Speaking in an interview that aired Saturday on Fox News’ My View with Lara Trump, Rubio said the United States never viewed Maduro’s capture as the end of Venezuela’s transition but rather as the beginning of a lengthy rebuilding process after more than a quarter century of authoritarian rule.

“A system that’s been in place for over a quarter century… those are deep roots that you have to deal with,” Rubio said. “We’ve always talked about phase one, where our priority was stabilization. We didn’t want the country devolving into civil war, mass migration, civil unrest and so forth.” Rubio said the administration believes Venezuela has now entered the second stage of that strategy, focused on economic recovery, although he acknowledged that the devastating June 24 earthquakes have complicated the effort.

Only after those objectives are met, Rubio said, should Venezuela move toward democratic elections. “Ultimately, you have to have transition,” he said. “At some point in time, there has to be legitimate elections at every level so that people know that the government that’s there is a legitimate government chosen by their people.” Rubio added that national reconciliation would be the first prerequisite for that transition, arguing that Venezuelans have remained politically divided for decades and suggesting that post-communist transitions in Eastern Europe offer useful models.

That all sounds quite reasonable to me.

Venezuela has dropped out of the headlines, though. The long hard task of rebuilding a country isn’t the sort of thing that makes sound bites.

The death toll in the earthquake now stands at about 5.5 thousand, according to this article from about a week ago. I’ve tried to find the best figures on the number still missing, and I’ve seen estimates that range from 1,000 to 30,000. That’s quite a gap.

The post Venezuela post-Maduro appeared first on The New Neo.

Wednesday’s earthquake was actually two separate ruptures, magnitude 7.2 and magnitude 7.5, that occurred just 39 seconds and 5 kilometers apart in northern Venezuela, killing at least 900 people and injuring thousands more, while causing widespread building damage across the region. The quakes occurred where the Caribbean tectonic plate grinds eastward relative to the South American plate along a multitude of faults. But they didn’t really surprise [Venezuelan earthquake expert]] Audemard. He had seen them coming.

In a 2017 study in Tectonics, he and his colleagues had studied the slip rate of one of the faults within the plate boundary, the Boconó fault, going back thousands of years. They found that the fault had not ruptured since a devastating magnitude 7.1 earthquake in 1812 that leveled Caracas, which meant strain had been accumulating on the fault for 2 centuries. The resulting “slip deficit,” they estimated, was enough to produce a magnitude 7 to magnitude 7.6 earthquake. The earthquake duo that hit this week is like “the 1812 earthquake’s brother,” Audemard says.

And about the fact that there were two earthquakes so close together in time and location:

Back-to-back “doublet” earthquakes are not uncommon. Higgins [geophysicist at Florida International University] says the stresses released by rupture along one segment of the fault probably triggered an adjacent segment’s rupture. But the short time gap between the two—less than 1 minute—seems exceptional, says Germán Prieto, a seismologist at the National University of Colombia. Doublets such as the 2023 Kahramanmara? earthquake in Turkey or the 1997 Kagoshima earthquake in Japan were separated by hours or days. The short interval between Wednesday’s shocks makes disentangling the signals particularly complicated for seismologists, and helps explain why the quake locations have been hard to pin down.

But at the moment, the science of the quakes is the least of Venezuela’s worries. The death toll is large, but it’s not only that. As with many earthquakes, there are earthquake survivors who were trapped in the rubble and who will die soon (or already have) without rescue. Now and then there’s a feel-good story such as this one, which reports a father and son rescued after four days. But such tales are not common, despite rescue teams from varied countries.

There are also many aftershocks still occurring. and the death toll at present is 1700 and rising, with estimates that go above 10,000.

And the Venezuelan government is being blamed, not for the earthquake itself but for problems with the response:

According to [Venezuelan pollster] Chirinos, public outrage is especially intense toward the armed forces, police and senior Chavista officials, including Delcy Rodríguez, Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello and National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez.

He said one of the biggest grievances centers on allegations that authorities obstructed humanitarian aid collected by civilians during the critical first hours after the disaster.

“The two biggest sources of anger are clear,” Chirinos said. “First, the obstruction of aid organized by ordinary citizens. Second, the inaction—or worse—of the armed forces.”

Videos circulating on social media over the weekend showed residents confronting military personnel, accusing them of standing by while civilians carried out rescue operations with little official assistance.

In some videos, survivors accused soldiers of looting apartments and confiscating donated supplies—claims that remain difficult to independently verify but have fueled widespread outrage.

The armed forces, already burdened by years of public distrust, now face what analysts say could be a near-total collapse in legitimacy.

Not surprising. It’s a terrible, terrible situation, and Venezuelans had already been through a lot before this.

The post More on the Venezuelan earthquake: the science, the toll, and the government appeared first on The New Neo.

At least 188 people have died and more than 1,500 are injured …

Many people are missing or still trapped beneath rubble as rescue efforts stretch into Thursday night. Many residents have nowhere to go after their homes were flattened in the port city of La Guaira, the capital Caracas and surrounding areas. …

The US is deploying elite rescue teams to Venezuela, though it’s not yet clear when they’ll arrive, and pledges of foreign aid are pouring in. Venezuelans living abroad are anxiously awaiting updates from loved ones.

There’s more news at the link.

The post Update on the Venezuela earthquake appeared first on The New Neo.

The earthquakes struck shortly after 6 p.m. local time. People evacuated swaying buildings in Caracas and remained outside, many visibly shocked as they saw entire walls that had collapsed, making furniture visible from the street. Dust columns could also be seen in two neighborhoods of the capital, where restaurants and other businesses are typically busy. People remained on the streets after sunset. Some sat on the ground hugging their pets as dust gathered around them.

“It started off gently and then gradually grew, and in the end, we all had to leave our houses, go outside and gather together,” Caracas resident Hector Ricci said.

I wonder how many of the buildings in Caracas are designed to withstand quakes. This was apparently the biggest one there in about a century. My guess is that the buildings aren’t designed for a big one, and this is why:

Strong earthquakes are unusual in Venezuela.

While the country sits near multiple fault lines, its position straddling the South American and Caribbean plates makes earthquakes much less common than in other parts of Latin America.

It was felt in Colombia and parts of the Caribbean. I very much hope the death toll isn’t high, but I fear it is.

[NOTE: I wasn’t at my computer or on my phone when the first news came, so I just heard about it close to 9:30 PM. But earlier today I had heard the news of a thankfully-much-smaller earthquake near the Fort Bragg area of California: a magnitude 5.6, which was the biggest in that area of California in the last forty years. It’s a beautiful place I know well, and I have relatives and friends all over the state.

I’ve been to California at least 75 times in the last 50 years, and have probably been in five or six earthquakes there myself. However, mercifully, I’ve never been in a very serious one – although a person doesn’t know that at the time until it’s over. I’ve been in ones that are gentle and ones that begin with a harsh jolt, ones that seem to be over quickly and ones that seem to go on for quite some time. They are always frightening, every single one of them.

Northern California and Caracas are very far from each other and on different tectonic plates, and so these earthquakes on the same day were almost certainly coincidental. But if it’s a coincidence, it’s certainly an eerie one.]

The post Magnitude 7.5 earthquake in Venezuela near Caracas appeared first on The New Neo.

No one will come away unmoved by the book, and no one will be able to put it down. … There is no way of reading Alive without a heightened sense of one’s own life and its value.

The book is not only an extraordinary survival saga, but it has tremendously moving stories involving family, friendship, love, and sacrifice. It is a sort of reverse Lord of the Flies, where the cooperation among the survivors was extremely impressive, and it also contained deeply spiritual and religious elements despite its horrors.

