Will there be a presidential debate?

The New Neo Posted on by

Maybe:

President Biden confirmed Friday that he may refuse to debate former President Donald Trump ahead of their anticipated election rematch.

“It depends on his behavior,” the 81-year-old Biden told reporters as he left the White House for a campaign trip to Philadelphia.

Trump, 77, said Wednesday that Biden must agree to debate him — amid suspicion that the incumbent would skip the traditional forums to deny the presumptive Republican nominee relatively unfettered TV air time.

“It is important, for the Good of our Country, that Joe Biden and I Debate Issues that are so vital to America, and the American People,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

“Therefore, I am calling for Debates, ANYTIME, ANYWHERE, ANYPLACE!”

It depends on his behavior feeds into the idea that Trump is some sort of out-of-control child, fuming and ranting – unlike the calm, cool, mature Biden. Those of us on the right who study Biden are scratching our heads that anyone can perceive the current president that way, but there are indeed many who do.

Democrats in general would probably rather not see a head-to-head debate for fear it would make Biden look bad. But I’m not at all sure that would be the result of a debate; it wasn’t that way in 2020, although it might have been. Biden’s handlers are more than able to give him enough preparation (including perhaps even knowing the questions in advance) and medication that his old fighting instincts will kick in as they did in 2020. Plus, he can lie in a debate and the MSM won’t call him out on it, so that’s a huge advantage.

People have perceived that Biden is extremely cognitively challenged. But every time he’s able to look at least somewhat with it and can string a bunch of coherent sentences together (even if wrong, even if angry, even if lying), he challenges that perception and allows some people who might otherwise not vote for him to relax and reassure themselves he’s okay after all.

So I’m not really sure if a debate is to Trump’s advantage, because the bar is so low for Biden and so high for Trump. But if I had to guess, I’d say there won’t be any debate – and Biden will blame it on Trump’s “behavior.”

Biden has a way with words

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ll just put this up here without comment. The comments practically write themselves:

It’s the tenth anniversary of the disappearance of Flight MH370

The New Neo Posted on by

Ten years. We know more than we did then, but the basic mystery remains.

To refresh your memory, if it needs refreshing:

MH370 set off from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia for China’s capital city on March 8, 2014. Thirty-nine minutes after taking off, the aircraft vanished from air traffic control radar displays.

The pilot sent a normal sounding radio call as the plane left Malaysian airspace, but he never checked in with Vietnamese air traffic controllers upon entering that country’s airspace as he should have done.

About two minutes after the last radio correspondence, MH370’s transponder — a standard piece of equipment on all commercial aircraft that routinely relays a plane’s position to air traffic control authorities — turned off, making the jet invisible to civilian radar systems.

Military radar and satellites showed that MH370 then turned around to travel over the Andaman Sea back toward Malaysia, flying for hours before it vanished, possibly when it ran out of fuel.

Malaysia’s prime minister said 17 days after the plane disappeared that, based on the satellite data, his government had concluded that the plane crashed down in a remote corner of the Indian Ocean, and that there were no survivors.

There were 239 souls on board, mostly Chinese nationals. Remains of the plane have washed up over the years but no remains of people. The leading theory – to which I subscribe – is that this was purposeful sabotage by the pilot.

A new search is being contemplated:

Texas-based marine robotics company Ocean Infinity, which tried previously to find the plane, has proposed launching a new search, and Malaysia’s transport ministry said it would consider the proposal.

The families and friends of the passengers have suffered a great deal, not just from the loss of their loved ones but from the long period of uncertainty. It is a terrible situation. The announcement of a possible new search was welcomed by the group:

“I’m on top of the world,” said Jacquita Gomes, whose flight attendant husband was on the plane. She said she is thankful that she may now have a chance for full closure and say a final goodbye.

“We have been on a roller coaster for the last 10 years. … If it is not found, I hope that it will continue with another search,” she said.

