The intricacies of Judge Engoron’s vindictive ruling on Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

Judge Engoron is quite creative in discovering ways to tie Trump into knots. It’s not just the verdict and the monetary award. There’s also this (emphasis mine):

But before any other court can review Engoron’s decision, Trump will have to pay hundreds of millions out of a portfolio based mainly on residential properties, commercial buildings, and resort holdings in New York City and around the world. …

“The amount he will have to put up will be in excess of $450 million, just to appeal,” a person familiar with the case told The Post.

In civil matters, it’s customary for judges to require up to 120% of a fine to be held in escrow while the case wends its way through the court system.

“The defense can propose a different amount to be held in escrow,” the source explained. “But the ultimate decision on that is up to the judge.”

Engoron’s ruling slapped a 9% interest charge on top of Trump’s fine, which will accrue daily until it’s paid.

Has there ever been a civil case with an award of such magnitude against an individual, brought by the government in which there were no damages of any sort? Apparently not. Also, of course, this case is an act of political vengeance.

More (emphasis mine):

And Trump will have to collect the money fast: he has just 30 days to come up with the cash, or to find a surety company to guarantee it for him – using some of his properties as collateral.

No bank that does business in New York is permitted to lend to the former president, under the terms of Engoron’s ruling.

“By imposing an astronomical award, Engoron made it difficult to even appeal his decision,” Turley said, calling it “one of the most insidious aspects of the ruling.”

“This award should shock the conscience of any objective jurist,” he said.

Indeed it should – and that’s why Turley, not a Trump supporter, expresses his own shock. He is pretty close to objective on this matter. But objective jurists are very hard to find these days.

This aspect of Engoron’s ruling is like Catch-22: you must do the impossible before you even get to appeal, and one of the things you want to appeal is the fact that the judge has made it nearly impossible to appeal. I wonder whether there is any procedural way around this. Could Trump somehow fast-track the case to SCOTUS, and would they accept it?

It’s a mad mad mad mad world: US is the lone vote in the UN Security Council against a ceasefire in the Israel/Palestine war

The New Neo Posted on by

My title is a riff on this 1963 movie. The film was a comedy, but what we’re seeing in the world these days isn’t funny. It’s a pathetic inversion in which we have a country with a history such as Algeria’s asking that Israel stop fighting the entities that invaded its borders, and murdered and tortured its civilian citizens when there already was a ceasefire in effect.

And to top it all off, the US was the only country voting against that resolution although the Security Council is made up of powers such as France and the UK, the latter of which at least abstained and therefore was only semi-cowardly and semi-destructive of Israel’s right to defend itself. Other Security Council permanent members (I should probably put “security” in scare quotes) are China and Russia; ’nuff said about that. The way the council is structured is that there are also ten non-permanent members elected by the General Assembly for two-year terms, and at the moment those members consist of Algeria, Ecuador, Guyana, Japan, Malta, Mozambique, Republic of Korea, Sierra Leone, Slovenia, and Switzerland. An interesting cast of characters, all of whom voted for the ceasefire.

More Orwellian inversion:

Before the vote, Algeria’s U.N. Ambassador Amar Bendjama, the Arab representative on the council, said: “This resolution stands for truth and humanity standing against the advocates for murder and hatred.”

But don’t think that the US was really standing up for Israel; such things are relative:

U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said the United States understands the council’s desire for urgent action but believes the resolution would “negatively impact” sensitive negotiations on a hostage deal and pause in fighting for at least six weeks. If that happens, “we can take the time to build a more enduring peace,” she said.

The proposed U.S. resolution, Thomas-Greenfield said, “would do what this text does not — pressure Hamas to take the hostage deal that is on the table and help secure a pause that allows humanitarian assistance to reach Palestinian civilians in desperate need.”

The US is asking for a temporary ceasefire in order to help obtain the release of the hostages. I assume that Thomas-Greenfield and her mentors in the Biden administration know this is unrealistic. Or perhaps they are in some sort of hazy pipe dream. Hamas has been adamant in stating that it has tons of demands before the hostages are released, and those demands include Israel’s surrender and Hamas staying in power and being rewarded. The Biden administration is continuing to try to walk a tightrope that offends neither of its flanks, Israel-haters and Israel-supporters.

