Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) RIP, neocon extraordinaire Norman Podhoretz, dead at 95. Here’s his son’s loving tribute.

(2) The GOP health plan passes in the House. The claim is that it lowers premiums by 11%. Will it pass the Senate? And if so, will it actually do what the GOP says it will?

(3) The police have seemed clueless in the investigation of the killings at Brown. But there may be a breakthrough, or at least the possibility of a breakthrough, because the police supposedly have found DNA evidence on shell casings.

(4) Trump wraps up the year by telling the nation of his accomplishments in his second term so far. I would think they wouldn’t need reminding, but people are often very “what have you done for me lately, like in the last two minutes?” Just closing the border and putting some brakes on DEI is impressive, but the old blowhard has done a great deal more.

And there was good news on inflation.

It seems so very obvious to me that Trump has done so many good things in his second term, and the contrast with Biden couldn’t be greater. But if people don’t perceive this, it doesn’t matter.

(5) Israel claims that MIT’s nuclear scientist Nuno Loureiro was murdered by Iran:

Married father-of-three Nuno F.G. Loureiro, 47, was gunned down in the leafy Boston suburb of Brookline at 8.30pm on Monday by an unknown shooter who is still on the loose.

Loureiro specialized in nuclear science, engineering and physics and he had previously spoken out in favor of Israel, a mortal enemy of Iran.

Now, Israeli officials have said Iranian operatives targeted the leading nuclear fusion researcher, according to the Jerusalem Post.

It makes a certain amount of sense, unfortunately. Are many sleeper cells waking up?

(6) Remember Fulton County, 2020? See this:

Earlier this month, Fulton County admitted that approximately 315,000 early votes from the 2020 election were illegally certified but were nonetheless still included in the final results of that election.

The admission came during a Dec. 9 hearing before the Georgia State Election Board (SEB) stemming from a challenge filed by David Cross, a local election integrity activist. Cross filed a challenge with the SEB in March 2022. Cross alleged that Fulton County violated Georgia statute in the handling of advanced voting ahead of the November 2020 election, counting hundreds of thousands of votes even though polling workers failed to sign off on the vote tabulation “tapes” critical to the certification process.

And Fulton County admitted to it. …

“These signed tapes are the sole legal certification that the reported totals are authentic,” Cross told the SEB at the Dec. 9 hearing. “Fulton County produced zero signed tabulator tapes in early voting.” …

“These are not clerical errors. They are catastrophic breaks in chain of custody and certification,” Cross said.

“Because no tape was ever legally certified, Fulton County had no lawful authority to certify its advanced voting results to the secretary of state. Yet it did,” Cross said. “And Secretary Raffensperger accepted and folded those uncertified numbers into Georgia’s official total without questioning them.”

But everything in that election was just fine, peachy-keen, A-ok.

(7) This article on DEI and how it has harmed white male millennials has gone viral.

Aiding Israel aids the US

The New Neo Posted on by

Tucker Carlson doesn’t see it (no surprise there):

Carlson did not merely argue that the Gulf states matter more. He went further, portraying Israel itself as a net burden on the United States. He described Israel as “a completely insignificant country,” with “no resources” and a population of just nine million, arguing that it has relevance only because Washington provides it with a security guarantee. Carlson claimed the US has “no overriding strategic interest” in Israel and dismissed the relationship in blunt terms: “What are we getting out of this? Nothing. It’s only cost.”

This is a striking assertion about a state that has just signed a $32 billion gas deal with Egypt, sits atop vast offshore energy reserves, and possesses one of the most formidable concentrations of human capital on the planet as a global high-tech and defence power.