Family members of passengers from Malaysia, Australia, China and India paid tribute to their loved ones during the event, lighting a candle on stage to remember them.“

No matter if it is 10 years, 20 years or more, as long as we are still alive…we will not cease to press for the truth. We believe the truth will eventually come to light,” said Bai Zhong, from China, whose wife was on the plane.

I hope they find out more.

NOTE: This article explores some of the theories about the plane’s disappearance.

Anti-Semitism thrives on lies filling in the gaps created by ignorance

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s Douglas Murray:

“Maybe if we come up with a perfect argument,” he said. “Maybe if we inform people about the history, and broadly speaking, you’re talking about trying to educate or inform people who are not educated or informed.”

Most anti-Israel people aren’t informed about the Peel Commission or the Balfour Declaration, according to Murray. “You’re talking about people who have never heard of any of these things,” he said.

The Peel Commission and Balfour Declaration are esoteric knowledge compared to what most people are ignorant about. I’ve previously told the story of a well-educated person I talked to around 2005, a woman a few years older than I am, who did not know that immediately after the state of Israel was created, the Arab world declared war on it and Israel won that war. She knew literally nothing about how Israel was created, and yet she bought every bit of Palestinian propaganda. In her case, she was a follower and admirer of Edward Said. In the case of many other people I know, ignorance is also usually involved, although they’re not all quite as ignorant as she was.

It’s also significant that when I discovered how little that acquaintance of mine knew, I offered to send her a link or two on the subject. She readily acquiesced. But I never heard back from her and I doubt she read what I sent, even though it wasn’t long. People are usually quite dug in in their beliefs.

Murray also says:

Asked why there is so much antisemitism in Europe, Murray replied that many are “working out to have some kind of guilt complex, which ends up attacking the victim.”

“It is a desire so deep down, they probably could never identify it even after years of therapy—to blame the Jews and accuse them of the same thing done to the Jews,” Murray said.

Much more at the link.

This idea of lies and propaganda filling in the gaps created by ignorance is something I’ve pondered many, many times. In the twenty years since I had that conversation with that acquaintance of mine, the education system and the left have made sure that the young people coming up are even more ignorant than before, and the MSM helps to fill their heads with leftist-approved lies. Anti-semitism is only one aspect of this, because the ignorance affects an enormous number of topics and creates an enormous amount of opportunity for the left.

[ADDENDUM: Well, this group of Jew-haters seems to be aware of Balfour, at least – they slashed his portrait at the University of Cambridge.]

The passing of the RNC guard: Michael Whatley and Lara Trump are elected

The New Neo Posted on by

The Trump allies are now in charge:

Speaking to RNC members, Whatley vowed that the organization “will be focused like a laser on getting out the vote and protecting the ballot.”

“In less than eight months, we are going to determine the fate of not only the United States but of the entire world,” he said. “And this body, the RNC, is going to be the vanguard of a movement that will work tirelessly, every single day to elect our nominee Donald J. Trump as the 47th president of the United States, flip the Senate, expand our majority in the House of Representatives.”

Good. And that Hill article doesn’t miss a beat in the next paragraph [emphasis mine]:

Whatley, who has served as chair of the North Carolina GOP and RNC general counsel, is a Trump loyalist who has echoed the former president’s rhetoric about “election integrity” in the wake of the 2020 election, which Trump has falsely claimed was fraudulent and stolen.

As for Lara:

Lara Trump will serve as co-chair and will have a major focus on fundraising. The RNC has lagged far behind Democrats in bringing in cash over the past year, a setback heading into what will be a lengthy and bruising general election campaign.

Speaking to RNC committee members on Friday, Lara said the RNC had already received a check for $100,000 and pointed to the importance of fundraising and encouraging early voting, something that the GOP has at times struggled to rally around.

“We’ve got to play the game a little bit differently. We have to encourage people to do things like early voting,” she said.

Agreed.

Biden’s SOTU: eye of the beholder

The New Neo Posted on by

Late last night I looked at comments to a YouTube video that featured excerpts from Biden’s SOTU speech, and the first ten or so were on the order of “Great speech!” “Unifying speech that will bring us together!” “Statesmanlike speech!”

