Trump’s dinner with Kanye

The New Neo Posted on by

You may have noticed that so far I’ve ignored the Trump/Kanye/Fuentes/Yiannopoulos dinner story. My gut feeling was that it was probably designed to dupe Trump and set him up for the attacks that followed. Should he have seen through it and prevented it, even though the extra guests were sprung on him? Yes.

The entire thing is depressing and exhausting, like so much of politics these days, and emblematic of the way we’ve descended into what might be called parody if it was the least bit funny.

So I’ll just say that I pretty much agree that this piece sounds plausible, the premise of which is that “Trump’s Meeting With Kanye Was Planned to ‘Make Trump’s Life Miserable’ and the Plan Worked.”

NOTE: The title of this post is a riff on the 1981 movie “My Dinner With Andre,” which I didn’t much like.

Maricopa fight highlights the bitter disagreements between the GOPe and the Trump wing

The New Neo Posted on by

The battle in Maricopa County at this point is mostly among Republicans. It’s a familiar one that’s been waged for as long as I can remember noticing anything about politics on the right, although the terms to refer to each Republican wing keep changing, as do the details of what they support and what they oppose. When I was very young, the sides used to be called the Rockefeller Republicans and the Goldwater Republicans, for example.

Recall that Goldwater came from Arizona. And so did the 2008 candidate detested by the non-GOPe wing, John McCain.

So the bitterness between Republicans concerning the voting in Maricopa County is the latest iteration. Kari Lake has this to say:

“This botched election should not be certified, especially in Maricopa County, where the board of supervisors are well aware of the catastrophic issues caused by the maladministration of Supervisor Bill Gates and County Recorder Steven Richer, who started a dark money PAC with the sole purpose of going after me, my campaign, and our movement while they supervised the election (emphasis added),” Lake revealed. “Let me repeat that: They ran an election with my name on the ballot, and their number one political goal was to see to it that I was not elected. Can you say, ‘conflict of interest’?”

Both Gates and Richer are Republicans, but they are not keen on Lake and her so-called “election denial” and in fact Gates was in charge in 2020, a year about which she was criticizing the results. He’s been upset about the audit that was done concerning the voting that year; after all, it’s an implicit criticism of his leadership. Back in 2021 he had this to say about it:

“The 2020 election … was the best election we’ve ever run in Maricopa County,” said Bill Gates, vice chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. Gates, a Republican, called criticism of the election results a “staggering refusal to follow the will of the voters.”

He said that in addition to the routine checks, the county supervisors authorized two audits that found no hacking or manipulation with the voting machines used in the election.

“It should have ended there,” Gates said.

So when Kari Lake ran on the idea that the 2020 election wasn’t on the up-and-up, she was attacking Bill Gates, who was still running the show. In this article from September of 2022, in the buildup to the midterms, we learn this:

“Unfortunately, all these election deniers were successful here in Arizona, in a swing state,” said Bill Gates, the Republican chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which has faced vitriolic backlash for defending the 2020 election against Trump’s false claims of fraud. “So we’ll see if those folks are able to win in the general election. I think that will give us a feel on where this party is headed in the future.”

Gates was censured by Legislative District 3 Republicans last month for saying election-denying GOP candidates may have to lose for the party to find its way.

You can’t call him a disinterested party. And of course Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, the Democratic nominee for governor who was declared the winner, is the opposite of a disinterested party and should have recused herself. I’d actually say the same for Gates.

NOTE: If there hadn’t been widespread malfunction of the voting machines in Maricopa on Election Day, I doubt we’d be talking about this now. And yet so far I haven’t seen any acknowledgement by Gates and/or Hobbs that the situation in Maricopa on Election Day was terrible and could not help but raise suspicions. As far as I can tell, they seem to be acting as though all the brouhaha is manufactured and they have nothing to explain and nothing of which to be ashamed. If anyone can find any acknowledgement by these players of the serious problems involved in the 2022 elections in Maricopa, please post a link in the comments.

