On viewing old photos: calmly we walk

The New Neo Posted on by

As part of going through my ex’s things, it falls to me to look at the old family photos.

Now, I could just toss them. But I can’t bear to do that. There are nuggets of great interest in there, and I feel the need to save them even if the kids (my own son and my many nieces and nephews) might not be interested. So I’m culling them, and it takes time and energy, as well as emotional strength to confront the past.

I know my ex wanted to do it himself and intended to do it. I absolutely know it. However, it wasn’t a pressing task and it was easy to put off. He had all the photos, he just didn’t have the time when he was working. And later, when he had the time, he didn’t have the energy (or even the dexterity) because of Parkinson’s. So now I either must throw them all out or do it myself. One thing of which I’m virtually certain is that I do it more ruthlessly than he would have. But it isn’t easy.

Some of the photos are slides – actually, many many thousands are slides. Among my ex’s things, I found a light box for viewing slides. The light box was unopened and unused; the florescent light had to be installed by me (it was still taped inside to protect it in the mail). The store at which the light box was purchased closed in 1994, so that gives you are rough idea of what we’re talking about.

I install the light and turn on the box. Fortunately the instructions are still there, ready and waiting, because the switch must be held down for at least five seconds for it to turn on. I would not have figured that out by myself.

I arbitrarily choose one box of slides to open and view first. And there, springing as though to life, are my parents on a trip to Varna, Bulgaria, in the mid-1970s. My parents together. My mother standing alone in front of beautiful flowers in a garden.

Have I ever seen these slides before? Perhaps; my parents used to have slide shows after their trips, and back then the slides were in carousels and shown on a screen.

I take a photo or two of the best of the slides and toss the rest. Into the garbage they go. It is sad, but not the saddest thing. The saddest thing is that they’re all dead, including my ex, and now all these tasks are mine and mine alone.

NOTE:

This experience makes me think of a post I wrote on the poem “Calmly We Walk” by Delmore Schwartz. It appears here and was written in 2018, before Gerard died and before my ex died. I see, clicking on it and reading, that Gerard made the first comment on the thread. And I think I’ll reproduce the post here. What follows is the text of that post.

—John Updike: we may skate upon an intense radiance we do not see because we see nothing else.

Delmore Schwartz was a mid-20th-century poet with a tragic life but a wonderful gift. In fact, Saul Bellow wrote the novel Humboldt’s Gift based on Schwartz, who was a literary sensation at a young age but who faded with time and alcoholism and mental illness, dying alone in a New York hotel at the age of 52.

Schwartz looked the quintessential poet, too:

And he wrote some beautiful poetry that contains an air of mystery and awe.

One of my favorites is “Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day“. I suggest you follow the link now and read the poem in its entirety to get the feel and flow of the whole before I discuss bits and pieces of it.

The poem begins somewhat slowly:

Calmly we walk through this April’s day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
Number provides all distances,
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now…

Although it’s poetry, this beginning is rather pedestrian, in both senses of the word. The poet is talking to someone (“we”) as he walks – maybe a girlfriend or wife? Or maybe he’s using the universal “we” as in “this is how we all stroll around in the park on a nice spring day.”

The poem is also very specific. Its specificity is in the designation of a certain time: April, 1937. Poets don’t often pin their creations to such an exactness of date unless they are speaking of some great historic event. But this is not a great historic event. It’s an ordinary spring day in an ordinary New York park. And this “we” is walking very calmly (in fact, that’s the first word of the poem).

So nothing special is happening.

But then there’s a turning that takes the reader by surprise, maybe even by shock. The setup of the ordinary day is peeled back and is revealed as transcendent, as all days are, and the poet speculates on the deepest questions of existence. Here’s the next line, right after “Number provides all distances/It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now”¦”:

Many great dears are taken away, …

Whoa! Yes, they are, for all of us. And then he follows with this:

What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn …)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(… that time is the fire in which we burn.)

So within this most ordinary day in the park – a sort of cliche, really – we have the presence of death and its seeming (possible, questionable) obliteration of the self. And the mechanism for that is the passage of time – which is the school in which we learn and the fire in which we burn, because each moment dies as it is born.

