What I’m learning about self-publishing

The New Neo Posted on by

One aspect of my efforts to publish Gerard’s book is that prior to this I knew next to nothing about book publishing except that self-publishing existed. Now I know a lot about it, and it’s quite a learning curve.

Early on I made the decision to have mostly paperback hard copies, and that print-on-demand was way too expensive and the quality not as good. So I have focused on having a small print run, to be expanded later if necessary. At this point I’ve ordered samples of the books printed by various printing companies that make hard copies for self-publishers. It turns out that’s a very thriving business with a dizzying array of contenders.

And the sample books they’ve sent me are complicated. So many choices of paper and cover types, including thickness and finish and lamination and embossing and on and on, each with a different price. And because my book has color pictures, which raises the price and makes good reproduction more challenging, it’s even more daunting to make a choice.

To top it all off, I often think how much Gerard would have enjoyed this part of the process. Not the nitpicky copy-editing, which he might have farmed out, but the aesthetic decisions relating to how the book looks and feels.

Not my forte. Printing was his forte. He’d been a magazine editors and book editor and agent for most of his working life, and he noticed things like print and fonts and arrangements on the page far more than I ever did. I have some aesthetic sense, but I just never paid a particle of attention to those things. My blog is visually plain, too, and I like it that way. Gerard used to tease me about that.

So it’s very ironic that I’m the one making these decisions.

Blood libel redux: the UN and Gaza death statistics

The New Neo Posted on by

Recently the UN backpedaled on its Gazan death statistics for women and children, the numbers they got from Gaza/Hamas in the first place and have been spreading far and wide for months. The blamed the fog of war for their error.

And then they backpedaled a bit on the backpedaling and pointed out that the totals are probably the same, it’s just the number of women and children that is much reduced.

What tools the UN officials are. And I mean that literally: they are terrorist tools, useful instruments for getting terrorist propaganda out to the world and giving it the stamp of approval. Because the truth is that the “fog of war” generally makes it hard to know until much later, and the Palestinians and Hamas have historically been proven liars over and over again on such subjects. This war started with a huge lie about the deaths in a hospital bombing claimed to be 500 and in fact just a few dozen, with a hospital supposedly destroyed and yet not damaged, and supposedly at the hands of Israelis and yet actually accomplished by the mechanism of a Hamas bomb aimed at Israel and falling short.

The UN knows that Hamas is completely unreliable. But they want to discredit Israel, so they report the false statistics and only correct them a little if at all, and much later after their hands are forced by statisticians proving the figures are bogus.

I recently found a new writer – new to me, that is – and he has written what I believe is the best article on these blood libels againt Israel in the recent war. Here it is – his Substack is called Bastiat’s Window – and here’s an excerpt:

Consider the Bastiat’s Window reader’s claim that, “The IDF has now killed 1.5% of the population of Gaza … .” The population of Gaza is around 2.5 million, and that would would indicate 37,500 Gazans killed since October 7. While the number could prove to be another example of inflated Hamas fabrications, let’s suppose not, for the sake of argument.

On October 7, Hamas launched an unprovoked sneak attack on Israel, killing perhaps 1,400 people—including some of the hostages. By Hamas’s numbers, Israel’s retaliation has killed 37,500 Gazans—27 Gazans killed for every Israeli killed in the initial attack (but not including IDF forces killed since then). Now consider a parallel situation. On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched an unprovoked sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, killing 2,403 Americans. Retaliation by America and its allies resulted in the deaths of perhaps 3,000,000 Japanese citizens—1,248 Japanese killed for every American killed at Pearl Harbor. By this crude measure, then, America’s post-December 7 response was 46 times as “disproportionate” as Israel’s post-October 7 response. Even more telling, America contributed mightily to millions of German deaths, even though Nazi Germany had not even attacked the U.S. when America declared war.

