RIP, Mary Quant – and the fashions of the 60s

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an obituary of Mary Quant, who practically invented the kicky women’s fashions of the 60s. I hadn’t thought about Quant in umpteen years. But looking at the photos there and at other articles about her brought back memories of that time and the clothes we wore.

The 60s are often thought of as the hippie years, but before all that there was the British invasion, not just of rock and pop music but also of fashion. I remember exactly and precisely when I was first encountered the latter. It was in the summer of 1963, and I met a group of teenaged British girls whose clothes immediately struck me as very different from ours and extremely cool. It wasn’t just the short skirts – it was the cut of those skirts, which were A-line hip-huggers framed by similarly low-slung belts on the hip. Some of the girls may have had little caps on, too. Something like this, only nicer:

And their haircuts, too – so trendy, so new, so fun.

One of the things I remember them asking me and my friends was what we thought of the Beatles. “Who are they?” we asked, and that evoked squeals of shock from the British girls. “You’ve never heard of the Beatles?” They simply couldn’t believe we were so provincial. They went on and on about them, and I filed the information away for future reference. I didn’t have long to wait; the Beatles came to America the next February, and the rest, as they say, is history.

I have the strange quirk of memory that I tend to remember all the clothing I’ve ever owned, and so I recall the British- and Quant-inspired clothing I had in the 60s, before everyone grew their hair long and wore only jeans, t-shirts, shawls, and beads. I wish I had some of those pre-hippie clothes now, even though they wouldn’t fit. They were wonderful.

Alas, I don’t even have any photos of those clothes. Back then, I probably didn’t even own a camera. But I do have a photo from a little later, where I”m wearing something similar. Unfortunately, it’s a black and white picture, so it doesn’t show that this dress was a very bright shocking pink. The chain belt around the hips was gold (not real gold, of course). The skirt was actually what was called culottes – split into pants – and it was short but not mega-short. You can just see the edge of the hem at the bottom of the photo. I’m standing with my boyfriend at the time, who was visiting me:

No, I don’t look like that now. And no, I don’t have that dress anymore. But that was the sort of thing we wore every day – dresses or skirts, not really very casual at all by today’s standards, but very attractive and very fun. Of course, it helped to be young.

No, George Soros wasn’t really a Nazi collaborator

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s pretty much a standard thing now for people on the right to add the words “Nazi collaborator” (or something similar but even more extreme) to their descriptions of George Soros.

But it’s not true that he was a Nazi collaborator. At best, it’s an exaggeration so extreme as to effectively be a lie. I’ve written about this topic before at some length, and I’m about to reiterate some of that information in this post. But that’s not really what prompted me to write about it The larger question that interests me is one I often wonder about: how much the right can fight fire with fire before becoming a version of what it hates.

No, we shouldn’t play by Marquis de Queensberry rules when the left is playing so dirty. Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight, and all that. The left lies incessantly, and with the full backing and cooperation of the MSM. So what should the right do in response? Correcting the lies of the left doesn’t really work very well, because a lie really does get halfway around the world before the truth has time to put its pants on. And by then it’s too late.

Plus, lies are usually simple to assimilate and understand. Truth tends to be more complex, and a lot of people figure TL;DR.

Also, this question of how far the right should go to counter the left isn’t just about lies. It’s about tactics in general. It’s about things like – just to take one current example – indicting one’s political opponents for crimes that would ordinarily not be prosecuted at all. Once the left starts and the right responds in kind (which it hasn’t yet), where does this thing end?

I yield to no one in my criticisms of Soros and especially of what he’s done in backing far leftist prosecutors in the US. His actions have been exceptionally destructive. Actually, though, I don’t think it’s even necessary to lie about him; the truth will suffice because the truth is bad enough.

There’s just something that sticks in my craw when I read lies, and lies discredit – in my opinion, anyway – those who write them. Your mileage may differ.

So here I am in the position, not of defending George Soros in general, but of attempting to set the record straight on this particular detail once again. Why bother? I’m not sure anymore, but let’s just say I’ve always tried to follow the truth wherever it leads me.

I refer you to this previous (2018) post of mine. Here’s a relevant excerpt:

With Soros there’s also the fact that, that although he was born a Jew by the Nazis’ definition—in other words, he was born in Hungary to parents of Jewish ancestry—he was never given any instruction in Judaism and his parents had actually repudiated Judaism. They weren’t just non-practicing Jews (although they were indeed that), they were actually anti-Jewish, according to Soros himself, who said that he “grew up in a Jewish, anti-Semitic home,” and called his parents “uncomfortable with their religious roots.”

I want to clear one thing up at the outset, however. There’s a lot of vilification of Soros for what he supposedly did during WWII in Hungary (as a child and young teenager), but the bulk of these accusations don’t appear to be true, or at least they are greatly exaggerated and built on only a small kernel of truth. On the other hand, Soros was mostly protected during World War II and didn’t seem to suffer, by his own admission. Soros himself has described WWII as an exciting period of life for him because his father seemed to have everything under control (Soros managed to masquerade as a non-Jew during this time) and “we managed not only to survive but to emerge victorious…”.

The allegations about Soros being a Nazi collaborator are based in great measure on an interview he gave with “60 Minutes” in 1998. The story is told in great detail in a 2002 Soros biography (let it be noted, by the way, that Soros was nine years old when the Second World War began and 14 years old when it ended):

Shortly after George went to live with Baumbach (who was a wealthy Hungarian; George was in hiding and concealing his Jewish identity in order to survive the Holocaust), the man was assigned to take inventory on the vast estate of Mor Kornfeld, an extremely wealthy aristocrat of Jewish origin. The Kornfeld family had the wealth, wisdom, and connections to be able to leave some of its belongings behind in exchange for permission to make their way to Lisbon. Baumbach was ordered to go to the Kornfeld estate and inventory the artworks, furnishings, and other property. Rather than leave his “godson” behind in Budapest for three days, he took the boy with him. As Baumbach itemized the material, George walked around the grounds and spent time with Kornfeld’s staff. It was his first visit to such a mansion, and the first time he rode a horse. He collaborated with no one and he paid attention to what he understood to be his primary responsibility: making sure that no one doubted that he was [his assumed non-Jewish identity] Sandor Kiss…

In a separate autobiography written by Soros’ father, his father adds that Soros the younger “even helped with the inventory.” That seems to have been on this one occasion, when Soros was around thirteen years old. He only stayed with Baumbach for a few weeks and then went to live with his mother, who had also assumed a false (non-Jewish) identity. Hardly the sort of thing people understand to mean by the term “Nazi collaborator.”

There’s much more at the link, including a discussion of other similar allegations against Soros. Each allegation seems to be based on the enormous exaggeration of a very very small truth about something Soros did as a child and young teen during the war. They don’t seem to be based on anything other than the testimony of both Soros and his father.

So, although you’ll read plenty of strong condemnation of Soros on this blog, it won’t include the charge “Nazi collaborator.” Why not stick with the very real things he’s done as an adult that are worthy of condemnation and opposition?

Whether or not Soros is called a Nazi collaborator, it doesn’t answer the larger question of what tactics the right should use in the very intense and bitter fight we’re in. I think it’s an important question.

On the arrest of security leaker Jack Teixeira

The New Neo Posted on by

From Matt Taibbi:

You’ll read a lot in the coming days about the dangers of apps like Discord, or of online gaming groups, which counterintelligence officials told the Washington Post today are a “magnet for spies.” The Leaker tale will also surely be framed as reason to pass the RESTRICT Act, the wet dream of creepazoid Virginia Senator Mark Warner, which would give government wide latitude to crack down on “communication technology” creating “undue or unacceptable risk” to national security.

In crisis we have opportunity.

Taibbi points out a huge double standard about intelligence leaks, which is that intelligence agencies/agents themselves leak all over the place, mostly for political reasons, and that is treated as perfectly okay. In contrast, other leakers are heavily punished.

