Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Pam Bondi is out as AG. I think she’s been on the way out ever since she “misspoke” on the Epstein files. She’s never been popular with the online right crowd.

This is from Trump, who – not surprisingly – isn’t telling why this happened:

Pam Bondi is a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend, who faithfully served as my Attorney General over the past year. Pam did a tremendous job overseeing a massive crackdown in Crime across our Country, with Murders plummeting to their lowest level since 1900. We love Pam, and she will be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future, and our Deputy Attorney General, and a very talented and respected Legal Mind, Todd Blanche, will step in to serve as Acting Attorney General. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

(2) Trump had already spoken out against Tucker Carlson (something J. D. Vance has yet to do, but it could happen). Now Trump has reposted a Douglas Murray column that absolutely excoriates Carlson as only Murray can do, entitled, “Deranged Tucker Carlson backstabs Trump.” Here’s Murray’s piece, if you’re interested. It is certainly clear where Trump stands on Carlson.

(3) California fraud involving government programs is incredibly widespread and has been going on for ages. Is anyone here surprised? The latest arrests involve hospice care that never was, to the tune of about fifty million dollars. Chump change in California:

The FBI, with the Health and Human Services (HHS), raided the home of Amelou Gill and Gladwin Gill, a doctor and a nurse, in Southern California over accusations that they committed $7 million in hospice fraud.

According to J.D. Vance, the FBI conducted additional raids in the area. In total, they nabbed people who allegedly stole over $50 million. …

St. Francis Palliative Care in Anaheim, which the Gills operate, has a 2.3% mortality rate over the last five years.

It’s odd when a hospice center has a 97% survival rate because people usually enter hospice at the end of a terminal illness.

It’s not unheard of that people who enroll in hospice don’t die within the six months allotted, and often they renew for another six months, and this can go on for quite some time. Or, now and then, they get better. But a 97% survival rate is beyond ludicrous.

There were many many signs in California (and elsewhere) that massive fraud was ongoing, and not just in hospice care. Much of it was ignored, although there were some prosecutions by the state. However:

(4) Moon launch by NASA:

The spur, of course, for today’s great leap was Elon Musk. While NASA’s big rival in the Sixties was the Soviets’ space programme, which threatened to prove that their ethos of collectivism could make faster progress than the American way of free men, free enterprise (and of course, free Nazis), Musk emerged in the 21st century as part Bond villain, and part John Galt. That Sixties narrative is now in danger of being reversed, with SpaceX taking the role of Ayn Randian, square-jawed enterprise and individual heroism, and NASA looking like the clumsy, over-burdened, over-regulated state-sector attempt, with more being spent on HR than R&D.

(5) Happy Passover! Each year, the meaning of the holiday seems to deepen. This year is no exception.

I need a new computer

The New Neo Posted on by

Mine is so outdated it’s ludicrous. How old is it? Well, let’s just say I’ve got Windows 7.

It’s not that I couldn’t have gone out and bought a new one years and years ago. After all, there’s a wide range of types and prices, and I mostly read and write on mine so I don’t need anything all that fancy. But what I hate, and what keeps me clinging – bitterly or otherwise – to the one I have is that I hate transitions to new devices and new systems.

And so I’ve been putting it off – for years. I nurse my old one along. It’s a Lenovo laptop, and people laugh when they see it, especially the keyboard. It has been worn down, like mountains that have been around for half a billion years. I’m going to post a photo, even though this is highly embarrassing:

And yes, I know I not only could get a new computer, but I could instead just get a new keyboard and attach it to the old laptop. But the keyboard is only a small part of the problem.

The seductive thing is – sometimes my computer works just fine. In fact, most of the time it works just fine. And so it lulls me into procrastinating on the task of replacing it – until I hit a day like today, when it’s been balky and strange and then suddenly, for no discernible reason at all, it’s fine again.

And, in the nature of computers, it’s not telling me: why today? Why now? Maybe it’s something else besides the ancient computer. Maybe it’s the wifi connection. Maybe it’s the weather. Maybe it’s – who knows?

And please please don’t tell me to get a Mac. Had one for many years and hated it. I never never never got used to it.

