The left sees no need to tiptoe around any more

The New Neo Posted on by

Read this and weep.

One thing I’ve long felt about the Obama presidency is that it showed the way and blazed the trail, at least for American leftists since the 60s. Particularly since Reagan, the left in this country used to think it had to tiptoe around so as not to wake the sleeping Americans, because it couldn’t get away with anything too blatant. The Gramscian march continued, in order to pave the way, of course. But people running for office felt they had to play by certain rules, for the most part, or they’d be in trouble.

Obama has shown that, given the right “leader,” Americans are no more protective of liberty, due process, checks and balances, and all that dead white man jazz than are most people around the globe. Exceptionalism? What old-fashioned hooey.

Sorry to be so gloomy today. But the news in general has not been good, here and in other countries.

Liberals win big in Canada

The New Neo Posted on by

So, why did Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party win yesterday’s Canadian election?

It seems that voters wanted hope and change. In particular, they seem to have wanted a change to a Prime Minister with very little political executive experience. Sound familiar?

Trudeau also has built-in name recognition—his father was Pierre Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada from April 1968 to June 1979, and then again from March 1980 to June 1984.

Justin Trudeau is very telegenic, young and handsome. Style over substance seems to be the watchword of the day. Here’s more:

Trudeau has used attacks on his good looks and privileged upbringing to win over voters, who recalled his father’s rock-star presence and an era when Canada had some sizzle on the world stage.

…The Trudeau victory weakened the Canadian dollar. Financial market players had praised the Conservative government for its steady hand in economic management, which had spared Canada the worst of the global financial malaise.

And from the WSJ:

Mr. Trudeau will become the leader of a Group of Seven country without having held an executive job or a cabinet post. He faces the task of injecting confidence into the economy, which he plans to tackle by loosening the country’s fiscal purse strings. He has said he would run budget deficits for at least three years to finance 60 billion Canadian dollars (US$46 billion) in infrastructure spending.

That approach is in contrast to the one taken by the Harper government…Mr. Harper was widely credited with helping Canada emerge relatively unscathed and in better shape than its G-7 peers from the global financial crisis and recession, in part by launching an aggressive stimulus program to mitigate the fallout…

Mr. Trudeau faces the task of proving himself on the world stage and is equipped with little experience of foreign affairs at a time when global tensions are escalating…

The news isn’t all bad; it might have been worse. For a while, polls indicated that a party even more to the left of Trudeau’s Liberals might win, the New Democrats (descriptive name, I think; maybe our Democratic Party ought to adopt it).

Justin Trudeau, like Obama, made his political name initially by giving a speech. In Trudeau’s case it was a speech in 2000 at his father’s funeral, when Justin was 28 years old. His pre-political resume resembles Obama’s a tiny bit, as well: he was a teacher, and also a “youth advocate,” whatever that is. And his campaign slogan? “Real Change.”

It’s only since the beginning of October that the Liberal Party surpassed the Conservatives. That’s three weeks. Why did this happen? I’m not at all sure, and haven’t found much to explain it, but then again I certainly don’t have my finger on the pulse of Canadian politics.

Then there’s this:

Trudeau has also committed to bringing in 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada and invest $250m into refugee processing.

I wouldn’t think that would be a tremendously popular platform, but apparently it was.

Oh, and let’s not forget one more thing—our own president (from an article written back in March):

Fresh out of the Israel election, where they failed to dump Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in spite of millions of dollars, top Obama campaign experts are still in Canada working to topple our staunchly pro-Israel, Christian, conservative prime minister.

Why is the Obama campaign team working Canada?

Primarily because current circumstances make The Land of the Maple Leaf easy pickings. The Justin Trudeau-led Liberal Party and Tom Mulcair-led New Democratic Party (NDP)””who have tried it twice before and came close””are poised to form a Coalition to rid Canada of Israel-loving Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

To the U.S., Canada is the country next door, to Obama it’s home of the architects of the maligned Keystone XL Pipeline and home to the world’s Number One elected defender of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The article goes on to list many many ways in which ex-staffers of the Obama campaign are working for the Liberal Party in Canada. It’s hard—actually, impossible—to say how much influence this had on the election. But these people are pretty effective political operatives.

What Jeb should have said about 9/11 and his brother

The New Neo Posted on by

Most readers here know I pretty much can’t stand Jeb Bush. I don’t mean personally; no doubt he’s a nice man who loves his wife and all that. I can’t stand him as a candidate and know no one who can, and I have long said that despite the money he gets he will not be the nominee.

Jeb Bush’s recent response to Trump’s assertions about his brother shows just how tepid and flatfooted Jeb is.