Over the years I’ve read other books on the subject, including several written by the survivors. I’ve watched several documentaries as well. In 1993 an American movie came out on the subject, and although I was looking forward to it immensely I was sharply disappointed. It just didn’t ring true, plus it left out or truncated very important parts of the story, in particular involving the astounding trek by two of the young men who survived the initial crash.

So when I heard recently that there was a newer movie, made in 2023 in the Spanish language, and using previously-unknown Uruguayan and Argentinian actors, I was extremely eager to see it. I had to wait till I was in a certain mood, because the story is a grueling one even to watch, and from the trailer I could see it was very realistically as well as poetically done:

And so I watched the film, and I have mixed feelings about it. I would recommend it, although you need to be prepared for a harrowing journey. Compared to the previous movie it’s better. But compared to the book it simply doesn’t work for me. That surprised me, and I’ve been pondering why I found it ultimately very inferior to the book that some of the survivors thought was already inadequate.

For one thing, I think a book has the ability to give so much more background on the entire situation and the people in it, which deepens the story and its significance. Just to take one example, in the book you learn a great deal about a woman who was one of the initial survivors, Liliana Methol. But in the film she’s almost an afterthought and somewhat of a cipher. There just isn’t enough time to render each person in his or her fullness.

Plus, there are an enormous number of characters, and the actors (who look a great deal like the real life people they are representing) somewhat resemble each other, especially as the movie goes on and many become bearded and all become thinner (the actors were forced to lose weight as the film went on, for the sake of realism). It wasn’t that easy to tell them apart, and I knew a great deal about the characters already.

Films with big casts need to pay particular attention to this potential problem. I think that, for example, The Great Escape (a film favorite of mine although of a very different type), which also had a very big cast, dealt with the numbers more successfully because the protagonists were from different countries, and there were many stars in the cast and that helped the viewers remember who’s who. That movie was also about a half hour longer than Society of the Snow, and although both movies are long they both move along quite quickly because there’s so much to tell. But The Great Escape has more time in which to tell it.

In the book Alive, there’s a great deal of emphasis also on the stories of the families searching for their lost relatives; many did not give up hope, and their tales are especially moving and make the eventual reunions even more poignant and deeply felt. There was virtually none of that in the movie; you merely see reunions with parents and girlfriends which are generic because we don’t have much of the backstory.

There are many exchanges and scenes in the book that seem naturally cinematic, and some are left out of the movie. I don’t know why; it wouldn’t take much to have included them. Instead, there are repetitive scenes of the suffering endured by the survivors and their decline – as well as a tremendous emphasis on the most sensationalistic part of their story, the fact that in order to survive they very reluctantly decided they must eat the bodies of those who had died (and the living made a pact to allow the others to eat them if they died before rescue came), Any movie about this incident must deal with that fact, but I think that after a while this particular movie could have left out some of the redundancy and gone for some more of the background stories.

Most of all, I was surprised that the movie seemed to leave out or gloss over one of the most salient characteristics of the group, which is that they were Catholics and mostly believers, and that their specifically Catholic beliefs helped them endure. That is, many of them explicitly likened their eating the flesh of their dead companions to the Eucharist, although they were well aware of the differences. Instead, in the movie there was a vaguer spirituality that was emphasized. Even the part where, after the survivors returned to civilization and priests told them they would not be condemned by the Church for what they did in extremis – that entire aspect was left out. Instead, there was an almost-throwaway scene in a church at the beginning of the film, with a priest talking about the Host while some of the young men pass notes among them. Unless you already know the plot, you could easily miss its significance.

This omission and de-emphasis seems to me to be a deliberate lessening of the religious message and slant of the entire event, a trend toward the universal rather than the specific. But the specific can have a universal message, and I felt the omission keenly although I’m neither Catholic nor Christian.

