Visiting Walmart

The New Neo Posted on by

A few days ago I went to Walmart to buy some Jazz apples, my favorite variety. These days the only stores that carry them around where I live are Walmart and Trader Joe’s. Another thing I wanted to get was a certain kind of dental floss.

While I was at Walmart I noticed some extraordinary outfits. On people, not for sale on the rack.

The first outfit of note was on a young woman with long purple hair and very dramatic makeup, and a few rings here and there (nose, for example). But that wasn’t what caught my eye. She also had on what I can only describe as some sort of S-and-M costume. It consisted of – I didn’t want to stare although perhaps that’s what she wanted, and so I’m not sure of every detail – some sort of shiny black bra and panties, a little black leather bolero with metal studs, metal armband bracelets, black fishnet stockings, black shiny high-heeled boots, and a whip.

No, just kidding about the whip.

The store was also full of the usual strung-out and wasted middle-aged and older people. Drugs? Poverty? Mental illness? Some combination of all of them?

As I was leaving, ahead of me I saw two women walking. I only saw their backs, so I’m not sure, but I think they were identical twins because they had the same very unusual body. They weren’t especially fat – maybe just a bit overweight, although nothing special – but they had the largest posteriors I’ve ever seen on people whose shape was fairly normal otherwise. These women made Kim Kardashian look very modest in that arena. They had long flowing straight hair, tiny waists, and their legs tapered down rather quickly to thin ankles. None of this would have been so very strange, I guess, had they not been wearing completely form-fitting multi-colored tights of some sort of sparkly shiny stuff, to draw attention to the entire area.

It was – unusual. sort of like horses, from behind. It reminded me of something, and for a moment I couldn’t figure it out. Then I realized it was this:

I left Walmart, went to my car, and unloaded my small bag of groceries. And then I noticed that I’d left the dental floss in the cart and and had never taken it out to buy it. The price was ninety-eight cents, but I just couldn’t bring myself to put it in the trunk and take it. So I thought I’d leave it in the cart and let the store put it back.

At that moment the young woman who worked for Walmart collecting carts came by. “Is that yours?” she asked, pointing at the lonely dental floss in my cart. I explained to her what had happened, and she looked at me in complete puzzlement. “Just take it,” she said. “Nobody’s going to care.”

This was a store employee, and I’m virtually certain she was correct. But it struck me how things have changed; stores have so much theft now that it’s factored in, and the loss of a bit of floss is a joke to them.

I just shrugged and made a sort of hands-up gesture of futility, got in my car, and left.

Uri Berliner resigns from NPR

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Please see yesterday’s post for some background.]

Uri Berliner has resigned from NPR:

Longtime NPR editor Uri Berliner, who was suspended after blowing the whistle on liberal bias at the organization, announced Wednesday he has resigned.

“I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years. I don’t support calls to defund NPR. I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism. But I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cited in my Free Press essay,” Berliner wrote in a statement published on X.

It’s interesting that he takes such a mild position about NPR itself, after lambasting it in his recent article that caused so much furor. As I’ve said many times, a mind is a difficult thing to change, even in someone undergoing some sort of mental transition from one point of view to another. Berliner has been at NPR for much of his adult working life and has a great deal invested in believing that its biased coverage is a relatively recent phenomenon although it’s not.

However, I applaud him for his courage in writing his article. I think he must have known it would result in his feeling the need to quit, once he’d burned his bridges that way. Then again, if he really believed in NPR as an institution, he might have been naive enough to think that his article would cause some soul-searching and change for the better there. But the only change it probably caused is that he’s now on the outs.

Get out the vote group is sending unsolicited voter registrations to non-citizens in Michigan

The New Neo Posted on by

But of course they are.

And no doubt it’s not limited to Michigan:

Documents provided to The Federalist show the form Al-Ani received was sent by the Voter Participation Center (VPC), a left-wing nonprofit that seeks to register Democrat-favorable demographics to vote. On the mailing envelope, the group lists its return address as that of Lansing’s Charles E. Chamberlain Federal Building and U.S. Post Office, which houses tenets such as the Federal Highway Administration.