By the very structure of the agreement (between the US and Israel), most of the money returns to American industry through the procurement of US equipment and weapons. But beyond that, the true value of the assistance is not merely economic. Israel has turned the assistance into an engine of operational development, field testing, and technological upgrading whose impact extends far beyond the Middle East. Israel is not merely a “customer” of American weapons systems. It is a living laboratory, under real conditions, for the American military. …

In Israeli military culture, no foreign equipment remains foreign. Every platform undergoes “sovereign integration” – modification, adaptation, and transformation into a fully Israeli system. The same is true of the F-35. When Israel was required to prepare the aircraft for a strike scenario against Iran – a distance of approximately 1,700 kilometres – it encountered a critical limitation: range. The solution did not come from the United States but from Israel. Unique external fuel tanks were developed, attached to the sides of the aircraft’s fuselage, enabling extended range without the use of refuelling aircraft. This is precisely the solution that Washington itself needs in much more distant theatres – foremost among them China.

Israel also added an advanced layer of electronic warfare to the aircraft, focused on detecting and disrupting the Russian S-300 and S-400 air defense systems. As a result, Israeli aircraft were able, for the first time, to conduct deep-penetration missions without the enemy systems even detecting that they had entered hostile airspace. this capability was a very important component of the strike. The Chinese air defense systems are indeed different from the Russian ones, but the engineering similarities between them render the Israeli lesson relevant to the Pacific theatre as well.

Another upgrade implemented by Israel concerns the ability to carry heavy external ordnance.

This is by no means the first time I’ve read of the help Israel gives to our military, and there’s much more where that came from. It’s basic information, readily available. Carlson is almost certainly aware of it, but he’s become a mendacious Israel-hater (and Jew-hater, which we can infer from his nasty obsession and lies). Perhaps he should register as a lobbyist for Qatar.

The problem is that there is general public ignorance on this score, and Carlson plays on that ignorance and takes advantage of it. Ignorance is fertile ground for sowing lies, not just in the arena of Israel but in general.

A while back I watched a VDH video in which he spoke on the subject of the benefits to the US of its relationship with Israel in terms of aid and military intelligence. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find that video at the moment. So this will have to do:

Susie Wiles, naif?

The New Neo Posted on by

Susie Wiles is supposed to be a savvy and hyper-knowledgeable political advisor. And yet she gave an interview to Vanity Fair and apparently thought the periodical would treat her – fairly? What planet does she live on?:

Wiles is featured in a VF cover article by Chris Whipple, after the White House gave the outlet access to the West Wing for the better part of the year. In the piece, the Chief of Staff opens up about the last 11 months on the job under Trump at each “moment of crisis.”

Most of the article is very negative, down to even the awful photos that were selected, featuring people like Wiles, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Deputy chief of Staff Stephen Miller, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and deputy chief of Staff Dan Scavino. Miller, Scavino and Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair are even described as the “pit bulls.”

Wiles herself wrote on X:

The article published early this morning is a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history.

Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story. I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team.

The truth is the Trump White House has already accomplished more in eleven months than any other President has accomplished in eight years and that is due to the unmatched leadership and vision of President Trump, for whom I have been honored to work for the better part of a decade.

I’m sorry, but what on earth did Wiles think would happen? I am actually very perplexed by this. Either the periodical distorted what she said in order to make the administration look bad, or she really did say things that made the administration look bad. Why the own goal?

There was no lack of heroes at Bondi Beach. Unfortunately, some of them are now dead.

The New Neo Posted on by

This is one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve ever seen. There was a couple at Bondi Beach who saw one of the gunmen early on, realized the danger, and tried to thwart him. This couple – Boris and Sofia Gurman – were not young; they were 69 and 61 years old. And yet Boris somehow managed to wrest away the gun from one of the terrorists. Here’s the story (there are some still photos at the link):

The dramatic dashcam footage shows Boris courageously tackling the terrorist, Sajid Akram [the 50-year-old father], on the street and wrestling away the gun as Sofia runs to help.

Boris is then filmed pointing the rifle at the mass killer in a frantic attempt to make him retreat — only for the terrorist to grab another rifle.

The couple, who lived in Bondi and had been married 34 years, were ultimately executed at close range.

A separate drone video showed the couple tragically clutching each other where they died.

The latter photo is also at the link.

