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Home » Open thread 12/5/22

Open thread 12/5/22

The New Neo Posted on by

So what have you got
At the end of the day?
What have you got
That you can take away?
Bottle of whisky
A new set of lies
Blinds on the window
And a pain behind the eyes…

Comments

Open thread 12/5/22 — 59 Comments

  1. Well, well, we’ve got a situation here in North Carolina. In a rural county best-known for golf (Southern Pines, Pinehurst), someone went out with a firearm on Saturday night and did serious damage to three power substations: two distribution substations belonging to Duke Power, and one transmission substation belonging to a local electric cooperative. Despite rumors about a protest at an adult drag show at the time, there is no evidence on who did this. Power may be out all over the area until Thursday.

    It’s too extensive and effective to be just some drunk redneck out shooting. What is worrisome is that it might be a test event by some sort of terrorists unknown to see how much damage can be done this way. No one has claimed responsibility.

    The vulnerability of our power systems is a serious issue.

  2. — Matt Taibbi exposing how journalists coordinated to promote an approved narrative. Outraged journalists respond with coordinated narrative.

    — https://freebeacon.com/coronavirus/hubris-exposed/
    “I went in with an open mind, believing that ‘the experts’ knew what they were doing.”
    “The lack of humility and inability to acknowledge or correct mistakes has proven to be a recurring issue among the expert community,”

    The way some politicians, institutions and individuals dealt with Covid should be all the evidence we need to conclude that they should never be in positions of power or influence again. How much more should it take to remove them in order to protect the people?

  3. They came on the scene after I stopped listening to music and had to work for a living.

    I use to work for Xcel energy. They really didn’t have much security around the coal plants or substations. Doubt if they do now. But with long range rifles or a drone it would be hard to stop something.

    Was it a test? Or some idjt? Will we ever know?

  5. BTW — anyone who treats the election results of 2020 and 2022 as honest has completely lost all credibility. There simply isn’t any credible argument left to believe that the same people who lie, slander, steal and cheat relentlessly in every possible way, who abuse power, who attempt coups, who treat parents as terrorists and trespassers to the gulag, who make fascists jealous with their power to censor and cancel, who have stolen elections for decades, somehow changed their stripes for the last two elections and became uncharacteristically honest.

    The argument the elections were honest and fair is laughable. It’s an insult. It’s every bit as ridiculous as the premise of global warming or mask mandates or pregnant men or 58 genders.

  7. Either an election is 100% Free and Fair – or it’s not, thus unfair. In an unfair election, like an unfair sport contest, the losing side can rightfully claim that the unfair process means an unfair result – so the winners’ stole the win.

    Trump is correct to claim that 2020 was not fair – thus it was stolen.
    I oppose unfair elections.
    Matt Taibbi is doing fine showing the Twitter unfair censorship – and so many journalists who had no problems with the censorship in 2020 now complaining about Matt using Musk provided Twitter files to expose the US gov’t interference thru requests to censor tweets.

    Trump had an ambiguous tweet complaining about it, noting that Massive Fraud allows rules & the Constitution to be ignored. Which could mean the Dems are ignoring rules, or it could be a call for Reps to rise up against the fraud. Definitely not clear – tho Trump haters & critics, including John Hindraker (Powerline), condemn Trump for ignoring the constitution.

    In the mean time, I wish the MainStream Media would Get Smart — or at least follow this MSO (Melbourne Ska Orchestra)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVyJkKKfRFs&list=RDGMEM29nh-so2GiiVvCzzeO3LJQ&index=22

  8. Interesting article / paper by Richard S. Lindzen about climate change. He is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

    See here;
    https://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/2022-09-22-Lindzen-global-warming-narrative.pdf

    and here:

    https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/12/04/mit-climate-scientist-dr-richard-lindzen-rejects-climate-change-as-a-quasi-religious-movement-predicated-on-an-absurd-scientific-narrative/

  9. I missed most of the Dire Straits material back in the day, except for Brothers in Arms of course. That’s a very nice one. I was reflecting on how the soprano sax had its day or decade in the sun. 1982 was the release date.

    OK ladies, does Mark Knopfler have a sexy speaking voice? I suspect the shot at 8:10 answers that.

    From Wikipedia:
    On the Sultans of Swing: The Very Best of Dire Straits DVD, Mark Knopfler said this about the song: “It’s just about the Private Investigations… “What have you got at the end of the day” – Nothing more than you started out with…” It is said the song was inspired by author Raymond Chandler.[1]

    This song was also modified by Mark Knopfler into a score for the Bill Forsyth film Comfort and Joy in 1984, in which portions of the song are used for certain scenes.

