Actually, I think the sun bear may have been the collie guy dressed in a bear suit

The New Neo Posted on by

What collie guy? This collie guy.

What bear? This Chinese bear:

A Chinese zoo has been forced to deny that its sun bear is actually a human in a costume, after video of one standing on its hind legs raised online accusations of a furry imposter.

A video clip of a bear rearing up and interacting with a group of people at a zoo in eastern Hangzhou city went viral on Chinese social media.

Many users posted comments doubting that the bear was real, with some alleging that its bipedal posture and wrinkled skin suggested that it was actually a human in costume.

But the zoo dismissed the rumours, saying in a statement written from the bear’s perspective on Sunday that the animal was real and its detractors “really don’t understand me”.

“The zoo director called me after work yesterday and asked if I’d been slacking off by finding a two-legged beast to replace me,” the bear, named Angela, said in the statement.

Well, I’m glad we’ve got that cleared up. The bear can talk – or rather, write – but only to reassure us that it’s not really a human.

Which makes me think of this bear, from the ballet Petrouchka:

That’s a movie of the ballet, and they might take some liberties with the stage version – such as, maybe that’s a real bear? I’m really not sure. But here’s a staged version (not a very good one – the crowd is meager and the stage is very shallow, which ruins many of the effects that depend on a big lifelike crowd) that shows you how it’s done in a live performance:

Oh, and the Chinese bear in the zoo? Here it is:

Retired ballet dancer?

Melanie Phillips writes about what’s going on in Israel with Ehud Barak

The New Neo Posted on by

Wow:

Unfortunately, there can surely be no compromise with the organizers of the anti-reform protests, because for them the real issue was never the reform itself. As was stated explicitly from the start by former Prime Minister Yair Lapid and others, the aim was to bring down Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

One of the main leaders of the protests is another former prime minister, Ehud Barak. An astounding video clip has now surfaced showing Barak in March 2020 addressing Forum 555, a group of retired Israeli Air Force pilots and navigators.

Three years before judicial reform was even a twinkle in the Israeli government’s eye, Barak detailed for this group a plan for a coup d’état that would overturn the Netanyahu government and install Barak himself as prime minister.

The plan involved inciting the civilian population to revolt by falsely claiming that Israel’s democracy was in danger and bankrolling protests that would manipulate popular patriotism by such measures as the mass purchase of Israeli flags.

Such an uprising, said Barak, had to be presented to the public as a defense of democracy rather than an attempt to get rid of Netanyahu. “Democracy is a better dividing line,” he said. “Support for democracy penetrates deep into the right as well.”

He went on, “I have a friend who is a historian and who once told me: ‘Ehud, they will call on you [to lead] when dead bodies float in the Yarkon River.’ But I wish to emphasize that the bodies will not be those of workers who infiltrated from the ‘territories,’ nor those of Israeli Arabs. The bodies that float will be those of Jews killed by Jews.” …

… So, Barak now just happens to be a leader of an uprising that fits every detail of the plan that he set out three years ago to mount a coup by misleading the Israeli public and enlisting them as useful idiots. Are we really supposed to believe this is just an astonishing coincidence?

The Barak video is virtually unknown in America or Britain, where the media hasn’t reported it.

If you look up Barak’s history, you’ll be reminded that he was the head of the Labor Party and was part of the failed 2000 Camp David negotiations. But there’s a lot more, some of it sympathetic (all four of his grandparents were killed either in pogroms or in death camps) and some of it courageous. An example of some of the latter:

Barak led several highly acclaimed operations, such as: “Operation Isotope”, the mission to free the hostages on board the hijacked Sabena Flight 571 at Lod Airport in 1972; the covert 1973 Israeli raid on Lebanon in Beirut, in which he was disguised as a woman to kill members of the Palestine Liberation Organization; Barak was also a key architect of the June 1976 Operation Entebbe, another rescue mission to free the hostages of the Air France aircraft hijacked by terrorists and forced to land at the Entebbe Airport in Uganda. These highly acclaimed operations, along with Operation Bayonet, led to the dismantling of Palestinian terrorist cell Black September …

Barak was awarded the Medal of Distinguished Service and four Chief of Staff citations (Tzalash HaRamatkal) for courage and operational excellence. These five decorations make him the most decorated soldier in Israeli history …

In addition, just to round things out:

Barak enjoys reading works by writers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and he is a classical pianist, with many years of study behind him.

