Europe’s borders: everything old is new again

The New Neo Posted on by

Europe had a dream of open borders.

It was a dream that depended on a certain comity/amity, but it turned into a nightmare when Europe tried to extend that dream to hosts of newcomers from the Middle East. Now, the border checks are being hastily re-assembled and re-instituted:

On Monday new travel restrictions imposed by Sweden to stem a record flow of migrants are transforming the bridge [to Denmark] into a striking example of how national boundaries are re-emerging. A year of clampdowns on migration and terrorism has all but killed the idea of a borderless Europe where you could drive or train-hop from Spain in the south to Norway in the north without ever having to show your passport.

“We’re turning back the clock,” said Andreas Onnerfors, who lives in Lund, on the Swedish side of the bridge.

“We’re going back to a time when the bridge didn’t exist,” he said, referring to the ID checkpoints being set up Monday on the Danish side for train passengers wishing to cross over to Sweden.

The move is meant to stop undocumented migrants from reaching Sweden, which abruptly reversed its open-door policy after receiving more than 160,000 asylum-seekers last year, mainly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

It follows the reintroduction of border checks in Germany, Austria, France, Belgium and other countries in what’s supposed to be a passport-free travel zone spanning 26 nations.

The moves are supposedly temporary, but are likely to be extended if Europe’s migrant crisis continues in 2016.

“It’s basically every country for itself now,” said Mark Rhinard, an expert on the European Union at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs.

The entire article is worth reading.

One can say many things about all of this, but one that comes to mind is: how very stupid they were. First, to think this open border policy would continue to work well no matter what the future held; and second, to not realize the effect the newcomers could and almost certainly would have on a Europe with such a policy. Europeans have been lulled into a false sense of optimism about what’s going on in the rest of the world and their own ability to handle things, because Europe has been so relatively peaceful for decades and the various countries of Europe were previously able to partially isolate and therefore partially ignore their own growing immigrant problems—lack of assimilation, and no way to effect the assimilation of a population in which many don’t even want to assimilate in the first place.

Ryan’s plans

The New Neo Posted on by

What is going to happen in the House in 2016? Well, this is what Ryan says, anyway:

That agenda, which Ryan has discussed at length since taking over as speaker in October, includes releasing a long-anticipated replacement plan for the health care law (“Just wait,” Ryan said when asked about that plan Wednesday); a tax reform proposal; welfare reform; and other major policy initiatives. The goal isn’t to pass legislation that, like health care repeal, would never be signed into law by Obama, but to set clear priorities ahead of this year’s election.

“The reason I took this job, and my colleagues know this, is we have to go on offense in 2016 and we have to offer a bold agenda,” Ryan said Tuesday night. “The people of this country who do not like the direction America is heading, which we don’t ”¦ we owe them an alternative.”

Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday it was “unfortunate” Republicans were beginning 2016 by voting on “messaging” bills rather than trying to find legislation that could have bipartisan support.

Two questions: will this actually happen?

And: do you think it’s too little, too late, and an insincere effort to woo Republicans prior to 2016, an effort that will turn out to be a false hope?

I plan to watch Ryan and the others and to evaluate all of that as it unfolds. As I’ve said before, I think conservatives should try to increase the number of conservatives in Congress, but otherwise the goal is to keep Congress in Republican hands and elect a Republican president. If that happens, there’s at least a chance of turning the ship around. Without it, I see no chance.

I am neither naive nor sanguine. But I retain some hope.

More about Trump and the Democrats

The New Neo Posted on by

Lately I’ve seen lots of articles and comments about Trump’s appeal to Democrats who might cross over to vote for him. It makes a certain amount of intuitive sense, actually. After all, Trump is not a doctrinaire conservative, to say the least. One could even say he’s a RINO of sorts, albeit an idiosyncratic RINO who is very conservative on certain issues and somewhat of a liberal on others.

Plus, the topic that seems to be firing people up about Trump is immigration, and although worries and concerns about immigration (illegal, legal, and refugee-esque) are more common among Republicans than Democrats, they are hardly limited to Republicans. So all in all, some Democratic support for Trump makes sense.

Democratic support alone wouldn’t automatically mean a victory over Hillary, strangely enough, either for Trump or for any other Republican candidate, unless that Democratic support is (to coin a phrase) absolutely HUGE. Short of that, for victory to occur, it would be necessary that Trump or any other candidate not lose Republican voters, as well. And of course we know that many Republican voters are not keen on Trump (same for Rubio, same for Christie, same for quite a few others).

Right now neither I nor anyone else can say what will happen in November of 2016. We’re limited to attempts to measure what’s going on in the here and now. Given that restriction, I must say that I’m skeptical about the those reports of widespread Democratic support for Trump—not because I don’t think it could be true, but because of the quality of the evidence. I already wrote about this a few weeks ago here, but since then a more recent poll on the subject has a lot of people buzzing.

There are lot of things about that newer poll that give me pause, however, even more than most polls. The first is that the pollsters showed respondents a Trump ad first, and were testing the results of the ad. That means that the ad was fresh in their minds, which certainly would be likely to create a positive bias in the questions that followed. The second is that there is no way to compare Trump’s crossover voters in the polls to the number of crossover voters other GOP contenders might get. More? Less? We don’t know; because the pollsters only asked about Democratic support for Trump (because they were actually testing the ad). The third is that this was an internet and partially app-based poll; they can sometimes be quite valid or sometimes very skewed, and I haven’t seen anything about how these particular subjects were selected in this particular poll.

The fourth is that there were 916 “likely voters” in the poll. I haven’t found any word on how that broke down in terms of number of Republican vs. Democrat respondents, but let’s just say that half were Democrats (458). Twenty percent of those said they would cross over for Trump, which means that about 91 of them said that. That’s a rather small “n” on which to pin an entire theory that Democrats are going for Trump. Plus, if Trump were to run against Hillary, 14% of Republicans in the poll said they would vote for Hillary, which would be 64. So the net difference among the entire voter pool of 916 between Democrats-for-Trump and Republicans-for-Hillary would be 27.

What’s more—and this is what especially gives me pause about current measurements of the “Democrats-for-Trump” phenomenon—as I wrote a while back, in more conventional polls with a more conventional design, in a posited race against Hillary no Democratic advantage for Trump over the other candidates appears. Nor, by the way, is there an advantage for Trump with black voters, another demographic that many people say goes for Trump more than for the other Republicans.

So far, I’ve not seen any conventionally-designed polls that find an advantage for Trump with such groups. In fact, the opposite appears to be true. For example, the very latest national poll from Fox, which I have already discussed here, had some details that I didn’t get into in that earlier post but which are relevant.

If you look closely at questions 22-25 in that poll, which was taken January 4-7 and involved a sample of 1006 respondents queried by telephone (cell and landline), you will see that Trump does slightly worse against Hillary among Democrats and among black voters than the other leading GOP candidates do. Take a look if you don’t believe me—and these are typical of results I’ve seen in earlier polls.

In a matchup against Hillary, Cruz gets 11% of those identifying as Democrats, whereas Hillary gets 6% of people who say they are Republicans. Rubio gets 12% of Democrats against Hillary’s 5% of Republicans, a trifle better. Bush (remember him?) gets 10% of Democrats to Hillary’s 7% of Republicans, a tiny bit worse. And Trump gets 9% of Democrats to Hillary’s 8% of Republicans, which is a bit worse, although they all cluster rather closely together and the differences are not so very significant.

Against Hillary, Cruz gets 5% of the black vote, but Rubio gets 9% of the black vote. Could be significant, I suppose. Bush gets 6% of the black vote against her. And Trump? 4% of the black vote. Again—except perhaps for Rubio—they all are very similar, but Trump does slightly worse.