Al-Ani said he has never engaged with VPC or any other voter registration groups. …

The Voter Participation Center is far from an obscure nonprofit. In fact, it’s a central component of leftists’ well-funded election machine that aims to accrue Democrats a ballot advantage over Republicans ahead of Election Day.

While federal law prohibits 501(c)(3) organizations from engaging in partisan voter registration, left-wing nonprofits such as VPC target demographics likely to vote for Democrats. According to InfluenceWatch, VPC “runs a direct-mail program that targets ‘unmarried women, minorities and millennials’ with voter registration mailings and phone calls.” Critics have described the group’s efforts as “imprecise, misleading, ineffective, and potentially illegal.”

Just now I did a very quick search to see if there are any legal challenges concerning this sort of thing. I couldn’t find any, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. If anyone can find more information about it, please post it in the comments.

The feds are getting out the Democrat votes

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s being done through executive order:

“This is a coordinated effort from left-leaning third parties and the Biden administration to use executive power and taxpayer resources for the purpose of federalizing elections and taking power away from the states,” said Chase Martin, legal affairs director at FGA.

There are definitely some similarities between Zuckbucks and Bidenbucks. Much like private corporate funds in elections and their contract demands of involving activist groups, Biden’s order mandates federal agencies work with the White House’s “approved, nonpartisan third-party organizations.” These are NINOs, nonpartisan in name only.

Despite repeated requests for information on the implementation of the executive order, including the criteria for the third-party groups, the Biden administration has either slow-walked or altogether stonewalled the release of documents.

Please read the whole thing.

NPR editor who criticized the network is suspended; NPR CEO’s tweets

The New Neo Posted on by

Uri Berliner, who has worked at NPR for 25 years, wrote an expose of their leftist bias. You can find it here. He seems to be somewhat of an old-fashioned liberal (or maybe an old-fashioned principled leftist), a rarity these days.

Now NPR has struck back; no surprise there. I quote another NPR article on that (my comments follow each excerpt from the piece):

NPR has formally punished Uri Berliner, the senior editor who publicly argued a week ago that the network had “lost America’s trust” by approaching news stories with a rigidly progressive mindset.

Berliner’s five-day suspension without pay, which began last Friday, has not been previously reported.

As I said, no surprise there.

Yet the public radio network is grappling in other ways with the fallout from Berliner’s essay for the online news site The Free Press. It angered many of his colleagues …

Why? Can’t they take criticism? Do they really believe that NPR is objective? If so, I’ve got this bridge …

… led NPR leaders to announce monthly internal reviews of the network’s coverage, and gave fresh ammunition to conservative and partisan Republican critics of NPR, including former President Donald Trump.

Oh no! It gave Republicans ammunition for pouncing. We can’t have that, even if the ammunition consists of the truth.

Conservative activist Christopher Rufo is among those now targeting NPR’s new chief executive, Katherine Maher, for messages she posted to social media years before joining the network.

So so long ago. Perhaps she was a mere child? We’ll see in a moment.

Among others, those posts include a 2020 tweet that called Trump racist and another that appeared to minimize rioting during social justice protests that year.

Those were very mild examples, carefully chosen.

Maher took the job at NPR last month — her first at a news organization.

Her first job at a news organization is to direct a huge one.

In a statement Monday about the messages she had posted, Maher praised the integrity of NPR’s journalists and underscored the independence of their reporting.

“In America everyone is entitled to free speech as a private citizen,” she said. “What matters is NPR’s work and my commitment as its CEO: public service, editorial independence, and the mission to serve all of the American public. NPR is independent, beholden to no party, and without commercial interests.”

Well then, it’s obviously fair and objective in its coverage, and the incredible bias of its director or its reporters – or its actual articles – is irrelevant. Of course Maher’s tweets while a private citizen are protected free speech. But people are merely pointing out the intensity of her leftist bias as expressed in those tweets, and suggesting that her bias might make it just a teeny bit hard to be objective.

If NPR’s mission is “to serve the American public,” please do so for a change because you haven’t in a long long time.

As for Maher’s tweets, that so-called “conservative activist” Chris Rufo is on the case. A lot of it is about that terrible thing, “whiteness” (Maher is white). You can find a sampler here as well as here.

I bet Maher thinks her own opinions are mild, because she’s probably been surrounded for a long time by people who are even more extreme than she is in their woke leftism.

Republicans defend Trump on the lawfare trials

The New Neo Posted on by

The right loves to criticize Republicans. And it’s not as though it’s hard to do; there’s plenty about the GOP with which to find fault. But please stick to the facts and do your homework.

There’s a particular sort of comment that I so typically see on blogs on the right that I’ve written several previous posts and/or comments on the phenomenon (although I can’t find them now): the “no GOP member is doing such-and-such” variety. Today I see that commenter “Sgt. Joe Friday” has obliged with the following:

Maybe I’ve missed it, but I have yet to hear any influential Republican speak up in Trump’s defense, or to even utter the words “innocent until proven guilty.”

Remember folks, the Democrats and Republicans in DC are not opponents, they’re dance partners.

No, they are not, and it’s a dangerous error to think so although a common one. They are different on many metrics, although the GOP often disappoints by joining the Democrats on certain issues, particularly involving spending. However, the Democrats are far left and are approving of many policies and people that are far more destructive to the nation and the world than what the Republicans advocate. Much of what I write on this blog day after day demonstrates that fact.

But back to the more narrow topic of Republicans speaking in Trump’s defense about the lawfare going on against him in the courts: just because you haven’t seen it or read it doesn’t mean it’s not happening. You may have missed it, as “Sgt. Joe Friday” mentions. You may have seen it and forgotten. Or it may be that GOP members are trying to get the word out but the media isn’t covering it. But it’s usually quite easy to find with a search.

For example, I searched for “rubio on trump trial” just now, and up popped quite a bit. Instantly. To take one example:

In an interview with “CBS Mornings,” [about the classified documents case about Trump] Florida Sen. Marco Rubio … expressed concern about the impact of the indictment on the country — and said it is “political in nature.”

“When you bring an indictment like this, it’s not done in isolation. It’s not done in a vacuum. You gotta take a lot of things into account. There’s no allegation that there was harm done to the, to the national security. There’s no allegation that he sold it to a foreign power or that it was trafficked to somebody else or that anybody got access to it,” said Rubio.

“You have to weigh the harm of that, or lack thereof, on the harm that this indictment does to the country. This is deeply divisive,” he said.

He said prosecuting the likely GOP presidential nominee, who will run against an incumbent president, is alone “political in nature,” and said there will be “certain harm.” …

When asked about Trump’s leadership qualities, Rubio expressed his belief that Trump could “do a better job” than President Biden as the next leader of the country. He also said he would personally choose Trump over Biden “in a heartbeat.”

Now, Ted Cruz. Immediately we get:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said Wednesday he is hopeful the U.S. Supreme Court “puts a stop” to what he called an “abuse of power” aimed against former President Trump after the high court announced it will weigh whether the former president can be criminally prosecuted for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

“I’m glad the Supreme Court is taking the case. I have to say what we’ve seen in the past year — about the targeting from the left, the targeting from Democrat prosecutors of Donald Trump — has been an enormous abuse of power,” Cruz said Wednesday on NewsNation’s “Elizabeth Vargas Reports.”

Or this:

It’s easy to find more – although, unsurprisingly, Mitch McConnell (who has nevertheless endorsed Trump for president) is not one of them. But you know who is? None other than Mitt Romney, who said:

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), a sharp Trump critic, voiced criticism of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of the former president on Tuesday, calling it an “overreach” that is political in nature.

“I believe President Trump’s character and conduct make him unfit for office,” Romney said in a statement. “Even so, I believe the New York prosecutor has stretched to reach felony criminal charges in order to fit a political agenda.”

He added: “No one is above the law, not even former presidents, but everyone is entitled to equal treatment under the law. The prosecutor’s overreach sets a dangerous precedent for criminalizing political opponents and damages the public’s faith in our justice system.”

Also, in that same article:

“It’s clear that this is a politically-motivated prosecution against President Trump,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), a Senate Judiciary Committee member, said in a statement.

“Politics should never tip the scales of justice, and Congress has every right to demand answers and accountability from the Manhattan D.A.’s office, especially as this directly relates to federal law.”

Also Mike Johnson, House Speaker:

I could easily go on, but I’ll stop here because I believe the point is made: search, and you’ll find.

Trump on trial: election interference, anyone?

The New Neo Posted on by

Election interference is just fine with the left if it’s the left doing it. So is political prosecution.

I’m with John Hinderaker on this:

Alvin Bragg’s criminal case against Donald Trump goes to trial today. It says something about the world we live in that we haven’t even bothered to mention it lately.

I summed up Bragg’s case against Trump here. In a word, it is pathetic. Trump made one or more “hush money” payments to Stormy Daniels, which was perfectly legal. The alleged crime is that his business documents reflect falsely that the payments were for legal fees and expenses. They were made to Michael Cohen, who in turn paid Daniels.

This is exactly the same dodge that Hillary Clinton’s campaign used when it camouflaged its payment for the fake Fusion GPS Trump dossier as payments to its law firm, Perkins Coie. Hillary’s case was much worse, however, as the payments were made by her campaign, not by her personally, and her false filing with the FEC was a campaign finance violation. Hillary, of course, has not been indicted.

The case against Trump is a joke because the records violation of which Trump is accused is a misdemeanor, on which the statute of limitations has run. It is only a felony if the records were falsified to cover up another crime. That is what Bragg alleges. But what crime? Bragg’s indictment doesn’t say. Presumably his theory will be that the payment to Daniels was a campaign finance violation, only it wasn’t. The payment was legal and no false filing was made with the FEC. Trump has not been charged with, let alone convicted of, any such violation.

So the case against Trump is terrible. But does it matter? The only reason Bragg brought the case (and the only reason the other prosecutions of Trump have been brought) is so that Democratic Party news outlets can say that Trump is a “convicted felon.”

It’s not the only reason, actually. Another reason is to keep Trump from campaigning for a while, because the judge has said that Trump must attend the trial every day:

“That I can’t go to my son’s graduation or that I can’t go to the United States Supreme Court, that I’m not in Georgia or Florida or North Carolina campaigning like I should be is perfect for the radical left Democrats, that’s exactly what they want,” Trump said in a press conference following the first day of court. “This is about election interference, that’s all it’s about.”

Will this make Trump into even more of a martyr? The prosecutors, the Democrats, and the left are betting that it won’t, but it’s at least possible that they may lose that bet. The outcome depends on the American people’s ability to see what’s happening here.

Ace has compiled several sources, and I suggest you read the whole thing. One issue is the judge’s conflict of interest:

Democratic clients of Loren Merchan, daughter of the judge presiding over Donald Trump’s hush-money trial, have raised $93 million in campaign donations, leveraging the case in their fundraising efforts. This has led to renewed calls for the judge, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, to recuse himself as Trump heads to a New York courthouse Monday for the beginning of jury selection in the case.

Loren Merchan is the president of Authentic Campaigns, a progressive political consulting firm whose top clients include Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and the Senate Majority PAC.

Since the indictment of Trump, Schiff’s campaign for US Senate has raised $20 million, while the Senate Majority PAC has raised $73.6 million.

Trump was ultimately gagged by Merchan’s father, Justice Juan Merchan, for raising concerns of a conflict of interest–leading to widespread condemnation, including from Stormy Daniels’ former attorney, Michael Avenatti who tweeted, “We can’t be hypocrites when it comes to the 1st Amendment.”

Ah, but many people can.

The jury selection process is ongoing, and I wish Trump’s attorneys luck in finding at least one person in New York who can be objective about this case – and even then, the judge has lots of power to shape what that person hears in the courtroom.

More on the Iran attack

The New Neo Posted on by

Jordan participated in the defense against Iran’s strike on Israel, saying it did so to protect its own citizens. But was that the only reason? As I wrote in this post nearly a week ago, the government of Jordan and Hamas are not friends, not at all – and that goes for the government of Jordan and the government of Iran. The message from Jordan is: don’t mess with us. Jordan is well aware that Hamas and Iran would love to topple the Jordanian government and have its own proxies take over.

There’s been at least a slight (and perhaps temporary) uptick in sympathy for Israel on the world stage:

Even among Israel’s closest allies, pressure had been growing to end the war in the Gaza Strip. The focus shifted to suffering Gazan civilians, with the world losing sight of the need to decisively defeat Hamas on the battlefield.

Iran succeeded in rallying the US and top European powers to Israel’s side. Not only did the US, the UK, and France express their unequivocal support for Israel; they actively took part in its defense, using a network of satellite, planes, and radars on the ground and at sea.

And instead of the UN Security Council discussing the need for a ceasefire in Gaza, it will be debating the Iranian threat and Israel’s right to self-defense on Sunday, with three permanent members sure to band together to condemn Tehran and Moscow.

I just did a search, but so far I can’t find anything that indicates such a vote ever happened, although there was a lot of discussion with both Israel and Iran claiming they acted in self-defense.

Once Iran gets nuclear weapons, however, it would be whole nother ball game. The risks for Iran in using nuclear weapons would be much higher, as well. It really depends on how badly the mullahs wish to martyr their own people (I’m assuming they have bunkers for themselves that probably would provide personal safety) versus how much they want to destroy Israel. They’ve certainly been yelling that the latter is their goal ever since 1979.

Here’s an interesting idea:

An Israeli strike on Iran’s drone facilities would not only be a fitting rejoinder to Saturday’s strikes, but would also help Ukraine in the face of Russian attacks. It would also be a message to Biden and the Europeans to consider the larger regional picture as they push Israel to wind down the campaign against Hamas in Gaza.

Then again, there’s the theater aspect of the present Iran/Israel conflict, which will be a topic for another post today or tomorrow.

Equality versus freedom

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s been said many times by many people.

Solzhenitsyn:

Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.

And then there’s Robert Frost (in the excerpt that follows, Frost uses “justice” in the traditional sense rather than in the leftist “social justice” sense). That link I just gave is now dead, but I used the quote and the link in this post from 2016:

Frost was convinced that the conflict between justice and mercy in human affairs is an eternal and universal moral problem of humanity, and not merely a contemporary political partisan concern…

With these facts in mind Frost’s criticism of the New Deal as “nothing but an outbreak of mass mercy,” is clearly more than mere partisan politics. In 1936, in the midst of attacks on [his collection of poetry] A Further Range by the political Left, Frost wrote to Ferner Nuhn, a young New Deal acquaintance and friend of Henry Wallace, that “strict justice is basic” for a free society, and freedom implied that some people succeeded and others failed. The winners reaped the rewards of their talents and efforts, but what about the losers? Frost acknowledged that government “must do something for the losers. It must show them mercy. Justice first and mercy second. The trouble with some of your crowd is that it would have mercy first. The struggle to win is still the best tonic. . . . Mercy . . . is another word for socialism.” Frost believed that what was commonly called “distributive justice,” the attempt to spread the wealth of society to the masses, through graduated in-come taxes and other such devices, was really distributive mercy misnamed. Frost drew out for Ferner Nuhn the logical consequences of a system of socialistic mercy:

“The question of the moment in politics will always be one of proportion between mercy and justice. You have to remember the people who accept mercy have to pay for it. Mercy means protection. And there is no protection without direction. A person completely protected would have to be completely directed. And he would be a slave. That’s where socialism pure brings you out.”

From Milton Friedman:

A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.

Thomas Sowell says it in his book The Quest For Cosmic Justice:

Not only does cosmic justice differ from traditional justice, and conflict with it, more momentously cosmic justice is irreconcilable with personal freedom based on the rule of law. Traditional justice can be mass-produced by impersonal prospective rules governing the interactions of flesh-and-blood human beings, but cosmic justice must be hand-made by holders of power who impose their own decisions on how these flesh-and-blood individuals should be categorized into abstractions and how these abstractions should then be forcibly configured to fit the vision of the power-holders. Merely the power to select beneficiaries is an enormous power, for it is also the power to select victims—and to reduce both to the role of supplicants of those who hold this power.

And yet we find ourselves in a society in which the idea of an elite group dispensing “justice” – as in social or cosmic justice – and creating “equality” has been in the ascendance, especially among the young. As Frost also wrote (from that same post of mine in 2016, with its dead link):

In a letter to Bernard De Voto in 1936 Frost wrote: “The great politicians are having their fun with us. They’ve picked up just enough of the New Republic and Nation jargon to seem original to the simple.” In 1939, in “The Figure a Poem Makes,” Frost said: “More than once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had been the originality it was mistaken for by its young converts.”

The appeal to the young is always present, unless it is strongly countered.