Farmers’ protest party does well in Dutch elections

The New Neo Posted on by

Unexpectedly:

BBB or BoerBurgerBeweging, as the party is called in Dutch, is a major threat to Prime Minister Mark Rutte and looks set to be in control of more Senate seats than the ruling conservative VVD party.

In the Senate, which has the power to block legislation agreed in the lower house of parliament, the prime minister’s party looks set to drop from 12 seats to 10 – while a first exit poll projected BBB to win 15 of a total of 75 available seats…

“Nobody can ignore us any longer,” BBB leader Caroline van der Plas told the Dutch broadcaster Radio 1.

That’s certainly nothing like a majority, but it’s apparently a very good showing and it will give them more power.

I’ve written previously about the Dutch war on farmers: see this and this, including the links in the latter post.

DeSantis on our Ukraine involvement

The New Neo Posted on by

I see no problem with his statement. I’ve highlighted certain words I think are important:

While the U.S. has many vital national interests — securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness within our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Communist Party — becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them. The Biden administration’s virtual “blank check” funding of this conflict for “as long as it takes,” without any defined objectives or accountability, distracts from our country’s most pressing challenges.

In other words, we need to avoid becoming even more involved (such as, for example, sending troops), and we need to define the mission more clearly and not make our participation unlimited.

He further refines that position here, including being explicit about no troop involvement:

Without question, peace should be the objective. The U.S. should not provide assistance that could require the deployment of American troops or enable Ukraine to engage in offensive operations beyond its borders. F-16s and long-range missiles should therefore be off the table. These moves would risk explicitly drawing the United States into the conflict and drawing us closer to a hot war between the world’s two largest nuclear powers. That risk is unacceptable.

In the next paragraph, he states that we shouldn’t have regime change in Russia as a goal. The rest of his statement is pretty ordinary.

In fact, I see the entire statement as a fairly reasonable, middling position. Those who are out to get DeSantis – from the left and from the right – don’t see it that way, of course.

A January 6th fact sheet – and some questions

The New Neo Posted on by

Julie Kelly has been one of the best reporters on January 6th from the start. A few days ago she published this handy fact sheet on the subject, summarizing what is known.

I want to focus on these points:

Roughly 100 defendants are accused of attacking police officers with a dangerous weapon. No one is charged with carrying or using a firearm inside the building.

Speaking of police, body-worn camera and independent video show outrageous misconduct by law enforcement. D.C. Metropolitan Police launched an aggressive and unnecessary offensive against the crowd assembled on the west lawn. Even though protesters were respecting police lines at the time, footage shows officers throwing stun grenades into and other devices containing rubber bullets into the crowd beginning shortly after 1:00 p.m.

Video and testimony by Capitol police officers at trial confirmed how that activity enraged the crowd. Other officers shoved women down stairs and shoved one man off the upper terrace balcony.

This conduct continued inside the building. Some officers shoved and hit individuals inside the Rotunda and other areas. A brutal scene in the lower west terrace tunnel unfolded as police used their batons to beat at least two women on the head resulting in bleeding and injuries.

Excessive force caused the deaths of four Trump supporters: Ashli Babbitt, Rosanne Boyland, Kevin Greeson, and Benjamin Phillips.

I’d like a list of the dangerous weapons and the number of people accused of wielding each.

I’d like to know exactly what supposedly provoked the attacks by police, or whether they were unprovoked. I would also like to know what ordinary protocol would have been for the police in such a situation.

I’d like to know how many of the attacks on police were in response to the attacks by police on otherwise unaggressive protestors.

I’d like to know what injuries were reported by police (supposedly 114 Capitol Police, for example). Major? Minor? “Injury” covers a wide range of possibilities, some of them quite minor.

I’d like to know which police injuries were from friendly fire, as it were – for example, did the police mistakenly tear gas themselves (I read such a report, but unfortunately can’t find it now)?

Lastly, of course, I want to know how many government agents were present and exactly what their roles were.

Will we ever discover – or uncover – the answers? I doubt it. But without those answers it’s impossible to understand what happened that day.

NOTE: I see that Julie Kelly writes this:

Excessive force caused the deaths of four Trump supporters: Ashli Babbitt, Rosanne Boyland, Kevin Greeson, and Benjamin Phillips.