When civilians or whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange (in jail for an incredible four years now), Reality Winner and now the “Discord Leaker” bring leaked information to the public, the immediate threat is Espionage Act charges and decades of jail time. When a CIA head or a top FBI official does it, it’s just news. In fact, officials talk openly about using “strategic leaks” as a P.R. staple.

Teixeira is a mysterious leaker in that it’s not even clear how he could get access to the information leaked. But there’s no dearth of articles such as this one, claiming that it’s not unusual for low level military people to have plenty of access to very sensitive material. If so, it seems to me that it’s just one more thing that’s wrong with the system, and would make such leaks virtually inevitable.

But the Pentagon is having trouble explaining his access:

None of the rest of us could explain how an enlistee in the Air National Guard got his hands on highly classified military and diplomatic intelligence leaked over the past few months. Now it turns out that the Pentagon doesn’t have a good answer for that question, either. The Wall Street Journal refers to it as “among the most puzzling questions” of the case, and the Pentagon’s lack of explanation for it is not building much confidence in opsec…

Jack Teixeira served in the 102nd Intelligence Wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, based on Cape Cod. What would the MANG “need to know” about Mossad communications, Russian and Ukrainian military operations, and diplomat communications? The former chief of Massachusetts Homeland Security, Juliette Kayyem, doesn’t have an explanation for it either…

That raises a significant question of how Teixeira gained access to these documents. Did he get them from within American systems? Or did an outside source provide the documents to Teixeira, and if so, for what purpose?

This case is clear as mud.

Bidens’s corruption detailed by ex-staffer

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t think it will matter in the least, but this report is certainly interesting:

Mike McCormick, a stenographer for the White House for 15 years, told “Fox & Friends First” the FBI has been ignoring his alarms on the matter despite his willingness to testify under oath before the federal grand jury investigating Hunter.

“In February, I went to the FBI and filed one of their tips on their website. If you do that, and you’re lying to them, you go to jail. I’m not lying. I’m telling the truth, and I’m not going to jail,” McCormick said Thursday. “Joe Biden is a criminal. He was conducting malfeasance in office to enrich his family. Jake Sullivan is a conspirator in that, and there’s more… Obama officials involved in it, I believe.”…

McCormick argued the timeline of the events suggests that Biden funneled American money overseas to “enrich” himself and his family, and used his own influence to aid his son’s rookie energy career.

The former stenographer made it clear he wants to present the information under oath before the grand jury in Delaware probing Hunter’s business dealings, which is led by U.S. Attorney David Weiss.

Germany is shutting down its last nuclear power plants

The New Neo Posted on by

It boggles the mind.

This is the news:

For 35 years, the Emsland nuclear power plant in northwestern Germany has reliably provided millions of homes with electricity and many with well-paid jobs in what was once an agricultural backwater.

Now, it and the country’s two other remaining nuclear plants are being shut down. Germany long ago decided to phase out both fossil fuels and nuclear power over concerns that neither is a sustainable source of energy.

Nuclear power seems very “sustainable” to me – unless a country decides to shoot itself in the foot by not sustaining it.

More:

…[W]ith energy prices stubbornly high and climate change a growing concern, some in the country and abroad are branding the move reckless.

Ya think?

And the claim in bold seems like wishful thinking [emphasis mine], except for the fact that they will legislate it to make it so, no matter what the reality:

“Right now, existing nuclear plants are a critical source of carbon-free baseload energy,” said Peter Fox-Penner, previously a senior official at the U.S. Department of Energy and now with the Boston University Institute for Sustainable Energy. “Energy efficiency, wind, and solar energy will soon become dominant sources, but in the meantime, it is wisest to continue to run existing nuclear,” as long as safety is the priority, he said.

The anti-nuclear movement rests on exaggerations of accidents that have already happened, one of which occurred in a plant such as Chernombyl with ancient technology that is quite different from and far riskier than today’s plants in Germany:

“Nuclear power remains a risky technology, and in the end, the risks can’t be controlled even in a high-tech country like Germany,” Environment Minister Steffi Lemke said at a news conference ahead of the shutdown.