    It was also used in the video release of the 1984 film Against All Odds during the deleted scenes. A section of the footage cut from the final release dealt with the time spent on the run, in Mexico, by Rachel Ward’s & Jeff Bridges’ characters.
    ________

    The full lyrics or “secco recitative” in this case:
    It’s a mystery to me, the game commences
    For the usual fee plus expenses
    Confidential information, it’s in a diary
    This is my investigation, it’s not a public inquiry

    I go checking out the reports, digging up the dirt
    You get to meet all sorts in this line of work
    Treachery and treason, there’s always an excuse for it
    And when I find the reason, I still can’t get used to it

    And what have you got at the end of the day?
    What have you got to take away?
    A bottle of whiskey and a new set of lies
    Blinds on the windows and a pain behind the eyes

    Scarred for life, no compensation
    Private investigations

    BTW, “Against All Odds” was actually a remake of a wonderful old film noir called “Out of the Past” starring Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer. Highly recommended. Ms. Greer also got a co-starring role in Against All Odds.

  10. The formerly pro FBI Andrew McCarthy seems to be seeing the light.

    “ How the FBI’s nod and a wink got social media to censor The Post’s Hunter Biden reporting

    Stop looking for a smoking gun. That’s not how this game works.

    Just as it did in 2016, the Democratic Party colluded during the 2020 presidential campaign with FBI leadership, its like-minded transnational-progressives in the loose-lipped community of current and former national-security officials and the media. The objective in 2020, as in 2016, was to try to drag a weak, deeply compromised Democratic candidate across the finish line.”

    https://nypost.com/2022/12/04/how-the-fbis-nod-wink-got-social-media-to-censor-the-posts-hunter-biden-reporting/

  14. Bob Wilson,

    I just saw Will Cain on Fox speaking about the lack of a smoking gun. He had participating in some very recent internet 2-way (n-way?) broadcast with Elon Musk while Musk was flying on a jet. He said the “interview” went on for 2 hours.

    Anyhow, Cain made the well known point that even in criminal trials strong circumstantial cases are often excellent and result in convictions. No murder weapon or no body? Not always a show stopper.

    There is a documentary TV series about a couple of experienced ladies who tour the country helping out on cold murder cases. One lady is an prosecutor and the other is forensics expert. The latter states that getting good DNA matches is usually rare, and the former prosecutor states that she loves a really good circumstantial case. (I forgot all the names for searching purposes.)

  15. I was out walking the dog on Forest Service land a couple of days ago and ran into a through-hiker heading for Georgia and the completion of hiking the Appalachian Trail. She said that she’d been hiking six months to the day. Wouldn’t it be nice to go six months without the constant bombardment of the news and worries of the world?

  16. Tom Grey – I’ll echo Kate. You have to really squint to see Trump’s tweet as anything other than a call to suspend the Constitution. Trump wrote:

    “So with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, and the Democratic Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great “Founders” did not want, and would not condone False & Fraudulent Elections!”

    Maybe if you read the second and third sentences in isolation you could see it as Trump accusing Democrats of suspending the Constitution. But the first sentence is there, introducing the “Massive Fraud” and asking about installing Trump as president or holding a replacement election. Then you have the second sentence claiming that the “massive fraud” allows for suspending the Constitution. So the second sentence doesn’t refer to the first? That’s a stretch.

  17. Pompeo is spot on. School choice legislation is my most important political issue.

    https://www.theblaze.com/news/pompeo-weingarten-most-dangerous-person

    Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten the “most dangerous” individual on the planet, accusing teachers’ unions of pushing “filth” on children.”I tell the story often — I get asked…

    Predictably, LOL

    Randi Weingarten angrily claims Pompeo ‘hurting kids’ with attacks on her

  18. The real shame is that the whole Twitter thing is a signficant scandal and a significant problem, but now we’re all talking about Trump’s idiocy again. What’s worse, private companies colluding with the government to censor political opponents or a guy who wants to suspend the Constitution?

    Don’t put questions like this in front of voters. You may not like the answer.

  22. One of my “dad joys” is having introduced my girls to Dire Straits & them also enjoying their music.

    Private Investigations is maybe my favourite from what could be my favourite band.

    As always Boss…much appreciated!

