Okay, I”m going to defend Margaret Brennan of CBS just a teeny tiny little bit

The New Neo Posted on by

Very teeny and very tiny.

You may have already heard the story of the folly of CBS’s Margaret Brennan. It occurred during an interview with Marco Rubio, in which Rubio defended J. D. Vance’s Munich speech in which Vance had criticized the current anti-free-speech policies of much of Europe. Brennan “interrupted Rubio with the claim that Vance was ‘standing in a country [Germany] where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.'”

She must have thought she had him there. Obviously, she did not, and the criticism of Brennan came fast and furious, not just from Rubio but from the right in general:

“I have to disagree with you,” [Rubio] responded. “Free speech was not used to conduct a genocide. The genocide was conducted by an authoritarian Nazi regime that happened to also be genocidal because they hated Jews and they hated minorities … There was no free speech in Nazi Germany. There was none. There was also no opposition in Nazi Germany. They were the sole and only party that governed that country, and so that’s not an accurate reflection of history.”

The ignorance and arrogance of most people in the news business doesn’t surprise me anymore. It’s gotten them far, after all. And yes, Brennan said something really stupid. The Nazis’ genocide of the Jews was committed when there was no free speech in Germany, so she was correctly excoriated for that statement.

But what if she really had meant that the rise of the Nazis was helped along by free speech in Weimar Germany? I have no idea whether Brennan even knows what the Weimar Republic was, but let’s imagine that she does, and that what she really meant was that maybe if the Nazis had been suppressed much earlier, they couldn’t have gotten as far as they did. That would be a very basic example of an argument sometimes made against freedom of speech, which it that it sometimes allow evil to triumph.

Of course, that’s an argument available to evildoers as well – that it’s they who are clamping down on the real evildoers.

Libertarians and classical liberals – and I count myself among the latter – believe that the best remedy for bad speech is to counter that speech with better arguments and better performance in the real world. But we all know that doesn’t always work, and that a lie can often get halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its boots on. But allowing free speech is still better than not allowing free speech.

What’s more, did the Weimar Republic even have free speech? Well, on paper they did because it was protected in their constitution, but in reality they didn’t, as FIRE (an organization devoted to free speech principles) explains:

Richard Delgado, an early champion of speech codes and now more famous as a founding scholar in the field of Critical Race Theory, cites the Rwandan genocide … along with Weimar Germany, as cautionary tales against free-speech purism. The problem is that neither historical precedent supports the idea that speech restraints could have prevented a genocide.

As I [Lukianoff] explained in my review of Eric Berkowitz’s excellent book, “Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News,” Weimar Germany had laws banning hateful speech (particularly hateful speech directed at Jews), and top Nazis including Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch and Julius Streicher actually were sentenced to prison time for violating them. The efforts of the Weimar Republic to suppress the speech of the Nazis are so well known in academic circles that one professor has described the idea that speech restrictions would have stopped the Nazis as “the Weimar Fallacy.”

A 1922 law passed in response to violent political agitators such as the Nazis permitted Weimar authorities to censor press criticism of the government and advocacy of violence. This was followed by a number of emergency decrees expanding the power to censor newspapers. The Weimar Republic not only shut down hundreds of Nazi newspapers — in a two-year period, they shut down 99 in Prussia alone — but they accelerated that crackdown on speech as the Nazis ascended to power. Hitler himself was banned from speaking in several German states from 1925 until 1927.

In [a] 1920s cartoon by Philipp Rupprecht, Hitler is depicted as having his mouth sealed with tape that reads “forbidden to speak.” The text beneath this image reads, “He alone of two billion people on Earth may not speak in Germany.”

Far from being an impediment to the spread of National Socialist ideology, Hitler and the Nazis used the attempts to suppress their speech as public relations coups.