In the 1940s, the singular goal of the Allies was to crush the capacity of Japan’s and Germany’s murderous regimes to make war. Israel’s sole purpose in Gaza is to similarly neuter Hamas. Israel’s campaign is as morally upright as America’s efforts against the Axis Powers, and Israel has a long way to go before its response is more lethal than America’s response between 1941 and 1945. …

When I offered this Israel-in-2024-to-America-in-1941 comparison, the Bastiat’s Window reader/commenter said:

“You compare the Gaza war to WWII. I don’t think the comparison is on point …”

I said he was absolutely right in that respect:

“You are correct in arguing that Imperial Japan’s December 7th attack on Pearl Harbor is not directly comparable to Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. [As a proportion of population], Hamas killed seven times as many Israelis as Japan did Americans. Hamas has always promised to murder every Jew on earth, whereas Japan never made any such threat against Americans. Japan attacked a military target, whereas Hamas attacked only defenseless civilians—raping young girls and old women, slaughtering babies in front of their parents, kidnapping small children, engaging in necrophilia, sending photos and films of their depravities to the victims’ loved ones—and promising endless future rounds of the same. Imperial Japan could only attack a small, remote outpost of the U.S. and posed little or no physical threat to the vast majority of Americans; in contrast, Hamas and its fellow Iranian puppets stand within tactical range of every Israeli.”

Excellent points.

Covering the Trump trial: Dershowitz and others

The New Neo Posted on by

Unlike most states, New York forbids courtroom cameras except for a few meaningless exceptions. Therefore our news of the historic Trump trial – and in this case the word “historic” is apropos – gets filtered to the public by the MSM, which hates Trump. So it’s not just the trial itself which is unjust, it’s the coverage.

How very convenient for the left. They can spin it any way they want, and it is difficult to counter what they’re saying. Transcripts are available, but few people will be seeking them out. To top it all off, there’s a gag order against Trump, who is barred from speaking about many aspects of the trial.

The power of this New York court to railroad – and try to silence – a former president and the current leading candidate and probable nominee of the GOP is extraordinary. Not only that, look at how the MSM is covering the efforts of others to get the word out. This NBC article, for example, is titled “Trump increasingly relies on allies to deliver the attack lines the gag order bars him from uttering: Legal experts say it might be challenging for the prosecution to try to argue that Trump is responsible for criticism by others.”

It might be hard to blame him for what other people say? Ya think? Ya think? It might be hard to bar the entire right from criticizing “witnesses, prosecutors, jurors or court staff members, as well the families of those people and of the judge presiding over the case”? So Michael Cohen can lie and lie and lie and Trump faces penalties if he calls him out, but the left would like to stop Trump supporters from doing so.

It’s not enough that the left controls the trial and almost the entire MSM and have gagged Trump, they would like to control every aspect of the messaging on this trial.

That’s why someone like Alan Dershowitz – who is not a Trump supporter but who actually believes he and everyone else should get a fair trial, and who is very familiar with courtroom proceedings – is vital as an observer and commenter on the goings-on. Dershowitz is very incensed at the travesty the trial has become. Watch the following video:

If you don’t have time to watch, read this:

HANNITY: I’ve got to imagine in all the years you practice law, have you ever seen anything like this?

DERSHOWITZ: No, I never have. I sat in the front row, literally just feet away from where all the action occurred. I rolled my eyes when the judge made some rulings that were absurd. Any first-year evidence student would understand that he was making biased rulings in favor of one side.

I stared him down, but Costello didn’t. He acted like a normal witness and the judge went berserk. The judge violated Trump’s constitutional right to a public trial by kicking the media out of the courtroom. I don’t know why I wasn’t kicked out, and I heard him lecture Costello… “What you did was contemptuous. You looked at me contemptuously…”

…it reminded me of Mae West when a judge said, you’re showing contempt for the court and Mae West said no, Your Honor, I’m trying my best to hide my contempt for the court.

I’m sure Costello was trying to hide his contempt for the court, but the judge had such a thin skin that he threatened him. He said he would strike the testimony and hold him in contempt if he rolled his eyes again. You have a constitutional right to roll your eyes and to stare at anybody. It was absurd!

In particular – and what especially drew Dershowitz’s ire in the video I posted – was that the judge threatened to strike the testimony of Costello, which means that the jury would be instructed to disregard it. This is really unprecedented, especially for eye-rolling. It makes a further travesty of a trial that is already a tremendous travesty. And Dershowitz also points out the because the judge dismissed the press and jury while he had his tantrum, the idea was that no one would see it except the trial participants. Perhaps Judge Merchan was unaware of who Dershowitz is, because he was one of the few people allowed to stay in the room.

