On Hamas’ barbarity and the desire for Israeli retaliation

The New Neo Posted on by

There are horrific videos of what Hamas has done in Israel today; please see this. A description:

At least 150 Israelis have been murdered and over 1,000 wounded by terrorist intruders from Gaza. Dozens of Israelis, including women and children, have been captured by Hamas taken into Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed.

Bodies of murdered Israelis have been “paraded” to cheering civilians. Not only does this satisfy the hatred of Palestinians toward Israel, but it is designed to provoke retaliation by Israel and place Israelis in the position of arousing the further ire of the many segments of the world that already hate Israel. Hamas is well aware of the propaganda value of the entire action/reaction.

Israel has no choice. Hamas and Iran are well aware of that, and have factored it into their calculations, and are more than willing to pay the price because they feel in the end it will help them. I hope their calculations are wrong.

Christopher Rufo looks at Nixon

The New Neo Posted on by

Interesting. Of course, America – and the world – has changed a lot since then:

Hamas attack; Israel at war

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, and the Palestinians are celebrating their favorite way: attacking Israel and Israelis in a huge terror operation. You can find news here, here, here, here, here, and here.

From the latter:

Who is behind the Palestinians’ attack on Israel? Iran, for one. The London Times minces no words:

“The British government believes that Iran is linked to the Hamas attack on Israel and that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is likely to have played a role in training and the supply of weapons (Dipesh Gadher writes).

“A Whitehall source said: ‘The Revolutionary Guards have their fingerprints all over this multifaceted attack. Hamas is just another tool in Iran’s campaign against the West.’”

Where would Iran get the money to finance the Palestinians’ war? Oh, that’s right. We just gave them $6 billion.

One can speculate that the timing of this war is not unrelated to the fact that we have a senile buffoon for a president. A senile buffoon who doesn’t much like Israel …

Of all the things the Obama/Biden faction has done, its enabling of Iran is up there as one of the worst. I’m going to assume this action by Hamas was planned some time before the money transfer, but that Iran knew the money was almost certainly coming and was able to plan accordingly.

The details of this attack are horrendous, with civilian targets and civilian kidnappings. In addition, there’s this:

Hamas and Hezbollah want to derail the much-rumored normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which will marginalize Hamas and Hezbollah to some extent.

No doubt Hamas expects — and likely hopes for — a strong Israeli response against them in Gaza …

Why does Hamas hope for a strong response against them in Gaza? Propaganda purposes. Propaganda is biggest export of the Palestinians, having disseminated it all over the world with no small success.

In recent years, when I’ve written about Israel it’s been almost entirely about internal Israeli politics. But when I first began blogging, most of the news about Israel was about terrorist attacks and the reaction of the Western left, which was to champion the Palestinians. Sadly, we seem to be entering that territory again.

NOTE: You can find updates on the news from Israel by checking here periodically.

Blocking children’s access to online hardcore porn

The New Neo Posted on by

The Federalist has an article about a Louisiana’s Republican state representative Laurie Schlegel’s successful fight to block online porn from children in the state. The article makes several important points:

(1) Online porn today is mostly brutal and violent, far far different from the old Playboy centerfold type.

(2) Children have widespread access to it.

(3) It has an addictive quality for many people, but for young children and teens it has the added effect of helping to form their ideas about sex when they are young and vulnerable.

There’s one important thing the article doesn’t discuss, however, which is the role that child access to online porn plays in the escalation of the transgender phenomenon among young girls. I have been struck at how often this factor is mentioned among detransitioners, who are often consumers of online porn in their youth and are so troubled by it that they decide to retreat from womanhood, since being a woman and sexual contact in general is associated with being the recipient of violent abuse.

Online porn is not so great for young boys, either, as this article in Psychology Today (not a bastion of right-wing thought) describes:

When an adolescent boy compulsively views pornography, his brain chemistry can become shaped around the attitudes and situations that he is watching. Sadly, pornography paints an unrealistic picture of sexuality and relationships that can create an expectation for real-life experiences that will never be fulfilled. …

Pornography shows us a world where relationships mean nothing and immediate sexual gratification means everything. Therefore, the adolescent viewer’s brain is being wired to expect that sex and relationships are separate from one another, and that men and women’s bodies should be sexually exaggerated as they are in porn–which can lead to shame about one’s own body as well as failure to be aroused by the bodies of others.

Pornography on the Internet can be inexpensive, easy to access, and easy to hide. Many adolescents look at pornography when their parents think they are doing homework. While masturbating to porn, the adolescent brain is being shaped around a sexual experience that is isolating, visceral, and completely void of any love or compassion.