Tucker Carlson, changer

The New Neo Posted on by

Anyone who’s followed Tucker Carlson over the years knows he’s been on a long and winding journey: from a childhood that was highly unusual, to say the least – raised in mega-wealth but with an eccentric mother who deserted the family when he was six years old and thereafter had nothing to do with her two sons – to a long career as journalist and TV personality with shifting positions. He reached the heights of popularity on the right with his Fox News show from 2016 t0 2023, as he became more and more aligned with what one might call the Buchanan-type isolationist wing of the party and finally was let go by Fox and started his own podcast. Riding on his previous popularity (and probably an assortment of bots and foreign fans in Muslim states) he’s been popular ever since and grown increasingly pro-Russia and pro-Arab as well as increasingly anti-Israel in a mendacious manner.

Along the way, his religious views have changed as well. He describes some of that in this short clip from a year ago:

So although he was a nominal Christian growing up, it really was a shallow thing. And he says that about three years ago he was mauled by a demon. In addition, it was about two or three years ago that he read the Bible for the first time:

Tucker on spiritual warfare: “Leaving aside elections, it’s clearly a pivot point in history. There are unseen forces acting on people. People, while they have freewill, are not really in charge of the arc of history at all. A lot of these issues are symbols of a larger battle.”

So according to Tucker, the larger overarching battle is spiritual. In the last couple of years he keeps mentioning his Christianity and yet also has taken more and more extreme positions on a host of issues including – of all things – sharia law. This latter position is a rather recent development. For example, see this short video excerpt from about eight years ago, back in his Fox News days:

Contrast to this short clip of Carlson recently, demonstrating what you might call his “evolution” in thinking:

In that clip Tucker still self-identifies as a Christian, but his praise for “tolerant” and “diverse” Arab Muslim societies is bizarre. Not only does it contrast with what he “knew” eight years ago, but it seems based on dinner party conversation with polite elites trying to curry favor with him.

And yes, he’s probably been getting money from Qatar. But he’s been mega-rich for his whole life, and I think the prospect of more money would be insufficient in and of itself to turn the tide for him like this. I think he’s become an Arab and Muslim admirer because of their enforcement of strict cultural norms that he says are lacking in Western countries. The issues of liberty – or harsh apostasy punishment, or his old concern for women’s rights, or his definition of “diversity” in Arab states (which is a laugh), all really have fallen off in service to his desire for what he sees as clean streets and moral strictness where a man’s a man and a woman’s a woman and all that.

Which brings us to the present. It appears that Tucker is edging closer to taking the next step – conversion to Islam. Here’s Tucker now:

Today SCOTUS heard arguments on birthright citizenship

The New Neo Posted on by

See this:

Here is the Question Presented on which the court agreed to take the case:

“The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment provides that those “born * * * in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” are U.S. citizens. U.S. Const. Amend. XIV, § 1. The Clause was adopted to confer citizenship on the newly freed slaves and their children, not on the children of aliens temporarily visiting the United States or of illegal aliens. On January 20, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order No. 14,160, Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship, which restores the original meaning of the Citizenship Clause and provides, on a prospective basis only, that children of temporary visitors and illegal aliens are not U.S. citizens by birth. The Citizenship Order directs federal agencies not to issue or accept citizenship documents for such children born more than 30 days after the Order’s effective date.

“The question presented is whether the Executive Order complies on its face with the Citizenship Clause and with 8 U.S.C. 1401(a), which codifies that Clause.”

President Trump is attending, although the left has been outraged about that and claims it threatens separation of powers (and apparently no president has ever done so before). However, there has been a chair there for presidents if one happens to want to attend, so it seems perfectly okay.

The Legal Insurrection article I linked in the first sentence says that from the drift of the proceedings there’s no way to tell how the justices will ultimately rule, but it seems the vote will probably be very close with Barrett casting the deciding vote. Jonathan Turley seems to think it most likely that the government will lose. I find that I agree, mostly because I think they’re reluctant to make that large a change when the intent of the statute’s framers is unclear because they never envisioned the present-day situation (for example, that of pregnant tourists coming here for the sole purpose of giving birth here and of conferring citizenship on their baby and then immediately leaving with the baby).