She cited the disaster at Japan’s Fukushima atomic power plant in 2011, when a tsunami knocked out the power supply leading to a catastrophic meltdown, evoking memories of the 1986 disaster at Chernobyl that remains a pivotal event for Germany’s anti-nuclear movement.

I’ve written about both of those events on this blog, and the propaganda surrounding them (see this as well as this).

Also:

While Lemke’s environmentalist Green party is most closely linked to that movement, it was former Chancellor Angela Merkel — then leader of Stegemann’s Christian Democrats — who pulled the plug on atomic energy in Germany following Fukushima. The decision led to a greater reliance on fossil fuels that has kept Germany’s greenhouse gas emissions stubbornly high compared to neighbors such as atom-friendly France.

Fancy that.

Germany expects to rely on hydrogen, which I know little about but which doesn’t seem nearly ready at this point to take up the slack: “some people have joked that hydrogen is the energy of the future, ‘and always will be.'” In the meantime, we have the next goals of the anti-nuclear movement:

Campaigners like Vent have now shifted their focus to nearby facilities that process nuclear fuel for reactors elsewhere in Europe.

“We need to stop enriching uranium,” he said. “We need to stop producing fuel rods for all the nuclear plants outside Germany.”

More parallels between the political situation in Israel and the US

The New Neo Posted on by

Israel and the US are very different, but there are parallels in their domestic situations at present. In Caroline Glick’s recent article on a speech Netanyahu made to Israel’s generals, I noticed some of these similarities, such as the fact that “protests are being organized by the top leaders of Israel’s security apparatus [the Mossad].”

In the case of Israel, which has a government on the right, the anti-government protests come mostly from the left. They are protesting Netanyahu’s attempt to limit what Glick calls the “now-limitless powers” of Israel’s Supreme Court and Attorney General, both of which – because of the non-democratic rules about how these entities are organized and new members chosen – are consistently and reliably and self-perpetuatingly on the left.

The similarities I see don’t include the main structure of the Israeli government and the US government, which are quite different, but the role of security forces in promoting the goals of the left. In Israel, those forces are even trying to topple Netanyahu’s government; in the US, they helped to create situations and propaganda that they hoped would get Trump removed from the presidency.

Another similarity involves the generals [emphasis mine]:

Judged by its substance, the apparent purpose of Netanyahu’s assault on the previous government’s weakness was twofold. First, he wanted to remind the public how we arrived at the current moment, where Hezbollah, Hamas and their Iranian bosses believe they can attack Israel with impunity. And second, Netanyahu wanted to implicitly remind the IDF and Mossad senior brass of their own role in facilitating the irresponsible and destructive gas deal.

In light of the leaked CIA report, and the leadership role retired generals have played in fomenting the anti-government insurrection over the past three months, Netanyahu’s decision to speak from the heart of the national security establishment in Tel Aviv rather than the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem was central to the message of national unity-of-purpose he sought to deliver to Israel’s enemies…

For years, Israel’s generals have stated publicly that the gravest threat facing Israel is the divisions within Israeli society. By repeatedly making these statements, and then standing foursquare with the left and pushing its policies from within the security apparatus, Israel’s military leadership wasn’t repairing those divisions. They were stoking and exacerbating them.

Apparently Israel’s military leaders and intelligence leaders are heavily aligned with the country’s left, while the majority of voters are on the right. And of course the Biden administration is also on the side of the left, including the left in Israel.

NOTE: Netanyahu has an autobiography out that has been highly recommended in The Claremont Review of Books.

Suspect arrested in Bob Lee’s murder

The New Neo Posted on by

Apparently the police must have had some evidence all along in the Bob Lee murder. My guess would be that it’s from video surveillance cameras in the neighborhood, plus perhaps witnesses who may have seen Lee with the accused earlier in the evening. Here’s the story as we have learned it so far:

Heavily armed police descended on a converted warehouse in the Bay Area before dawn on Thursday and arrested an IT entrepreneur in connection with the fatal stabbing of Cash App founder Bob Lee, who was attacked in the early hours of April 4.

Lee’s ex-wife Krista Lee identified the suspect as Nima Momeni, calling him a “soulless piece of shit” in a text message to The Daily Beast.

San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott later confirmed Momeni, 38, was booked on a murder charge.

There’s no indication that Krista Lee knew Momeni, however.

The article goes on to say that neighbors had found Momeni to be a friendly person. He seems to have had enough money to have lived in a fairly upscale place, too.

More:

The neighbor said he met Momeni after Momeni held the door open for him when he first moved to the building, adding that they’ve “been good friends” ever since. He described Momeni, who was originally from Iran and ran his own IT business, as “super sweet,” though Momeni moonlighted as a DJ and “pissed off all the neighbors playing loud music at all hours of the night” and hosting parties.

The neighbor said Momeni “seemed really unsettled” last week, and that he had recently been acting strangely. Just three or four days ago, Momeni allegedly approached the neighbor and asked him if he wanted to travel to Colombia. Two days ago, he randomly tried to gift the neighbor an “amazing Eames chair.”

That strange behavior would have been after Lee’s murder.

According to the neighbor, Momeni indicated that he was expecting a visit from the police, though he cast it as related to a “conflict with some girl.”

The neighbor said he did not know Lee, and speculated that Momeni may have encountered him at a party. He added that he was not altogether surprised that Momeni has been accused of a grisly crime, since he’s a “tough guy, training all the time, super into weapons.” Momeni had a few guns and knives lying around at his bachelor-pad apartment, the neighbor claimed.

Guns just “lying around”?

Momeni also had a record of arrests for two misdemeanors, one knife-related:

In 2011, Momeni was charged in Alameda County with allegedly selling a switchblade (a misdemeanor crime in California) and for driving with a suspended license, the Chronicle reported—he pleaded no contest to the license charge while the switchblade charge was dismissed.

I wonder why his license had been suspended. Substances, perhaps? Might substances have been involved in Lee’s death, as well? I assume we’ll find out more as time goes on.

Is McConnell retiring?

The New Neo Posted on by

Maybe:

Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell has been out of the public eye for weeks, following a serious fall that hospitalized him. Now multiple sources confirm that Senators John Barrasso of Wyoming, John Cornyn of Texas and John Thune of South Dakota are actively reaching out to fellow Republican senators in efforts to prepare for an anticipated leadership vote — a vote that would occur upon announcement that McConnell would be retiring from his duties as leader, and presumably the Senate itself.

One source says that Cornyn has been particularly active in his preparations, taking fellow senators with whom he has little in common to lunch in attempts to court them.

Requests are being targeted at a plethora of conservative senators, including the sixteen who voted to delay the leadership election earlier this year, a proxy for opposition to McConnell’s leadership. Rick Scott, the Florida senator and former NRSC head who challenged McConnell, ultimately received ten protest votes. These members could prove key to determining the next Republican leader.

A lot of people on the right would be very happy to see McConnell go. But I say, be careful what you wish for. There are a lot of other senators as RINO-ish as McConnell (or more so), and some of them are in that group “actively reaching out.”

It would certainly be interesting, however, if McConnell retires. And the situation might end up better than before.

Also:

If McConnell decides to retire from the Senate altogether, and not just from his leadership position, it would be up to Democratic Governor Andy Beshear to fill the vacancy. However, Kentucky’s Republican-controlled legislature recently passed SB 228, which would constrain Beshear’s power by requiring him to choose one of three candidates recommended by leaders of the same political party as the outgoing senator. Beshear originally vetoed the bill, but his veto was overridden by the legislature. So, there is no need to worry about a Democrat being appointed as a replacement.

Everything old is new again

The New Neo Posted on by

First we have the Democratic Convention being held in 2024 in Chicago – shades of 1968 – and now we have bra burnings.

NOTE: The original braless look of the 60s was best on not just the young, but the young with a relatively petite endowment in that area of the body. In other words – even when young, large breasts tend to be overtaken by gravity. Nowadays, however, implants and surgery have enabled women to have a combo that’s very rare in nature: large breasts that look as though they could levitate like helium balloons.