I don’t know about you, but that transition passage hits me like a ton of bricks every time I read it. I never quite expect it even though I’ve read the poem many times. And the transition would not be as forceful without the specifics that precede it (those numbers do indeed “provide distances”). Perhaps we, the modern readers, feel it even more strongly, because it’s been over eighty [now close to ninety] years since that April day to which the poet is referring, and just about everyone who was around him on that day in the park (except some of the babies and children) is dead.

I’m not going to discuss every line of the poem, but here’s another excerpt in which the poet returns to the very specific, naming some of the people who are gone:

Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where are they now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
No more? No more? …

Five lines and four question marks. Good questions, too.

This is the last stanza, which never fails to give me goosebumps:

Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.

Schwartz is caught up in a great rush of feeling that I think can rightly be called cosmic—as he calmly walks through that April day in 1937. And now, perhaps, the strangeness of the word “through” in that sentence has more meaning.

The poet was a mere 23 years old when he wrote that poem. I think of him as a human tuning fork, vibrating too sensitively (and almost unbearably) to the harmony of the spheres.

The SATs have become less demanding

The New Neo Posted on by

I actually think we already knew this sort of thing has been happening for a long time:

Johns Hopkins University’s Institute for Education Policy released a study comparing older versions of the SAT with a current practice test. Although a change in difficulty cannot be established, researchers found substantial differences in the reading section that, across the examined dimensions, “point to the test becoming less demanding.”

Questions now loom over whether expectations for college preparedness have declined, and whether the changes signal a deeper problem affecting the school system.

Questions looming? Is there really any doubt it’s been happening?

More:

The changes include significantly shorter passages, an 83 percent drop in vocabulary questions that require independent word knowledge, the near-total replacement of argumentative and persuasive texts with expository ones, and readings whose meaning can be grasped through context rather than assumed prior knowledge. …

David Steiner, executive director of Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy … posited that the changes could be attempts to increase equity. “We know that children of more privileged backgrounds bring more background knowledge to a test on average, so by dialing back the amount of background knowledge required, you’re enabling a more level playing field,” he said.

Can’t have people who know more doing better, if it violates the DEI goals of education.

Also, background knowledge is hardly irrelevant. It grounds a person learning new information and allows that person to relate the new to the old, giving it context and depth. Background knowledge also helps a person evaluate the truth of what he or she is reading. I wrote a post on that subject back in 2016, and one of its points was that it is partly the schools that have failed to teach students background knowledge:

In other words, [book author] Hirsch says that kids from richer and poorer families start out roughly equal in skills, but since schools fail to demand that children learn facts that would help them understand what on earth they’re reading, the poor kids quickly fall behind because they don’t get that background information from their environment. This may sound like some sort of excuse, but it’s not; as I said, he mounts some fairly persuasive evidence that it’s at least a large part of the story (or that it was by the 1980s, when the book was written).

When kids are learning to read from texts such as “Dick and Jane played with Sally” (yes, I know they don’t use Dick and Jane any more, but you know what I mean) there’s not much context they need to understand that isn’t well within their easy reach. When they’re in junior high and high school, and they are reading a passage about the Civil War, Grant, and Lee (for example), it helps to know there was a Civil War, when it happened, what the issues were, and who the major players might have been. These need to be firmly in place before the children can understand what they read. And the lack of specific knowledge is cumulative, because the children who lack it fall further and further behind because they don’t want to read things they don’t understand, and more and more things become things they don’t understand.

It’s only gotten worse since then, and I see little to nothing happening to arrest the slide. One of the reasons is that teachers who are also culturally illiterate have come up through the system, and people who plan curricula are for the most part interested in leftist indoctrination rather than giving children knowledge and skills.

Islamic pilots pose insider threat …

The New Neo Posted on by

… according to this article.

Ya think? Isn’t that sort of obvious?

Excerpt:

Former aviation security officials say the FAA needs to reassess threats inside cockpits and the measures intended to counter them. They say this review is especially urgent because the agency has made insider threats to the cockpit more likely by recently forcing airlines to add a secondary barrier to the cockpit in the form of a metal gate on new planes.

