The most influential female rock star of the 60s you’ve never heard of…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is Beverly Bivens.

I’d never heard her name, either.

And although I remember the music of her group We Five very well, I hadn’t thought of it or them for years. A college friend of mine had had their LP, and so I was familiar not only their bona fide hit song but with some of their lesser-known songs as well. In particular, in my lovelorn freshman year when my boyfriend suddenly dropped out of school and I was missing him terribly, I listened to a cut of theirs called “Love Me Not Tomorrow” over and over, and even learned how to play it on the guitar, regaling (and probably boring) my friends with my angst.

I hadn’t heard that song since freshman year in college—and believe me that was a long time ago—when some train of thought yesterday led to wonder if it’s on YouTube. And sure enough, I found it there, just as I’d suspected I would.

I was expecting the song to be ho-hum and cliched. But when I listened to it I was immediately struck by something quite different: the singer. With the perspective of years, I thought, “Wow! What a voice!” even though at the time of the original I’d been so in love with the song I never really noticed the voice as a separate entity at all.

Why wasn’t Beverly Bivens a star, a household word? She was certainly pretty enough. But she left the group around the time she get married at the ripe old age of nineteen, and retired not long after.

As for her voice, I’m not the only one who was mighty impressed:

Almost operatic in quality, its range was described as low tenor to high soprano. Bob Jones has recalled that “Bev had this husky kind of voice, and somehow there’s this old soul in there.”…

Bivens’ voice and that of Mary Travers had a similar atmospheric quality, although Bivens’ was the more commanding. In the latter respect, there was a similarity with both Judith Durham of the Australian group the Seekers and Dusty Springfield…

You may remember We Five’s biggest hit “You Were On My Mind,” a catchy bouncy upbeat tune showcasing Bivens’ happy/sad light/dark easy/powerhouse vocals. But the song I was talking about earlier, the one I used to play on the guitar, was this more obscure and somber one:

And here’s We Five’s big hit, which you probably do remember if you’re Of A Certain Age. Bivens’ smoky lower register is what makes it so spectacular:

[NOTE: Another thing I’d never known before is that “Love Me Not Tomorrow” was written by John Stewart of The Kingson Trio. Stewart’s brother Mike was We Five’s founder.]

Is this what the Yemen alert was all about?

The New Neo Posted on by

Yemen vs. al Qaeda:

Yemen has emerged as the focus of a feared attack that has led the U.S. to shut down temporarily 19 diplomatic posts in the Middle East and Africa. American and British workers from embassies in Yemen’s capital of Sanaa also have been evacuated.

Washington has been backing a campaign by Yemen’s military to uproot al-Qaida militants and their radical allies who had taken over a string of southern cities and towns. The militants have largely been driven into the mountains and countryside, and Yemeni intelligence officials say the current threat may be retaliation for that offensive.

A U.S. intelligence official and a Mideast diplomat told the AP that the closures were triggered by the interception of a secret message between al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahri and Nasser al-Wahishi, the leader of the Yemen-based al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, about plans for a major attack.

Hard to believe al-Zawahri is still alive, but he is. Alive and kicking.

As is the “decimated” al Qaeda.

Left and right, Europe and the US

The New Neo Posted on by

I found the following comment to my post on Tamerlane Tsarnaev and the BBC (cross-posted at Legal Insurrection) to be a good reminder of the difference between our own left/right divide vs. those of Europe:

Some concepts don’t translate well across the Atlantic, and to Americans the European press can seem to have originated on Planet Bananas.

In Europe (which includes Britain, even if they sometimes like to pretend otherwise) they’re all socialists, save for a smattering of monarchists and anarchists. The left-wing/right-wing schism is along different lines than in the US.

European right-wing means socialist and nationalist, left-wing means socialist and internationalist. Extreme European right-wingers are fascists. Extreme European left-wingers are communists. There are of course many minor variants. To Americans the distinctions aren’t terribly important; they’re all totalitarians. We’d call them all left-wing. It’s not clear that very many Europeans have even the vaguest idea of what the American right-wing is really about. They just assume that it has some similarity to the European right-wing, which couldn’t be more wrong. They simply lack the conceptual machinery to recognize it.

And it occurs to me that’s exactly the way our very own MSM would like us to see it here, too. They purposely misrepresent the American left/right divide (and especially the right) in just that manner. They are such Europhiles that they’d like the US to resemble Europe today, and are trying to push us in that direction. Obama, of course, is doing the same, with their assistance.

I’ve noticed this point of view among many of my liberal friends, too—a reflexive idealization of Europe and downputting of the US at almost every opportunity.

And another great comment, this one from “MBE” on the BBC thread at this blog:

In simple terms, the fundamental difference between Socialism/Communism and Nazism/Fascism is under the Communist model, the government owns everything and allocates it amongst citizens as it sees fit. Under Fascism, private individuals and companies own property, but must do whatever the government want (ie independent rule of law is illusionary). The primary difference is the degree to which the government micromanages: under Communism it must do everything (which is difficult and stifling), under Fascism and working forms of Socialism the government doesn’t need to bother with every little thing, but remains all-powerful. As commentator “Paul in Boston” noted, Fascism utilises “Corporatism”.

Ring Wing/Conservative tends to be foremostly based upon individual freedom within the framework of the law, with a large focus on self-control/discipline. Communism/Fascism are pretty much the exact opposite: individual freedom is totally subordinate to the whims of the ruling group of the ruling party.

Commentator “MDL” mentions Franco and Pinochet ”“ two very interesting people. I’d add Lee Kwan Yew into that mix: dictators who seized control for the very specific reason of preventing Communism, and who used their time not to establish a dynasty, but to transition to Democracy. Past leaders of Taiwan and South Korea (I forget their names, but there are a few “Kims” in there) deserve similar kudos.

Spain has been a strong democracy since Franco died (their only big mistake has been the EU). Chile, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore have become probably the best examples of democracies transitioning from dictatorships/juntas in recent history. Kemal Ataturk and his successors in the Turkish military also fit this mold. While one may disagree with their methods, the bottom line is they acted to prevent long term communist totalitarianism, and left behind vibrant democracies with vibrant economies.

These are guys who broke eggs to make omelettes, but at least they made pretty decent omelettes.

What do you think? Did they break too many eggs or just the necessary number, and how good are the resulting omelettes?

Tawana Brawley: the wheels of justice grind slow

The New Neo Posted on by

…but they grind exceedingly fine.

Just recently, post-Zimmerman, I wrote a post about former NY Duchess County DA Pagones and Tawana Brawley’s accusations against him. And although I’m glad to see that Brawley is finally paying, money really doesn’t quite cut it, as Pagones says in the Post article, although it’s a good start.

Why wasn’t Brawley held criminally liable for her lies instead of just civil damages? Her age, I believe: she was fifteen at the time. If she’d been older, I believe she could have been charged with filing a false police report—which can be a felony if the charges were bad enough, which they certainly were in Brawley’s case.

But even had she been older, it might have been difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Brawley had filed a false report. That’s the standard for a criminal as opposed to civil judgment. As for Sharpton and the others, they could just say they were relying on her word, and besides they didn’t file any police report at all. So the only remedy regarding them was the defamation suit which Pagones ended up winning.

Why am I being so harsh on Brawley? Well, the article doesn’t go into the details of what Brawley et al actually alleged about her presumed attackers. Read this is you need a memory refresher:

On November 28, 1987, Tawana Brawley, who had been missing for four days from her home in Wappingers Falls, New York, was found seemingly unconscious and unresponsive, lying in a garbage bag several feet from an apartment where she had once lived. Her clothing was torn and burned, her body smeared with feces. She was taken to the emergency room, where the words “KKK”, “Nigger”, and “Bitch” were discovered written on her torso with a black substance described as charcoal.[8]