When I read that story, many things came to mind. The first is their incredible heroism, and the horrific ending as well as the tremendously touching photo. The second was the thought: if only they’d had a weapon! The third was: wait a minute, they did have a weapon and – much like another hero that day, Ahmed al Ahmed – they used it only to threaten the terrorist rather than shoot him. Unlike Ahmed, who only ended up wounded, they ended up dead.

I don’t know why they didn’t use the gun. Perhaps neither had ever fired one before and didn’t really know what to do. A worse possibility is that perhaps they thought that by firing, they’d be the ones arrested or even killed by police. They almost certainly only had at most a few seconds to think what to do, and I’m not faulting them in the least. I’m just both sad and angry that it came to this.

At first I thought maybe neither fired the gun at the terrorist because he hadn’t yet shot anyone and they weren’t sure how dangerous he was, but I learned from this article that that was not the case:

“My dashcam accidentally captured this shocking scene,” the user who posted the video, who told NBC News she wanted to go by the name Jenny, said in the caption to her post.

“One terrorist on the bridge fired the first shot, then the second, then the third. Meanwhile, the other terrorist had just gotten out of the car when an elderly man by the roadside didn’t run away. Instead, he charged toward danger, fought desperately to grab the gun, and held on tightly! Watching through the lens as the old man was finally shot and fell to the ground — my heart was torn apart,” she said.

From their first names, it seemed to me that this couple had probably emigrated to Australia, and it turns out they were Jewish and had come from Russia.

Another person who tried to fight was killed as well:

Reuven Morrison, 62, was killed when he physically confronted one of the gunmen, according to his daughter, Sheina Gutnick.

“He managed to throw bricks at the terrorist,” she told CBS News.

Also not a young person.

There were many civilian heroes at Bondi Beach that day. All of them were extraordinarily brave, but unfortunately all of them were unarmed. RIP.

Fiddling with DC crime statistics

The New Neo Posted on by

The police chief of Washington DC recently resigned. She’s come under suspicion of falsifying crime data in DC – or rather, ordering her underlings to do it, in order to make the situation look better than it actually was.

Remember when many people on the left said it was an outrage that Trump sent the National Guard to the city to restore order? Well:

The House Oversight Republicans released a preliminary report accusing Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) Chief Pamela A. Smith of manipulating crime data to make the city appear safer.

Smith resigned last week, citing “family, and also being more present with loved ones” after two years.

Sure thing.

More:

The Committee interviewed commanders:

“The Committee’s ongoing investigation has heard testimonies from commanders that there are clear pressures placed on MPD personnel to lower the classifications of crime to present to the public the perception of low crime in the District. Specifically, there was an emphasis on the daily crime report (DCR), a public-facing dataset that only includes nine categories of felony offenses, above all other crimes discussed within the highest levels of the MPD. Chief Smith, the commanders testified, was so preoccupied with the statistics of the select crimes that were made public that she incentivized her subordinates to lower those crimes by whatever means necessary.”

By whatever means necessary.

One of the results of all this was that many experienced police left, morale had become so low.

And yes, Smith was not only a DEI hire (second female head and first black female head) but a DEI administrator:

Smith joined the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia (MPD) in May 2022 as the chief equity officer, assigned to the executive office of the chief of police. She led the department’s efforts on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). She developed an organizational channel for department-wide accountability by providing strategic advice to the MPD chief of police, executive leadership, and senior management officials within the department. In addition to her DEI focus, she supervised the directorates for employee well-being and support unit and equal employment opportunity office.

A side note of possible interest is that she is an ordained Baptist minister.

As far as I can see, Smith’s Wiki page says absolutely nothing about her manipulation of statistics – or even about accusations that she manipulated statistics.

Reflections on the Reiner family tragedy

The New Neo Posted on by

Probably all of us know a family or families where lives have been upended by drug addiction – probably not as dramatically as the Reiners’ lives were, where the endpoint was apparently matricide and patricide – but badly enough, and with suffering enough. Sometimes it’s as it was with one old friend of mine who struggled for decades with the addiction of a beloved child and finally ended up winning the battle, for now. But only for now. As they say, one step at a time. Sometimes, as with a relative of mine to whom I’m not especially close, that same struggle was sadly lost with the death of that child from drugs.

In all the cases I know, the family tried almost everything under the sun to help that child get free: countless programs, rehabs, tough love, not-so-tough love, logical consequences such as jail time, all sorts of therapy, you name it. I think it’s easy, so very easy, to stand on the sidelines and give advice or judgment as to why it didn’t work out: I would have done this; I would have done that. Maybe it even worked for your child when you did it, but that doesn’t mean it would have worked for that other child.

I think it’s wrong to imagine we can say what causes a child – or anyone, for that matter – to become addicted to drugs, to spiral down and down and down, to come up again only to spiral down again, and to ultimately succumb to the darkest of forces or to finally emerge in the light.

I know that when I read the story of the Reiner parents’ attempts to help their son Nick, I felt I recognized heroic efforts to save him. It wasn’t enough, and maybe nothing would have been enough. Maybe he was a sort of sociopath from the start. Maybe not. Maybe family fame had something to do with it. Maybe not. I only know enough to say that I don’t know.

The survivors – the Reiners’ biological daughter and other son, as well as their adopted daughter (Reiner’s ex-wife Penny Marshall’s child from another marriage) – will almost certainly have a very tough road ahead of them, and I hope they get whatever help they need. As for the alleged murderer, their son Nick, he may finally kick his habit while incarcerated. Perhaps then the full weight of what he’s done will sink in. Would it be worse for him to get the death penalty, or to have to live with the knowledge?

A terrible tragedy.

Who is Mustapha Kharbouch and why are his pages being wiped?

The New Neo Posted on by

Mustapha Kharbouch is a student at Brown, but suddenly his social media pages and other articles about him are disappearing and people are speculating:

Social media users Tuesday claimed that a Brown University social media footprints were getting deleted as the manhunt for the shooter entered the fourth day, The law enforcement did not release the name of any suspect but social media users pointed out that the university removed the profile page of a student named Mustapha Kharbouch.

The page is alleged to have indicated, among other things, that “Mustapha is believed to be a first-year student studying International & Public Affairs” and that “He is a third generation Palestinian refugee born and raised in Lebanon.”

Hey, and I’m a third-generation Belarusian refugee. After all, my paternal grandparents were born in that benighted country and presciently left it well over a hundred years ago, for which I would like to heartily thank them.

“Third-generation refugee” is an oxymoron. There are no third-generation refugees, except for the propaganda wizards called the Palestinians.

Until something further is announced, I’m going to regard this Mustapha Kharbouch thing as a mere rumor. I put it up as a post because the “third generation refugee” phrase caught my attention.

Newsom and fraud in California

The New Neo Posted on by

Anyone surprised?:

Someone needs to make this make sense

“Tim Walz is getting destroyed for a billion dollar fraud scandal, but nobody’s talking about California

– Tim Walz lost only a billion dollars. Federal investigation, people going to prison

– Gavin Newsom, $32 billion in unemployment fraud, $13 billion in Medi-Cal, $6 billion in food stamps. That’s over $50 billion gone

– Tim Walz is facing house oversight, treasuries investigating terrorist ties

– Gavin Newsom, no investigation, no oversight, no consequences.

One party rule, zero accountability.

Well, both states have Democrat rule. But Walz is facing some accountability only because he is a political liability to the Democrats, not because of the fraud itself although that’s the ostensible reason. Walz is an odd bird who just isn’t politically viable outside of Minnesota, and probably not now even in Minnesota.

Newsom is another story, for the simple reason that he’s much better-looking and much smoother. He is considered the leading 2028 Democrat candidate for president (or certainly one of them), not for any actual accomplishments but for those two reasons: looks and smoothness.

More on the Bondi Beach shooters, heroes, and victims

The New Neo Posted on by

More facts emerge:

[The younger] Akram is an Australian-born citizen, while his 50-year-old father arrived in the country in 1998 on a student visa, which later transitioned to a partner visa in 2001, Australia’s Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke told reporters Monday.

Since then, the gun-wielding father — who was killed at the scene during a shootout with police — had made three trips abroad, returning each time on a resident return visa, Burke said.

The guns were legally owned. As suspected, there was an excuse, because gun ownership in Australia is very strictly regulated:

The father, who was killed at the scene during a shootout with police, was part of a “gun club” and held a recreational hunting license for over a decade, officials said.

“So the firearms license was to be for a recreational hunting license. There are two types of hunting license: the ability to hunt on a property or also as part of a hunting club — so a gun club. He was a member of a gun club and was entitled by nature of the firearms act to have a firearms license issued.”

Sajid has had his license since 2015, allowing him to legally own the “long arms that he had” as registered guns, Lanyon added.

“In terms of a firearms license, the firearms registry conducts a thorough examination of all applications to ensure a person is fit and proper to hold a firearms license,” Lanyon noted.

Of course, Australia plans to further restrict guns as a result. Why don’t they monitor what goes on in mosques instead? Too “Islamophobic” I suppose. And what’s a “watch list” – which at least one of the two was supposedly on – if not something to monitor?

In this case, the father had lived in Australia almost 30 years. I bet the pair were both radicalized within the last few years, or even since 10/7.

And the police – what gives? Completely unimpressive performance:

One of the survivors of the terror attack at a Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration said four police officers just “froze” during the 20-minute rampage on Sunday that killed 11.

Eyewitness Shmulik Scuri said he was with his family when the two suspects began firing at the crowd of worshippers from a nearby bridge.

“For 20 minutes. They shoot, shoot. Change magazines. And just shoot,” the witness told reporters. …

It wasn’t until a local good Samaritan, a local fruit seller, disarmed one of the terrorists that police appeared to return fire, taking out one of the shooters, video shows.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the police are taught that, because of draconian Aussie gun control, they will never face such a situation and won’t need training for it. On the other hand, I have read that two of the four police were targeted immediately by the gunmen, and wounded – although I also read that two others hid (possibly women?). There are still a lot of rumors swirling around, so it’s hard to know what to believe.

However, not only was there hero Ahmed al Ahmed who’s become well-known for disarming one of the shooters (and then being shot by another), but there was a second hero who tried to disarm the other shooter and was himself shot by police for his pains. You can find that story here. Granted, it’s not always easy to tell who’s who, but this guy apparently had his arms up when shot.

The saddest element of the whole thing are the victims. You can find some of their photos and stories here. Two rabbis, which indicates some careful aiming by the shooters. A ten-year-old girl, out enjoying the day with her family. An 87-year-old man who survived the Holocaust as a child. One thing that struck me but did not surprise me is the number of victims who had been born in other countries; Australia used to be a refuge for Jews. No more.

There are only about 120,000 Jews in Australia, and a great many came post-Holocaust. That means they represent less than a half a percent of the total population there. The Muslim population there is much larger, both for bad (the shooters) and good (the heroes): 3.2% in 2021 and probably more today, due to a high birthrate.

The Bondi Beach massacre is definitely an example of “globalize the intifada.” But it’s not new; not at all. I immediately thought of the 1994 bombing in Argentina, orchestrated by Iran (as Bondi may have been):

The AMIA bombing occurred on 18 July 1994 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and targeted the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA; transl.?”Argentine Israelite Mutual Association”), a Jewish Community Centre. Executed as a suicide attack, a bomb-laden van was driven into the AMIA building and subsequently detonated, killing 85 people and injuring over 300. To date, the bombing remains the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentine history. In 1994, Argentina was home to a Jewish community of 200,000, making it the largest in Latin America and the sixth-largest in the world outside of Israel. …

In 2024, an Argentine court ruled that Iran directed the attack, and that it was carried by Hezbollah. The ruling also characterized Iran as a terrorist state.

Argentina and Australia are far away from the Middle East. But even thirty years ago, jihadis were bent on globalizing the intifada, although back then it wasn’t a popular slogan on Western college campuses. Now it is.

[NOTE: I plan to write a post tomorrow on Australian gun control and its effects.]