That was written in 2011, and since then the role of violence in these images has become dominant and even more destructive to normal functioning. For example, this was written in 2021 by the parent of a teen girl who suddenly announced a desire to become a boy. When she gave her parent (I’m assuming a mother, but it’s not clear) access to her devices, this is what the parent found:

The history on every device was filled with pornography, and the porn was mostly guy-on-guy. It was violent porn. It was anime porn with rape scenes, pregnant cartoon men being sodomized, gang bangs with cartoon children. There were internet sites that contained written porn, with beatings, followed by forgiveness and sex.

My daughter had been sucked into the dark web.

She was only 13.

There were searches for ball gags, hand-cuffs, whips and leather outfits. There were surveys to determine what deviant sex acts she would partake in. There were Discord and Instagram chatrooms where girls discussed whether they are bottoms or tops, givers or receivers, abusers or abused. There were discussions of turn-ons with weaponry. There were images of cartoon dogs giving oral sex. My daughter started drawing penises on her walls in her room, her shoes and her pants.

More at the link. It is very very disturbing and I suggest you read the whole thing.

The difference between the atmosphere in which children are raised today, and their possible exposure to hardcore porn, and the atmospher in which older adults were raised is enormous. I included the above excerpt as an illustration of the sort of thing we’re talking about. And even if a parent manages to block such things on a home computer or on a child’s phone, there are other friends with other phones and other computers.

A very serious problem.

Pack your bags: it’s off to the re-education camps with you!

The New Neo Posted on by

Shortly after Trump was elected in 2016 – and even during the campaign – I noticed that anyone who wore a MAGA hat was being demonized as a racist and a violent extremist. This seemed like a very ominous turn to me. After all, “Make America Great Again” is a perfectly okay slogan, and nothing Trump had done or said seemed all that terrible to me, although at the time I was wary and had opposed Trump during the primaries, preferring a different GOP nominee.

During Trump’s presidency, it got worse and worse. There were even incidents such as Jussie Smollet’s faked hate crime that supposedly was perpetrated by men in MAGA hats. Biden escalated matters with rhetoric such as his “Red Wedding” speech, and of course the persecution of the J6 defendants and the characterization of that demonstration as a “deadly insurrection.”

Therefore it’s not a new thing that the FBI has been pursuing people on the right, claiming they are dangerous terrorists. So this news is really only a slight escalation of an ongoing action:

The federal government believes that the threat of violence and major civil disturbances around the 2024 U.S. presidential election is so great that it has quietly created a new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter: Donald Trump’s army of MAGA followers.

When last I checked, that’s half the country.

More:

The challenge for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the primary federal agency charged with law enforcement, is to pursue and prevent what it calls domestic terrorism without direct reference to political parties or affiliations—even though the vast majority of its current “anti-government” investigations are of Trump supporters, according to classified data obtained by Newsweek.

So to summarize: they’re going after one side, but they want somehow to convey the idea that they’re being even-handed. Good luck with that. Actually, people on the right already know they’re being targeted as the dangerous enemy, and people on the left think that’s what the right deserves.

More:

“Especially at a time when the White House is facing Congressional Republican opposition claiming that the Biden administration has ‘weaponized’ the Bureau against the right wing, it has to tread very carefully,” says the [unnamed FBI] official.

Earth to unnamed FBI official: it’s not just the Republican opposition “claiming” it; it’s acknowledged far more widely than that, because it’s obviously true.

And right on schedule, Hillary Clinton chimes in with an oh-so-helpful suggestion:

“I mean, we had very strong partisans in both parties in the past, and we had very bitter battles over all kinds of things: gun control, and climate change, and the economy, and taxes,” Clinton said. “But there wasn’t this little tail of extremism wagging the dog of the Republican Party as it is today, and sadly, so many of those extremists, those MAGA extremists, take their marching orders from Donald Trump, who has no credibility left by any measure.”

“He’s only in it for himself. He’s now defending himself in civil actions and criminal actions, and when do they break with him? You know, because, at some point, you know, maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members. But something needs to happen,” she added.

I especially like that word “formal.” Will the deprogrammers wear tuxedos, or will they belong to a special unit, or what?

Ah, but she didn’t mean anything so very pernicious by it. She just meant they should lose the election:

When asked how this “deprogramming” could be done, Clinton said the defeat of Trump and candidates aligned with him was the solution. Clinton, who had alleged her election loss in 2016 was illegitimate, also blasted “election deniers.”

Losing an election is always known as “formal deprogramming.” Sure thing.

And of course, there are plenty of videos of Hillary herself denying the results of the 2016 election.

All the presidents’ dogs

The New Neo Posted on by

Presidents often own pets, in particular dogs. It humanizes them, makes them seem like regular guys. And of course, many of them just like dogs and have always had them.

And then there’s President Biden. What gives? The reports are that Biden’s dogs have been biters, and that Biden may have been mistreating them by hitting and kicking them. A Freedom of Information Act has been filed by Judicial Watch in order to find out. If it’s true, it’s certainly not a good sign about Biden – but only one of so very many.

You can see a history of presidential pets here. I think that, so far, the most famous one was FDR’s Fala, a Scottie he mentioned in this well-known speech, and is featured in a DC statue. It’s worth having a listen to FDR talking about Fala:

(An aside – whenever I see FDR during his days as president, it startles me that he looked so much like my grandmother.)

Trump was one of the rare presidents who didn’t have any pets, and was quite frank about the fact that, although it might be politically expedient to own one, he just didn’t want one.

Remember when Romney was the GOP nominee in 2012, and was accused of having mistreated a dog years earlier by putting it in a crate on the roof of his car? And LBJ made headlines by hoisting his beagle by the ears. You can read about it here, including LBJ’s tone-deaf comment, “”It does them good to let them yelp.” Yikes!

Biden’s novel idea for the border: build a wall!

The New Neo Posted on by

An idea whose time has apparently come:

The Biden administration has paved the way for the construction of a new wall along the southern border in Texas by waiving more than a dozen federal laws in a stark reversal of its previous stance on the physical barrier.

The Department of Homeland Security announced the plan to bypass long drawn-out environmental reviews in order to expedite border wall construction in Starr County, TX as the administration struggles to handle an ongoing migrant crisis that has strained local and federal resources. …

“There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States in the project areas,” Alejandro Mayorkas, the DHS secretary, said in a notice posted on the US Federal Registry.

The Democratic administration is picking up where former President Donald Trump left off.

What gives? The cries of woe from the non-border states that have received a recent influx of illegal aliens (I’ve decided to use that older term, which has the advantages of accuracy and clarity) must have been practically deafening in the ears of the Biden administration. And my guess is that the polls were very worrying as well. Those are the only reasons I can think of for the issuing of this order at this point.

Question: will the environmental groups that have been so active in opposing the wall in the past start suing this administration now?

Playing musical offices: Pelosi loses

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve read so many differing reports about who ordered Pelosi out of her office and why. Here’s the latest:

We wrote earlier about how one of the first orders of business for speaker pro tempore Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) in the aftermath of the House’s ousting of Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as Speaker was to notify former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that she needed to immediately remove her things and vacate her hideaway office. …

In an update to this story, we’re learning that it wasn’t McHenry but McCarthy himself who was behind the call to get Pelosi kicked out of her hideaway office, something few on the House side have outside of high-ranking members. Further, the person who will be utilizing that office will be … McCarthy …

Interesting.

I also want to call your attention to this comment by “former legislator.” If you haven’t seen it yet, please take a look.

Here’s my question about Gaetz’s method of removing McCarthy

The New Neo Posted on by

As just about everyone who reads this blog already knows, the mechanism Gaetz used to get rid of McCarthy as Speaker was basically to allow the Democrats and a small GOP group to remove a Republican Speaker through the alliance of eight Republicans and every single Democrat.

The only reason I can see that this hadn’t occurred before was convention – plus it would be very difficult for such a tiny group to do it unless the majority margin was small. But it certainly might have happened. However, it was understood that, although legal, such a move might be suicidal, destructive, chaotic (whichever adjective you prefer) because basically any Speaker would be thus threatened if he or she disappointed even a very small number of his or her party members. With 221 Republicans in the House right now, it can almost be guaranteed that any Speaker would anger or disappoint or frustrate at least a tiny number of GOP members of the House. It’s basically inevitable.

Let’s put aside for a moment whether you think McCarthy was an okay Speaker or whether you think he dearly needed removal. My question is this: now that Gaetz has crossed the Rubicon, what’s to stop any other small group from doing the same thing? Power is intoxicating; how exciting to be able to exercise it with just a few colleagues! You might theorize that, in fact, Gaetz had more supporters than we know and that others would have voted with him if necessary. But that’s just a theory, and it’s irrelevant to my question because the removal could have been accomplished by that small group alone without any support or help at all from any other Republican. And I don’t think the Democrats would be at all reluctant to continue to cooperate with Republican chaos, and the removal of a succession of GOP Speakers.

Many people say, so what? The House GOP isn’t doing much anyway (and of course their power is limited by the fact that the Democrats control the Senate and the presidency). But a demonstration of that sort of continuing and repeated chaos and dissension on the part of Republicans would, IMHO, lead to them losing both houses in 2024. And if that happens, we’ll see just how different a Democrat legislature is from a Republican one, especially if the president is also a Democrat.

But back to my question: what’s to stop other small factions from doing the same to any GOP member who replaces McCarthy as Speaker? Is it just the fear that it would backfire on the right and enable the left? That certainly didn’t stop Gaetz.

And that’s assuming McCarthy can be replaced fairly quickly and without too much fuss. If that happens, and if the rest of the GOP manages to stay its hand and not follow in Gaetz’s footsteps in terms of Democrat-aided Speaker-removal, then this storm will pass. But if not? Well, He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind.