The “allow trans women” (that is, biological men) movement in women’s sports has reached its apogee as two biological men compete against each other in the finals of a pool tournament

The New Neo Posted on by

If you believe that all a person has to do to be a woman is to declare oneself a woman, then it follows as day follow night (or is it night follows day?) that you must support the absurdity of post-pubescent biological men in women’s sports. There’s really no way around that, and therefore many people have chosen that ideology over their support for women’s sports.

My experience with pool being mostly limited to the old movie The Hustler, I never really thought about whether pool is a sport or not. But whatever it is – and I guess it is – men have the upper-body advantage in reach and power.

And so we have this:

Harriet Haynes and Lucy Smith, who were both assigned male at birth, fought for the title at the Ultimate Pool Women’s Pro Series Event 2 in Wigan in the UK this weekend.

Haynes went on to defeat Smith 8-6, but vocal critics on both sides of the Atlantic claimed the real loser in the battle was women’s sport. British former Olympics swimmer Sharron Davies and American former college swimmer Riley Gaines were among those speaking out.

However, others celebrated the achievement and claimed being trans had not given the players any unfair benefits during the game.

Yeah, right. It’s just chance that of all the women on the circuit, two biological men were the finalists:

Opponents of trans players in pool suggest they benefit from various advantages, such as being able to smash their break shot with more speed. While one British pool group, the English Blackball Pool Federation (EBPF), has claimed that trans women benefit from a greater hand span, stronger fingers, and longer limbs enabling a greater reach across the table, according to The Independent.

If you look at the photo of the two finalists here, I think it’s interesting that they resemble each other enough to be siblings.

Open threads and the scrolling days

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been doing open threads every day except Sunday for quite some time. I think they’re a nice addition to the blog and people seem to like them and enjoy the open-ended commenting.

But I’ve noticed an unforeseen side effect for me: a focus on the passage of time. It seems to go more quickly than ever anyway, as we get older. But having to put the date down every day highlights it for more. One day it’s the first of the month; a nice clean slate. Then suddenly, two weeks have passed and it’s mid-month. How on earth did that happen? And then, the end of the month comes all too swiftly.

As my ex-husband said the other day, “a year is not very long.”

It reminds me of this song:

Tariffs again

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s another post on tariffs, because they’re a big deal right now.

As I’ve said several times, I haven’t decided what I think about them and am willing to adopt a “wait and see” attitude. But in the meantime, they make me very uneasy.

Because it’s a topic of great interest, here’s a link to an article criticizing the tariffs. An excerpt:

President Trump imposed hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs on the countries of the world, that vary enormously from nation to nation. He calls them “reciprocal” tariffs, but they aren’t reciprocal at all. Trump increased tariffs even on friendly countries that had lower tariffs than we do, which is the very opposite of reciprocity. He imposed 10% tariffs even on countries that we have a trade surplus with, like Australia — which has fewer trade barriers than America does, and has some of the lowest tariffs on Earth.

In all this reading about tariffs and thinking about tariffs I became curious to know what another outside-the-box thinker, Javier Milei of Argentina, thinks of Trump’s tariffs. Here’s what I found:

Speaking at an event at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and resort in Florida, Milei delivered a brief speech as he received an award for his defence of free markets and conservative values.

Declaring he is ready to work side-by-side with the United States and Trump, Milei praised the US president and ruled out retaliatory measures.

“Argentina is going to move forward to readjust the regulations so that we meet the requirements of the reciprocal tariffs proposal developed” by Trump, Milei said, according to remarks briefed by his office. …

“As you can see, we make policies with actions, not mere words, and on that, we agree with President Trump: it is time to act, and we are committed to taking the necessary measures,” he added.

Milei said that he had given instructions to ensure Argentina complies with Washington’s remaining requirements and vowed to “resolve the asymmetries with the United States in a short period of time.”

Milei is an iconoclastic thinker who has done a lot of things in Argentina that had people very worried about the outcome, but the results have been generally good for that country, considering how things stood before he took office. I’m not saying that Milei and Trump are identical – they most definitely are not – but there are certain resonances.

More on Milei at Mar-a-Lago:

“Make Argentina Great Again!” Milei bellowed from the ballroom stage at at Mar-a-Lago late Thursday.

It would have been the fourth face-to-face meeting between the leaders since Mr. Trump’s election victory last November as President Milei, who has imposed a sweeping austerity program to fix Argentina’s long troubled economy, offers himself as one of Mr. Trump’s strongest allies in the global culture war against the “woke” left.

Also, here’s a link to quotes from Bill Ackman on the tariffs. Interesting.

So you can use this thread for more discussion of Trump’s tariffs.

