Sophie Rebecca, the trans ballet dancer – nope

The New Neo Posted on by

A lot of people have called my attention to this supposed story:

You can well see that, stories to the contrary, this person is not on any track to become a professional dancer. This person is also in his/her 30s as a beginner, and adult beginners usually are enrolled in adult classes and are allowed to be really really bad at dance. Professional schools generally have children’s classes, which are more serious, and adult classes, which contain a mix of older people who just want to learn a bit of dance as well as ex-dancers in their semi-dotage.

Dance classes almost all include both sexes, except for the professional tracks for younger dancers that often feature special pointe classes for girls, special classes for boys that feature jumps, and partnering classes for both.

In ballet, anatomy is destiny. Female bodies tend to be much more more flexible and male bodies much stronger. Size differentials are important in partnering, too – it helps a great deal if the woman is considerably smaller and lighter than the man. That’s why taller male dancers are often in increased demand for partnering.

And everyone must be very lean, but males are bulkier because of their greater musculature. In order to partner, their upper body strength must be further developed. Many female dancers may only weigh 100 pounds or so, but that’s still a lot of poundage to haul up over your head while looking pleased about it.

Another day, another roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) One of Trump’s newly-appointed prosecutors is Matthew Colangelo:

…[At the DOJ] Colangelo was involved in some of the most ideologically driven election law decisions of the Eric Holder era – ranging from attacks on Voter ID laws to failing to enforce federal laws requiring states to maintain voter rolls.

In sum, Bragg has appointed a militant leftist attorney to prosecute Donald Trump in New York City. A Harvard Law graduate, Colangelo has used his powers and position to advance far-left ideological aims. His abuse of power has cost taxpayers millions of dollars in one state.

That’s exactly the sort of person I’d expect to be working on the Trump case – a hyper-partisan fighter.

(2) I wonder whether the people Trump describes here will be rooted out and fired or removed:

“When I went to the courthouse, which is also a prison in a sense, they signed me in and I’ll tell you, people were crying,” he said. “People that work there, professionally work there, that have no problems putting in murderers and they see everybody. It’s tough, tough place and they were crying. They were actually crying.”

“They said, ‘I’m sorry.’ They’d say, ‘2024, sir. 2024.’ And tears are pouring down their eyes. I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. “Those people are phenomenal. Those are your police. Those are the people that work at the courthouse. They’re unbelievable people. Many of them were in tears or close to it. Many apologies.

Of course, he might be exaggerating. But even New York City has some people on the right.

(3) Glenn Greenwald on coverage of the Nashville shooter:

“This Nashville shooting has been erased from memory even though it happened very recently because it’s such an inconvenient narrative given that the shooter was not just someone who was trans but very possibly acted on behalf of this radical ideology,” Greenwald told Kelly.

“And amazingly they won’t show us the manifesto even though we always see the manifesto when they can link it to the right,” greenwald continue, adding “We’ve retained counsel in Nashville to try to obtain that manifesto because it’s journalistically in the public interest.”…

“So somehow a shooting by what appeared to be somebody motivated by at least in part radical theories of gender ideology and killed Christian children in the name of that ideology,” Greenwald continued, “Somehow that has been turned around so that whoever is concerned about that [component] of the story is now back to being a 1960s Jim Crow racist.”

“Of course it wouldn’t work without the media’s cooperation…

I’m glad to hear they’re trying to get the manifesto.

(4) The Biden administration is really pushing electric cars:

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) unveiled new vehicle emissions that could force manufacturers to make two out every three vehicles run on electricity by 2032.

What could possibly go wrong?

(5) Democrats plan to hold their 2024 convention in Chicago. Seems fitting.

Bud Light’s marketing VP tries to explain the reasoning behind the Dylan Mulvany move

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s what she has to say:

“I’m a businesswoman. I had a really clear job to do when I took over Bud Light,” Heinerscheid said in a late March episode of the Make Yourself at Home podcast. “It was this brand is in decline. It’s been in decline for a really long time, and if we do not attract young drinkers to come and drink this brand, there will be no future for Bud Light.”