It occurred to me a day or two ago that Americans would benefit from a dramatic reading of the trial testimony, and today to my surprise I discovered that such a thing exists. I haven’t listened yet, but here’s a link to an article explaining how this came to be, and here’s the reading:

NOTE: It also occurs to me that for many young people with little knowledge of law and little experience of how strange all of this is, it seems ordinary and fitting. Their main concern would be whether the trial will be successful in getting Trump rather than whether it is fair. It also occurs to me that such ignorance and/or “ends justify the means” mentality is hardly limited to the young, although I’m assuming it’s more common in that group.

The donation drive is over – and a great big Thank You!!

The New Neo Posted on by

Once again, I offer a huge “thank you!” to every single person who has contributed so far, and to all those who contribute at other times of year. I am so very grateful to you all, and to all the readers and commenters here.

Just a reminder for the rest of the year: if anyone wants to contribute to thenewneo, click on the “Donate” button either to the right or at the bottom of the page, depending on what sort of device you use when reading the blog. If the Donate button isn’t showing, disable your adblocker and that should make it visible. You can make a single payment or regular monthly payments, as you wish. You can use a Paypal account or a credit card.

And of course there’s also the Amazon portal below it, which can be used for Amazon purchases.

The Ignatius report on the war in Rafah: will Israel scale back?

The New Neo Posted on by

Today there’s a WaPo article by David Ignatius on the war in Gaza:

I’ve seen other articles reporting on what Ignatius wrote; for example, this, entitled: “Report: Israel opts for limited Rafah action with Biden’s blessing: the IDF won’t engage in a full-scale assault on the last Hamas stronghold in southern Gaza.” Excerpt [emphasis mine]:

In an opinion piece published on Monday citing sources familiar with the matter, the newspaper’s senior commentator wrote that the framework for eventually ending the Gaza war became more clear after a just-wrapped trip to Saudi Arabia and Israel by U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk, the U.S. National Security Council’s coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa.

“Israeli leaders have reached a consensus about a final assault on Hamas’s four remaining battalions in Rafah. Instead of the heavy attack with two divisions that Israel contemplated several weeks ago, government and military leaders foresee a more limited assault that U.S. officials think will result in fewer civilian casualties and, for that reason, Biden won’t oppose,” said Ignatius.

“At least 800,000 of the roughly 1.5 million Palestinians who had gathered in Rafah have left, U.S. officials believe,” he added.

Ignatius also wrote that Israeli defense officials have agreed on a strategy for “the day after” Hamas is defeated, with Ramallah playing a role. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is against Palestinian Authority involvement in governing Gaza given its support for terrorism, a stance Ignatius acknowledges.

The post-Hamas Gaza “will include a Palestinian security force drawn in part from the Palestinian Authority’s administrative payroll in Gaza. This Palestinian force will be overseen by a governing council of Palestinian notables, backed by moderate Arab states such as Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia,” he said.

So, what does all this mean? Trying to read Ignatius in the WaPo and understand the backstory is like reading Pravda and Kremlin tealeaves in Soviet days, but I’ll give it a go.

First let me say that Ignatius is the usual Democrat hack (I’ve written about him before, here as well as here). But that doesn’t mean he’s not correct. It means we certainly can’t assume that he is, or that this is straightforward reporting.

I also want to call your attention to phrases such as “eventually” ending the war and “more limited” assault. They are both unclear both as to time and scale.

Various possibilities come to mind in explaining the article. Ignatius’ sources – probably either Sullivan, McGurk, or their aides – may be trying to say something like, “See, President Biden is doing great and has gotten peace in our times underway, having convinced the nasty old Israelis not to bomb Rafah into the Stone Age.” There may be no agreement at all, merely talks about it, and this Ignatius story might be a form of pressure on Israel. Or, there might be an agreement of sorts, in which the Israelis go somewhat easier in exchange for Biden and company not stabbing them in the back in the ICC, and in exchange for some sort of vague support for the war’s aftermath in controlling Gaza and educating the Gazans in the notion that Israelis are not devils incarnate after all.

As for that business of the “governing council of Palestinian notables,” it would be fascinating to get the names of these stellar leaders and hear about their wonderful accomplishments. And I’d be curious whether Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are in fact onboard with this, and if so how they see their roles. They do have an interest in keeping the Gazans from attacking Israel again, but they also have an extreme antipathy to dealing with the Palestinians at all, as the latter and their allies have tried to disrupt the stabilty of other Arab countries and on the whole have been bad, bad news.

I haven’t yet seen any announcement from the Israeli government about any of this. And I wonder how the Ignatius report can be reconciled with this:

As the military operation in Hamas-held stronghold of Rafah entered its second week, the IDF is expanding its control over the city. The military was advancing “into Rafah, one area after another and gradually expanding,” the Israeli TV channel i24NEWS reported Tuesday.

If the Ignatius report is correct, however, it may be that Israeli leaders think that they cannot eliminate all the terrorists anyway, that world opinion is isolating them further and further, that the Biden administration is willing to cut off their armaments and their own supply can’t last forever, and that the best solution may lie in the more moderate Arab nations gaining some control of the area if they’re willing to do so in exchange for an Israeli pullback of sorts.

Time will tell.

The defense rests in the NY Trump trial

The New Neo Posted on by

The Trump trial in New York was a travesty from the start: the change in the statute of limitations, the elevating of a misdemeanor into a felony by means of the implication that there was some unspecified other crime connected with the misdemeanor, the compromised status of the judge in terms of his daughter’s work, the fact that Bragg had campaigned on getting Trump, the choice of venue, and of course the fact that the bar for indicting a leading presidential candidate should be high rather than so low even a worm couldn’t slither under it.

But slither they did.

Judge Merchan should have either recused himself or thrown the case out of court before it began. And/or later he should have ruled for a directed verdict. But instead, he seems determined to make sure Trump is found guilty and who cares about reversal on appeal; the latter would only be happening after the election, after the damage is done. And inflicting damage on Trump is the aim of the entire enterprise.

It doesn’t matter that the other crime – the one that supposedly makes the case a felony – has neither been stated, defined, nor proven. It doesn’t matter that the evidence rests on the shaky shoulders of one Michael Cohen: perjurer and thief. It doesn’t matter – and if it ends up mattering, if at least one juror says “no” to this railroading of Trump, I will be both pleased and very surprised.

But I’m not at all surprised that Trump didn’t take the stand. Nothing he could say would change anything to help him with this judge and jury, and in general it is advised that defendants can only hurt themselves by testifying. What’s more, there’s no case. What is there to rebut? The jury will do what it will do at this point.

This courtroom proceeding and the background to it have made a number of things crystal clear – not that they were murky before, but they’re even more clear now. The first is that the left will stop at nothing to destroy Trump and the right in general. The second is that the road to lawfare against the right is to try the person in a deep blue venue, and it’s virtually a certainty that – no matter how weak or even corrupt the case may be – you will get your conviction (again, if that turns out to be untrue here, I will be very pleasantly surprised). The third is that the left’s willingness to be so open about its willingness to upend the legal system and any other system in further of gaining more and more power indicates that the left has zero reluctance to use fraud at the ballot box. And the fourth is that the MSM will cover and spin just about anything the left does, the better to engineer the re-election of a confused, destructive, mendacious, stupid, vicious tool named Joe Biden.

Notes from Chairman Biden

The New Neo Posted on by

A mite confused:

In comments first reported by the New York Post, Biden addressed an NAACP campaign event in Michigan Sunday night, where he repeatedly railed against his presumptive Republican opponent, former President Trump, while offering an aside about the contagion – which began in 2019 while the latter was in office.

“When I was vice president, things were kind of bad during the pandemic,” Biden said near the beginning of his remarks.

“And, what happened was Barack said to me: ‘Go to Detroit – help fix it.’”

Addled.

The explanation is that he’s not addled about when he was president, he’s addled about the difference between a pandemic and a recession:

The White House’s official transcript following the president’s remarks included a strikethrough of the word “pandemic”—instead replacing it with the word “recession.”

Biden was apparently referring to Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, who took office while Biden was still VP back in 2014.

I actually think that’s what happened. But even so, it’s still odd for a speaker not to catch the error immediately – that is, if that speaker is thinking straight and paying any attention to his or her words. Joe is doing neither.

What’s more, there’s this:

“In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse,” Hur said in his report. “He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (‘if it was 2013—when did I stop being Vice President?’), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (‘in 2009, am I still Vice President?’).”

So let’s just split the difference and say that Biden is addled about a lot of things.

And then there was Biden’s stirring commencement speech at Morehouse College: With malice towards all and charity towards none. No, that’s not a quote; it’s a summary:

“You missed your high school graduation. You started college just as George Floyd was murdered, and there was a reckoning on race. It’s natural to wonder if the ‘democracy’ you hear about actually works for you. What is democracy? That Black men are being killed in the street,” Biden said.

He continued, “What is democracy? The trail of broken promises still leaves Black communities behind. What is democracy? You have to be ten times better than anyone else to get a fair shot. Most of all, what does it mean? As you’ve heard before, to be a Black man who loves his country even if it doesn’t love him back in equal measure.”

“They don’t see you in the future of America. But they’re wrong,” he added.

The crowd applauded at his comment.

What a malevolent force Biden is.

Dispatches from the Kangaroo Court of New York

The New Neo Posted on by

Astounding proceedings today.

Astounding.

Cohen embezzled 60K from Trump, but is not being prosecuted for it nor did he plead guilty to it. He got off by testifying against Trump on these ridiculous charges.

And then there was Judge Merchan and Costello. You may recall who Costello is – he was Cohen’s lawyer at one time, and has information directly contradicting almost all of Cohen’s testimony against Trump, particularly as regards Trump’s motivation and knowledge.

Oh, plus the fact that Merchan contributed to Biden’s campaign in 2020 and to a group called “Stop Republicans.” This was illegal for him to do, even though the donations were small.

ADDENDUM:

Here’s a good one from Turley:

Here we go again: donation time!! [BUMPED UP: scroll down for today’s new posts]

The New Neo Posted on by

Ah yes, here we go again.

It’s been awhile since I’ve asked for donations. In the meantime, many readers have donated anyway, and I thank you all profusely. Some of you even have a setup whereby you make a monthly payment, which is also great. I appreciate it so very much, and it helps to keep this blog going.

If anyone wants to contribute to thenewneo, please click on the “Donate” button either to the right or at the bottom of the page, depending on what sort of device you use when reading the blog. If the Donate button is not showing, disable your adblocker and that should make it visible.

I thank everyone in advance. If it weren’t for you readers and commenters, I’d probably be doing something other than this in my dotage.

I’ll probably keep this post at the top of the blog for the next week.

California dreaming: the Racial Justice Act is a law enforcement nightmare

The New Neo Posted on by

I hope this doesn’t spread to other states. It’s bad enough that it’s the new policy in California. It’s truly stunning to contemplate:

California is about to demonstrate what a world constructed from the tenets of critical race studies looks like. The sentencing reversal in California v. Windom is the result of a recent law that will likely bring the state’s criminal-justice system to its knees. The Racial Justice Act, passed in 2020 without meaningful public review, turns long-standing academic tropes about implicit bias and white privilege into potent legal tools. And the floodgates are about to open. Starting this year, the RJA allows anyone serving time in a California prison or jail for a felony to challenge his conviction and sentencing retroactively on the ground of systemic racial bias.

The Act was introduced by stripping an old bill of its content and replacing it with this content and then fast-tracking it in a stealth way without hearings or publicity. Now it’s the law, and it’s an incredible one that will have enormous repercussions:

The Racial Justice Act operationalizes the proposition that every aspect of the criminal-justice system is biased against blacks. But according to the act’s legislative authors, it’s too hard to prove such bias in the case of individual arrests and prosecutions. Therefore, the act does away with the concept of individual fault and individual proof. From now on, statistics about past convictions are sufficient to invalidate a present trial or sentence. …

[Previously, defendants were required to] show that criminal-justice decision-makers were purposefully biased against them, in order to throw out a conviction or a sentence under the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court ruled. Statistics purporting to show a historical pattern of bias are not enough to support the requisite showing of individual discriminatory purpose against a particular defendant.

Thanks to the RJA, McCleskey no longer governs bias challenges in California. From now on in California, statistics purporting to show a pattern of bias in the past are enough to invalidate a current arrest, criminal charge, or judicial sentence.

And it doesn’t need to actually show bias, just a disparity in results. The insane presumption is that all races and groups commit crimes in proportion to their percentage in the population, and any disparity in numbers is evidence of discrimination.

Please read the whole thing.