On the 22nd anniversary of 9/11

The New Neo Posted on by

It doesn’t seem possible that so many years have passed. And yet in a way, 9/11 seems like ancient history, or a bad dream. Or both.

There are college graduates who were not born when 9/11 happened. To an entire generation, 9/11 is part of the background noise of their lives, something that was always there. They cannot imagine the shock of that day for those of us who are older.

We should bow our heads and remember those who were foully murdered on 9/11, many of them young people themselves who would now be middle-aged or old but never got the chance. The NY Times has written many abominable things before and since 9/11, but its “Portraits of Grief” sketches of the victims are wonderfully done and remain heartbreaking.

One of the many terrible legacies of that day is the surveillance state, enabled by the War on Terror’s Patriot Act and now used against us all, particularly on the right. But I believe that would have happened anyway, because the computer age and other advances in technology have made that type of spying on the average citizen all too tempting and all too possible.

But would the left have gained such ascendance without 9/11? I think the answer is “yes.” Recall that on 9/11 the left was fully ready with its “blame America” stance. The Gramscian march was already well advanced, too.

And would Obama have been elected in 2008 without 9/11? I think so; his appeal was about a host of other things, including the (utterly betrayed) promise of racial healing, the financial crisis, and his own carefully-crafted persona.

Without 9/11, however, the Afghanistan War would not have happened, a war whose consequences – thanks in particular to Joe Biden – have been bad and whatever good it accomplished undone. The attacks of 9/11 were not the reason for the Iraq War – unlike the Afghan War. But I submit that without 9/11 the Iraq War would not have happened, either.

On a personal note, 9/11 was the catalyst for a several-years-long process of reading and thinking that led to a political change on my part. The change was only of political affiliation, however. Nothing basic about my point of view changed, and the change wasn’t about terrorism or 9/11 itself. I simply became more interested in learning the facts about history and politics as well as the MSM coverage of those things, and in the course of that activity I discovered to my surprise that I no longer could support the Democratic Party. And so in a very real way 9/11 began a long process that led to my starting this blog in the fall of 2004.

RIP to all the victims and heroes of 9/11. And may their families, and the survivors, be comforted. And may the republic somehow manage to reverse the terrible course it’s been on lately.

[NOTE: Here’s my personal account of 9/11.]

ADDENDUM: There are many many videos available about 9/11. Here are just a few short ones:

The Letter

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve always been very fond of the 1967 hit “The Letter” by the Box Tops. I had a long-distance boyfriend at the time, about to be drafted and sent to Vietnam, and the song had particular resonance. But it was also just a catchy, catchy song. I never thought that later popular versions, such as the one by Joe Cocker, could hold a candle to it. Your mileage may differ, but I loved and still love the bouncy carnival-type instrumentation of the original, the beat, and the roar of the airplane at the end. Here’s the original:

Here’s Joe Cocker:

And this is so funny; apparently some sort of TV appearance where the Box Tops were required to lip-sync, and they’re not even pretending. Lead singer Alex Chilton was 16 years old here but looks (and more importantly sounds) older to me:

As with so many songs of that early era in rock, “The Letter” has an interesting backstory – interesting to me, at least:

Wayne Carson wrote “The Letter”, built on an opening line suggested by his father: “Give me a ticket for an aeroplane”. Carson included the song on a demo tape he gave to Chips Moman, owner of American Sound Studio in Memphis, Tennessee. When studio associate Dan Penn was looking for an opportunity to produce more, Moman suggested a local group, the DeVilles, who had a new lead singer, sixteen-year-old Alex Chilton. … Penn gave the group Carson’s demo tape for some songs to work up. With little or no rehearsal, the group arrived at American Sound to record “The Letter”. Chilton recalled:

“We set up and started running the tune down … [Dan] adjusted a few things on the organ sound, told the drummer not to do anything at all except the basic rhythm that was called for. No rolls, no nothin’. The bass player was playing pretty hot stuff, so he didn’t mess with what the bass player was doing.”

Penn added: “The guitar player had the lick right—we copied Wayne’s demo. Then I asked the keyboard player to play an ‘I’m a Believer’ type of thing.” Chilton sang the vocal live while the group was performing; Penn noted: “I coached him [Chilton] a little … told him to say ‘aer-o-plane,’ told him to get a little gruff, and I didn’t have to say anything else to him, he was hookin ’em, a natural singer.”He later explained, “[Chilton] picked it up exactly as I had in mind, maybe even better. I hadn’t even paid any attention to how good he sang because I was busy trying to put the band together … I had a bunch of greenhorns who’d never cut a record, including me”.

About thirty takes were required for the basic track. Then Penn had Mike Leech prepare a string and horn arrangement to give it a fuller sound. Leech recalled: “My very first string arrangement was ‘The Letter’, and the only reason I did that was because I knew how to write music notation … Nobody else in the group did or I’m sure someone else would have gotten the call.” Penn also overdubbed the sound of an airplane taking off to the track from a special effects record that had been checked out from the local library.