    PS…now that I’m a father-in-law I’m anticipating adding Dire Straits to a list of “granddad joys.” In due time of course! 😉

  23. Lee smith was kicked off the standards for asking questions about the steele dossier, thanks to kristol fils

    I so respected the father as with podhoretz pere

  24. Bob Wilson @ 11:55 am thinks McCarthy is getting it. From the NY Post article:

    “…Democrats and their collaborators put major 2020 emphasis on social-media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, which had served Donald Trump well in 2016.

    The result was the systematic suppression of the Biden family corruption scandal: the staggering millions of dollars that are now known to have been poured into the Biden coffers from agents of such authoritarian, anti-American regimes as China and Russia and such corrupt ones as Ukraine. Joe Biden is in it up to his neck, although the media-Democrat complex continues branding the scandal as “the Hunter Biden probe,” the better to obscure the president’s complicity.”

    Makes you wonder if Biden’s enthusiastic support for Ukraine is just the bill for Biden’s corruption coming due. And we all get to pay it.

    Like any good extortion scheme, Ukraine would be more than willing to spill the beans if the payments don’t keep coming.

  25. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten the “most dangerous” individual on the planet, accusing teachers’ unions of pushing “filth” on children.”I tell the story often — I get asked…

    Weingarten’s ghastly. AFAICT, they’re just doing their usual business of defending any and all bad behavior by their members. The question is why their members want to do these things and why they’re permitted to do that.

    Any Republican legislature can do much to ruin the AFT and the NEA in their state: end by law collective bargaining for public employees, insisting that agencies like the AFT and the NEA operate as voluntary mutual aid societies and insisting that their revenues come from checks cut by their members out of said members’ personal accounts and not be withheld on their pay stubs.

    Look to the curricula of the teachers’ colleges to see why we have the teachers we do. Serious people have a hard time sitting through all the crud those benighted institutions dump on them and so you get a teacher corps composed of people who find that stuff palatable. The administrators are worse than the teachers. To fix this, Republican legislators need to close all of the state teachers’ colleges and discharge their faculty, to debar by law any requirement by local school districts that an aspirant teacher have an ‘education’ degree, and provide for alternative certification via subject specific examinations. Local school boards need to clear the cr!p out of the superintendants’ offices through downsizing and dismissals of discretionary employees.

  26. Makes you wonder if Biden’s enthusiastic support for Ukraine is just the bill for Biden’s corruption coming due. And we all get to pay it.

    What’s left of Biden’s brain may be suffused with crooked purposes. Enthusiastic support for the Ukraine is perfectly sensible.

  28. What’s worse, private companies colluding with the government to censor political opponents or a guy who wants to suspend the Constitution?

    The Constitution is already suspended, something Trump recognizes and you don’t.

  29. I love your website and reading the comments. At 78 no education beyond High School. Raised in a coal mining town enlisted in the Marines at 17 rather than being drafted for Vietnam, I finally love and enjoy my life. With my Highschool sweetheart of 59 years. We raised 2 children and got them educated of which we are so proud of. The real reason I am writing is I have hope for this country after reading your comments I can tell your followers are highly educated and I just feel good about our country.

  31. Kristol fils started out of working for moynihans staff if memory served who was a serious democrat even if we argued about his particular position

  32. TommyJay:

    Knopfler has a wonderful speaking voice in every way, including sexy.

    I also love his singing voice, which is highly idiosyncratic.

    And I love the “singing voice” of his guitar.

  33. The fathers had paid their dues. The sons had not. This is not unusual.

    Podhoretz Jr is an obvious nepot and the board of Commentary appears to be liquidating the publication’s endowment to provide a retirement fund for him (through the avenue of giving him an obscene compensation package). Wm. Kristol had other career options he elected to forego in order to enter opinion journalism and speechwriting; also, his most consequential patron was Rupert Murdoch, not his father.

  34. “Twisting By the Pool”, is one of the happier songs, by Dire Straits.

    For those readers that aren’t students of 1950s + 1960s culture- “the twist” was a popular dance in the ’50s and ’60s.

  35. Art Deco:

    I don’t see the relevance of your comment to mine. When I wrote of “paying dues” I was speaking about life lessons the fathers learned from being first-generation US-born children of immigrants, born in 1930, and of being on the left themselves and observing from the inside what it all was like. The sons had no such experiences.

  37. Neo, I saw the Youtube comment, with which I agree, that Knopfler’s guitar is so effortlessly wonderful. Somehow, there’s a difference between skillful musicianship and effortless and yes singing.

