The Lindsay Clancy eleven and the sole holdout

The New Neo Posted on by

Seems there are two extremes right now on the subject of the Clancy case, at least in terms of the bulk of online discussion. I don’t fit into either camp – not those who say Clancy is some sort of heroic persecuted figure (or that her husband did it), nor those who say she’s nothing but a vicious killer who wanted her kids dead and came up with the excuse of mental illness for her own evil actions.

Modern-day jurors have a tendency to discuss trials and deliberations publicly, and a number of Clancy case jurors have come out with a lot to say, post-trial. Their decision came down, as I figured it would, to the idea of reasonable doubt, held by eleven jurors who would have put Clancy in a mental hospital for an undetermined amount of time rather than in prison for life.

I’ve written before about the fact that Massachusetts law supports that verdict (whether you think it’s a good law or not, and personally I do not) and how unusual that law is. Here’s a post I wrote on the subject.

I will add that in law school I studied the law of criminal responsibility as it relates to mental illness, and I also have my training as a family therapist, and I have long thought there is no good solution to the problem of psychosis and crime. There is a wide variety of legal approaches – very wide, actually – all with pros and cons, and all unsatisfactory.

The approach I prefer is to sentence the person, and if there is diminished responsibility because of a psychosis, the person starts serving the sentence in a mental hospital and finishes out the term in prison when the hospital deems the person recovered from the psychosis, with the total in both institutions being the time served. It’s not a great solution at all, but I think it is probably better than the others.

But it’s very far from the law prevailing in Massachusetts, the law under which Clancy was tried and which operates in this case.

Those who believe Clancy should have been found guilty seem to perceive a sex divide in the jurors’ opinions because the lone holdout was a male – as well as a race divide because he was also black. But there were two other males on the jury, and they sided with the nine women on the panel. The jurors are being portrayed by many on the right more or less this way (the following excerpt is by John Hinderaker):

You know the holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy case? The one who thought strangling her three children was a crime worth punishing? The one the liberal white women jurors denounced as dumb? Unable to understand the jury instructions and comprehend the subtle concept of reasonable doubt? Turns out he was the only juror “of color.” The holdout juror was a black guy …

But that’s a false dichotomy. Based on Massachusetts law, I might even have reluctantly sided with those “liberal white women jurors” in their verdict (not necessarily in their descriptions of the lone holdout, which by the way don’t seem to have actually included the word or even the concept “dumb”). Was the holdout the only person on the jury who thought strangling three children was a horrific crime “worth punishing”? But the jurors were not being asked if it was a serious crime worth punishing. They were being asked whether Clancy’s moral sense and criminal responsibility were compromised by her serious mental problems:

“We weren’t trying to figure out if she murdered the children. She did. And she’s admitting that. We’re trying to figure out did she know right from wrong at that time,” foreperson Roni Carlson said.

Legally in Massachusetts, if the prosecution failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Lindsay Clancy knew right from wrong and also could have restrained herself from those criminal acts, then the verdict of the eleven would be quite appropriate. That seems to me to be the case, whether I like that verdict or not. But instead, the lone holdout is being considered by the right as a hero and as the only virtuous person on the jury, and the eleven others (nine women and two men) are considered to be excusing the murder of children rather than trying to follow the law while realizing full well how horrific these crimes were.

But the most important reason the holdout should come in for criticism is this (at least, according to the other jurors who gave interviews): he had agreed with them that there was reasonable doubt that Clancy should be held fully responsible and yet he was determined to find her guilty anyway. That’s a form of jury nullification, basically, because it’s not the way the law in Massachusetts works. In Massachusetts, if reasonable doubt on the score exists, you must find the defendant not guilty:

“He admitted he had reasonable doubt and I started filling out the forms, I was so excited,” the foreperson said.

“There were three forms I had to fill out and I started filling them out, I wrote my signature on each one but then he said, ‘But I’m still not going to say she’s not guilty by reason of insanity.’”

Nor did the interviewed jurors blame Clancy’s husband Patrick instead, which was one of the conspiracy theories popular with some especially extreme online Lindsay-defenders. Here’s what two of the jurors said about Clancy’s husband:

Juror No. 5 said she “will never be the same” after hearing Patrick’s 911 call, which was not publicly broadcast.

The “horrifying” [911 call made by Patrick] dispelled any online conspiracy theories that the husband was somehow involved, according to the anonymous panelist.