You can say it’s all a bunch of garbage. You can say that things will change because there’s lots more time (and I’d agree with you there). You can say people are lying to the pollsters, but I think that’s just another way of saying “I’ll throw out what I don’t like and keep what I do like.” If people are lying, we’re all just guessing, so don’t cite statistics about 20% of Democrats supporting Trump from a different poll where they could just as easily be lying. And I can think of a very good reason why people would lie and say that—because they are Democrats who think Trump would be a weaker nominee for the GOP than the others would and therefore they want Trump to be nominated, so they want to encourage Republicans to think of him as a winner who will draw the Democratic vote and defeat Hillary.

Is my theory right? Haven’t a clue; it certainly could be wrong. But I’m airing it to show that there’s no problem thinking up ways to discredit polls if you’ve got a mind to. As for me, I tend to think that polls tell us something real, and that most people don’t lie to pollsters (and that only a very tiny minority do), but that the best way to evaluate a poll is to look at sample and methodology, and then look at average trends in many polls over time. The trends I see so far with Trump are that he doesn’t appeal to Democrats or black voters more than the other GOP candidates do, and perhaps even slightly less. That could change. I can certainly imagine why he might end up appealing more to those groups, but so far I just don’t see it.

[NOTE: People also often bring up crowd enthusiasm when speaking of Trump. In general, I don’t think crowd enthusiasm matters in terms of election results, for reasons I already stated back in 2012 and also here.]

RIP David Bowie

The New Neo Posted on by

Most people seem to be reacting to the news of the death of David Bowie at 69 with shock.

I had the same feeling, too. I think it was because he had just put out a new album to great acclaim, and none of the many articles about it referenced the fact that he was ill. His cancer seems to have been a closely-guarded secret.

Bowie was one of the most unusual people in rock, a field populated by many unusual people trying to outdo each other in their unusualness (or at least it used to be; not so much of that now). But few could compete with Bowie, who had a uniquely cool sleek look that was compelling, and who wasn’t afraid of costumes and various personae. That he played an alien in the movie “The Man Who Fell To Earth” was no surprise; he was a natural for the role, as it were.

I have to confess that although I’m familiar with some of Bowie’s most well-known work, I really don’t know much about his music and I didn’t really follow it. But you didn’t have to be a fan to know about him. I saw “The Man Who Fell to Earth” and thought he did an excellent job, although the film was cut so much when it was shown in the theaters (certainly not his fault nor his doing) that I could hardly make sense of it.

In 1992 Bowie married the model Iman, which made them a couple for the ages—impossibly tall, slim, ectomorphic, and beautiful, like two people from a far-off future. Iman has said this about their romance, which began with Bowie falling for her at first sight and her taking longer to reciprocate, but ultimately doing so:

“As I always said: I fell in love with David Jones,” she said. “I did not fall in love with David Bowie. Bowie is just a persona. He’s a singer, an entertainer. David Jones is a man I met.”

RIP David Bowie and David Jones, and thanks for all the music.

Actor Sean Penn takes on a new role: reporter

The New Neo Posted on by

I guess when you play tough guys long enough you start thinking you’re tough yourself, or yearning to be tough yourself. Or maybe your regular life—even though it involves living and working among glamorous people and being very very rich—isn’t quite exciting enough for you.

So you decide, if you’re Sean Penn, that it would be really neat to locate escaped Mexican drug lord El Chapo and interview him for Rolling Stone, that stellar publication that brought us Jackie of UVA.

Interesting that Penn could find El Chapo and the Mexican government couldn’t (or wouldn’t?). Interesting, also, that Penn’s interview appears to have “unwittingly” led to El Chapo’s (real name: Joaquin Guzman) capture by Mexican authorities, which means that Guzman’s own vanity was his undoing. Or maybe he was bored, too.

As Ann Althouse points out, most people will not be reading the Rolling Stone interview, which apparently is filled with self-indulgent rambles from Penn. I certainly won’t be reading it, anyway. I’ve got better things to do, although whether I’ll actually be doing them or not remains uncertain.