  38. Kristol fils started out of working for moynihans

    Aye, but he worked for Moynihan in 1976, when Moynihan had just departed his second tour as a Nixon-Ford appointee. He had three opponents: Paul O’Dwyer (old left, with red haze associations), Bella Abzug (who distilled in her person every kind of sectarian cause), and Ramsay Clark (formerly of the Washington establishment, then in the early stages of the political dementia which eventually left him the front man for the Workers World Party). Moynihan had been an impressive practitioner of public diplomacy during his time in charge of the U.S. Mission to the UN (1975-76). The Republicans running were Peter Peyser, a temporizer Republican who later changed parties and was elected to Congress as a Democrat and the incumbent senator (Wm. F. Buckley’s brother James). The intellectual circle around Kristol, Podhoretz, Ben Wattenberg, &c were dissenting Democrats at the time, not out-and-out starboard Republicans. Moynihan as he was in 1976 was catnip; Buckley was not.

  39. Hi neo,

    Heh, heh!
    No offense meant, honestly. 🙂

    Really, I think everyone has their own tastes in music, as well as their own tastes in Dire Strait’s songs.

    Yeah…I think DS has some very…happy songs, but in my neighborhood- it’s hard to see or encounter them, when the songs: “Industrial Disease”, and “So Far Away From Me”, get played on the radio, all the time.
    Hope you’re having a good day. 😀

  40. I don’t see the relevance of your comment to mine. When I wrote of “paying dues” I was speaking about life lessons the fathers learned from being first-generation US-born children of immigrants, born in 1930, and of being on the left themselves and observing from the inside what it all was like. The sons had no such experiences.

    Kristol was born in 1920, Podhoretz in 1930. Just about anyone born in 1925 had a more uncomfortable upbringing than someone born in 1957. America in the 1920s (much less the 1930s) was much less affluent than America in the 1970s. Also, both Kristol Sr and Podhoretz Sr had military service (though neither saw action, IIRC).

    Joseph Kristol worked in the garment industry in some capacity. Julius Podhoretz was a wage earner at a dairy for many years, owning and operating a bakery late in life. The one had been a subject of the Tsar, arriving in 1898; the other had been a subject of the Hapsburg Emperor, arriving in 1912. Both fathered two children – a daughter and a son each. Wm. Kristol seems rather disdainful of the working class in which his father grew up; I’m not seeing that in Podhoretz Jr’s writing.

  41. Art Deco:

    I have no idea what point you’re trying to make. My point is that fathers and sons had very very different life experiences in all sorts of ways, particularly of the inner workings of the left but not limited to that.

  42. I have no idea what point you’re trying to make.

    I’m making observations, not an argument. I’m skeptical of two contentions: (1) that having been on the left at one time is ‘paying your dues’ and (2) that being the child of an immigrant is all that significant in these circumstances.

  43. Art Deco:

    Political changers are definitely different than people who haven’t changed, in particular people who were activists and politically involved on the left and then switched to the right have definitely paid dues that those who kept to one side or other haven’t. In fact, Podhoretz senior wrote a book about it called Ex-friends. In addition, the older generation Podoretz and Kristol were self-made men, children of leftist immigrants who almost certainly did not speak English originally and were poor when Irving K and Norman P were born. Very different and, if you’ll pardon the expression, much less “privileged” then the atmosphere in which Bill K and John P were raised.

  44. In addition, the older generation Podoretz and Kristol were self-made men, children of leftist immigrants who almost certainly did not speak English originally and were poor when Irving K and Norman P were born. Very different and, if you’ll pardon the expression, much less “privileged” then the atmosphere in which Bill K and John P were raised.

    I assume Podhoretz and Kristol have offered a short memoir of their upbringing at some time; I’ve never seen it. (Irving Howe did and Midge Decter, whose parents were American born, did). Podhoretz and Kristol were capable salaried employees who knew how to network and hustle donations. They weren’t ‘self-made men’ in the way the term is usually used. Bernie Sanders’ father, who made himself affluent in the world of commission sales and could call himself an affluent man 17 years after his arrival, is closer to the mark.

    Both the Kristol and Podhoretz families spoke Yiddish at home ca. 1930. No doubt both households were impecunious, but that was quite common among the native born as well.

    Irving Kristol and his wife ca. 1985 lived on the 14th floor of 200 Central Park South. The building is a co-op. No clue what the rents and purchase prices were back then, but as we speak, the places for sale on the 14th floor have asking prices between $600,000 and $3,600,000. She worked for the CUNY Graduate Center and he worked for a philanthropic concern he had founded. The non-profit sector was supporting both adequately. (IIRC, they decamped to DC around 1990, he predicting New York would be like Detroit within 20 years; his widow eventually lived in Falls Church, Va.).

