The majestic Gillian Murphy as the Swan Queen Odette

The New Neo Posted on by

Gillian Murphy has been with American Ballet Theater for about 25 years. She’s getting close to retirement age (she’s 45), but this video was made at least fourteen years ago. Murphy is exceptionally strong and she is also tall for a ballet dancer (probably around 5’6″, which is quite tall for a female dancer since they spend so much time on pointe).

That makes Murphy naturally queenly and less fragile, but her arms and upper body give the necessary fragility and vulnerability here. Her long fingers are very expressive and she uses them masterfully; it’s not all that common to notice a ballerina’s fingers but I find hers very arresting. Her extensions are extreme but her upper body and flow saves her performance from being too acrobatic.

The moments in this pas de deux when the Prince folds her “wings” in and cradles her are performed beautifully (and filmed well, too) so that the viewer really understands what the gesture means. He’s saying You needn’t be a swan anymore and try to fly away – be a woman, and I will love and protect you. That is essentially what the Act Two love story is all about.

There is often confusion about the Swan Queen. She’s a woman under a spell and has been transformed into a swan by day, but she becomes a woman again at night. When Prince Siegfried meets her and dances with her she is a woman, but a woman who retains her swanlike characteristics. She can be released from the spell if someone vows to love her forever, and is faithful to that vow. It’s that last part that leads to his involuntary and unaware betrayal in Act Three.

But here’s the pas de deux from Act Two. The part I mentioned about folding in her wings can be seen from around 5:58 to 6:12, and then again from 6:27 to 6:37:

How many illegal aliens will be voting in 2024? And how many voted in past elections?

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Here’s some research:

In 2014, the academic journal Electoral Studies published a groundbreaking study by three scholars who estimated how frequently non-citizens were illegally voting. Based on data for the 2008 presidential and congressional elections, the study found that:

– “roughly one quarter of non-citizens” in the U.S. “were likely registered to vote.”
– “6.4% of non-citizens actually voted.”
– 81.8% of them “reported voting for Barack Obama.”
– illegal votes cast by non-citizens “likely” changed “important election outcomes” in favor of Democrats, “including Electoral College votes” and a “pivotal” U.S. Senate race that enabled Democrats to pass Obamacare.

The study’s voter registration rate was estimated with data from two key sources:

1. A national survey in which 14.8% of non-citizens admitted that they were registered to vote.
2. A database of registered voters that reveals what portion of the surveyed non-citizens “were in fact registered” even though “they claimed not to be registered.”

By combining these data, the author’s “best” estimate was that 25.1% of non-citizens were illegally registered to vote.

That was in 2008. There’s a lot of other information in the article, including data that contradicts those results, and the caveat that it’s hard to get valid data on the subject.

There’s also this:

To prevent illegal voting by non-citizens, Congressional Republicans recently introduced a 22-page bill to “require proof of United States citizenship” to register to vote in federal elections.

While reporting on a press conference announcing the legislation, media outlets like the Associated Press, CNN, NBC News, Rolling Stone, and NPR attacked the bill as unnecessary. NPR, for instance, reported that “it’s already illegal” for non-citizens to vote in federal elections and “there’s never been evidence to support the idea noncitizens are voting at anything other than miniscule numbers.”

Catch-22, of course. If we don’t require proof of citizenship, how would we know the extent of non-citizen voting and/or voting attempts, and how would we ever document and prove it? It is currently impossible to do so, and those objecting to the bill either are abysmally stupid or duplicitous in their arguments. But we’re used to that, right?

CORRECTION: The title of this post should read “non-citizens” rather than “illegal aliens.” [Hat tip: commenter “Paul Nachman.”]

The ghouls of Gaza

The New Neo Posted on by

The IDF has discovered the bodies of three of the hostages:

The military announced Friday that soldiers recovered the bodies of three hostages from the Gaza Strip, as intensive fighting raged there between Israeli forces and Hamas.

The three were named as Itzhak Gelerenter, Amit Buskila, and Shani Louk.

In a press statement, IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said the bodies were recovered in an overnight operation carried out by the military and Shin Bet.

The IDF is understandably laconic on the details, but later in the article it mentions that “some of the intelligence for the operation came from Palestinian terror suspects captured by the IDF and interrogated by the Shin Bet.” All three were killed at the NOVA festival and their dead bodies were brought to Gaza.

Shani Louk has been known almost from the start to be dead. Louk became emblematic of the barbaric violence of the Gazans on October 7 towards women. Her half-naked and twisted body was paraded through Gaza as a trophy, a symbol of conquest and domination by Hamas over Israel as well as sexual titillation for the Gazan masses who cheered her death and mutilation.

However, until recently, Itzhak Gelerenter and Amit Buskila were thought to have been alive. But apparently that never was the case; they were killed on October 7 in Israel and their bodies brought to Gaza.