Experts say the added security, while well-intentioned, could backfire following al-Qaeda’s call last month for Islamist pilots to carry out more suicide attacks inside cockpits and for followers to infiltrate the ranks of pilots. Al-Qaeda has reestablished terror training camps in Afghanistan, along with recruiting and propaganda organs, echoing its pre-9/11 potency.

Enhanced security measures designed to lock out threats could merely lock in an attacker. At the same time, the FAA is adding more people to the flight deck under a new training program that lets air traffic controllers sit as passengers in cockpit jump seats to observe operations up close, potentially opening up more security issues with relative “strangers” in the cockpit. All major U.S. carriers have agreed to participate in the program, which will vet controllers at the airport prior to takeoff but won’t screen them in advance for extremist views.

That sounds like a really bad idea.

Oh, and thanks again, Biden, for your withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Back in the 20th century, hijackings were mostly the thing. But they were attempted by outsiders, not insiders. With 9/11, the pattern of takeover changed; it wasn’t a hijacking exactly, it was a pilot substitution by a group of fanatics bent on mass murder and suicide, accent on the “murder” part. One of the results was fortifying of the cockpit. But much like a virus, the incidents have morphed in order to respond to changing defenses, and in recent decades we have the phenomenon of pilots themselves committing the mass murder and suicide.

That’s not to say that there were zero incidents of the kind prior to 9/11. When I researched it just now, I was surprised to find that there had been a few during the 1990s and one in the 1980s. I had heard of one of them before, the EgyptAir crash in 1999:

EgyptAir Flight 990 plunged into the Atlantic Ocean off Nantucket, Mass., on Oct. 31, 1999, killing all 217 people on board. Investigators concluded that the most likely explanation was that the co-pilot, Gameel al-Batouti, deliberately brought down the plane, although they sidestepped the question of motive and Egyptian officials have disputed that conclusion.

The flight data recorder showed that he waited for the captain to leave the cockpit and then disengaged the autopilot. As the plane descended, he could be heard saying in Arabic, “I rely on God,” over and over.

For the most part, the motives of these pilots are somewhat unclear although it’s logical to assume that some of them – such as the EgyptAir co-pilot, had something to do with religious fanaticism. However, it could have been something more personal; we’re unlikely to ever know for sure. But seeing this about the EgyptAir co-pilot, if I had to guess I’d say “personal and job-related”:

Investigators learned from another EgyptAir pilot that Al-Batouti was supposedly reprimanded for repeated inappropriate behaviour with female guests at the Hotel Pennsylvania, a New York City hotel often used by EgyptAir crews. Hatem Roushdy, the EgyptAir official said to be responsible for the alleged reprimand, was a passenger on Flight 990. Investigators confirmed that shortly before the flight, Roushdy revoked Al-Batouti’s privilege of flying to the United States and informed him that Flight 990 would be his last on the route.

Revenge?

But these days, with the explicit call from Iran for more Islamist terrorist pilots, the motive of terrorism becomes ever more likely. How to deal with it? Well, there’s this:

“Pilots who have openly espoused and supported terrorists should be grounded as unstable,” said former airline executive Michael Boyd, president of Boyd Group International, an aviation consulting firm, in an interview with RealClearInvestigations.

Seems like a no-brainer, but I guess it actually has to be implemented. One would have thought supporting terrorists had long been a red flag for hiring pilots, but I guess not so much. Same for mental illness, by the way, particularly risks of suicide.

Open thread 11/14/2026

The New Neo Posted on by

Ballet was very different back then. One of those differences was that the pointe shoes had very little support compared to those of today. But Pavlova had exceptionally strong and beautiful feet:

I started a thread for the FAA snafu

The New Neo Posted on by

And here it is.

The ground stop has now been lifted. But what was that all about?:

Domestic US flights are being allowed to depart again after federal officials issued an hourslong ground stop due to safety concerns from a telecommunications outage. The issue stemmed from a problem with network routers that cascaded nationwide, an airline source said.

