And now for some good news

The New Neo Posted on by

The bad news just keeps coming, so here’s an antidote—a shoulder-level double amputee has been fit with robotic arms whose movement is controlled by his mind. This process has involved a series of training steps:

In order to prepare his body for the devices, Baugh underwent a surgery called targeted muscle reinnervation. The procedure redirected nerves that once controlled his limbs to interact with the prosthetics.

Next, he trained on a computer, working with virtual models as pattern recognition software learned to apply signals from his brain to his intended movements. Then, Johns Hopkins researchers fitted him with a personalized socket to hold the prostheses to his body and translate his mental controls.

When they attached the robotic limbs, he performed a variety of two-handed tasks””becoming the first person to ever manipulate two independent arms with his mind at the same time.

This is the stuff of science fiction come true.

I also wonder whether, if Baugh had been plagued by phantom limb pain at any point, the re-training helped with that. I say this based on the evidence that what is known as mirror therapy can work to help phantom limb pain, as can mental visualization to a lesser extent.

President Obama says that Sony “made a mistake”…

The New Neo Posted on by

…when it responded to the North Korean cyberattack by pulling the film that satirized North Korea. “I wish they had spoken to me first,” he said (the “they” referring to Sony, not to North Korea). He also again vowed to respond to the attack “in a place and manner and time that we choose.”

Perhaps. I can’t say I think the North Koreans are shaking in their shoes right now.

But my take on it is this: why wouldn’t Sony cave, when the supposed leader of the supposed free world has been caving right and left for six years? Obama has set the standard, and his “I wish they had spoken to me first” is almost comical.

The Sony cyberattack: portent of things to come?

The New Neo Posted on by

When I first read about the cyberattack on Sony I didn’t pay all that much attention.

That turned out to be wrong. This attack on a US company, almost certainly by the government of North Korea, is a devastating blow to which Sony—and, more importantly, the US—have offered no effective reaction so far. In fact, Sony has caved in the face of the threats.

Obama is promising an “appropriate response” to what the administration labels a “serious national security matter.” But it’s unclear what that could possibly be, unless it involves a retaliatory cyberattack on North Korea, or some cyber-activity that suggests that we at least have the capacity to do so if we wanted to.

A nation such as North Korea—or any of the other numerous hostile countries or groups in the world—could go to the heart of our economic system and strike a huge blow. Computers have taken over much of the record-keeping and communications in business and government, and the centralization that they have accomplished, while both comprehensive and convenient, is convenient for hackers, too.

The sophistication of the attackers seems to keep pace with all efforts to protect against them. The entire incident has pointed to a tremendous vulnerability as well as cowardice (at least so far) on our part.

Very very worrisome. Very.

[NOTE: This piece by, of all people, George Clooney, makes some very good points.]

The WaPo sees the light on Obama and Cuba

The New Neo Posted on by

Lately the WaPo has been backing off from its kneejerk approval of the Obama administration, but this editorial along those lines is especially strong:

IN RECENT months, the outlook for the Castro regime in Cuba was growing steadily darker. The modest reforms it adopted in recent years to improve abysmal economic conditions had stalled, due to the regime’s refusal to allow Cubans greater freedoms. Worse, the accelerating economic collapse of Venezuela meant that the huge subsidies that have kept the Castros afloat for the past decade were in peril. A growing number of Cubans were demanding basic human rights, such as freedom of speech and assembly.

On Wednesday, the Castros suddenly obtained a comprehensive bailout ”” from the Obama administration. President Obama granted the regime everything on its wish list that was within his power to grant; a full lifting of the trade embargo requires congressional action. Full diplomatic relations will be established, Cuba’s place on the list of terrorism sponsors reviewed and restrictions lifted on U.S. investment and most travel to Cuba. That liberalization will provide Havana with a fresh source of desperately needed hard currency and eliminate U.S. leverage for political reforms.

See what I mean?

The WaPo goes even further, and departs from the somewhat bipartisan clamour of the “sanctions weren’t working anyway” crowd:

Mr. Obama argued that his sweeping change of policy was overdue because the strategy of isolating the Communist regime “has had little effect.” In fact, Cuba has been marginalized in the Americas for decades, and the regime has been deprived of financial resources it could have used to spread its malignant influence in the region, as Venezuela has done. That the embargo has not succeeded in destroying communism does not explain why all sanctions should be lifted without any meaningful political concessions by Cuba.

Read the whole thing; it doesn’t falter.

I’m not sure what’s going on at the WaPo, and I’m not sure whether it will encompass more than this issue (and their excellent reporting on the UVA story), but it’s something. At one point a while back, noticing some of the softening, I thought perhaps it was a set-up for Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, but it’s hard to see how that factors in here unless Clinton herself starts to comment negatively on Obama’s Cuba move.

At any rate, I’m glad to see it. Mock and revile the MSM as you wish, but the WaPo and the Times are still very influential in shaping public opinion among legions of liberals. Contrast the WaPo‘s editorial with the one in the Times, which is a model of fulsome praise:

The administration’s decision to restore full diplomatic relations, take steps to remove Cuba from the State Department list of countries that sponsor terrorism and roll back restrictions on travel and trade is a change in direction that has been strongly supported by this page. The Obama administration is ushering in a transformational era for millions of Cubans who have suffered as a result of more than 50 years of hostility between the two nations.

Mr. Obama could have taken modest, gradual steps toward a thaw. Instead, he has courageously gone as far as he can, within the constraints of an outmoded 1996 law that imposes stiff sanctions on Cuba in the pursuit of regime change…

Cuba’s president, Raéºl Castro, deserves credit for his pragmatism. While Cuba remains a repressive police state with a failed economy, under his leadership since 2008, the country has begun a process of economic reforms that have empowered ordinary Cubans and lifted travel restrictions the government cruelly imposed on its citizens.

You get the drift—let’s applaud Raul! Sickening. I’d love to see evidence of these “empowered ordinary citizens”; au contraire.

[NOTE: The WaPo’s motive does not appear to have been to help Hillary, because she has come out in favor of the deal and reports are that she pushed it heavily when she was SOS.]

Obama the “negotiator”

The New Neo Posted on by

Marco Rubio, among others, thinks that Obama is a bad negotiator:

I don’t know what his intentions are. His foreign policy is at a minimum naive, and perhaps even truly counterproductive to the future of democracy in the region.

Just last week we imposed sanctions on human rights violators in Venezuela, but the people who are supporting the Venezuelans in conducting those violations — literally the Cubans have taken over the Venezuela government, we’re actually lifting sanctions on them.

How absurd is that? And it’s just par for the course, all of these tyrants around the world know the United States can be had. At a minimum I will say this, the president is the worst negotiator we’ve had as president since at least Jimmy Carter and perhaps in the modern era.

But Rubio is wrong; Obama is not a bad negotiator at all. He is a faux negotiator.

And perhaps Rubio even knows this (the hint being “at a minimum”) but feels he can’t say it or he will be labeled a kook.

But I can say it: Obama’s intentions here were to prop up the Castro government and concede to them, and the negotiations were an excuse to do that. There were no reluctant concessions on the part of Obama, there were eager concessions.

As Rich Lowry writes, it’s not so much about whether it was time to loosen economic sanctions or not (reasonable people differ on this), it’s about how it was done:

The rest of Obama’s sweeping revisions ”” diplomatic relations and the loosening of every economic sanction he can plausibly change on his own ”” are freely granted, no questions asked. It is quid with no pro quo. Even if you oppose the isolation of Cuba, this is not a good trade.

After waiting out 10 other U.S. presidents, the Castro regime finally hit the jackpot in Obama…

Every dictator around the world must be waiting anxiously for a call or a postcard from Obama. The leader of the free world comes bearing gifts and understanding. He is willing to overlook human-rights abuses. And his idea of burnishing his legacy is to clinch deals with his country’s enemies.

Anyone who has observed Obama over the years ought to know that. It is not subtle, it is obvious. Whether it be Iran, the Afghan Taliban (Bergdahl swap), or Cuba, this is his m.o. for “negotiating” (wink, wink) with tyrants.

I was saying to a friend the other day that comparing Obama to Carter is an insult to Carter, who was a liberal but a patriot with good intentions. Obama is not a patriot and does not have good intentions, unless your idea of what’s good for the world is to bring America down, hurt its allies, and help its enemies. There are many people on the left who believe exactly that.

Obama on Cuba

The New Neo Posted on by

In retrospect, Obama’s push to normalize relations with Cuba shouldn’t have been any sort of surprise. As a leftist and a statist he is ideologically simpatico, and such a move would also appear to be supported by a majority of Americans, at least according to this poll from last February.

It’s the details that have that special Obama flair. The fact that this was done in secret, representing the fruit of 18 months of labor that we knew nothing about, is unsettling but again, not surprising (wonder what else is going on in secret? I sure do, and I bet it involves Iran). The fact that it involved a prisoner swap of three guilty Cubans we held for one innocent American (and which the administration has taken pains to insist is not a swap) is another. Another is the little phone chat Obama had with Castro yesterday, the first such contact between a president and Castro since the latter took office in the late 50s.

One surprise is that, at least for now, Obama is acknowledging that he does not have the right to completely lift the embargo by executive order, because that was an act of Congress. He’s definitely relaxing it, though. But I have little doubt that he’s only deferring to Congress on this issue because it’s not all that important to him; I firmly believe he would declare the embargo null and void under some sort of prosecutorial discretion argument if he really cared to have another big hassle about it.

Some members of Congress are up in arms, but I predict they will be powerless to stop it, as they have been powerless so far against this administration (and not all of those opposing this are Republicans, either). Note the screaming hypocrisy/irony of Obama’s statement [emphasis mine] in the second paragraph following:

Some Republicans and Democrats vowed to oppose Obama’s new policy, which will also include making it easier for Americans to travel to the Socialist-run island 90 miles from Florida beaches and return with consumer goods ”“ including Cuba’s fabled rum and iconic cigars.

“To those who oppose the steps I’m announcing today, let me say that I respect your passion and share your commitment to liberty and democracy,” Obama said.

Right.

Jackie enters Stephen Glass and Catfish territory

The New Neo Posted on by

You have to hand it to “Jackie” of the Rolling Stone UVA story—she dedicated an awful lot of creative energy to her hoax. Although I suspect that on first telling her main motivation was to earn the attention, sympathy, and romantic interest of her friend “Randall” (real name: Ryan Duffin), the story snowballed as she got more of what is known as secondary gains from it.

Jackie now appears to have fleshed out her tale a la Stephen Glass—the New Republic wunderkind who created fake notes and fake phone numbers and even got his brother to pretend to be a source—by setting up fake phone accounts for her fake boyfriend who fake-raped her, in order to have him appear to text her friends. I think this should be enough to convince the lingering Jackie-defenders that the woman has been running a con.

Of course, some are still officially undecided, including the three friends she seems to have thrown under the bus in the Rolling Stone story. I can understand their hesitation, though, because a con artist can be intensely compelling, and it’s very hard to admit you were conned by a friend. Fortunately, most people don’t operate the way Jackie did, and so it can be quite a leap for those not naturally inclined to cynicism to understand how they’ve been taken for a ride by someone they knew and liked.

I don’t know whether Jackie is just a garden-variety sociopath, or whether her mental/emotional troubles are of a more sympathetic kind. At any rate, she was a mere freshman in college when this all began to go down, and at least at the outset she appears not to have intended to go national with her story. That happened step by awful step, as she got deeper and deeper into campus anti-rape politics, and then met up with Sabrina Rubin Erdely, reporter for Rolling Stone. It was Erdely who was older, presumably wiser, and who had a professional duty to fact-check Jackie’s story. Erdely was extremely negligent in failing to do so, and her career should be absolutely finished (I also wonder whether someone at UVA—perhaps the accused fraternity—can sue her for damages).

So both Jackie and Erdely bear guilt, and a lot of it. But strangely enough, I would consider the editors of Rolling Stone even more guilty, because I hold them to a higher standard (I know; how foolish of me). But they are supposed to be the authorities, the last check on irresponsible journalism, the skeptical ones who need to always be suspicious. After all, fact-checking standards exist for a reason, and the reason is to make sure that a publication prints what used to quaintly be known as the truth. Printing fake stories as a result of a combination of lack of due diligence plus ideological fervor is not something new, of course. But in the last couple of decades it seems to have become more and more common.

Federal judge rules Obama’s executive amnesty orders unconstitutional

The New Neo Posted on by

This is good news, but it’s probably just the beginning of the battle:

Earlier Tuesday, a federal court in Pennsylvania declared aspects of President Obama’s executive actions on immigration policy unconstitutional.

According to the opinion by Judge Arthur Schwab, the president’s policy goes “beyond prosecutorial discretion” in that it provides a relatively rigid framework for considering applications for deferred action, thus obviating any meaningful case-by-case determination as prosecutorial discretion requires, and provides substantive rights to applicable individuals. As a consequence, Schwab concluded, the action exceeds the scope of executive authority.

Jonathan Adler, who wrote the piece, adds that he’s not sure whether states (such as Texas, mounting a suit) will be found to have standing to challenge Obama’s order in the courts. But he thinks this case proves that even if states don’t have standing, there are other ways to get a foot in the courtroom door on this issue.

I keep harping on the importance of electing Republicans in order to appoint more federal judges who are on the right rather than the left, because the judicial system is a huge player in the fight against encroaching leftism and its tyranny. Judge Schwab was appointed by George W. Bush, so this is another indication of that fact.

And don’t give me the old “sometimes the judges Republicans appoint aren’t all that conservative” business. Although that happens, it is very very seldom, and the judges Republicans appoint are always more conservative than those liberals appoint. It matters.

Pakistini Taliban attack school, kill 140+ children and teachers

The New Neo Posted on by

Another outrageously evil attack in which Islamist terrorists target children, this time in Pakistan:

Militants from the Pakistani Taliban have attacked an army-run school in Peshawar, killing 141 people, 132 of them children, the military say.

Officials say the attack in the north-western city is over, with all the attackers killed. Seven militants took part in all, according to the army.

Gunman methodically went from room to room and shot most of the victims in the head. The terrorists are reported to have been wearing suicide vests, and this article indicates that some of those vests were set off after Pakistani security forces came to the scene. The school appears to have had its own security, but:

The gunmen, who several students said communicated with each other in a foreign language, possibly Arabic, managed to slip past the school’s tight security because at least some of them were wearing Pakistani military uniforms, some witnesses said.

When I wrote the introductory sentence to this post, I was careful to say that this attack involved the targeting of children. It is important to state that the killing of children was completely intentional and the main goal of the operation, rather than children being accidental collateral damage in an attack on other people. This is an important distinction, a line the terrorists’ (and the left) purposely blur in statements such as this:

“We selected the army’s school for the attack because the government is targeting our families and females,” said Taliban spokesman Muhammad Umar Khorasani. “We want them to feel the pain.”

I would bet a large amount of money that the Pakistani government does not “target” their families and females, although some have probably been killed as collateral damage. But there is no question that children were targeted here, and that this is often the terrorists’ m.o.. We’ve seen it a great deal when Palestinian terrorists work in Israel, for example. Here the rationale, if you can call it that, was that a lot of these victims were children of army personnel; in Israel, the Palestinians often say that since all Israelis serve in the armed forces, all children are fair game as targets because they grow up to be soldiers. It’s evil sophistry, but many Western leftists will parrot these arguments with approval.

President Obama used the word “depraved” to describe the attack. It’s an old-fashioned term but it fits the situation well. But that doesn’t mean this was a random act of insanity. It is a purposeful approach, one with that of ISIS and other Muslim terrorist groups who want to sow fear and the deepest grief possible.

Of course, by doing so they might motivate the Pakistini government and its people to step up the fight against them. Perhaps they don’t care, or perhaps that’s what they want, because they think that they are on the side of righteousness and will prevail.

It’s another demonstration of just how twisted human beings can become.

Another day, another MSM hoax

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, at least Jessica Pressler and New York Magazine appear to have done a bit more fact-checking on this story than Erdely and Rolling Stone did on theirs.

And yet, duped again:

In the most recent edition of New York, its annual Reasons to Love New York issue, the magazine published this story about a Stuyvesant High School senior named Mohammed Islam, who was rumored to have made $72 million trading stocks. Islam said his net worth was in the “high eight figures.” As part of the research process, the magazine sent a fact-checker to Stuyvesant, where Islam produced a document that appeared to be a Chase bank statement attesting to an eight-figure bank account. After the story’s publication, people questioned the $72 million figure in the headline, which was written by editors based on the rumored figure. The headline was amended. But in an interview with the New York Observer last night, Islam now says his entire story was made up.

Here’s the New York Observer article in which Islam acknowledged the deception.

Note a couple of things about all of this.

These recent hoax stories have appeared predominantly in the liberal media. That’s not to say that media on the right doesn’t make errors and can’t be fooled. But so far the episodes have clustered on the other side. Of course, let’s not forget that there are more media outlets on the left, so the law of averages would dictate it. But still, it makes sense to conclude on the basis of recent evidence that the right is more concerned than the left with getting the story right in terms of research and/or less inclined than the left to decide a story is just too good to fact-check rigorously.

This fits in quite nicely with the observation that the left is more dedicated to ends justifying means than the right is, and more contemptuous of its readers’ ability to discern truth from falsehood. Thus, these articles.

The New York Magazine article about Mohammed Islam, the Stuyvesant High student with the multi-million stock market win, does not appear to have been driven by a leftist ideological or political agenda, unlike Erdely’s UVA rape article. It seems to have been more of a fun human interest story, although I suppose the Muslim angle might have been a small part of the draw.

[NOTE: Speaking of the Muslim angle, Mohammed Islam is not an Arab, he’s a Kazakh.]