And of course, when the Nazis were in power, they were able to use the Weimar anti-free-speech precedent against the Nazis’ own opponents:

The laws mentioned earlier that allowed Weimar authorities to shut down newspapers, and additional laws intended to limit the spread of Nazi ideology via the radio, had their reins turned over to the Nazi party when Hitler became chancellor. Predictably, the Nazis used these preexisting means of censorship to crush any political speech opposing them, allowing for an absolute grip on the country that would have been much more difficult or impossible with strong legal protections for press and speech.

I actually think that, even without those Weimar speech-suppression laws, the Nazis would have managed just as easily to clamp down on the opposition. They did it through violence and threats of violence, through the declaration of emergency powers (allowed by the German constitution), and ultimately by the fact that Hitler manipulated the Reichstag into dissolving itself, making him a complete dictator.

However, I like that phrase “the Weimar Fallacy.” The nicest thing I can say about Brennan is that she may indeed suffer from it.

Presidents’ Day poetry

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[NOTE: Today is Presidents’ Day, and this is a repeat of a previous post.]

I’m not that old, but pedagogical practices in my youth seem absolutely archaic compared to whatever passes for education these days. For starters, we had Washington’s Birthday and Lincoln’s Birthday, and they were on their actual real birthdays: Lincoln on February 12, and Washington on February 22.

Two days off! But they didn’t necessarily fall on Mondays; they fell whenever they fell, and sometimes – alas – they fell on a Saturday or a Sunday.

We also had to memorize terrible patriotic poetry back then, and lots of it. When I say “terrible” I’m not referring to its patriotism, I mean that it just wasn’t very good poetry. I suppose kids weren’t supposed to care about that aspect of it. Also, in those days I was very quick at memorizing poetry and so those early poems have tended to stick. Therefore I have a relatively large bank of memorized doggerel to draw on.

One of those poems was about George Washington. To give you an idea of the flavor of what I’m talking about, it started this way: “Only a baby, fair and small…” and then filled the reader in on all the stages of Washington’s life, verse by verse. I had never looked it up online and was skeptical that it could be found, but voila! Here it is; isn’t the internet great?

And I now present it to you as an example of what the New York City schoolchild used to have to memorize and recite. I seem to recall this was in fifth grade:

Only a baby, fair and small,
Like many another baby son,
Whose smiles and tears came swift at call,
Who ate and slept and grew – that’s all,
The infant Washington.

I’ll let you go to the site and see it for yourself. The next verse is for the schoolboy Washington, then we have the lad Washington, then finally man/patriot and a lot of generalities with the only specifics being “surveyor, general, president.” Why so much emphasis on Washington’s boyhood I don’t know; maybe to go with the cherry tree story. But still, at least we were taught to think highly of Washington.

And Lincoln had a poem for memorization, too. It was a better effort than the Washington one, I think, although still not very good and rather creepy at that. I see now that the poem was by Rosemary Benet, apparently the wife of Stephen Vincent Benet.

I have no idea why the poem they had us memorize about Lincoln was not about his accomplishments at all, but rather about the mother who died when he was nine years old. In the poem, she comes back as a ghost and inquires about him. But here it is:

If Nancy Hanks
Came back as a ghost,
Seeking news
Of what she loved most,
She’d ask first
“Where’s my son?
What’s happened to Abe?
What’s he done?”

“Poor little Abe,
Left all alone.
Except for Tom,
Who’s a rolling stone;
He was only nine,
The year I died.
I remember still
How hard he cried.”

“Scraping along
In a little shack,
With hardly a shirt
To cover his back,
And a prairie wind
To blow him down,
Or pinching times
If he went to town.”

“You wouldn’t know
About my son?
Did he grow tall?
Did he have fun?
Did he learn to read?
Did he get to town?
Do you know his name?
Did he get on?”

The urge that rose in me was to shout, “Yes, YES, don’t you know?” into the void.

Instead of that one, we might have been asked to memorize this poem – or at least the very last part of it, which I’ve always liked:

And when he fell in whirlwind, he went down
As when a lordly cedar, green with boughs,
Goes down with a great shout upon the hills,
And leaves a lonesome place against the sky.

