Christopher Wray testifies in his own inimitable way

The New Neo Posted on by

A few tidbits can be found here.

For example:

And this:

People like Wray can do this sort of stuff in their sleep; it’s become second nature and they know that only the right will call them on it. The left will back them up.

From Gaetz to Wray:

…[T]he FBI has broken so bad that people can go and engage in queries that when you come before the Congress to answer questions, you’re, like, blissfully ignorant — you’re blissfully ignorant as to the unlawful queries; you’re blissfully ignorant as to the Biden shakedown regime. And, it just seems like it gets into kind of a creepy place as well…

Just so the American people realize, the Court has smacked you down, alleging — or ruling — “FBI personnel apparently conducted queries for improper personal reasons.” People were looking themselves up; they were looking their ex-lovers up. Who has been held accountable or fired as a consequence of the FBI using the FISA process as their, like, creepy personal snoop machine?

Would that were all that’s wrong with the FBI.

NOTE: Today’s entire proceedings here.

ADDENDUM: And here’s Wray on FBI assets on January 6th:

“I would really have to see more closely exactly what he said and get the full context to be able to evaluate how many agents, or actually agents or human resources, were present at the Capitol complex and the vicinity on January 6,” Wray said. “It’s gonna get confusing because it depends on when we were deployed and responded to the breach that occurred anywhere under federal agents.”

Biggs called him out for obfuscating: “You and I both know that we’re talking different things here, and please don’t distract here because we’re focusing on those who were there in an undercover capacity on January 6. How many were there?”

Wray played dumb: “Again, I’m not sure that I can give you the number as I sit here. I’m not sure there were undercover agents on the scene.”

Please read the whole thing; the bobbing and weaving from Wray goes on for quite some time. He is a master of nitpicky rhetorical obfuscation.

Author Milan Kundera dies at 94

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: Commenter “Barry Meislin.”]

RIP Milan Kundera.

Long-time readers here probably recall that Kundera has been one of my favorite authors and almost certainly was my favorite living author, someone I’ve quoted time after time on this blog. You can find a list of these posts here; I highly recommend this one.

For me, Kundera defies description, but of course I’ll try to describe him. He was an expat Czech who had been a Communist in his youth but was a political changer. As a writer, he had one of the most distinctive “voices” ever, and that voice often stepped out of the storyline to make a point that was philosophical or historical or most likely both. Everything he wrote reflected the working of an unconventional mind and spirit, uncategorizable, playful, thoughtful, ironic, and deep.

I first read Kundera before he became famous, when excerpts from one of his works – The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – appeared in The New Yorker, which I used to read assiduously. I only had to read one or two paragraphs to realize that this was a writer like no other, someone who was going to matter to me in terms of the evolution of my thinking about life and about politics and history. And so it was.

This interesting profile of Kundera, who was an elusive guy, appears in – of all places – The New Republic. I think Kundera defied all attempts to explain him.

Here’s another profile of Kundera that’s worth reading, with this quote from a 1985 interview:

“For me, indiscretion is a capital sin. Anyone who reveals someone else’s intimate life deserves to be whipped. We live in an age when private life is being destroyed. The police destroy it in Communist countries, journalists threaten it in democratic countries, and little by little the people themselves lose their taste for private life and their sense of it,” he told the writer Olga Carlisle. “Life when one can’t hide from the eyes of others — that is hell.”

I’ll close with a couple of quotes from Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting that I’ve used on this blog:

…human beings have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of har­mony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.

Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. Madame Raphael had cut the picture out of the magazine and would stare at it and dream. She too longed to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring. First she looked for them in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then among the Trotskyites, then in the anti-abortion movement (A child has a right to life!), then in the pro-abortion movement (A woman has a right to her body!); she looked for them among the Marxists, the psychoanalysts, and the structuralists; she looked for them in Lenin, Zen Buddhism, Mao Tse-tung, yogis, the nouveau roman, Brechtian theater, the theater of panic; and finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.

The most beautiful woman in the Netherlands

The New Neo Posted on by

Is a biological male.

Is anyone the least bit surprised at this development, in which Rikkie Valeria Kolle has won the Miss Netherlands title?:

So if the best female athletes are men, now the most beautiful females are men as well. That photo doesn’t look all that lovely or feminine to me, but the standards of female beauty have changed over the last few decades – many many years before this – to what one might describe as a more masculine ideal. By that I mean what I’ve long thought of as an adolescent boy with breast implants. In other words, a tall, very thin although somewhat wiry person with broad shoulders and fairly straight hips for a woman, and breasts that are relatively large relative to that person’s extreme thinness and slender hips.