Erdogan had plans for Syria …

The New Neo Posted on by

… but Israel has apparently thwarted them, at least for now:

Turkey scoped out at least three airbases in Syria where it could deploy forces as part of a planned joint defense pact before Israel hit the sites with airstrikes this week, four people familiar with the matter said. …

The Israeli strikes on the three sites Turkey was assessing, including a heavy barrage on Wednesday night, came despite Ankara’s efforts to reassure Washington that a deeper military presence in Syria was not intended to threaten Israel.

I wouldn’t trust Turkey’s reassurances of much of anything.

It’s always interesting when Israel shows what it is capable of doing in the region. I think it has been clear for a long long time that if Israel was intent on anything resembling genocide it could have accomplished that a long long time ago. The charges of “genocide” are both ridiculous and illogical, but that doesn’t stop “Israel is committing genocide” propaganda from succeeding nor does it stop nations like South Africa or entities like international courts from labeling just about anything Israel does to defend itself as “genocide.”

Meanwhile, the Never-Netanyahus have created a Russiagate-type narrative about Netanyahu that involves Qatar. It’s rather convoluted, but – as with so much of Netanyahu’s enemies’ effort to destroy him – it resembles some of the tactics of those who tried to destroy Trump. I’ve cued up this video for the part where they discuss what they call “Qatar-gate”, including how it resembles many attacks on Trump:

If you want to know how the “Qatar-gate” story is being used, here’s an example:

Merav Svirsky, sister of slain hostage Itay Svirsky, tells some 1,000 anti-government protesters at the Begin Road entrance to the IDF headquarters that it’s “insane and insufferable, and painful to the spirit and soul and body, that I paid the dearest price because of this government of destruction and its head,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“He’ll do anything to preserve his rule,” she says. “And if that’s not enough, today we also know that ‘diplomatic source’” — reportedly Netanyahu’s pseudonym in press statements from his office — “is sometimes Qatari public relations posing as a diplomatic source,” adds Svirsky, alluding to recent revelations from the criminal investigation of alleged criminal ties between Hamas-backer Qatar and top aides to Netanyahu.

Much of the carnage on October 7 was targeted at Israelis on the left, who already detested Netanyahu. It is natural for many (not all) of the hostage families to blame Netanyahu first and foremost, as though Hamas is barely involved and/or more than willing to have peace and it’s merely Netanyahu and his evil ambitions that stand in the way of the hostages’ freedom. And the anti-Netanyahu forces in the press and in public life play on that already-existent hatred of Netanyahu, fanning the flames.

In other news in Israel, the IDF claims it killed the terrorist involved in the Bibas kidnappings and probably in their murders as well.

Open thread 4/5/2025

The New Neo Posted on by

The video I chose for today has embedding disabled. It’s about how people used to preserve food before refrigerators. That may not sound all that interesting to you, but I found it quite fascinating. So if you want to watch it, click here.

Hamas revises its casualty figues downward

The New Neo Posted on by

There is no excuse for any western news organization reporting Hamas’ death figures as truth. And yet they do it constantly.

Meanwhile:

Hamas’ new March 2025 fatality list quietly drops 3,400 fully “identified” deaths listed in its Aug & Oct 2024 reports—including 1,080 children. These “deaths” never happened. The numbers were falsified—again.

The MSM in this country and many western European countries has become the propaganda organ of the terrorist regime of Hamas. That has been evident for many years – see my post on the Jenin massacre that never was. But in recent years it’s become ever more apparent and shows no signs of letting up, and has done enormous damage.

On those prescription drug ads on TV

The New Neo Posted on by

Roger L. Simon writes:

We have all sorts of advertisements for medical installations big and small competing for our attention (and money), but even worse we have virtually non-stop advertising for prescription drugs on television. Indeed they seem to dominate the medium appearing on cable and network alike to the degree that sometimes you wonder if there is anything else. …

The United States and New Zealand are the only countries where prescription drug ads are legal on television. …

We live in a society where pharmaceutical corporations hypnotize us into thinking there is a pill for everything. They are doing the same to the medical community on a daily basis for mutual gain. Too many doctors have become prisoners of both the pharmaceutical companies and themselves, leaning expectantly on lobbyists for the latest cure-alls. It’s a toxic syndrome that must be stopped.

Here’s some of the history:

Such promotion [of prescription drugs on TV] was banned until 1997, when the FDA reluctantly allowed pharmaceutical ads on TV, so long as they gave an accurate accounting of a medicine’s true benefits and risks, including a list of potential side effects.

There’s also this:

Direct-to-consumer advertising is really intended for consumers. As a primary care physician, people certainly come into my office with advertisements that they’ve printed off the internet or that they remember seeing during the football game the previous Sunday and say, “What about this drug?” Studies show that when patients come in and ask their physicians about particular drugs, they’re more likely to get prescriptions for those drugs. Doctors of course also watch TV, but the pharmaceutical industry spends much more money advertising its drugs directly to physicians, through visits to their offices, sponsorship of continuing medical education, support of professional society meetings, consultancies, and the like. Actually, the amount of money that pharmaceutical companies spend on advertising to physicians is far higher than the amount spent on direct-to-consumer advertising because physicians are the ones writing the prescriptions.

Roger Simon’s article starts this way:

My father was a doctor and when I was a kid in the 1950s I recall asking him why he didn’t advertise. Medicine was his business, wasn’t it? Normally responsive to my questions, he was taken aback, wondering how I would even countenance such a thing. The honorable medical profession was above that. They weren’t a bag of potato chips or the latest Chevrolet.

Well, drug companies aren’t physicians, but back then they didn’t advertise either – except in medical journals. I’m not sure when the latter started, but my father-in-law was a doctor and I recall in the 1970s seeing his journals filled with drug ads.

My own father was an attorney and accountant, and I remember his horror at the idea of attorneys advertising, even through ads in the Yellow Pages (the Yellow Pages are another ancient reference at this point, of course). My father also was incensed when attorneys starting billing by the hour. He billed by the job and had his own system; whatever it was, he was good at what he did and never lacked for business, some of it pro bono.

NOTE:
I also read an article a little while back (which unfortunately I can’t locate at the moment) that said that drug ads are a huge part of the support for TV, and without them a great many stations would go under.

The experts: who do you trust?

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t put much trust in experts’ prognostications, and haven’t for a long time. I think it began when so many failed to predict the fall of the Soviet Union. I was a Democrat back then, and I didn’t see the problem as linked to one side or the other. But it did teach me to take forecasts by experts with a grain of salt and then some.

It’s only gotten worse – much worse – in the ensuing years. At this point, I read every article with an eye to scoping out the biases of the author[s].

I have my biases, too, and I’m upfront about them. But I really truly do try to be fair, knowing that I won’t achieve absolute objectivity but nevertheless striving for it. Wouldn’t most “journalists” and “experts” (and even hard scientists at times, but I’m talking more about economists and psychologists and people in the “soft” sciences) say the same? And yet there are unconscious and/or conscious biases all over the place.

My reluctance to trust predictions has come to the fore on the subject of Trump’s tariffs, as I’ve said in several posts about that topic. Trump is an outside-the-box thinker, and his approaches in particular are hard to analyze and make predictions about, whether the person making the prediction is a Trump hater or Trump supporter.

I have noticed in the past that most of the horror stories about what will happen as a result of some action of Trump’s have not materialized. And some things have – so far at least – worked out very well, such as the reduction in illegal aliens pouring over the border. Tariffs make me especially nervous and I don’t have a good feeling about them. But as with so many things Trumpian, I know it’s best to take a “wait and see” attitude.

How do experts become experts? Isn’t it through the opinion of other experts, and the academy? How do expects get discredited? How about that guy who had a formula that had correctly predicted the last umpteen gazillion elections and then fell flat on his face in 2024 when he said Kamala would absolutely win? He’s not an expert anymore. But there are plenty of other experts who have been wrong over and over and yet continue in their lucrative gigs.

One expert I generally respect is Thomas Sowell, but he generally describes the past and present rather than predicting the future. He’s written about the failures of experts, especially in universities – “intellectuals” – in a number of books in which he states that a lot of knowledge in a narrow field, and success in a chosen profession, often give intellectuals the idea that they know a lot about a great many things of which they are ignorant (see this book of Sowell’s about the phenomenon).

I also happened upon a YouTube video that featured Sowell opining on Trump’s tariffs. Before I watched it, I assumed it was either from Trump’s first term (or even earlier about tariffs in general). But no; it featured the 94-year-old Sowell in what looks like a recent interview. He seems sharp as ever, although he finally has started to look somewhat old and his words don’t come quite as quickly and crisply as when he was younger. Here’s the video:

It’s easy to find those who say this will undoubtedly be a terrible disaster, and a little less easy but still possible to find those who say the opposite. I find Sowell’s statements convincing compared to most of them. He doesn’t try to read Trump’s mind, but offers various scenarios for what Trump is thinking and considers that the outcome will be based on how Trump uses the tariffs and decisions he makes around them.

And here’s Commerce Secretary Lutnick’s explanation for the policy, plus his prediction:

I want to get a gig updating websites for the government

The New Neo Posted on by

I can do that. I’ve designed websites. I do it very very slowly but hey, I do it. And the pay would be very very helpful (hat tip Ace):


The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the agency created by executive order on President Donald Trump’s first day in office, has uncovered yet another striking example of wasteful federal spending. This time, the target is the Department of Veterans Affairs, which until recently had been paying nearly $380,000 a month for relatively simple website modifications—work that a single staffer now handles internally with just 10 hours of effort each week.

DOGE broke the story via a post on X, formerly Twitter, praising the VA for not renewing the contract. “VA was previously paying ~$380,000/month for minor website modifications,” the agency wrote. “That contract has not been renewed, and the same work is now being executed by 1 internal VA software engineer spending ~10 hours/week.”

This revelation adds to DOGE’s growing list of accomplishments, which already include the cancellation of 113 wasteful federal contracts valued at over $4.7 billion.

I’m not sure whether my level of cynicism has gotten high enough to say that none of this surprises me.

Trump’s tariffs anger Europe

The New Neo Posted on by

Europe is angry at Trump.

You might ask: what else is new? Europe has been angry at Trump for a long time – that is, when it’s not busy ridiculing him for things like warning them (pre Ukraine War) about their dependence on Russian fossil fuels.

But now they’re really angry. Really really angry:

European leaders reacted with shock and anger over President Donald Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs, with the French prime minister calling them a global “catastrophe” and the German economic minister comparing them to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

On Wednesday, President Trump announced reciprocal tariffs on countries that have been levying disproportionately higher import duties on U.S.-made goods. The president called April 2, the day of his announcement, the “Liberation Day” that would “forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn.”

President Trump promised “a little tough love” for the “foreign cheaters” who, for decades, have been hurting the interests of U.S. workers and manufacturers. “Foreign leaders have stolen our jobs, foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories, and foreign scavengers have torn apart our once-beautiful American Dream,” he warned, speaking from the White House Rose Garden. “But it is not going to happen anymore.”

… The France-based Euronews TV channel reports:

“The EU is ‘preparing for further countermeasures’ to protect its interest,’ Ursula von der Leyen said after after Donald Trump announced a 20% levies on European goods, urging the US to ‘move from confrontation to negotiation’.

“’We are already finalising a first package of countermeasures in response to tariffs on steel. And we are now preparing for further countermeasures, to protect our interests and our businesses if negotiations fail,’ the Commission president said on Thursday from Samarkand, Uzbekistan, where she will attend the first-ever EU-Central Asia summit.

“Outgoing German Economy Minister Robert Habeck compared the impact of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs on the world economy with that of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.”

What I get out of all of this is that Europe is understandably angry that the US is no longer accepting the fact that Europe protects itself and the US doesn’t. But – as I’ve said before – the subject area of tariffs is most definitely not my strong suit, and I admit that they worry me.

Also, there’s this about how the Trump administration arrived at its high figure for the tariffs Europe imposes on the US:

In a statement released Wednesday night, the US Trade Representative explained that Trump’s sweeping “reciprocal tariffs” were calculated using a complex formula that aims to “balance bilateral trade deficits” between the US and its trading partners.

It adds that the calculation factors in “a combination of tariff and non-tariff factors that prevent trade from balancing.”

In other words, the 39% figure has been inflated by factoring in a range of measures that the Trump administration considers to place barriers to trade – not just tariffs.

Trump himself said during his announcement:

In the coming days, there will be complaints from the globalists, and the outsourcers, and special interests, and the Fake News, always the Fake News will always complain. But, never forget, every prediction our opponents made about trade for the last 30 years has been proven totally wrong. They were wrong about NAFTA, they were wrong about China, they were wrong about the Trans Pacific Partnership, which would have been a disaster if I didn’t terminate it. If I didn’t terminate that, United Autoworkers, you would have had no jobs in this country. You would have had no jobs. It was all going to other countries. In my first term, they said tariffs would crash the economy. Instead, we built the greatest economy in the history of the world.

I don’t know about “in the history of the world.” Typical Trump talk. But I do know that for many many decades I’ve been upset that so much of our industry has departed this country. I’ve read the arguments about how that’s not a bad thing, but I continue to see it as a bad thing when during COVID we were dependent on China for our pharmaceuticals, for example.

And then there’s this from Batya Ungar-Sargon, former leftist and now semi-changer:

Here’s the truth about tariffs: For 60 years they destroyed the American working class to funnel money upwards into the pockets of the rich. Donald Trump is the first president in generations to tell Wall Street to screw itself—he’s for the working men and women of this country.

I don’t think anyone knows where this is going.