Muzzling Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

Will this occur, or is it just a rumor?:

The gag order [on Trump] would carry penalties if broken, such as fines and possible jail time. It would essentially stop Trump from speaking about the case, which would include fundraising off of it. That would be a big damper on his current plan to fight back, which has revolved around stirring public outrage. It would also be a move that further interferes with the 2024 presidential race.

Trump currently has plans for a big speech after his arraignment:

Trump, 76, will speak from his Palm Beach home and resort at 8:15 p.m. Tuesday, his campaign said in an emailed statement.

The speech — Trump’s first since a grand jury voted to indict him last week — would follow his scheduled 2:15 p.m. arraignment in Manhattan Supreme Court.

But the address to his supporters could reveal very little about the case should the judge decide to impose a gag order on Trump during the hearing.

Legal experts have said such an order, which would silence the 2024 presidential hopeful, would not be unusual, noting they are fairly common in high-profile cases. A source close to Trump’s legal team, however, told The Post on Sunday his attorneys are not anticipating a gag order will be issued.

But there is nothing usual about a leading presidential candidate being charged with a crime and issued a gag order – at least, not in this country.

As I’ve written before, I think this indictment is designed to foster the ultimate goal of boosting Trump among his supporters and leading to his GOP nomination while simultaneously making those in the middle recoil from voting for him in the general. At the same time, it throws red meat to the left. Therefore those who planned it – and I don’t for a single moment think it was just Bragg, going rogue – consider it a potential plus in every way.

SSRIs and violence

The New Neo Posted on by

Every time there’s a school shooting or any sort of mass violence, the subject of SSRIs comes up from one commenter or another.

Sometimes people also bring up the subject of fatherlessness and mass shooters, which I wrote about at length in this post, the gist of which is that there is no connection although it’s popularly thought that there is.

Now, on to SSRIs. It is notoriously difficult to do research on whether SSRIs trigger more violence, have no effect, or help prevent violence, and if so in what populations. It’s a popular internet meme that they trigger violence, but the evidence is not at all clear that that is so, and as I said it’s very difficult to design a good study. One obvious reason is that such people are often at higher risk for violence in the first place, and drugs are not given randomly. There is almost certainly something already different about the people who get them and those who don’t.

This is one of the better-designed studies, and as you can see if you read it it’s very hard to tell what it all means, if anything. For example:

As is often the case, the authors of the study themselves are rather cautious. While obviously concerned that it is possible that SSRIs may actually cause violent behavior in a small minority of people, they fully recognize that other explanations are possible. These include the possibility that what is driving the violent behavior is medication undertreatment, based on the finding that the risk with violence was only found among individuals who were likely taking subtherapeutic doses. As reported by MedScape, one of the study authors, Seena Fazel, states: “Our own view is that some evidence suggests that it’s a bit more complicated than that, because we found a link with subtherapeutic doses of SSRIs, and that would suggest to us that it may be that it’s actually a lack of treatment [and] it could be residual symptoms that are driving this link.” At the same time, if antidepressants really worked wonders for young people, we should see that therapeutic SSRI usage was associated with a reduced risk of violent behavior, which it wasn’t.

A couple other factors also deserve mention. The idea of comparing periods on and off medication within the same individual is a clever design, because many individual factors that might be related to risk of violence, like one’s socioeconomic status or DNA, are held constant. However, because the period of medication use was not randomized (and couldn’t be), it introduces the very likely complicating issue that individuals were taking medications during times when they were feeling more depressed, anxious, and angry to start with, and thus at higher risk of acting violently. Finally, it is important to note that a statistically significant association certainly does not mean that most people taking antidepressants are out there hurting others. When taking SSRI medications, the conviction rate of violent crimes was at a 1.0% rate compared to 0.6% without medications.