The US resolution also strongly supports another pipe dream, the 2-state solution.

The rest of the nations have a range of motives for voting for the Algerian resolution or not opposing it. Among them are being overtly on the side of Hamas and wanting Israel’s destruction, just wishing Israel would go away and shut up, being secretly at least sort of pro-Israel but wanting to placate its own large Muslim population (that would be the UK, for example).

None of these votes on resolutions are anything but theater at the moment because the UN has no way to compel Israel to obey. Netanyahu has made it clear that the Israelis are uninterested in suicide and that the UN can go pound sand. But the UN has long been trying to isolate Israel among the nations of the world, and that campaign is well advanced.

The UN, of course, has anything but clean hands in this business. Not only did it participate in the original partition that established the nation of Israel – something I think was a good thing, but which I’m pretty sure the UN as an institution and most of its member nations regret – but it has been instrumental in fomenting the vicious hatred of the current population of Palestine towards Israel and Jews, through the tender ministrations of UNRWA and its murder-inciting propaganda.

The resolution rests on several fictions. The first is that such a vote matters. The second is that Hamas would abide by a ceasefire if one were implemented. But the third and most important is the idea of the suffering Palestinians as being separate from Hamas. But Hamas is not a rogue group; it is in charge of the government of Gaza and was elected by the people of Gaza, who strongly support it. The people of Gaza also strongly support the massacre of October 7. What’s more, the only reason they are at risk is that Hamas wishes them to be, by placing Hamas’ military in civilian and even humanitarian venues such as hospitals.

All of this is ignored by the UN and so many of its member countries, even those Western ones that should know better – because it is inconvenient (and depressing, actually) to think how dire the situation is and how difficult it would be to fix it. Better to pretend, and blame Israel.

Presidents’ Day poetry

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Today is Presidents’ Day, and this is a repeat of a previous post.]

I’m not that old, but pedagogical practices in my youth seem absolutely archaic compared to whatever passes for education these days. For starters, we had Washington’s Birthday and Lincoln’s Birthday, and they were on their actual real birthdays: Lincoln on February 12, and Washington on February 22.

Two days off! But they didn’t necessarily fall on Mondays; they fell whenever they fell, and sometimes – alas – they fell on a Saturday or a Sunday.

We also had to memorize terrible patriotic poetry back then, and lots of it. When I say “terrible” I’m not referring to its patriotism, I mean that it just wasn’t very good poetry. I suppose kids weren’t supposed to care about that aspect of it. Also, in those days I was very quick at memorizing poetry and so those early poems have tended to stick. Therefore I have a relatively large load of memorized doggerel to draw on.

One of those poems was about George Washington. To give you an idea of the flavor of what I’m talking about, it started this way: “Only a baby, fair and small…” and then filled the reader in on all the stages of Washington’s life, verse by verse. I had never looked it up online and was skeptical that it could be found, but voila! Here it is; isn’t the internet great?

And I now present it to you as an example of what the New York City schoolchild used to have to memorize and recite. I seem to recall this was in fifth grade:

Only a baby, fair and small,
Like many another baby son,
Whose smiles and tears came swift at call,
Who ate and slept and grew – that’s all,
The infant Washington.

I’ll let you go to the site and see it for yourself. The next verse is for the schoolboy Washington, then we have the lad Washington, then finally man/patriot and a lot of generalities with the only specifics being “surveyor, general, president.” Why so much emphasis on Washington’s boyhood I don’t know; maybe to go with the cherry tree story. But still, at least we were taught to think highly of Washington.

And Lincoln had a poem for memorization, too. It was a better effort than the Washington one, I think, although still not very good and rather creepy at that. I see now that the poem was by Rosemary Benet, apparently the wife of Stephen Vincent Benet.

