The attack on Iran has begun [BUMPED UP – scroll down for newer posts]

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I am busy this afternoon for a few hours, but will be adding to this later today. There’s much fast-breaking news at the moment. Meanwhile, I’ve bumped it up and you can scroll down for newer posts.]

The rumors were correct:

The US and Israel launched airstrikes against Iran Saturday morning in response to the regime’s refusal to dismantle its nuclear program after weeks of negotiations — targeting military infrastructure and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s compound in Tehran.

The attacks — which the Department of War called “Operation Epic Fury” — follow a massive US military buildup in the Middle East and come after President Trump repeatedly warned Tehran that it would face consequences if it didn’t make a deal with the US.

Iran then launched missiles towards Israel in a retaliatory attack as officials claimed the response would be “crushing.”

“Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime,” Trump said in an eight-minute video address on Saturday. …

Airstrikes were also reported in other enclaves, including Isfahan, Qom, Karaj and Kermanshah.

Israeli military officials were prepared for the “initial phase” to last over several days, with the first strikes taking place during the day as a surprise to Iran, Israel’s Channel 12 reported.

Khameini himself is apparently somewhere other than home, as might be expected. He’s supposedly in an “undisclosed secure location.”
I can well believe it.

Trump is clear that he wants regime change, and that it’s up to the people of Iran:

“To the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand. Stay sheltered, don’t leave your home, it’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, we will take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations,” Trump said.

“For many years, you have asked for America’s help, but you never got it. No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight. Now you have a president who is giving you what you want, so let’s see how you respond. America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force.

“Now is the time to seize control of your destiny and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close, within your reach. This is the moment for action, do not let it pass,” he said.

We don’t know the details of what will be happening before we are “finished.” The “we” here includes Israel, which in the past has had excellent intelligence on Iran. I hope that remains the case; do they have any tricks up their sleeve? They’d better. The risk level is high.

There have been retaliatory strikes by Iran against Israel, and against a US naval base near Bahrain, and perhaps other US bases in the Middle East. The extent of any damage isn’t clear.

On the kindness of strangers

The New Neo Posted on by

My ex-husband has had Parkinson’s disease for about five years, but it’s gotten considerably worse during the last two years. That’s when I started to notice a phenomenon that has increased over time: people race eagerly to help him.

And I mean race. I’ve seen little old ladies, young people, burly men, people of all shapes and sizes and ages running over to him to offer help when all he’s doing is unloading groceries from his cart or getting out of the car. For a while it puzzled him, and it even puzzled me: why did they perceive him as so very in need of assistance? He really – so far – can usually do all those sorts of things on his own.

But people notice something almost immediately. And they can see it from across a large parking lot, and it apparently telegraphs “help me, please!”. Yes, his hand shakes, and he’s stooped over and walks slowly – he, who used to be so gracefully athletic. But he’s (fortunately) still fairly independent. And yet they notice something, whatever it is.

So I’ve been impressed by how massively kind people are being. It’s really quite extraordinary.

During the Biden administration, the FBI recorded a conversation Susie Wiles had with her lawyer

The New Neo Posted on by

Does this surprise you? I have to say, sadly, that it doesn’t surprise me:

The FBI, under President Joe Biden, subpoenaed the phone records of Susie Wiles, President Donald Trump’s [current] chief of staff, and [current] FBI Director Kash Patel when they were private citizens.

The subpoenas came out when Smith investigated Trump for allegedly trying to overturn the 2020 election and hiding classified information at Mar-a-Lago.

The most significant part of the story, which Reuters buried, is that two FBI officials said that the agency wiretapped and recorded a call between Wiles and her attorney in 2023.

The attorney supposedly consented to the FBI recording the call.

According to Marc Caputo of Axios, the lawyer denies the claim, saying he never gave permission for anyone to record the phone call.

A call between lawyer and client is privileged. And in this case, neither the lawyer nor Wiles waived privilege – which I believe only the client can waive, anyway. Plus, this seems very much like a fishing expedition.

Shocking – but as I said, unsurprising. We’ve grown used to these violations. And we’ve also grown used to there being no consequences for those who commit them.

Republican prosecutors and firearm deaths

The New Neo Posted on by

Interesting report of a study on crime that shows the following:

Our key result shows that narrow election of a Republican local prosecutor leads to a reduction in all-cause mortality among the most criminal justice-involved demographic: young men ages 20 to 29 years old. This reduction is meaningful (9.8 fewer deaths per
100,000, or a 6.6% reduction) and conforms with the well-documented fact that criminal activity tends to peak in one’s twenties and decline quickly thereafter (Rocque et al., 2015). We then show that the mortality reduction is concentrated in deaths involving firearms, and heterogeneity analysis indicates a large reduction in firearm homicides among young Black men and a smaller reduction in firearm suicides/accidents among young White men. In relation to the opioid crisis, we find no evidence that narrow election of a Republican prosecutor affects overall drug or opioid overdose mortality among any demographic groups.