I think it’s obvious that such a situation would not have been the intent of the statute’s framers, although they never explicitly addressed it. But I think it might take a constitutional amendment to change the law. I doubt such an amendment would pass – too many blue states? – and in any event it would take a long time.

[NOTE: I’ve written on the birthright citizenship question many times. I refer you in particular to this post, which adds links to several other posts of mine on the subject, plus a quote with some predictions.]

Planning for the Iran War’s aftermath

The New Neo Posted on by

We don’t know the extent of the planning for the aftermath of the current Iran operation, either by the US, Israel, or the Iranians. We don’t know what’s going on at present in terms of the destruction of the regime’s lower-down personnel rather than just the weaponry, its infrastructure, and upper echelon of leaders. We don’t know how many defections there have been, or from which regime segment. We don’t know what will happen in terms of negotiations or in terms of surrender, unconditional or otherwise (although I can’t imagine anyone in the regime surrendering unconditionally).

We don’t know how chaotic a transition of some kind will be, or how long-lasting, or how solid. We don’t know how many disruptions – particularly in the oil market – will take place, nor how serious and long-lasting they will be.

I have long assumed that it’s the Israelis who know the most about the ins and outs of Iran’s structure, including the factions who would like to take over in any Day After – their strengths and weaknesses, and their viewpoints. I think it’s a valid assumption of mine. But I don’t know.

Nor do I think there are good analogies from the past. There are huge differences between Iran and Iraq, and Iran and either Germany or Japan in World War II.

I came across this recent article purporting to provide a roadmap of sorts for the aftermath of the war. It’s long and involved, and I don’t know how well it matches plans already in the works or what will happen in the future. But I think it’s worth reading.

An excerpt:

Here we arrive at what is perhaps the most consequential analytical error in the entire strategic discourse: the persistent treatment of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a military organization.

It is not. It is a corporate conglomerate that happens to possess an army, a navy, a missile force, and a nuclear program. …

If the binding agent is economic rather than ideological, then the mechanism of accelerated regime collapse is economic rather than kinetic. A general who controls a $500 million construction portfolio operates on a fundamentally different calculus than a Basij ideologue with nothing to lose. One can be turned; the other can only be neutralized. The United States should be mapping these incentives at the individual commander level and designing calibrated offers: asset protection in exchange for institutional surrender, with amnesty for cooperation, and targeted financial strangulation for resistance. This costs a fraction of what sustained bombing costs, and it strikes directly at the structural ligament that holds the regime together.

And when that ligament snaps, when the Supreme Leader’s authority vanishes entirely, the legal and religious shielding of the bonyad empires evaporates with it.

What follows will not be an orderly audit.

It will be a scramble.

But it seems to me that’s the sort of thing that’s already known and understood, even though we’re not being told any details. Whether it will be carried out as planned is another question. But I don’t see why anyone should assume this sort of thing hasn’t been gamed out by the US and in particular by Israel.

Israel has so far taken the lead in killing the rulers of Iran, based on some sort of deep intelligence. I assume that Israel will take the lead in the aftermath if things go well, and that they have plans based on actual knowledge. But it is certainly possible that I’m being too sanguine. It’s a time of uncertainty.

SCOTUS rules 8-1 against anti-conversion therapy laws as First Amendment violations

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s a mark of how vile these laws are that the only dissent was Justice Jackson. From the Gorsuch-written opinion:

Ms. Chiles [a therapist] does not question that Colorado’s law banning conversion therapy has some constitutionally sound applications. See Brief for Petitioner 53. She does not take issue with the State’s effort to prohibit what she herself calls “long-abandoned, aversive” physical interventions. Instead, Ms. Chiles stresses that she provides only talk therapy, employing no physical techniques or medications. Yet, she argues, Colorado’s law still applies to her, prescribing what she may say in “voluntary counseling conversations” with her clients. And because that application of the law strikes at the heart of the First Amendment’s protections for free speech, she contends, it warrants considerably more searching scrutiny than the rational-basis review the Tenth Circuit applied in this case or the intermediate-scrutiny review some other lower courts have employed in cases like hers.