Who are these people? Bots, paid operatives, or just party regulars? Do Democrats really see that and hear that when they watch and listen to Biden?

The right saw it as the angriest and nastiest speech ever, and incredibly divisive. For example from Ted Cruz:

Frankly tonight Joe Biden reminded me like an angry old man standing on his porch, screaming to the kids, “Get off my lawn!” That’s who he was.

I’ve never seen…. I’ve been to 12 State of the Union addresses. I’ve never seen anything remotely like this. This was entirely focused on the November election. …

… [H]alf the Republicans almost fell asleep because after welcoming the president where we stand and show respect for the office, we basically just sat there for over an hour, as he told lie after lie after lie.

And he just went hard left. I’ve never seen anything like this.

That pretty much fits my impression of Biden whenever I’ve watched him give speeches, which granted isn’t very often because it’s hard to stomach.

Apparently a lot of people also were taken with Speaker Johnson’s expressive eyerolls:

And many people have pointed out that the MSM propaganda machine quickly got the word out in unified fashion, crowing that Biden’s speech was the f-words “fiery” and “feisty.” Examples abound; see this, this, and this.

Tonight’s State of the Union address: Biden to supply Hamas

The New Neo Posted on by

I won’t be watching tonight’s speech by Biden. As usual, I’ll just check the transcript later.

And yes, I think he’ll be able to stand there and read it, although there may be a few “gaffes.” And the Democrats will applaud wildly. Or maybe not-so-wildly; they’d love for him to step down and not run in 2024. But they’ll applaud anyway, of course.

One of the things he’ll apparently be saying is this

President Biden will announce during his State of the Union address Thursday that he’s directing the U.S. military to lead the construction of a port along the coast of Gaza on the Mediterranean Sea to boost the amount of aid getting to Palestinian civilians.

“We know the aid flowing into Gaza is nowhere near enough and nowhere near fast enough. The president will make clear again this evening that we all need to do more, and the United States is doing more,” a senior administration official said on a call with reporters.

The port would be able to receive large ships that can bring in food, water, medicine and other supplies into Gaza, which has been under fire for months as Israeli forces carry out shellings and military operations in response to Hamas’s attacks last October.

How kind of him. I’m sure the Muslim voters of Michigan will be happy about it. Because that’s what this is all about, IMHO.

It is the equivalent of airdrops to Germany during World War II. As Stephen Green writes:

You can move in a lot more food by sea than you can by air. A whole lot more. A starving soldier is a soldier who cannot fight. Biden is going to make damned sure that Hamas has all the calories it needs to kill as many Israelis as possible in a war that will go on needlessly long.

More:

Initial shipments of supplies would come via Cyprus, enabled by the U.S. military and partners. Officials said the U.S. would work with the United Nations and other humanitarian partners to distribute aid across Gaza once it reaches the port.

Oh, the UN. They’ll certainly make sure Hamas doesn’t get the lion’s share (that’s sarcasm, by the way).

Plus:

A senior administration official said the U.S. worked “very closely with the Israelis in developing this initiative.”

What Israelis? The Israeli left? The only information on that I could find is this:

An Israeli official speaking on condition of anonymity said Jerusalem “fully supports” the US plan, but did not comment on what it said about Israel’s ability to prevent a humanitarian crisis on its own.

An unnamed “official” says the Israelis support the plan. Perhaps they do, but only in the sense that they think it will take some of the international heat off them. I predict that it will do no such thing. It will merely feed it, as in oh, the Israelis were so mean that the US and the UN had to step in to feed the Palestinians who are victims of Israeli aggression.

Hamas is the perpetrator in the present conflict, and the Gazans overwhelmingly support Hamas and the atrocities it (along with many Gazan civilians) perpetrated on 10/7. The enabling of the Gazans and Hamas to live to fight another day only perpetuates the horror for Israel and for Gazans as well.

