There’s been a shooting at a Christian school in Wisconsin [see UPDATE below]

The New Neo Posted on by

RIP.

I feel a weary sorrow every time I hear about a school shooting. They seem to come with regularity, and although they are all slightly different, they all seem somewhat similar as well.

Initial reports were that five were killed, including the shooter, and five injured. But a more recent article says the dead are a teacher and the shooter, who was a teenage student at the school, and six are injured (two of them in critical condition).

We don’t know many details at this point. It sounds to me – and this is a complete and total guess – that the shooter may have committed suicide after killing the teacher and injuring the students.

And now I see this confusing report that a teacher and a teenage student were killed in addition to the shooter, and that the shooter killed himself but the police aren’t revealing the student’s gender at this time. And yet the article uses the term “himself.” Which makes the situation seem to resemble that of the Nashville trans shooter Audrey Hale. But I have no idea what the true story is.

UPDATE 9:30 PM:

From Andy Ngo:

I can report that the deceased mass shooter at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisc. is a 15-year-old girl named Natalie Lynn Rupnow.

She carried out the mass shooting in the school library, according to a source. She did not identify as trans.

The teen girl used the name “Sam” online and the username “crossixir.” She had an extensive online obsession with school shooters and death, particularly the 1999 Columbine High School shooting. Rupnow was a big fan of the KMFDM rock band, which was also referenced by one of the Columbine shooters. (She often wore the shirt of the band.) …

A purported “sneak peek” of her manifesto was posted on her Discord account, where she discussed a desire to kill all males in a rant inspired by fringe extremist online culture.

The Columbine killers expressed hatred for just about everyone, and most of their victims were killed in the school library. In addition, they died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds.

The government and the drones

The New Neo Posted on by

Is there anyone who trusts the government anymore? That’s a rhetorical question.

Their explanations about this latest drone business remind me of something from a farcical comedy, but they’re not really funny. Something like this: We don’t know what the drones are but they’re nothing to be concerned about.

However, logic would indicate that reassurances aren’t particularly reassuring if they’re based on ignorance. Therefore, either you know and aren’t telling or you don’t know and therefore cannot reassure.

President-elect Trump goes with the “they know and aren’t telling” explanation, and I agree:

Dostoevsky’s Demons

The New Neo Posted on by

I was in high school when I first read a Russian novel; it was Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The book immediately grabbed my attention – here was something to really sink my teeth into, something that dealt with the Big Questions. Later in high school we also read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, which did nothing for me. I think maybe I didn’t understand it at the time.

In college I took a course in Russian literature (in translation; I can’t speak a word of Russian except da, nyet, and dacha). That was a very deep dive into writers both famous and to me obscure. I can’t remember all the books we studied, but one of them was Demons by Dostoevsky. Our translation was titled The Possessed. Here are the themes, and I think you’ll see their relevance to both the late 1960s, when I took that course, and now [my emphasis]:

A fictional town descends into chaos as it becomes the focal point of an attempted revolution, orchestrated by master conspirator Pyotr Verkhovensky. The mysterious aristocratic figure of Nikolai Stavrogin—Verkhovensky’s counterpart in the moral sphere—dominates the book, exercising an extraordinary influence over the hearts and minds of almost all the other characters. The idealistic, Western-influenced intellectuals of the 1840s, epitomized in the character of Stepan Verkhovensky (who is both Pyotr Verkhovensky’s father and Nikolai Stavrogin’s childhood teacher), are presented as the unconscious progenitors and helpless accomplices of the “demonic” forces that take possession of the town. …

Dostoevsky’s nihilists are portrayed in their ordinary human weakness, drawn into the world of destructive ideas through vanity, naïveté, idealism, and the susceptibility of youth. In re-imagining Nechayev’s orchestration of the murder, Dostoevsky was attempting to “depict those diverse and multifarious motives by which even the purest of hearts and the most innocent of people can be drawn in to committing such a monstrous offence.” In A Writer’s Diary, he discusses the relationship of the ideas of his own generation to those of the current generation, and suggests that in his youth he too could have become a follower of someone like Nechayev. As a young man Dostoevsky himself was a member of a radical organisation (the Petrashevsky Circle), for which he was arrested and exiled to a Siberian prison camp. Dostoevsky was an active participant in a secret revolutionary society formed from among the members of the Petrashevsky Circle. The cell’s founder and leader, the aristocrat Nikolay Speshnev, is thought by many commentators to be the principal inspiration for the character of Stavrogin. …