There’s also this:

Our study encompassed nationwide data over a 15-year period. In this period, the homicide rate per 100,000 remained fairly constant, with a moderate decline in recent years, leading to an average of 160 homicide victims per year. The suicide rate decreased steadily from 10.26 (approximately 1,500 victims) in 1994 to 8.77 (approximately 1,400 victims) per 100,000 in 2008. The homicide–suicide rate remained relatively stable, averaging at 0.05 per 100,000 (varying from 4 to 14 victims per year, see Fig. 1). In the same period, the rate of total antidepressant use increased considerably, from 3,038.81 in 1994 to 5,650.58 per 100,000 in 2008. A similar increase was observed for the rate of SSRI use alone, which more than doubled from 1,482.25 in 1994 to 3,161.15 per 100,000 in 2008 as well as the rate of SSRI use including venlafaxine, with an increase of 1,486.81 in 1994 to 3,904.20 per 100,000 in 2008. Over the same period, the number of defined daily doses used rose from 59.6 million in 1994 to 245.3 million in 2008: a fourfold increase. This indicates that not only more people used antidepressants, but also that the mean duration or intensity of the treatment grew…

Rates of the use of SSRIs including venlafaxine were also found to be negatively associated with both homicide rates and suicide rates. No significant independent association was found between rates of SSRIs including venlafaxine and homicide–suicide.

Here’s an article about suicide and SSRIs for young people:

The 2004 study examined the clinical trial data that had been collected on two types of medications, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) and selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRI). The results of the study prompted the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to issue a black box warning, the most serious level of warning in prescription drug labeling, for the risk of suicides in children and adolescents being treated with antidepressants in 2004. The warning was extended to young adults ages 18 to 25 years in 2006.

The researchers in the current study performed a meta-analysis of 41 studies, reviewing the data on a total of 9,185 youths, adults, and geriatric patients who were treated with fluoxetine (Prozac is one common brand) and venlafaxine (Effexor) immediate (IR) and extended release (ER) preparations…

In all three age groups, treatment with fluoxetine and with venlafaxine IR and ER resulted in a statistically significant improvement in depressive symptoms when compared to treatment with placebo. The decline in depressive symptoms was also faster for patients treated with medication than control group patients. In the adult and geriatric patients who were treated with fluoxetine or venlafaxine, suicidal thoughts and behaviors decreased over time.

As the patients became less depressed, they had fewer suicidal thoughts and attempts. Although the youths who were treated with medication showed the same statistically significant decrease in depressive symptoms as the older populations, they did not show a decrease in suicidal ideation and actions.

“In kids, we don’t see a harmful effect, but we do see a disassociation between the beneficial effects on depression and the potential beneficial effect on suicide,” said the study’s lead author…

The newest analysis did not support the idea that there was an increased risk of suicide in children and adolescents taking fluoxetine, an SSRI. In explaining the difference in their findings, the researchers note that these original meta-analyses included fewer studies and the studies were of shorter term than the longitudinal data they analyzed.

There probably will be a number of readers here who say something like this: “It’s all lies promulgated to cover up the damage drug companies do and to preserve their profits.” You’re welcome to that point of view, and certainly during the COVID years the CDC and many other official entities have earned our distrust. But if you throw out all research, including older studies such as these, you are left with internet memes and paranoia. That’s not science, either. I believe that most of these studies are attempts at valid research on a subject that is inherently difficult to study, and that the bulk of the evidence indicates that SSRIs do not increase violent behavior.

Worst ice cream flavor of the month, and best jellybean ever

The New Neo Posted on by

Zabar’s is offering chocolate matzoh ice cream for Passover:

The limited-edition Passover flavor is available through April 13 when Passover ends and is sold by the pint for $20, but there’s a lot to go into it for the price. This ice cream is as decadent as can be, starting with a house-made matzo, and a vanilla base, paired with homemade caramel and tempered chocolate and house-roasted almonds.

Some people like matzoh. I don’t count myself among them. And of course, I can’t eat chocolate because it gives me migraines. I love caramel, but have you ever noticed (and unless you can’t eat chocolate I don’t see why you would have) that caramel ice creams very often contain chocolate? That makes them verboten to me.

I realize, from earlier in my life before I had to banish chocolate, that caramel and chocolate is a very tasty combination. But caramel alone is very nice, too, and it is very rare to find it. Take it from me; I often look. Salted caramel, which is a somewhat different taste, had a brief but boring time in the sun (is that a bad metaphor for ice cream?). But I’m not all that keen on it.

For observant Jews, the Zabar’s offering has another drawback:

It’s important to note this flavor, while being offered for Passover, is not a pick for those strictly observant of the dietary laws of the holiday. It is not certified kosher for Passover.