The first time I noticed this sort of body coming into prominence involved a biological female, Bo Derek, when she starred in the movie “10”. Here’s the poster, to refresh your memory. And here is a very brief clip:

I’m not criticizing Derek, who seems to have a body that’s naturally that type. And standards of beauty are always met only by a small minority. But fewer women conform to that standard of beauty than to the older standards of breasts and hips more in proportion to each other, not quite so tall nor quite so thin, and shoulders less broad. The newer standard of “male adolescent with implants” is probably met more easily by male to female trans people, with the help of hormones and breast augmentation and the like. So get used to more of this, which seems a form of misogynistic usurpation of the feminine disguised as celebration and tolerant inclusion.

NOTE: Here’s a piece on why this win by Kolle is a wonderful thing that we should all celebrate. Comments are mixed, as you might expect.

Charging Luft

The New Neo Posted on by

Your friendly neighborhood FBI and DOJ, hard at work:

A fugitive who claimed to have provided the FBI with information on the Biden family’s business dealings in China is facing decades behind bars for alleged arms trafficking and other charges involving Iran.

Gal Luft, a 57-year-old dual U.S.-Israeli citizen, is charged with acting as an unregistered agent of China and seeking to broker the sale of Iranian oil in violation of sanctions, federal prosecutors in Manhattan said on Monday.

The indictment, handed down by a grand jury in 2022 and unsealed Monday, also accuses Luft of recruiting and paying a former high-ranking U.S. government official on behalf of principals based in China in 2016, without registering as a foreign agent as required by law.

They say the best defense is a good offense, and this is a good offense to protect the Biden family, who appear to be guilty of all of that and more. Of course, I don’t know much about Luft, who may be a scumbag himself. But then there are the other scumbags, including those in the FBI and the DOJ. In the island of the liars, who is telling the truth?

At any rate:

The indictment comes days after The New York Post published a 14-minute video of Luft, recorded at an unknown location, in which he claimed he was arrested in Cyprus to stop him from testifying to the House Oversight Committee that the Biden family had allegedly been bribed from a source with ties to the Chinese military.

In the video, Luft claimed to have provided this information to officials from the FBI and the Department of Justice during a March 2019 meeting in Brussels, but this was supposedly covered up.

There are certain types of criminal charges that are very very useful to a partisan FBI and DOJ and partisan prosecutors in certain states such as New York. Among them are FARA violations and lying to the FBI, which are prosecuted differentially depending on the politics of the defendant. It’s quite apparent at this point, and anyone who’s been following the Hunter Biden case at all can see what’s going on.

It doesn’t matter to this administration or to the FBI and the rest. They are flaunting their power and basically saying just try and stop us. They don’t care how it looks, they are that arrogant and confident.

More here:

Robert Henoch, an attorney for Luft, called the indictment “a vicious attempt to silence a witness to corruption.” The attorney said “there was no arms trading whatsoever” and that Luft didn’t act as an agent for a foreign entity or lie to federal agents, as alleged.

The Institute for the Analysis of Global Security also defended Luft in a statement, saying he is an expert on energy security, economics and geopolitics…

Henoch said Luft met with two prosecutors and four FBI agents in Brussels to share allegations about Biden family financial dealings with the Chinese government. “He told the DOJ prosecutors things which they did not want to hear, so they charged him with lying,” Henoch said.

Lying to the FBI shouldn’t even be a crime. And when the FBI lies – which it seems to do almost constantly – it seems that’s perfectly okay. But the FBI has no credibility whatsoever anymore.

Money and that vast left-wing conspiracy

The New Neo Posted on by

Follow the money:

This is the first of two reports based on internal Arabella documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. They provide a rare window into the inner workings of the Left’s dark-money network, revealing just how centrally controlled a vast swath of activist organizations are by a central clearinghouse based in the nation’s capital—as well as the lengths to which Arabella’s leaders go to disguise that control and create the illusion of grassroots political activism.

In recent years, there’s been a lot of big money flowing into the left.

The Brits are contemplating making parental failure to cooperate with transition a form of child abuse

The New Neo Posted on by

I believe a similar law is in the works in California. Coming soon to a state near you?

Jonathan Turley describes the British legislation:

As the debate rages in the United States over parental notification and authority in cases involving transgender children, the United Kingdom is embroiled in a controversy over a law that would not only limit parental authority in such cases but affirmatively require parents to pay for such transitioning. Under the interpretation put forward by police, parents who refuse to use the alternative pronouns for their children or refuse to pay for their transitioning could be criminally prosecuted.

According to the UK’s Code for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), abusive conduct now includes “withholding money for transitioning [and] refusing to use their preferred name or pronoun.” So a parent with familial or religious objections to the transitioning of a child would be required under the law to fund operations or treatments.