“Checked out from the local library.” I love these stories – there are so many of them in early rock and pop music. I recall finding out about how hard it was to get sound effects back then compared to today, and how creative people had to be, in connection with the Bee Gees hit song “Tragedy”:

By the way, Wayne Carson, writer of the song “The Letter,” was the child of two professional musicians. Here’s another great story:

In the mid 1960s he returned to Springfield, where he began working with music publisher and promoter Si Siman. Together they pitched songs for years, without success until Siman’s friend and producer Chet Atkins took a liking to a tune called “Somebody Like Me” and wanted to have Eddy Arnold record it. Carson was taken aback when he got a call from Arnold, one of the most successful country acts of all time. “Eddie said, ‘Wayne, I love the song, but it needs another verse’,” Carson recalled. “So I said, ‘Well, the third verse goes like this’ and I just wrote it right there over the phone.” The song became his first number one hit in late 1966 and spent four weeks on top of the country charts.

“The Letter” wasn’t a country song, but I suppose it could have been one if recorded in that style. Carson was also a co-writer on the following big hit, a song I like a great deal but which I never would have linked with “The Letter.” The song was recorded by many people, including Elvis, but I’m very fond of this version:

Number of missing in Lahaina now stands at 66

The New Neo Posted on by

This new number is a huge improvement over the thousand-plus people originally thought to have perished, or even the four hundred or so that constituted the revised number:

One month after the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century leveled the historic town of Lahaina, Hawaii Gov. Josh Green said Friday that the number of missing has dropped to 66, the confirmed death toll remains at 115 and authorities will soon escort residents on visits to their property. …

With about half the deceased still unidentified, Green said he expected there to be significant overlap between the names on the missing list and remains that have already been recovered. Therefore, he said, he did not expect the death toll to rise considerably.

That’s the history of what happened in Paradise, by the way. Although the Paradise death toll was never thought to be as high as initially thought in Lahaina, it was nevertheless much higher for a while than the final Paradise toll turned out to be. Any death toll is sad, and both fires were horrific, but lower death tolls are certainly relative good news.

Trump as martyr

The New Neo Posted on by

In a post I wrote about three weeks ago, I mentioned that Trump might be becoming a martyr in the eyes of voters on the right. I certainly perceive him that way, and have for some time – not in the religious sense but in the more general sense of, “a person who suffers very much or is killed because of their religious or political beliefs, and is often admired because of it.”

It can be dangerous to make someone into a martyr. However, that person’s enemies can weigh all their options and believe that martyrdom is better than either letting the person live or continuing to let the person function freely. The Ayatollah Khomeini is a pretty good example; in this post I wrote about how in 1963 he was under a death sentence but his life was spared by the Shah’s government because they didn’t want to make him a martyr and therefore even more powerful. Of course, we know what ended up happening – and one of the first people Khomeini had executed was the general who had successfully argued years earlier for sparing Khomeini’s life.

I am not for a single moment suggesting that Trump is some sort of Khomeini and the left the Shah. What I’m trying to say, however, is that when there’s a figure that a political group sees as the enemy, there is the dilemma of how to counter that person and the movement represented by those who support the person, and there are many different ways to handle it.

When Trump was running for office back in 2016, the Democrats handled it by ridicule and scorn; they mostly imagined him to be a ludicrous figure who wouldn’t win. Their horror when he did win was a good part of the reason why they spent the next four years in so-called “resistance” activities, including trying to frame him over and over and over, as well as impeaching him on exaggerated grounds. It didn’t work, but through propaganda, “rigging,” “fortifying,” and perhaps outright fraud, they managed to defeat him in 2020.

But that wasn’t enough – no, not nearly enough. They are determined to destroy him one way or the other. In that post from three weeks ago I described various possible scenarios, but the point is that they want him gone and the lawfare against him is a big part of it so far.

But have they considered the possibility that the Shah had to consider with Khomeini, martyrdom? Trump certainly has considered it. Back in June he told a religious group the following [my emphasis]:

Speaking at the Faith and Freedom Coalition gala in Washington DC on Saturday night, Trump slammed the two indictments he is currently facing as he looks to reclaim the White House in 2024.

He said he considers each new indictment against him a “badge of honor.”

“I’m being indicted for you and I believe that ‘you’ is more than 200 million people who love our country,” the former president said to applause. “This is a continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time.”

There is a subtle – or perhaps not-so-subtle – echo there of Christian belief. But it’s certainly true that he is being indicted to give warning to his supporters, who are at least half the nation. And the similar persecution (through Draconian sentences) of the J6 defendants bears this out.

Trump’s June declaration to the faith group was no one-off. Yesterday he repeated the claim [emphasis mine]:

Former President Donald Trump told supporters at a campaign rally for the 2024 election in Rapid City, South Dakota, on Friday that he considers the various criminal indictments against him to be a “badge of honor.”

“Every time the radical left Democrats, Marxists, communists, and fascists indict me, I consider it a great badge of honor,” Trump said. “And I’m being indicted for you. I am being indicted for you. I’m not too thrilled about that. But that’s part of the job description, isn’t it?”