But from articles about Penn’s El Chapo interview, I’ve gleaned the following interesting tidbits about how the druglord sees his profession and his role in it:

El Chapo explains how he wound up joining the illegal drug trade.

‘Well from the age of 15 and on, where I’m from, which is the Municipality of Badiraguato, I was raised on a ranch called La Tuna in that area and up until today there are no job opportunities.

Well, its a reality that drugs destroy. Unfortunately, as I said, where I grew up there was no other way and there still isn’t a way to survive. No other way to work in our economy to be able to make a living.’

The cartel boss claims he is not to blame for people becoming addicted to drugs, saying people would continue to take narcotics if he died.

See, he had no choice. It was poverty that drove him inevitably to it. And he has no further responsibility, either, for the addiction and deaths of others, because—well, if he didn’t provide the service, someone else would have to. ¿Entiendes?

A Mexican actress was the go-between for the interview:

El Chapo was caught after contacting actors and directors about making a Narcos-style biopic about his life, Mexican officials said. It is not clear whether Penn was contacted about the movie.

The seeds for the bizarre meeting between Penn and El Chapo were sown back in 2012 after a representative for the Mexican gangster contacted [Mexican actress] del Castillo, who had posted tweets saying she had more trust in the cartel than the government…

Del Castillo later met a fixer called Espinoza – and both of them remained in contact with El Chapo’s people after his escape.

Penn later met Espinoza and suggested he meet the fugitive for a magazine article and, incredibly, the Sinaloa cartel agreed to it.

Del Castillo and Penn appear to be in some sort of trouble, but don’t sit on a hot stove waiting for them to suffer legal consequences.

I just found this extraordinary dancer: Evgenia Obraztsova

The New Neo Posted on by

I haven’t really kept up with the Bolshoi and other Russian dancers during the last decade or so, but YouTube has allowed me to start remedying that condition. In the past, I’ve often talked about how the quality of balletic artistry has degenerated at the same time that ballet has improved in the technical sense, so that many dancers today seem to me to be mere performers doing amazing tricks but without the emotional resonance of the older generations. The latter might have made some errors, and their legs might not have risen quite to the sky, but so many of the great ones of the past could muster up a feeling of sublimity and transcendence in their audiences. And that, I submit, is one of the main goals of art, or at least it used to be.

However, Russian dancer Evgenia Obraztsova, whom I’ve just discovered, comes awfully close to combining the height of the technical and the artistic. I’ll probably write more about her in the future, when I’ve watched more videos, but for now I’m just enjoying her youthful exuberance, her light and airy ballon, her soulful expressiveness, and her astounding technique.

Here’s the “youthful exuberance” part, in a role in “Don Quixote,” made popular by the astounding Plisetskaya (see her here; no one can compare to Plisetskaya, and I submit that no one ever will compare, but Evgenia Obraztsova gives it an awfully good effort):

In the following excerpt from the second act of “Giselle,” you need to know that this scene occurs after Giselle has died and become a Wili, a spirit condemned to haunt the forest and lure and dance young men to their deaths, because she has been betrayed in love. The clip begins as the wraithlike spirit of Giselle has been summoned from the grave under a spell cast by the queen of the Wilis, who commands her to dance:

If you like the ballet “Sleeping Beauty”—and I’ve never been all that keen on it, myself—here’s Obraztsova in an excellent rendition of the famous pas de deux, where she manages to combine the extraordinarily acrobatic extensions of what I’ve called “extreme ballet” with a delicacy and freshness and charm that makes it all work as a believable whole:

There are a wealth of other Obraztsova riches on YouTube. Happy watching!

In latest Fox poll, almost everyone beats Hillary

The New Neo Posted on by

For the moment, anyway.

Yes, yes, I know that polls at this point don’t matter much, if at all. But they still interest me, because they’re the best we’ve got. They can also tell us something about trends, and the trend for Hillary right now is down.

The newest national poll is from Fox, based on phone interviews that were conducted from Jan 4-7 and featuring 1006 registered voters, the vast majority of whom said they intend to vote. For Republicans and Republican-leaners, the margin of error is 5%, which is rather large. For the entire survey, the margin of error is 3%, which is more typical but still worthy of note.

It’s very interesting to see what’s happening with the projected head-to-head battles of some of the Republican leaders against Hillary Clinton. Mostly the results seem to preserve the patterns each candidate has already established for quite some time, with Rubio doing the best of all (a +9 lead—although he’s never seen anything like that large a lead before). Cruz is next with a +7 lead (also bigger than he had before), Trump has a +3 lead (as usual in national polls, Trump is doing worse against Hillary than the other two, but I believe this is the first time he’s ever led Hillary, so that’s a change for the better for Trump). Unfortunately the pollsters didn’t ask about Christie (although Christie has led Hillary in earlier national polls), nor did they ask about Carson (same). So, why was there a question about Bush? At any rate, Bush is doing the worst of those the pollsters did ask about: he’s tied with Hillary.

Does this poll represent a real improvement of the prospects of the Republican field vis a vis Hillary? I don’t know. It could be an outlier, or the phenomenon could be real. As I mentioned, the margin of error is big. I also noticed that the percentage of Republican respondents in the poll seemed higher than usual, with the parties roughly equal. That could account for the higher scores across the board versus Hillary. It will be very very interesting to see if these anti-Hillary trends persist over time, and if they grow.

The clash of opposing progressive causes: which will win out, feminism or PC protection of Muslim refugees?

The New Neo Posted on by

The recent sexual gropings in the New Year’s Eve crowds in various European capitals, apparently perpetrated by gangs of Muslim men on local women, have thrown Europe’s progressives into turmoil. They are being presented with the dilemma of choosing between two favored principles, the freedom of modern women and the right of Middle Eastern Muslim immigrants to emigrate freely to Europe.

This clash was inevitable. Anyone the least bit familiar with customs in the Middle Eastern Muslim world toward women would know how harsh the treatment is, and what often happens to women who transgress (as all Western women would probably be considered to be doing just by living their normal Western lives). In this clash, so far it’s the women who are losing and the new arrivals who are winning, although that could change if the situation gets bad enough.

For example, you can see the clash in the angry reaction to the statements of the mayor of Cologne—a woman—who suggested guidelines for female behavior at future public festivities:

Reker’s suggestion that women could avoid being sexually harassed (or raped, as two women reported they were on New Year’s Eve) by keeping potential assailants at “arm’s length” drew immediate backlash. On Twitter, the outrage””much of it alternating between shock and sarcasm””amassed under #einarmlaenge, or “an arm’s length” in German.

Aside from everything else you might say about it, Reker’s suggestion sides against the women and on the side of the perpetrators, in placing the onus on the women to change their usual behavior in order to be protected, behavior Western women have come to see as perfectly reasonable and ordinary: that of going out into a celebrating crowd. In addition, if you think about it, Reger’s suggestion is also absurd on the face of it: in crowds, it is impossible to keep anyone at arm’s length; that’s the very nature of a crowd. So if you follow Reker’s words to their logical conclusion, it means that women shouldn’t go out to celebrate where there might be crowds of people in close proximity.

It has been clear for a long, long time (actually, for centuries) that anyone who defends Islam as it is often practiced in the countries of the Middle East is defending a culture that oppresses women (to use a leftist term). And yet it has also been clear for a long time—at least since the 1979 revolution in Iran, when leftists joined forces with the repressive Islamists to overthrow the Shah—that leftists would often choose the Islamists over feminism. In some cases, actually, it was even the feminists themselves who chose to stand with the Islamists (I recall feminists/leftists donning chadors in 1979 in Iran as a badge of solidarity), or at least winked at them or tolerated them, perhaps thinking that in the end the progressives would win out over the Islamists. But the Islamists have had the last laugh there, haven’t they? And so they may again.

