Florida: Vindman down, Nixon up

The New Neo Posted on by

We’ve got another DSA member winning a Democrat primary, this time in Florida for the US Senate. The outcome was considered an upset:

Progressive state Rep. Angie Nixon scored a major upset over former National Security Council aide Alex Vindman in the Florida Democratic Senate primary, NBC News projects, setting up a general election race against Republican Sen. Ashley Moody.

Vindman, a retired lieutenant colonel and Iraq War veteran who rose to prominence as a witness during President Donald Trump’s 2019 impeachment hearings, was viewed as a heavy favorite against Nixon, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, heading into Tuesday’s contest.

Vindman isn’t exactly a fountain of charisma, but a DSA member is an odd choice for a basically red state such as Florida. And how is it the polls were so wrong – again? Most of the other polls have overestimated the DSA candidates’ leads, but in this race polls seem to have done the opposite.

Odd, but perhaps all the polls are way off because the number of “undecideds” has been large in each race. For example, a July poll said this:

A recent poll released in July by Democratic Party sponsor Change Research showed Vindman leading Nixon in the Aug. 18 primary election 34% to 24%, with 41% of primary voters still undecided.

That’s a huge number of undecided people.

Another problem for Vindman was that he hadn’t lived in Florida long. And Nixon voiced the right (that is, the current leftist) stance on Israel:

Nixon is an advocate for cutting U.S. aid to Israel, a controversial position in a state with the country’s third-largest Jewish population. Her stance put her at odds with members of her own party at times and was in contrast to Vindman, a Jewish immigrant born in Soviet Ukraine.

Hopefully, it’ll be moot in November because hopefully, GOP candidate Ashley Moody will win. But I take nothing for granted. The seat they’re all vying for is Rubio’s, by the way. He vacated it when he was appointed SOS by Trump, and Moody was chosen by DeSantis to take his place until the 2026 election, which will be to fill in the remaining two years.

Spent many hours today …

The New Neo Posted on by

… with my ex in the local emergency room. He’s basically okay. They found something relatively minor.

Growing old is no joke. Nor was the ER, which has degenerated in recent years: short-staffed, very long waits, extremely depressing group of sick people sitting there for hours and hours and hours.

I finally left him there when he was somewhat better, but now I’m about to leave to pick him up. I’ll probably post more in late afternoon or perhaps not till the evening.

News roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s been one of those days.

(1) Speaking of Bin Laden … which some of you were, in this thread from yesterday –

I am reminded that I had seen a comment that appeared at Instapundit the other day about him. Here’s the part that caught my attention:

Beyond the obvious that he was a mass murderer, Bin Laden was a piece of sh*t con man. Bin Ladin was basically an Arab Luigi, only he had a lot more money and was not quite as retarded as Luigi. He was a rich kid poser, who grew up in one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia living in absolute luxury that allowed him to indulge in every sort of luxury belief, in Bin Laden’s case whack job Muslim Brotherhood theology rather the usual Marxism. Then when it came time to act on those beliefs, Bin Laden was happy to let other people fly planes into buildings while he ran for his life and hide out in Pakistan. Real brave guy. Certainly someone whose thoughts on world affairs everyone needs to hear.

The comparison to Luigi and the DSA rich-kid lefties is quite apt, actually. Bin Laden became an active jihadi during the Russian-Afghan War, when he was in his mid-20s (he was born in 1957). But he was raised in great wealth and had inherited a great deal of money when he was very young, and was also highly educated.

(2) That entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in today’s youth. For example:

Attorney General Dave Sunday announced that the leader of a cocaine-trafficking ring involving Penn State University students and two student fraternities surrendered Tuesday morning.

Agostino Abbatiello, 24, was arraigned by Magisterial District Judge Kelley Gillette-Walker on numerous felonies, including multiple counts of possession with intent to deliver (cocaine), and conspiracy. …

Thirteen of the charged defendants were Penn State University students at or around the time of the alleged conduct, in 2023 and 2024. According to the investigation and a grand jury presentment, Abbatiello and Thomas Robinson were the main suppliers for the criminal organization, making”> regular trips to Philadelphia and New York for large quantities of cocaine.

Well, tuition is high these days.

(3) What a novel idea – the Census Bureau checked voting records against citizenship records for 128 million 2020 voters, and has found 24K noncitizens who voted. Fancy that.

