Gerard Vanderleun’s obituary: on loss and memory

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the link to Gerard’s obituary.

It’s not particularly long, considering how much he did in his life. And of course, like most obituaries, it doesn’t really convey the person himself in all his complexity and energy and vitality. Gerard’s blog was much better at doing that.

As for me, I have my memories of the entire person in what he liked to call “the world dimensional.” But memories are selective, and memories are a pallid substitute for the living, breathing person. As C. S. Lewis described in his book about mourning his wife, A Grief Observed, after the death of a loved one the person in the real world tends to be replaced by the person in the mind of the survivor, and the imagined person no longer has any separate agency or ability to act. There is just no getting around one’s grief over losing the actual person whom one can talk to, touch, smell, hear, be surprised by, laugh with, and share all the wonders of life on earth.

Last night, by chance when I was looking at some historic dress videos on YouTube, I came across one about Victorian mourning jewelry. Some of the jewelry was made of the hair of the deceased. I understand the impulse; at least I think I do. It comes from wanting to have some tangible and corporeal part of the loved person.

Many years ago, Gerard gave me a beautiful heart-shaped locket, and in it he put a tiny clipping of his hair. But perhaps five years later I noticed that the lock of his hair had fallen out and the locket was empty. I never replaced the hair with another clipping, although I could have done so. Why didn’t I? I don’t know; I just kept forgetting to do it, and anyway I had the real person to talk with and spend lengthy periods of time with and so why bother?

Do I wish I had it now? Perhaps I wish it a little bit. But it wouldn’t bring him back and maybe it’s just as well I don’t have that sort of relic. I did bring back a few things of his when I returned home from California. A couple of his hats – he liked to wear hats. A little decorative wooden box I once gave to him, which now contains odds and ends like his driver’s license. A Japanese print I purchased for him in an attempt to replace an older and more beautiful yet similar one that got burned when Paradise and his entire home was destroyed.

But looking at such things is bittersweet. And who really wants to get such gifts back, gifts given with love?

When I was a little girl, my grandmother told me a story. She said that her maternal grandparents had both died within a month of each other (in the 1870s), when her mother – my great-grandmother – was sixteen years old. My newly-orphaned great-grandmother wore mourning jewelry, as was the custom back then. One piece was a locket with a lily of the valley on it and a black background. I still have the locket, and it used to have the deceased couple’s photos in it but somewhere along the line one of the photos fell out (do you detect a pattern here?). My grandmother also showed me some of that hair jewelry, from the same era. It seemed very very strange to me at the time.

But after my grandmother died and then many years later my mother died, I couldn’t find the hair jewelry anywhere. Had my mother thrown it out? Probably. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? Probably a good thing.

I think.

Here take my picture; though I bid farewell
Thine, in my heart, where my soul dwells, shall dwell.
‘Tis like me now, but I dead, ’twill be more
When we are shadows both, than ’twas before…
–John Donne

KimGardner…

The New Neo Posted on by

…may really be in trouble now.

A terrible, terrible story:

“As Attorney General, I want to protect the people of St. Louis, and that includes protecting victims of crime and finding justice for them,” said Attorney General Andrew Bailey. “Instead of protecting victims, Circuit Attorney Gardner is creating them. My office will do everything in its power to restore order, and eliminate the chaos in St. Louis caused by Kim Gardner’s neglect of her office.”

On February 18, 2023, Janae Edmonson, a teenage athlete, was walking back to her hotel in downtown St. Louis after a volleyball tournament when she was run down by a speeding vehicle and lost both of her legs. One was severed, and the other maimed. Ms. Edmonson survived the crash due to her father’s quick action and emergency medical training, but both of her legs were amputated.

The driver of the speeding vehicle, Daniel Riley, should never have been in that car. He is a dangerous gunman who should have been in jail. In 2020, the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office charged Riley with First Degree Robbery and Armed Criminal Action for stealing a firearm from a victim at gunpoint.

For some more background on Gardner, please see this.

One answer to the question of whether the Ukraine war is a quagmire

The New Neo Posted on by

Stephen Green writes:

The Russo-Ukraine War might very well end up a quagmire, but neither Russia nor Ukraine is there yet…

The Russo-Ukraine War just turned one year old. That is not by any measure even a long war…

Absent a swift Russian victory — which by April of last year was no longer in the cards — there was never going to be a rapid conclusion to this war. Russian strongman Vladimir Putin imagines there are existential stakes involved. He believes, in true paranoiac Russian fashion, that the West is out to destroy Russia. For him, this war isn’t merely about subjugating Ukraine, although that is certainly part of his maximalist goals. Just as importantly, however, Putin desires to destroy the postwar system that the US helped implement after 1945 to maintain the global peace…

If Putin imagines existential stakes, for Ukraine the stakes are existential. After the horrors of the Holodomor and other, lesser attempts at erasing Ukrainian national identity, Ukrainians understand precisely what Russian domination means…

There are two endgames for the Russo-Ukraine War.