If there were a way to establish which people among the Gazans are actually innocent – whether that number is tiny or substantial – and to help them out, that would be fine. But there is no such way. Unfortunately, Gazans decided to elect a group of terrorists as their government, and to cheer and support (and even join in some cases) those terrorists as they perpetrated acts of barbaric horror on Israelis. That has resulted in a war, and in war the aggressors suffer. At least, that’s the way it used to be. But world opinion has mobilized around helping these aggressors, and that’s what Biden is doing.

Larry Summers makes sense up to a point

The New Neo Posted on by

As I read this interview with economist and former Harvard president Larry Summers, I was in basic agreement with the points he made in the first half or so. For example:

So I think what happens in universities is immensely important. And I think there is a widespread sense—and it is, I think, unfortunately, with considerable validity—that many of our leading universities have lost their way; that values that one associated as central to universities—excellence, truth, integrity, opportunity—have come to seem like secondary values relative to the pursuit of certain concepts of social justice, the veneration of certain concepts of identity, the primacy of feeling over analysis, and the elevation of subjective perspective. And that has led to clashes within universities and, more importantly, an enormous estrangement between universities and the broader society.

When the president of Harvard is a figure on a Saturday Night Live skit, when three presidents of universities combine to produce the most watched congressional hearing film clip in history, when applications to Harvard fall in a several-month period by more they’ve ever fallen before, when alumni are widely repudiating their alma mater, when they’re the subject of as many legal investigations as the Boeing company, you have a real crisis in higher education. And I think it’s been a long time coming because of those changes in values that I was describing. …

I think the values that animated me to spend my life in universities were values of excellence in thought, in pursuit of truth. We’re never going to find some ultimate perfect truth, but through argument, analysis, discussion, and study we can get closer to truth. And a world that is better understood is a world that is made better. And I think, increasingly, all you have to do is read the rhetoric of commencement speeches. It’s no longer what we talk about. We talk about how we should have analysis, we should have discussion, but the result of that is that we will each have more respect for each other’s point of view, as if all points of view are equally good and there’s a kind of arbitrariness to a conception of truth. That’s a kind of return to pre-Enlightenment values and I think very much a step backward. I thought of the goal of the way universities manage themselves as being the creation of an ever larger circle of opportunity in support of as much merit and as much excellence as possible. …

We celebrate particular ideas in ways that are very problematic, and we are reluctant to come to judgment: What started all the controversy at Harvard, and it has many different strands, was on October 7, when 34 student groups at Harvard, speaking as a coalition of Harvard students, condemned Israel as being responsible for the Hamas attacks. Those reports of the 34 student groups were reported in places where literally billions of people read them. And based on some inexplicable theory, the Harvard administration and the Harvard corporation (the Trustees of the University) could not find it within themselves to disassociate the university from those comments. I have no doubt that if similar comments had been made of a racist variety, there would have been no delay in the strongest possible disassociation of the university. But because Israel demonization is the fashion in certain parts of the social justice-proclaiming left, there was a reluctance to reach any kind of judgment, even about the most morally problematic statements.

All very correct. But then, after a mention of how Reagan’s early political career involved criticizing policies at Berkeley, Summers says:

And so it seems to me that universities that fail to govern themselves effectively are at immense peril to themselves and to the broader progressive values that they hold.

Ah, so the problem is that the universities’ behavior imperils progressivism? And it is understood that universities hold progressive values? But what if truth imperils progressivism and its values? Is that even a possibility in Summers’ mind? Is this about truth or is it about politics?

More:

I think it’s fine to stand strongly against a set of people who in many ways are riding this horse, but wish the process of thought and wish academic freedom ill. The problem is not that Harvard has worked itself into a war with Elise Stefanik. The problem is that it got itself condemned from the White House press briefing room of the Biden administration, that it finds itself subject to investigation from the Department of Education of the Biden administration, that the attacks on it are coming in a bipartisan way.

