And then, as though there wasn’t already enough going on, we have a dockworkers’ strike

The New Neo Posted on by

How long will it last? Will there be major shortages? Tune in to find out:

Dockworkers at dozens of ports stretching along the East and Gulf coasts walked the picket line after midnight on Tuesday as they launched a massive strike that threatens to reignite inflation and spark product shortages at the start of the holiday season.

The work stoppage went into effect at 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday after the International Longshoremen’s Association, which represents 45,000 workers, and the alliance representing ports failed to renew a collective bargaining agreement that had just expired.

For the first time since 1977, 36 ports stretching from strategic seaboard locations as far north as Maine and as far south as Texas – all of which handle an aggregate $3 trillion in the country’s annual international trade – will be idle due to a work stoppage.

They want more pay, and “protection against automation.” The article says that large retailers have stocked up on goods in preparation for Christmas, but after a few weeks if the strike goes on the effects will be felt. And for things like bananas, they will be felt more immediately.

We’ve become accustomed to a great many products imported from all over the world.

And of course, if the strike goes on for a while, it will have political repercussions.

IDF enters southern Lebanon; Iran launches missile attack on Israel

The New Neo Posted on by

So far, the expected Iranian missile attack appears to resemble one back in April in scope and effect, in which the missiles were either successfully destroyed or didn’t cause deaths even though some of them hit. Israel has a robust (but not inexhaustible) defense capability as well as extensive bomb shelters.

But these attacks from Iran are frightening, and the defense is costly to Israel in terms of money. Was this a carefully calibrated and face-saving move by Iran to supposedly not start a major war, which Iran fears it would lose? Is Iran willing to sacrifice Hezbollah to the Israelis, in order to protect itself?

Iran wishes to pose as the reasonable one:

Iran’s mission to the United Nations issued a statement that confirmed the attack on Israel and indicated that its direct assault was over.

“Iran’s legal, rational, and legitimate response to the terrorist acts of the Zionist regime — which involved targeting Iranian nationals and interests and infringing upon the national sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran — has been duly carried out,” the Iranian statement said. Iran supports many proxy groups in the region, and it wasn’t clear whether any of those groups might still launch additional attacks on Israel after the Iranian missile salvo.

Meanwhile, in Israel there was a lethal terrorist attack:

While Iran’s missiles appeared to have claimed no lives, Israeli police said two gunmen opened fire on members of the public on a road in Tel Aviv not long before the rockets were fired. The Associated Press cited police as saying six people were killed in the attack before the two suspects were neutralized.

I see that word “neutralized” a lot these days. It often means “killed,” and I think that’s what happened to today’s attackers.

Meanwhile, the IDF is engaged in southern Lebanon:

Israeli officials have characterized the incursion into southern Lebanon as limited in scope, saying there will be “no long-term occupation.”

Officials have, however, declined to say how deep Israeli troops would venture into the country or how long the operation is expected to last. On Tuesday, the Israeli military called on residents in more than two dozen villages in southern Lebanon to evacuate approximately 30 miles into the country. …

The Israeli military earlier said it was focused on removing “immediate threats” from Lebanese villages along the border, including Hezbollah’s ability to infiltrate northern Israel. Israeli soldiers, including paratroopers and commandos, as well as armored corps troops have been “preparing for limited, localized, targeted operations in southern Lebanon,” the Israeli military said, adding that soldiers have been training for weeks and had gained skills and operational experience in Gaza over many months.

That last bit is of the utmost importance. The IDF is now very used to this sort of operation – which I believe involves clearing and obliterating the tunnels of Hezbollah in particular, much as occurred with the tunnels in Gaza. The IDF is battle-hardened in terms of the sort of operation that will be necessary in southern Lebanon.

Western North Carolina is devastated

The New Neo Posted on by

If you’re wondering why inland, mountainous western North Carolina was hit so hard by Helene, here’s the explanation:

It’s a beautiful area in which I once spent a month (with Gerard, about fifteen years ago). Driving around in the fall was wonderful because anywhere you went it was picturesque. Asheville was a fun town with plenty of good food, but I was staying to the west of there in the mountains. Now the entire area seems to have been hard hit, with many deaths. The toll is expected to rise.

We all know that, if a Republican had been in the White House, or a Republican was the governor of the state, these two people would be fully blamed by the press. These days, however, does anyone expect anything of Biden? Yes, he was on the beach, and yes, he said he’d been “on the phone” about it for two hours, but does anyone even consider him president anymore? The headline of that AP story I just linked is basically “Trump pounces!”

Kamala Harris says she’s been in touch with authorities. She and Biden are planning a visit (not necessarily together), and Trump is in Georgia with some aid. Seems as though all of them are waiting until things calm down enough in North Carolina to visit, so that they don’t impede rescue operations there. Right now access and communications are terrible in that area.

One of the impressions I get is that, although there was a warning in North Carolina to evacuate low-lying areas, the portion of the state that was hit hardest by the surge was at elevation and therefore I’m assuming everyone was still at home. I see that a state of emergency had been declared for western areas prior to the storm, but it was mostly about preparedness and I see nothing about evacuation. This would make for a much higher death toll.

The photos and videos remind me somewhat of the dreadful tsunami of 2004. The latter disaster struck an enormous area and caused over two hundred thousand deaths in many countries of the world, so its scope was far greater. But both show the tremendous destructive power and force that water can take on.

Tim Walz on China: lying then, or lying now?

The New Neo Posted on by

Or both?

The story, according to Minnesota Public Radio and the Walz campaign:

Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz “was so proud of his extensive experience” traveling to China that he “occasionally used to exaggerate it” by claiming to have visited the communist country twice as often as he actually did, Minnesota Public Radio reported on Monday.

Walz went on around 15 trips to China in the 1990s and early 2000s—rather than over 30, as he stated earlier in his political career—his campaign told Minnesota Public Radio this week.

Why is Walz pulling back on his “old China hand” credentials? Because the House Oversight Committee is investigating the nature of his longtime ties to China.

I guess that what appeals to the voters of Minnesota doesn’t sound so great on the national stage. So Tim adjusts the story accordingly.

Helene’s devastation, plus politics

The New Neo Posted on by

We don’t know the final death toll of Hurricane Helene, but it’s already high:

The Category 4 hurricane made landfall along Florida’s Big Bend region late Thursday night, with winds of 140 mph and a devastating storm surge. Helene left behind widespread destruction from the Sunshine State through Georgia into the Carolinas and Tennessee Valley as the storm traveled across the U.S.

At least 120 people have been confirmed dead across six states – Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee. …

Communities in western North Carolina were hit especially hard by the effects of Hurricane Helene, with catastrophic flooding destroying hundreds of roads and bridges. Access to several areas has been cut off, preventing crews from getting much-needed supplies like food, water and fuel to residents.

Dozens of people are now confirmed dead in North Carolina, and hundreds of people remain unaccounted for due to the lack of power and communication access.

Later in the article, it says that the storm brought between 10 and 29 inches of rain to the mountain areas of North Carolina. That is a storm of astounding magnitude.

NOTE: Reactions to natural disasters are often used to make political points. You probably recall how George W. Bush was blamed for the toll of Katrina in 2005. Now, with Biden symbolically at the helm, does anyone expect much leadership from him or from VP Harris, who is busy staging photo-ops on the storm? This article describes the plans of Biden, Harris, and Trump. The latter seems to be going to the area first (to Georgia; NC is still too messed up), and the others say they hope to in the future.

Hope for Iran?

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “sdferr.”]

Netanyahu has a message for the long-suffering people of Iran:

The vast majority of Iranians know their regime doesn’t care a whit about them. If it did care, if it cared about you, it would stop wasting billions of dollars on futile wars across the Middle East. It would start improving your lives. Imagine if all the vast money the regime wasted on nuclear weapons and foreign wars were invested in your children’s education, in improving your health care, in building your nation’s infrastructure, water, sewage, all the other things that you need. Imagine that.”

“When Iran is finally free — and that moment will come a lot sooner than people think – everything will be different,” he promises. “Our two ancient peoples, the Jewish people and the Persian people, will finally be at peace. Our two countries, Israel and Iran, will be at peace.

“When that day comes, the terror network that the regime built in five continents will be bankrupt, dismantled. Iran will thrive as never before. Global investment. Massive tourism. Brilliant technological innovation based on the tremendous talents that exists inside Iran. Doesn’t that sound better than endless poverty, repression and war?”

Concludes Netanyahu: “Don’t let a small group of fanatic theocrats crush your hopes and your dreams. You deserve better. Your children deserve better. The entire world deserves better. I know you don’t support the rapists and murderers of Hamas and Hezbollah, but your leaders do. You deserve more. The people of Iran should know – Israel stands with you. May we together know a future of prosperity and peace.”

Just about everyone knows that the majority of Iran’s people don’t want the theocracy that has ruled the country with an iron fist for over forty years. So far, they have been powerless to overthrow that regime. Perhaps Netanyahu is getting way ahead of himself with this vision of a Middle East at peace, but at this point it’s at least a possible consequence of the twistings and turnings that have led us from October 7, 2023 to this moment.

The death of Narallah and the attacks on the Hezbollah hierarchy are not direct hits on the Iranian mullahs, but they have to feel more vulnerable at this point. Hezbollah was – and perhaps still is – their strongest and most well-equipped proxy. It had extended Iran’s reach very far: to South America, to Syria, to Iraq, and of course most of all to Lebanon, Iran’s colonial crown jewel. Now Israel has reduced the power of that outpost of horror, at least temporarily, with stunning speed and remarkable ingenuity of a type that has astounded the world and was not predicted by anyone, as far as I know. Exploding pagers and walkie-talkies? Even screenwriters hadn’t come up with anything like that – but Israel did.

After a year of such heartache and horror, it’s a welcome moment of hope. Netanyahu seems to be positioning himself as a contender for the job of “leader of the free world” – after all, at the moment, there’s a vacancy. The “free world” has been shrinking lately, but his vision is that it can expand and that Iran can be part of it.

Today is the 20th anniversary of this blog [BUMPED UP: scroll down for new posts]

The New Neo Posted on by

That’s mind-boggling to me.

I started very tentatively, at my son’s suggestion. When he said I should start a blog I immediately said, “No, no way.” But he went to Blogger.com, showed me a few blog templates and told me to choose one and a blog title, and set it up. I didn’t give any of it much thought at all at the time and really just did it to get him to stop nagging me. But he told me it would be there if I ever wanted to fool around with it.

A week or two later, I guess I was bored enough to go there and fool around with it. After a few posts entitled “Test,” I published my very first real post, which was this one, only of course it was on my old Blogger website and got transferred over here many years later when I moved.

I posted intermittently for a few months, with almost no visitors and no comments. Actually, it took me a while to even get a site counter up there – at first I didn’t know there was such a thing. So I’m not sure what my initial traffic was, but if I got ten visitors a day that would have been a surprisingly large number to me.

Then one day in late February of 2005 – for no reason I can explain – I decided to get serious. What would happen, I wondered, if I tried posting every day and writing to other bloggers asking them to promote me? I made a little pact with myself to do that for one month and watch my traffic and comments, and if nothing improved I’d just quit. I was uncertain I could actually grind out a post or two every day for a whole month, but I did manage to do that, and got a few links from other bloggers who were in a generous mood.

In a month or two I had hundreds of readers a day, which seemed like a big big deal at the time. I even got a few Instalanches with ten thousand or more. I originally had no photo on the blog, but I decided I needed one because all my readers assumed I was a man and I wanted to correct that notion. It was my son, again, who suggested – because of my shyness – that I mimic the Magritte painting with the apple. The first photo I put on the blog was so bad (I don’t seem to have it anymore) that I soon replaced it with this better one – which I replaced a few years ago because it had gotten so outdated:

By the time a few more months had passed, I had a respectable mid-level – although not huge – audience and an active comments section.

Back in those days there were a lot of individual bloggers and there was a lot of blogger camaraderie. Blogs were the hot new trend, and the excitement was building. Pajamas Media formed and we had huge blogger get-togethers where I met people I’d been corresponding with, and the din of a hundred bloggers all jabbering together was formidable. When we had meals, much of the food went untouched because there was so much animated talking that people couldn’t bear to stop long enough to eat.

Those days are long gone. But they lasted a few years and were very fun.

And how did I meet Gerard? He was one of the many bloggers I wrote to, explaining what my site was about and sending some links. He was kind enough to link to me on his blog, and there were two or three short exchanges of that nature. Then, for reasons that remain obscure, one day he sent me a very long email about what was actually going on in his life at the time. It was written with his usual flair and I was fascinated. So that’s how we met – in the virtual world, long before we met in what he called the world dimensional (that phrase is from a poem by Hart Crane).

Well, now it’s a habit for me to blog. I also value my readers highly. Do I do it for you? Do I do it for me? Yes and yes.

Let’s celebrate!

Some thoughts on the recent turns that the war in the Middle East has taken

The New Neo Posted on by

With the killing of Nasrallah announced earlier today, and all the events of the last year in that region of the world, here are some musings.

Of course, Israelis detested Nasrallah. But I wonder how many Arabs felt the same way and are happy that Israel managed to take him out. He was an agent of Iran, which after all isn’t part of the Arab world, and had been responsible for the death of many Arabs, too. And although the vast majority of the Arabs of Gaza and the West Bank (or Judah and Sumeria) are highly invested in the perpetual war to destroy Israel, I wonder how many others in the region would just like the Palestinians and Iranians to cease and desist. For example, the Lebanese might recall the days when their country was a very pleasant place in which to live, and might want some of that back again. The Palestinians have stirred up trouble and bloodshed wherever they’ve gone. And the same for the Iranian mullahtocracy.

But even if it’s correct that many Arabs would like the wars to stop and could live with the existence of the state of Israel, will it matter? Because the billion dollar question is: what will Iran do?

One of the brilliant things Netanyahu has done is to make the message very clear: we can find you and kill you wherever you are. And although the higher-ups speak of the glory of martyrdom, I doubt they’re extremely eager for it themselves. It’s hard to know how well such deterrence would work for people who believe that martyrdom is the best way to paradise, but these people also seem to crave and enjoy having power on earth.

Speaking of Iran, one of the men taken out in that Beirut strike was Abbas Nilforoushan, Iran’s big man in Lebanon:

Nilforoushan, Hezbollah’s key Iranian advisor, was behind the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations in Iran. He appears to be second-in-command when it comes to military operations. In a 2020 article, the Israeli news website YNET identified him as the Islamic “Guard’s deputy commander for operations.”

Israel’s latest operations against Hezbollah have had an extraordinary boldness and must strike at least some fear into the hearts of Iran’s proxies and the Iranians themselves. I don’t think they saw anything like this coming and to me it seems to represent a sea change. First the utter shock and science-fiction quality of the exploding pagers, then the walkie-talkies, and then a whole series of targeted killings on the mid-level leaders. Then the higher-ups were obliterated while in a bunker-like headquarters where they were conferring, and my strong suspicious is that it was highly fortified. And yet they’re gone, killed in a place where they probably felt the safest, assembling in person because their other communications were either dismantled or seemed too dangerous to use.

Apparently, Khamenei has now been moved to a “secure” location. But is any location secure?

And to top it all off, the big blast occurred when Netanyahu was addressing the General Assembly of the UN and giving that body a piece of his mind.

NOTE: Joe Biden has come through with a pretty decent statement on the killing of Nasrallah. Then again, it’s being reported that Biden is none too pleased at having been kept out of the information loop and that his ceasefire plans didn’t work out. Harris’ statement starts out fine and then pivots to the usual blah-blah about the need for diplomacy. I think diplomacy has been tried for a long long time in the region, and has utterly failed when dealing with terrorists.