The movie caused me to get out my old copy of Alive and start re-reading it. In the introduction, the author writes:

When I returned in October 1973 to show [the survivors] the manuscript of this book, some of them were disappointed by my presentation of their story. They felt that the faith and friendship which inspired them in the cordillera do not emerge from these pages. It was never my intention to underestimate these qualities, but perhaps it would be beyond the skill of any writer to express their own appreciation of what they lived through.

I think that’s an honest assessment; it’s an impossible task. Nevertheless I think that Piers Paul Read came as close to accomplishing it as anyone could. For me, he certainly came closer than any movie could.

The post I watched the movie “Society of the Snow,” about the 1972 Andes plane crash and survival appeared first on The New Neo.

The fatal plane crash at LaGuardia Airport on Sunday night was entirely avoidable and likely caused by a miscommunication — but either way, the Air Canada jet had the right of way, experts said Monday.

“Once that aircraft was cleared to land … it owned that runway,” said Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general of the Department of Transportation, to The Post.

There appeared to be clear confusion between the control tower and ground control when the plane smashed into the truck, killing two pilots and injuring dozens, she noted.

It could have been worse, according to this:

It was “just pure luck” that the LaGuardia plane crash didn’t involve more fatalities — with the jet miraculously hitting the fire truck at an angle that avoided fuel supplies, an aviation-safety analyst said Monday.

Former FAA safety inspector David Soucie told CNN that the spot on the truck where the Air Canada passenger plane struck it minimized the destruction, which led to two pilots being killed and scores of passengers, crew and two cops wounded.

It was nighttime when the crash occurred. A flight attendant was ejected, strapped to her seat, but survived.

RIP to the pilots.

The post Plane crashes with truck on landing at LaGuardia appeared first on The New Neo.

And this man may be one of them [hat tip: commenter “Kate”]:

The suspect, 29-year-old Jonathan Rinderknecht, was arrested at his home in Melbourne, Florida, on Tuesday, officials said during a press conference Wednesday. He will make an initial appearance in Orlando on Wednesday.

Officials accuse Rinderknecht, also known as Jonathan Rinder, of starting the Lachman Fire just after midnight on New Year’s Day that “maliciously damaged and destroyed, by means of fire, specifically, the fire known as the Lachman Fire and Palisades Fire,” a criminal complaint obtained by Fox News said.

While the Lachman Fire was quickly suppressed, officials said it continued burning underground until winds ignited what became the Palisades Fire.

I’m a bit confused by that. How does a fire burn underground and then get ignited by winds?

I know several people who’d lived in Pacific Palisades for about fifty years and lost their homes in that fire.

More:

Rinderknecht was an Uber driver, and he was described by two passengers as “agitated and angry” the night he was accused of starting the fire, according to the complaint.

Officials said during the presser that he was a resident of Palisades and was familiar with the neighborhood he is accused of starting the fire in.

The complaint said Rinderknecht allegedly said that he grew up in France and that he played a French rap song during his rides. The music video for the song “Un Zder, Un The” by the French artist Josman depicts fire scenes.

So, an Uber driver with a fascination with fire? How reassuring. There also seems to have been some anger at the rich as a possible motive:

Prosecutors also allege Rinderknecht used ChatGPT to create images of a “dystopian painting” of a city being burned on one side while “hundreds of thousands of people in poverty are trying to get past a gigantic gate with a big dollar sign on it.”

He’s being charged federally with destruction of property by means of fire – despite the fact that twelve people died in the fire. The charge carries a possible penalty of five to twenty years.

I wonder what other evidence they have against him, if any. A surveillance video would be good, because some angry words to Uber passengers and the creation of an AI painting aren’t very strong grounds for conviction even though he might indeed be guilty.

ADDENDUM: I see that there is cellphone evidence that places him in the vicinity of where the fire was set, at about the right time.

The post Man arrested on suspicion of having set the Palisades fire appeared first on The New Neo.

And yet in some ways a lifetime ago. As the British poet Philip Larkin wrote in a poem looking back on the days prior to a different historical event: “Never such innocence again.”