How should he have responded instead? It was a golden opportunity to slam the Democrats, and one he missed; he should have pointed out that all the planning and many of the activities connected with 9/11 (such as the terrorists’ pilot training in the US) happened under Bill Clinton’s watch, which makes Clinton largely responsible if anyone. So far as I can tell in quite a bit of Googling, Jeb hasn’t said that in response to Trump (and if he has, I’d appreciate a link).

Jeb should have pointed out that generalized warnings that al Qaeda would attack were and are meaningless without the details of who, what, and where, and that a big part of the reason intelligence could not put these details together in a coherent manner was due to Democratic policies (FISA and the firewall) that were put in place quite some time ago. An excellent article explaining how it happened and what it meant for the sharing of intelligence about the 9/11 attackers was written by Andrew McCarthy, and appeared in Commentary in 2004. Here’s a relevant excerpt:

…[P]rosecutors developed] grave apprehension about “the appearance of impropriety”””a hidebound concept governing lawyer ethics that is perfectly nonsensical in the life-and-death context of national security. Even as militant Islam began its terrorist war against the United States with the 1993 WTC bombing and the 1994-95 “Bojenka” plot to blow a dozen American airliners out of the sky over the Pacific, the Justice Department was worrying that agents and prosecutors might be perceived to be using intelligence-gathering authority to build criminal prosecutions. Often, the result was weeks or more of delay, during which identified terrorists who happened also to be committing quotidian crimes went unmonitored while the government dithered over whether to employ FISA or the criminal wiretap law. The insanity reached its apex in 1995 with the “primary purpose” guidelines drafted by the Clinton administration: henceforth, a firewall would be placed between criminal and national-security agents, generally barring them even from communicating with one another.

The damage from the firewall and the impediments to FISA has been incalculable. It took ten years to make the racketeering case against Sami al-Arian, the professor accused of helping run the murderous Palestinian Islamic Jihad from the campus of South Florida University, because the wealth of information collected by intelligence agents was withheld from their criminal counterparts. And that was a pittance compared with what happened in the waning weeks before the September 11 attacks. Zacarias Moussaoui, who had paid cash for pilot training (and was reported to authorities when his bizarre behavior””including intense interest in how cabin and cockpit doors worked””could no longer be ignored), was detained by the immigration service. Worried FBI intelligence agents were desperate to search his computer, but were turned down by supervisors who decided there was insufficient evidence to go to the FISA court. His al-Qaeda membership and numerous connections to the hijackers were not uncovered until after the attacks.

And the Moussaoui travesty itself pales in comparison to the story of Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, excruciatingly recounted in Slate by Stewart Baker, general counsel of the National Security Agency during the early Clinton administration. The pair, who had trained to pilot planes, lived in California. In August 2001, an astute FBI intelligence agent was trying to find them, and asked the criminal division for help. But FBI headquarters stepped in and insisted that the firewall not be breached: criminal agents were to stay out of the intelligence effort. A few weeks later, al-Midhar and al-Hazmi plunged Flight 77 into the Pentagon, their manifold ties to Mohammed Atta and the other hijackers kept safely under wraps.

All of this was the result of Democratic sponsored and Democratic orchestrated policies.

I don’t expect Trump to know a thing about it; he’d rather blame President Bush, whom he’s hated and considered “evil” for a long time. And he knows accusing GW will get brother Jeb Bush all riled up, and that Jeb will be ineffectual in his response.

And you know what? I doubt Jeb has a clue about any of this, either.

We’re in the very best of hands.

We are so cruel to illegal immigrants

The New Neo Posted on by

This Yahoo story about two siblings who came here illegally attempts to play the heartstrings:

When Vladimir Gongora arrived in New York City three years ago, he didn’t know his own name.

Vladimir was born deaf in the small village of Cuyantepeque in the northwest corner of El Salvador. He wasn’t allowed to go to school and never learned to read or write.

“He used to cry and cry because he couldn’t ask for anything,” his mother, Dolores remembers. Then, when Vladimir was about 7 years old, he began gesturing to his little sister, Patricia, who was just 5. Bit they bit, they formed their own sign language, which became increasingly complex. Patricia translated her brother’s signs into Spanish for her parents, and all of a sudden, Vladimir was no longer so alone…

They’ve been inseparable ever since. But a U.S. immigration court could soon force them apart.

Vladimir and Patricia both crossed the border on their own to join their parents in New York City ”” Vladimir in 2012, Patricia two years later. The two were part of a surge of unaccompanied minors from Central America who arrived at the southern border of the United States. Last year, Vladimir was granted asylum by the federal government because of the persecution he faced in El Salvador for his disability. (He was, among other things, denied access to schooling.) His sister also claimed asylum but was denied by the asylum office in April, despite her key role in helping her brother communicate. Now the government is pushing for her deportation, an action her attorney is appealing.