As more and more evidence has come out of the dangers of medical transition – drugs and surgery – for minors (and even at times for adults), the main gender clinic in the UK was closed down. However, there will be other decentralized clinics opening, and obviously the trans activists are working on many fronts to codify the idea that transition is a right, that it’s a right even for children, and that parents have no say in the matter unless it is to “affirm.”

So, are they preparing Joe’s retirement dinner?

The New Neo Posted on by

It would appear so, from the number of at least slightly negative articles that have been written lately about Biden. For example, as Steven Hayward of Powerline points out:

First, Maureen Dowd, the weather wane of respectable centrist feminist opinion at the New York Times, delivers a well-deserved scolding for Joe Biden’s directive to make his son Hunter’s love child with a stripper into a non-person: “The president’s cold shoulder — and heart — is counter to every message he has sent for decades, and it’s out of sync with the America he wants to continue to lead.”

There’s also an Axios piece that reveals the deep dark secret [sic] that Joe Biden is not the genial avuncular guy of the press’s propaganda:

Behind closed doors, Biden has such a quick-trigger temper that some aides try to avoid meeting alone with him. Some take a colleague, almost as a shield against a solo blast.

The president’s admonitions include: “God dammit, how the f**k don’t you know this?!,” “Don’t f**king bullsh*t me!” and “Get the f**k out of here!” — according to current and former Biden aides who have witnessed and been on the receiving end of such outbursts. . . Senior and lower-level aides alike can be in Biden’s line of fire. “No one is safe,” said one administration official.

The puzzlement is not that the press has ignored this till now – they ignore what they believe is in the interest of the left to ignore – but how even the most gullible reader of the MSM could have failed to see it for him or herself. There is nothing about Joe Biden that telegraphs “nice” to me – and I felt that even back when I was a Democrat, as did most Americans who failed to support him in various presidential bids over the years until 2020, COVID, the press, and Trump Derangement Syndrome apparently helped many to change their minds. Or perhaps they forget, or never knew, or weren’t paying attention. At any rate, the myth of Joe’s congeniality was always a hard sell.

So the betting is on for when Joe will be ushered gently out the door. It’s been on for a long time, pretty much since he took office or even before. Originally, many people thought he’d be pushed out by June of 2021. That didn’t happen. Then the theory was that they would wait till he’d served for two years, so that Kamala could get two and a half terms out of it. But she turned out to be a dud, and so here it is two and a half years later and Joe is still president.

We can argue about how active he is in his own administration, but I have long been of the opinion that although he’s being manipulated somewhat by others, he’s more in charge than most people on the right believe. I also think he’s stubborn and still highly ambitious and prideful about himself, and won’t be pushed aside easily. And then there’s the conundrum of what to do about Kamala. I don’t think that problem has yet been solved, and until it is I think Joe is staying.

One thought that strikes me – and not for the first time – is how supremely insincere all the left’s whining about the advanced age of presidents and candidates was. Remember when Reagan was too old? And McCain, for goodness sake? But in 2020 they showed no hesitation to run a man who would be 82 before his first term was up, if he stayed in office till the end. Hypocrisy is too weak a word for it.

The lost art of épaulement

The New Neo Posted on by

Alla Shelest was virtually unknown in the West, but she was an eminent dancer in the USSR during the 30s, 40s, and 50s. Here she is trying to teach a younger dancer what’s known as épaulement, which is “the nuanced positioning of the head, shoulders, and neck” which makes dancing “better, richer, and more artistic.” Shelest’s efforts here to convey her own knowledge are somewhat in vain. And this is a while back; today’s dancers tend to be even more deficient in épaulement. In this video, it is the older yet luminous Shelest to whom the viewer’s eyes are drawn rather than to the soloist she’s coaching.

Those government agents in the crowd on January 6th

The New Neo Posted on by

Tucker Carlson has said that, when he interviewed Steven Sund, who was the chief of the Capitol Police on that January 6th, Sund stated that on January 6th the crowd “was filled with federal agents.”

We’ve pretty much known that for quite some time, haven’t we? But the questions I have about it are: what does “filled with” mean? And how involved were the agents in inciting the crowd?

We already know, from information that came out during the Proud Boys trial, that there was quite a bit of involvement with and encouragement of that particular group. But is that just the tip of a large iceberg? And if so, how large?

There is no question that the answers to these questions are known by the government. There is also little question in my mind that we will never learn the answers. And yet those answers are incredibly important.

I also believe that, were we to somehow discover that the entire thing was heavily orchestrated by the FBI and/or other government agencies, and that most of the incitement that day was at their hands, then the vast majority of Democrats would deny it or justify it in some way. That’s how cynical I’ve become about things like this.