A detective from the Sheriff’s Juvenile Aid Bureau, among others, was summoned to interview Brawley, but she remained unresponsive. The family requested a black officer, which the police granted. Brawley, described as having an “extremely spacey” look on her face, communicated with this officer with nods of the head, shrugs of the shoulder, and written notes…Through gestures and writing, however, she indicated she had been raped repeatedly in a wooded area by three white men, at least one of them a police officer…

Brawley provided no names or descriptions of her assailants. She later told others that there had been no rape, only other kinds of sexual abuse. Forensic tests found no evidence that a sexual assault of any kind had occurred. There was no evidence of exposure to elements, which would have been expected in a victim held for several days in the woods at a time when the temperature dropped below freezing at night.

So, how did Pagones come into the picture? How did he get to the point of suing Brawley for defamation if at first she didn’t name or describe her supposed attackers? That came later, after Sharpton et al had jumped on the Brawley bandwagon:

Sharpton, Maddox, and Mason generated a national media sensation. The three claimed officials all the way up to the state government were trying to cover up defendants in the case because they were white. Specifically, they named Steven Pagones, an Assistant District Attorney in Dutchess County, as one of the rapists, and a racist, among other accusations.

There’s more, much more; the whole entry is well worth reading. Here’s a sample of some of the reaction to Brawley even after the hoax had been discovered:

Legal scholar Patricia J. Williams wrote in 1991 that the teenager “has been the victim of some unspeakable crime. No matter how she got there. No matter who did it to her and even if she did it to herself.” These comments aroused controversy as well.

The events were alluded to in Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing, in which a scene showed a brick wall bearing the graffiti message “Tawana told the truth”

Plus é§a change, plus c’est la méªme chose. In service of a “higher truth.”

And then there’s this:

Retro Report interviewed Mr. Sharpton and asked whether, 25 years later, he felt that any crime had occurred at all.

“Whatever happened,” he answered, “you’re dealing with a minor who was missing four days. So it’s clear that something wrong happened.”

Remind me again: why is this guy a TV pundit? Sharpton was also found guilty of defamation, but his “supporters” have been paying his bills.

Obligatory reading: the permanent bureaucracy

The New Neo Posted on by

This.

Excerpt:

Barack Obama is the first president of the democracy that John Adams warned us about.

Democracy never lasts long,” Adams famously said. “It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself…”

…[T]he United States is not going to fall for a strongman government. Instead of delegating power to a would-be president-for-life, we delegate it to a bureaucracy-without-death. You do not need to install a dictator when you’ve already had a politically supercharged permanent bureaucracy in place for 40 years or more…Barack Obama isn’t the leader of the free world; he’s the front man for the permanent bureaucracy, the smiley-face mask hiding the pitiless yawning maw of total politics…

Congress’s supine ceding of its powers, and the Obama administration’s usurpation of both legal and extralegal powers, is worrisome. But what is particularly disturbing is the quiet, polite, workaday manner with which the administration goes about its business ”” and with which the American public accepts it. As Christopher Hitchens once put it, “The essence of tyranny is not iron law; it is capricious law.”

And please pay particular attention to this last paragraph:

Barack Obama’s administration is unmoored from the institutions that have long kept the imperial tendencies of the American presidency in check. That is partly the fault of Congress, which has punted too many of its legislative responsibilities to the president’s army of faceless regulators, but it is in no small part the result of an intentional strategy on the part of the administration. He has spent the past five years methodically testing the limits of what he can get away with, like one of those crafty velociraptors testing the electric fence in Jurassic Park. Barack Obama is a Harvard Law graduate, and he knows that he cannot make recess appointments when Congress is not in recess. He knows that his HHS is promulgating regulations that conflict with federal statutes. He knows that he is not constitutionally empowered to pick and choose which laws will be enforced. This is a might-makes-right presidency, and if Barack Obama has been from time to time muddled and contradictory, he has been clear on the point that he has no intention of being limited by something so trivial as the law.