By the way, speaking of holiday flavors this time of year, those Russell Stover pectin jelly beans I love were nowhere to be found this year. Not even on Amazon or the mothership itself, the Russell Stover website. However, the latter had a little notice that asked for your email address if you wished to be notified when they became available. Of course I signed up. A day or two ago I was informed they’re back in stock, and I quickly put in my order. You can, too.

Biden and the fountain of youth

The New Neo Posted on by

Over the years, there have been plenty of remarks like this one about Biden’s increasingly feeble state:

I don’t think Biden could get through a day without being told where to go and what to do. Not just being told what to do in the sense of, today you give a speech on education to a group of teachers. Told what to do in the sense of, where to stand.

This sort of discussion hasn’t been completely lost on Biden, however. For example, when campaigning, he sometimes used to challenge people to a wrestling match. But now he’s decided to take a more pro-active approach and has announced he soon will be getting a transfusion of young blood – specifically, young plasma. Here’s Biden on the subject:

I know I’m not getting any younger – but neither are any of you, ha ha! All jokes aside, I’ve reached the big eight-o, and although I’m completely hale and hearty I’ve decided to up my game a little more. The transfusion will come from a thirty-year-old man who lives in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the wonderful town in which I was born. This will give me a populist boost, too, which can’t hurt, even though Trump will be a jailbird by the time of the 2020 – I mean 2024 – election and no threat to me at all.

Oops, they told me I wasn’t supposed to say anything about Trump’s arrest. Oh well; after my transfusion, “they” won’t be controlling me any more. I’m kicking them to the curb and flexing my new muscles. Joe Biden unleashed and unfettered will be an even better president than the old Joe has been so far – although I know it’s hard to believe I could be any better than I’ve already been.

Speaking of “better,” I’m dumping that babbling bore Kamala. Boy, was that lady a mistake. And by the time of the election she’ll be sixty years old. I need to trade her in for someone younger, and there are plenty of candidates who fit the bill: female, minority, youthful.

And Jill, you’re next for a trade-in!

Just kidding, honey. Trying to keep you on your toes.

His speech was met with hearty applause.

The clever and highly-coordinated – and terrifying – war on “disinformation”

The New Neo Posted on by

Please read this article on the development of the anti-“disinformation” campaign of the left. An excerpt:

In his last days in office, President Barack Obama made the decision to set the country on a new course. On Dec. 23, 2016, he signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which used the language of defending the homeland to launch an open-ended, offensive information war.

Something in the looming specter of Donald Trump and the populist movements of 2016 reawakened sleeping monsters in the West. Disinformation, a half-forgotten relic of the Cold War, was newly spoken of as an urgent, existential threat.

That “something” was the wake-up call that, in a fair election, the left might not always win. So anything that could empower the right had to be stopped by a war that was fought on many fronts. One of those front was information censorship, something in which the left often engages when in power. That’s something Orwell knew very well, and it’s why he emphasized that aspect of the leftist regime he depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

More:

Since 2016, the federal government has spent billions of dollars on turning the counter-disinformation complex into one of the most powerful forces in the modern world: a sprawling leviathan with tentacles reaching into both the public and private sector, which the government uses to direct a “whole of society” effort that aims to seize total control over the internet and achieve nothing less than the eradication of human error.

They want to eradicate what they label as error, not actual error. Although sometimes error is involved, it can just as easily be truth that is labeled “disinformation” by the left. In act, it’s probably even more important for them to suppress truth than falsehoods.

To continue:

Step one in the national mobilization to defeat disinfo fused the U.S. national security infrastructure with the social media platforms, where the war was being fought…

The strategy of national mobilization called for “not only the whole-of-government, but also whole-of-society” approach, according to a document released by the GEC in 2018. “To counter propaganda and disinformation,” the agency stated, “will require leveraging expertise from across government, tech and marketing sectors, academia, and NGOs.”

The American press, once the guardian of democracy, was hollowed out to the point that it could be worn like a hand puppet by the U.S. security agencies and party operatives…

By conflating the anti-establishment politics of domestic populists with acts of war by foreign enemies, it justified turning weapons of war against Americans citizens. It turned the public arenas where social and political life take place into surveillance traps and targets for mass psychological operations. The crime is the routine violation of Americans’ rights by unelected officials who secretly control what individuals can think and say.

This has become more and more obvious over time, but only the right seems to be paying attention or caring. That is probably for two reasons. The first is that the MSM isn’t really reporting much on this and is actually part of it, and the second is that a lot of people on the left feel that the ends justify the means.