Some of this is what we might suspect; after all, Republican prosecutors probably are more aggressive about charging and convicting criminals, and locking up criminals would tend to reduce crime, even though the left might have you think that the best way to reduce crime is to get a bunch of social workers to speak soothingly. But the details are somewhat odd. When I first saw that “narrow election” of GOP prosecutors reduces firearm deaths, I wondered whether it held true just for murder or whether it also applied to suicides. I vaguely remembered learning long ago in some sociology class that suicides form the majority of gun deaths. It turn out that is still true:

[In 2023, for] the third straight year, gun suicides reached a new high: 27,300, or 58% of all gun deaths, were suicides. And more than half of all suicides in 2023 involved a gun. …

The report notes that suicides accounted for the majority of all firearm deaths every year since 1995.

What is a “narrow election”? I assume it’s a close election. Perhaps in places where GOP candidates win prosecutor elections by large margins, gun deaths are already lower.

But why would a GOP prosecutor’s “narrow election” make the number of suicides by gun be reduced? I don’t know. And why would the effect happen only among young white men? Is it just gun suicides that go own, or do all suicides go down? Well, the suicide rate in general is higher in white people than in black people. This is not a new phenomenon; it’s another thing I learned in college classes. Here are some recent staistics:

In 2023, men died by suicide 3.8 times more than women.

White males accounted for 68.13% of suicide deaths in 2023.

In 2023, firearms accounted for 55.36% of all suicide deaths. …

In 2023, among both males and females, Whites had the highest U.S. age-adjusted suicide rate (Male: 25.23 per 100,000; Female: 6.53 per 100,000). Suicide rates were much lower among Black or African Americans (Male: 14.59 per 100,000; Female: 3.44 per 100,000) and Asians (Male: 9.71 per 100,000; Female: 3.55 per 100,000).

When I was in college I did a big research report on suicide for a course I took, and I had to present the findings to the class and answer questions. So I had to know my statistics, and I recall that all these patterns were present back then: the sex, age, and race differentials. I’m surprised the trends have been so stable.

Fetterman will not become a Republican

The New Neo Posted on by

He says so. And I believe him. He has few commonalities with GOP policies. But what he does have is some sort of integrity of the sort Democrats used to have long ago when I was a child. He doesn’t name-call Republicans, and he often says common-sense things.

That does not mean he has any intention of switching parties. His stance also is a way to keep favor with voters in Pennsylvania, which – unlike so many large states – is not blue.

The left now ♥ Tucker Carlson on Iran

The New Neo Posted on by

Ace discusses how Tucker Carlson – who is totally against any sort of action against Iran – has now become the darling of the left (such as Ben Rhodes) on this issue.

Of course he has. I’ve noticed myself how the pro-Carlson commenters to his YouTube videos (be they bots or be they actual people) frame any US attack on Iran as evidence that Trump is Israel’s puppet, and ignore the fact that we have our own reasons for wanting regime change there.

From Ace:

… Tucker Carlson, who is not antisemitic, wants you to know that he is no coward and was not afraid to step into Israel proper …

In explaining that he’s not a coward who is afraid of Israel, he says that he asked the US to tell Israel the exact plane he was on, because this Non-Antisemitic Non-Coward really believed that Israel, which is “fighting a war with seven different countries,” was plotting to shoot his airplane out of the sky and then claim they thought it was an “Iranian Drone,” and he wanted Huckabee to tell them specifically he was on this plane so that Israel could not murder him by anti-aircraft missile and then pretend they didn’t know.

He cites the totally non-antisemitic USS Liberty trope to show that Pefidious Jews love doing that kind of thing. (He continues insisting Israel knew it was an American ship, even though the NSA has released intercepted radio transmissions showing that Israel had identified the ship as Egyptian.)

The hate-Israel group is very very big on the Liberty incident and ignores all the evidence that Israel attacked the ship by mistake and has made amends. Carlson cites the incident quite a bit, always indicating (falsely) that it’s a well-known fact that Israel knew it was a US ship. Carlson referenced this during his recent interview with Mike Huckabee, also saying that Israel is the world’s “most violent country,” as though Israel has been the aggressor in its wars against those who continually attack its citizens. (I watched much of the lengthy Huckabee interview and hope to write about it soon. But for now, suffice to say there’s a reason some people call him “Liar Tuck.”)

Ace writes, in that same post:

Tucker Carlson got sick of being called antisemitic by the perfidious Satanic Jews who drink Christian babies’ blood, and so he reached out to one of these Jewish Mind-Controllers to ask him how he could convince the Worldwide Jewish Conspiracy to stop calling him antisemitic.

This particular Perfidious Jew, Yoram Hazony, told him he could start by ending his constant claims that Jews are engaged in a constant aggression against Christians and start all the wars in the world for no reason at all except to spread the Nefarious Jew Conspiracy.

Tucker Carlson then said, “Short of that, I mean.”

Or words to that effect. Tucker did not want to stop accusing Jews of conspiring against Christians, he just wanted the Jews to stop noticing he can’t stop accusing Jews of conspiring against Christians.

[ADDENDUM:

I think people who haven’t watched Tucker in the last year probably haven’t a clue how loathsome (a good word for him) he’s become. People who do imitations of him, such as the brilliant Ami Kozak, may seem as though they’re exaggerating wildly, but it’s actually only a tiny bit if at all.

Tucker is not only loathsome, he’s a dangerous man because he trades on his previous reputation and uses it now to spread Jew-hating lies, and he does so while claiming to be a Christian and to be working for Christianity.

Candace Owens does something similar, but what she says about Jews is even worse, and her previous reputation wasn’t as good.]

[ADDENDUM II:

For those of you who are wondering “what happened to Tucker Carlson?”, I suggest you read my 3-part series on the subject, particularly the first part.
Part I can be found here.
Part II can be found here.
Part III can be found here.]

What’s on tap for Iran?

The New Neo Posted on by

I make no predictions on this. But a lot of people reading the tea leaves think some sort of attack is imminent. There’s this, for example:

Now it appears that the State Department has begun moving non-essential options out of the way – a warning, perhaps, that Trump has tired of circular arguments from Tehran.

The timing and the choice both seem significant. First, the US has begun moving non-essential personnel from Iraq, likely the closest and most vulnerable target for Iran’s proxy militias …

More pointedly, the State Department ordered the same evacuation in Israel …

That seems like a very clear signal that the talks in Oman did not go well. The urgency of these moves is another indicator that the talks produced nothing more than the same demands from Iran to keep enriching uranium and the same refusals to discuss their ballistic missiles and terror proxies.

I have always felt the talks with Iran are some sort of stalling tactic. But I also think an attack will be very hard to pull off successfully (and it certainly won’t be an invasion), and that there’s quite a bit of disagreement within the administration on what to do, and when to do it.

On the difficulty of getting accurate statistics on illegal aliens and US crime

The New Neo Posted on by

Today commenter “Snow on Pine” offered this link on the subject, which says:

[Crime rates are] almost always statistical projections.

Look, if we can’t accurately quantify crime stats in a closed ecosystem like cybersecurity, we don’t have a prayer of tabulating crime rates everywhere else. Too many variables. …

Some states explicitly prohibit the police from asking about or tracking the data. You also have the problem of unsolved crimes: If you don’t catch the perpetrator, you’ll never know who did it.

Furthermore, it’s reasonable to assume that someone who’s cagey enough (or well-connected enough) to illegally cross the border, live in the shadows, and evade authorities would likely be a more successful criminal than your Average Joe. And if illegal immigrants are targeting other illegal immigrants, that increases the probability of the victim staying silent — for very obvious reasons.

There’s much much more of interest at the link. However, as the article points out, one indicator is the fact that the crime rate has fallen just about simultaneously with the deportation crackdown – although even that could be a coincidence, albeit an unlikely one. Social science research – which criminology research basically is – is very difficult to do in a way that indicates an unequivocal cause/effect relationship.

Remember back in 2015 when Trump first announced he was running for president and there was a huge megative reaction from the press and Democrats when he spoke about illegal aliens and crime? Funny thing, but the very first post I wrote about Trump’s candidacy, back in early July of 2015, was on that topic. It’s worth going back to it to see that one of the main points was how much flak Trump was getting for pointing out the phenomenon, and how very difficult it was to confirm whether or not he was correct, and to what extent.

A few excerpts:

Let’s look at what he actually said:

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” Trump said. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

“And some I assume are good people,” he added.

But it’s not just Mexico that’s dumping all of it’s problems in the U.S., Trump continued. “It’s coming from all over South and Latin America and it’s coming probably, probably, from the Middle East. We don’t know.” …

Then I offered a bunch of links that to some extent backed up what he was saying. If you’re interested, go to the post and read the whole thing. One of the things I wrote was this:

The media and liberals are hyper-concerned with campus rapes whose high numbers are largely a myth. But they seem to show little concern for [women raped by illegal aliens, either while in transit or in the US] – as long as it’s Trump bringing it up.

And here we are nearly ten years later. What a long strange trip it’s been.

[NOTE: I was writing about the topic of the difficulty of getting statistics on illegal aliens and crime even before Trump’s candidacy. For example, please see this detailed post on the subject from July of 2014.]

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Schumer’s answer, when asked why Democrats didn’t stand when Trump said to stand if they believe that “The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens,” was: “Of course we support Americans; we’re not going to be a prop in Donald Trump’s little show.”

Ah, but the Democrats love to put on their own “little shows” – wearing all white, dramatically ripping up the SOTU address, yelling at Trump, boycotting the address. The other irony is that, by refusing to stand, they guaranteed that they would earn a place as the villains in “Trump’s little show.”

(2) J. D. Vance makes this observation about the Democrats’ repeated refusal to stand during the speech:

But I will say, Bill, something that I saw that probably most TV viewers didn’t see was really the cowardice, because there were a few Democrats who sort of politely clapped. They didn’t want to stand up. I guess maybe they were worried about being primaried by the far-left fringe of their party. But they were all looking around. They weren’t actually saying, you know what, I’m going to stand and support this because this is a common-sense, obvious statement. They were all looking around for cues from their colleagues, because they didn’t have the courage to stand on their own.

I don’t doubt it. You can call it “party discipline,” but it’s actually quite chilling.

(3) Dueling Trump impersonators:

I prefer Kozak, although they’re both good. Kozak’s Tucker is astounding, though, and even more so if you’re really familiar with Carlson’s mannerisms. It seems like an exaggeration but it resembles the real Carlson quite closely.

(4) Wine seems to be losing popularity:

Jon Phillips, the owner of Sonoma County winery Inspiration Vineyards and Winery, told The Post that the population decline of the industry’s top wine-consuming generation has led to a recent downturn in sales.

“A lot of people have a misconception that the Boomers are drinking less,” he said. “This cannot be emphasized enough: it’s not because the Boomers are drinking less, it’s because there are less Boomers.”

That would be fewer Boomers, not less. But you get the idea. As a non-drinker, I know next to nothing about this. Looking it up just now, I find the following:

The 2025 sample included nearly 5,000 U.S. adults over the age of 21, balanced to the U.S. census for age, income, education, gender, and ethnicity. It found that 31% of wine drinkers are now Millennials, surpassing Baby Boomers at 26%, whose share has dropped significantly from 32% in 2023. Gen Z’s share also climbed from 9% to 14%, despite only half the cohort currently being of legal drinking age.

“These findings show both opportunities and challenges,” said Liz Thach, President of the Wine Market Council, who presented the results alongside Research Director Christian Miller during a recent webinar for WMC members. “We’ve seen gains among Millennials and Gen Z; however, the industry is concurrently experiencing a decline in overall wine consumers.”

“What is interesting about this change is that despite all the talk about young consumers reducing alcohol, the largest erosion we found was in Baby Boomers – consumers over 60 years of age,” stated Christian Miller.

So again, is it because there are fewer Boomers around? It’s not clear. However, it’s part of an overall decline in alcohol consumption, with “beer, spirits, and wine sales all experiencing declines in the past year.” Is that because cannabis consumption is up? That’s my guess. And it appears to be a distinct possibility.

(5) Thune says the SAVE Act will come to the Senate floor. That does not mean it will pass; there aren’t enough GOP votes to go with the nuclear option or impose a talking filibuster, as far as I can see.

India ♥ Israel – for now

The New Neo Posted on by

Modi and Bibi seem very buddy-buddy (see the photos at the link, as well):

In a clear message to the region emphasizing the strength of their alliance, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged on Wednesday to work in lockstep to confront Islamist terrorism, with the Indian leader telling the Knesset in a historic address that his nation stands “firmly” with the Jewish state.

“India stands with Israel firmly with full conviction in this moment and beyond,” Modi told lawmakers during a special session in the Knesset honoring the Indian premier, the first time an Indian leader has addressed Israel’s parliament.

The two long-serving leaders have developed a famously close personal relationship — occasionally uncomfortably so — reflecting a strategic relationship that has been expanding steadily for decades. …

In the Knesset on Wednesday, Modi called Israel “a protective wall against barbarism,” echoing language that Netanyahu has used when speaking to Western audiences.

Netanyahu wants to create a regional alliance to counter Iran’s alliances.

From Modi:

The massacre of October 7 made it absolutely clear: either the jihadist axis of evil will break us, or we will break it …

If you want to learn more about the history of Israel/India relations, see this.