Barak earned his bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1968, and his master’s degree in engineering-economic systems in 1978 from Stanford University, California.

However, Barak is now 81 years old. Maybe he’s lost a few steps, and that accounts for his recent actions? If in the video Barak says what Phillips claims he says, the content is shocking – that is, it would be shocking except for all the things we’ve seen happen in this country during the last few years.

Trump versus everyone else

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Molly Brown” writes in the DeSantis thread:

There is a common assumption in many of these comments that if the GOP would just nominate a more ‘mainstream, likeable, whatever you want to call it’ candidate – that candidate will have a chance to sell himself to the ‘moderate, swing, independent’ voters that Trump can’t win.

But I see no evidence of support for “mainstream” candidates, although it was certainly true years ago as recently as 2008 and 2012 (McCain and Romney). But now, for example, there is nothing “mainstream” about DeSantis. He is actually even to the right of Trump in his policies. That is what has allowed the media to demonize him already, before he ever declared his candidacy.

And in fact, the idea that DeSantis is somehow “mainstream” is exactly the line that has been spread about him on the right as a criticism by the Trump forces, something that I described in that recent post: that DeSantis is some sort of GOPe Jeb-light. But look at what he’s done in Florida and you will see that he has been boldly conservative. Plus, when he was in the House, he was one of the founding members of the Freedom Caucus in 2015.

And it’s also an odd thing to say he’s being presented as “likeable,” because another big criticism of DeSantis from the right is that he’s not very likeable – that he’s cold, wonky, etc.. His boosters do not call him “likeable”; they call him smart. He also has a history of fighting back, particularly against the MSM. His “likeability” quotient isn’t all that high, but he is not hated with the heat of a thousand suns by many moderates, unlike Trump. It’s certainly possible that DeSantis could end up being hated just as much as Trump and liked less, but another thing about DeSantis is that a great many people don’t know much about him and/or haven’t yet made up their minds what they think about them. But hated of Trump is baked into the cake for a lot of voters, who also find that Trump-hatred to be a potent motivator to vote in 2024 – even to vote for Biden, whom nobody much likes.

This election is quite different from previous ones. Trump is an unusual candidate, as is Biden. But so is DeSantis. And it’s very very early to tell how it will shake down. I think the vast majority of people will be voting for whomever their party nominates; it’s that group in the middle that tends to decide things. But the days of nominating a politically moderate Republican in order to supposedly appeal to that group are over. And the same is true for Democrats; no moderates can get traction, although Joe Biden sold himself as a moderate in 2020 – despite the fact that anyone who looked at his record under Obama, or actually has paid attention to the Democrats in the last decade and a half, should never have believed it. I don’t think many people are that naive anymore about Joe being a moderate politically.

Just a little while ago, commenter “wendybar” also had this to say:

The naysayers can keep naysaying, and keep voting for the Mitt Romneys and then wonder why we keep losing.

But there isn’t a single Romneyesque figure in the current GOP presidential candidate field who’s doing at all well. I suppose, though, that if the definition of a “Romney” is “anyone other than Trump,” then they are all “Romneys.” But they are not, and in particular DeSantis is not.

In addition, commenter “davemay” wrote this:

Until justice is restored, we can never go back to politics as usual. Trump vs. DeSantis (or whoever else) presupposes that elections are on the level, or even matter anymore. We cannot unsee what we have seen…

Simply, Neo, we are at war. We saw the cities burning, and that WILL HAPPEN again (no doubt there will be an inciting incident that will be used as a pretext for violence so as to ensure a Democrat, or acceptable not-Trump candidate, wins the presidency. Can the Deep State even take the chance of a free and fair election?

I have no disagreement with that, and I believe I have made it clear in the past. And of course “war” is at present a metaphor. And whether elections have been won by Democrats through outright fraud (possibly) or just through “rigging” (definitely) or through both, I also agree that the outlook is dire. But then “davemay” adds this:

To his great credit, Donald Trump exposed the rot and corruption and the sheer diabolical evil of our political class. No one else could have done it. No one else would have the courage to do it and withstand the vitriolic whirlwinds unleashed against him.