• Travel nightmare: An estimated 1.5 million people were stranded by flight cancellations, according to analysis by the data firm Cirium. The skies emptied as flights that were already in the air came in for landing and the ground stop dragged on for more than four hours.

• No known threat: Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the ground stop did not stem from a threat to the US and was not linked to this week’s disruptive Microsoft outage. Preliminary reports indicate this was not a cyberattack, law enforcement sources told CNN.

Believe? Disbelieve?

Republicans in the Senate, the SAVE Act, and Thune

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “HC68” wrote this (the first sentence is a quote from me):

I have never been able to understand the thought processes that would lead someone to stay home to punish those who are generally on that person’s side and enable those who want to destroy whatever policy that person is advocating.

— neo

Not to defend them, I 99% agree with everything you said, but I do see a human nature basis for it.

Why punish someone who is 75% on your side and in so doing reward somebody totally against you?

Imagine Joe Smith. He’s married to Jane Smith. Joe has an enemy named Darla Jones who has spent decades making his life harder.

Jane Smith has a brief affair on a business trip and Joe finds out and divorces her. He spends a great deal of time and effort to do as much damage to her as he can in the divorce proceedings, trying to get the kids, the cars, the dog, and the house, and gets a lot of it. He and his lawyer manage to really mess Jane over.

A bystanders asks Joe: “Joe, Jane was faithful and loving to you for years, she only cheated once. But you spent ten times as much energy sticking it to her as you ever did to Darla. Why?”

Well, most of us understand why Joe would do that, though we might or might not agree that it was wise or best.

Because of the sense of betrayal.

I think, in a more generalized, irrational level, that this same impulse drives people to be harsher to ‘their own side’ over disagreement. I don’t think it’s the only reason or even necessarily the main reason, but I think it’s in play.

Broken human nature again.

HC68 makes a good point. However, a spouse having an affair is of a different category than politics; it is personal and almost inevitably highly emotional and hits right in the gut. If people feel towards their elected representatives the way they feel about their spouses, they will be perpetually angry because not getting what you want is pretty inevitable in politics.

What’s more, if you react with that intensity of feeling at not getting what you want, don’t say you’re acting on logic and not on emotion unless it’s crystal clear someone has lied to you and betrayed you purposely, rather than merely been unable to achieve the desired result.

Take the hatred of Thune on the right; it’s been going on for quite some time, and a great deal of it centers on his handling of the SAVE Act although it’s hardly limited to it. I’ve written many times before about the SAVE Act. I’m not at all sure that most people who are so very critical of Thune and the entire GOP on this actually remember the progression of events and who on the GOP side voted against it, or how much it actually could have accomplished.

For example, see this post of mine. An excerpt:

The online chatter is that the GOP doesn’t want to pass it. I think it’s much more accurate to say that a certain minority of them don’t, but they hold a lot of power because of the tiny margin the GOP has in terms of numbers.

But I am convinced that – although I strongly support the bill – people are exaggerating what it would accomplish in this election cycle, if passed. There would be immediate court challenges that would probably tie it up so that it couldn’t be implemented prior to the 2026 election. …

I think the whole thing hinges on 2028, not now. And yet everyone is so fired up about this that a failure to pass it could have the result of many voters on the right punishing the GOP in the midterms. That would be a real self-own, IMHO.

I made that prediction last March. And it certainly turned out to be a big element on the 2026 election debacle.

I’d like you to take a look at this, too. When Thune brought the SAVE Act up for a vote (I think the last time he tried, although I’m not sure), four Republicans voted against it. Do you recall that, and who they were? Here are the four: Susan Collins (R-ME), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Thom Tillis (R-NC), and Mitch McConnell (R-KY). No real surprises there. The Senate’s GOP majority was small, which made it possible for the four to sabotage what I believe the rest for of the GOP senators actually wanted to pass. This has often been the case with the GOP (starting with the FDR years), which has tended either to not have a majority or to have a small one.