“Martyr” seems to have become part of Trump’s job description. He’s well aware of it. Will this perception affect anyone other than those who already support him? I’m speaking not about those on the left, or those who already hate his guts. I’m speaking about those in the middle who aren’t sure. Such people must still exist, right?

Moroccan earthquake death toll over a thousand, and rising

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s been a major earthquake in Morocco causing high casualties:

The number of people who have died in the Morocco earthquake has risen to 1,305 people with 1,832 injured, state TV in the country has said.

Many of the fatalities after the 6.8 magnitude quake are in hard-to-reach areas south of Marrakech.

The epicentre was high in the Atlas Mountains – about 43 miles (70km) away from Marrakech, a popular tourist destination.

Reaching people in remote villages, where old, traditional buildings may be more likely to collapse, will be a key focus of the rescue effort.

The major problem seems to have been non-earthquake-proof structures. Large earthquakes are rare in Morocco, but it is an earthquake zone:

According to the US Geological Survey (USGS) the 6.8 magnitude earthquake was just 11 miles below the surface.

The epicentre was in the High Atlas Mountains near Oukaimeden, around 50 miles south of Marrakech.

It’s a sparsely populated area with Amazigh, or Berber, villages.

Houses are traditionally built with mud bricks and may not have withstood the shaking. There’s also a risk of landslides on steep slopes.

The location is within the African tectonic plate, around 350 miles south of the boundary with the Eurasia plate that Europe and much of Asia sit on.

RIP to the dead.

Open thread 9/9/23

The New Neo Posted on by

Another obscure sport that’s more like an impressive circus act:

And it takes two women to do the work of one man – but still extremely impressive. The gradated sizes of the women are no accident:

Actually, sometimes the heavy lifting can be done by one woman – if it’s the right woman:

The Biden administration would like to make Texas the sanctuary state

The New Neo Posted on by

This:

The Biden administration is considering forcing migrants who cross into the United States illegally to remain in Texas while they wait out their asylum screening.

Administration officials cite the proposed plan as a way to curb the flow of illegal immigrants at the southern border, The Los Angeles Times reported, citing three U.S. officials not authorized to discuss the matter.

The plan would force migrants to remain in Texas, or possibly other border states by tracking their location through GPS monitoring devices, such as ankle bracelets, the officials told the Times.

The Democrats must be alarmed by the reaction in places like New York to the recent influx there of illegal arrivals. They can’t afford to alienate (pun intended) their base. But Texas? No need to worry about alienating Texans; it’s already been done.

On Biden’s polls

The New Neo Posted on by

There is polling that shows Biden’s approval rating low and dropping, but I’m not so sure it matters except in one sense: it may motivate the Democrats to make sure he doesn’t run in 2024. Then again, polls also show that he and Trump are statistically tied. To me, that means that their support is more or less locked in. Those who plan to vote for Trump are probably never going to vote for Biden no matter what is done to Trump, and those who plan to vote for Biden will vote for any Democrat over Trump and could not care less what Biden does or has done. They may think he’s awful, but they think Trump is more awful.

Another point is that national polls aren’t much help. It’s really the state polls in the swing states that matter, and I’ve seen precious few of those.

This recent CNN poll has another interesting aspect, though. If you go to page 17, which pits the GOP contenders against Biden, you’ll notice that – at least in this poll that was taken the last week of August, shortly after the GOP debate – they all do rather well. Every single candidate they asked about (Haley, Pence, Scott, Ramaswamy, Christie, and DeSantis) are pretty much in a dead statistical heat with Biden. The sole exception is Nikki Haley, who is six points ahead of Biden.

I wonder if that Haley advantage has any legs, or if it’s just a statistical glitch or a temporary reaction to the debate. It’s something to think about, though. And I wonder how she does in swing states.

Haley is not my preferred GOP candidate at all, but if she has the strongest chance of winning I’d support her. Thing is – as I’ve written before – I think the GOP primaries are pretty moot since I believe Trump will be the nominee.

Hey, why not indict all the Republicans?

The New Neo Posted on by

Except maybe those who voted for Trump’s impeachment.

This grand jury in Fulton County probably would have done so, if asked:

The grand jury wanted to charge 39 people allied with President Donald Trump.

The list includes Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), former Georgia Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, and Michael Flynn.

The district attorney ended up charging 19 people, including Trump.

That’s some conspiracy. There’s plenty of precedent in the annals of tyrannical regimes for outlawing the opposition party, and the Democrats would dearly love to do just that. But even Fani Willis didn’t go that far – yet, anyway.

A grand jury has a very different task than a jury. A grand jury only hears the evidence favorable to the prosecution. That gives a prosecutor who wants to go after certain people perceived as enemies a great deal of power, and an unscrupulous prosecutor is capable of great harm. But Fani Willis is not a rogue prosecutor acting on her own. The Democratic Party is wholly behind her, and her actions are part of a – dare I say “conspiracy”? – on the part of the left, which has taken over the party almost entirely.

NOTE: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – even back in law school when I was a Democrat, I was very very troubled by the broadness and opportunity for prosecutorial abuse afforded by the conspiracy laws.