In the first, the West grows bored and impatient and denies Ukraine the weapons it needs to continue the fight. In that case, Ukraine is once again an oppressed subject of the Russian Empire, and Czar Vlad goes to work using his enhanced position to split NATO.

In the second, Ukraine maintains its territorial integrity — although perhaps only to its post-2014 extent rather than 1991 — and Russian losses are punishing enough to keep the bear caged for another 20 years. In that case, we’ll have bought, on the cheap, a generational handicapping of our number two geopolitical rival.

There is a third possibility but it’s no endgame. The West provides just enough assistance to keep Ukraine in the fight, but not enough to force Russia to agree to a peace.

Now that would be a quagmire.

I think the problem is that option three is the most likely. Almost from the start – once it became clear that Russia was not getting the quick victory it wanted and expected – option three seemed the most likely. That’s where the “quagmire” talk comes from.

Tunning red states blue

The New Neo Posted on by

This is how it’s going in Kansas:

The left believes that mass voter registration campaigns increase election turnout and that high turnout leads to Democratic victories. The trick is getting millions of disengaged eligible voters on the voter rolls in key states, a feat requiring an army of activists and an ocean of money. The left has both. The top 24 leftist voter registration nonprofits spent an estimated $434 million in 2020 alone, much of which came from foundations of “progressive” mega donors sharing the last name “foundation.”

Between July and August 2021, the Kansas Health Foundation pumped $2.9 million into its voter engagement campaign. Recipients were required to report on which “populations” with “health disparities” they planned to engage and how they would incorporate “advocacy and/or grassroots organizing to affect [sic] change on health equity.”…

At the top of the list is the Kansas Appleseed Center, which uses nutrition and public health as cover to push voter turnout campaigns and election “reforms.” The group demands expanded use of absentee ballots and drop boxes to collect them, and it rails against allegations of election fraud.

The left has money, the left has dedicated workers, and the left is patient. This particular strategy is brilliant and completely legal. A state such as Kansas is large geographically, but its population is relatively small. In 2020, for example, the total presidential vote there was 1,341,729.

Will this sort of effort succeed in a red state like Kansas? I don’t know. But I do know that the right had better have some sort of plan to counter it and/or to match it.

Biden and asylum

The New Neo Posted on by

What’s going on with Biden’s latest announcement on the border and asylum? As this CNN article points out, it does appear to “mirror Trump.” That’s certainly rare in the annals of Biden’s executive orders, so what gives?:

The Biden administration released a new rule Tuesday that largely bars migrants who traveled through other countries on their way to the US-Mexico border from applying for asylum in the United States, marking a departure from decadeslong protocol.

The new 153-page proposed regulation, which could affect tens of thousands of people, is the most restrictive of a patchwork of policies put in place by the Biden administration to try and manage the US-Mexico border and is reminiscent of a Trump-era policy.

The proposed rule would presume asylum ineligibility and “encourage migrants to avail themselves of lawful, safe, and orderly pathways into the United States, or otherwise to seek asylum or other protection in countries through which they travel, thereby reducing reliance on human smuggling networks that exploit migrants for financial gain,” according to the text of the regulation.

Your guess is as good as mine about this, maybe better. Remember the outraged hue and cry when Trump instituted what seemed to be something similar?

So here are some hypotheses on Biden:

(1) It won’t be enforced and it won’t change anything. It’s just a way to take some talking points away from the right prior to the next election.

(2) It will be enforced – at least temporarily – and is just a way to take some talking points away from the right prior to the next election.

(3) Biden woke up from a deep deep sleep and believes he’s the Biden of forty years ago.

(4) The Biden administration and the Democrats have become aware that Hispanics are not quite as firmly in the Democratic pocket as previously thought, so maybe it’s time to have a mild and temporary slowdown of illegal immigration from that area.

(5) It’s a temporary response to the expiration of Title 42:

Administration officials on Tuesday rejected the comparison to the Trump administration, saying that it’s not a categorical ban on asylum and emphasizing efforts to expand access to legal pathways to the US, including a recently launched parole program for certain nationalities.

The proposed rule will be posted in the Federal Register for a 30-day public comment period and likely take effect in May, when a pandemic-era border restriction, known as Title 42, is set to expire. The rule is also expected to last for two years.

Israel’s left and its war against Netanyahu

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not quite the same as our left’s war against Trump, but it has harmonic vibrations.

The left in Israel has a more powerful court system to do its bidding. In the following excerpt from an article by Caroline Glick, “MQG” stands for the “Movement for Quality Government.” Love those Orwellian titles:

…[L]ate last month MQG submitted a new petition asking the justices to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As in the case of Deri, MQG’s petition is based on a political rather than a legal argument. MQG argues that as a criminal defendant, Netanyahu is unfit to serve. The premier, MQG insists, is acting with a conflict of interest by overseeing judicial reforms while on trial. And as a result, the justices should declare him unfit and remove him from office.