The title of the piece is “Is a callous immigration system tearing siblings apart?” I wonder what would satisfy liberals who ascribe to that philosophy: turning no one away? Giving everyone services forever? Why have an immigration system at all?

Speaking of services, the public is already footing the bill for their legal defense:

This short timeline can make it challenging for the young immigrants ”” some are just toddlers ”” or their relatives to find an attorney; the court does not provide defendants with a public defender as in the criminal system. Patricia and Vladimir are lucky ”” they have attorneys and live in New York City, where the city council has allocated funding for nonprofits to represent unaccompanied minors.

I wrote that the public is already paying for their attorneys, which must be a pretty penny, but I very much doubt that’s the only thing for which the public is paying. It’s also quite interesting to me that in the entire article (which is fairly long) there is very little said about the children’s parents: how did they get here? How do they support themselves (or do they in fact support themselves)? One would think such details would be relevant, but apparently not to the reporter who wrote the piece or the editors who approved it. That would distract from the propaganda message.

It’s edifying to look at the comments there. When I clicked on them, there was a grand total of 1,680. I only read the first twenty or so, but not one of them was sympathetic to the story’s premise. Some made excellent points, including this:

What loving parents, they leave their children (minors at the time) to fend for themselves, while they come to America illegally as well. I guess there was no problem splitting up the family then. Also, it seems that Vladdy was perfectly OK to be without his sister for 2 years, was that also the US Immigration court’s fault? They were both 17 or 18 when they crossed the border illegally; at that age, you should be responsible for your actions. So far it seems to me that the parents as well as their adult children are responsible for their actions.

Good point; these two siblings were already voluntarily separated for two years, and Vladimir (who supposedly was unable to communicate with anyone but his sister at the time) made the journey first, alone. It’s not hard to see why that would happen: he was the one who was more likely to be granted asylum, and they knew it; and then she could come in and plead that her presence was necessary for him.

Not only that, but the article noted that since his arrival in NY, Vladimir has been in school learning American Sign Language at the Lexington School for the Deaf in Queens. So by my calculations, he’s been there since some time in 2012, and therefore he should be able to communicate with the rest of the world and not be so dependent on his sister.

If you’ve got the patience to look through more of the comments there, I’d be curious if any of them agree with the propaganda points the story is pushing.

Now, this is odd

The New Neo Posted on by

The other day I came across an interesting fact about Jerry Parr, the Secret Service agent credited for having saved Reagan’s life by pushing him into the car when Hinkley tried to assassinate him, and making the decision to go to the hospital when no one had yet realized that Reagan had been shot (they thought he’d merely broken a rib from the shove):

Parr’s interest in joining the Secret Service originated as a boy after watching Code of the Secret Service (1939) starring Ronald Reagan as agent “Brass” Bancroft.

That’s quite a coincidence.

Another interesting fact:

Parr came to believe that God had directed his life to save Reagan, and became a pastor after leaving the Secret Service.

Here’s the famous photo of the moment:

jerryparr

The assassination attempt changed the way presidents are ushered in and out of buildings.

Carrie Fisher on what happens to faces over time

The New Neo Posted on by

The seventh Star Wars film is due to be released in two months, and I’m starting to see a lot of hype about it.

Seven is an awful lot of Star Wars. Way too much for me. I’ve never been a fan, which apparently makes me un-American or something. But I put in my time like everyone else when my son was little. I think I saw the first three, and then got my Get Out of Star Wars Free card. It stuns me to think how much time has passed since then.

Speaking of time, it must be hard to be Carrie Fisher. Or at least, a little bit hard. After all, there’s nothing like being in a huge blockbuster film when young, which is probably the most well-known thing you ever did, and then to get older in the public eye with your youthful countenance and body emblazoned on so many posters and other memorabilia to remind you and everybody else of what once was. Your aging face can’t quite compare—despite having had some “work” done, and despite the fact that you were never known as a great great beauty in the first place.

I know, the money and fame is probably compensation enough or more than enough. But still, those constant reminders could be tough. However, Fisher apparently finally figured “whatever; I’ll do a sequel and cash in on the power of the Star Wars franchise.”

A year or so ago Fisher was speaking of her reunion with Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford to make the new movie. She was pretty funny about it, too:

While talking at the Hay Festival in Wales, she admitted that, 31 years after they all worked together on Return Of The Jedi : “We all look a little melted. It’s good to see other melted people.”

When I was young, I thought that wrinkles were the main facial effect of getting older. And they certainly are part of it, for some people the most noticeable part of it. But another part of it is that “melting” of which Fisher speaks, the loss of contour at the edges of the face. Young people usually have sharp definition, particularly of chin and what are later known as “jowls.” Older people start getting blurry, and either puffed or haggard.

But really, these three all look pretty darn good. I don’t see a whole lot of melting. Particularly Ford, IMHO, who’s 73, whereas Fisher is a relative child of 58 and Hamill squeezes in between them at 64:

starwarsyoung

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Speaking of melting, and of Hollywood:

Fall interlude

The New Neo Posted on by

In the past couple of days I’ve taken some time to drive around New England photographing the fall.

I had thought this would be a less colorful fall than usual because of the dry weather we’ve had. But when it got going there was a sudden intense burst, and the sunny days made me want to take off in my car with my camera—which is mostly my android phone, plus a little point-and-shoot.

On Thursday I went up to the far north, the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Yesterday I stayed close to home. I got some good photos considering that my camera doesn’t have the ability to faithfully represent the detail of what I see with my eyes, especially the mountains with their distant vistas.

To paraphrase the Sound of Music, the hills were alive with a blaze of color. Extraordinary every time you see it, but impossible to photograph properly without all the mega-equipment I see some people wielding. So with some of these you’ll need to use your imagination to fill in the details.

I’ll be posting a couple today, and some more in days to come.

The distant:

FallNorth Camera 2015 069-002

FallNorth Camera 2015 122-002

I stopped at one spot on the Kancamagus Highway called Lower Falls, where the water reflections of the trees were as astounding as the trees themselves:

PemiMirrorWaterAutumn2015-002

Close to home:

fall15 021-001

Thanks for the donations!

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, this is the last day of my asking for donations for this cycle.

I usually only ask for donations twice a year. Sometimes I even go longer in between pleas, because of some innate reluctance to do it.

But I thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for all your donations—and for your time, your thoughts, and just for coming here.

Can the Cubs break the other curse?

The New Neo Posted on by

Ah, now it’s all clear to me.

I’d heard about how well the Cubs are doing this year. I used to follow baseball assiduously (see this), but since I’ve been in baseball recovery I hardly pay attention. But in addition to my history as a Red Sox fan who used to be steeped in the Red Sox lore of The Curse, I’m well aware of the sad and sorrowful history of the Cubs.

The two curses were/are of different types. For the Sox, it was an “always a bridesmaid” curse, in which they typically had good teams and came close, year after year, only to lose in some newly creative and increasingly heartbreaking way. The Cubs, on the other hand, have pretty much been uniformly bad.

But this year, there’s hope. The Cubs are about to play in the National League Championships for the first time in twelve years. They haven’t played in a World Series since 1945, and haven’t won one since 1908. That’s a while.

What I didn’t know until yesterday was that Theo Epstein, the man who at a very young age was instrumental in building the Red Sox team that finally ended the Curse, has been President of Baseball Operations for the Cubs since 2011.

Guy’s a baseball genius, obviously. But we already knew that.

Go Cubs!

All hail our new leader: Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

This post isn’t about Trump. It’s about his supporters.

Not all of his supporters, either. But a certain very vocal percentage. I’m not sure what that percentage is. More than half? Less than half? Much less than half? What I do know is that the group I’m referring to doesn’t just support Trump in the ordinary fashion of people supporting their favored candidate. They appear to support him in the very same way that a great many of Obama’s supporters looked at him: as The One, the only person who could magically save us by—fill in the blanks.

It’s different for right and left, of course, in terms of exactly what these groups want from the savior, and what they see that savior accomplishing. Often, very very different. But the phenomenon is similar, an irrational appeal to emotion and magic—an appeal which, by the way, each candidate (Obama and Trump) has carefully fostered and encouraged.

Now, all candidates are fairly egocentric. And they must brag; it goes with the territory. Did any candidate ever get elected by saying “Oh, I’m not so great, and maybe I won’t accomplish as much as the other guy would?” Of course not. But Obama and now Trump take it to new levels.

Trump was criticized yesterday for his Bush and 9/11 remarks, which happened to fit into the anti-GWB pattern I had already noticed in the post I wrote yesterday before I ever saw those newer remarks of Trump’s. But in all the furor about Bush and Trump and 9/11, few seem to have commented on something else that Trump said in the same interview [emphasis mine]:

While speaking about national emergencies, Trump said that he would be a better president than his rival candidates or earlier presidents.

“I think I’m much more competent than all of them.”

Does that not remind you of someone? Our current president, perhaps? It is an excellent example of what I’m talking about—that appeal to the idea that he is obviously more wonderful than all the other candidates, in ways that don’t have to be proven or demonstrated, but merely asserted.