“All I could think was that if these people could have heard that visceral, blood-curdling scream, I don’t think I could name a single actor or actress that could have performed that the way he did, and not that he performed it, but I will never be the same after that,” she said.

“Just to imagine living through that and being the person to find your children in that scenario, it shakes you.”

I think it’s very interesting that a great many people on the right who think Clancy absolutely should have been found guilty are playing the race card about the lone holdout juror. They are asserting that the eleven (who were white) who voted to commit Clancy are racists putting down a heroic black man.

Now it turns out that the holdout juror had a history of domestic violence allegations. The Hinderaker article says this:

It is a rule of modern life that anyone who dissents from leftist dogma must be destroyed.

However, there was a reason to reveal the information that’s not about “destroying” this man. That reason was this [my emphasis]:

The holdout juror who caused Lindsay Clancy’s mistrial has a history of alleged domestic violence such as grabbing his wife by the throat and punching his nephew, according to a report.

The still-unnamed juror, only described as a black man in his 30s, faced a criminal charge in September 2021 for allegedly assaulting his wife, NBC10 Boston reported. …

A juror questionnaire in Massachusetts asks whether someone has been arrested, charged with a crime, or been served with a court order — all boxes that the holdout juror should have checked.

If he’d answered honestly, he almost certainly would not have been serving on the jury. I think this matters and that it’s not merely some idle and vicious doxxing, as Matt Walsh writes:

They’re flat-out doxxing an anonymous juror because he didn’t acquit a triple murderer. These people are evil beasts. Demons from hell.

And Hinderaker wrote:

This was an effort by a “reporter” named Sue O’Connell and a Boston television station, NBC10, to doxx the holdout juror and ruin his life. Why? So that in the future, no one will dare to oppose the agenda of the far left while serving on a jury. Every juror must toe the line, or else.

Left out is the fact that the juror apparently lied in order to get on the jury. And so perhaps he did have an agenda after all. There’s a reason they ask that question of jurors. Do we not care about that sort of thing anymore? I submit that we should care and that we certainly would care if this juror had come to a conclusion with which we disagreed.

It’s fully possible to give a reasoned argument about why a guilty verdict would have been the correct one. But do it without playing the race card – something about which the right always mocks the left. And do it without pretending that this guy didn’t violate the jury selection rules, at least if these allegations about him are true.

New roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) And then there was one. Reality TV’s 16-year-long saga of a man with multiple wives ends with just one man married to one woman. And they’ve quit the show.

(2) It was a story that captured the news cycle for a few days: the rescue of the downed US airman in Iran. Now he tells his story:

BRAVO: “I will be thankful, to my dying day, for my pilot and crewmate, Alpha, for saving our lives and ejecting us.”

After they ejected, Alpha and Bravo found themselves 5 miles apart, separated and alone on the ground in the rugged Iranian desert. Alpha landed safely. Bravo was lucky to be alive. …

BRAVO: “My parachute was damaged in the initial attack. At one point when I looked up and saw no parachute, that was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen. So I paused, right then. And I prayed, ‘Lord, your will be done. But if I’m getting through this, I need help.'”

(3) I don’t think a whole lot will come of this:

The leaders of Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales will meet on Monday to discuss plans for the breakup of the United Kingdom, according to The Telegraph.

First Ministers John Swinney of Scotland, Rhun ap Iowerth of Wales, and Michelle O’Neill of Northern Ireland are expected to sign a joint declaration demanding the right to hold referendums on breaking away from the UK. For the first time, the three constituent nations of the UK are held by pro-separation parties.

The Telegraph reported sources as saying that the summit’s purpose is to pile more pressure on Prime Minister Andy Burnham after he said in the parliament on Wednesday that he would back another Scottish independence referendum if public opinion backed one.

I say I don’t think anything will come of it, except perhaps the exertion of political pressure. But I freely admit that internal British politics is not my forte.

(4) This is no surprise whatsoever. In fact, it was pretty much inevitable:

The new Charlie Kirk memorial at Turning Point USA’s Phoenix headquarters lasted three days before somebody decided even a statue of an assassinated conservative was too much to tolerate.

The eight-foot bronze statue, unveiled Thursday to mark one year since Kirk was murdered, was found Sunday morning covered in red paint. Vandals painted an X across Kirk’s face, sprayed red paint around his neck, and defaced a nearby religious memorial.

Ghouls.

(5) Scott Johnson of Powerline writes about the current investigation of Ilhan Omar. The Powerline blog has been closely involved with revelations about Omar’s activities – including the possibility/probability that she married her own brother with the intent to commit immigration fraud.