Trump exposed the rot by drawing their hatred, and if “no one else could have done it” that’s only because he was (and is) hated the most. But he was ineffectual in stopping it or fighting it, and it continues unabated to this day, with no small success. And yes, I’ve always given Trump much credit for “withstanding the vitriolic whirlwinds,” but he’s not the only strong person in the world. For example, DeSantis has already had plenty of vitriol unleashed against him during his Florida tenure, and I don’t think he’s the only one with similar courage.

What’s more, in terms of preventing voter fraud, Trump has been remarkably ineffective. Not only did he fail to stop it if in fact it’s occurring, but his efforts to right it have landed him in legal troubles – troubles in which so far he seems to be on the losing end. In contrast, DeSantis did a great deal to improve the voting rules in Florida. Most people don’t seem to be aware of this. The details can be found here. And yes, a governor has more control over a state in this regard, and Florida has a Republican legislature to greatly help. But plenty of other states with Republican-controlled legislatures have failed to accomplish what was done in Florida to make voting safer, and it was done in Florida with DeSantis’ leadership. He is well aware of the problem and has the track record to prove it (see also this).

I have no way of knowing who would be the GOP candidate most likely to beat Biden in the general (or beat the person who replaces Biden as the Democrats’ nominee). Neither do you. But I’m tired of this “Trump is the only one who…” business, and I’m tired of descriptions of DeSantis that just don’t conform to his actual history in politics. That is because this is such a vital election. We’ve been saying that for years, but it doesn’t get less true over time; it gets more true.

[NOTE: Commenter “davemay” also wrote that, “Support for Trump is not about a cult of personality. If there is no commitment to truth or justice, then what’s the point?” Support for Trump is not about a cult of personality for some people. I support Trump in the sense that I’ve supported much – in fact, most – of what he did as president, and I am outraged at the lies told to frame him. And I certainly am not part of any Trump “cult of personality.” But some Trump supporters are part of such a cult, and I see it constantly.

And to davemay’s question “If there is no commitment to truth or justice, then what’s the point?” I answer that the point is to restore that commitment. And it will not be restored by misrepresenting the strengths of other candidates or by ignoring Trump’s weaknesses, which have become more apparent since the fall of 2020.]

Did you know that Hunter Biden is a member in good standing of the DC and Connecticut Bars?

The New Neo Posted on by

In addition to being such a fabulous and successful artist, Hunter Biden is indeed a Bar member:

First reported by the Daily Caller, Biden told the judge during his first appearance in a Wilmington, Delaware federal court, in which his expected plea deal ultimately collapsed, that he was a member of the D.C. and Connecticut Bars.

According to the D.C. Bar website, Biden remains a member in “good standing,” despite the rules of professional conduct stating that it is misconduct for a lawyer to “commit a criminal act that reflects adversely on the lawyer’s honesty, trustworthiness, or fitness as a lawyer in other respects.”

In connection with the fact that Hunter is actually a lawyer – and a graduate of Yale Law School, no less – he seems to have gotten a rather hefty paycheck from a man named Ho in 2018 for supposed legal services. Margot Cleveland wonders about the following, which was a portion of the Statement of Facts contained in Hunter’s court pleadings and read into the record at his recent court hearing:

On or about March 22, 2018, [Hunter] Biden received a $1 million payment into his Owasco, LLC bank account as payment for legal fees for Patrick Ho, and $939,000 remained available as of tax day. Over the next six months Biden would spend almost the entirety of this balance on personal expenses, including large cash withdrawals, transfers to his personal account, travel, and entertainment.

I’m not sure which thing seems more noteworthy – that someone was paying drug-addled Hunter that kind of money for supposed legal work, or that Hunter managed to blow it so quickly. Or maybe it’s this:

…[T]he overwhelming evidence indicates that was a lie and that the money, at best, represented payment for influence peddling and, at worst, was a bribe…

First, there’s the problem that the $1 million payment on March 22, 2018, was made not to Hunter Biden’s law firm, Owasco PC, but to Owasco LLC. And if you are going to pay $1 million for legal representation, you kinda want to pay the law firm supposedly providing those services.