Never mind that the justices have a conflict of interest since it is their powers the government’s proposed reforms would check. Never mind that in a bid to prevent politicized judges and prosecutors from overturning the will of the voters, the law explicitly permits prime ministers to serve not only while standing trial, but even if convicted. And never mind that the charges against Netanyahu have fallen apart in Jerusalem District Court.

MQG saw with the Deri ruling that the justices feel no inclination to respect either the law or the will of the voters when their personal interests are at stake. And indeed, last week, Justice Daphne Barak-Erez gave the attorney general and the government a month to explain why the court shouldn’t overturn the votes of 2.4 million Israelis who voted for Likud and its coalition partners to return Netanyahu to the Prime Minister’s Office.

In a withering response to Bark-Erez’s order, Justice Minister Yariv Levin described MQG as “a gang of lawyers who do not respect the outcome of the election, working to carry out a coup and remove the prime minister from office.”

Levin continued, “It’s not surprising that the partners in this effort are the same ones leading the opposition to judicial reform: the leftist group which refers to itself as the Movement for Quality Government, the attorney general and the Supreme Court. This effort to oust the prime minister in contravention of the law, while trampling on the democratic election, is no different from a coup that is carried out with tanks.”

Ah, but it’s not a coup or an insurrection when the left does it. When the left does it, it’s a fortification.

Glick adds that the Israeli media is fully complicit in this endeavor. Sound familiar? Also, on the education front, the Israeli left has spearheaded a post-Zionist curriculum in the public schools:

…“[D]emocracy” curricula like those promoted by MQG are disguised efforts to subvert Israeli democracy. In the case of its school programs, the subversion comes in the form of post-Zionist indoctrination.

While claiming to oppose religious coercion, the actual goal of the “democracy curricula” is twofold. First, it seeks to bar Jewish Israeli schoolchildren in nonreligious public schools from learning about the Bible, Jewish history, religious traditions and holidays. Second, it strives to replace Judaism with post-Zionist curricula. To the extent Judaism is taught, it is taught from a critical perspective.

Similar to Critical Race Theory curricula in the United States, which indoctrinates American schoolchildren to believe their country was born in the sin of racism and has no moral claim to justice, groups like MQG advance “democracy” as a means of gutting Israel’s Jewish character and indoctrinating Israeli children to believe that there is something inherently wrong with Jewish nationalism and national self-determination. The “democracy” programs in the schools indoctrinate children to believe that the only moral way for Israel to organize itself is as a post-Jewish “state for all its citizens.”

The Glick article goes on to describe the Biden administration’s support for the MQG’s efforts against Netanyahu. No surprise there.

The January 6th footage…

The New Neo Posted on by

…should be interesting, at the very least. The authorities have certainly been secretive about the video evidence for two full years, releasing only what they think will advance the all-important insurrection narrative.

Tucker Carlson has said that some of the footage already reviewed “contradicts the narrative” we’ve been presented so far. I look forward to hearing more and deciding for myself.

One of the many many outrages connected with the political use made of January 6th are the lies that were told – for example, saying that demonstrators killed Officer Sicknick. Those lies have already served their propaganda purpose, and many people still don’t know they were lies. Most of those people, of course, will dismiss whatever Carlson may say and whatever the new footage may reveal, unless it is a perpetuation of the insurrection narrative.

Julie Kelly writes:

Releasing the video never should have been a political fight; after all, the footage was recorded on a taxpayer-paid closed circuit television system installed on public property to monitor public employees. Contrary to arguments by Capitol Police and the Justice Department, the video belongs to the public, not federal agencies.

But both entities, with the help of D.C. District Court judges, have successfully kept the trove largely under wraps for more than two years…

In a sworn statement filed in March 2021, Thomas DiBiase, general counsel for the Capitol Police, insisted the footage constituted “security information” that required very limited access. “Our concern is that providing unfettered access to hours of extremely sensitive information to defendants who already have shown a desire to interfere with the democratic process will . . . [be] passed on to those who might wish to attack the Capitol again,” DiBiase warned.

The Justice Department subsequently designated the tapes as “highly sensitive” government material subject to protective orders in January 6 prosecutions. It’s been a major battle for defendants and their attorneys to properly access all of the video tied to their cases; defendants cannot watch any clips without the presence of a legal authority and none of the footage can be shared or downloaded.

Of course, there have been some exceptions. Capitol Police shared cherry-picked clips with h the House Democrats on the second impeachment committee as well as the January 6 select committee. For example, the brief clip of Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) running through a hallway that afternoon presumably after the breach was produced from surveillance video. HBO also accessed surveillance footage for its slanted documentary on January 6. “Security” concerns, my foot.

I wonder whether there will be a court battle to stop Carlson from reporting on the footage. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were.

Spambot of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

Clear as mud:

I loved as much as you will receive carried out right here.

The sketch is tasteful, your authored subject matter stylish. nonetheless, you command get bought an shakiness over that you wish be delivering the following. unwell unquestionably come more formerly again as exactly the same nearly a lot often inside case you shield this hike.