Farm seizures planned in the Netherlands

The New Neo Posted on by

I have written at some length before on the government’s war on farmers in the Netherlands, so I refer you to this series of previous posts of mine: this and this, as well as this related post on efforts in Canada.

So now we have the next step:

The Dutch government plans to buy and close down up to 3,000 farms near environmentally sensitive areas to comply with EU nature preservation rules…

The Netherlands is attempting to cut down its nitrogen pollution and will push ahead with compulsory purchases if not enough farms take up the offer voluntarily.

Farmers will be offered a deal “well over” the worth of the farm, according to the government plan that is targeting the closure of 2,000 to 3,000 farms or other major polluting businesses.

More here:

The state-backed “emission reduction” drive in the Netherlands is part of a more extensive EU climate campaign as Brussels doubles down on its radical globalist agenda despite a record rise in food and fuel prices across the Continent…

Faced with a government-backed climate onslaught, Dutch farmers are organizing themselves politically. They have fielded a new political party called the Boer Burger Beweging (BBB), or the Farmer-Citizen Movement.

Founded in 2019, the BBB has succeeded in creating a nationwide footprint. “In next year’s provincial elections, which will also decide representation in the Dutch senate, or Eerste Kamer, the BBB is fielding more than 300 candidates in all 12 provinces. In recent polls, the party ranks fourth of the 17 leading parties in the Netherlands,” the UK-based Guardian newspaper reported earlier this month.

There’s a similar farmers’ movement in Germany.

For quite some time I’ve mentioned that climate scientist Judith Curry is my favorite go-to person for what I consider sanity on climate-change issues. I haven’t seen her address the farm/nitrogen situation directly, but I recommend this recent interview with her on the entire subject of governments and climate in general. She’s so reasonable that it’s no wonder she was driven from academia:

Apple and the China riots

The New Neo Posted on by

Apple had a role in the recent demonstrations in China:

AirDrop, the file-sharing feature on iPhones and other Apple devices, has helped protestors in many authoritarian countries evade censorship. That’s because AirDrop relies on direct connections between phones, forming a local network of devices that don’t need the internet to communicate. People can opt into receiving AirDrops from anyone else with an iPhone nearby…

Apple didn’t respond to questions about the AirDrop change. It plans to make the “Everyone for 10 Minutes” feature a global standard next year, according to Bloomberg…

But why did Apple rush out the change unannounced, in an unassuming update to iOS in early November, and apply it only to Chinese iPhones? One clue may lie in what happened the month prior, when Xi Jinping’s anointment to a third term as China’s leader was met with rare displays of public dissent…

Apple has repeatedly helped China control dissent, mostly by removing apps that protestors have used to coordinate, communicate, or gather information. (Quartz’s iOS app was removed by Apple, at China’s request, at the height of the 2019 protests in Hong Kong.)

China is a huge market for Apple. Plus, there’s this:

Protests have erupted at the world’s biggest iPhone factory in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou, according to footage circulated widely online.

Videos show hundreds of workers marching, with some confronted by people in hazmat suits and riot police.

Those livestreaming the protests said workers were beaten by police. Videos also showed clashes…

Last month, rising Covid cases saw the site locked down, prompting some workers to break out and go home. The company then recruited new workers with the promise of generous bonuses.

Footage shared on a livestreaming site showed workers shouting: “Defend our rights! Defend our rights!”

Other workers were seen smashing surveillance cameras and windows with sticks.

“They changed the contract so that we could not get the subsidy as they had promised. They quarantine us but don’t provide food,” said one Foxconn worker during his live stream.

Recently I was thinking about the early days of the rapprochement with China during the Nixon era. Remember those table tennis tournaments with players from a country we knew so little about? Remember the reassurances that China would become more like us as it industrialized and interacted more and more with the West? I don’t recall much if any discussion of the idea that the influence would be working the other way around, and that we’d become more and more like them. And yet that seems to be the case.