The left will say it’s not so many; nothing much to be concerned about

(4) There was a massive earthquake in Indonesia yesterday, an area of frequent earthquakes. RIP to the victims.

(5) “Fauci’s Partner-in-Crime David Morens Pleads Guilty to Illegal Evasion of Federal Records Laws (to Cover Up His Complicity in Covid).”

I guess Biden or Biden’s autopen forgot to pardon him.

Voter “vouching” in Minnesota

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s how it works:

As Presler noted earlier, it is Minnesota policy that one “registered Minnesota voter can vouch for up to 8 persons (without an ID).”

On X:

1 registered Minnesota voter can vouch for up to 8 persons (without an ID).

In St. Louis County (Duluth, MN), 737 of the 13,375 voters that registered to vote on Election Day in 2024

“proved their residence through vouching.”

737 / 13,375 = 5.5

?5.5% of voters that registered to vote for the presidential election in ONE county did so via vouching?

More:

As Muckraker wrote on X:

“BREAKING: Hidden camera captures Minnesota poll workers confirming alleged foreign terror organization members can vote if vouched for. We put Minnesota’s voter ‘vouching’ system to an extreme test by asking if it was okay to vouch for alleged Hamas militants who had recently come to America from the Gaza Strip.

“An election worker said, ‘You can vouch for up to 8 people,’ and added, ‘If you’re vouching for them, they wouldn’t need to show anything,’ referring to the alleged Hamas members we asked about registering to vote. We were also told that the person doing the vouching ‘is the documentation.'”

Minnesota’s not the only state with the system of vouching:

As of August 2026, 36 states required voters to present identification in order to vote at the polls on Election Day, but many states provide for exceptions to these rules. Of these states, 24 required voters to present identification containing a photograph, with certain exceptions, and 12 states did not explicitly require photo identification. The remaining 14 states did not generally require voters to present identification in order to vote at the polls on Election Day. …

In 15 states, some or all voters can sign an affidavit or a form in lieu of providing identification. Four states allow election officials or other voters to vouch for a person’s identity instead of an ID. And in four states, voters who live and vote in state-licensed nursing homes or care centers do not have to provide ID.

The site says four states have vouching, but I’ve been having trouble finding which states they are – besides Minnesota, of course.

Jason Arday, leftist martyr

The New Neo Posted on by

The left says the right is to blame for Arday’s death. But exposing the truth doesn’t kill someone. The left that rewarded his lies set him up for exposure, and if he killed himself (it’s not official, but it’s fairly clear that he almost certainly did), then it’s the tragic outcome of that plus his own actions.

From Roger Kimball:

Whatever else can be said about the “Jason Arday Affair,” he was not the victim. Perhaps you can say he was the casualty, first, of his own mendacity and race-fired megalomania and second, of an educational establishment that, marinated in the anti-white, self-flagellating racial animosities of the moment, colluded in the construction of Arday’s fantastical, self-aggrandizing, and ultimately self-destructive fantasies.

And Kurt Schlichter is harsh but correct here:

Of course, the entirely predictable response of the institutional left to [Arday’s] cowardly and apparent self-deletion has been to insist, loudly and with quivering outrage, that his death is our fault. You see, we normal people pointed out that he lied about his background, his achievements, his credentials, and his work. The fact that we did what a functioning institution should’ve done itself outraged his boosters, so these moral illiterates now invert the moral calculus to keep the exposure of academic fraud from happening again. Arday lied pathologically and endlessly, enabled by a ridiculously solicitous academia, then likely killed himself when his lies were exposed. …

But let’s be serious about these condescending leftists. They knew Arday was a phony. They also knew he was useful. His existence supported their narrative, so that irritating objective truth thing could be dispensed with. But he was never their peer; he was their pet.

Yes, they treated him as a pampered and indulged pet, which is both insulting and cruel. In the end, it was very cruel indeed.

But I wonder how much they actually knew, at least at the start when they first hired him. He checked all the DEI boxes and then some, and scholarship isn’t what it used to be (and perhaps never was, in the field of education). I think they wanted so much to believe that they followed a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and never checked a thing. When the first doubts were raised, they then went into protective mode. At some point they definitely knew the truth, at least most of them did. But denial is a very powerful thing. People can fool themselves, and that makes them even bigger fools.