September 10, 2001, felt like an idyll compared to September 11, 2001, and all the years since then. 9/11 opened our eyes to the vulnerabilities most of us hadn’t seen before or had ignored and denied until then. It gave us a brief illusion of unity – marred by a few sour notes – that quickly dissipated even as an illusion.

And now there are adults who were born after 9/11. Now there are middle-aged people who were young children then.

We remember, although we’ve ultimately assimilated that day into our view of the world and it no longer seems so strange. The pain is still there and the heroism is still there. For the many families who lost loved ones, the scars and the memories remain.

Many years ago I wrote my own reminiscences about that day and how it affected me: here’s that post. The events of 9/11 were the beginning of a learning process for me that took several years and ended up changing my politics and led me to start this blog. All of that was unforeseen at the time.

There are so many videos about 9/11 it’s hard to select one or even a few. There are documentaries that trace the day through cable news coverage, through talks by survivors, or through re-enactments. There are videos that concentrate on air traffic control, or the military response, or the phone calls from people who would die that day. They are uniformly fascinating, compelling, chilling, haunting – even now.

So I’ll just choose one to highlight here.

RIP to all the victims and the many heroes of that day and beyond.

The post On the 24th anniversary of 9/11 appeared first on The New Neo.

Here’s what the preliminary report says:

India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) found that fuel switches had flipped to cutoff position—a move typically done only after landing—just 50 seconds into the flight as the aircraft climbed to 625 feet. The cockpit voice recorder captured one pilot asking the other why he cut off the fuel, with his colleague replying that he hadn’t. The switches flipped a second apart, roughly the time it would take to shift one and then the other manually. …

Both fuel switches were found in the run position with indications that both engines were attempting to relight before the crash. The commanding pilot, Sumeet Sabharwal, 56, had 15,638 hours of experience, while co-pilot Clive Kunder, 32, had 3,403 hours.

I also watched several YouTube videos of pilots discussing the findings, and the lean is to the idea that this was most likely done deliberately, although there’s a lesser possibility that it was some sort of software glitch. The idea that this was a purposeful crime would be simply unbelievable, except that there is precedent. Perhaps a fuller report in the next year will tell us more, but I have a feeling we may never know for sure.

Of the 242 passengers and crew on the airplane, all but one died. In addition, there were 19 fatalities on the ground and 67 injured. RIP.

More here:

According to airline pilots and experts, the movement of the fuel control switches—critical switches that allow and cut fuel flow to the plane’s engines—have to be deliberate actions and their accidental movement is next to impossible. The switches have brackets on either side to protect them. Additionally, there is a stop lock mechanism that requires the pilots to lift the switch before moving it from either of its two positions—RUN and CUTOFF—to the other. The report did not mention whether the investigators have so far been able to ascertain if the switches were toggled by one of the pilots or not.

These switches are usually moved only when the aircraft is on ground—to start the engines before departure and to shut them down after landing. Movement of either of the switches during the flight would be required only in the event of the corresponding engine failing or suffering enough damage that would require shutting off fuel supply to it to ensure flight safety. The pilots may also switch off fuel supply and then immediately switch it on if they believe that the affected engine could be restarted safely.

The post Disturbing Air India crash report appeared first on The New Neo.

See this as well as this. So so sad. And now the governor of Texas is saying that at least 160 people remain missing.

And yet the left is trying to make political hay of such a tragedy. No surprise there; Katrina was the template.

The tragedy stirs up the age-old question of why bad things happen to good people. There are a number of choices. The first is that God exists but is not omnipotent. The second is that God exists but does not micromanage the world and create constant miracles; floods are the consequence of natural forces in nature. The third is to be an atheist. The fourth is the response of the Book of Job, which if I understand it correctly says that God exists but we cannot possibly understand His ways and should trust Him.

RIP.

The post Incredibly sad: the Texas flood victims appeared first on The New Neo.