Or what about this old chestnut by Walt Whitman? Schmaltzy, but it still gives me a little shiver when I read it:

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

The Palestinians: masters of psychological warfare since over 50 years ago

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For decade upon decade, the Palestinian terrorist groups and the Palestinian leadership have been masters of both propaganda in general and psychological warfare in particular. It it wasn’t for that fact, they would probably have very few sympathizers in the West. But they have many – especially among people who think themselves compassionate and loving – and this despite the fact that the terrorists’ actions are barbaric, sadistic, and vicious.

So, how do they manage this feat? One basic way is by lying, with fake videos and photos in combination with what might be called victimhood appropriation. The messages: they’re not the Nazis; the Jews are the Nazis and they are the victims of Nazis. It’s the Jews who are genocidal, and they are the victims of genocide. They are starving, and not their Jewish hostages. The Jews fired a rocket and destroyed a hospital; it wasn’t their own rocket that fell short in the parking lot. The Jews dispossessed them; they didn’t leave voluntarily. Israel is an apartheid state, despite 20% of its population being Arabs, and “Palestine” having no Jews at all. And they are “brown,” which gives them special victim status, even though over half of Israelis are every bit as “brown” in actual color. But “brown” isn’t about color; it’s about victimhood.

This paradoxical effect began, at least to the best of my memory, with the horrific attack at the Munich Olympics. It made Yasser Arafat famous and, for whatever reason, sympathetic to many in the West. Two short years later he was addressing the UN, cleverly saying, “Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom-fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”

Gun, you say? In the UN? Here’s the way the NY Times covered it back then [typos corrected]:

Head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, [Yasser] Arafat, told the United Nations General Assembly today that his Organization’s goal remained a Palestinian state that would include Moslems, Christians and Jews.

I read that now and it’s immediately apparent that he meant that Palestinians would have the right of return to Israel, and that the larger state of which he spoke would be ruled by Arabs, and that any tolerance of other religions would be as temporary dhimmis at best. The Israeli ambassador to the UN knew what Arafat meant, and pointed it out:

Israel’s delegate, Yosef Koah, said in rebuttal that this would mean the destruction of Israel and the substitution of an Arab state.

How many believed Koah? How many even cared? More:

Mr. Arafat was applauded by many delegates in the 138-country Assembly when he said he was dreaming of “One democratic state where Jew and Moslem live in justice, equality, and fraternity. [In] such a state, he said, all Jews “now living in Palestine” could become citizens without discrimination.

Sure thing. And of course, because there weren’t any Jews “now living in Palestine” – nor did Arafat have any interest in justice, equality, and fraternity – it was all a boldfaced lie. In the Middle East, only in Israel did Jew and Moslem live in relative justice, equality, and fraternity.

Arafat had already been schooled by his Soviet teachers in how best to turn the West against Israel, and so in his speech he called Israel “imperialist” and “racist” and referred to himself as a “freedom fighter.” As for the gun, did he or didn’t he?:

Cameramen and other people who were near Mr. Arafat noticed that he was wearing a holster under his bulging windbreaker. A spokesmen later denied that Mr. Arafat Had carried a gun into the Assembly hall and asserted that the holster, if there had been one had been empty. …

The Palestinian leader, who has seldom been seen in public without a holstered weapon, definitely wore a leather holster under his windbreaker, according to close observers, but there were conflicting reports about whether it contained a gun.

A United Nations guard said there was a gun, and one of Mr. Arafat’s bodyguards told The Associated Press that “it’s not only real, it’s loaded.”

However, a spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization said that he had persuaded Mr. Arafat to remove the pistol before he entered the hall for his address.

Is that not somehow perfect in terms of propaganda? The showmanship, the sense of threat and danger and macho daring appealing to the romantic (small r) sensibility, the ambiguity, and the lies, all coupled with the rhetoric about wanting peace and equality and those things Arafat knew would ingratiate him with the West. These days, they’ve even dropped the peace and equality talk; they don’t feel the need to lie about that anymore and they’re quite successful without it.

By the way, Arafat was only the second non-head-of-state to address the Assembly; the first was Pope Paul VI.

Skipping to the present, the hostage transfers (including today’s) are staged as propaganda theater, designed to show Hamas dominance combined with kindness. See, we give them goodie bags! The Red Cross is here! We dress them in these nice track suits! The horror is hidden away, although some of it emerged at the transfer last week in the extremely obvious weakness and emaciation of the three hostages released. I don’t think Hamas will make that particular mistake again; they will fatten them up slightly if possible and if they have enough time, and the rest they will let die and say that Israeli bombs killed them.

But the real psychological torment they perpetrate isn’t just on the hostages. Nor is it just on the families, although those things do satisfy their sadism. It’s on the Israeli people in particular, as well as the Israeli leaders. That’s a big part of the goal, and it would be achieved even if the leaders of Israel were willing to sacrifice the hostages’ lives and go full steam ahead with the war. If that were to occur, the Israeli public would continue to be torn, and most would experience almost unbearable grief because just about everyone’s heart breaks for the hostages, who are considered like family.

The Israeli government is in a lose/lose position once hostages are taken, and that’s why the Palestinians are so very eager to take them. And one of the many many advantages of hostage-taking, as far as the Palestinians are concerned, is that it pits grieving families against grieving families: the hostage families who want prisoner exchanges versus those who don’t, the hostage families who press for prisoner exchanges versus those families whose loved ones were murdered by the very prisoners that are being released, and the present hostages versus future deaths at the hands of the released prisoners. What a cornucopia of riches for the terrorists!

When you take a hostage you are in a position of total power if, like Hamas, you don’t care if your own people are killed in retaliation. The terrorists and jihadis welcome such deaths as a propaganda point. They have no hesitation to kill the hostages if necessary, and have done so when they thought rescue was near, or maybe just for fun. They are in complete control. They can make Netanyahu squirm as the families pressure him and act as though he’s the one who took their loved ones captive. With the eyes of the world upon them, the terrorists know that many of those eyes approve of them as “freedom fighters.”

NOTE: Coverage of the hostage transfer that happened this morning can be found here, and elsewhere in Israeli papers as well as our own media. An excerpt from that link:

All three of the hostages freed today endured “very harsh captivity, including physical abuse.”

All three were very hungry when released. All three have learned Arabic in captivity.

Sagui Dekel-Chen and Iair Horn were held together, and with other hostages, in recent days. For most of their captivity, they were in tunnels.

They were held with other hostages and have returned with signs of life regarding at least three.

Both men were wounded when they were abducted and suffered abuse that exacerbated their injuries.

Sasha Troufanov was held alone.

All three were held in Khan Younis, from where they were freed today, mere hundreds of meters from their homes on Kibbutz Nir Oz.

Iair Horn has told his family that he and his brother Eitan were held together early in their captivity, but not recently.

Much more information at the link and elsewhere.

One quote from this article is a good example of what some of the demonstrating hostage relatives say:

“The prime minister has tried to thwart the agreement again and again and again.”

“One person stands between us and all the hostages,” she says, referring to the premier.

“Netanyahu — we’re sick of the procrastination,” she [the mother of man still held hostage] says.

This seems illogical to me, although I think it’s also understandable because of the depth of the grief and anger the hostage families must feel. For many, it’s easier to blame Netanyahu – and the correct blame is that he was Israel’s head when the hostages were taken, so he should be at least partly to blame for failing to protect against October 7 itself. But in my opinion, he’s not to blame – much less solely to blame – for the fact that many hostages are still in captivity.

It’s especially easy to blame Netanyahu for not freeing the hostages if the person never liked him in the first place. Blaming Netanyahu for everything is also a way to deny the tremendous power Hamas has over the hostages, and how relatively powerless Israel is in such a situation. The hostages were almost impossible to rescue without having them killed. Fighting back without reservation subjects some or perhaps all of them to death, as well. Hamas’ condition for the release of all has basically always involved Israel’s surrender.

There is no solution that doesn’t cause grave peril, and Netanyahu doesn’t hold the hostage cards – Hamas does. But it’s easier to ignore the bind and claim that Netanyahu can somehow cut the Gordian knot. Would that it were true.

Why is the Democratic Party continuing to move to the left, when even its own voters don’t want it to?

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About a recent Gallup poll:

A new Gallup poll reveals a growing divide within the Democratic Party, with 41% of Democrats now saying they want the party to move toward the center. Meanwhile, support for a more liberal direction has dropped to 36%, down from 49% in 2021—marking a significant shift in voter sentiment. …

According to Gallup, moderation is particularly popular among more affluent Democrats, while younger, white, middle-class voters remain more inclined toward progressive policies. This ideological split could have major implications for future elections, especially in swing states where centrist candidates, who rely on the suburbs, tend to perform better than their left-wing counterparts. …

Despite this, Democratic leadership continues to embrace progressive policies, creating friction between party elites and the broader electorate.

We’ve certainly seen that in the Democrats’ recent choices to head the party.

So, why can’t – or won’t – the Democrats tack more towards the middle? After all, they managed to do that in 1992, after the Reagan/Bush-One years, and they were quite successful for a while with Bill Clinton.

Here is my modest attempt at possible answers to that question. Take your pick, or add your own.

(1) They will, eventually. They’re just not ready quite yet.

(2) They cannot and will not, because they’re gotten rid of all their moderates. The party is now composed almost totally of committed leftist ideologues, even if that’s not true of the rank-and-file voters.

(3) The political operatives in the party live increasingly in deep blue enclaves and are completely out of touch with even their own voters, or potential voters, who don’t. It’s more or less the Pauline Kael effect.

(4) In Democrat circles, moderation isn’t just considered moderation these days. It has been labeled sexism, racism, and general bigotry.

(5) During the Obama years, the Democrats became used to the idea of the unstoppable ascendance of the left – that a permanent hold on power was not only achievable, but imminent. The Gramscian march was nearly complete, and they held the reins in education, many churches and synagogues, much of the legal system, media, the unelected DC bureaucracy, and the arts and museums. Any reversal of this is thought to be temporary.

(6) The answer to winning is better messaging. Delivering results that help people’s lives is not necessary. Communication is all.

(7) Another charismatic candidate like Obama will come along and do the trick.

(8) The right will overreach and there will be a backlash.

Trump announces reciprocal tariffs

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Here’s the announcement, which came yesterday:

And on trade, I have decided, for purposes of fairness, that I will charge a reciprocal tariff, meaning whatever countries charge the United States of America, we will charge them. No more, no less. In other words, they charge us a tax or tariff, and we charge them the exact same tax or tariff. Very simple.

Sounds kind of good to me, but I freely admit that economics is not my strong suit. However, surprisingly, even the BBC can’t seem to find anything too terrible to say about these tariffs. An excerpt:

Trump cast his plan for so-called reciprocal tariffs as part of his effort to bring investment to the US and boost manufacturing.

“If you build your product in the United States, there are no tariffs,” he said, adding that he was “just doing what was fair”. …

Historically, the US has championed free trade and kept the majority of its tariffs low, except on certain products such as footwear and, more recently, steel and aluminium.

The US has an average tariff rate of 3.4%, compared with an average rate of 5% in Europe, according to the WTO. …

John Cassidy, chief executive of Red Cedar Investment Management, said Trump’s string of rapid-fire tariff announcements had unnerved Wall Street, which “does not like the unknown”.

But he warned against over-reacting, noting that tariffs that Trump imposed during his first term had a relatively mild impact on the US economy.

“I think Trump’s playing a hand here and I think he’s got a very strong hand to play,” he said.

However, Alex Durante, economist at the Tax Foundation, said it remained to be seen what changes could result from Trump’s moves.

He does not think tariffs are the best strategy for dealing with trade complaints, given the costs and uncertainty they introduce for US firms and risks of retaliation.

The gist of it is that nobody seem to know what will happen. But the objections seem rather tepid to me.

Your mileage may differ.

The three hostages who might be returned tomorrow, plus news on some of those who have already, and an apology returned

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The three hostages due to be released tomorrow have been named. They are American-Israeli Sagui Dekel-Chen, Russian-Israeli Alexandre Troufanov, and Argentinian-Israeli Iair Horn.

Interesting that all three have international connections. Perhaps – we can hope, anyway, although it may be a very vain hope – they were treated a bit better than the last group, for that very reason.

The name of Troufanov rang a bell for me, and I wasn’t sure why. But I think it might have been this

Troufanov was taken hostage along with his grandmother Irena Tati, mother Yelena (Lena) and girlfriend Sapir Cohen. The three women were released during a brief ceasefire in November 2023. Troufanov’s father was killed in the Oct. 7 attack.

So that’s another family that has suffered especially greatly as a group, during and since October 7. According to this article, Troufanov was originally kidnapped by Palestinian Islamic Jihad rather than Hamas. Hostage Dekel-Chen’s family seems to be intact, fortunately, and his pregnant wife actually gave birth to a third child while he was in captivity. Iair Horn was kidnapped with a brother who’d been visiting him, and the brother (or the brother’s body; who knows?) remains in Gazan hands.

Here are the three, before:

They may or may not look anything like that tomorrow. Assuming, of course, that they are released.

The hostages who have already been released in the latest deal have stories to tell which are coming out bit by bit. I doubt we have the entirety of anyone’s story, either; some details are kept hidden because they don’t want to jeopardize further hostage releases. But more and more of the obvious sadism of their captors is revealed. For example, there’s this:

Speaking with Channel 12 news alongside three other mothers of the surveillance troops, Shira Albag quoted her daughter Liri as saying, “I got out of the hell that we went through there, but the men, the soldiers, are going through worse than us.”

“The terrorists also made a point to show them videos and share with them all sorts of things that they [the male hostages] were going through there, that they were starving… all sorts of things that are really tough,” the soldier’s mother said. “Even today when they’re here, we don’t know everything exactly what they went through.”

The women kept journals in captivity – I’m surprised they were allowed writing implements – but of course Hamas burned them before their release.

And this is not surprising; it’s what I was thinking:

Orly said her daughter had told her that if she had been released two months earlier she, too [like the three men recently released], would have looked emaciated.

“To see her in this state today and say, ‘Well, she probably ate well, she was fine’ — that’s not true: there were periods when they had nothing to eat or the same portion was used for four, because there were four of them at the time, and after that, it was used for two, so they had the opportunity to gain a little weight,” she said.

Fattening them up for presentation.

As I wrote in an earlier post, these women had been traumatized even before they were kidnapped. They were at the surveillance post, the one that had given warnings – that were ignored – of an imminent attack. They also watched their fellow soldiers at the post be murdered and perhaps tortured before murder. And only then were these women taken into captivity.

It seems to me they will be bonded to each other for life, having shared such intense experiences and having supported each other.

Now the IDF head has apologized to them:

Halevi met with Agam Berger, Liri Albag, Naama Levy and Karina Ariev, who were released from Hamas captivity after some 15 months. The fifth surveillance soldier released from Hamas captivity, Daniella Gilboa, was not present at the meeting.

“It was wrong to have not taken you seriously, you were amazing soldiers, I apologize for what you experienced in captivity,” Halevi said to the soldiers, according to leaked remarks. …

The chief of staff also told them that the military would fully investigate what happened on October 7, and that they should “be partners in the investigation” by providing testimony. …

“From me personally and in the name of the commanders in the IDF, I am very sorry for everything you have been through, it’s our responsibility, and we can’t go back and change. We are very focused on learning so that this will not recur.

“From what you have told me now, I understand that you, with superior heroism, have dealt with unimaginable difficulty, both during captivity and in the way you were during the release,” Halevi added.

Too little, too late. But still, something.

Fifteen female surveillance soldiers (out of fifty-two soldiers killed at the base) were murdered that day by the terrorists, and seven were kidnapped. One of those kidnapped was murdered later in captivity, five have been returned to Israel in the exchanges, and one was rescued.

Halevi is slated to resign on March 5, due to the IDF’s failure to prevent the October 7 massacre.

Vance goes to Europe, and has a few things to say

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J. D. Vance gave Europe a tongue-lashing about their lack of devotion to free speech and liberty in general, and their reluctance to pay for defense. For example:

The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe … is the threat from within — the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States.

Lots more at the link.

Seems to me that Vance is taking a leaf out of Milei’s book. Or maybe vice versa.

At any rate, here’s the head of NATO:

I also want to thank you personally for everything you have done over the years in engaging with Europe. It has been noted before, and it’s really important. And I look forward also from that perspective to our talks and on Europe stepping up, the European part of NATO stepping up. You’re absolutely right. It has to be done. We have to grow up in that sense and spend much more.”

Rutte then took particular aim at the Minsk Agreements of 2014 and beyond, which negotiated a ceasefire between warring factions on the Ukraine and Russian sides, though ultimately failed to keep the peace.“We also have to discuss the defense industrial base. Of course, this is a problem we have both in the US and in the rest of NATO. We are simply not producing enough. We are not keeping up with the Russians and the Chinese. And then, of course, Ukraine, how to bring Ukraine to a lasting peace. And no Minsk again. So it has to be lasting.

Easier said than done. But sometimes people actually respond to leadership.

Keeping up with the DOGE news

The New Neo Posted on by

I can’t keep up – there’s too much news breaking every day. But I try.

This seems important. Some of it isn’t due to payments to people perpetrating fraud, but some definitely is. At the very least, we seem to have utterly incompetent bookkeeping. How much is merely that and how much is payment to people perpetrating fraud? Either way, it’s shocking:

On Wednesday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) held her DOGE subcommittee hearing and announced it has discovered that over the past 20 years, the U.S. government has squandered $2.7 trillion on improper payments. Just last year alone, the government handed out $170 billion to individuals who were deceased, criminals, or otherwise ineligible for government programs.

Even more alarming, the government made $44 billion in payments with no clear record of where the money actually went — officials simply don’t know.

Medicare and Medicaid are the biggest culprits when it comes to these improper payments. The Biden administration lost a staggering $764 billion due to a combination of inaccurate record-keeping, bureaucratic incompetence, and outright fraud.

This has been going on under presidents from both parties. No one seemed to have the power and energy – and in some cases, even the inclination – to look into it. Before we had computers, it would have been difficult – well-nigh impossible – to search thoroughly. But we’ve had computers for a long time.

Remember the old adage, “good enough for government work”? This isn’t good enough – even for government work.

And what’s up with the limestone mine? Yes, the limestone mine (and I linked to Yahoo because they’re not known for being sympathetic to any causes on the right, and nevertheless they’re covering this):

In a press conference in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Elon Musk, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, said that the US government stores and processes all retirement paperwork in a limestone mine.But he added: “We were told the most number of people that could retire possibly in a month is 10,000 because all the retirement paperwork is written down on a piece of paper. Then it goes down a mine.”

Musk said: “Instead of working in a mineshaft, carrying manila envelopes to boxes in a mine, you could do practically anything else, and you would add to the goods and services of the United States in a more useful way.”

DOGE’s X account later published photos of the facility.

I’m surprised they haven’t enlisted monks to be scribes.

This is actually not news, although it was news to me and probably to you. But the article mentions that:

A 2014 Washington Post report said 600 Office of Personnel Management workers processed federal employees’ retirement papers by hand at the site, with them passing thousands of case files from cavern to cavern.

The manual process continues to operate because of successive administrations’ failures to automate it, the outlet said, delaying how fast workers receive their full retirement benefits.

The left is trying very hard to stir up outrage about what DOGE is doing, with stories like this one, parts of which seem bogus. But yes, I am pretty sure that DOGE is causing some hardship. But something needed to be done, and it’s been needed for a long, long time.

In addition, although this isn’t a DOGE action, it’s along the same lines. From Lee Zeldin: