The Twitter files and the smoking gun

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m in complete agreement with this from the NY Post, by Andrew C. McCarthy:

Just don’t look for a smoking gun. We’re not going to see an FBI document that says, “Tell Twitter the Biden evidence is Russian disinformation.” When the new Chief Twit, Elon Musk, released the so-called Twitter Files over the weekend, Matt Taibbi’s consequent thread of reporting observed there’s no evidence of a specific warning to social-media platforms that the Biden information was sourced to Russia or hacked. As Devine countered, however, there is significant evidence of FBI collusion in the scheme.

I can explain the apparent disconnect. It is not necessary for FBI officials to issue specific warnings to convey the message that a story should be killed.

In these schemes, there are sophisticated actors in each camp, including former government officials in media and social media. When government officials do their nod-and-a-wink routine, these execs get the hint. The higher-ups at Twitter and Facebook knew the FBI wasn’t holding regular pre-election meetings with them idly. They would also have understood that when briefing private parties the FBI can’t accuse people of specific criminal misconduct — such as espionage and hacking. So it keeps things “general” (as Taibbi described the warnings). That, along with its perceived authority, allows it to get its accusatory message across but later deny it did so.

I have long thought the same. These people are not stupid, and they are used to playing this game and quite good at it. No one is going to leave “smoking gun” evidence, nor do they need to do so in order to get the message across and get the results they want.

McCarthy ends with this (and please read the whole thing):

That’s how this game is played. The players know exactly what they’re doing. They say enough to endorse the lie but leave themselves room to deny that they did so. They think we’re idiots.

The only part with which I don’t agree – at least not exactly – is that last sentence. I would modify it this way: they think that the MSM and the Democrats will rationalize, explain away, coverup, and otherwise manage to convince a lot of people that this was all quite innocent and in fact a big nothingburger tha can be safely ignored or waved away. And that, because a great many people – maybe even most, but at any rate enough – don’t really want to focus on all this complex and sordid stuff, sorting out the wheat from the chaff and trying to figure out the truth in a sea of lies, that the approach will work to shove it all under the rug still again.

Or, alternatively, they think that enough people will realize what actually happened and yet rationalize that the ends justify the means in the worthy cause of promoting Biden and defeating Trump.

Talking points on the left: about those Twitter files and Matt Taibbi

The New Neo Posted on by

The leftist troops have been told what line to take on Matt Taibbi – who’s been reporting on the Twitter files – and here it is:

Imagine throwing it all away to do PR work for the richest person in the world. Humiliating shit.

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) December 2, 2022

The article goes on to list statement after statement, mostly by people connected to journalism in some way, using the same phrase or nearly the same phrase excoriating reporter Taibbi. Are we to believe all these people simultaneously thought of the same supposedly brilliant ad hominem bon mot? I don’t think so. One thing I’ve noticed over the years is how on-point and organized the left is in its messaging.

Taibbi is being attacked for taking on the task of summarizing the Twitter files on the banning of stories (such as the Hunter laptop) that Musk has recently released, and for that Taibbi must be destroyed if possible and certainly completely discredited. That is a given.

The recitation of the same phrase from so many sources reminds me of this, although the message is quite different:

[NOTE: There are other talking points and rationalizations as well. See Ace’s take on some them here, from the formerly “conservative” NeverTrumpers Kristol and French.]

Fasten your seatbelts

The New Neo Posted on by

I searched for the following movie clip because I was thinking of including it in a post about Trump vs. DeSantis. It didn’t quite fit, but I became fascinated with the scene for other reasons.

First of all, of course, there’s Bette Davis’ famous line about fastening your seatbelts. Boy, they don’t make them like Davis anymore. Then there’s Marilyn Monroe in a bit part, upstaging just about everyone by just standing there and saying a few lines.

But the thing that really got me were the fashions. They took me back – boy, did they take me back! The movie was made in 1950, and I doubt I remember fashions from that year, but the styles were popular for a few more years, and very similar to what my mother used to wear to parties. So elegant and stylized. I think it was called “The New Look,” when after WWII there was suddenly a lot more material available for clothing and skirts got longer. And the jewelry! My mother had a pin something like the one on Davis’ dress here (my mother smoked, too, although unlike Davis she quit when she was in her 40s), and also had two matching rhinestone clips like the ones the woman in the background on the right is wearing at 0:38 to 0:43. I still have those two clips, although I have never worn them. And here they are:

I don’t have a dress that they would work well with. Actually, I don’t have any dressy cocktail-party type occasions anymore, nor did I ever have all that many to begin with (sigh).

And let me add that the moment I downloaded that photo to my computer, up popped an ad for costume jewelry.

Here’s the movie scene:

ADDENDUM:

For the curious:

I’ll add that I just noticed that my dress clips are slightly asymmetrical.

With the Biden administration, the left has pulled the mask off

The New Neo Posted on by

During his administration, Obama was careful to keep his leftist core under control except to those with discerning eyes. Obama carefully calibrated his movements to the left and never went too much further than the public could accept with the help of the ever-thoughtful MSM. Plus there was his seemingly erudite and thoughtful manner of speaking – and even his baritone voice itself – which soothed people into thinking he was not especially radical. The “change” of which he spoke was vaguely-defined. The assumption on the part of many was that, whatever the change was, it would be something great.

But with Biden there’s none of that. His persona is strange and his rhetoric vacant, mendacious, unintelligible, and/or openly vicious. There’s also the destructiveness of his advisors and appointees. My sense is that the left has allowed itself to get so bold as a direct result of changes that occurred during the Obama administration. First, they made certain that agencies such as the DOJ and FBI were wholly occupied by the partisan left. Second, the advent of leftist-led social media gave them an extra lever of control. Third, the Overton window was shifted substantially to the left, step by step. Fourth, the takeoever of the MSM was substantially complete. Fifth, the campaign against voting laws that helped to prevent fraud – such as voter ID – successfully made use of the “racist” accusation. Sixth, Obama himself furthered an increasingly successful drive (begun long before Obama, but perfected by him) to make “racist” a charge that more and more people associated with the right in general and just about everything it did or advocated. Since then, the label of “terrorist” has also been successfully applied to much of the right, via the persecution/prosecution of the Whitmer kidnapping defendants and especially the January 6th demonstrators.

It’s obvious that our present government can correctly be labeled as leftist, and that they no longer seem to care or to be afraid of that label. And if there also has been successful voting fraud, it would give them a further sense of invulnerability.

The left circles the wagons on the Twitter censorship story

The New Neo Posted on by

The story about the media and Twitter coverup of the Hunter Biden laptop story prior to the 2020 election in order to help elect Joe Biden is now followed by a coverup of the coverup – or excuse-making, minimization, rationalization, and/or counterattack.

This is what they do.

Here’s a typical counterattack, for example:

You can follow what Taibbi actually reported here. There will be more to come. The story is also summarized by the New York Post in this piece. Among the basics is the fact that Dorsey seems to have been more fool than knave, having been left out of the censorship-decision loop by subordinates supposedly acting on their own (at least according to the emails) to make up the “it was hacked!” story to try to justify blocking a news item they knew was not only not hacked but also true.

Of course, that was also obvious at the time, although only the right noticed. That’s an example of how very successful this approach by the left has been. A vast number of Americans either never hear the actual story, or are programmed to reject it as fake even before they learn much about it and therefore not inclined to try to learn much about it.

For me, the Hunter Biden laptop story was a turning point after many other turning points that began in my case, as best I can recall, with the Swift Vets story in the leadup to the 2004 election. I had read the Vets’ allegations in some depth and they seemed to be quite credible and very much in need of deep and objective investigation. I really thought at the time the story broke – and this was nearly twenty years ago – that most people would be alarmed by the depth of the allegations and the non-flakiness of the accusers and would want to know the truth. When I saw that not only was that not the case, but that it was the Vets who would become the villains according to the MSM and the Democrats – that the truth of the matter was not the issue, only blocking their political effect – it was deeply disillusioning.

As I said, that was a long time ago and there’s been story after story after story following the same pattern, so many that by now it’s a mountainous edifice. That’s one of the main reasons that when a person on the right and a person on the left try to talk together about politics, even if they are relatively polite and friendly to each other, there is a lack of common references that means that the person on the right knows about a ton of stories that the person on the left is either ignorant about or believes are lies. Try patiently amassing the evidence for the truth of each one; it would take years to explain and even then I doubt it would be believed.

The Hunter Biden laptop story was only one in a long long line, but for a moment – just a moment – I thought it would finally be the straw that broke the camel’s back of enough Democrat voters that it would matter in the election. Apparently the censors in social media and the MSM thought the same, and that’s why they worked so assiduously to keep the story either unknown or labeled fake. A poll after the election indicated that knowing the story would have changed the minds of a significant number of Biden voters, but after the election doesn’t matter except theoretically. Mission accomplished.

There was also a poll taken this past August indicating that, by that time, the majority of those who knew about the laptop story believed it had affected the 2020 election [emphasis mine]:

Nearly four of five Americans who’ve been following the Hunter Biden laptop scandal believe that “truthful” coverage would have changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, according to a new poll.

A similar percentage also said they’re convinced that information on the computer is real, with just 11% saying they thought it was “created by Russia,” according to the survey conducted by the New Jersey-based Technometrica Institute of Policy and Politics.

Note that these findings are limited to people who were following the story. I can’t get to the poll itself, which seems to be for subscribers only, so I don’t know what percentage of people they called said they’d been following the story by that time. My guess is that most people who vote Democratic are either not following it or simply do not care what was done, as long as Biden won and Trump was defeated.

And if that hunch of mine is true, it is the reason we’re in the crisis we’re in. Too many people – and way too many in the press – are unable and/or unwilling to look at each story objectively. People have learned to look away or dismiss things that don’t fit their ideology. That’s a human tendency anyway – after all, a mind is a difficult thing to change – but it’s been encouraged and exacerbated by a press that should be seeking the truth rather than echoing partisan falsehoods.

Why have there been low COVID death rates in Africa?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an interesting article from August of 2021 about the relatively low death rates from COVID in Africa. One of its points is that there is evidence that more people in Africa were exposed to COVID and infected with it, at least at a subclinical or mild level, then the relatively small number of COVID tests done there had indicated. So why the better outcomes in Africa in terms of percentages coming down with serious disease? The difference doesn’t seem to reside in failure to report COVID deaths, either, nor was it Africans’ compliance with stringent government policies to reduce the spread. And the data there is probably mostly prior to the vaccine, so it’s not related to that. Africa has had lower rates than the Western industrialized world from the start.

It seems to be a real difference, in part because of this sort of thing:

Population structure and spatial distribution strongly predict the patterns of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in communities. Analysis of spatial and temporal clustering of populations shows a correlation between density/crowding and viral reproduction number. Africa is the least urbanized global region, with 55% of the continent’s population living in rural areas with wide variations across countries. Modelling shows greater reproduction rates in urban areas, and epidemiological data are skewed towards higher cases in urban areas across all countries

So there was somewhat less transmission in the first place because of the rural population distribution. Age of the population was a factor as well:

The small slice of the African population who are older (only 3% of the African population is 65+) live overwhelmingly at home, often with extended families spanning multiple generations. This alone explains a huge discrepancy in cases, as roughly one third to one half of deaths in wealthy countries, such as the U.S., have resulted from superspreading events in elderly nursing homes and assisted living facilities, providing the rationale for prioritizing the inoculation of these older individuals. While multiple family homes generally have more people in a shared space than the typical single-family homes of Western countries, this slightly increased risk of within-household spread is offset by the significantly decreased risk of large-scale superspreading events in the community, often caused by congregate nursing home settings

South Africa has a higher percentage of people in nursing homes than the rest of Africa does, and its COVID statistics indicate a higher death rate.

Africans also spend far more time outdoors and far less indoors than those in the West, also a factor in reducing COVID spread. When Africans are indoors they tend to be sleeping, but:

Even in the case of sleeping, these homes are often well ventilated with outside air, significantly reducing the chance of viral transmission when compared to tightly enclosed indoor spaces in developed countries. Additionally, higher temperatures and UV light intensity have been shown to predict SARS-CoV-2 spread, although the evidence is inconsistent. Prolonged, year-round outdoor living with direct exposure to UV light in mostly warm and tropical climates could partially explain reduced transmission…

But there was also less mortality in those in Africa who did contract COVID, and therein lies an especially interesting tale:

It is well known that people with pre-existing conditions, such as diabetes, chronic respiratory diseases, obesity, and hypertension have a greatly increased risk of moderate to severe complications from COVID-19 infection. Broadly, these conditions are considerably less prevalent in low income and lower middle income countries (LICs and LMICs) when compared to higher income countries (HICs)…

South Africa, which accounts for nearly 40% of all reported COVID-19 cases and deaths in the continent, reports an exceptionally high burden of NCDs…

…[A] recent cohort study in South Africa suggested that HIV was associated with a doubling of mortality risk of COVID-19. This is potentially significant to consider in explaining why South Africa has a disproportionate COVID-19 burden in the continent, given that it also has the greatest number of people living with HIV/AIDS in the world …

The phenomenon of trained immunity may be tempering the COVID-19 burden in the continent. Here, we focus on four elements underlying this hypothesis: (i) BCG [tuberculosis] vaccinations, (ii) exposure to varied commensal microorganisms, or the “hygiene hypothesis”, (iii) prevalence of infectious diseases, and (iv) historical use of herbal plants and remedies.