Second, not only did Ho not pay Hunter’s law firm, Owasco PC, Ho didn’t even pay Owasco LLC. Rather, Ho paid Hudson West III LLC $1 million on Nov. 2, 2017 — mere weeks before federal prosecutors charged Ho with bribing foreign officials to advantage the Chinese communist energy company CEFC…

Then there is the Attorney Engagement Letter reportedly recovered from Hunter Biden’s laptop, dated September 2017, between Patrick Ho and Hunter Biden, which provided for a $1 million retainer for legal representation. Significantly, this agreement was not entered into between Ho and any of the Owasco entities, but with Hunter Biden personally. Yet on Wednesday, Biden told Judge Noreika his law firm was doing the work for Ho. But what law firm that was, Biden seemed not to know.

Of course, Hunter didn’t know because no “legal” representation was provided to Ho and none was expected. Yet that’s precisely what the government and Hunter Biden represent as true in the Statement of Facts, and they may have gotten away with the deception had Judge Noreika accepted the plea agreement without question.

I don’t see anyone in the press discussing this except for Cleveland, a lawyer who writes for The Federalist.

The scope and breadth of the possible deceptions and corruption of Hunter Biden and many of the rest of the Biden family members is quite extraordinary, but even more extraordinary is the intensity of the efforts of the government to cover it up. And if the payments from Ho actually were on the up and up, I wonder if we’ll ever learn what work Hunter did for him to merit such a huge transfer of money – although, then again, to Hunter a million dollars was just six months’ worth of entertainment funds.

Lewis Carroll’s original Alice book

The New Neo Posted on by

The real Lewis Carroll, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, created the original “Alice” stories for the young Alice Liddell and her two sisters one day when they were rowing on the Thames. The story was originally spoken extemporaneously, but the girls liked it so much that Alice begged him to write it down. And so he did, which means young Alice Liddell had not just an inspirational role in the great classic but a more direct one.

Dodgson made a handwritten and hand-illustrated copy for Alice and her sisters. The famous editions the rest of us know were illustrated by Tenniel later, but Dodgson’s concepts were different. The work is a labor of love, and Alice herself kept it till 1928 and only sold it to get money after her husband died.

See the care with which the cover is made – it must have taken Dodgson a lot of time. (After the photos load, you can make each one bigger to see the detail.)

Here’s more.

Also this:

I love the Alice books. As a child, I really didn’t understand them. But I was drawn to them nevertheless. My very young grandchildren seem to feel the same way. And the Alice books are among those childhood classics that only get better when a person becomes an adult.

Is DeSantis a “failure” for 2024, and if so why?

The New Neo Posted on by

On today’s open thread we have this question from commenter “Cornflour”:

From the beginning of the campaign season, I thought that nobody stood a chance against Trump, but I preferred DeSantis, and I thought he’d do much better than he has. He’s now regressed to irrelevance.

Does anybody here have a short explanation for his failure?

I’ll oblige, but it won’t be all that short.

First of all, Cornflour provides a not-insignificant part of the answer: “I thought that nobody stood a chance against Trump.” The GOP has a built-in frontrunner, and that’s Trump. He’s a former president, after all. But in the past when a former president has run for a second term it has almost always been as an incumbent. As an incumbent, the president tends not to have any viable challengers; although sometimes someone steps up to challenge him, that person usually doesn’t do very well.

One example of such a person was Ronald Reagan in 1976 when he challenged incumbent president Gerald Ford for the GOP nomination. But Reagan didn’t win that nomination. And how was he doing at this point in the race?:

In polling in June 1975, Ford led Reagan by 41%-20% in a large field, or 61%-33% in a head-to-head matchup.

And Reagan was an exceptionally strong candidate (as later history tells us), plus Ford was an exceptionally weak incumbent. He was the first unelected president, and didn’t really have much of a draw to voters except for the fact that he was the incumbent. And of course we know that he lost to Carter in 1976.

Today we have a somewhat unique situation in the GOP race. We have a former president running who is not an incumbent. But as a former president, he has a very large portion of the GOP vote already locked up. This devotion to Trump of so many primary voters on the right is not just because he was president, it’s because he also was – and remains – extremely popular on the right.