We know that’s true of Ashli Babbitt. I’ve read conflicting things about the death of Boyland, including the fact that video purporting to show her being beaten to death is of a different incident. I’ve never heard it alleged that the other two deaths were anything but heart attacks. I’d like more definitive word on all of this.

Also, please note how cleverly and duplicitously The Hill covered some of this a year ago. Typical:

Previously, [it had been reported that] more than 80 officers were injured on Jan. 6, which resulted in five deaths after pro-Trump supporters stormed the building in the hope of stopping Congress’ count of Electoral College votes affirming President Biden’s win.

The way that sentence is constructed, a reader could easily conclude those deaths were of injured officers, even though that is completely untrue. This is no accident; this is the way reporters work these days to frame a mendacious narrative while not necessarily lying in the technical sense. No police died that day and even later the police who died (such as Officer Sicknick) did not die from injuries sustained that day – although the Democrats and the press would have you think they did.

China and the Bidens

The New Neo Posted on by

Some news:

“According to bank documents we’ve already obtained, we know one company owned by a Biden associate received a $3 million dollar wire from a Chinese energy company two months after Joe Biden left the vice presidency,” Comer said in a March 14 press release. “Soon after, hundreds of thousands of dollars in payouts went to members of the Biden family.” Comer explained that the Oversight Committee will “use bank documents and suspicious activity reports to follow the money trail to determine the extent of the Biden family’s business schemes, if Joe Biden is compromised by these deals, and if there is a national security threat.”

More at the link.

I have reached a level of cynicism that says nothing much will come of this, even if more very suspicious facts are revealed.

Silicon Valley Bank joined the BLM virtue-signalling…

The New Neo Posted on by

…to the tune of 73,450,000 dollars.

Small change, comparatively speaking:

The figure comes from an extensive report dropped by the Claremont Institute on Tuesday. The report details $82 billion dollars in social justice/BLM investments by major American companies. SVB stands out as one of the larger donors, next to big donors like Apple ($100 million) and Comcast ($165 million). While at the top of the donation pool, those contributors do pale in comparison to donors like Blackrock ($810 million) and Citigroup ($1.1 billion). However, the group did pledge on their website to provide in total up to $11 billion dollars by 2026 for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs and racial justice causes.

SVB executives explained on their website the turbulent racial atmosphere following the George Floyd killing and protests prompted them to expand “opportunities for dialogue,” a calling that doesn’t seem too have much concrete investment return, but ended up taking $74 million dollars out of bank coffers anyway.

The George Floyd “narrative” that was pushed by the left and the MSM bore tremendous fruit – for BLM itself. Corporations almost immediately, way before any trial or many facts had come out, scrambled to outdo each other in demonstrating their solidarity with the idea that Floyd’s death was a terrible act of murder by a racist cop and was typical of the sort of thing that happens all the time in America. A fiction, but a useful one, and one that persists to this day among a huge percentage of the voting population.

And then we have this report:

The significance of Shellenberger and Taibbi’s testimony and the Democrats’ reaction to it

The New Neo Posted on by

What occurred:

Taibbi and Shellenberger had not even uttered a word yet when the Ranking Member of the House Judiciary subcommittee Del. Stacey Plaskett, D-U.S. Virgin Islands, referred to the witnesses as “so-called journalists” in her opening statement. The pair glanced at each other, clearly surprised and confused by the utterly unprovoked attack.

From there it only got worse. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Texas, asked the pair of scribes if they were being paid to testify, again to an absolutely shocked response from them. She went on to try to force Taibbi to reveal information about his sources, a journalistic Rubicon he rightfully refused to cross.

Other Democrats accused them of wearing tin foil hats, and intimated in ugly language with clear disdain that they were only in it for the money, not to discover the truth about our federal government pressuring Twitter to censor Americans’ speech, which was the reason for the hearing…

The chilling message, and one meant for all journalists, was crystal clear: if you report uncomfortable facts that Democrats don’t like, they will attack you and try to discredit you and your work.