And many of his supporters seem to believe it. One form this takes is the oft-repeated claim that Trump is the only person who can beat Hillary Clinton. It’s curious to me, because this is a version of the old “he’s most electable” song, one that many of the same people supporting Trump have been so critical of when offered on behalf of other candidates in recent years. But is it even true?

I see no evidence for it; see these polls, for example. Polls are flawed and variable, of course. But they give an indication—the only real indication we have, especially if you look at a great many of them. So far the indications from polls are that Trump does not do better than many of the other Republican candidates against Hillary Clinton.

But perhaps evidence is not necessary when one is acting on faith. And more than anything, what I see fueling the Trump supporters is a combination of faith in Trump plus anger at the GOP. I’ve wondered from the start why more of that energy isn’t being directed to support for Cruz, because Cruz would seem to me to be the natural preference of those who are angry with “establishment” Republicans and want a conservative to be elected.

But for some reason, that’s not the way it’s gone so far. I maintain that the reason is that Trump taps into a drive on the right, similar to the drive on the left that helped give us Obama—that is, the desire for a leader who will magically fix everything by sheer force of his personality, his promises, and his own tremendous and towering faith in his own untested and unproven abilities.

The stabbing intifada and the narrative

The New Neo Posted on by

What are the roots of the stabbing intifada?

Jeffrey Goldberg takes a long time to say it, but he gets most of it said. It’s not a “cycle of violence” where both sides are similar. One side is lying and inciting its people to violence, and this has been going on at least since the 1920s in similar fashion. The current dispute concerns the history of the Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock, and access to the sites.

The NY Post says it more succinctly, and adds a few more things, such as the latest incident of what one might call the Muhammed al Durah phenomenon, complete with the cooperation of our State Department in the lies being told:

…Wednesday…Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said in a speech that Israeli security forces “executed” an innocent 13-year-old boy, Ahmad Mansara, “in cold blood.”

The story has fueled Palestinian anger for days. A photo of a bleeding Mansara, lying on the ground, filled social networks and gave birth to endless angry tweets. It also, apparently, informed official statements, including at the State Department, denouncing “excessive use of force” by Israel.

What’s wrong with this picture? This:

Far from innocent, Mansara, along with his 19-year-old brother, was on a knifing rampage. Video footage from closed-circuit security cameras shows them stabbing an Orthodox Jew and then a Jewish child who left a store on his bicycle. Only later, when Mansara tried to attack two policemen, was he shot down.

Oh, and Mansara was far from “executed.” On Thursday, the government issued a photo of him being treated in an Israeli hospital.

But as Churchill said, the lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. Nowadays, a lie gets all the way around the world, aided by the speed and scope of modern media.

Lies are very effective, and Big Lies often most effective of all.

Let’s clear up what’s really happening. From Goldberg’s article:

The current “stabbing Intifada” now taking place in Israel””a quasi-uprising in which young Palestinians have been trying, and occasionally succeeding, to kill Jews with knives””is prompted in good part by the same set of manipulated emotions that sparked the anti-Jewish riots of the 1920s: a deeply felt desire on the part of Palestinians to “protect” the Temple Mount from Jews.

From the NY Post:

Arabs are convinced that Israel is set on destroying, desecrating or “Judaizing” Haram al-Sharif, the Jerusalem compound that includes al-Aqsa, Islam’s third-holiest site. As Abbas indelicately put it in a mid-September speech, the Jews are trying to “defile al-Aqsa with their filthy feet,” and must be stopped.

Israel points out that the arrangements that have existed since 1967, when it seized control of the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site, are intact, and will remain so: A Jordanian trust, the Waqf, maintains the Mount.

Jews can visit, but not pray there…

Once Abbas presented his al-Aqsa “narrative” in September, Palestinian youths heeded his call to spill blood for Jerusalem. They drove cars into pedestrians at bus stops, cut down passers-by with knives, meat cleavers and screwdrivers and otherwise attempted to kill Jews.

Here’s how the State Department has been complicit in furthering the Palestinian narrative:

Enter State Department spokesman John Kirby, who said Wednesday, “certainly, the status quo has not been observed, which has led to a lot of the violence.”

Come again? That factually challenged statement followed Secretary of State John Kerry, who has his own “narrative”: Israeli settlement expansion is responsible for the violence. (State later walked back Kerry’s statement.)

And after pressure from Israeli and Jordanian officials, Kirby also retracted, tweeting, “Clarification from today’s briefing: I did not intend to suggest that status quo at Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif has been broken.

Oh, really? Because what else did your words mean?