It’s not that these people were killed in Gaza and their bodies kept in Gaza, which would have been bad enough. No, their dead bodies were transported to Gaza either by their killers or by other Gazans on October 7 hoping for glory or a payoff or both. Hamas operatives as well as ordinary Gazans knew the bodies’ value as mediums of exchange for the living terrorists and murderers imprisoned in Israel.

What does this tell us of Hamas and the Palestinians? We’ve long known they’re in the grip of a death cult, and this is further evidence of that. The desecration of dead bodies is not a mark of civilized behavior, and that’s a reason the Palestinians are fond of making up fake stories about Israelis doing something similar although it’s the Palestinians who specialize in it.

We also have just learned that two Thai nationals thought to have been living hostages had also been killed on October 7 and their bodies taken to Gaza. I have come to believe that there are no living Thai hostages left in Gaza, although there are still some living Israelis. The reason I say this is because so many Thai hostages were released early on, and I see no reason Hamas would still be holding the rest if they had been alive. The Thai hostages are not worth all that much to Hamas; that’s why they initially released so many. I also believe that on October 7 the terrorists who killed and/or kidnapped the Thai nationals may not all have been aware that they were not Israelis.

It continues to astound and depress me that so many people around the world either deny these horrors or excuse them, believing a host of lies about Israel, Gaza, and what’s happening there.

And as for the word “ghoul,” which I used in the title of this post, I learned the following after I chose the word:

Ghoul is from the Arabic … ‘to seize’. …

In Arabic folklore, the ghul is said to dwell in cemeteries and other uninhabited places. A male ghoul is referred to as ghul while the female is called ghulah. A source identified the Arabic ghoul as a female creature who is sometimes called Mother Ghoul or a relational term such as Aunt Ghoul. She is portrayed in many tales luring hapless characters, who are usually men, into her home where she can eat them.

Some state that a ghoul is a desert-dwelling, shape-shifting demon that can assume the guise of an animal, especially a hyena. It lures unwary people into the desert wastes or abandoned places to slay and devour them. The creature also preys on young children, drinks blood, steals coins, and eats the dead, then taking the form of the person most recently eaten.

So the word is from the Arabic. Interesting.

NOTE: Yesterday I read this sad story of an elderly Israeli couple slain by terrorists on October 7. Their only son lived, and relates the story. RIP.

ADDENDUM:

The body of another hostage has been found during the same operation and just identified. The story is similar; he was killed on October 7 and his body taken to Gaza. He was Ron Benjamin, 53:

Benjamin had set out the morning of Hamas’ harrowing attack for a bike ride with friends near Kibbutz Be’eri, but turned around after hearing sirens, The Times of Israel reported.

He was last heard from at 7:30 a.m. on Oct. 7, when he called one of his daughters and left a voicemail that he was going home to Rehovot due to the volley of rockets, the outlet reported.

The article also adds this detail about Shani Louk – and perhaps it is true of the other bodies as well:

Louk’s father, Nissim Louk, said his daughter’s body had been discovered in a cool, deep tunnel and was still in excellent condition when it was brought home.

Hamas knew these people were dead but they allowed the families to believe they were still alive, the better to torment the relatives and encourage them to pressure the Israeli government to make concessions. It was also understand that a Rafah operation by the IDF would probably lead to the finding of some hostages, dead or alive. But the whole world, including Biden and company, seems to have wanted to protect Rafah.

Trump, the New York jury, and New York City’s voters

The New Neo Posted on by

In yesterday’s thread on the Trump trial, commenter “Nonapod” observed:

I confess that I find it somewhat mystifying that we can’t count on the integrity and respect for the law of at least 1 out of 12 NYC Democrats. Trump derangement must be severely debilitating among such people, overriding most rational thought.

My response is that, if it was just the population of NY we’re talking about, it actually would be likely that someone on that jury would vote to acquit Trump. After all, in 2020 in Manhattan (where the trial is taking place) the vote for Trump was 14.5%. That’s approximately one in seven.

But if it were to include all of New York, the news would be even more hopeful for Trump. In other boroughs, the tally for Trump in 2020 was better: 17% for Trump in the Bronx, 25% for Trump in Brooklyn, 30% for Trump in Queens, and Trump won Staten Island (New York’s only Republican borough) 61.6% to 37.6%.

And those are Trump supporters in New York, people who actually voted for him and not just people who might be persuaded to not convict him in a kangaroo court trial.

The problem, however, is that the jury is not necessarily representative even of Manhattan, where one in seven people support Trump. It consists of a very carefully selected group of people, and the sample is small. The process of jury selection is a good part of the tactics of winning a trial. I know next to nothing about who these people are, but I know they have been carefully selected. Who knows how it will go? But I do know that if the jury were truly representative of the Manhattan population (and certainly of the NYC population as a whole), Trump would get at least a hung jury.

It has also been my experience that most people’s opinions of a trial are heavily influenced by their political positions, especially in a political trial. That is true of both left and right, although I believe that it’s even more common on the left, because leftists openly state that the ends justify the means and that law is a purely political power play.

Why write so often about Israel and Palestine?

The New Neo Posted on by

It seems that lately I’ve been writing a great deal about three subjects: Israel/Palestine, the current Trump trial in New York, and the 2024 election. Plenty of other important things are happening – and I do write about them. But my focus has been on those three.

The latter two obviously affect us all. But what about Israel/Palestine? Why so much about that? I often see the sentiment from commenters on blogs on the right (not on this one, however) to the effect of: who cares? Let them duke it out. It doesn’t affect me at all.

My answer is a variation of the old “you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” There’s plenty in the Middle East conflict that affects us all and will continue to affect us all: the clash between left and right, the transformation of our universities into indoctrination factories, the leftist bias of the press, lessons in history and propaganda, and the aims of Islamic radicals to take over the Western world (yes; it is their aim, and they state it quite clearly). In furtherance of that aim they are more than willing to kill not just the Israelis, not just the Jews, but anyone who gets in their way. There’s also the revelation of the foreign policy aims of the Obama/Biden coalition.

Then there are the moral issues. This is a war in which Israel our ally, and the most Western nation in the Middle East, was cruelly and barbarically attacked during a ceasefire by a group that states its desire to do it again and again and again until Israeli and the Israelis are destroyed. The Israelis are fighting a necessary defensive war. And it’s no accident that their enemies consider Israel to be the Little Satan and the US the Great Satan:

The epithet was coined by Iranian religious leader Ruhollah Khomeini, who used it in a speech on 5 November 1979, one day after the onset of the Iran hostage crisis. In the speech, he condemned the United States as an imperialist power that sponsored corruption throughout the world.

Note Khomeini’s clever use of terms that would appeal to Western leftists: the US as an “imperialist” power. Of course, in the familiar Orwellian inversion of language, Islam is a hugely imperialist movement and has been since its founding, and Iran has taken over many countries in the Middle East and influences and promotes the war against Israel and the spread of terrorism as well as anti-Israel, anti-Jewish, anti-American, and anti-Western propaganda.

Note also that one of the first actions of the Islamic rulers of Iran after the 1979 revolution was to take Americans hostage.

Michael Cohen is the world’s worst witness. Will it matter?

The New Neo Posted on by

Everything depends on whether there is anyone of integrity on the jury. All it would take would be one person, and that person would have to be strong enough to resist extreme pressure and even threats. I wouldn’t count on it, although it’s possible.

The NY case against Trump is bogus in so many ways, many of which have been discussed on this blog and all of which have been touched on elsewhere. No need to recap them at the moment. But the utterly contemptible corruption of the prosecution’s star witness, Michael Cohen, grows more apparent every day – and it was amply apparent to begin with.

Yesterday I wrote about how even Anderson Cooper was remarking on it. But today I saw this series of other videos featuring equally gobsmacked TV newspeople noting how poorly Cohen had performed and had well Trump’s attorney had shown him to be a vengeful former employee who had been lying constantly, and lying on the stand as well.

You might want to follow that link and take a look at the videos there. But here’s an especially colorful one:

And here’s Jonathan Turley, speaking about Cohen even before yesterday’s dramatic testimony on the stand:

So, what does it all mean? Nothing, as I said, unless there’s at least one juror with integrity and courage. If the judge had any integrity and courage, this case would be decided for Trump in a directed verdict, because no evidence has been produced that could reasonably convict him. But I feel pretty safe in saying that this judge will not do that. If the prosecutors had any integrity (I know; don’t ask for something impossible) this case would never have been brought in the first place. But it was, and here we are.

They didn’t televise this trial despite the fact that it would have gotten very high ratings, because they knew how terrible it would look. They knew it would expose the hollowness of the case against Trump and the duplicity of the prosecutors and the witnesses against him. Too many people watching it might be shocked enough to vote for Trump when they saw for themselves, up close and personal, just how corrupt these people are, and how completely and utterly unprincipled the whole thing is.

So they thought they’d filter it for the public through the MSM and could count on the jury to convict, and although a conviction would probably be reversed that didn’t matter because it would happen after the election. But what they didn’t quite bargain for was that Cohen would be so awful that even the MSM would notice and some sort of vestigial reporting instinct would kick in for some people, at least for a day.

I doubt that instinct will last any longer than that.

I would dearly love to see a video of what happened in that courtroom yesterday. But we’ll probably never get to see it, and I doubt it even was allowed to be filmed. But apparently there was a real Perry Mason moment, the type of drama that was common on the TV series but actually is rare in real life.

It is also informative to listen to Costello, who was Michael Cohen’s attorney (the one referenced by Turley in the above clip). Costello has his own tale to tell of Cohen’s motives and statements:

NOTE: Court is not in session today because they allowed Trump to attend his son Barron’s high school graduation. How very kind of them.

As it dawns on Anderson Cooper that Michael Cohen might not be the most reliable witness in the world

The New Neo Posted on by

How bad must it be for Anderson Cooper to admit that Michael Cohen appears to be a liar?

Of course, the jury might not care, because they hate Trump so much. And Cooper tries to limit the idea of Cohen as a liar to just this little itty bitty bit:

It was another bad day for the case against Donald Trump after the former president’s legal team absolutely destroyed Michael Cohen. But don’t take my word for it. Trump’s lawyer, Todd Blanche, was so effective at boxing Cohen in on his lies that he left CNN’s Anderson Cooper absolutely stunned.

“But the last 20 minutes of court today right before the lunch break, it was incredible,” he admitted. “Elie Honig on my program last night had talked about, on a cross-examination, lawyers want to kind of put the witness in a — build a box around the witness and then slam it shut. That’s what Todd Blanche did to Michael Cohen.” …

“I think it’s devastating,” Cooper added later. “I mean, for Michael Cohen’s credibility on this, I mean, on this one particular topic.” [The topic was a certain phone call in which text messages both before and after the phone call contradicted Cohen’s testimony about the call itself.]

[Cooper] added, “Yes, I think, if I was a juror in this case, watching that, I would think this guy’s making this up as he’s going along or he’s making this particular story up.”

This particular story.

Actually, you could say about Cohen more or less what Mary McCarthy said about Lillian Hellman: every word he says is a lie, including “and” and “the.”

The Netherlands’ government moves further towards supporting Israel

The New Neo Posted on by

Recently:

In an advanced draft for a coalition agreement between four right-wing Dutch political factions, the partners agreed to look for the “appropriate time” for moving the embassy of the Netherlands to Jerusalem.

The draft agreement published Thursday morning follows the November general elections in the Netherlands, in which the pro-Israel, far-right Party for Freedom of Geert Wilders received the highest share of the vote with 37 seats out of 150 in the Dutch lower house.

The draft states that research will be conducted into “the appropriate time in which the move of the embassy to Jerusalem can occur.”

If the Netherlands does follow through, it will be the sixth country to open an embassy in Jerusalem, following Papua New Guinea, Kosovo, Honduras, Guatemala and the US.

This was started by Trump, of course, when he announced such a move for the US.

There’s also this:

One clause on immigration in the draft agreement states that the Holocaust will be included in the integration exam, which anyone seeking Dutch citizenship needs to pass.

Another said Dutch asylum and immigration protocols would be reviewed. “Concrete steps will be taken towards the strictest ever entry rules for asylum and the most comprehensive ever package to control migration,” the agreement said.

Interesting. Elections have consequences.

NOTE: If I were to ask people, “What do The Netherlands, Papua New Guinea, Kosovo, Honduras, Guatemala, and the US have in common?” I doubt whether anyone but those reading this post could answer the question.

King Charles’ portrait: the Red King or the King of Hearts and Butterflies?

The New Neo Posted on by

My goodness. Take a look at Charles’ portrait (copying it seems to be blocked, but if you click on the link you can view it):

The bold portrait, painted by British artist Jonathan Yeo, is the first official portrait of the 75-year-old king since his May 2023 coronation. It was unveiled inside Buckingham Palace on May 14.

The portrait, drenched in the color red, depicts Charles wearing the red military uniform of the Welsh Guards, as he sits with his hand on his sword, amid a vibrant red background. A monarch butterfly hovers over the king’s right shoulder.

Everything looks red except the king’s face, and that is painted realistically and showing every line and sag.

The artist says:

… [M]uch like the butterfly I’ve painted hovering over his shoulder, this portrait has evolved as the subject’s role in our public life has transformed. I do my best to capture the life experiences and humanity etched into any individual sitter’s face, and I hope that is what I have achieved in this portrait.

Count it achieved.

I actually think if the artist had painted the rest of the portrait in that same style and with realistic colors, it would have been fine. But then it wouldn’t have been talked about so much. It would have have in line with tradition – although I suppose that tradition dictates a more flattering and softening look, particularly for the face.

I remember Charles as a little boy, when I was a little girl. ‘Nuff said.

The overwhelming redness of the painting gives the whole thing an otherworldly and creepy air. It also reminds me of Lewis Carrol’s queens. There’s the Red Queen (the metaphor being a game of chess):

And the Queen of Hearts (the metaphor being a card game):