So why is Thune to blame for not passing the SAVE Act? Perhaps he ought to have somehow twisted their arms more forcibly. Would that have worked? Also, many people assume that the Democrats would have managed to twist holdout Democrats’ arms had they been in that position. I’m not at all sure that’s these particular four would have changed their minds no matter how much their arms were twisted. Nor did the Democrats accomplish what they wanted when Sinema and Manchin were in the Senate and the Democrat majority was small; they managed to block the Democrats’ strong desire to nuke the filibuster, to pass their own voting “reform” act, to pack the Court, and to add a few solidly blue states.

It’s not that I love Thune and think he’s done great things; not at all. But I don’t think he could have worked that miracle and I don’t know who could have. Plus, there’s something else: not a lot of people want the job of Majority Leader. It’s a somewhat thankless task because you don’t get much credit ordinarily for what does pass, but you get a lot of blame for what doesn’t. Back when he ran for Leader in 2024, who opposed him? Why, Cronyn of Texas and Rick Scott. They didn’t have the votes to win, but had either done so, would he have done better? I very much doubt it.

More on Thune and the SAVE act, from Google AI:

Senate Majority Leader John Thune did allow votes on the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, with the Senate voting on the legislation multiple times (including at least five to six separate votes), though the bill failed to advance because it did not reach the 60 votes required to overcome the legislative filibuster.
Key details regarding Thune and the SAVE Act include:
• Multiple Votes Held: John Thune permitted floor votes and debate on the SAVE Act, noting that the measure was the pending business on the Senate floor for over two weeks and voted on six times.
• Lack of Democratic Support: All 47 Senate Democrats voted against the legislation each time, and Republicans did not have the 60 votes necessary to pass it or the votes to eliminate the legislative filibuster.

Do you think it was all theater and someone like Collins would have voted for it but Thune didn’t actually want her to? I certainly don’t think so.

The real remedy for all of this would be to have voted for more Republicans in 2026 and to have a larger margin in the Senate, and then you wouldn’t need Collins or Murkowski. I often think some portion of the “uniparty” accusers who purport to be on the right, and the ones who scream “betrayal,” are Democrat operatives – because of course voter apathy will harm the GOP and help the Democrats. Duh.

And yes, they re-elected Thune as Minority Leader this time. I keep reading what a betrayal that is, how awful, how it proves the GOP senators don’t want to accomplish anything. But perhaps the job of Minority Leader is a thankless one and no one else wanted it; Thune ran unopposed.

NOTE: I fully expect many people to disagree with me on this.

News roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) First, a disclaimer. I knew nothing about Jensen Huang until the current scandal broke. And even now I only know the bare outlines. But the thing about the story that interests me most is this: why would he risk so much? Was the sex that good? Somehow I doubt it, but it must have been good enough for him to assume the risk. After all, as Kissinger said, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. Huang probably was quite accustomed to assuming a certain amount of risk or he wouldn’t have secured the career position he occupied – plus he probably (and foolishly) felt immune from exposure for whatever reason.

(2) Some people in Maine are waking up to the fact that Susan Collins was able to get a great many financial advantages for Maine, and when she leaves office her replacement, Troy Jackson, will almost certainly lack the same clout. Too late, folks. You should have thought of that sooner.

Maine is not a rich state, either. As Google AI says:

• Maine ranks near the bottom (around 44th) for forward-looking economic outlook and low in real gross domestic product (GDP) growth, largely due to an aging population and a declining base in traditional manufacturing and timber.

• Financial Hardship (ALICE): While standard poverty numbers look moderate, about 40% of Maine households fall below the ALICE threshold (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed), meaning many working families struggle to afford basic housing, utilities, child care, and food.

(3) And speaking of Maine, they will have Paul LePage to kick around some more. LePage is an ex-governor of the state, an outspoken Republican who was an embarrassment and a scourge to its liberals. He has now managed to do the nearly-impossible in this election: he flipped a Congressional district from blue to red, and now bears the honor of being the sole Republican in Congress from all of New England.

LePage will be representing Maine’s 2nd Congressional district, which covers the huge northern and more rural part of the state (see this). As with much of New England, the northern part of Maine is more conservative than the southern part, but state population clusters in the southern part. More:

It is the largest district by area east of the Mississippi River, and the 24th largest overall. It is the second-most rural district in the United States, with 72% of its population in rural areas, and it has the second-highest proportion of non-Hispanic White residents (90.9%); only Kentucky’s 5th congressional district exceeds it in the two categories.