I have written two fairly lengthy posts on the subject of these laws, so I’m not sure there’s much more to add except that I strongly believe this was the right decision and long overdue. My first post on the subject was in 2013, when New Jersey passed such a law (and Governor Christie signed it). An excerpt:

It is no use pretending that therapy—and the licensing of therapists by the state—is not at least partly a political endeavor subject to political fashion rather than a science. Nor should therapists be completely unrestricted. For example, therapists are already prohibited from sexual contact with patients—even willing patients, even adult patients—because it is considered inherently exploitative. But the most harmful practices that could be used by conversion therapists (for example, electric shock) could be banned without banning the entire enterprise. And as the articles point out, mainstream therapy organizations have already condemned conversion therapy and do not advocate it.

But apparently none of that would be enough for the advocates of this bill; the therapy itself must be defined by the government as inherently and unfailingly abusive (what’s next, taking children away from parents who don’t applaud and celebrate their gayness?) As the nanny state grows, so will these essentially political moves by the government. This bill opens the door for a host of governmental abuses in which the state dictates the enforcement of politically correct thought through the mechanism of so-called therapy, and therapists become the instruments by which the public is indoctrinated in what is currently politically acceptable and what is verboten.

The present ruling arrests that trend at least somewhat. It is encouraging that even two of the liberal justices voted with the majority.

My other previous post on the subject can be found here. It is about the Colorado law. An excerpt:

I have some retired therapist friends who are Democrats, and a few years ago when I told them that anything other than “gender-affirming” therapy was discouraged or even sometimes banned they were aghast. That’s how quickly the policies have changed, and how radically.

What is banned under the Colorado law is described this way: “efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.” That’s pretty darn broad.

Ukraine says it will be helping to open the Strait of Hormuz

The New Neo Posted on by

Some interesting news from Ukraine:

Ukraine will supply weapons and defense technology, including systems that can help unblock the Strait of Hormuz, to Gulf countries under new agreements, President Volodymyr Zelensky told reporters on March 30.

“All agreements that will be legally formalized are extremely important for our country,” Zelensky said. “Ukraine has never had such agreements with this region before.” …

“The experience of unblocking sea trade routes with the help of among other things, sea drones – could this experience help unblock the Strait of Hormuz?” Zelensky said. “They know that they can count on our expertise in this area, and we spoke in detail about sharing our experience of the Black Sea corridor and how it functions.”

If this works out as stated, it would be some rare positive fallout from the Ukraine War. It would also be another way for Ukraine to stick it to Russia, because the latter favors Iran.

I have noticed that on the American left there is widespread support for Ukraine and a widespread lack of support for Israel and the US in the Iran operation. Will this action of Zelensky’s cause some cognitive dissonance on the left?

On the other hand, on the “woke right” (if you have a better name for that group, please let me know because I’m not so keen on that one) and/or the isolationist right, both Ukraine and Israel (and Trump, at this point) are excoriated and our support for them derided. So at least there’s consistency there and they can continue to hate Zelensky.

The conspiracy theorists regarding the Charlie Kirk murder are quite happy about this

The New Neo Posted on by

This article appeared in the Daily Mail concerning the trial of Tyler Robinson. Its headline reads “Bullet used to kill Charlie Kirk did NOT match rifle allegedly used by suspect Tyler Robinson, new court filing claims.”

As you might imagine, many of the pundits who think Tyler Robinson is being framed (whether or not they are of the ISRAEL DID IT variety) are writing about this (see, for example, Candace Owens’ reaction).

From the Daily Mail article

But his defense attorneys now argue that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives ‘was unable to identify the bullet recovered at autopsy to the rifle allegedly tied to Mr Robinson.’

The defense team may now offer the ATF firearm analyst’s testimony as exculpatory evidence, they said in a motion filed on Friday to push the preliminary hearing back at least six months, Fox News reports.

The Fox article has nothing about the allegations regarding the bullet evidence. And the Daily Mail article has nothing more about it than the quote I posted, despite the incendiary headline.

Note that it doesn’t say the gun was ruled out; it says the Bureau was unable to identify it to the rifle, which sounds as though the evidence about the bullet was probably ruled “inconclusive.”

The article didn’t add that this is not all that unusual in forensics cases. But see this article from a forensics periodical:

A forensic firearms examiner, when comparing two bullets or two cartridge cases, for example one an “unknown” or “questioned” (from crime scene) and the other a “known” (from a suspect weapon), will in the U.S. ordinarily follow The Association of Firearms and Toolmarks Examiners (AFTE) or the Uniform Language for Testimony and Reports (ULTR) guidelines issued by the Department of Justice, and arrive at one of three major conclusions: “identification”—the bullets came from the same gun, “elimination”—the bullets came from different guns, or “inconclusive”—the bullets might have come from the same gun, might have come from different guns. … The AFTE criteria further divide the Inconclusives into three sub-categories labeled A, B and C, where A leans to without reaching an Identification, C leans to without reaching an Elimination, and B is neutral.

We have no idea which, if any, of these designations were given the bullets in this case. Nor do we know if any other forensic scientists also examined the bullet and gun evidence. The media isn’t saying.

More here about the science of bullet matching:

We always knew it was never a perfect science. We knew that not every bullet could be traced to a specific firearm. Microscopic tool marks left behind on a fired bullet as it travels down the barrel were never really seen as “a firearm’s DNA,” as some have termed it. Bullets fired into non-homogenous substances such as the human body can impact muscle, bone, clothing, and internal objects, all of which can deform the bullet, making identification difficult.

We knew that—our trust in television aside—not every bullet can be traced to a specific firearm. For example, some rifles, such as a particular Canadian law enforcement agency’s patrol carbine, are manufactured with hammer-forged barrels that do not machine the rifling grooves in a barrel in the traditional way. Instead, they use a hardened die inserted into a barrel blank that is pounded by tens of thousands of powerful hydraulic hammer blows to form and shape the barrel to exact dimensions. This process may make it difficult to come to a conclusive decision about the precise firearm a bullet was fired from

Other firearms manufacturers that use non-traditional rifling may not leave enough marks on the bullet that can be matched to a specific barrel even if recovered fully intact. …

A 2009 report by the National Academies of Science first called into question how ‘exact’ the science was and how there were few—if any—scientific, double-blind research studies to back up the claims made by examiners in court. The report pointed out that, unlike fingerprints, bullet examination protocols don’t specify how many points of similarity are needed to form a conclusive opinion.

A 2016 report to the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) concluded that firearms analysis did not meet the criteria for scientific validity, which requires repeatability and reproducibility.

There is no question that further research is needed.

In another widely quoted research paper from 2022, the Ames II Study, 173 firearms examiners compared thousands of fired cartridge cases and bullets. The overall rate of errors and false positives in the study was considered to be under one per cent.

Critics of the Ames II Study point out that the three categories the examiners used, “Identified,” “Eliminated” or “Inconsistent,” skewed the result numbers substantially. Being able to answer “inconclusive” and still be scored as perfect meant error rates of under one per cent were, in fact, closer to 30 to 40 per cent. Critics also pointed out that examiners disagreed on a number of matches made by their own colleagues, and even the same examiner reached different conclusions when given the same test batch twice. Critics considered that the large number of “inconclusive” results was like answering every multiple-choice question on a test with “I don’t know” and still scoring perfectly.

I am not a ballistics expert, to say the least. But just twenty minutes or so of research revealed all of that.

The Daily Mail article does detail some of the other evidence against Tyler Robinson, which is simply overwhelming.

I wrote all of the above prior to listening to this video, which answers some of the questions – apparently based on information that was released two weeks ago and which the Daily Mail article’s author didn’t see fit to mention (nor did any of the conspiracy theorists that I read on X). The gist of the video is that the autopsy results revealed a fragmented bullet that would be very difficult to match to a weapon. The fragmentation also accounted for the lack of an exit wound (no exit wound is something the conspiracy theorists often cite as suspicious). Here’s the video:

The woman in the video is lawyer Andrea Burkhart.