There is a fascination with what Obama has done because it is so strangely audacious and yet it seems to evaporate almost as soon as it occurs, at least in the mind of the majority of the American public. His genius is to do outrageous things so disarmingly they seem to have put the public to sleep. Or maybe the public was already lulled to sleep by a combination of mass media, education unworthy of the name, and the distraction of vapid and often offensive entertainment.

I’ve described it, thousands of other pundits and bloggers and commenters on the right have described it, and yet description will not rescue this country, although description/understanding is a necessary first step. And the IRS abuses were a dramatic wakeup call in the power of the “liberal” bureaucracy to stifle actual liberty. “Phony” scandal, indeed.

Bezos buys the WaPo

The New Neo Posted on by

The MSM seems to be treating this as a very big story. I can’t imagine why, although for them I suppose it’s a sort of inside baseball. But I’ll provide this thread for those of you who want to talk about it.

To me it just seems like a guy with a ton of money bought a plaything to fool around with. The WaPo sold for $250 million, considerably more than its poor step-cousin the Boston Globe, but mere chump change to Bezos, whose net worth is 100 times that (estimate: $25 billion).

Bezos made his fortune by having a great idea, Amazon, and successfully developing it at just the right time. As for politics, he’s described as a libertarian, but has also donated much more money to Democrats than Republicans, so that sounds like a very odd sort of libertarianism to me. I have no expectations that the newspaper will change into something worth reading under his helm, but I’d love to be pleasantly surprised.

ADDENDUM: The name “Bezos,” combined with all that money, made me think of this:

And then, looking at the translation of the lyric from Spanish to English, there’s this. Had Ilsa been listening to “Besame Mucho” as well as “As Time Goes By”?

This is surprising

The New Neo Posted on by

Why surprising? After all, he’s 67. But George W. Bush seemed to be in superb health and took very good care of himself. Did all the right things.

And yet: a stent was placed in an artery following blockage discovered during a routine exam.

It oddly parallels Bill Clinton’s experience, although Clinton seems to have had a more serious problem since he had had angina as a symptom and then underwent bypass surgery. A few years later, he had some stents placed as well, and he’s been on a very rigorous diet program too.

Interestingly enough, Clinton’s problems were diagnosed about three and a half years after his presidency ended and Bush’s come four and a half years after the end of his. Makes me wonder if there’s something about the stress of the presidency that helps this along.

Otherwise, the two men are pretty different. When Clinton got heart disease everyone blamed it on his well-known penchant for eating junk food, and the fact that he was supposedly overweight. I never understood the “overweight” charge against Clinton; for a man his age he was in pretty good shape, actually, and not especially overweight at all.

But Bush? A lean, mean fighting machine. And his heredity is super—look at his parents! For me it underscores the essential unpredictability of these things. You can look at statistics, but for each individual there’s no predicting much of anything.

At any rate, I wish him a very speedy and uneventful recovery, and many more healthy years enjoying his family and his painting.

CNN’s intrepid reporters…

The New Neo Posted on by

…are getting fearful.

Speaking truth to power and all that.

[ADDENDUM: Remember Remember CNN head Eason Jordan’s story of cover-up in order to get access to Saddam Hussein’s regime? The dilemma actually isn’t a simple one(employees could have been endangered by telling the truth, as Jordan points out), but what’s the point of access if it’s only access to cover up and lie?

As far as covering for Obama goes, CNN and other news outlets have no good excuse. Obama isn’t torturing and murdering them, except in the career sense by threatening to ban them as he tried to do with Fox. No, the news is a willing and voluntary collaborator with Obama.

And looking back at that story about Eason Jordan, and reading how happy he was about the fall of Saddam Hussein, reminds me of how much worse things have become with the press during the Obama administration. Gone are the days when any self-respecting liberal MSM outlet would talk about the tyranny and torture the Iraqui dictator wreaked—even though now there’s no need for “access” to Saddam or protection from his wrath for their staff in Iraq.

Now, their liberal/left ideology motivates them to hide the truth.]

Why were all the warning signs about Nidal Hasan ignored?

The New Neo Posted on by

This is an outrage. An absolute outrage. Don’t read it if you don’t want to get very, very angry.

PC insanity run amok allowed Hasan to commit his crime—which could have been seen coming several miles away on a foggy day.

And it is a double outrage the way the surviving victims have been treated.

[NOTE: The fact that Nasan is planning to be his own attorney and to interrogate the witnesses, who will include his own victims, reminds me of the Colin Ferguson trial. Who’s Ferguson? The LIRR shooter:

During the course of his cross-examinations, Ferguson would refer to himself in the third person, most particularly asking the victims of the shooting “Did you see Colin Ferguson…” to which the witness would reply “I saw you shoot me.”

By the way, when I Googled Ferguson I discovered to my surprise that there’s another Colin Ferguson, a Canadian actor and comedian. This has nothing to do with anything, really, but I thought it interesting.]

BBC exclusive: Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a Tea Party member!

The New Neo Posted on by

No, the BBC doesn’t actually say “Tea Party member.” Here’s what it does say:

One of the brothers suspected of carrying out the Boston bombings was in possession of right-wing American literature in the run-up to the attack, BBC Panorama has learnt.

So, what was this supposed “right-wing” literature? Was Tamerlan reading about lower taxes and federalism, more restriction of federal versus state government? About shrinking entitlements or stopping the growth of the welfare state? About the deficit? Reversing Roe v. Wade?

No. Here’s the BBC’s list of Tamerlane’s supposed right-wing causes:

Tamerlan Tsarnaev subscribed to publications espousing white supremacy and government conspiracy theories.

He also had reading material on mass killings…

The programme discovered that Tamerlan Tsarnaev possessed articles which argued that both 9/11 and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing were government conspiracies.

Another in his possession was about “the rape of our gun rights”.

Reading material he had about white supremacy commented that “Hitler had a point”.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev also had literature which explored what motivated mass killings and noted how the perpetrators murdered and maimed calmly.

There was also material about US drones killing civilians, and about the plight of those still imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay.

Let’s take them one by one.

—White supremacy is neither of left or right, it is racism which is not espoused by the mainstream of either side today but has been used by both sides in the past. For example, take eugenics—which, surprisingly, even the leftist Guardian has conceded (in a rare burst of candor) was championed by the left. Margaret Sanger, a socialist, was an excellent example of the eugenics movement and its racist aspects.

And few on the left ever acknowledge (or ever will) that Hitler was a socialist, but the evidence is quite compelling, although for the most part the left has been dedicated to suppressing it and even reversing it so that Hitler is widely perceived as right-wing:

It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too. The title of National Socialism was not hypocritical. The evidence before 1945 was more private than public, which is perhaps significant in itself. In public Hitler was always anti-Marxist, and in an age in which the Soviet Union was the only socialist state on earth, and with anti-Bolshevism a large part of his popular appeal, he may have been understandably reluctant to speak openly of his sources…

Hermann Rauschning, for example, a Danzig Nazi who knew Hitler before and after his accession to power in 1933, tells how in private Hitler acknowledged his profound debt to the Marxian tradition. “I have learned a great deal from Marxism” he once remarked, “as I do not hesitate to admit”. He was proud of a knowledge of Marxist texts acquired in his student days before the First World War and later in a Bavarian prison, in 1924, after the failure of the Munich putsch…His differences with the communists, he explained, were less ideological than tactical. German communists he had known before he took power, he told Rauschning, thought politics meant talking and writing. They were mere pamphleteers, whereas “I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun”, adding revealingly that “the whole of National Socialism” was based on Marx.

Now, if the BBC had decided to headline that, it would be news worth publishing. But don’t sit on a hot stove until they do.

—Do most criminal mass killers have political motivations that involve either left or right? Aren’t they far more likely to have been moved by private demons? And among politically-motivated mass murderers, although I’ve not seen a study, my impression is that the left is very well-represented indeed. As for government-perpetrated mass killings (the source of the vast majority of such mass deaths), they have been far more connected to the left than the right from the rise of Communism on. Pol Pot, Stalin, anyone? Even the BBC would be hard-pressed to say they weren’t men of the left, although knowing the BBC they just might give it a go.