More:

…[T]he next stage, already underway, is being carried out through both scalable processes of artificial intelligence and algorithmic pre-censorship that are invisibly encoded into the infrastructure of the internet, where they can alter the perceptions of billions of people.

It’s not only already underway, but it’s been underway for a long time. I noticed it years ago – I don’t recall how many – when suddenly Google was no longer a fairly neutral search engine. It became very difficult to find articles that ran counter to the leftist party line, and very easy to find information that conformed with it.

The article is very long, and I haven’t read it all yet. But it seems well worth reading in its entirety. Another excerpt:

What do the members of the ruling class believe? They believe, I argue, “in informational and management solutions to existential problems” and in their “own provi­dential destiny and that of people like them to rule, regardless of their failures.” As a class, their highest principle is that they alone can wield power. If any other group were to rule, all progress and hope would be lost, and the dark forces of fascism and barbarism would at once sweep back over the earth.

That’s the very same group that the brilliant Thomas Sowell has been writing about for nearly three decades. He has called them “the anointed” and emphasized that being in error over and over again did not seem to make a dent in their arrogant assumption that they must rule.

Defending “democracy” is their cry, although they don’t define it (sometimes it’s “our democracy”). That justifies almost anything, including ending liberty. Without liberty, what is “democracy”? What remains is not just “tyranny of the majority” (although there’s certainly that, too); it’s tyranny of the elite minority.

The left believes liberty is dispensable at this point. It’s just too threatening:

Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich responded to the news that Elon Musk was purchasing Twitter by declaring that preserving free speech online was “Musk’s dream. And Trump’s. And Putin’s. And the dream of every dictator, strongman, demagogue, and modern-day robber baron on Earth. For the rest of us, it would be a brave new nightmare.” According to Reich, censorship is “necessary to protect American democracy.”

That’s a perfect example of the total inversion of the idea of liberty. It’s where our leftist “elites” have arrived, and technology – particularly AI, which the article discusses at length – gives them tools of control they never had before, far superior to the telescreen of Orwell’s imagination.

CBS: don’t say trans

The New Neo Posted on by

CBS issues a directive about coverage of the Nashville shooter:

Top executives at CBS News have banned staffers from using the word “transgender” when reporting on the Nashville shooter — despite the fact that police have said Audrey Hale was just that and cited it as a key point in the case, The Post has learned.

“The shooter’s gender identity has not been confirmed by CBS News,” the network’s executives insisted in a Tuesday memo obtained by The Post. “As such, we should avoid any mention of it as it has no known relevance to the crime. Should that change, we can and will revisit.”…

Sources said Ciprian-Matthews and Milne spent 15 minutes on the Tuesday call discussing the directive — which bewildered many journalists, given that Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake said Hale was transgender and that her identity may be relevant to the motive.

“This is absurd because the police identified Hale as transgender,” a CBS insider said. “If the cops didn’t address it, maybe you could avoid it, but withholding information is not journalism.”

Ah, but that’s exactly what it is these days. An enormous part of modern journalism is what information to leave out, as Iowahawk famously wrote in 2013:

Roundup on the Trump indictment

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Even Mike Pence has mouthed words of criticism of the indictment:

“The unprecedented indictment of a former president of the United States on a campaign finance issue is an outrage,” Pence said on CNN. “And it appears to millions of Americans to be nothing more than a political prosecution that’s driven by a prosecutor who literally ran for office on a pledge to indict the former president.”

(2) Kevin McCarthy has plans:

House Republicans sent Bragg a letter last week demanding he answer questions about why he was pursuing criminal charges against the 45th president that were based on a seven-year-old financial transaction with porn actress Stormy Daniels and legal statutes that had expired…

“Alvin Bragg has irreparably damaged our country in an attempt to interfere in our Presidential election,” McCarthy said. “As he routinely frees violent criminals to terrorize the public, he weaponized our sacred system of justice against President Donald Trump. The American people will not tolerate this injustice, and the House of Representatives will hold Alvin Bragg and his unprecedented abuse of power to account.”

House members are quite limited in their ability to do much about it, however.

(3) Alan Dershowitz writes:

Harvard law professor and author Alan Dershowitz said Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against former President Donald Trump is “bringing shame” to Bragg’s prestigious office…

“[Alvin Bragg and Letitia James’] campaign pledge was, ‘We promise you, if we get elected, we will get Trump by hook or by crook,'” Dershowitz said. “They didn’t know what crimes they would get before they set out first, to name the person, and then to rummage through the statute books, find some crimes, but they didn’t find any, so they made them up.”

And yet later in the same article Dershowitz is quoted as saying he’ll probably vote for Biden in 2024, because he’s in favor of gay marriage and the like. Does Dershowitz think Bragg did this on his own, and that it’s not typical of the travesty the entire left and the Democratic Party has made of Dershowitz’s beloved law?

(4) Robert Costello on where the case might be headed:

“Well, I think I got through to them, because [Monday] I understand they called back another witness by the name of David Pecker, who used to run the National Enquirer,” Costello, a former attorney for Michael Cohen, told host Greg Kelly.

The change in direction attempts to turn the focus of Bragg’s case off of a convicted felon Cohen and porn actor Stormy Daniels – who was paid for a non-disclosure agreement of an alleged affair that became public anyway. The case might be homing in on other allegations of a non-disclosure agreement with another woman Karen McDougal and Pecker.

Pecker allegedly paid for the rights to the salacious stories, designed to smear then-candidate Trump during the final weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign, only to not to print them.

“And what they’re investigating now is he bought a story involving the McDougal lady and then never published the story,” Costello continued to host Greg Kelly. “So, apparently, Mr. Pecker admitted with the federal authorities when he got a non-prosecution agreement that he should have filed with the Federal Election Commission, the FEC.

“But that doesn’t mean that Donald Trump should have filed something. The only way that Mr. Pecker would involve Donald Trump is if Donald Trump repaid that money, and I haven’t heard any allegation that he did.”

(5) And here’s Turley:

It is a big moment and it’s a chilling moment. The fact is that over months of investigation, we have not heard of other crimes…

…Donald Trump may be the first former president to be indicted, but if this is the standard, he won’t be the last. It’s going to obviously get very fierce in terms of the motions and the litigation ahead of us and obviously the politics.

(6) Glenn Greenwald:

(7) Possible grounds for dismissal of the case.

The Democrats solemnly intone no one is above the law in response to the Trump indictment

The New Neo Posted on by

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Pelosi’s hardly the only one saying it, but she’s one of the most obvious:

Before I get to the statement about no one being above the law, I want to point out the obvious fact that Pelosi is either ignorant of the most basic foundation of American criminal law, or purposely ignoring it, which is that no criminal defendant in the US is ever required to prove innocence. That a former Speaker would make a statement like hers is just another indication – not that we needed one – of the decline of this great country. Here’s some of the criticism of that aspect of Pelosi’s tweet – by Republicans, so it’s a sort of “Republicans Pounce” article.

But “no one is above the law” is different. It’s a mantra that seems to conform to our system of law, and to be non-controversial. But actually, presidents are ordinarily not eligible for criminal prosecution while in office, which makes them at least temporarily above the law. And prosecutorial discretion means that, while no one is forever “above the law” de jure (not even a president), plenty of people are de facto above the law. We’ve certainly seen that to be the case in terms of the politically favored, but it’s true even for ordinary people. In other words, prosecutors have tremendous power to make decisions about whom to prosecute and when, and they fail to go after some people who appear to be breaking the law while doggedly pursuing the conviction of others who seem to have broken the very same law.

It’s hard to think of a system where that would not be true. After all, there are so many laws that can be violated that there is no way on earth to try every possible perpetrator. Prosecutors must pick and choose, and at the moment we rely on them to be fair and objective in their choices. Obviously that is often not the case, and it most definitely is not the case here. In fact, Trump’s eventual trial lawyers could ask that the case be dismissed as a selective prosecution or selective enforcement:

His lawyers will argue that simple document-misrepresentation cases are usually handled without bringing a criminal prosecution (usually as a civil matter), and that “bootstrapping” a misrepresentation as an election-law felony has never before even been tried, much less approved.

However, we still don’t know the exact charges; we are merely assuming this is about the Stormy Daniels payments and campaign finances. But the selective prosecution claim would probably apply to all of the charges against Trump that have been discussed lately.

Selective prosecution is the opposite of being above the law. But we are used to these Orwellian statements by the left.