Oh, so it’s okay to do something that alienates the right, but doing something that also alienates at least a portion of Democrats is a no-no. And it seems that Summers thinks the likes of Stefanik “wish the process of thought and wish academic freedom ill.” Really? And just what evidence does Summers have for that, other than his own Democrat politics? After all, he’s just spent quite a lot of verbiage to say that on campuses it’s the left that’s been wishing the process of thought and wishing academic freedom ill – and not just wishing these things ill, but actively stomping on them. But he continues to cling to the idea that it’s somehow the right wishing it and doing it.

When I read the interview, the sudden change startled me although it absolutely shouldn’t have. It is completely standard. And it doesn’t matter how smart the person is otherwise – like Summers – or how persecuted that person has been by the left. One of the reasons Summers was hounded out of Harvard was that he told some inconvenient truths that angered the left; the right had nothing to do with it. And yet he thinks the right is the bigger problem. Go figure; it’s another case of a mind being a difficult thing to change, especially regarding politics.

Governor Hochul calls out the National Guard to police the NYC subways

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember when the NY Times staff was outraged because the paper published a Tom Cotton editorial supporting the idea of using the National Guard to quell some of the post-Floyd riots in American cities in 2020? Well, now that a Democrat, Governor Hochul of New York, has done the same for the New York subway system, it seems to be perfectly okay with the Times.

And remember how awful and how racist New York’s stop-and-frisk policy was deemed to be? Opposition to that policy helped lead to the election of leftist Bill de Blasio. But the summer of 2020, with its violence as well as its anti-police atmosphere, has contributed to many resignations within the NYC police force, a situation the current Mayor Adams has described as “a law enforcement crisis.”

Enter Hochul with the equivalent of stop-and-frisk for all who enter the subways in certain high-traffic stations. Well, at least it’s not just suspicious people they will search, right? Here’s some information (and by the way, the right-leaning NY Post’s article was number 31 in the Google list when I checked, instead of much higher up where it should be as one of New York City’s largest periodicals):

“Governor Hochul has made historic commitments to make our subways safer, from security cameras to mental health personnel,” a rep for the governor said in a statement. “Tomorrow, she will unveil new legislation to protect riders, new state personnel to assist NYPD with bag checks, and other new measures to keep New Yorkers safe.”

The heightened focus on subway violence comes as The Post exclusively revealed last week that underground crime skyrocketed months after the number of transit cops on patrol had plummeted to levels not seen since Mayor Bill de Blasio was in power.

Meanwhile, subway crime rates surged in the first two months of this year alone, spiking by nearly 20% compared to this time last year, the latest NYPD stats show – largely driven by increases in grand larcenies, felony assaults and robberies.

The mayor — who just last week said the NYPD would be moving to 12-hour tours in the system — has previously blamed the crime spike on the city’s rollback of its 2022 subway safety plan, which saw the number of cops underground dwindle when state funding dried up.

And here are some details of the methods proposed:

Here’s what Hochul’s five-point plan entails:

Influx of 1,000 National Guardsmen, state and MTA cops.
Law to allow judges to ban transit assault perps from trains, buses.
Install CCTV cameras in all train cars, conductor cabins.
Better coordination between NYPD and district attorneys to thwart recidivists.
$20 million to expand Subway Co-Response Outreach mental health teams.

As for the bag checks:

In an interview on WPIX-11 Wednesday along with Chief Michael Kemper, head of the NYPD Transit Bureau, Adams insisted the new bag checks would not lead to racial or ethnic profiling.

“We’re not profiling, we’re random based on the count, a number,” the mayor said. “And people who don’t want their bag checks can turn around and not enter the system. You don’t have to come through and do the bag checks, but they are random.”

So let’s inconvenience everyone so there’s no accusation of racism, and let’s just check for weapons so that law-abiding citizens can’t have them either for defense. I can’t even imagine how this bag check thing would work at rush hour. And of course bag checks for weapons will do nothing to stop weaponless crimes involving, for example, pushing people into the paths of trains, or beatings.

And how will the banning of transit assault perpetrators from public transportation be accomplished? And what will courts have to say about that?