Were the Brown victims targeted?

The New Neo Posted on by

Authorities are now saying that Benjamin Erickson was not the killer, and we don’t know who was:

[Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha] said that there was only “some degree of evidence” that led them to Erickson, but said their investigation “now points in a different direction.”

“I think it’s fair to say that there’s no basis to consider him a person of interest, and that’s why he’s being released. We still have a lot of steps to take in this case,” he added.

The authorities never gave out his name officially, but it was leaked.

I’ve seen a lot of online chatter about how long it’s taking to find the killer, and how incompetent the authorities are. That seems pretty impatient to me. Erickson was fingered as a person of interest through cellphone data and that sort of thing, but I’m going to assume that all the witnesses are being interviewed, more data is being crunched, and an arrest will emerge. It’s early yet, and life is not a CSI TV show.

It is reported that the murderer yelled something, and a lot of people seem to think that of course it was something Islamist and this is being covered up. Perhaps; it’s certainly possible. But I’ve read it was “something unintelligible,” which is possible as well.

This lovely young woman is one of the students who was murdered:

The first victim of the deadly school shooting at Brown University has been identified as a sophomore student and vice president of the school’s college Republican club, Ella Cook, according to her Alabama parish and a former classmate.

The news of Cook’s death was shared during a service at the Cathedral Church of the Advent in her hometown of Birmingham.

This is unusual; as with most Ivy League schools, active “out” Republicans are not all that common, and her role would have given her high visibility. Was she targeted for this? We haven’t a clue at this point.

Today they released the name of the second student who was murdered:

Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov was identified by the Uzbekistan Foreign Affairs Ministry on social media Monday as the second student who died in Saturday’s shooting at the Providence, Rhode Island university, according to NBC News. …

Umurzokov’s aunt also confirmed his death to NBC, telling the outlet that she found out the news when her nephew’s mother called her “in the middle of the night.

“He was very kind, smart. Attended talented and gifted schools,” Umurzokov’s aunt said, adding that he “wanted to be a neurosurgeon ’cause when he was 10 he had a very serious eight-hours-long brain surgery.”

“We hoped that he would have had a bright future,” the grieving aunt added, according to NBC.

Again: targeted, or random? RIP to both.

[NOTE: By the way, I have a lot more to say about the Bondi carnage. But not today.]

The Reiner murders

The New Neo Posted on by

Rob Reiner’s son Nick – who was arrested for the murder of his parents – had a history of severe drug problems and had been behaving strangely lately:

Family friends told The Times that Rob and Nick Reiner got into an argument Saturday evening at a party at Conan O’Brien’s home and that many people noticed Nick acting strangely at the party.

Nick Reiner, who had struggled with addiction for years, was living in a guesthouse on his parents’ property, family friends told The Times, and his mother had become increasingly concerned about his mental health in recent weeks.

The family friends, who did not want to be identified because of the nature of the crime, said that the Reiners’ daughter found her parents Sunday afternoon.

What a terrible terrible situation for the daughter – not just finding the carnage, but losing nearly her entire family (there is one other surviving brother as well as a stepsister) in one fell swoop.

Also:

By 2015, he had gotten clean, working with his father on “Being Charlie,” a semi-autobiographical film about addiction and recovery. Rob Reiner directed and Nick co-wrote the film about a successful actor with political ambitions and a son addicted to drugs.

At the time of the premiere, The Times reported that Rob Reiner and his wife at their worst moments “wondered if there was an end in sight, and whether it would be the tragic one that a voice in the back of their heads kept telling them was coming.”

It’s the tragic one – very tragic. RIP.

Friends were not all that surprised:

Rob Reiner’s son Nick was notorious for being violent, and those around him “instantly knew’’ he was the one who allegedly murdered his parents, friends, and neighbors, told The Post on Monday.

“This is not the first time their son has been violent,’’ a longtime neighbor of the victims said of Nick Reiner, 32, who is charged with fatally slitting the throats of his parents in the family’s Los Angeles mansion. …

A former classmate of Nick’s told The Post that the suspect — who had been in and out of rehab since age 15 — has “always been troubled’’ and that she “instantly knew it was him’’ when she heard the news.

Depressing. So many families have a child lost to drugs, and the struggle can seem endless. Fortunately, they don’t all end up this way.

[NOTE: And yes, Trump chimed in with an offensive take on the event. Although he called the murders “a very sad thing” and wished that they “rest in peace,” he also took the occasion to rail against Reiner’s TDS (which the man definitely had) and to suggest it somehow contributed to his murder. This seems absurd and stupid, although it’s not the first time and probably not the last that it’s true of some of Trump’s utterances.]

What a weekend: mere anarchy

The New Neo Posted on by

Too many murders, both of the public political and jihadi type, and of the private. They signify different things and threaten different things, but there’s this quality to it:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

I’ve posted that poem or parts of it many times on this blog. But unfortunately, it seems more appropriate than ever. I’ve never quite understood why Yeats uses the term “mere” to modify “anarchy” – is it ironic? But I won’t quibble with a masterpiece, written in 1919, over a hundred years ago.

I left out the first two lines, but they matter too:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

To me, this suggests not only that things are spinning out of control, but that the guiding principle has been lost. From the poem’s Wiki page:

[Yets] saw the age of classical antiquity as beginning with the Trojan War and then that thousand year cycle was overtaken by the Christian era, which is coming to a close. And that is the basis of the final line of the poem: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

I’ve long thought the answer is: Islamic bloodlust and revenge. Although then again, that’s certainly nothing new. How about “Islamic jihadist bloodlust and revenge, and the abdication of so many Western governments to a takeover by lies and a failure to protect the west’s previous values and present-day populations”?

The Jews are just the proverbial canaries in the coal mine, but so many people don’t see that. As writer Guy Goldstein (a man who grew up in Australia) writes, in a Substack essay entitled, “Can I Still Call Australia Home?”:

As I see the footage of the memorials [in Australia], I see Jews standing alone, a spectacle that the rest of Australia is watching. I see people talking about the impact on the Jewish Community, and what this means for Jews. I don’t hear anyone talking about Australians. I see politicians coming to politic, I see a few locals coming to spectate, what I don’t see is Australians embracing Australians. No “We are one, but we are many”.

This past few years has felt like something more than just a local conflict in the Middle East for Jews around the world. Watching my people being gunned down in Australia, I finally understood what it was. They have undone the emancipation of the Jews. The Jews have been restored to their rightful place as “other” in the eyes of the West.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve been a citizen your entire life. It doesn’t matter that you’ve been Australian your entire life. You’re a Jew now. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been American your entire life. It doesn’t matter that you bleed red, white, and blue. You’re a Jew now.

We see it in France. We see this in the UK. As an Australian, I never imagined that it would happen to us. I never imagined that the land that my grandmother worshipped as the font of all that is good in humanity, as her saviour and her true love, would turn into exactly the place that my family had to flee.

I don’t agree that this is true in the United States. Not yet, and I hope never. But it’s getting closer – too close for comfort. And if the bell tolls for the Jews, it tolls for thee.

Mass shooting at Sydney beach, mass shooting at Brown University [scroll down for UPDATES]

The New Neo Posted on by

Two gunmen opened fire on a crowd at Sydney’s Bondi Beach celebrating the beginning of Chanukah, killing an unknown number of people (presently reported as sixteen) and wounding many more. This is the embodiment of “globalize the intifada.”

One of the gunmen was killed by police and the other wounded and taken into custody, but they had free rein for many minutes before they were taken down. It’s not hard to guess at the background of the shooters, only one of whom has been officially named so far:

One of the gunmen who opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach has been named as Naveed Akram. …

The 24-year-old suspect, who was shot dead by police, was a bricklayer who had recently been laid off. …

Social media posts from an Islamic centre in Australia show Akram completed religious studies in 2022, raising questions about possible radicalisation and extremist networks operating in the country. Adam Ismail, the head of the Al-Murad Islamic Institute, where Akram studied, declined to comment when contacted by The Telegraph. …

Israeli authorities said they were examining responsibility for the attack amid concerns it may have been orchestrated by a foreign state or militant organisations. The shooting occurred against a backdrop of escalating tensions between Australia and Iran, following a series of suspected Iranian-directed attacks on Jewish targets in the country.

Note what’s missing: Akram’s country of origin (I’ve read Pakistan, but just as a rumor), was he a citizen or not, and what were his ties to the other shooter (I’ve read a rumor he was from Lebanon, but have read nothing official)? How did they obtain their weapons in a country like Australia, which has very strict gun control (I have no doubt criminals and terrorists can do it)? Why did it take so long for police to shoot the perps? What was the police presence at this event, an outdoor Jewish celebration that would obviously leave people highly vulnerable?

And then there’s the Brown University shooting, which we know even less about although it occurred slightly earlier. Two students were killed and about nine injured, and a “person of interest” is in custody. The police are being very tight-lipped, but there’s this:

At approximately 4:05 p.m. EST on December 13, 2025, a shooting occurred inside Room 166 on the first floor of the Brown University School of Engineering’s Barus and Holley Building, which also houses the university’s physics department and MacMillan Hall. The room had a capacity of 186 people according to Brown University’s website. At the time of the shooting, a review session for an introductory economics class was being held by a teaching assistant for Teaching Professor of Economics Rachel Friedberg.The building was unlocked, since it was the second day of the school’s final examinations for the fall semester.

Who is Rachel Friedberg, and what kind of economics does she teach? This kind:

Her research centers on the economic outcomes of immigrants in the United States and Israel, and on immigration’s impact on the labor market of the receiving country. She has testified before the U.S. Congress and participated in Israeli Knesset committee deliberations on immigration policy and reform. A faculty affiliate of the Program in Judaic Studies, she is currently studying the demography and economics of the American Jewish community.

I suppose all of this could be a coincidence. But I would bet not.

One bright spot is that the Bondi attack featured a hero named Ahmed al Ahmed:

Video verified by the BBC showed Mr Ahmed run at the gunman and seize his weapon, before turning the gun round on him, forcing his retreat.

Mr Ahmed, a fruit shop owner and father of two, remains in hospital, where he has undergone surgery for bullet wounds to his arm and hand, his family told 7News Australia.

RIP to the victims.

UPDATE 4 PM:

The Sydney shooters were father and son:

New South Wales Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon says that they believe there were only two shooters involved — a father and son who are ages 50 and 24.

The father was a licensed gun owner, Lanyon says at a press conference, saying that they believe all his firearms have been recovered.

The father has been killed and his son, earlier identified as Naveed Akram, 24, is “in critical but stable condition,” Lanyon says.

I know that gun ownership is extremely restricted in Australia. How was this guy a licensed gun owner? Seems very odd.

UPDATE 4:20 PM:

Footage of Ahmed al Ahmed wrestling the gun away can be found here. Ahmed was apparently shot in the hand by the other gunman afterwards. Note that he sneaks up on the shooter from behind; seems the shooter neither saw nor heard him. Amazing footage.

UPDATE 8:30 PM:

A person of interest in the Brown shooting has been identified as Benjamin Erickson. There’s a lot of information about him here, but nothing that would immediately suggest a motive except for a possible mental health history. He may have become a Brown student in the fall of 2025, but that’s not clear.

UPDATE 10:50 PM

This is probably totally unrelated to the rest of the news in this post, but Rob Reiner and his wife have been found murdered in their Brentwood, LA home:

On Sunday, Dec. 14, the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) was called to the home at around 3:30 p.m. local time to provide medical aid, and upon arrival, they found a man and a woman dead, the LAFD confirmed to PEOPLE.

Rob and Michele were found dead by apparent homicide inside their home, TMZ reported. According to the outlet, they suffered wounds consistent with a knife attack.

Terrible news. RIP.

UPDATE 12:20 AM 12/15/2025:

Now it’s been announced that Reiner and his wife were killed by their son Nick, who has a lengthy history of drug addiction and homelessness although in recent years was said to have been doing better. Horrific.

Progress on the poetry book

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m happy to report that I finally found a printer that can put out a version with which I’m satisfied, and I gave them the go-ahead. I originally thought the book would be available around Thanksgiving time, but that obviously never happened. But it should be ready around December 18, if there are no more glitches.

A preview of the cover:

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Chanukah begins tomorrow evening. In honor of the holiday, Israel has released a video they found that Hamas had made in December of 2023 for propaganda purposes but never made public, of the six hostages whom they later foully murdered, lighting Chanukah candles:

Weak and emaciated hostages pray and sing as they light the festive candles, a video aired by Israeli TV channel Keshet 12 reveals. The footage originally recorded by Hamas for propaganda purposes showed hostages giving each other hope as they celebrated Hanukkah. Another video showed them marking New Year’s Eve 2024.

RIP.

(2) Many states – nearly all of them blue – have refused to hand over their voter roll data for inspection, and the DOJ is suing.

(3) The GOP has proposed a new law that attempts to deal with the Obamacare subsidies which are due to expire soon. Part of the proposal:

Under the legislation, groups or associations of employers could band together to offer health insurance regardless of industry, provided they:

– Existed for at least two years for purposes other than providing insurance

– Establish formal governance with employer-controlled boards

– Cover at least 51 employees total

– Offer coverage to all employees of member employers

– Self-employed individuals could join as both employers and employees if they work at least 10 hours weekly or 40 hours monthly in their business, with at least 20 self-employed members needed to form a group.

The bill includes protections requiring plans to follow ACA nondiscrimination rules …

Much more at the link.

(4) More on the Minnesota fraud:

“Most of that $500 million hasn’t served a single meal, and some of the simple things are if they would have just gone to the facilities, you know, you hear of the thousands of people being served out of an apartment twice a day, all they would have to do is show up and look at it,” Minnesota Republican state Sen. Mark Koran told Fox News Digital about the fraud that was hiding in plain sight in Minneapolis.

“There was a legislative auditor report that showed that 30 property owners where these businesses claim to operate out of, contacted the Department of Education who manage it, who managed that program, and they told them one, the businesses don’t exist in their facilities, so they don’t exist, period, and one of them I think was a city park,” Koran said.

“And so the Department of Education gave that complaint to the nonprofit Feeding Our Future to address those issues, and the Department of Education continued to pay millions to those thirty with a blatant, simple process of ‘We’ve been notified they don’t exist’ and they rejected and ignored it.”

(5) A large percentage of Somalis in Minnesota are on some form of welfare:

– More than half (52 percent) of children in Somali immigrant homes in Minnesota live in poverty, while only 8 percent of children in native-headed homes are in poverty.

– One in eight children in poverty in Minnesota lives in a Somali immigrant home.

– About 39 percent of working-age Somalis have no high school diploma, compared to just 5 percent of natives.

– Among working-age adult Somalis who have lived in the U.S. for more than 10 years, half still cannot speak English “very well”.

– About 54 percent of Somali-headed households in Minnesota receive food stamps, and 73 percent of Somali households have at least one member on Medicaid. The comparable figures for native households are 7 percent and 18 percent.

– Nearly every Somali household with children (89 percent) receives some form of welfare.

An Animal Farm for our times

The New Neo Posted on by

Switching it up:

Originally conceived by George Orwell as a satirical allegory for the Russian Revolution and the subsequent struggles of the USSR under the rule of Joseph Stalin, Animal Farm’s political ire is redirected in this lively CG-animated adaptation directed by Andy Serkis. Rather than Stalinism, Serkis takes aim at greed, rapacious consumerism and corporate corruption and malfeasance. There’s also a timely dig at populist political movements.

I’ll fix that for you: “Originally a satirical allegory for the evils and lies of Communism, the Russian Revolution, and the subsequent struggles of the USSR under the rule of Joseph Stalin, Animal Farm’s political ire is perverted in this lively CG-animated adaptation directed by Andy Serkis. Rather than Stalinism, Serkis takes aim at its opposite, capitalism, emphasizing the greed, consumerism and corporate corruption that can accompany it. There’s also a dig at populist political movements such as Trump’s.”

More from the review:

But while it may struggle to satisfy diehard Orwell purists, the film still takes a political stance and delivers an emphatic message celebrating equality and the power of the collective – albeit one which permits us a little more hope than was present in Orwell’s 1945 novella.

I’ll fix that for you: “But while it should outrage those who’ve read the Orwell original, the film still takes a political stance and delivers an emphatic message celebrating equality and the power of the collective, things the original work mocked as propagandist lies that the left always betrays. This gives present-day leftists a little more hope than was present in Orwell’s 1945 novella.”

ADDENDUM: there’s an odd contradiction in Orwell, because he was a lifelong socialist and yet he criticized Communism, which is a form of socialism. I wrote about that in this post.

Tucker Carlson and the art of the Big Lie

The New Neo Posted on by

This video is a discussion of an especially egregious lie told recently by Tucker Carlson. The part I’ve cued up is only about ten minutes long, and you don’t even have to watch it all to get the picture, although it really is worth watching the whole thing. Carlson’s lie is not a subtle one, but he seems for the most part to be getting away with lies this blatant:

Here’s a summary of the provisions of the Ugandan law Carlson is misrepresenting [my emphasis]:

The act prescribes life imprisonment for sex between two people of the same biological sex and the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality”. The latter offence includes “serial offenders”, same-sex rape, sex in a position of authority or procured by intimidation, sex with persons older than seventy-five, sex with the disabled and mentally ill, and homosexual acts committed by a person with a previous conviction of homosexuality. Further, under its provisions, the promotion (including normalisation) of homosexuality is punishable by imprisonment for up to 20 years and fines.

The bill is highly popular within Uganda according to polls, and was voted for nearly unanimously by Parliament. The United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and the European Union, and several local and international NGOs have condemned it.

Tucker is a vicious liar. In this case he’s especially targeting Ted Cruz, whom he almost certainly hates because Cruz is one of those Christian Zionists whom Carlson has said he hates “more than anybody.” In the clip, Carlson also implies that Cruz’s objection to the Uganda law in question is racist.

If you don’t want to take the YouTuber’s word, or mine, for the fact that Carlson is flagrantly lying, you can check the text of the Ugandan law itself here.

Which makes Tucker’s lie especially fascinating and subtly pernicious is that he invites people to check out the law even though it contradicts his description of it. My guess is that he assumes – correctly, in most cases – that the mere fact that he suggests that people check it out means that the vast majority never will. After all, wouldn’t most people assume that Carlson would never have said to look at it for themselves if he wasn’t telling the truth about it? Among other things, he’s relying on his reputation from the past as a regular newsperson who does his research, in order to gain people’s trust for his lies now.

NOTE: Carlson has recently said he’s planning to buy some real estate in Doha, in order to prove what a free-thinking American he is.

Is MTG Plotting to Destroy the GOP?

The New Neo Posted on by

That’s the headline of this piece by Matt Margolis at PJ Media. My first thought on reading the title was: well, join the club. If that’s her goal, she’s got plenty of company on the right – or the former right.

There’s a history to this sort of thing, although the details vary. We’re all familiar with erstwhile conservatives Bill Kristol, and the Cheneys. They didn’t just leave the fold, they decided to turn on it and unite with their former opponents on the left and far left. Two more recent examples are Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, pundits who at least for a while seemed to be solidly on the right and now are in flagrant “tear it down, ha-ha-ha” mode, and although they haven’t joined with the far left they are certainly helping it along by being every bit as awful as the left always claims the right is.

From the Margolis article about MTG:

Greene’s final weeks in Congress have been nothing short of bizarre. The once-fiery Trump loyalist has spent recent days cozying up to liberal media outlets and apologizing to Democrats for her past conduct. She recently appeared on CNN to trash President Trump and the GOP. This is the same woman who spent years trolling progressives and championing conservative causes without apology. Now she’s doing a liberal media blitz and trashing the GOP on her way out. She even participated in a photo op with Code Pink, a left-wing anti-war group.

Despite the alleged effort to oust Johnson, sources say that the plan is likely to fail and that she may not even introduce the motion. However, if it were to succeed, it would be a political disaster for the GOP as we head into the midterms.

And then we have the infuriatingly destructive behavior of a great many Republicans in the Indiana Senate. I don’t pretend to have my finger on the pulse of Indiana, but WTF is this?:

The Indy Star reports:

The Indiana Senate rejected mid-decade redistricting today, capping off a bitter state fight for control of Congress that has divided the GOP, spurred violent threats and dramatically changed the political landscape ahead of the midterm elections.

The failure will likely be seen by President Donald Trump and his allies as a rebuke of his vision for cementing a congressional majority at all costs. Several groups have promised to spend top dollar on unseating those who oppose redistricting, setting the stage for a messy primary if the Senate did not pass the bill.

If it had succeeded, Indiana will join a handful of other states who have changed their maps mid-decade for political goals, likely eliminating Indiana’s two Democratic congressional seats and fracturing Indianapolis in the process.

This was an own goal, something in which the GOP seems to specialize.

J. D. Vance tweeted:

Rod Bray, the Senate leader in Indiana, has consistently told us he wouldn’t fight redistricting while simultaneously whipping his members against it. That level of dishonesty cannot be rewarded, and the Indiana GOP needs to choose a side.

The Indiana Senate is controlled by the GOP, the bill had passed the Indiana House, and it should have passed the Senate easily. I’ve read that Rod Bray has TDS, and that it’s a spite thing, but I have no idea whether that’s true. His Wiki entry offers few hints, except that he’s from a family that’s been active in Indiana GOP politics for a long time.

Trump seems to think it’s Bray who’s the culprit:

“Unfortunately, Indiana Senate ‘Leader’ Rod Bray enjoys being the only person in the United States of America who is against Republicans picking up extra seats, in Indiana’s case, two of them. He is putting every ounce of his limited strength into asking his soon to be very vulnerable friends to vote with him.” …

“Bray doesn’t care,” Trump said. “He’s either a bad guy, or a very stupid one!”

The Time article goes into the supposed reasons for the rejection by the Indiana GOP:

But some local officials have said redistricting close to the 2026 primary will “create chaos,” citing huge expenses in ensuring that voter registration systems are updated to reflect the redrawn maps and that voters are duly informed of the changes. “It would put a great deal of stress on the election system,” Kate Sweeney Bell, clerk of Marion County, said, according to Axios. “That pushes away poll workers, causes longer lines at polling locations, frustrates voters, and ultimately sows distrust in the process.”

It’s also not as if Indiana voters want Republicans to redistrict mid-decade. An August poll found that a majority of them oppose it, and some voters have expressed concern that the new map also diminishes their representation as lawmakers would have to cover a wider, more varied geography. Another poll released in November found that many Indiana voters would instead want state lawmakers to focus on voter issues like property taxes and energy bills.

There’s also concern that the new maps would be “a dilution of Black votes,” given that Carson [a black Democrat member] may lose his U.S. congressional seat after redistricting.

One analyst wrote for the Indiana Capital Chronicle that even with Trump and Republican Gov. Mike Braun pushing for redistricting, state lawmakers may find their political careers in jeopardy if they go ahead with the plan, which would be “breaking faith with Hoosier voters.”

What I glean from that is that they think it would be too much work, and they’re afraid of being called racists. That’s in addition to whatever TDS may exist among the group, and the desire to spite Trump.

There’s this sort of thing:

To state senator Mike Bohacek, there’s also a personal element: his vote against redistricting came in response to Trump’s use of the word “retarded” to describe Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz in the President’s Thanksgiving message. Bohacek, whose daughter has Down syndrome, is an advocate for persons with intellectual disabilities, and posted on Facebook that Trump’s “choice of words have consequences.”

Bohacek doesn’t seem to be the least bit perturbed at the idea that the consequence of his anger at Trump’s use of the word “retarded” may be the Democrat left winning control the US House of Representatives in 2026 and not only frustrating the entire agenda of the right but replacing it with their own. I think that Bohacek’s vote really says a lot about so much of the Trump opposition being an issue of style rather than substance, an attempt to show that “we’re not crass like Trump.” Who is the petty one here?