I have no idea why the poem they had us memorize about Lincoln was not about his accomplishments at all, but rather about the mother who died when he was nine years old. In the poem, she comes back as a ghost and inquires about him. But here it is:

If Nancy Hanks
Came back as a ghost,
Seeking news
Of what she loved most,
She’d ask first
“Where’s my son?
What’s happened to Abe?
What’s he done?”

“Poor little Abe,
Left all alone.
Except for Tom,
Who’s a rolling stone;
He was only nine,
The year I died.
I remember still
How hard he cried.”

“Scraping along
In a little shack,
With hardly a shirt
To cover his back,
And a prairie wind
To blow him down,
Or pinching times
If he went to town.”

“You wouldn’t know
About my son?
Did he grow tall?
Did he have fun?
Did he learn to read?
Did he get to town?
Do you know his name?
Did he get on?”

The urge that rose in me was to shout, “Yes, YES, don’t you know?” into the void.

Instead of that one, we might have been asked to memorize this poem – or at least the very last part of it, which I’ve always liked:

And when he fell in whirlwind, he went down
As when a lordly cedar, green with boughs,
Goes down with a great shout upon the hills,
And leaves a lonesome place against the sky.

Or what about this old chestnut by Walt Whitman? Schmaltzy, but it still gives me a little shiver when I read it:

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

Netanyahu channels Churchill and says Israel will “finish the job”

The New Neo Posted on by

Fortunately, Netanyahu et al in Israel aren’t listening to anyone who tells them it’s time to lose:

Addressing American Jewish leaders Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued that the Israeli army was going to unprecedented lengths to protect civilians in Gaza during the war with Hamas, while insisting: “We have to finish the job.”

Speaking before the annual meeting of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in Jerusalem, Netanyahu blasted South Africa and Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza.

The prime minister lambasted Lula for comments he had made earlier on Sunday, in which he compared Israel to the Nazis, saying the only historical equivalent to events in Gaza was “when Hitler decided to kill the Jews.”

“He should be ashamed of himself,” Netanyahu said to applause.

One of the many many problems we have today is that people such as Lula are not only not ashamed of saying such a heinous thing; they are proud of saying it.

More:

Netanyahu promised that none of the accusations would stop Israel’s offensive against the Gaza terror group, pledging “total victory against [Hamas] savages,”

“When we set out to do this, even our best friends said to us, ‘It can’t be done,’” …

One thing Israel cannot agree to is an international diktat that would… force a Palestinian state on Israel after the horrors of October 7,” he said, insisting the Israeli people were united around this. Netanyahu called on the Conference of Presidents to adopt the same resolution his cabinet passed earlier in the day against any unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state.

Speaking before Netanyahu, US Ambassador Jack Lew sought to downplay talk that the US could recognize a Palestinian state unilaterally.

“We have never said there should be a unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state,” says Lew.

Instead, he called for an “over-the-horizon process that includes a vision for a demilitarized Palestinian state.

“Now is a moment in time when there is a real possibility that by engaging in normalization and negotiations with Saudi Arabia” along with reforms in the Palestinian Authority, “there can be a demilitarized Palestinian state. But Israel will have to make that choice,” Lew said.

That’s the tightrope on which the Biden administration is walking. The MSM keeps saying that the administration wants a Palestinian state and that Israel won’t agree, but Lew is saying something more – nuanced. The administration wants to throw a fish to all the Israel-hating and Jew-hating leftists, of whom there are many, while still keeping Democrats who support Israel in the Democrat camp. To do, they must express unrealistic thoughts such as “reforms in the Palestinian Authority.”

But the PA doesn’t want to reform and, more importantly, the Palestinians don’t want it to reform. They want Israel gone and Israelis (and Jews in general, for many of them) dead. You don’t “reform” that overnight, nor do you do it by talking. You do it by winning a war and then totally revamping an educational system that has marinated generations in the worst sort of murderous hate, backed by religious beliefs as well. Underestimate the task and you are asking for defeat.

Netanyahu’s language in the speech reminded me – a bit – of Churchill’s “give us the tools and we will finish the job.” The Israelis also need to start making more of their own “tools,” of course.

Churchill was addressing President Roosevelt in 1941 but prior to the US’s entry into the war:

Here is the answer which I will give to President Roosevelt: Put your confidence in us. Give us your faith and your blessing, and, under Providence, all will be well.

We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle, nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.

Right before that, Churchill quoted Longfellow, who had been quoted by Roosevelt in a letter to the British leader:

The other day, President Roosevelt gave his opponent in the late Presidential Election [Mr. Wendell Willkie] a letter of introduction to me, and in it he wrote out a verse, in his own handwriting, from Longfellow, which he said, “applies to you people as it does to us.” Here is the verse:

…Sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

Indeed.

Trump, Milei, and Bukele: the populist three at CPAC

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an interesting trio (emphasis mine):

The “lion of the Andes,” Argentine President Javier Milei, is traveling to Washington next weekend to speak at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference convention and is the second populist Latin leader whom organizers will showcase to the thousands of Republican activists.

He will join El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele at the four-day event that is also expected to feature former President Donald Trump, who is making his record-setting 14th appearance.

The populist presidents won big with promises to reform their governments and bureaucracies dramatically. Bukele was reelected this month with an estimated 85% of the vote. Milei won in November with over 55% of the vote.

Both are also popular among American Hispanics, and their message to the CPAC is expected to be watched closely.

I’ve noticed that “populist” is often considered a dirty word. What makes a politician a populist? Well, he or she pits himself or herself as being for the people against the elites. Therefore it’s a given that most of the elites will frame such people as dangerous and evil. But there’s a wide variety of populist politicians in terms of their location on the left-to-right continuum as well as the statist-to-anarchist continuum.

More:

Although the term began as a self-designation, part of the confusion surrounding it stems from the fact that it has rarely been used in this way, with few political figures openly describing themselves as “populists”. …

In news media, the term “populism” has often been conflated with other concepts like demagoguery, and generally presented as something to be “feared and discredited”. It has often been applied to movements that are considered to be outside the political mainstream or a threat to democracy. The political scientists Yves Mény and Yves Surel noted that “populism” had become “a catchword, particularly in the media, to designate the newborn political or social movements which challenge the entrenched values, rules and institutions of democratic orthodoxy.” Typically, the term is used against others, often in a pejorative sense to discredit opponents.

Considering the way the “elites” have been behaving in recent years – the amount of control they want to dictate over people’s lives, and the transparency of their hypocrisy – it’s no wonder that populist politicians have been gaining in quite a few countries, and even winning in some. And it’s no wonder they are considered a huge threat by the non-populist powers.

The Trump real estate verdict and New York’s economy

The New Neo Posted on by

William Jacobson says get out of New York while you can:

Rough politics has given way to the political weaponization of prosecutors’ offices. It’s dangerous and sets a tone for the entire state that political opponents of those in power are living – and operating their businesses – on borrowed time.

I don’t care what you think of Donald Trump, it’s disgusting, unseemly, and in my view completely unethical for a prosecutor to run for office pledging not only to get a political opponent, but also his family. That’s what Letitia James did when she ran for New York Attorney General. She then fulfilled that campaign promise, weaponizing her massive and powerful office to scour through Trump’s businesses to find a crime, but she found none that could be prosecuted so she brought a civil lawsuit to ruin Trump and his family.

Nothing about this process was within norms of how prosecutors should conduct themselves and their offices. It may not be unprecedented, but it’s still clearly wrong.

I don’t think the civil lawsuit had merit and predict it will be reversed on appeal, at least as to the outlandish fines imposed, but that’s besides the point. The lawsuit never would have been brought if James had not targeted Trump with the full weight of the NY Attorney General’s office specifically because she didn’t like his politics.

Professor Jacobson goes on to criticize the Bragg case against Trump, also in New York, and just as absurd in its charges.

I don’t know enough about the NY appeals court to say whether I think either case will be reversed at the state level (if indeed the Bragg case results in a conviction, which has an excellent chance of occurring). But I do think that if either or both cases go all the way to SCOTUS they probably will be reversed. There’s no question in my mind that guilty verdicts in either should be reversed, and I would say that even if the targets were blue – which of course they wouldn’t be in New York.

I blame not just James, but the judges who don’t throw such cases out of court because they are based on tortuous and novel legal “theories” that are obvious ploys to get one person. Juries likewise, but they are somewhat less culpable because it’s the judges who control the courtroom and what is allowed as evidence (the real estate trial was not a jury trial).

Governor Hochul realizes the real estate verdict could have a chilling effect on doing business in the state, but she is reassuring on that:

Hochul joined John Catsimatidis on “The Cats Roundtable” on WABC 770 AM, where she was asked if other New York businesspeople should be worried that if “they can do that to the former president, they can do that to anybody.”

“I think that this is really an extraordinary, unusual circumstance that the law-abiding and rule-following New Yorkers who are business people have nothing to worry about, because they’re very different than Donald Trump and his behavior,” Hochul responded….

The governor provided reassurance to New York businesses after the ruling. “By and large, they are honest people and they’re not trying to hide their assets and they’re following the rules,” she said of the people who own and conduct business in the New York City area.

But of course business people, especially those who do business on a large scale as Trump did, know full well that what Trump did was standard practice, has never been prosecuted before without someone being harmed as a result, and are aware that the way in which they are “very different than Donald Trump and his behavior” has nothing to do with their business practices and everything to do with their politics.

How many big business people in New York are conservatives and/or Republicans, and politically active? I don’t know, but I think it’s probably a relatively small number. But maybe not. People are voting with their feet (as the old saying goes) and leaving the state, but this has the effect of making it more reliably blue than ever, and will lead to more prosecutors such as James, more judges such as Engoron, and more juries that will convict those with whom they disagree rather than those who are guilty. It becomes a more and more dangerous venue for conservatives the more blue it gets.

Not that I’m suggesting people should stay for that reason. But it is a result of their departure.

Does New York really care? If most people see this as a one-off that only affects Trump, the vast majority will continue to invest there. Also, remember this ten years ago from then-governor Cuomo?:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has caused a firestorm in the Empire State for declaring to a talk radio host that conservatives who are pro-life, pro-gun and anti-gay marriage “have no place in the State of New York.” Said Cuomo of conservatives: “Their problem is not me and the Democrats; their problem is themselves. Who are they? Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are…. Moderate republicans have a place in this state.”

Clearly, Cuomo didn’t think these people were needed and felt the state would be better off without them. It would certainly be even more monolithically blue, which would give the Democrats more and more power to do whatever they wished.

NOTE: I’ve noticed that some people believe the real estate case was a criminal one, because it was brought by the state. But actually it was a civil case; see this.

Jonathan Turley provides his opinion:

In laying the foundation for his sweeping decision against former President Donald Trump, Judge Arthur Engoron observed that “this is a venial sin, not a mortal sin.” Yet, at $355 million, one would think that Engoron had found Trump to be the source of Original Sin.

The judgment against Trump (and his family and associates) was met with a level of unrestrained celebration by many in New York that bordered on the indecent. Attorney General Letitia James declared not only that Trump would be barred from doing business in New York for three years, but that the damages would come to roughly $460 million once interest was included.

That makes the damages against Trump greater than the gross national product of some countries, including Micronesia. Yet the court admitted that not a single dollar was lost by the banks from these dealings. Indeed, witnesses testified that they wanted to do more business with Trump, who was described as a “whale” client with high yield business opportunities.

Undervaluing and overvaluing property is a longstanding practice in New York real estate. The forms submitted by the Trump organization cautioned the banks to do their own estimates and the loans were paid in full and on time. Yet, the New York law used by James is a curiosity because it does not actually require a victim. Indeed, everyone can make ample profits and still allow for an investigation into “repeated fraudulent or illegal acts.”

I see plenty of jubilation online, too. It doesn’t matter to the celebrants that the law has never been used this way before and that it is clearly a biased political prosecution. They want Trump to suffer and they don’t care how it happens, but giving it the color of law is the icing on the cake.

Having campaigned on bagging Trump on any basis, James turned the law into a virtual license to hunt him down along with his family and his associates.

Engoron proved the perfect judge for the case. The opinion itself seems almost cathartic for the jurist who struggled with Trump inside and outside of court. In the judgment, Engoron fulfilled Oscar Wilde’s rule that the only way to be rid of temptation is to yield to it. He ordered everything short of throwing Trump into a wood chipper.

Turley isn’t usually quite that colorful in his writing. But he is very incensed about this case and this verdict:

The size of the damages is grotesque and should shock the conscience of any judge on appeal.

That would require a conscience, however.

Turley believes this will hurt business in NY:

As James gleefully uses this law to break up a major New York corporation, it is hard to imagine many businesses rushing to the Big Apple. …

The one hope for New York businesses may be the U.S. Supreme Court. Despite the deference afforded to the states and their courts, the court has occasionally intervened to block excessive damage awards.

So according to Turley, it’s not even clear that SCOTUS would take the appeal. I think it would, but I certainly don’t know. And would it happen prior to the election? Ordinarily the case has to go through the state system first.

I think this part of Turley’s essay actually makes one of the most important points of all:

In electing openly partisan prosecutors such as James and District Attorney Alvin Bragg, voters have shown a preference for political prosecutions and investigations.

As John Adams wrote:

We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Enjoyment of movement in ballet

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Tom Grey” writes:

This enjoyment of dancing seems to be usually missing in a lot of ballet, where the dancers are working on making their difficult, unnatural, but lovely movements look easy, and their acting is so often to express emotions other than enjoyment of the dance.

That’s always been true of ballet, which as an art has a great many themes that are tragic, as in opera and theater. And yet even within those ballets, if you watch the full-length versions, there are quite a few passages that express a lighter quality and feature the joy of dance. For example, Act One of Giselle is an excellent example of that, in which the peasant girl Giselle – whose love of dance is a big part of her character – dances joyfully with the man she considers her boyfriend and also dances solo to express her happiness. Here’s an example of a solo:

And of course there are tons of “happy peasant” dances within such ballets. It’s true, however, that modern-day ballet dancers are not as good at conveying joy as previous ones once were. But some of them can still do it if it’s in the choreography. A great example is “Stars and Stripes” by Balanchine, choreographed in 1958. Here’s a performance from 1993 (not so recent, but still not SO long ago) that’s just plain fun, and the dancing is superb – particularly by Woetzel, but really by both soloists:

I wish I had a good video of Jerome Robbins’ Dances at a Gathering. It is a ballet that truly expresses the joy of dance, although more recent renditions can’t stand up to the original, in my opinion. It was choreographed in 1969, and I saw the original many times, live. It draw vaguely on folk dance motifs, and the music is Chopin. The 1969 cast danced it with a sense of abandon and risk that was thrilling. But here’s a little bit of a more recent production that (at least to me) fails to convey that excitement; the lifts (and what I call the “swoops” and “drags” and “swings” and “tosses”) are relatively restrained and tame. But it’s still beautiful:

And this pas de deux from the ballet remains glorious:

It is very very difficult to find any video of the original production. I know that the Lincoln Center Dance Library has it, but unless something has changed, you have to go there to watch it. Here is a video, however, that shows a few old and brief snippets of three parts of it, and only the first and third are of the original production; the second is from the 1980s, I believe. The video gives you a little bit of the flavor anyway, especially the third bit that features one of my favorite dancers of all time, Violette Verdy, doing a small part of her solo. Take it from me; she was transcendent in Dances At a Gathering. The role was choreographed on her, and no one else can come close:

It’s time to consider its versus it’s (again)

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Based on some comments in today’s open thread, I think it’s time to recycle this old post.]

It may be the most common error in English, and Spellcheck doesn’t catch it (although Spellcheck catches me when I attempt to spell Spellcheck “Spellcheck,” much preferring two words or a hyphenation to my single word).]

I try my best to pay attention to grammar and spelling, helped out by the always-handy Spellcheck (shh—don’t tell anyone, but I’m not the world’s best speller, unaided).

But Spellcheck has its limits. And one of them is the proper use of the word “its.” “Its,” that is, vs. “it’s.”

Have you ever noticed how often those two words are confused? Even though I try to pay close attention, I’m always catching myself messing up, and my bet is that, despite my best efforts, some of them have slipped by here. I see it all the time in the work of others, too (and no, I’m not going to do an exhaustive search and link to examples; you’ll just have to take my word for it. Or not.)

The error almost always goes in one direction only: the use of the apostrophe, as in “it’s,” for the possessive form of the word, when it should only be used for the contraction “it is.” Example (the one that sparked this rumination): originally, instead of “…see this from Reuters, not known for its right-wing bias” I had written “…see this from Reuters, not known for it’s right-wing bias.”

Why do we do this? Are we all just stupid! No, no, a thousand times no! We are actually very smart, because we are extrapolating a general rule to include this word, and that is the rule about forming possessives. Usually we do this by adding an apostrophe and an “s,” as you no doubt well know. But with the words “it’s” and “its,” we choose to reserve the apostrophe for the contraction, and that leaves the possessive hanging out there, alone and forlorn and apostropheless.

In this, however, we’re following another rule (are you still with me? or have I already bored you to tears?), that of the possessive personal pronoun: hers, his, theirs, ours, yours, for example. All lack apostrophes. But they’re not confusing, somehow—perhaps because, unlike “its,” they clearly refer to people, and are never given an apostrophe because they never become contractions.

Now, aren’t you glad I cleared that up? But I bet it won’t stop me from making the same mistake again—and again and again.

The social media war against Israel and the Jews

The New Neo Posted on by

For a long time I’ve been convinced that social media is a force that can be used to spread evil in a way that has never before been possible. Here’s some very strong evidence of that; please read the whole thing.

It describes the social media war against Israel and the Jews. Goebbels would weep with envy at what’s been made possible these days through the internet.

An excerpt:

… a huge campaign against us started on October 7th, while our people were still being slaughtered.”

According to Rolnik, the campaign involved exploiting the precise targeting tools of social media platforms to quickly incite large audiences in different places using customized propaganda. The propaganda was disseminated using a massive army of bots, avatars, and sock puppet accounts. …

When tens of thousands of sock puppets, avatars, and bots simultaneously initiate attacks on Israel, Zionism, and Jews, they can swiftly reach millions of people online. …

Often, the claims will be tailored to the group being targeted. For instance, Black Lives Matter activists were inundated with messages and videos depicting Israel as a “white” country oppressing those with darker skin. Climate activists, concerned about the future of the planet, were targeted with messages portraying Israel as a colonialist entity destroying the natural environment. Those focused on wealth inequality were bombarded by a campaign presenting Israelis as capitalist imperialists crushing the poor.

To Rolnick, the intelligence failures in the lead-up to October 7, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists streamed into southern Israel practically unchallenged, killing 1,200 people and taking hundreds hostage in an unprecedented paroxysm of violence, “pale in comparison” to Israel’s inability to grapple with the online campaign against it and against Jews around the world.

“It stands out as our most significant failure. Why? Because, in that arena, we are essentially irrelevant,” he said. “And you can see that even now, despite everything we know happened on October 7, Facebook, Google, and all these entities are still undermining us. It drives me crazy. What else needs to happen?”

I have also become convinced that, if Iran were to gain nuclear weapons and somehow use them to eliminate Israel – or if Israel were to be eliminated in some other way and its population murdered – a very significant number of people in the world would consider it okay, or would even rejoice.

And this is as good a place as any to embed the following informative video:

NOTE: Way back when Google was in its infancy, I noticed that any search I did that had any relation to Israel or Jews drew an enormous number of anti-Semitic sites at the top of the list. In fact, there were so many that one had to scroll past a page or two to get to any more objective sources. The anti-Semites had gamed the algorithm. In a while, the Google people tweaked the algorithm in some way in order to improve the situation. But it was clear to me even back then that the Jew-hating forces were intent on using the internet to spread their point of view, and they were quite sophisticated already.