(6) A 61-year-old Canadian woman was legally and speedily euthanized in Canada without having any terminal conditions and against her grown daughters’ will. It’s a terrible story, and unfortunately this sort of thing is becoming more common there and in other countries that have legalized euthanasia.

In Microsoft’s eyes, I’m my own parent

The New Neo Posted on by

First, a relevant musical interlude:

You might recall that recently I purchased a new computer. Transitions like that are not my forte. It takes some time for me to get familiar with a new system, and I often find it very frustrating for a while.

This go-round was no different. I’ll spare you the details. Let’s just say that during the process I got to know a few members of the local Geek Squad.

And no, please don’t tell me to get a Mac. Been there, done that, kept it for four years and never got used to it. My new computer is a Lenovo PC and it required me to register with Microsoft, something my old Lenovo PC (circa 2012) never made me do. Progress.

It seemed that the registration would be a fairly easy task. But no, it wasn’t. For some unknown reason, when I was signing up, Microsoft was eager to know about the minor child in my home. I don’t have a minor child in my home. But it would not let me take that option. It insisted on knowing said child’s name and age. And so finally I made one up. That couldn’t hurt, right?

Big mistake. Microsoft would not let me register after that as an adult. It assumed there was an adult in the home, and I was the child, and that I needed that adult’s permission to do anything with that computer.

So off I went back to the Geek Squad, although the nice young man who helped me was somewhat stumped by the whole thing. But he kept trying different approaches and finally, somehow, he came up with a solution and made another account for an adult, which he very creatively named “test.” However, for some reason I no longer remember, I would be forced to use the child account and not the adult one whenever I worked on the computer. It seemed to me that would be okay. And at first, after I took it home and turned it on, it was.

But then, after an hour or so of work, it cut me off and informed me that as a minor child I had to get my parent’s permission to use it any longer than that. Okay, I could fix that, right? But when I signed in as the adult, this is the little note I got from Microsoft.

Hi test,
Jean wants more screen time on PC today.
How much extra time would you like to give them?
15 minutes
30 minutes
1 hour
2 hours
8 hours
Custom time
I don’t want to give more time today

Jean asked on June 3 at 9:28 AM. The screen time you allow can be used on any PC they use. We sent this request to all adults in the family. If nobody responds, the current screen time schedule stays in effect.

To learn more, visit https://account.microsoft.com/family

Microsoft respects your privacy. To learn more, read our privacy and cookies statement.

Nice to know.

Note that it does not give the option of letting child “Jean” have unlimited time on the computer, although the choice “custom time” seemed promising. And that’s how I finally solved the problem, allowing little Jean to be on the computer as much as she likes.

So everything I’ve been doing on this new computer since June 3 has been with my pretend parent’s permission.

Victor Davis Hanson on Carney and Canada

The New Neo Posted on by

Hanson discusses the state of the trade war:

Stage four is more serious for Canada. The jobs report came out. They’ve lost 41,000 jobs just in one week of the tariff war. We created 160,000 in August. It’s gonna get worse for Canada.

We have, as I said, nine times the population, 13 times the nominal GDP, and Canada is entirely reliant. Seventy-five percent of it is reliant. I don’t say that out of triumphalism or boasting, but in sadness for Canada. I don’t know what they’re doing.

Mr. Carney, who had three passports before he was prime minister, a Canadian, a British, and an Irish. He was the epitome of a globalist, and he wasn’t a nationalist. So his immigration, his energy, his defense policy, and his trade policy were all globalist. They were all European-style, and they didn’t realize or properly exploit the natural gifts of Canada. …

[Carney has whipped up anti-American feeling] because he did not want, as I said in stage three, he didn’t want an autonomous Alberta and an autonomous Quebec, and those referenda are coming up.

More importantly, he’s now interfering in U.S. internal midterm politics. …

He does not know what he’s doing. He’s living in a fantasy house. …

He and the Chinese are the only two countries that issued counter tariffs. People in Europe love what he’s doing, but not one of them would follow his example. He’s got his neck out, and the fate of 41 million Canadians depends on him being successful, and he’s gonna fail because the United States is saying, “This is a new world. We’re not gonna subsidize everybody’s defense and run up $200 billion deficits with one neighbor, Mexico, and $50 billion to $60 billion with our northern neighbor and call it a free trade zone.”

Then again, maybe he’s counting on the left taking control of the US and doing a switcheroo.