(4) France is not known for freedom of speech. Just ask author Michel Houellebecq, who is being investigated for saying mean things about Islam. And it’s not the first time, either:

The French novelist Michel Houellebecq — author of Whatever and Atomised among other books, and a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature — has been placed under formal investigation in France for “complicity in provocation to discrimination, hatred or violence against a group of people because of their origin”.

This is the second time Houellebecq has faced prosecution over his opinions. In 2002, he was tried on charges of racial hatred after calling Islam “the dumbest religion”. The charges did not stick. Now, though, he has been indicted over various comments he made in 2022 to Popular Front about Muslims in France.

“The wish of the native French population,” Houellebecq said, “is not that Muslims assimilate but that they stop robbing and assaulting them. Or, another solution, that they leave.” “When entire territories come under Islamist control,” he predicted, “I think acts of resistance will take place. There will be attacks and shootings in mosques, in cafés frequented by Muslims, in short, Bataclans in reverse.” Finally, Houellebecq claimed that the “great replacement” theory “[is] not a theory, it’s a fact. It’s statistical evidence.”

Whether or not you agree with all those sentiments is not the point. The point is whether he should be prosecuted for them. Also, in describing retaliatory attacks on Moslems, he is making a prediction rather than advocating such violence.

And by the way, in case you’re wondering, there have indeed been quite a few prosecutions in France of people who have made anti-Semitic remarks.

(5) From Homan, on keeping the border secure:

The bottom line is, again, we got the most secure border in the history of this nation. Congress may be more blue. Texas may be more blue. But the White House is red. Bright red. And again, President Trump created the most secure border in history. These caravans can come to the border all they want. They’re not to be released into the United States. They’re going to be turned around, or, be prosecuted, then turned around, because we will charge them with a crime. So they can sit in jail, serve their sentence before they’re deported. But we’re not giving one inch on this border. This is the most secure border in history, we’re going to keep it secure, because we got President Trump in the White House, who’s not going to let this border become chaotic again. And neither will I.

Time will tell.

Fatal shooting in DC

The New Neo Posted on by

Terrible. As far as I can tell, the shooter was an ER physician who’s been slowly flipping out into what ended up being a murderous rage, and the subject matter was black mold in his condo.

Ace covers the story here.

Trump takes Vance off the Iran case

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not sure why Vance was ever assigned to Iran in the first place, except that Trump may have felt that Vance would be perceived by the Iranians as more willing to deal than, say, Rubio. Trump wanted to Give Peace a Chance.

But at this point, Trump doesn’t seem any too pleased with Vance’s attitude towards that conflict, or to Trump’s handling of it:

Trump has tasked Vance to put his “complete and total attention” on corruption in Democrat-run states, which Trump insists is a much higher priority than negotiating with Iran. In fact, Trump declared in the same post that we don’t need a deal with Iran at all …

Vance has chaired Trump’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud for the last several months, which has mainly focused on Democrat-run states and cities anyway. Trump’s order for Vance to focus exclusively on this effort is new, and it follows Vance’s public criticism of Trump’s approach to Iran and Israel.

It also follows a last-ditch effort by Vance to cut a deal …

Vance has said that the Iran war was the reason for the midterm debacle. It certainly was part of the reason. But the Democrats’ brilliant plan to emphasize “affordability” (with the help of the MSM, and without needing to describe their supposed solutions) was more important, according to polls. Also, what element of the Iran war were people annoyed with? Wasn’t it that we dithered around trying to negotiate with those who cannot be trusted to negotiate? Wasn’t that Vance’s department?

This difference between Trump and Vance represents a very real split on the right. It’s between the Iran hawks and the isolationists, and it’s nothing new. However, it’s been fueled by the likes of the neo-Buchananesque Tucker wing. It’s hard to estimate that wing’s size, but I believe it’s consequential. Make no mistake about it, Vance is on that side, as has been apparent for quite some time. That he doesn’t necessarily buy into all the Jew-hating doesn’t mean he isn’t basically aligned with that wing on a foreign policy level.

[NOTE: I will add that I believe that one reason Republican turnout was down in this election was the influence of the Tucker wing. He explicitly told his listeners he cannot vote for the GOP this round; he started saying this back in June:

Carlson asked how any American “could support a political party that’s not loyal to the United States.”

“It’s not possible to vote for people like that and I’m not going to,” he said. “I voted Republican my entire life, I worked at Fox News … I’ve been a consistent defender for 35 years of the Republican Party, but there’s no defending this because it’s immoral.” …

“And if I’m out, then I think a lot of other people are out, too.”

Yes, a lot of his follower are bots or foreigners. But there are a lot of real voters in the US who listen to him and whom he influences, too. He wanted them to stay home, and they did.]

[NOTE II: I had hoped to publish that piece on the midterms and the GOP Congress and Thune today. I’m going to postpone it, though; too many other chores I have to do. However, I really do think I’ll be publishing it tomorrow.]

On the topic of election fraud in 2026

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “physicsguy” writes:

… [H]ere’s a very interesting article giving some POSSIBLE reasons for the statistically anomalous 20 million increase in Democrat votes last week. I know Neo abhors any idea of conspiracy in voting fraud, but this is worth a read:

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/11/it-was-a-coup/

First, just to clear something up: I don’t abhor the idea of conspiracy in voting fraud, although of course I abhor fraud if and when it occurs. I’ve written a huge number of posts on the subject of voting fraud and I believe several things about it. The first is that of course it sometimes occurs. The second is that it tends to occur in geographic areas dominated by blue cities offsetting redder rural areas. The third is that much of the supposed “statistical” evidence for it is weak. The fourth (and perhaps most important) is that if it’s done well it’s almost impossible to detect.

Even more important, perhaps, is something I’ve written many many times: when voting security is lax – and in particular with the use of computers rather than hand-counting of paper ballots, as well as universal or widespread mail-in ballots – trust in the integrity of the voting process becomes fatally flawed whether there is significant fraud or not. That’s happened in the US; trust is very much broken. Once that happens, each side tends to think an election where they lost was stolen by the other side.

I read the piece physicsguy linked, and I’m unimpressed by it. For example, I’ve read previously that in many elections the results actually do seem to occur almost everywhere and to a similar degree – for example, let’s say we’re talking about a 5% swing to Democrats, or close races breaking uniformly to Democrats. Same is true for election years in which Republicans tend to get the breaks. The latter occurred, for example, in 2024. I remember the maps; do you? Here’s one, for example.

Now, it the author of that article had done a detailed comparison to the election of 2024 and compared the swings to the GOP back then to the swings to the Democrats this time, I’d be much more interested. In fact, I haven’t seen anyone claiming fraud in the 2026 election doing that sort of analysis (if you find something of that sort, please give me a link). The bank-and-forth cries out for explanation, if the Democrats could commit such widespread and influential fraud in 2020 and 2026, why were they asleep at the wheel in 2024? Surely they hated Trump and the Democrats just as much.

I suggest that anyone who hasn’t read my analysis of the 2026 results in the state of New Hampshire, please do so (here’s the link). When I looked at those results, in a state (NH) with enormous election security and which previously was controlled by the GOP at the state level, and saw the enormity of the swing to Democrats (with one anomaly: the Republican governor hung on), I became more convinced than ever that the 2026 election results were basically bona fide and represent an actual trend that holds for most of the nation.

That trend is the thing to which the right needs to be paying attention. Claims of fraud without sufficient evidence not only serve as an excuse, but they are counterproductive in that they can further depress turnout on the right. If everything is fixed, then there’s no hope and no reason to go to the polls. If low turnout on the right was the problem in this election – and I think there is strong evidence that was the case – then the claim of fraud everywhere is highly likely to depress that turnout further.

NOTE: I’m open to changing my mind about the 2026 election and fraud if I see an argument and evidence that is convincing and that explains what happened in 2024. So far I haven’t seen it.