    The Podhoretz family at one time lived on the Upper East Side on 81st St. As we speak, the apartments on their floor have an asking price of around $1.7 million; one of their neighbors across the hall was Madeleine L’Engle. (They at one time owned a 2d piece of property in the Hamptons; they took out a mortgage on it to finance a defense of their son-in-law when Lawrence Walsh was on his tail). The NGO sector was good to them too.

  45. I want to second the recommendation by John Tyler @11:32 .

    IMO, Lindzen has written a paper that laymen can understand, but provides references to deeper studies and papers. What he shows is that the Basic Climate Models (BCMs) have been wrong because they are unable to properly model the effects of water vapor, aerosols, and other so-called forcings.

    He also points out that nowhere in the IPCC reports has the observed climate change been described as a crisis. That is a description used by AGW activists. How many are aware of this?

    Like Anthony Watt has done, he calls into question the idea of an average global temperature. The whole proposition is based on somewhat sketchy records and cherry-picked points of reference. It may be a worthwhile general reference, but it’s anything but a precise picture of global temps. Much less something to base national energy policy on. The satellite-based temperatures are far more reliable, though covering a much shorter time period. (1979 to the present.) He has some interesting charts on this issue.

    It takes a while to read and is worth studying for better understanding of the details of his arguments.

    You can read it here:
    ttps://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/2022-09-22-Lindzen-global-warming-narrative.pdf

  46. “What’s left of Biden’s brain may be suffused with crooked purposes. Enthusiastic support for the Ukraine is perfectly sensible.” – Art Deco
    Ukraine is two countries trying to maintain artificial borders from a bygone empire.
    How much more of Ukraine needs to be destroyed and lives lost before this reality sets in.
    We’re flooding an extremely poor country with money. As of Oct. 2022, nearly $100 billion was contributed worldwide to Ukraine, about $40 billion for military operations.
    Ukraine’s GDP was $91 billion in 2015. It was $200 billion in 2021. It will be higher this year. War has been profitable for some in Ukraine.

  47. Art Deco:

    I don’t think “self-made man” means what you think it means. It refers to someone who achieves some sort of success without the help of family wealth or connections. That would be Irving K and Norman P, but not their sons.

    See this:

    A man who became successful or wealthy through hard work and not by inheritance or help from others.

  48. Ukraine is two countries trying to maintain artificial borders from a bygone empire.

    Its borders are no more ‘artificial’ than than those of any other country not delineated by water or mountains.

    It is not two countries, it is one country. Every oblast in the country voted for the declaration of sovereignty in that 1991 referendum. Over 80% of the public in the Ukraine identifies itself as ‘Ukrainian’ when asked. Self-identified Great Russians account for about 17% of the population and do not form a majority anywhere bar the Crimea. (They were shy of 40% in the Donbass ca. 2010). There are political parties who advocate a Russophile orientation in foreign policy and those who advocate an occidental orientation. In competitive elections held in 2012, the ratio of votes for the one to votes for the other was about 0.75. In those held in 2019, that ratio had fallen to 0.20. That’s what Vladimir Putin’s deft diplomacy has wrought for his advocates in the Ukraine. As for an actual merger of the Ukraine and Russia, such a program was not advocated by any political organization of significance in the Ukraine in 2012 and social surveys done on the question suggest that only about 4% of the population favors that.

  49. It refers to someone who achieves some sort of success without the help of family wealth or connections. That would be Irving K and Norman P, but not their sons.

    Uh, no.

  55. I meant to just show the votes in a graphic form. A divided country.

    I have news for you: there is regional variation in opinion in any country larger than a city-state. (While we’re at it, the purveyors of Russophile opinion were outnumbered 5-1 during the last election).

  56. Brain E:

    Who needs votes when you have an army and “little green men?” Little green men in Donetsk and Luhansk. An army in Crimea (2014) and in the rest of Ukraine (2022) at least those parts that border the motherland or its vassal, Belarus?

    But of course it was intended to be a divided country, as in divide and conquer. You no doubt approve of Vlad’s most recent elections in the newly “liberated” Roosian lands of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporhisia (sic)?

  59. “in 2019, that ratio had fallen to 0.20. That’s what Vladimir Putin’s deft diplomacy has wrought for his advocates in the Ukraine.” – Art Deco

    That’s because the LPR, DPR and Crimea didn’t vote in the election. They had already declared their independence. The graphs I linked follow the majority/large plurality ethnic Russian oblasts.

    Crimea had gained an autonomous status inside Ukraine, and the Donetsk, Luhansk oblasts had been seeking the same since 1994.

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