Dostoevsky wrote that “Communism will conquer one day, irrespective of whether the Communists are right or wrong. But this triumph will stand very far from the Kingdom of Heaven. All the same, we must accept that this triumph will come one day, even though none of those who at present steer the world’s fate have any idea about it at all.”

Since the Russian Revolution, many commentators have remarked on the prophetic nature of Demons. André Gide, writing in the early 1920s, suggested that “the whole of (the novel) prophesies the revolution of which Russia is presently in the throes”. In Soviet Russia, a number of dissident authors found a prototype for the Soviet police state in the system expounded by Shigalev at the meeting of Pyotr Verkhovensky’s revolutionary society. …

Dostoevsky biographer Ronald Hingley described the novel as “an awesome, prophetic warning which humanity, no less possessed of collective and individual devilry in the 1970s than in the 1870s, shows alarmingly few signs of heeding.” … In his book Dostoyevsky in Manhattan French philosopher André Glucksmann argued that ‘nihilism’, as depicted in Demons, is the underlying idea or ‘characteristic form’ of modern terrorism.

There are patterns of human behavior, and this appears to be one. I recognized that even in the 1960s, and it somewhat inoculated me against some of the worst excesses of those times, and of leftism in general.

Kash Patel knows what it feels like to be spied on by the FBI

The New Neo Posted on by

This is what I’m referring to:

As chief counsel, Patel had no idea [between 2017 and 2018] that the subject of his investigation — the FBI — was collecting his data and increasing the visibility of witnesses he was communicating with, including whistleblowers.

At the time, Patel was demanding to see FBI documents and depose FBI witnesses to find out if the bureau had abused its power in obtaining a FISA warrant to spy on Trump aide Carter Page.

But Patel remained in the dark until 2022, when Google finally was cleared to send him a copy of the subpoena. Outraged, he told me at the time: “The FBI and DOJ subpoenaed my personal records while I caught them doing this to Page back in 2017.”

He said the McCabe FBI didn’t want anybody to find out that it “literally copied and pasted” Democrat opposition research, wholesale, into wiretap-warrant applications.

He added that he hoped those behind the abuses would be prosecuted by a future Trump administration: “They must be held accountable or they’ll only abuse their power again.”

The IG probe reveals that the FBI had renewed the subpoenas each year, snooping on congressional staffers for up to five years. That means McCabe’s successor, Christopher Wray, signed off on the continued collections.

Some would call it revenge. But I think it more rightly should be called justice, and perhaps even poetic justice, that Patel is poised to become FBI director.

The FBI has been out of control for a long time regarding Trump and the right. The people who have been participating have long believed there will be no serious negative consequences for them, and so far they have been correct. Perhaps that’s about to end.

About Pelosi’s hip fracture

The New Neo Posted on by

First of all, a disclaimer: I make no predictions about Pelosi’s recovery from a hip fracture she sustained in a fall the other day. But anything is possible.

I read these musings:

Statistically, when a woman in her mid-80s breaks her hip, the consequences are cataclysmic. Up to 33% of older adults with hip fractures die within a year. 50% are unable to bathe, feed, wipe their butts, or dress themselves.

About one in five end up in a long-term care facility.

During the first three months after a hip fracture, older adults have a five to eight times higher risk of dying. And this elevated mortality rate lasts nearly a decade.

An untreated hip fracture is even worse. 70% of victims are dead within a year.

It’s not a trivial thing.

Often, it’s not that the broken hip itself is so medically dangerous, but it’s an overall indicator of physical frailty: if your grip-strength, stamina, balance, and bone density have all severely deteriorated, you’re more likely to fall and break your hip. It could be more correlation than causation.

All that may be true, but I don’t see it as having much relevance to Pelosi’s situation. A great many people who fracture their hips are already in bad shape, and it’s not my impression that that’s the case for her. The article actually points this out.

But what I’m thinking about is my own mother. She fell and fractured her hip (or did she fracture her hip and then fall?; sometimes it’s that way around) at the age of 96, and that was a couple of years after having a stroke. She was pretty darn frail at the time, although she could still walk with a walker.

At 96 her prognosis was awful. The hospital hesitated to even operate, which would have left her in terrible shape. They did a bunch of tests on her cardiovascular system and pronounced her strong enough to at least withstand the surgery, and so some sort of hip replacement was performed.

She bounced back. It was uncanny. There was a 65-year-old woman with a similar injury sharing a room with her who had a lot more post-op pain and a slower recovery. And it’s not that my mother was so cooperative with rehab; she was not. She just recovered quickly and no one knew why.

I remember being stopped in the hallway of the hospital by one of her doctors, who said in a between-you-and-me way: “You know, your mother is a very strong woman.”

My answer was, “I guess she is, but I never knew it before.”

My mother lived to be 98, and during those two years, up until the final month or two, she was walking around as before with her walker. The broken hip didn’t seem to have much effect on her.

That’s just one person. And of course, she did die two years later. But considering the age she was when she broke her hip, that amount of survival was a pretty good deal.

The Biden administration is trying to thwart Trump on its way out

The New Neo Posted on by

No surprise, really.

First we have the border wall materials that are being auctioned off. This not only hurts Trump, but it hurts all taxpayers, because it means to build the wall he’ll have to buy new materials at a higher price:

The Biden administration is using its final weeks to haul a massive amount of border wall materials away from the southern border to be sold off in a government auction, an apparent effort to hinder President-elect Donald Trump’s effort to secure the border, The Daily Wire has learned.

Videos obtained exclusively by The Daily Wire from a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent show unused sections of the wall being hauled away on the back of flatbed trucks from a section of the border just south of Tucson, a hotspot for illegal crossings during the Biden administration. The agent estimates that up to half a mile per day of unused border wall is being moved.

“They are taking it from three stations: Nogales, Tucson, and Three Points,” the border patrol agent, who was granted anonymity to speak freely, told The Daily Wire. “The goal is to move all of it off the border before Christmas.”

Secondly we have the continuation of the prosecution of some of the remaining J6 defendants, and the re-definition of the meaning of a pardon by Merrick Garland’s DOJ, which now says acceptance of a pardon is an admission of guilt:

“[A] pardon at some unspecified date in the future … would not unring the bell of conviction,” federal prosecutors argued in a Jan. 6 case before U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols. “In fact, quite the opposite. The defendant would first have to accept the pardon, which necessitates a confession of guilt.”

The pronouncement is the latest attempt by the Justice Department to salvage the legacy of its Jan. 6 investigation, which leaders say is the most sweeping criminal probe in American history. Trump has pledged to unravel that probe with the stroke of his pen by granting clemency to many of the nearly 1,600 people who have been charged for their roles in the attack on the Capitol four years ago.

The legal significance of presidential pardons, and whether they imply guilt, has been debated in courts for decades. The Supreme Court has opined that pardons often carry an “imputation of guilt” even if the consequences for that guilt are erased. And the Justice Department has previously concluded that even if pardons eliminate criminal consequences, those convicted of crimes can still face punishment in other forums, like professional ethics boards.

“A pardon … does not erase the conviction as a historical fact or justify the fiction that the pardoned individual did not engage in criminal conduct,” the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel wrote in a 2006 opinion.

Do you see the difference? It is true that some of the J6 defendants pled guilty (often under threat of much greater sentences if they don’t, of course). And no, pardons don’t erase that in the legal sense. But pardons do not come with the necessity for “an admission of guilt” by those pardoned. The do imply guilt, or they can imply guilt, and they don’t legally wipe away the confiction, but that’s a far cry from a confession of guilt through the acceptance of a pardon.

And here’s the ramping up part:

Activity in the J6 investigation accelerated the month before the election. At least 16 individuals were arrested; home security camera footage obtained by RCI shows the heavily-armed pre-dawn FBI raid of a subject in California on October 17.