There are NeverTrumpers who supposedly are on the right, of course. And then there are people like me, who thought Trump did well as president and that from the start of his presidency until now he has been unjustly persecuted, but who feel he also has shown poor judgment in the last couple of years, and has been so tainted in the eyes of even moderate voters that the GOP would be better served by choosing a different nominee. In other words, we think Trump would be a poor candidate in the general.

The Trump loyalists disagree, to say the least. They disagree mightily, and they are numerous. They feel that Trump is owed the nomination. They want to show the leftist forces who have tried to destroy Trump that they cannot keep him down. The more charges the left throws at Trump, the more this group is determined to elevate him to the nomination.

How big is that group? I don’t know, but I think it’s a sizable portion of the GOP primary voters. Trump encourages this kind of personal loyalty and this kind of outraged support, as well as the idea that he’s owed something. In terms of justice, he certainly is owed exoneration. But that doesn’t make me feel he’d be a good candidate in the general. But lots of people disagree with me, and they will be voting in the primaries.

So Trump starts out with majority support among GOP voters, and that’s difficult and probably impossible to overcome.

But what of DeSantis himself? From the moment that Trump and his most loyal supporters got a whiff that DeSantis was thinking of running, the anti-DeSantis drumbeat began – on the right. I noticed it immediately in the blogosphere, and I wrote about it – for example, in this comment of mine from December of 2022. That’s a long time ago. Here’s an excerpt:

…[T]he campaign to discredit DeSantis is quite successful so far … considering how early it is in the game. I spend a lot of time looking at comments both here and at other blogs and media websites on the right, and it is amazing how quickly the anti-DeSantis message took off on the right side of the blogosphere. It utterly took over comments at Conservative Treehouse in almost no time at all – and that’s a blog with a huge following on the right, and there were well over a thousand comments on each of sundance’s posts about how awful DeSantis is. I saw a lot of it among Ace’s commenters as well – another huge conservative blog with a big following – as well as at Instapundit. It came to my blog almost instantaneously although certainly not as widespread, and many other blogs I looked at. Of course the left hates DeSantis, but what I’m talking about was and is all on the right and it followed Trump’s attack on DeSantis. I discussed some of the problem in this comment of mine. They were calling DeSantis “The New Jeb,” among other things.

It is still going on at a lot of popular blogs on the right. Just to take one small example, here’s a comment I saw at Instapundit just yesterday:

“DeSantis is the GOPes shitty simulacrum of Trump. He appears Trump like, hits the right notes on garbage wedge issues. When it comes down to the uniparty’s goal of selling out our country to people that want to cede our superpower status to China, he’ll be right there with them. Think of how shitty the GOP has been in practice, and that’s what a DeSantis presidency would be. He’s fully aligned himself with the Bush cabal, and I’ve seen enough pictures of GW hanging out with Obama and Clinton to know what that means.”

It got to the point where certain very popular blog comment sections were completely dominated by “DeSantis is Jeb” commenters. And that has continued, and it has been encouraged by Trump.

Before DeSantis challenged Trump, DeSantis was a hero on the right. Everything I’ve seen about his actions as governor in Florida has been bold, strong, and conservative. But I don’t think anything – and I mean that literally: anything – would change the minds of those GOP voters one might call EverTrumpers. They spread mostly lies or distortions about DeSantis, and the MSM – which wants Trump to be the nominee, as does the left, because they think he will be a weak candidate – gladly ramps up the volume plus adding the left’s own take on DeSantis as an evil villain who wants to drink the blood of everyone other than conservatives.

Then we have DeSantis himself. Simply put, he is not Trump. Nobody is – except Trump, and that has good aspects and bad. Trump is an unusually energetic and humorous candidate, a very entertaining man – that is, if you don’t hate him. He gives his supporters a kind of high, and is a lot of fun, and of course is perceived as a fighter. Neither the more sober DeSantis nor any other GOP candidate can compare in terms of those attributes, even though the traits may count for little in the general. But the GOP base has gotten addicted to Trump’s spark and his unique way of speaking and joking, as well as his obvious feistiness. Everyone else looks dull and wan in comparison.

Then there’s the issue of whether any GOP candidate could win in the general. Whether one believes fraud will prevail, or mere “rigging” of the election, or simply that the voters have moved too far left, the idea that the election is unwinnable by the right has taken hold among many people on the right. It might even be the truth; I don’t know. But that belief system doesn’t mean that voters shouldn’t be strategic when they think about whom to support for the nomination. And yet some use it as an excuse to not really even consider the general.

However, many people think Trump is the most likely of the GOP candidates to win the general, although I heartily disagree. I think they are living in a fantasy world, pumped up by anger at what’s been done to Trump and the need to avenge it. I get it, but I think the enmity against Trump is so vast and so widespread that he hasn’t a chance of winning. These people often say that, not only is Trump the only one who can win, but he’s the only one who can … fill in the blank: the only one who can drain the swamp, the only one who will fight. And yet I don’t think his track record on draining swamps when he was in office was good, and I think he commits a lot of unforced errors.

Finally, there is the fact that the campaign has hardly even begun. The first debate occurs in a month. Most people probably have seen little of DeSantis – or the other GOP candidates besides Trump – yet. But there are forces on both left and right who have made it their business to destroy DeSantis’ candidacy before the public gets to know him, and they are very strongly motivated and active. Obviously, DeSantis would need to counter those forces in order to get the nomination or at least increase his percentage of support. Time will tell whether that will happen, but he really hasn’t had much of a chance yet because it’s so early.

I don’t think that any candidate should be ruled out this early in the game, although lots of people would like people to think it’s already over for DeSantis (or RFK junior, or Vivek, or anyone else for that matter). And yet it’s in the interests of the left, the MSM, and the Trump loyalists to make people believe it’s already happened and they should turn away from DeSantis because he’s a loser. Never underestimate the power of propaganda to taint people’s perceptions.

The whole thing is sad and destructive. The coming election is exceedingly important, and this circular firing squad stuff is not going to help the right at all. But here we are.

The man who wanted to look like a border collie

The New Neo Posted on by

Border collies are attractive dogs – but there’s a limit. If a person wants to be one, for example, I think we can safely say that a line has been crossed.

I first saw the story at Instapundit, with the following headline: “Man who spent $20K to transform himself into border collie steps out for first-ever walk in public,” and this link to a NY Post article about it.

What was my first thought? That the man had surgically altered himself to look like a collie.

That’s what it’s come to – that I, a logical person quite in touch with reality, assumed that the man had made permanent changes to that effect, and had gotten a surgeon to cooperate. The last few years have made this a plausible thought.

Fortunately, that’s not what the story was about. The money was spent for a very realistic doggie costume.

[UPDATE: A commenter helpfully points out that the costume isn’t a border collie, it’s a rough collie. True. But that NY Post URL still has “border” in it. Weird.]

Another demonstration of two-tiered justice: more charges against Trump and a Trump employee

The New Neo Posted on by

The two-tiered system is crystal clear at this point – and actually has been for quite some time. Here’s the latest example:

Special Counsel Jack Smith, who turned a blind eye to Biden family corruption as head of the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) public integrity section during the Obama administration, slapped three additional charges on former President Donald Trump on Thursday for his alleged mishandling of classified documents. The department has also added a Mar-a-Lago maintenance worker to the original indictment.

I don’t think they really even care about maintaining a pretense of objectivity or fairness. It’s way beyond that.

Trump’s response:

“This is nothing more than a continued desperate and flailing attempt by the Biden Crime Family and their Department of Justice to harass President Trump and those around him,” the Trump campaign wrote in a statement. “Deranged Jack Smith knows that they have no case and is casting about for any way to salvage their illegal witch hunt and to get someone other than Donald Trump to run against Crooked Joe Biden.”

Correction: it’s neither desperate nor flailing, unfortunately. It’s a raw exercise of partisan power. Another correction: they want to run against Trump, because they think he will be a very weak candidate, and these prosecutions are both a way for him to rally his base and gain more sympathy on the right, and a way for him to lose even more Independents.

And I think it may work to just that effect. Trump certainly plays right along, although I believe he is sincere in thinking he would be the best candidate for the GOP to nominate.

Recently a friend of mine spontaneously declared to me that she (a) doesn’t understand why Trump would even be “allowed” to run; and (b) she thinks he should already be in prison for a long long time. I take it that this is a common mindset on the left. This prosecution is extremely popular with that group.