Paging Hezbollah

The New Neo Posted on by

I didn’t even know that this could be done or how this could be done, but apparently it’s a real story. This time, the word “unprecedented” is fully warranted (unless you’re talking about a science fiction writer’s fevered dream):

At least nine people were killed and thousands were injured when pagers held by Hezbollah members across Lebanon exploded on Tuesday afternoon, in what appeared to be a widescale, coordinated attack attributed to Israel.

The unprecedented wave of explosions, which also reportedly killed and injured several people in Syria, sparked chaos in a region already on high alert for the outbreak of full-scale hostilities.

It came hours after Israel designated the halting of Hezbollah’s attacks one of its main war goals and announced that it had foiled an assassination attempt by the Iranian proxy group against a former senior official.

Lebanese Health Minister Firas Abiad said in an evening press conference that nine people were killed and 2,750 more were injured in the blasts, including some 200 people in critical condition.

Iranian proxy Hezbollah has clearly been contemplating a huge attack on Israel in addition to the rockets that rain on Israel daily and have meant that, ever since October 7, citizens who ordinarily live in the northern part of Israel have been mostly evacuated and living as internal refugees.

Hezbollah claims that some non-Hezbollah members died or were injured in this pager attack, and I don’t doubt it. However, these were pagers, not cellphones, and therefore I would imagine there isn’t a whole lot of lending out of one’s pager.

An attack of this type has tremendous shock value in the psychological sense in addition to the physical sense. The message is something like: “we see when when you’re sleeping, we know when you’re awake – and we can get you in ways you’ve never even imagined.” It also adds to the perception that the Israeli intelligence forces still have nearly-magical powers, although those powers were sorely lacking on October 7.

As I already said, I haven’t a clue how this could be done. Did the pagers originate in Israel in the first place? I doubt it. Perhaps some Israeli scientists were told, by some Hezbollah-based spy or mole, what sort of paging equipment the terrorists of Hezbollah use, and a vulnerability in the lithium batteries was exploited. This article says that Hezbollah used to employ mobile phones but switched to pagers, but doesn’t say when. Also:

“It looks likely that the pagers they [Hezbollah] purchased may have been compromised and turned into remote bombs,” [an anonymous Israeli] security expert said, stressing that this was just speculation based on his expertise.

Related theories here:

Reportedly, the Israeli intelligence send a message to the pagers which shortened the batteries of the pagers, causing them to explode.

Another, less Tom Clancy‘ish explanation would be that these fighters all belonged to the same unit and someone sabotaged them (assuming here that pagers are routinely collected, stored and distributed; which would mean that pagers were distributed this morning; perhaps it’s a mix of both).

In other words, who knows?

RIP Michaela DePrince

The New Neo Posted on by

I was shocked and saddened to read yesterday of the extremely untimely death of ballet dancer Michaela DePrince. To compound the sorrow, her mother died a day later. It’s an incredible tragedy for the family and for Michaela’s sister Mia in particular, who had become very close to Michaela when they were both little children in a Sierra Leone orphanage. Mia’s and Michaela’s lives were utterly transformed when they were adopted by the same American family and they became sisters for real.

I wrote this post ten years ago about Michaela’s story. Her life could rightly be considered inspirational; she triumphed over great odds and hardship early on. In that previous post I included this video, but I’ll include it again:

Michaela DePrince was twenty-nine years old. Her family has not revealed her cause of death; perhaps they don’t even know it yet. Her mother died of unrelated causes without learning that Michaela had died, nor did Michaela know her mother was about to die (see also this).

SCOTUS now leaks like a sieve

The New Neo Posted on by

Now we have another reminder of how far this country has degenerated. The NY Times recently published this piece about recent SCOTUS deliberations concerning the Trump cases. From this Reason article by Volokh:

First, this leak is far worse than the Dobbs leak. In Dobbs, one or more people exfiltrated a draft opinion from inside the Court, and somehow that opinion made its way to Politico. (Maybe Jodi Kantor can tell us how that happened!) It was devastating for the draft decision to become public, and it nearly led to the assassination of Justice Kavanaugh. But the aftermath of the leak was swift and overwhelming: the Court was placed on lockdown, and a sweeping investigation was launched to find the culprit(s). But the Trump leaks are systematic and thorough. We have insights of confidential memoranda, detailed conversations at conferences, KBJ’s changed vote, Justice Alito losing the Fischer majority, and information about many Roberts clerks were working on the case. This tapestry would require insights from so many different people. Moreover, all of this comes after the Dobbs leak when Chief Justice Roberts (apparently) put strict limitations on access to Court information. What did all of those measures accomplish? Apparently not much.