Here’s a recent tweet from Nathan Cofnas (I featured an interview with him in this post; he’s the professor who said Arday plagiarized his PhD thesis):

For those without X, it says:

There is an anti-Cofnas hate rally in Trafalgar Square with ~15,000 attendees. If I were in London there is a real possibility that I would be murdered.

1000s of academics & journalists knew the truth about Jason Arday for more than a year. Now you know why no one said anything.

Cofnas is asserting that tons of people knew for at least a year. That probably is true. I don’t think most of them knew for the first year or two, but that was through willful blindness. I also think Cofnas is correct that many people were afraid to speak up, for fear of getting the sort of vicious reaction he’s getting. Others wouldn’t speak up because they felt it would hurt the DEI cause to which they were wedded. Some didn’t speak up because they felt not only would it be cause for accusations of racism against them, but because they also might lose their positions.

How did that war on terror go?

The New Neo Posted on by

It is commonly accepted that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were disasters, and that the “war on terror” (whatever that means) wasn’t won. But are these things true? Here’s a discussion that might be of interest. See what you think.

By the way, about the idea that the Bush administration thought the Iraq aftermath would be easy (“a cakewalk”), I beg to differ and I wrote about it in this post from 2005.

The problems in the present campaign against Iran – and they are many – stem from the fact that Iran is a much bigger country than Iraq with a larger population and a more religiously fanatical leadership unafraid to kill vast numbers of its own people, plus the IRGC has a structure that makes it exceptionally difficult to break, with power to control or threaten to control the vital Strait of Hormuz. In addition, we no longer tolerate having any boots on the ground, or nation-building of any complexity or length, and the Iranian leaders are well aware of that fact.

AOC and freezing eggs

The New Neo Posted on by

LBJ bared his belly to show us his gallbladder scar.

Too much information.

AOC has bared hers to show us her quest to freeze her eggs in order to preserve her chances to have children. Also too much information. But certainly more interesting information, considering that this is a practice – purposely delaying conception and using medically-assisted means in an effort to get pregnant later at the “right” time – that has become more common.

AOC says:

“Maybe in life you can’t have everything,” she says. “But here’s the secret: You can have a hell of a lot.”

AOC is herself a good example of maximizing a gift for gab and a little bit of undergrad-type knowledge and gaining a position of some power, perhaps to gain even more. She’s thirty-six years old now and had been keeping company with a boyfriend of at least a decade, although they’ve now broken up:

… she also is single, with The New York Times reporting that she has split from her long-term fiancé and college sweetheart, Riley Roberts. …

… Now she finds herself at 36, still beautiful, considered youthful by the standards of the day, but with ovaries that stubbornly remain in nature’s grip. From the age of 35 a woman’s fertility falls off a cliff.

AOC is trying to outsmart the process by using hormone injections to force her ovaries to emit six to 10 eggs at once which are then removed and frozen in the uncertain hope that they can be successfully thawed and fertilized when she’s ready to become a mother.

The rest of the article discusses the difference between left and right on child-bearing and abortion and Having It All. It also contrasts AOC with Karoline Leavitt, who at 28 has two children and a great career but is leaving to spend more time with her baby and toddler.

What interests me more is whether AOC is giving women (and perhaps herself) false hope that conception can be almost indefinitely delayed and yet ultimately be successful. But even with egg-freezing that can definitely extend the window of possibility, actually having a baby gets more and more difficult and there are costs both monetary and in terms of health. The drugs involved to induce hyper-ovulation are disruptive and potentially damaging. The chances of successful fertilization and implantation get lower and lower as times goes on, no matter at what age the eggs were frozen. Pregnancy itself is more difficult and hazardous as a woman gets older. And then of course there’s the question of whether a partner or husband is ever found. Although a woman can go it alone with donor sperm, that’s still another difficult decision.

The other day I was watching an interesting podcast on these sorts of issues, and so here it is:

[NOTE: The article characterizes AOC as “still beautiful.” You may disagree. I happen to think AOC is a very attractive woman. I also think that’s part of her electoral success. If she weren’t attractive, I’m not at all sure she’d have been elected in the first place or would have such a large following today.]

DSA Democrats vs. non-DSA Democrats: is there a difference?

The New Neo Posted on by

From commenter “Selfy”:

Talk Radio host Vince Coglianese said today that “non-DSA Democrats” support the same things that “Democratic Socialists” do, but they just won’t admit it.

Note the word “support.” I don’t know what most non-DSA Democrats believe. But I have noticed for years that almost all Democrats who run as moderates vote for every single far-leftist measure proposed in Congress.