The four above categories are all interesting and well worth reading about, but the possibility of exposure to malaria and malaria medication having an effect is of special interest and is treated in section (iii), prevalence of infectious diseases. Here’s an excerpt:

This pathogenic environment [in Africa] precipitates the wide use of antibiotics, antimalarials, and other drugs to treat NTDs, such as azithromycin and ivermectin often distributed through mass drug administrations, which might counteract to mitigate COVID-19 morbidity. In particular, used widely over several decades in SSA, ivermectin has been spotlighted as a potential treatment for COVID-19, including by the NIH. Researchers have postulated that “circulating viruses or parasites in the African subcontinent” could explain high SARS-CoV-2 antibody seropositivity. For instance, of 228 million cases of malaria worldwide in 2018, 93% were in SSA [sub-Saharan Africa]. Notably, South Africa is not generally endemic for malaria and other NTDs. Intense malaria exposure (which is frequent in many rural areas in SSA and much less so in urban areas, and not at all in South Africa or in northern Africa countries) has a strong influence on the immune system and could contribute to a better trained immunity. It is possible that infection by malaria alone may overstimulate the immune system and confer an immune advantage when compared to nonexposed populations. To further investigate this potential role, as very few to no communities outside of Africa are holo-endemic for the disease, mechanistic studies would be needed to determine if there is cross-immunity between malaria and SARS-CoV-2 exposure.

There are also possible genetic factors, including one the article doesn’t mention: a population’s proportion of Neanderthal genes. It first occurred to me that this was a factor while watching a YouTube video on Neanderthals (I no longer recall which video) that mentioned that Neanderthal DNA contains some genes that predispose carriers to a more severe reaction to COVID and a greater likelihood of death from it (also see this).

There are probably a host of factors explaining the African results, not just one or two. The issue highlights the complexity that is often discovered when trying to analyze why COVID vulnerability differs from one population to another.

Geoff Duncan of Georgia, what a guy

The New Neo Posted on by

Seems there’s an awful lot of fake sanctity going around these days – for example, Georgia’s Republican Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan. Ah, such virtue! Such principles! Perhaps Duncan will have a future someday with that pinnacle of moral rectitude and intellectual rigor, CNN:

Duncan is really the epitome of why so many people on the right detest the politicians they refer to as the GOPe.

Not that Duncan gets any credit for virtue among the many Warnock-admirers who seem to constitute the entire comment pool at that YouTube video I just linked. The comments prominently include mockery for Duncan’s supposedly standing in line while knowing who the candidates were, and then not voting – something few people think actually is the truth. Another typical response was that of course he voted for the obviously-superior Warnock but didn’t want his fellow Republicans to know it. Alternatively, some thought he actually voted for the terrible awful no-good worst-ever candidate Herschel Walker (they never give a specific example of why they say he’s so beneath contempt; apparently it’s supposed to be self-evident) and was too ashamed to admit it.

And all of those commenters would probably have voted for Fetterman without hesitation had they lived in Pennsylvania.

The ingenuous Bankman-Fried

The New Neo Posted on by

I happened to catch this yesterday on YouTube, and was fascinated and repulsed by the odious Bankman-Fried and his apologists who reek of equal measures of mendacity and fake sanctity. It struck me, not for the first time, that this should be farce and yet it’s reality:

There’s no reason any of this should surprise me, given the antics of our current president and his family, as well as the Democrats and the press. The most outrageous lies, the most destructive policies, are met with solemn and sometimes fawning approval. There is so much rottenness around that Bankman-Fried’s preposterous pose of innocent naivete is nowhere near the worst of it.

[ADDENDUM: Also see this.]

Radical leftism then and now: defiance versus compliance

The New Neo Posted on by

I mentioned this in a comment the other day, but I think it bears repeating. For students of the 60s and early 70s, radical leftism was a stance of defiance rather than compliance with much of what they were being taught in universities, unlike today.

This means that back then the left involved somewhat different type of people with somewhat different personalities, although the older leftists ended up being the teachers and mentors of today’s leftists. Once that happened, the mantra of the old left wasn’t “question authority” but “follow our authority; we know best.”

And yet I believe that the leftist youth of today still think of themselves as rebels rather than followers. After all, though they are compliant with their professors, many disagree with their own parents and grandparents. To that end – thinking of themselves as rebels – they also keep feeling they have to up the ante and become more and more strident and outrageous in their demands, in order to differentiate themselves from said older leftist mentors.

Therefore some of the battles in recent years on the left have been between the fading Boomer old-school left and the young left. The old supposedly-held values of free speech, and the belief in objective truth, can now be jettisoned because the left is in control. Why even let their opponents on the right speak? They see no reason; no reason at all.