Second, and I alluded to this point in my earlier post, Justice Kagan is absent from this reporting. There is absolutely nothing about what she thought or did during these deliberations. There are insights into all of the other eight Justices, but nothing on Kagan. This isn’t new. Back in the day when Biskupic got the scoops, Kagan was also largely absent. I think it likely that Kagan, or at least Kagan surrogates, are behind these leaks. If Kagan is willing to publicly undermine her colleagues in a speech at the Ninth Circuit, why would she do any less off-the-record?

In recent years, the left has been chipping away at respect for the Court. They consider it an unacceptable outrage that, for the moment, it has a majority appointed by Republicans. The left sees the left as the only legitimate holder of power in all branches of government and all institutions.

The would-be Trump assassin

The New Neo Posted on by

Ryan Routh, the guy who tried to assassinate Trump yesterday, seems like a Trump-hater (no surprise there) with a few screws loose (no surprise there either). Among other things, he’s very pro-Ukraine and has tried to somehow recruit soldiers to fight for that country. He’s also got a record in North Carolina:

Routh is a native of North Carolina, where his list of arrests includes simple drug possession, driving without a license, expired inspection and operating a vehicle with no insurance. In addition, the Greensboro News & Record reported in 2002 that Routh was arrested after barricading himself in his roofing company’s office during a three-hour standoff that followed a traffic stop in which he put his hand on a gun before fleeing.

Routh apparently voted for Trump in 2016 but later came to hate him and support Democrats.

One very interesting and revealing comment is by his son [my emphasis]:

The son of the alleged gunman who targeted former President Donald Trump on his Florida golf course Sunday said his dad hates Trump like “every reasonable person does” — but claimed he’s not a violent person, according to a report.

Oran Routh told the Daily Mail that his father, Ryan Routh, who was arrested in the alleged assassination attempt, isn’t a fan of the Republican nominee.

“I don’t like Trump either,” he added.

I’m glad we’ve got that cleared up – neither of them is one of those Trump-loving crazies. This particular form of virtue-signaling by Routh’s son is an excellent sign of how such hatred has been utterly mainstreamed by the relentless hammering home by Democrats and the MSM that Trump is literally Hitler and deserves to die.

Speaking of Democrats:

And who’s responsible for all the violence against Trump, according to the MSM? Why, Trump, of course.

From the Bee:

This old house

The New Neo Posted on by

I think this video is kind of fun. My observations follow:

(1) My mother called the refrigerator the icebox for most or maybe even all of her life.
(2) I have very strong memories of transom windows. In particular, they were a feature of my pediatrician’s office waiting room. I found them ominous after that, and still do. I hated that office with its odd medicinal smell.
(3) When I was in law school I lived with four other women in a house with a parlor and a living room. It had only one bathroom, however, which was quite a challenge with five or us.
(4) In my married life I lived in a house that had been built in the 1930s and had what you might call servants’ quarters, although we certainly didn’t have servants. There was a large garage, and over that were two very small rooms and a bathroom, accessed by a special staircase that led from the kitchen.
(5) I don’t have any personal experience of wash basins.
(6) That same house that had the servants’ quarters above the garage had a coal chute in the basement.
(7) I never had knob and tube wiring.
(8) When I was a child we didn’t have a milk door, but we had a milkbox right outside the kitchen door, on the side stoop. It was made out of wood and lined with metal.
(9) Yep, that same house with the servants’ quarters had a butler’s pantry, albeit a rather small one.
(10) Never had a dumbwaiter.
(11) Never had picture rails.

Kamala Harris gives a 10-minute interview

The New Neo Posted on by

As Archie Bunker would say, whoop-de-doo.

I didn’t watch all of it; just a couple of minutes. But here’s an analysis from Elizabeth Stauffer at Legal Insurrection:

If Harris’s reply sounds familiar to you, it’s because we heard parts of it – almost verbatim – three days earlier, as she tried to dodge a similar question during the debate with former President Donald Trump. In contrast to her surprisingly strong and coherent performance on Tuesday night, her responses throughout this interview were laced with the “word salads” we’ve grown so accustomed to hearing from Harris.

Describing her answer in a post on X, The National Review’s Noah Rothman wrote, “It takes some species of talent to filibuster for 90 straight seconds while saying nothing [at] all of value.”

Here’s the interview:

Harris’ answers during the debate with Trump sounded canned, but that’s not so unusual because candidates always prepare for a set of topics they expect to encounter. But it is odd that she sounded more disjointed and rambling in this recent short sit-down interview from a friendly source pitching softballs. And if you think – as some people assert (“without evidence”) – that she got the questions for Tuesday evening in advance, why would you think she wouldn’t have gotten these questions in advance as well?

Personally, I think she just has a number of statements in her head that she’s practiced and used over and over, and sometimes she’s more coherent in stating them and sometimes less so. They are usually some combination of platitudes, lies, and meaningless stories. Nothing this woman says sounds sincere or authentic to me.

Has anyone else noticed that Biden looks kind of happy, now that he’s mostly-retired?

The New Neo Posted on by

I think his smile here looks unusually genuine. And his banter sounds more on-point than is customary:

Some people are interpreting this exchange as evidence he’s trying to sabotage Kamala Harris and boost Trump. I don’t think so. But I have little doubt he’s angry at Pelosi, Schumer, Obama, Harris, and the others who pressured him to withdraw from the 2024 campaign.

Fact-checking Kamala

The New Neo Posted on by

The debate moderators last Tuesday left Candy Crowley circa 2012 behind in a cloud of dust in terms of strategic “fact-checking.” Crowley protected Obama in a 2012 debate against Mitt Romney by giving a dramatic and false “fact-check” (I wrote at length about it at the time, in particular in this post and this one).

But the moderators at the Trump/Harris debate “fact-checked” Trump (often incorrectly) again and again and again, while letting Harris skate on lie after lie after lie. No fact-checking for her. It was journalistic malpractice; if you’re going to fact-check in real time at all (which I don’t think should be happening), it must be fair, even-handed, and correct. This wasn’t even close. Then again, “malpractice” only would apply depending on what today’s newspeople consider their guiding principles, and for a long time objectivity has not been among them.

The other day I posted a video of some podcasters analyzing the back-and-forth in the debate in terms of the roles of the moderators and the questions they asked each candidate. In case you missed it, here it is again:

There are also a number of articles that deal with the lies Harris told that the moderators didn’t challenge in any way – and in fact, there was zero fact-checking of Harris during the debate. The lists are long enough that no article deals with them in depth, but here’s an example of such a list.

The problem is that Harris knows she’ll get away with lies because (a) there will be no fact-checking of her in real time (b) the MSM will almost certainly not be fact-checking her properly later unless they are forced to for some especially egregious error; and (c) most listeners will not know she’s lying because she’s often repeating lies told by the MSM for years, and therefore people don’t even recognize she is lying.

One fact-check the media was forced – by the public because of community notes on Twitter – to issue had to do with Harris’ support for paying for transition for illegal immigrants claiming to be trans. Here’s what happened:

Despite all of this being true, here’s how Time covered this moment: “The former President … falsely claimed that Harris “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison.”

Now, on top of Time being staffed with lousy, lazy, partisan, left-wing activists who spread misinformation, there’s another reason Time spread this lie… The idea of taxpayer-funded sex change operations for illegal aliens is so outside the mainstream, so wackadoodle, Time likely didn’t even bother to fact-check Trump’s statement. It was simply assumed Trump had invented this because no sane person would ever support something so ridiculously dumb. …

Well, much to Time’s humiliation, the truth will out and the outlet was forced to not only issue a correction …

Something similar happened to the New Yorker on the same subject. How many listeners see the correction? I haven’t a clue, but my guess is that it’s a lot fewer than saw the debate, and the MSM and the Harris contingent count on that.

I also want to call special attention to another “fact-check” during the debate. This one was on violent crime statistics. The use of statistics in politics is both common and tricky. Here is the exchange in question:

But not only did a report from yesterday say that violent crime is up, but the report under discussion during the debate was – just as Trump said – incomplete and missing important data. And then there are police sources reported on here who say that in NY, “migrant crime” is rampant:

Police sources shared with The Post a staggering estimate that as many as 75% of the people they’ve been arresting in Midtown Manhattan in recent months for crimes like assault, robbery and domestic violence are migrants. In parts of Queens, the figure is more than 60%, sources there estimate. …

The problem is made much worse by sanctuary city laws that mean New York cops aren’t allowed to work with ICE on cases in which they believe suspects are in the country illegally. Additionally, the NYPD says it is barred from tracking the immigration status of offenders.

This makes it almost impossible for authorities to get their arms around the problem, experts and sources on the ground say.

Or to compile valid statistics on the subject and report on it accurately.

But the authoritative moderator/”fact-checker” Muir knows nothing of this.

Towards the end of the segment I cued up in that clip, note the way in which Harris counters what Trump says about crime:

I think this is so rich, coming from someone who has been prosecuted for national security crimes, economic crimes, election interference, has been found liable for sexual assault and his next big court appearance is in November at his own criminal sentencing.

Accompanied by a sarcastic, derisive laugh. This particular moment hasn’t been emphasized much in discussions of the debate, even on the right. But to me it is one of the most chilling, maybe even the most chilling. First use twisted and novel versions of the law to blatantly persecute your rival in courts chosen for their bias for your side, and then laugh and mock in triumph at what you’ve done, using that “evidence” to say that your opponent doesn’t care about violent criminals targeting ordinary citizens because he is a criminal himself.

I could say so much more, but this is long enough for today.