The Founders and Islam

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s been a discussion in the comments section about the attitude of the Founders towards Islam, and how it relates to freedom of religion, and I thought I’d add some background.

At the outset, when the principles of freedom of religion were being established in Virgina in 1779, and Jefferson and Madison were discussing them (later to be the basis of the First Amendment of the US Constitution), Jefferson felt that freedom of religion should:

…comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahomedan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination.

This was despite the fact that the Founders must have known, for example, the history of the Crusades and later of the Gates of Vienna.

In 1786, when the fledgling US was dealing with the Barbary pirates, by whom many US and European ships were seized and their crews sold into slavery, the initial reaction of the US was this:

Congress gave assent to the Treaty of Tripoli, negotiated by Jefferson’s friend Joel Barlow, which stated roundly that “the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen.” This has often been taken as a secular affirmation, which it probably was, but the difficulty for secularists is that it also attempted to buy off the Muslim pirates by the payment of tribute…

…Jefferson and John Adams [later] went to call on Tripoli’s envoy to London, Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdrahaman. They asked him by what right he extorted money and took slaves in this way. As Jefferson later reported to Secretary of State John Jay, and to the Congress:

The ambassador answered us that [the right] was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Later, as president, Jefferson launched a war against the pirates and was successful. But he never had to deal with anything approaching large numbers of Muslim arrivals to this country; at the time, Muslim immigrants were few and far between, nearly nonexistent. The fight was almost wholly an external one, and so the question of whether Islam’s tenets disagreed with our Constitution, and what to do about that in terms of immigration, did not really come up.

And then there was John Quincy Adams, not exactly a Founding Father (although we might call him a Founding Father’s Son). In 1830 he wrote, in the context of discussing the Russo-Turkish wars:

In the seventh century of the Christian era, a wandering Arab of the lineage of Hagar, the Egyptian, combining the powers of transcendent genius, with the preternatural energy of a fanatic, and the fraudulent spirit of an impostor, proclaimed himself as a messenger from Heaven, and spread desolation and delusion over an extensive portion of the earth. ”¦He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST: TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE.

Between [Islam and Christianity]”¦a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. That war is yet flagrant; nor can it cease but by the extinction of that imposture”¦While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon earth, and good will towards men. The hand of Ishmael will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him”¦(Blunt, 1830, 29:269, capitals in orig.)”¦.

The precept of the koran is, perpetual war against all who deny, that Mahomet is the prophet of God. The vanquished may purchase their lives, by the payment of tribute; the victorious may be appeased by a false and delusive promise of peace; and the faithful follower of the prophet, may submit to the imperious necessities of defeat: but the command to propagate the Moslem creed by the sword is always obligatory, when it can be made effective. The commands of the prophet may be performed alike, by fraud, or by force (Blunt, 29:274)”¦

I’ve been able to locate the entire passage, and the rest of the essay is an elaboration on the differences between Christianity and Islam, as well as a discussion of Russia’s (a Christian nation’s) war with the Ottomans. In the essay, Adams does not discuss the prospect of Muslim immigration to this country, still extremely rare at that time, and what it might mean. So he never had to come to any conclusions about freedom of religion in this country, and whether it included the freedom to practice a religion he had described in such a manner.

[NOTE: In a footnote to his essay, Adams describes (page 379 in the complete text) the negotiation of a Barbary War treaty in Algiers, when the American signers assumed that the English and Arabic translations were the same. Wrong! The Arabic translations apparently contained an extra clause omitted in the English version, which required payment of the very sort of tribute the treaty was meant to end.]

New Year’s Eve sexual assaults in Finland, too

The New Neo Posted on by

Helsinki has had some problems much like Cologne’s, but not quite as widespread:

Asylum seekers who met in central Helsinki to celebrate New Years’s Eve “had similar plans” to commit sexual assault and other crimes as those who targeted women in the Germany city of Cologne, Finnish Police have reported.

Three Iraqi asylum seekers have been arrested for committing sexual assaults during the celebrations in the city’s Senate Square, where some 20,000 had gathered.

Security personnel reported “widespead sexual harrassment” during the celebrations, police added, with women complaining that asylum seekers had groped their breasts and kissed them without permission.

“This phenomenon is new in Finnish sexual crime history,” Ilkka Koskimaki, the deputy chief of police in Helsinki, told the Telegraph. ”We have never before had this kind of sexual harrassment happening at New Year’s Eve.”

It seems that Western Europe has been such a relatively pacific place post-WWII that it has contributed to a truly extraordinary naivete about the differences between their culture and the people they’ve been letting recently in under the guise of compassion for the needy and the afflicted. It’s hard to believe that anyone who follows the news, or anyone who has read about the treatment of women in most Middle Eastern Muslim countries, could be ignorant of the difference between a place like Finland and a place like Iraq. But I believe that many people are—or at least they were—ignorant.

My guess is that the magical words “asylum” and/or “refugee” (combined with decades of PC propaganda) helped the European natives see the newcomers as peaceful supplicants, coming only in order to take shelter from the storm. No doubt there are such people, and it’s highly possible they’re in the majority, but there also should have been little doubt that in addition there would be a significant number of aggressive people out to cause trouble and to take advantage of their hosts, and who would have a very predatory attitude towards women in western culture.

It may be that the only reason things weren’t worse in Helsinki on New Year’s was because authorities were tipped off:

He said that the police had received tip-offs from staff at the asylum reception centres.

“Our information from these reception centres were that disturbances or other crimes would happen in the city centre. We were prepared for fights and sexual harrassment and thefts.”

He said that police had established a “very massive presence” to control the estimated 1,000 Iraqi asylum seekers who had gathered in the tunnels surrounding the central railway station by 11pm, many of whom appeared to be under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

Mr Koskimaki said that sexual assults in parks and on the streets had been unknown in Finland before a record 32,000 asylum seekers arrived in 2015, making the 14 cases last year “big news in the city”.

It all reminds me of this:

This should be considered a smoking gun—but will it be?

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s early in this story, so there might be some extenuating circumstances we don’t know about yet—

But with that caveat, this should be big, big news:

In [an email] thread from June 2011, Hillary exchanges e-mails with Jake Sullivan, then her deputy chief of staff and now her campaign foreign-policy adviser, in which she impatiently waits for a set of talking points. When Sullivan tells her that the source is having trouble with the secure fax, Hillary then orders Sullivan to have the data stripped of its markings and sent through a non-secure channel.

That should be game, set, and match, yes?

Among other things, it may depend on what the material actually was and its level of classification. However:

Ordering aides to remove headers to facilitate the transmission over unsecured means strongly suggests that the information was not unclassified. On top of that, removing headers to avoid transmission security would be a violation of 18 USC 793 anyway, which does not require material to be classified ”” only sensitive to national security.

See also this.

I love love love…

The New Neo Posted on by

…this story, in which two young people who met when one donated a portion of his liver to the other ended up falling in love and are engaged to marry. There’s a video at the link, but it can’t be embedded, so you’ll have to go there to watch it:

The two underwent grueling surgeries in March that took over eight hours. Doctors removed 55 percent of Dempsey’s liver. The recovery process took about two months for both Krueger and Dempsey. During the process they realized they were falling in love with each other.

“If wasn’t for this person, I wouldn’t have made it to Christmas,” Krueger said. “[Dempsey] was a selfless and brave person who was perfectly healthy and didn’t know me before this.”

By the way—not to take anything away from the noble gesture of the man who made the donation, but a healthy liver will ordinarily regenerate after such a procedure. So it’s a physical manifestation of the idea that in love, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. He not only gets a new love, he gets a partly new liver, and she gets a wholly new one.