News roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) We wouldn’t want a wonderful person such as this to be deported from Canada, now would we?

A Haitian woman who disfigured a stranger in a Montreal-area biting attack has been given a reduced sentence by a Quebec judge on the grounds that a harsher prison term would endanger her “precarious immigration status.”

Just two days after Christmas in 2022, Macdala Monfiston spent eight minutes viciously attacking a woman outside a bar in Laval, Que., leaving the victim with bite marks all over her arms and face. …

Although good Samaritans attempted to intervene, they were held back by Monfiston’s boyfriend.

After Monfiston pleaded guilty to aggravated assault in early 2025, a Court of Quebec judge sentenced her to four years in prison – the sentence already a fraction of the maximum 14-year sentence set for the crime under the Criminal Code.

But in a decision released this week, the Quebec Court of Appeal ruled that four years was too harsh, in part because it could possibly get her deported.

Canada has gone left, and I’d say it’s also gone pretty far into suicidal empathy. This may be especially true in Quebec. Note also that the Quebec Court of Appeal ruling was signed by three female judges – not that males are immune to suicidal empathy, but I think females are somewhat more vulnerable.

(2) Not supporting Israel-hating rap singer Macklemore enough gets Ed Sheeran in trouble with the “Free Palestine” crowd. Mackelmore has been saying that “Free Palestine” are “two words … near and dear to my heart.”

I think a good rejoinder would be, “Yes, free Palestine … from Hamas and Jew-hatred.”

(3) The holdout juror in the Clancy trial says that no, he did not have reasonable doubt, contrary to what some other jurors on the panel have alleged about him. He’s also a Trump-supporter, which he says made him a target of the others. I can well believe it.

(4) The British village of Piddington (great name) doesn’t seem to suffer from suicidal empathy:

A tiny English village has voted overwhelmingly to leave the United Kingdom in a symbolic referendum triggered by government plans to house more than 1,200 male asylum seekers at a former military site nearby.

Residents of Piddington, a rural village in Oxfordshire, voted 285 to 26 to “secede from the UK and pursue self-determination,” with a turnout of nearly 92%. The vote has no legal force.

Piddington has a population of around 350 people. The asylum accommodation plan would house up to 1,256 asylum seekers, more than three times the population of the village, at a former British military base in Bicester, half a mile from Piddington.

The site would operate as a non-detained asylum accommodation, meaning the asylum seekers would be able to come and go. …

“I’m worried about the safety of the children and the women of the village,” said Jennifer Owen, who voted to leave the U.K. “The towns won’t be the same, they’ll be overrun, village will be overrun. It just won’t be the same again.”

Isn’t that the point?

Until now, most of the asylum centers have been located near poorer towns. Piddington, however, is relatively affluent. And that’s the plan, too:

“We cannot have a situation where it’s only the poorest communities in the country that receive all of the dispersal of refugees and asylum seekers,” [Prime Minister] Burnham told GB News.

Well then, I suggest he take about thirty into 10 Downing Street and an equal number into his family home, where he sometimes still lives.

(5) Iran branches out:

One disturbing aspect of the surge in antisemitic violence since October 7 has received relatively little attention: Western governments say that Iran and Iranian-backed organizations have been behind a series of plots and attacks against Jewish and Israeli targets across Europe, North America and Australia.

The phenomenon became impossible to dismiss as a collection of unrelated incidents in June. Twenty-four governments, including the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, Germany and Sweden, jointly condemned “lethal plotting and other malign actions” by Iran’s IRGC Intelligence Organization, Quds Force and Ministry of Intelligence. They specifically identified “Jewish and Israeli communities and interests” among Iran’s targets and noted the Iranian security services’ longstanding relationship with international and local criminal groups.

This is not completely new, however. For example, there’s the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people and was sponsored by Iran and carried out by Hezbollah. There was also the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in that city. More at the link.

Slightly overzealous comment filter

The New Neo Posted on by

The new comments policy I instituted a while back has been working very well so far (knock wood) to block trolls.

On the other hand, it’s a trifle overeager and sometimes blocks certain comments from regular comments for no reason whatsoever, as far as I can tell. So if you find that a comment of yours fails to appear, please wait a few hours. I check these things at least once a day, and I’ll liberate it from the moderation or spam pile before too much time passes.

Also, comments from first-time commenters go into moderation just that first time, until I approve them. After that, comments from that same commenter should appear automatically.

Throwing money at schools doesn’t work …

The New Neo Posted on by

… if you don’t apply it in a thoughtful way. New York, case in point:

… New York public education is falling behind because the state has ignored chances to discover what educational practices really work, use that evidence to improve student outcomes, and make its leadership accountable for results.

While the state gathers troves of data, many of its most important programs are poorly measured or poorly evaluated.

For example, New York knows very little about its two fastest-growing programs: special education and school-based mental-health services. In New York, 21 percent of public school students are classified as having a disability, compared with the national average of 15 percent. The state has also opened more than 1,000 school-based mental-health clinics and hired counselors at a rate few other states can match. But it does not track if students are getting the services they need, if the programs are effective, or even if parents agreed to them.

Brilliant, just brilliant.

Similar problems dog New York’s tracking of individual students, teacher training programs, and the elimination of the infamous compulsory Regents exams of my youth. New York knows that charter schools are a good idea, but for political reasons they are very limited. And on and on and on.

It’s a choice to be mediocre, and to use money to fund Democrat constituencies in education rather than caring about education itself.

Say goodbye to the penny

The New Neo Posted on by

The act eliminating them is a pun:

The House of Representatives voted to send the smallest piece of US currency the way of the dodo on Monday, passing the bipartisan Common Cents Act in a unanimous vote.

In addition to blocking the Treasury from minting any more pennies save for collector coins, the bill would also set up a framework for cash transactions to be rounded to the nearest 5 cents, in order to eliminate the need for pennies altogether.

When was the last time you used a penny? Now they cost too much to manufacture. So begone!

When I was a kid, penny candy was actually a thing. We went to a little news store that had many bins of it and made our choices carefully. But that’s when a candy bar usually cost a nickel.

Love at first sight: a personal story

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I’ve had this draft among my many hundreds of drafts for about sevem years. I never got around to publishing it; not sure why. But today seems like a good time to do so, for obvious reasons.]

This post of mine about love at first sight sparked a lot of discussion, including some personal stories about the phenomenon, some doubters, and some believers.

Until it happened to me I’m not sure I believed in the existence of love at first sight, either. And I certainly didn’t expect that it would ever happen to me. Indeed, the evening I met my husband-to-be, such a thing was furthest from my mind.

It was the evening of one of my very first days in law school. I had just arrived for a temporary stay in a spare room in the apartment of two other women while I looked for more permanent lodging. I was exhausted, and all I was really thinking about was that at least I had a place to sleep for a few nights. I entered a room where the two young women were talking to a young man, and I sat myself down in an available chair (a wooden rocker) to relax for the very first time that day.

And then I glanced at the man. His look intrigued and attracted me, but it wasn’t just that. He was talking to the two women, and what he said was very entertaining, witty, and humorous. They were laughing and laughing. I’ve always been attracted to humor in men, and the combination of that plus his good looks – and something else, some indefinable and indescribable perception that to this day I don’t understand, but let’s call it “connection” – was apparently all it took.

About 24 hours later I had a thought I’d never had before: “I might marry this guy.”

I was twenty-one years old. We married five years later, and although we’re divorced now we stayed married for over thirty years. Was the love real? Absolutely. And I still can’t explain the phenomenon of love at first sight.

And I’m still extremely surprised that it happened to me.

The Lindsay Clancy eleven and the sole holdout

The New Neo Posted on by

Seems there are two extremes right now on the subject of the Clancy case, at least in terms of the bulk of online discussion. I don’t fit into either camp – not those who say Clancy is some sort of heroic persecuted figure (or that her husband did it), nor those who say she’s nothing but a vicious killer who wanted her kids dead and came up with the excuse of mental illness for her own evil actions.

Modern-day jurors have a tendency to discuss trials and deliberations publicly, and a number of Clancy case jurors have come out with a lot to say, post-trial. Their decision came down, as I figured it would, to the idea of reasonable doubt, held by eleven jurors who would have put Clancy in a mental hospital for an undetermined amount of time rather than in prison for life.

I’ve written before about the fact that Massachusetts law supports that verdict (whether you think it’s a good law or not, and personally I do not) and how unusual that law is. Here’s a post I wrote on the subject.

I will add that in law school I studied the law of criminal responsibility as it relates to mental illness, and I also have my training as a family therapist, and I have long thought there is no good solution to the problem of psychosis and crime. There is a wide variety of legal approaches – very wide, actually – all with pros and cons, and all unsatisfactory.

The approach I prefer is to sentence the person, and if there is diminished responsibility because of a psychosis, the person starts serving the sentence in a mental hospital and finishes out the term in prison when the hospital deems the person recovered from the psychosis, with the total in both institutions being the time served. It’s not a great solution at all, but I think it is probably better than the others.

But it’s very far from the law prevailing in Massachusetts, the law under which Clancy was tried and which operates in this case.

Those who believe Clancy should have been found guilty seem to perceive a sex divide in the jurors’ opinions because the lone holdout was a male – as well as a race divide because he was also black. But there were two other males on the jury, and they sided with the nine women on the panel. The jurors are being portrayed by many on the right more or less this way (the following excerpt is by John Hinderaker):

You know the holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy case? The one who thought strangling her three children was a crime worth punishing? The one the liberal white women jurors denounced as dumb? Unable to understand the jury instructions and comprehend the subtle concept of reasonable doubt? Turns out he was the only juror “of color.” The holdout juror was a black guy …

But that’s a false dichotomy. Based on Massachusetts law, I might even have reluctantly sided with those “liberal white women jurors” in their verdict (not necessarily in their descriptions of the lone holdout, which by the way don’t seem to have actually included the word or even the concept “dumb”). Was the holdout the only person on the jury who thought strangling three children was a horrific crime “worth punishing”? But the jurors were not being asked if it was a serious crime worth punishing. They were being asked whether Clancy’s moral sense and criminal responsibility were compromised by her serious mental problems:

“We weren’t trying to figure out if she murdered the children. She did. And she’s admitting that. We’re trying to figure out did she know right from wrong at that time,” foreperson Roni Carlson said.

Legally in Massachusetts, if the prosecution failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Lindsay Clancy knew right from wrong and also could have restrained herself from those criminal acts, then the verdict of the eleven would be quite appropriate. That seems to me to be the case, whether I like that verdict or not. But instead, the lone holdout is being considered by the right as a hero and as the only virtuous person on the jury, and the eleven others (nine women and two men) are considered to be excusing the murder of children rather than trying to follow the law while realizing full well how horrific these crimes were.

But the most important reason the holdout should come in for criticism is this (at least, according to the other jurors who gave interviews): he had agreed with them that there was reasonable doubt that Clancy should be held fully responsible and yet he was determined to find her guilty anyway. That’s a form of jury nullification, basically, because it’s not the way the law in Massachusetts works. In Massachusetts, if reasonable doubt on the score exists, you must find the defendant not guilty:

“He admitted he had reasonable doubt and I started filling out the forms, I was so excited,” the foreperson said.

“There were three forms I had to fill out and I started filling them out, I wrote my signature on each one but then he said, ‘But I’m still not going to say she’s not guilty by reason of insanity.’”

Nor did the interviewed jurors blame Clancy’s husband Patrick instead, which was one of the conspiracy theories popular with some especially extreme online Lindsay-defenders. Here’s what two of the jurors said about Clancy’s husband:

Juror No. 5 said she “will never be the same” after hearing Patrick’s 911 call, which was not publicly broadcast.

The “horrifying” [911 call made by Patrick] dispelled any online conspiracy theories that the husband was somehow involved, according to the anonymous panelist.

“All I could think was that if these people could have heard that visceral, blood-curdling scream, I don’t think I could name a single actor or actress that could have performed that the way he did, and not that he performed it, but I will never be the same after that,” she said.

“Just to imagine living through that and being the person to find your children in that scenario, it shakes you.”

I think it’s very interesting that a great many people on the right who think Clancy absolutely should have been found guilty are playing the race card about the lone holdout juror. They are asserting that the eleven (who were white) who voted to commit Clancy are racists putting down a heroic black man.

Now it turns out that the holdout juror had a history of domestic violence allegations. The Hinderaker article says this:

It is a rule of modern life that anyone who dissents from leftist dogma must be destroyed.

However, there was a reason to reveal the information that’s not about “destroying” this man. That reason was this [my emphasis]:

The holdout juror who caused Lindsay Clancy’s mistrial has a history of alleged domestic violence such as grabbing his wife by the throat and punching his nephew, according to a report.

The still-unnamed juror, only described as a black man in his 30s, faced a criminal charge in September 2021 for allegedly assaulting his wife, NBC10 Boston reported. …

A juror questionnaire in Massachusetts asks whether someone has been arrested, charged with a crime, or been served with a court order — all boxes that the holdout juror should have checked.

If he’d answered honestly, he almost certainly would not have been serving on the jury. I think this matters and that it’s not merely some idle and vicious doxxing, as Matt Walsh writes:

They’re flat-out doxxing an anonymous juror because he didn’t acquit a triple murderer. These people are evil beasts. Demons from hell.

And Hinderaker wrote:

This was an effort by a “reporter” named Sue O’Connell and a Boston television station, NBC10, to doxx the holdout juror and ruin his life. Why? So that in the future, no one will dare to oppose the agenda of the far left while serving on a jury. Every juror must toe the line, or else.

Left out is the fact that the juror apparently lied in order to get on the jury. And so perhaps he did have an agenda after all. There’s a reason they ask that question of jurors. Do we not care about that sort of thing anymore? I submit that we should care and that we certainly would care if this juror had come to a conclusion with which we disagreed.

It’s fully possible to give a reasoned argument about why a guilty verdict would have been the correct one. But do it without playing the race card – something about which the right always mocks the left. And do it without pretending that this guy didn’t violate the jury selection rules, at least if these allegations about him are true.