India avenges Daniel Pearl

The New Neo Posted on by

The murder of Daniel Pearl seems like ancient history now; it happened early in 2002. However, a few weeks after the October 7, 2023 massacre in Israel I took a look back at Pearl’s murder and wrote this:

Remember Daniel Pearl? Why do I start this post with him? He was the first terrorist victim – at least the first I can remember – whose death contained that special element of horrific sadism and psychopathic brutality crossed with modern technology, in that his beheading was videoed and purposely broadcast by the perpetrators. This was way before ISIS, but it foreshadowed the behavior of that group. It was something out of a psychological horror movie, and yet it was real.

Pearl was held hostage first, too. And then before the terrorists killed him he was forced to say things such as, “I am a Jew.” That was very very important to the terrorists, although the US seemed to be their main target for the moment.

Here’s an interesting fact that I never knew before, about Daniel Pearl’s mother, which is that she was an Iraqi Jew [born in Baghdad] who fled that country in the 1940s because of persecution and violence …

During the video, Pearl was made to say at the outset:

“My name is Daniel Pearl. I’m a Jewish-American from Encino, California, USA. I come from, uh, on my father’s side the family is Zionist. My father’s Jewish, my mother’s Jewish, I’m Jewish. My family follows Judaism. We’ve made numerous family visits to Israel.”

Jewish, Jewish, Jewish; Israel, Israel, Israel. That was no mere detail to Pearl’s killers. It’s not that they won’t kill non-Jews; they certainly will, and with relish. But it is Jews they wish to eliminate from the earth first.

I go on to add that the who killed Pearl want killing Jews to be a worldwide effort.

Now we learn, however, that as a result of India’s retaliation against Pakistani terrorists who murdered civilian tourists in Kashmir, the killer of Daniel Pearl has been, as they say, neutralized. Here’s the story:

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), India’s governing party, said that the Indian army killed Pakistani terrorist Abdul Rauf Azhar in “Operation Sindhoor.”

A group of Islamist terrorists, including Azhar, kidnapped and murdered Pearl in 2002. The terrorist was affiliated with al-Qaeda and Jaish-e-Mohammed, an Islamist terror group that aims to separate Kashmir from India and fully incorporate it into Pakistan. …

In the BJP announcement, the party said that Azhar was involved in a number of terror activities, including the 1999 hijacking of an Indian Airlines flight, the 2016 Pathankot Air Force base attack, and a 2001 terror attack on the Indian parliament.

Azhar’s involvement in the 1999 hijacking freed Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British-born al-Qaeda member who formerly served in Pakistan’s intelligence agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

Azhar wasn’t targeted because he killed Pearl. He was targeted because of his terrorism against India. But as you can see, it’s all connected. And I wonder whether India got some help from Israeli intelligence.

I would add the old saying “The wheels of justice grind slow,” but it doesn’t seem like “justice” when this person and his colleagues have been walking the earth for over 20 years since the beheading, and have recently managed to kill 26 innocent people more.

NOTE: See also this article in the India Times.

Papal surprise

The New Neo Posted on by

The surprise? The newly-elected pope is an American from Chicago. I don’t think that was on the radar screen of any predictions I ever read or heard.

His name is Robert Prevost, to be known as Pope Leo XIV. It doesn’t sound to me as though he’s a conservative; sounds somewhat in the mold of his predecessor, and he even has a South American angle because he was a missionary in Peru for many years and later became a citizen of that country, and only recently a cardinal.

More here:

President Trump sent his well wishes to the new American Pope, Robert Prevost — even though the new pontiff has been critical of the president, his administration and his treatment of migrants.

Prevost, who has taken the name Pope Leo XIV, has shared several highly critical posts about Trump and his immigration policies on X.

One scathing post Prevost retweeted read: “There is nothing remotely Christian, American, or morally defensible about a policy that takes children away from their parents and warehouses them in cages. This is being carried out in our name and the shame is on us all.”

The MSM seems to be his main source on that issue. And is he the first pope with a history of tweeting prior to his election to the post? I think maybe.

Here’s his Vance reference:

The new pope also previously shared an op-ed from the National Catholic Reporter titled: “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others,” following comments the vice president made on Fox News in February.

During the interview, Vance said, “There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.”

I’m going to assume the Pope-to-be knows a great deal more about Christian concepts than I do, but strangely enough I’ve written something related to that very topic, which you can find here.

AI taking over education?

The New Neo Posted on by

This is a problem – a big problem:

Some teachers have responded by having many in-class essays, with electronics banned. I wish them well.

I see the AI phenomenon as the next step – albeit a huge one – in the dumbing-down of education that’s been going on for many many decades. My ex-husband was a university professor in the late 1970’s to the mid 1980’s, and it was evident even then that many many university students couldn’t write. That trend accelerated, but now with AI they mostly don’t even have to try. Calculators have made it so that most don’t seem to know basic math or even arithmetic. General knowledge – especially of history – has fallen by the wayside. If you don’t have a background of knowledge, what on earth could you write knowledgeably about?

The conflict between India and Pakistan

The New Neo Posted on by

A helpful tip for people of the future: don’t partition an “I” state and a “P” state, especially if the “P” state is Muslim. Israel and Palestine; India and Pakistan.

I’m being a bit facetious about a topic that’s very serious, but it’s an odd pattern, isn’t it? Of course, there are huge differences between the conflicts, and although the animosity between India and Pakistan has religious roots I think the border dispute (Kashmir in particular) is more central than it is in the Middle East, where it’s somewhat of a screen for the annihilationist goals of the Palestinians. As far as I know, Pakistan has no plans to annihilate the Indians, which would be an odd goal considering India’s enormous population. Israel, on the other hand, is very small.

What will happen now between Pakistan and India? Well, there are threats:

India hit Pakistan and Pakistani Kashmir with missiles on Wednesday and Pakistan vowed to retaliate saying it shot down five Indian aircraft, in the worst clash in more than two decades between the nuclear-armed neighbours.

India told more than a dozen foreign envoys in New Delhi that “if Pakistan responds, India will respond,” fuelling fears of a larger military conflict in one of the world’s most dangerous – and most populated – nuclear flashpoint regions. …

India said it struck nine “terrorist infrastructure” sites, some of them linked to an attack by Islamist militants that killed 25 Hindu tourists and one local in Indian Kashmir last month.

Pakistan said at least 31 of its civilians had been killed and 46 wounded, a military spokesperson said, and that India “had ignited an inferno in the region”. This included deaths from the strikes and border shelling.

Is Pakistan telling the truth about civilian casualties? I don’t know.

But I’ll go out on a limb and say I don’t think this will end up in some sort of nuclear conflagration. There is a lengthy history of this sort of skirmish there and they are ordinarily contained.

NOTE: That Reuters article I linked has a typical weasel headline: “Pakistan vows retaliation after Indian strike over tourist deaths.” Terrorists killed the tourists; they didn’t just die.

Birthrates large and small

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Snow on Pine” recently started a discussion about people claiming China’s population is less than officially reported. That rang a small bell for me; I believe such rumors/reports are mostly based on the work of this guy:

China has long been over-reporting its population, over 100 million people fewer than officially claimed, a Chinese scientist told Newsweek, a claim met with strong resistance from demography circles.

Yi Fuxian, an obstetrician at University of Wisconsin-Madison who conducts demography research, said the censuses China carries out every 10 years are “seriously overestimated” in an effort to match official estimates. The annual data should be corrected with the census data, he said. …

… [A] closer look at demographics showed a glaring disparity, Yi said. Around 164.24 million babies were born between 1991 and 2000. After accounting for these births and subtracting deaths and net migration, there were about 40 million fewer Chinese than reported.

However, Yi is apparently pretty much alone among scientists in thinking that.

What is not disputed is China’s very low birthrate, shared by other Asian nations such as South Korea and Japan. Here’s a handy chart in which countries around the world are listed by birthrates in descending order. It’s readily apparent that different areas of the world have very different birthrates, with Africa the highest (for example Niger, number one, has a rate of 6.7), then countries in the Arab world and Latin America, as well as places like Tajikistan. Then come the nations of the West, with the US fairly high in that category (1.7). Bringing up the rear is some of Asia, minus Laos (2.36), Cambodia (2.51), and Vietnam (1.88). Here are the large countries in Asia with the very low birthrates: China at 1.02, Japan at 1.23, and South Korea at .75.

One of the outliers is Israel, a highly developed country with a birthrate of 2.9. This is not due, as most people might assume, to very high birthrates among the very religious. Although the latter phenomenon does exist, there are not enough ultra-Orthodox people in Israel to account for the highrate, which exists in all groups to varying degrees. Nor is it due to the 20% of Israel’s population that is Arab. See this:

… [I]n recent years, Muslim women in Israel have almost the same number of children, on average, as Jewish women in Israel do. In contrast, fertility remains very high among the Haredi Jewish population, who are at the same 6.5 rate of pre-Revolution Iran. Even Jewish Israelis outside the Haredi community have higher fertility than their counterparts in other countries. …

… [E]ven though Haredi [ultra-Orthodox] fertility is high, it is far below maximal levels observed in other populations (10 children per woman on average), and it is consciously limited and controlled by married couples, implying that family planning and family limitation in this population is widespread.

Beyond the wide disparities in fertility among various Jewish subpopulations, Israel is also unique in the value placed on having children among self-described secular Jews, who most commonly have three children by the time they complete their families, a markedly higher rate than their Diaspora counterparts. Why?

It’s that phenomenon – the secular Jewish birthrate in Israel – that is unusual. Here’s the explanation the article gives (in addition to a generally “pro-natalist” policy by the government):

The collectivist and communitarian core of Israel’s social philosophy places a family-shaped framework around its mores at all levels of society. Individuals rely to a great extent on their families within and across generations, strengthening family bonds and engendering a broad and expanded conception of the family: in size, relational lines, and responsibility. Put another way, cultural codes for family behavior and commitment are rather extensive because familial feeling extends beyond the boundaries of the nuclear family. Taking this into account, we can understand Israel’s high fertility in part as springing from the institution that serves as the foundation of family life: marriage.

The author points out that over time there’s been a slow and slight reduction in the Israeli birthrate among secular Jews, and that may or may not continue. But what I don’t see emphasized in the article, and what I think are also large factors, are two other things. The first is that about half of Israel’s Jewish population is descended from Jews from Arab and/or North African countries, and they may be following their own cultural heritage that somewhat resembles that of those countries. The second is that much of the other half of Israel’s Jewish population descended from Holocaust survivors, for whom every Jewish child born represents a triumph over the forces – then and now – which would destroy the Jews. Therefore I don’t think the Israeli experience can speak to that of other Western or Asian countries; it’s significantly different.

I’ve put up other posts – including videos focusing on China – about the falling birthrates in Asia and around the developed world, so I won’t go into a huge analysis of that now. This post just scratches the surface. But it’s a very important topic that I’ll probably revisit, one that doesn’t seem to be going away.

Open thread 5/7/2025

The New Neo Posted on by

This is one of Cohen’s less well-known songs, but I think it’s very beautiful. He (uncharacteristically) forgets some of the words to the third chorus – the one about his children – which go like this:

And they lead me away to the great surprise
It’s “Papa, don’t peek, Papa, cover your eyes”
And they hide, they hide in the world.

The Trump assassination-attempt photo wins a Pulitzer

The New Neo Posted on by

But it’s the wrong photo. Although the winner is an interesting shot (literally; it shows the bullet track before hitting Trump’s ear), it can’t compare in terms of composition and importance to the one that became iconic. The latter – the non-winner – makes Trump look like a courageous hero, which he certainly was that day. And we can’t have that.

So therefore:

Met Gala fashion

The New Neo Posted on by

I thought I’d do a light little number on the usual over-the-top fashions at the Met Gala, but I ran into the fact that the following story has taken over and dominated everything else. I think it’s a tale for our times, very emblematic of the changes that have gone on in our culture in general.

Some actress I’ve never heard of wore what looks like a jacket, panties (as in “underwear”), and pantihose as her ensemble. But that’s not quite it – as if that weren’t enough. The real news – and what created controversy even among many people who ordinarily wouldn’t be shocked by that sort of thing – was a portrait embedded in the lower part (see how delicately I put that?) of the panties.

Here:

That’s what it’s come down to, although I must admit I might have looked at that outfit and completely missed the Rosa Parks reference if it hadn’t been the talk of “X”.

The theme of the entire Gala was this:

In support of this year’s exhibit, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” the Met Gala 2025’s dress code was Tailored for You, a concept inspired by the show’s focus on menswear and suiting.

Follow that link and scroll down and you’ll find lots of photos. A few of the outfits are even quite attractive, such as Zendaya all in white (it’s very hard to duplicate the photos here, so you’ll have to go there). Demi Moore resembles a leftover extra from the Ascot scene in the movie My Fair Lady, Al Sharpton (so thin now!) seems to be sporting a vaguely Captain Hook-ish ruffled cuff look, Jeff Goldblum channels Count Dracula, someone named Colman Domingo resembles a royal blue lampshade with an antimacassar on top, and Diana Ross is – well – Diana Ross.

The FBI misled the public on the 2017 baseball practice shooting of Republican members of Congress

The New Neo Posted on by

I guess this is news, but it seems to me that we (the right, that is) already knew it and so should have any sentient being following the story:

The FBI “misled the public” for years in claiming a sniper’s attempt to kill Republican congressmen at a June 2017 baseball practice was “suicide by cop”, when it was in fact domestic terrorism, according to a new congressional report released Tuesday.

The 27-page House Intelligence Committee report concludes “the FBI’s bottom line – ‘the FBI does not believe there is a nexus to terrorism’ – was based upon falsehoods, half-truths, and manipulations of the known facts.”

So I guess maybe the news is that it was a deliberate coverup rather than stupidity on the part of the FBI? I think we also knew that already. Plus, “suicide by cop” and “domestic terrorism against Republicans” are hardly mutually exclusive.

What’s going on with Senator Tillis saying he probably won’t back Trump’s nominee for U.S. Attorney for D.C.?

The New Neo Posted on by

Tillis, Republican senator from North Carolina who is on the Judiciary Committee, is saying that he will oppose Ed Martin, Trump’s nominee for the powerful position of U.S. Attorney for D.C.. Here’s his “reasoning”:

I met with Mr. Martin. He seems like a good man. Most of my concerns related to January 6 and he built a compelling case on some of the 1,512 prosecutions that were probably key to the moment, bad decisions. But where we probably have a difference is I think anybody that reached the perimeter should have been in prison for some period of time, whether it’s 30 days or three years is debatable. But I have no tolerance for anybody who entered the building on January the 6th, and that’s probably where most of the friction was. …

I have to say that Mr. Martin did a good job of explaining how there were people that probably got caught up in it, but they made the stupid decision to come through a building that had been breached and that the police officers and others were saying, stay away. So the difference wasn’t that they should be charged. In my estimation, it’s by how much? That’s an argument I’m willing to have, but we have to be very clear that what happened on January the 6th was wrong. …

… [I]f Mr. Martin were being put forth as a U.S. Attorney for any district except the district where January 6 happened, the protest happened, I’d probably support them, but not in this district.

I think you can see why I put the word reasoning in scare quotes. Does Tillis know how our legal system works, or is supposed to work? Does he agree that in an adversarial system, even the most vicious criminals need a defense and that lawyers argue certain things as part of a defense that they don’t always even agree with? Does he understand that many many J6 defendants were not being told by police officers to “stay away” – au contraire?

Does he know anything about that day?

His vote is especially important, by the way, because there’s a deadline on the nomination which is coming soon, and if the position isn’t filled by that time then The Great and Powerful Boasberg gets to appoint someone to fill the position.

So, what’s going on with Tillis? Some possibilities:

(1) He craves attention and this is getting him quite a bit.
(2) He actually is extremely ignorant of how the legal system works and/or how J6 went down.
(3) He is virtue-signaling.
(4) He is going to capitulate at some point, but he wants something in exchange for his vote.

I see the following from Tillis’ Wiki page:

Tillis initially opposed President Donald Trump’s national emergency declaration to divert funding to a border wall but voted for it after pressure from his party.

That’s interesting.

Other interesting tidbits – which may or may not be relevant – are these two:

By the time he was 17, his family had moved 20 times, living in New Orleans and Nashville, among other places; Tillis never attended the same school in consecutive years. …

Tillis, his father, and his two brothers are all named Thomas Tillis.

A bit confusing, perhaps?

Tillis doesn’t have a law degree; he’s got a BA from the University of Maryland in technology management. Not sure why he’s on the Judiciary Committee.

There’s also this:

After the release of the Access Hollywood tape during the 2016 United States presidential election, Tillis called Trump’s comments “indefensible”. According to Politico, he “began the Trump era by negotiating with Democrats on immigration and co-authoring legislation to protect special counsel Robert Mueller” but has increasingly aligned himself with the president due to pressure from his party. While occasionally criticizing Trump’s tone, Tillis said in 2017 that he had “not deviated once from any nomination or any vote that the president happens to be supportive of” and has voted with Trump’s stated positions 90% of the time as of January 2021.

He also was against the Hegseth confirmation before he was for it.

And I assume he’s currently undergoing a bit more of that familiar “pressure from his party” – at least, I hope so.