George W. Bush: again with the “religion of peace”

The New Neo Posted on by

For the 25th anniversary of 9/11, George W. Bush said this:

“This decision, shortly thereafter, was to go to a mosque,” Bush said on Wednesday evening. “I did so because I was deeply concerned about stories of women in coverings being harassed at shopping centers, particularly in Michigan.”

Bush revisited his 9/11 response during a conversation with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at “A Legacy of Service: America at the 25th Anniversary of 9/11,” held at his presidential center in Dallas. …

“I want you to talk about a couple of those events. You talked about going to the Islamic Center and trying to make sure that our Muslim American citizens knew that we didn’t blame them for what had happened,” said Rice.

“I also made it clear that Islam was a religion of peace, not a religion of war, and that these people subverted their religion,” Bush added.

That turned out to be a greatly-criticized statement, for obvious reasons. At the beginning, however, it’s understandable he didn’t want vigilante justice wreaked on ordinary Muslim-Americans. But that could have been done by just saying it – that ordinary Muslims were not terrorists and should not be attacked in retaliation. To characterize Islam itself as a “religion of peace” was absurd then and is absurd now.

That’s not to say there aren’t Koran verses supporting peace, but there are Koran verses for almost anything, including many supporting war. Nor is the religious text the only point, although the Koran probably has more advocacy of war than exists in other religions. More importantly, it’s pretty obvious that, at least in the last few decades, people acting in the name of Islam are involved in an enormous amount of the terrorism and war-making in the world, both internal (Muslim on Muslim) and internationally.

Polls are an indicator of how much support violence has in the Muslim world, including in the US. For example, in a 2024 poll (obviously taken post 10/7), 37% of Muslims in the US saw Hamas positively. And in July of 2026 the Hamas approval rate among Muslims in America had risen to 44%.

Those are, quite simply, terrible figures.

Don’t forget the murder of Daniel Pearl, “the Jew”

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Yesterday on the thread about the murder – and attempted beheading – of Andrew Wimsatt in Austin, commenter “Marlene” brought up the murder/beheading of Daniel Pearl and wondered whether his being a Jew had anything to do with him being targeted. I replied that it did, and linked to a post I had written on the subject in October of 2023, just a few weeks after 10/7. Here’s the post again, because I think it’s become even more relevant as time has gone on.]

Remember Daniel Pearl? Why do I start this post with him? He was the first terrorist victim – at least the first I can remember – whose death contained that special element of horrific sadism and psychopathic brutality crossed with modern technology, in that his beheading was videoed and purposely broadcast by the perpetrators. This was way before ISIS, but it foreshadowed the behavior of that group. It was something out of a psychological horror movie, and yet it was real.

Pearl was held hostage first, too. And then before the terrorists killed him he was forced to say things such as, “I am a Jew.” That was very very important to the terrorists, although the US seemed to be their main target for the moment.

Here’s an interesting fact that I never knew before, about Daniel Pearl’s mother, which is that she was an Iraqi Jew who fled that country in the 1940s because of persecution and violence:

Pearl was born Eveline Rejwan on November 11, 1935, in Baghdad, Iraq. Her father, Joseph, was a tailor who ran an import business, and her mother, Victoria (Abada) Rejwan, was a homemaker. … When Pearl was 5, she lived through the Farhud, an outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in Iraq following a failed nationalist coup. She and her family hid in their home for days, protected by their Arab neighbors who told rioters that no Jews lived there.

Her family then moved to a suburb of Baghdad but anti-Jewish attacks persisted and she herself witnessed the bodies of Iraqi Jews hanging from gallows in a square. Her father lost vision in one eye after an assault and he had to bribe a police officer to free his two sons after they were arrested on false charges.

In the late 1940s, Pearl worked with an underground Zionist movement that facilitated the emigration of Jews, then illegal, to British-controlled Mandatory Palestine. At this time, Pearl began using the Hebrew name Ruth. Around 1948, her two older brothers were smuggled into Palestine from Iraq. In 1949, Ruth’s oldest brother was killed fighting for the Israeli army, which she did not learn about until years later as her father had withheld the information from his family. In 1951, Pearl arrived with her family in Israel as part of the mass exodus of Iraqi Jews.

So the horror of Arab anti-Semitism was one of her earliest experiences, long before the nightmare returned in a very personal way.

Pearl’s mother met her husband Judah Pearl in Israel, and they moved to the US in 1950 for graduate studies. Both were scientists. Ruth Pearl died in 2021, but her husband is still alive at 87, and he was born in Tel Aviv in 1936 to Polish-Jewish immigrants who had had the prescience and good fortune to be able to emigrate to Israel.

Daniel Pearl was abducted, held hostage, and murdered by various jihadi groups in 2002, when he was 38 years old. That was over 20 years ago, so you may have forgotten some of the details that perhaps didn’t seem so important at the time. But here are a few:

On February 21, 2002, a video was released titled The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl. The video shows Pearl’s mutilated body …

The Jew Daniel Pearl. And of course there was the broadcasting, with great pride, of not just the killing but the mutilation. What seemed so unusual back then stopped being unusual a long time ago, because we’ve seen many such videos over the years. And now, with social media, we have refinements such as this: filming the murder of a young man on his cellphone, and sending the video to his mother.

But back to Pearl and the video of his killing. During the video, Pearl was made to say at the outset:

My name is Daniel Pearl. I’m a Jewish-American from Encino, California, USA. I come from, uh, on my father’s side the family is Zionist. My father’s Jewish, my mother’s Jewish, I’m Jewish. My family follows Judaism. We’ve made numerous family visits to Israel.

Jewish, Jewish, Jewish; Israel, Israel, Israel. That was no mere detail to Pearl’s killers. It’s not that they won’t kill non-Jews; they certainly will, and with relish. But it is Jews they wish to eliminate from the earth first. One can argue about what the Koran says about Jews; it says a lot of contradictory things, many of them not good. But you can’t argue about what hadith Hamas chose to put in its charter as inspiration:

The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him

So do not be surprised when Palestinians and Palestinian sympathizers in Western countries stand in public squares and celebrate the killing of Jews and scream that they want to kill more. As courageous Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes:

In short, anti-Semites the world over have been emboldened by this crisis, and Jews are once again being blamed for their own massacre. And I am not remotely surprised. In my childhood, I was steeped in the Islamist movement’s noxious anti-Semitism — which has been on such ugly display this week.

Born in Mogadishu, Somalia, I spent my early years escaping political strife after my father was imprisoned for being an anti-government activist. We moved between countries before settling in Kenya.

The worst insult in the Somali community was to be called a ‘Jew’, not that any of us actually knew one. To be called a ‘Jew’ was so abhorrent, some felt justified in killing anyone who so dishonoured them with this ‘slur’.

As a teenager in Nairobi in the 1980s, I joined the Muslim Brotherhood — the strict Sunni Islamist movement, founded in Egypt in 1928, from which Hamas ultimately descends.

I vividly remember sitting with my female fellows in mosques, cursing Israel and praying to Allah to destroy the Jews. We were certainly not interested in a peaceful ‘two-state solution’: we were taught to want to see Israel wiped off the map.

When I was 16, my school’s teacher of religion was Sister Aziza. She read to us the Koran’s lurid descriptions of the everlasting fire that burns flesh and dissolves skin — the place reserved for Jews.

Sister Aziza described Jews as physically monstrous, with horns coming from their heads, out of which flew devils that would corrupt the world. Jews controlled everything, she told us, and it was the duty of Muslims to destroy them.

It was a lot to take in for a teenager who read Western romance novels in secret, but I believed every word. …

[Much later] I abandoned my religion, but I have never lost my clear-sighted understanding, forged in my childhood, of Islamism’s pathological hatred of Jews, as well as Muslims considered as heretics and non-Muslims in general.

The former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi — a one-time leader of the Muslim Brotherhood — declared that Muslims should ‘nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred’ of Jews.

One of the most chilling things about the 10/7 terrorist attacks was that for several previous years Hamas pretended to be backing away from violence, and fooled Israel into thinking that actually was true. Now they are bragging about the success of their deception, which caused the Israelis to give them travel permits and also to let down their guard somewhat. According to a Hamas official:

“We made them think Hamas was busy with governing Gaza, and that it wanted to focus on the 2.5 million Palestinians [there] and had abandoned the resistance altogether. All the while, under the table, Hamas was preparing for this big attack.”

And they want this to be a worldwide effort. They’ve been preparing the ground for decades: emigrating to Western nations, using propaganda in the MSM, and enlisting many allies in academia (see this). Perhaps they have overestimated their support and overplayed their hand, causing at least some of their erstwhile allies in the Western Left to recoil in horror. Perhaps. But perhaps not. There is no mistaking their intent anymore, nor the lengths to which they are willing to go to achieve it.