Well, count me as someone who considers this behavior business as usual for the Democrats. I think that “chilling message” was received by journalists – and anyone paying attention – a long long time ago. If Shellenberger and Taibbi were surprised by the extremity of it, they shouldn’t have been. It’s been scorched earth for a long time on anyone the left considers its enemies – Robert Bork, anyone? – and what’s more the attacks are often successful both in intimidating the targets or others like them, and in convincing onlookers that the targets are not people with a message worth taking seriously.

The news so far on the drone downing

The New Neo Posted on by

A summary:

An MQ-9 reconnaissance drone on a routine mission of the international waters of the Black Sea was intercepted by a pair of Russian Su-27 fighters based in occupied Crimea around 7 a.m. CET, or 2 p.m. Eastern.

During the interception, the two fighters dumped fuel in front of the MQ-9. Then one of the fighters collided with the propeller of the MQ-9. As a result, the MQ-0 was total loss; the Russian fighter had to make an emergency landing.

There’s a great deal of brouhaha being written about this. I’m reserving judgment. But in the meantime – was this a “routine” mission? Perhaps. Was it over “international waters”? Maybe. I neither accept the official word at the outset nor reject it.

That’s part of the problem with all the lies that have been told on other subjects in recent years. We’ve learned not to uncritically swallow the government line – or maybe we learned that a long time ago. But the danger is to routinely reject it.

I also think – although I could certainly be wrong – that nothing all that much will come of this, except some bluster on both sides.

Snowstorm and intermittent connection problems

The New Neo Posted on by

Where I live, mid-March is still winter. Yes, tiny green shoots that will someday become daylilies have been poking up in the sunniest spots. But snow and ice storms can still happen for at least another month, and today there’s a snowstorm with wind.

It’s quite lovely and swirly out there, but I was having connectivity problems earlier, although the power hadn’t gone out.

Yet.

Last night I got about six text messages from the power company, all of them saying the power might go out and they’ll be working hard to fix it. Nothing like a little anticipatory self-congratulation. It often goes off in storms because of trees coming down or other weather-related events, and one terrible time many years ago it was out for five miserable days when the temperature fell below zero.

So I’m posting this while I still can, and hoping that this time all the warning will prove to have just been alarmist.

Talking on the phone: what is it with people these days?

The New Neo Posted on by

I continue to have somewhat surreal experiences with people who answer the phones these days. And I’m not talking about people who live in Bangladesh or wherever many seem to reside, I’m talking about right here in this country. For example, just now I got a call from an Ear Nose and Throat office in response to a referral, and the woman – who sounded rather young – was clearly a native speaker.

No appointments are available for the next two months; that’s become standard and even six months or more is not unusual. Are there doctor shortages these days? More sick people? Hard to say, but waiting periods have gotten longer.

But that’s not what I want to focus on; it’s the strangeness of the rest of our little talk. She asked me what time of day I prefer, and I answered “afternoons.” She proceeded to offer me an 11:30 AM time that was on a day when I’ll be otherwise occupied, and so I asked for a different day – and she gave me another appointment at 11:30 AM on another day. I mentioned again that I’d said I prefer an afternoon appointment, and she asked what I meant by “afternoon.”

That was the beginning of the surreal part.

I tried to keep the sarcasm out of my voice when I answered that “afternoon” means after noon, and that 11:30 AM is before noon. She then managed to come up with an appointment at 1:45 PM, and added that it would be with Dr. B.

And yet my referral had been for Dr. A, who also had come highly recommended by a friend. Bait and switch?

I told the woman on the phone that I thought the referral had been for Dr. A, and she answered, “She only comes into our office on Fridays.” Which prompted me to ask if there was another office Dr. A frequented. Lo and behold – yes, there was, in a town ten miles away. I told her I was more than willing to go there instead, and she answered that I hadn’t made that clear until now.

“I didn’t know Dr. A had another office until now,” I answered, a fact that seemed self-evident. It was the scheduler who’d known all about the two offices – including knowing that the original referral was for Dr. A – and hadn’t informed me.

Apparently she handled the scheduling for both offices, and easily found an appointment there for me around the same time of day except on a Thursday. The wait was still two months, but there were more choices in that office and so it was easier. And yet she hadn’t thought to mention at the outset that I had a choice between the two very-nearby offices.

It seems as though so many communications that should be – and used to be – easy and straightforward have become convoluted and cryptic. Why?