure this information…

The investigation included subpoenas to state officials…and several search warrants executed on the private email accounts of state employees, state officials, and campaign workers and fundraisers associated with Wisconsin Republicans and Governor Walker. In the “Falk boxes,” three hard drives in particular contained nearly 500,000 unique emails (from Yahoo and Gmail accounts, for example) and other documents (email attachments, for example) totaling millions of pages. The hard drives included transcripts of Google Chat logs between several individuals, most of which were purely personal (and
sometimes very private) conversations. GAB placed a large portion of these emails into several folders entitled, “Opposition Research” or “Senate Opposition Research.”…

Because of the very broad nature of the search warrants, the John Doe III investigators obtained emails and chat logs from hundreds and perhaps thousands of other individuals who corresponded with the individuals listed above.

Before the widespread use of computers and email and chats it would have been impossible to collect that sort of information on that scale—difficult to collect it even on one person, much less hundreds and thousands. Now it is easy, if you have the power to do it and the will to do it. Paranoia becomes far more understandable, doesn’t it?

I doubt that the people who collected this information had the time or inclination to read all of it, but they stored it for future reference when needed. And with computers it’s relatively easy to do a search of the material at any point and find anything you want almost immediately. Then just leak it to your eagerly cooperating friends in the media and voila! Mission accomplished.

One good thing is that so-called John Doe investigations are only allowed in a few states. Wisconsin is one of them, but in 2015 Governor Walker signed a bill outlawing them for investigating political corruption. This was a direct result of the abuses that had occurred (and are detailed in the recent report). But if the John Doe investigation had succeeded in its goals, such a bill probably would never have been passed.

It’s easy to see the possible parallels with the Mueller investigation on the federal level (not to mention Lois Lerner and the IRS), and other special prosecutions that almost inevitably seem to turn into enormous fishing expeditions that cast a wide (and biased) political net.