During Trump’s first term and when Biden was president, the only rebels who stopped the far left’s plans to eliminate voting security and/or to make DC a state, for example, were Sinema (who ended up leaving the party and then leaving the Senate) and Manchin (who was from a deep red state). Here’s the history of the DC statehood bill, as a memory refresher:

In February 2019, the House Democratic leadership put its support behind legislation to grant D.C. statehood. H.R. 1, the For the People Act of 2019, included a nonbinding expression of support, passed 234 to 193 in March 2019 on a party-line vote, with Democrats in favor and Republicans opposed. …

On June 26, 2020, the House of Representatives passed the “Washington, D.C. Admission Act” 232–180 largely along party lines; Collin Peterson and Justin Amash were the only Democrat and Libertarian, respectively, to vote no. It died in the Republican-controlled Senate at the end of the 116th Congress. …

In 2020 and 2021, the full House of Representatives voted on statehood bills, both approved on party-line votes with Democrats in support and Republicans in opposition.

On April 30, 2021, Democratic senator Joe Manchin came out against both H.R. 51 and S. 51, effectively dooming their passage.

This is typical. When the leadership says hop, almost all of the Democrats hop, except for a few “mavericks.” The only current Democrat senator I can think of at the moment who might fulfill that maverick function is Fetterman, and probably only on foreign policy questions.

Again, I’m not sure what the moderates actually think. But what nearly all of them actually do is to support the far left, once elected. For the most part, it’s a distinction without a difference. When running for office, however, there’s a bit more pushback from some of the so-called moderates, especially if they live in purple districts or states.

The voting electorate is another story. The committed, activist sub-group is well-informed and holds to leftist principles. The rest of the Democrat voters probably have many different levels of awareness, but many vote on one or two issues (abortion in the past, Israel-hatred or “affordability” in the present, for example). It strikes me as very odd that Democrats have managed at the moment to campaign rather successfully on “affordability,” particularly since it was under Biden that inflation soared and prices got so high, and nothing that the Democrats have proposed recently would be likely to fix the problem. However, they address people who are hurting financially through a Robin-Hood-esque promise to take from the rich and give to the poor. I suppose that’s what the word “affordability” means to a lot of people.

A tarantella for Edward Villella

The New Neo Posted on by

Edward Villella used to be the most famous male dancer in the US. He slightly predated Nureyev’s defection and Baryshnikov’s later arrival, and they eclipsed him to a certain extent. But he was quite a star, and I saw him dance in person many many times.

I absolutely loved Villella, and it was partly because of the way he looked, as well as the fact that he exuded a sex appeal that was different from the Apollonian quality of Baryshnikov and the exotic aura of Nureyev. I also happened to once take a class from Villella when he was in his 40s, and I can safely say that his magnetism was even more marked close up and personal.

Is he forgotten these days? Perhaps, at least somewhat, and certainly with young people. There aren’t even that many videos of him in his prime. The other day I was looking for some and found, among other things, a video of him doing “Tarantella,” a short and frenetic dance choreographed for him by Balanchine although not one of my favorites. In the video, it first shows Villella doing the two short solo variations, then Baryshnikov doing them, and then a series of other later dancers doing the same thing.

Fascinating, including the comments, only a few of which liked Villella and many of which criticized his loosy-goosy manner and casualness, especially his relaxed upper body. But what they didn’t get is that the piece was originally made for him and the carefree happy-go-lucky style was intentional in this piece and it’s something that has been lost with modern dancers. It’s very playful. Even Baryshnikov, who may have been the greatest ballet dancer of all time, doesn’t quite pull it off for this particular ballet. Let’s just say that Baryshnikov gives us the intense Russian version, very perfect but not the original artistic vision.

Here’s the clip. Unfortunately, the quality of the video for Villella and Baryshnikov is poor. Villella is shown until 1:54, and then Barishnikov, and then the rest of them. But I think despite the poor quality of the first two, it still shows what I’m talking about. Note also that as the years go by, the tempi get slower and slower, although never slow:

Here’s a short Villella documentary. The still thumbnail at the beginning gives you some idea of why so many women (me included) were drawn to him. It also has a few very short excerpts from Tarantella that are in color and of much better quality than the previous ones. He narrates some of this documentary; I think he was in his early 80s at the time, but he’s 89 now: