Looking back at Churchill’s “Finest Hour” speech

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve said many times that I don’t much care for political oratory. In my lifetime, I don’t recall any political speech that interested me at the time, although in retrospect I would rate some of Reagan’s as quite good. But I think Lincoln and Churchill were geniuses of the art, with Churchill maybe edging out Lincoln but just by a hair.

Yesterday I had occasion to quote this famous 1940 speech of Churchill’s, and it got me to thinking:

Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”

There are so many things about that speech that would never be said today. The first is a statement about the Western world that characterizes it as “Christian civilization.” The second is the idea of Empire as something of which to be proud; even in Churchill’s time, speaking that way was somewhat of an anomaly and he was considered an old-fashioned throwback. But he was the throwback Britain – and the West – needed at the time. And the idea the speech conveys of World War II as a nearly apocalyptic crisis, pitting the forces of good against evil, was actually not an exaggeration.

But it’s this sentence that seems so apropos to me: “But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.” Does it not feel as though we’re on the brink of something like that now, only not from an external enemy but from internal weakness? A sort of cultural, moral, and spiritual suicide being committed by the West? And science has only become more and more advanced as well as more “perverted” in its uses, particularly the propaganda and surveillance and control made possible by the internet.

It’s certainly not our finest hour. But we can hope that our finest hour will come – perhaps in some way we can’t foresee – and that we’ll measure up to it. And let us also fervently hope it doesn’t involve carnage, unlike the terrible catastrophic bloodbath that was World War II.

The polls and Biden

The New Neo Posted on by

They are many indications from polls that Biden is in trouble for 2024, and lots of articles and posts about it. I refer you to this, this, and this, to take just a few examples.

So, is Biden in trouble in terms of the 2024 presidential election? I have my doubts. Here they are:

(1) I’ve long said I think he will run, because a good alternative (and a way to get rid of Kamala) hasn’t presented himself. But it’s certainly possible that things will become so bad for Biden that they’ll “retire” him and decide on someone else. I still don’t think that will happen, but it would hardly surprise me if it did.

(2) Polls, especially at this point in time, probably don’t mean much. For example, most Democrats I know might be worried that Biden is cognitively challenged and might yearn for someone better to run, but that someone would always be a Democrat. They would never vote for the Republican. But they might stay home if not enthusiastic, right? Not if Trump is the opponent. They would crawl over broken glass to vote for the proverbial yellow dog Democrat if it’s that or Trump.

(3) National polls don’t tell much, even close to the election, because it’s swing state polls that matter. I haven’t read anything about those.

(4) Who knows what might happen with Trump’s trials, and how much that could affect the vote in 2024. Right now is the relative calm before the storm. Mollie Hemingway believes that persecuting/prosecuting Trump and other opponents has hurt the Biden administration and the Democrats. Again, I’m not at all sure, although it certainly doesn’t seem to have helped them. I hope Hemingway is correct and that as the trials go on, more and more Americans will find the whole thing repellent and take it out on the Democrats. But I don’t know.

(5) The amount of fraud that the left can pull off, and whether it will matter enough, is a wild card.

I like to look at singers while they sing

The New Neo Posted on by

I find that I like to be able to see singers when they sing. That means I prefer watching live performances of my favorites.

I wonder why. Maybe I like to see the physical effort. Also, the emotion on the face seems to matter to me. And, since most of the singers I like happen to be men, I can’t eliminate the element of sex appeal – which is not necessarily handsomeness in the conventional sense (although that certainly doesn’t hurt), but just some je ne sais quoi.

Singers reveal themselves when you watch them sing – tough or tender, cold or warm, schmaltzy or cool, tense or relaxed. The Gibb brothers and Mickey Thomas (in “Fooled Around and Fell in Love“, anyway) and the Beatles in their younger days seem to be having so much fun while singing. Joplin wore more than a piece of her heart on her sleeve. Dylan does little for me; he just seems so detached. Mark Knopler’s concentration is very deep and still and yet he moves me greatly, perhaps because his guitar expresses so much emotion. Leonard Cohen has a knowing air, sometimes sardonic. Richard Thompson is another favorite of mine who stands still in concert without seeming to emote very much, and yet his voice has that sob in it and there is always a bittersweet quality of experience.

Okay, so sue me – but I love love love Barry Gibb here. He was at the height of his looks and his voice, and strikes just the right regretful and poignant emotional tone (Streisand doesn’t quite do it for me emotionally, although her voice is lovely). Barry knows how to subordinate his voice when singing with someone else – after all, much of his career was based on singing with other people, in particular his brothers. And here he never loses focus on the interaction with Barbra and continues to face her for much of the song except the beginning part, when he hovers almost protectively over her. And no one – no one – can wear white like Barry:

Destroying Russell Brand

The New Neo Posted on by

I have come to detest the MeToo movement, which I actually disliked from the start. The idea that women don’t ever lie is an abomination, one that is used to ruin men’s lives and destroy the protections built into the legal system against false allegations and allegations that come so late in time that it is difficult or impossible to mount a defense.

Russell Brand recently has been accused by several women of sexual assault taking place many years ago. No doubt Brand was a promiscuous SOB when he was younger. He admitted that well before these allegations surfaced. He says all the sex was consensual and the women say it was certainly not.

Nowadays if someone accuses a person of sexual assault – especially a person whose politics aren’t sufficiently leftist and woke, and Brand fits that definition – then that person must be destroyed, including economically. Just send him to Siberia and be done with it. And yes, it’s interesting that the accusations against Brand have come out when he’s become a successful YouTuber who questions the standard messaging on COVID as well as challenging other kneejerk leftist positions. I don’t necessarily agree with Brand on a ton of things, but I strongly defend his right to say them.

He is innocent till proven guilty. Period.

What are the accusations? Here’s one, which happened in 2008. What is the statute of limitations on indecent exposure? Three years in California. Isn’t that convenient? So apparently, this can’t be heard in a court of law, so there would be no need to prove it and the allegations cannot be easily challenged.

The women are all anonymous. One says he raped her in 2012, also in LA. Another says she was 16 at the time of the alleged assault (not sure where that is alleged to have occurred, but in Britain 16 is the age of consent).

It’s interesting to me that all the allegations are of offenses that are alleged to have occurred between 2003 and 2013. That’s between ten and twenty years ago. They seem to have mostly been in California. The statute of limitations there for rape and certain other sexual offenses is open-ended; see this. However, that only applies to such crimes if committed after 2017. For crimes before that, the older limitation applies, which is ten years.

So it appears that all of these alleged crimes are past the time of the statute of limitations, if I am correct in my understanding of the law. That means that they fall into the realm of character assassination and never will be heard in a court of law – unless, of course, Brand defends himself a la Trump, calls his accusers liars, and is successfully sued for defamation.

Is Brand guilty? I don’t know. He’s certainly guilty of being a boor and sexually promiscuous. He apparently mended his wicked ways quite some time ago, and as far as I can tell these people have never come out of the woodwork with these accusations before in terms of pressing charges when they might have done so. To me, whether the charges are true or not (and I doubt we’ll ever know), this smacks of an orchestrated campaign to get Brand. And so far it has been very successful; you can read about a cascade of cancellations of gigs and demonetizations of videos by Brand.

Rumble has stood firm in its defense of Brand’s free speech rights and has refused to deplatform him. However, the anti-Brand forces are now out to punish Rumble and are having some success:

Major brands have started pulling adverts from Rumble, where Russell Brand broadcasts his weekly show, as the comedian vows to keep publishing videos on the platform in spite of claims of rape and sexual assault against him.

Burger King, Asos and HelloFresh are among the brands to have removed adverts from the platform, where Brand has amassed a following of 1.4m, according to the News Movement. He hosts a weekly live show on the platform at 5pm BST.

According to the News Movement, Burger King said it had paused advertising with the platform while investigations continue, while Asos said it had manually removed its ads from Rumble.

Apple and Amazon haven’t pulled their ads – not yet, anyway.

Why they nominated Biden in 2020

The New Neo Posted on by

I noticed a discussion of the question in this thread, and I thought I’d reiterate my own opinion of why the Democrats wanted to nominate Biden in 2020.

They were desperate to defeat Trump, but their pool of candidates wasn’t strong. Sanders – who, by the way, is even older than Biden – seemed to have a good chance of being the nominee, and they were terrified that he would alienate so many people that they wouldn’t be able to pull him across the finish line no matter what they did, fraudulent or not.

So they turned to Biden, who had the following attributes: malleable and unprincipled, he would do whatever they wanted in terms of policy. Not only that, but they believed they could successfully sell him as a moderate (unlike Sanders), as well as a “uniter” because he supposedly came across as affable and avuncular. He may not have been the most coherent, but he was coherent enough for COVID times, because they could plausibly hide him away for the most part.

But probably his biggest plus was that he had been Obama’s VP for eight years. That Obama aura had rubbed off on him just a wee bit, and that was very much a plus. Obama’s reflected glow was also was a draw for the all-important black vote, for which Biden himself wasn’t necessarily a magnet. That’s also where Kamala Harris came in – both black and female, she was thought to be likely to lock in those two vital constituencies even further.

In 2024, it’s a bit different – although they still may be able to pull it off by hook or by crook. People have gotten to know how incompetent Biden is, as well as how leftist his administration has been, and they also see his mental decline. Harris is a dud (and that’s being kind). And yet alternatives to the two and a way to replace them are still not obvious, and the undead Trump has yet to have a stake driven into his still-beating heart, although not for lack of trying.

Senator Menendez (D-NJ) and his wife are indicted for bribery: what might be behind it?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the news:

Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., and his wife have been charged with bribery over their alleged acceptance of “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in return for the use of the senator’s influence to enrich three New Jersey businessmen and benefit the Egyptian government, according to an indictment filed in Manhattan federal court that was made public Friday.

The charges include conspiracy to commit bribery, conspiracy to commit honest services fraud and conspiracy to commit extortion under color of official right. The bribes the couple received included “cash, gold bars, payments toward a home mortgage, compensation for a low-or-no-show job, a luxury vehicle and other items of value,” the indictment alleges.

Federal agents said they discovered many of the items when they executed search warrants on the couple’s home in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, in June 2022. …

Menendez will step down as chair of the Foreign Relations Committee while the case proceeds, a source close to him said on Friday.

Menendez denied the charges and said that prosecutors have “misrepresented the normal work of a Congressional office” and are attempting to “dig my political grave.”

Neither of the articles I linked mentioned politics, but that’s what the discussion is about on blogs on the right. Why Menendez, and why now? He’s a Democrat, after all; aren’t they ordinarily immune? The amount he is alleged to have gotten is relative chicken feed compared to the Bidens’ take.

Menendez may indeed be crooked. I’m going to assume there’s a great deal of that sort of thing going around. He’s been indicted before on similar charges involving different people, and I’ve written about that. Let’s take a look. For example, in March of 2015 I wrote this about the charges back then:

This case has been smoldering for quite some time. So the timing of the [announcement of pending charges against Menendez] could be just a coincidence. But it’s certainly “interesting” that it has come right after the Iran deal controversy in which Menendez featured so prominently as a leading Democrat who joined with Republicans to vociferously criticize Obama …

Menendez has long been a critic of the Iran deal, perhaps the only Democrat who can claim that status. He also recently (September 6) voiced “concerns” about Biden’s Iran prisoner swap. It seemed to me back in 2015, and it seems to me now, that he is being punished for this sort of thing. Otherwise, he would be protected Isn’t Biden working on a new Iran deal? And now Menendez won’t be chairman of that Foreign Relations Committee. The case also might be seen as a distraction from Joe’s bribery woes.

NOTE: By the way, Menendez and his wife were married in 2020, so this is a recent relationship.

Who “deserves” it?

The New Neo Posted on by

I often see remarks such as that of commenter “Wendy Brown,” who writes (the first sentence in the comment is a quote from another comment in the thread):

“If Trump is the nominee, a large segment of the GOP and the independents won’t support him.”

Then they deserve Joe Biden and his open borders.

And if Trump is not the nominee, and a significant segment of his supporters in the GOP as well as some independents decide to not support the eventual GOP nominee, do they also “deserve Joe Biden and his open borders”?

One of the main troubles with this sort of sentiment is that “Joe Biden and his open borders” – or whatever a victorious Biden and the Democrats would do – isn’t just visited on the segment who voted for him. Such consequences are visited on the entire country.

So it always puzzles me when people write that sort of thing about “deserving.” It reminds me of being a child in school, when certain people in the class misbehaved and we all were made to stay after school in detention. I bristled at the idea of group punishment for the actions of a part of the group, and I would sit at my desk for the duration, silently seething.

As a country we are all carried along by whatever happens as a result of an election. As Obama once famously said, “elections have consequences.” Indeed they do, and with the parties far more polarized than they used to be, the consequences can be more and more dramatic and dire. Those on the right who nitpick about this and that, and refuse to vote for the nominee, are definitely enabling the election of the left. But although I don’t think we all “deserve” the consequences, we all experience them.