9/11 was a wakeup call for a lot of people. And so is this. The question is whether it will be heeded.

How Fairfax County teaches young people about 9/11

The New Neo Posted on by

Don’t dare blame Islam!

Here’s the story:

A wealthy Washington, D.C., suburb’s public school district is advising teachers not to link 9/11 with radical Islam and to be sure to create “safe spaces” for Muslim students as the nation somberly marks the 25th anniversary of the terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans.

The guardrails in a six-page instructional guide, “25th Anniversary and Commemoration of 9/11” and distributed to teachers, has prompted critics to accuse Fairfax County (Virginia) Public School’s liberal leaders of coddling post-9/11 sensitivities rather than teaching history.

But of course. Some people did something.

That’s what education in blue areas has come to – and although blue states and counties and cities are the worst in that respect, the phenomenon is not limited to them.

A murder most foul in Austin

The New Neo Posted on by

Andrew Wimsatt, aged 62, was murdered in Austin, Texas, last Monday:

Wimsatt was sitting on a park bench at 10:55 a.m. Monday in the 2400 block of Chandler Creek Road when [Benedict Ogbodiegwu, 26] began attacking him with a knife about three minutes later, the document said.

Ogbodiegwu wrapped his left arm around Wimsatt, the affidavit said. It said Wimsatt tried to push him off but failed. Ogbodiegwu stabbed Wimsatt several times before Wimsatt fell to the ground, where Ogbodiegwu continued to stab him, according to the affidavit.

According to the document, Ogbodiegwu then put his knee on the victim’s chest and started sawing the knife across Wimsatt’s neck before running away toward the park’s pool area.

Winsatt never had a chance. By all accounts – and there are many, because Winsatt was known by many people online – the victim was “a gentle and generous soul.” For example, from David Burge (“Iowahawk”):

Andrew was a well respected civil engineer who worked in highway design and transportation research, a bit of a gentle avuncular Southern gentleman who was at the same time an afficionado of punk rock, pop surrealism art, and Midcentury Modern. He lived in Cambridge Towers, a 1965 landmark MCM condominium building near the Texas Capitol in Austin.

He was also a supporter of libertarian causes, particularly free speech on campus, and was a superfriend of @wethefifth and
@TheFIREorg. Supernice as they come, never an angry word about anyone, which makes this all the more incomprehensible.

Last time I saw Andrew was when my son played a show at the 29th Street Ballroom in Austin a few months ago. I didn’t even know he was aware of the kid, but apparently had previously ordered a few signed copies of his debut vinyl LP and was there to see him play live.

Hawkspawn, Mrs B, and I had a nice chat with him after the show. I called Hawkspawn to let him know and he, like me, was a bit shook by the news.

RIP and Godspeed, Busty.

What an outrageous and horrible and utterly cowardly deed. And yet of a type with which we’ve because all too familiar. RIP.

The suspect has a history of arrest for theft; see this. I’m sure the authorities know a great deal more about him, but so far no information has been released.

9/11: 25 years later

The New Neo Posted on by

What has happened since 9/11? Twenty-five years have happened.

It doesn’t seem possible. And yet I know it’s true. For me, 9/11 marked the beginning of a several-years-long process that led to the creation of this blog and a life I never had envisioned at the time. On 9/11 itself, the events were profoundly shocking and horrific, and I couldn’t even begin to understand them.

To go back to that day is to go back to a world that seems far more than twenty-five years distant – to another mindset, one with trouble imagining that the things we saw and heard that day were possible in anything but an action/horror movie. Now it all seems highly possible, perhaps even inevitable. But that’s only in retrospect.

I’ve watched many documentary videos recently about 9/11. I’ve watched many in the past, too. The stories are of heartbreaking tragedy and loss, of errors, of tremendous bravery, of inspiring survival, of selfless people helping people, of last loving words, of horror and evil. What does it all mean now to those too young to remember, too young to know a world where 9/11 hadn’t yet happened on a beautiful September day with a surpassingly clear blue sky? As with all history, the time will come when more and more people alive will not remember, and their views will be shaped by later events we cannot quite imagine.

I can’t speak for them. I can only speak for myself, and to a certain extent for my generation. For many of us, it was a watershed experience. Today is a solemn day and a solemn remembrance. RIP.

NOTE: Douglas Murray captures an interesting perspective here:

And here are links to some previous posts of mine about 9/11. I particularly call your attention to this post, which was part of my “change” series, as well as this one.