Here’s Mike Pompeo in 2020 on the Nixon opening:

Pompeo didn’t want to directly undermine Nixon’s supposed accomplishment. “I want to be clear that he did what he believed was best for the American people at the time, and he may well have been right,” Pompeo said of Nixon’s diplomacy with the Chinese.

Pompeo’s use of the word “may” was telling. Maybe Nixon was right—or maybe he wasn’t. Given the substance of his speech, it is quite possible that Pompeo thinks Nixon was wrong…

“The kind of engagement we have been pursuing has not brought the kind of change inside of China that President Nixon had hoped to induce,” Pompeo said. He later added a stark warning: “If the free world doesn’t change—doesn’t change, communist China will surely change us.” Again, one suspects Pompeo may think Nixon got it wrong.

The whole article is well worth reading. It also purports to explain what China wanted from letting the US in during Nixon’s tenure.

NOTE: There were some people who weren’t pleased with Nixon’s China advances early on, however. There was some opposition from conservatives, but it had to do with a perceived betrayal of Taiwan involved in making nice to mainland China. Nor do I think China’s entry into the Western sweepstakes could have been long postponed, anyway.

On the China protests and zero COVID

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s an awful lot being said about the Chinese protests, but I’m going to boil it down to this interview with a Chinese dissident artist. I’m pretty much in agreement with him, from what I see – except I’m inclined to blame the West more than he does, for being reluctant to speak out in support of the demonstrators:

He says that China’s lockdown policy has been “mad” (as in seemingly crazy), and I agree that it seems that way. But it’s also possible it’s an attempt to see how much control it can exercise – although to what purpose I don’t know, because it’s causing so much upheaval within China and is so out of line with the policy of other countries, even those who have locked down fairly stringently. Why is China so completely dedicated to an unrealistic zero COVID policy? Why so very extreme? I’ve seen speculation, but I think that the most logical explanation is that they wanted to be able to boast of being the only country to successfully keep COVID away, and therefore are superior to the rest of the world.

Today commenter “Cornflour” offered a link to this Asia Times article:

Events have prodded China to speed up the schedule for a shift of Covid focus to treatment rather than prevention, according to sources close to the State Council leadership.

The sources have reaffirmed to Asia Times that decisions reached just prior to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of China to relax Covid controls have not changed. Indeed, preparations for the change have been underway since early October, they say – but now, with omicron cases surging and protests threatening to get out of hand, the matter has become more urgent.

According to the sources, further relaxation is now scheduled to start in the course of January…

Health officials and their direct superiors who have been promoting heightened control measures to prevent death of the elderly have been overruled. Local government officials who are deemed to have promoted measures deemed excessive – not in line with the 20 new guidelines for easing Covid Zero that were issued November 11 – will be reprimanded, according to the sources.

The report says the new plan is to emphasize treatment and to import vaccines, and deal with COVID much as the rest of the world does. I guess time will tell whether this is an accurate representation of the plans of the Chinese government.

COVID was such a golden opportunity for the authoritarian left

The New Neo Posted on by

Governments around the world used the fear engendered by the COVID pandemic to increase their control on both the behavior of their populations and the ability of those populations to exchange information. The excuse was that this was a life-or-death emergency, and to that end they both exaggerated the threat and lied about many things connected with it. In addition to flat-out lying, there were elements of the science that were not “settled,” and yet the authorities pretended they were and blocked speculation by the hoi-polloi (that’s the rest of us) about things that didn’t fit the official narrative.

And yet much of that speculation, so strongly suppressed, has turned out to be true. And not on minor issues, either. One big one is the probable lab leak origin of the virus.

That’s not to say that all such speculation is true. Hardly. Much of the falsehood by the speculation crowd comes from the use of statistics to supposedly prove some point that those statistics simply don’t prove. But that certainly doesn’t justify squelching all dissent and disagreement and questioning of the official line, which is what happened with Twitter:

On Tuesday, Musk released publicly a report that explains how many accounts were banned due to supposed COVID-19 “misinformation.” He then dropped a bomb of a policy change, making it official that Twitter will no longer ban anyone for expressing varying opinions on the coronavirus…

Conservative accounts were targeted in large numbers, with over 11,000 of them being banned, while liberal accounts were allowed to spread all manner of misinformation on various topics with not even an eye being batted. Then there were the over 11 million “challenges” put on posts, which entailed a disclaimer asserting something was false because the “experts” said so when it often wasn’t.

I have to say that Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is one of the more interesting stories these days, although it has a lot of competition. The man has cojones, that’s for sure, because he knows they’re coming after him. For example, back on November 10, Biden said this:

“Mr. President, do you think Elon Musk is a threat to U.S. national security?” a reporter asked the president during a press conference on Wednesday. “And should the U.S. — and with the tools you have — investigate his joint acquisition of Twitter with foreign governments, which include the Saudis?”

“I think that Elon Musk’s cooperation and/or technical relationships with other countries is worthy of being looked at,” Biden responded. “Whether or not he is doing anything inappropriate, I’m not suggesting that. I’m suggesting that it wor- — worth being looked at. And — and — but that’s all I’ll say.”

The reporter attempted to probe Biden on how the federal government might “look at” Musk, to which Biden respond that there were “a lot of ways,” before moving on to another reporter’s question.

I bet there are.

It’s almost humorous – almost, but not quite – that Biden is suggesting that Musk’s “cooperation or technical relationships with other countries” needs looking into, considering Biden’s own history and that of his immediate family.

The Arizona election mess continues

The New Neo Posted on by

The latest:

Mohave County Board of Supervisors Chairman Ron Gould said Monday he chose to canvass the 2022 Arizona general election because otherwise, he’d be arrested.

“What we found out today from the county attorney is, essentially, if I have a question with how our election is run and I don’t get my question answered, I have no choice but to canvass the election, which is the technical word for certifying it,” Ron Gould told KTAR News 92.3 FM’s The Gaydos and Chad Show on Monday.

“Or I’ll be charged with a felony.”

I’m curious what the charges would be – obviously not minor, because he says it would be at the felony level. Is “election denial” now a crime? Or perhaps it’s somehow connected to the fact that there were no irregularities reported in Mohave County and his failure to certify was based on Maricopa’s problems? Gould has said “that they chose to make the political statement because when elections are run poorly in the state’s most populous county it disenfranchises the smaller, rural counties.”

The article also said that, had Mohave County not come on board, that county’s vote would have been excluded in the final certification. Mohave County is a majority-GOP county, so it certainly wouldn’t have helped the Republicans, but the Democrats won anyway so I guess it wouldn’t have mattered much if at all.

In addition, there’s this, which I found towards the end of the article. It involves Cochise County, which is the last Arizona holdout county refusing to certify:

Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs filed a lawsuit Monday night against the Cochise County Board of Supervisors for not certifying the election by the state’s required Nov. 28 deadline.

That’s the final sentence in the article. It fails to mention what many know, which is that Katie Hobbs cannot possibly be considered a disinterested and neutral party. She was the Democrat nominee for governor, and the winner over Kari Lake in 2022 in a very close race. As the present Secretary of State in charge of supervising her own election, she refused to recuse herself despite calls to do so and the fact that her conflict of interest is blatant and glaringly obvious.

What’s going on in Arizona highlights several important points. The first is that in states with early voting, the GOP strategy of voting on Election Day and not before is not a good idea.

The second is that – and I’ve already said this many times – the only remedy available is prevention because once an election is done it’s virtually impossible to prove fraud or error that mattered, unless it’s a counting error that involves paper ballots (which is not the usual situation at all). It doesn’t matter how suspicious the events are and how they undermine trust in elections. Trust is not the point; suppression of dissent is the point, and those with power will exercise it to its full extent.

And the third is that integrity is almost nonexistent. In years past, it seems to me that someone in the position of Katie Hobbs would have recused herself to prevent the appearance of impropriety and bias. It was understood how important that is. No more. Power is everything, and they intend to never lose it.