Shortly after the election, DOJ officials instructed attorneys working on J6 cases to carry on regardless of the pending change in leadership. “[Federal] prosecutors in the Justice Department’s Capitol Siege Section received guidance this week about how to proceed in pending Jan. 6 cases … including a directive to oppose any Jan. 6 defendant’s requests for delays,” Ryan J. Reilly of NBC News reported on Nov. 9. “Prosecutors are instructed to argue that there is a societal interest in the quick administration of justice and these cases should be handled in the normal order.”

Here’s one of these recent cases (emphasis mine):

On December 6, Lamberth not only sentenced Grillo to 12 months in federal prison but took the unusual move of remanding him into immediate custody; judges usually allow a defendant to report two to three months following sentencing. Lamberth’s decision appeared to make sure Grillo spent some time in jail before a presidential pardon spared him.

In a 13-page sentencing document explaining his reasons for imposing such a harsh move, Lamberth again criticized what he believes are attempts to “minimize the events of January 6.” Lamberth then erroneously claimed five police officers died as a result of the protest. “One can only wonder what further horrors might have transpired if our elected officials had not gotten out in time. No matter what ultimately becomes of the Capital Riots cases already concluded and still pending, the true story of what happened on January 6, 2021 will never change.”

The “true story” does not involve the death of any officers as a result of the protest. And yet the judge appears to think it does.

More on the left’s big slobbering love affair with Luigi Mangione

The New Neo Posted on by

It continues. More thoughts:

(1) The left loves the worst who are full of passionate intensity, as long as that passionate intensity has been aroused by leftist causes.

(2) The left has always had a special jones for young leftists who are violent and deemed attractive, such as Che.

(3) There’s also a contagion effect spread through social media.

(4) The left hates capitalism and especially American capitalism, and doesn’t think health insurance should be a business at all. Therefore, health insurance companies are evil. Brian Thompson was a successful capitalist who was CEO of a health insurance company. Therefore, evil.

(5) The left believes it must use violence because it knows it can’t ordinarily get its way trough the ballot box. Since the left believes that it is virtuous and its causes are just, violence is okay to get its way. They believe fear and intimidation are great tools – and those are the goals of Thompson’s murder.

(6) The left believes that health care is an entitlement, and that no claim should ever be denied. They also believe for the most part that government should be running the provision of health care, although people who believe this ignore the bitter complaints of those in Canada and Great Britain who are regularly denied health care that most people can get here. Perhaps the left believes that stinginess in health care is just fine as long as it’s government being stingy and not private businesses. The left also ignores the huge amount of government control of health care reimbursement that exist today. Obamacare, anyone?

(7) A smaller segment of the right applauds Mangione as well, but for slightly different reasons. I’m not 100% sure of their reasons, but I’ve seen such people on comment boards on the right and I don’t think they’re trolls. Some people on the right also believe health insurance companies and executives make obscene profits at people’s expense. Facts and figures don’t necessarily matter to them any more than they matter to the leftists. It seems visceral to me.

And this is late-night TV’s idea of a funny bit:

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Apparently Luigi Mangione never had any personal dealings with United Healthcare until he decided to murder Brian Thompson. This actually does not surprise me.

(2) Twenty-six FBI assets and informants (“confidential human sources”) attended the festivities on J/6, and some entered the Capitol while others entered the restricted area around the Capitol. This was all done without orders or permission for most of them. We don’t know for sure what they did while there, but the IG says they did not commit violence or urge others to do so, although they broke the same laws as the people charged with trespass and – surprise, surprise – the FBI assets were not charged.

(3) The UN is an Orwellian cesspool. Up is down, down is up, because the UN says so.

(4) Meanwhile, in Syria, meet the new guys on the block:

(5) And about those New Jersey drones:

White House National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby told the media that the drones over New Jersey are not malicious or from a foreign country.

They don’t seem to know what they are, however. At least, they’re not saying.

(6) Democrats, hoist on their own petard.

I think they really believed the right would never come to power again.