As for other mass killers such as, for example, Islamic terrorists (can’t imagine why that would come to mind in a discussion of Tamerlan Tsarnaev), there’s nothing right-wing about their motivations, unless you consider all religious fundamentalism to be of the right. But it’s almost solely the left that supports Muslim fanatics, allies with their cause, and makes excuses for their murders.

—9/11 and Oklahoma truthers? There’s not much data on the latter that I can find, but national polls indicate that 9/11-truthers are far more likely to be on the left side of the political fence than from the right. “Government conspiracy theories” are hardly the sole province of the right, to say the least.

—Now we get to the sole point of view on the list that could properly be called “right-wing”: gun rights. But if someone like Tsarnaev is reading about that issue, it doesn’t tell us anything about his politics in general. He was contemplating murder, for heaven’s sake, and interested in getting greater access to weapons (and by the way, Tsarnaev had most likely committed a previous multiple murder of great brutality, although the mode of killing was knife rather than gun).

—Learning about how mass killers work? That’s about the psychology of murder, not about left or right.

—The final item in the list, material about “US drones killing civilians, and about the plight of those still imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay” are primarily concerns of the left rather than right. Even Obama has drawn criticism from the left for using too many drones and for not fulfilling his campaign promise to close down Guantanamo. These are leftist causes, although some libertarians get into the act too in that interesting area where right and left come full circle and meet.

But I might have saved myself the trouble of going down this list. The BBC certainly doesn’t care, nor do most of its readers. Propaganda rather than information is the name of the game—the BBC being the player who perpetrates it, and the readers being the players who swallow it.

This is hardly just about the BBC. The left (which includes much of the mainstream press) is dedicated to the proposition that all bad people are of the right, or at the very least should be portrayed as being of the right, and that bad people who are actually unequivocally of the left (Lee Harvey Oswald, for example) either are to be portrayed as innocent or their leftism must be toned-down and papered over—just as Tamerlan Tsarnaev, whose motivation as a Muslim jihadi could not have been more clear, must be recast as a man of the right.

Mugabe gives a lesson in how it’s done

The New Neo Posted on by

On Saturday Robert Mugabe won the election in Zimbabwe handily against challenger Morgan Tsvangirai.

Republicans: take note, and don’t make the mistakes Tsvangirai made.

As for Obama and his fellow leftists: they’ve been taking notes all along. And here’s how it’s done:

The voting last week was peaceful, but plagued with problems. The parties did not get a copy of the voters’ roll until the day before the vote, raising fears of fraud…

Election observers also noted that far too many extra ballots had been printed and that too many voters had been reported as needing assistance. Mr. Tsvangirai said that at one constituency where 17,000 people had voted, 10,000 had been assisted, a high rate of people needing help in a country with one of Africa’s highest literacy rates.

Almost twice as many people voted in this election as in 2008, and according to the figures released by the election commission, Mr. Mugabe benefited most from the swell of new voters. His total number of votes doubled, while Mr. Tsvangirai’s level of support remained the same.

So that’s what Mugabe did right. And what did Tsvangirai and his party the M.D.C. (Movement for Democratic Change) do wrong?:

Job Sikala, a leader of one of the breakaway factions of the M.D.C. that boycotted the vote, said Mr. Tsvangirai and his allies had been naé¯ve to expect that the election would be fair…

Indeed, by agreeing to enter into a power-sharing government after the 2008 election, which was marred by political violence, the M.D.C. helped rescue ZANU-PF from its own excesses, Mr. Sikala said, echoing the views of many analysts.

“The day they joined the inclusive government they resuscitated a decomposing, dead donkey,” Mr. Sikala said.

Left is left and right is right. And the right here should be very very wary of cooperating with the Obama administration (especially on amnesty) with the thought that it will gain them a single vote. On the contrary—it will guarantee that the Republican Party will turn into a decomposing, dead elephant.