So, Mulvaney’s signing was supposed to attract the young. I can’t quite imagine that it did, but did Heinerscheid not realize you shouldn’t do that at the expense of losing the customers you already have?

She continued:

“It means having a campaign that’s truly inclusive and feels lighter, and brighter, and different, and appeals to women and to men,” Heinerscheid continued. “And representation is sort of at the heart of evolution — you got to see people who reflect you in the work. And we had this hangover — I mean, Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor, and it was really important that we had another approach.”

Well, she certainly instituted “another approach” – one that seems to have appealed to almost no one.

Bud Light and its marketing director are just a single example of a widespread phenomenon in which companies voluntarily shoot themselves in the foot in the name of “inclusion.” Do they realize that they may be destroying their brands in the process? Do they care?

The military intelligence leak

The New Neo Posted on by

Lots of people are writing about this, but I’m not going to do so except to say what I’ve said here many many times: I am suspicious of all the detailed military information on the Ukraine war and all prognostications. The only prediction I’ve made is one that I continue to make: this war has been and will be a long slog and there have been and will be many casualties. I don’t see a good resolution happening and I am very pessimistic about a negotiated peace.

But I figured that you would want to duke it out in the comment section, so consider this a thread for that. Here’s an article with some links, and here’s something by Glenn Greenwald that mirrors a bit of my own skepticism:

The White House was in on the Trump raid

The New Neo Posted on by

This should come as no surprise:

“On August 8, 2022, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) conducted an unprecedented raid of Mar-a-Lago on the ground that potentially classified records existed there. According to press reports, Biden Administration aides were “stunned” to hear of this development,” AFL begins in a press release. “However, new NARA records obtained through America First Legal’s investigation into the circumstances surrounding the Mar-a-Lago raid further confirmed that the FBI obtained access to these records through a ‘special access request’ from the Biden White House on behalf of the Department of Justice (DOJ).”

According to AFL, it appears that “the Biden White House and DOJ coordinated to obtain the Trump records and perhaps create a pretext for the law enforcement raid by way of the ‘special access request.’”

In addition to confirming that the White House was involved in setting up Trump, AFL also proves that the National Archives misled Congress about the role the White House played in the raid.

Lies all the way down. Or all the way up, as it were.

Democrats used to say it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup. But it’s all good when the Democrats are doing it.

Poll indicates support for Trump indictment

The New Neo Posted on by

I was recently interacting with several people who were jubilant at the Trump indictment. That attitude didn’t surprise me at all, although it saddened me. These people are quite bright and well-educated, but they are Democrats and they get their news from the usual sources and are surrounded by other Democrats. It is my distinct impression that, were I to quiz them on the supposed legal basis for such an indictment, they wouldn’t know and what’s more they probably wouldn’t care all that much. If I tried to inform them, they would probably think that I’m the one who’s biased.

Plus – and I can’t reiterate this enough – most people really don’t follow legal reasoning, even if those people are quite smart. It’s boring. And a lot of people feel that it consists of meaningless rhetorical tricks, so why bother to care?

So now there’s this recent ABC news poll on the subject of whether Trump should have been indicted:

Currently, just over half of Americans (52%) view the charges against Trump as serious (was 50% last week). Additionally, half of Americans (50%) say Trump should have been charged with a crime in this case, up five percentage points from last week. The slight changes in both cases look to be drawing from people who said “don’t know” in the earlier survey, a number that is down six percentage points in both questions…

In a new question, most Americans (53%) believe that Trump intentionally did something illegal in this case. About one in ten (11%) say he acted wrong but it wasn’t intentional, and a fifth (20%) believe he did nothing wrong.

Democrats overwhelmingly think he should have been charged and most also don’t think the charges were politically motivated. Republicans overwhelmingly don’t think he should have been charged and also think the charges were politically motivated. Independents are, as usual, in-between, but on this question they bear slightly more resemblance to the Democrats than to the Republicans.

You may think this poll is garbage, and it may well be. But the results seem very plausible to me. The media’s spin, plus the legal ignorance of most people, does the trick. The poll questions don’t seem to have included anything about knowledge of what is actually in the indictment or whether it’s a crime. I would wager that most people haven’t a clue, except that it has something to do with payoffs to a porn actress. But actually, it has to do with how the utterly legal (and rather commonplace) payoffs were recorded. It’s not even at all clear that Trump ever had sex (in the Clintonian or any other sense) with Stormy Daniels. Most people are probably unaware of that, too.

How many real “Proud Boys” members were there?

The New Neo Posted on by

More and more, it seems that the number of actual Proud Boys were outnumbered by the government agents infiltrating the group. And it wasn’t just the FBI doing the infiltrating. As the information continues to trickle out, the number of agents and agencies grow:

The numbers so far are 50 or more, and they may go higher. These people were not just observing; they were participants and instigators. So far I’ve just seen discussions of verbal egging-on, but I’m wondering if there were acts by agents such as scaling the walls and/or window-breaking.

“Cite and release” considered in Los Angeles

The New Neo Posted on by

Long long ago, when I was in college and took some sociology courses, I seem to recall learning about the purposes (plural) of incarceration. I’m doing this from memory, but they went something like this: protection (of the public), deterrence (for other would-be criminals who might think twice), punishment (in the moral sense of “you do the crime, you do the time”), and rehabilitation (for example, courses and training available in prison).

Imprisonment never fell equally on all groups. Just to take one obvious example, prisons are mostly filled with men. Is that because men are being discriminated against? No; it’s because crimes are disproportionately committed by men. And youngish men, at that. There are also racial and socioeconomic differences. For that matter, I seem to recall that crimes are disproportionately committed by people who have had head injuries.

Incarceration does not, and never will, be “fair” in the sense that every group is imprisoned in exact proportion to its representation in the general population. But that impossible endpoint seems to be the goal of the left. Another goal is to empty the prisons as much as possible. And what of those goals of imprisonment that I mentioned at the outset: protection, deterrence, punishment, and rehabilitation? I don’t see how they are preserved, although there is lip service paid to the latter through programs that advocate social workers replacing police for many offenders.

Which brings us to this Los Angeles proposal:

Calling overcrowding in Los Angeles County jails a humanitarian crisis, Hilda Solis and Lindsey Horvath, members of the L.A. County Board of Supervisors (BOS), introduced a motion to depopulate the jail system by making permanent the Emergency Bail Schedule—a pandemic-era policy that freed individuals held on bail for both felonies and misdemeanors. Under “cite and release,” police would issue a “ticket” or citation for suspected unlawful conduct but would not bring the suspect to jail for a formal booking. Suspects get released on the condition that they make a signed promise to show up to their court date.

What sorts of offenses would be subject to this policy? Why, nothing so terrible:

The motion also called for citing and releasing individuals with aggregate bail amounts set at $50,000 or below. According to the Los Angeles County Felony Bail Summary, bail for the following offenses fall under that threshold: possession of firearm by a felon, assault with a deadly weapon, assault with a firearm, assault with chemicals, extortion and criminal threats, burglary with explosives, recklessly causing a fire with great bodily injury, and vehicular manslaughter (i.e., driving a vehicle with gross negligence). Common sense would suggest that these offenses warrant a more serious response than a citation…

In L.A. County, an overwhelming number of such crimes would be eligible for cite and release, including domestic violence; child abuse; battery; sexual battery; violation of a protective order; pimping a minor (aged 16 or older); possession of GHB (a so-called date-rape drug) with intent to commit sexual assault; child stealing; contact with a minor to commit sexual offense (with a prior); incest; sodomy (for victims under age 18); oral copulation (for victims under age 18); possession, distribution, or control of child pornography; and elder abuse.

The public outcry was so huge that Solis and Horvath withdrew the motion. But it is emblematic of where the left wants to take the treatment of those accused of crimes and those incarcerated for crimes. Need I also add that the innocent victims of such a policy would have disproportionately consisted of black people?