It’s roundup time again

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) I think that anyone paying attention has known almost from the first couple of months that there was a very good chance that COVID started with a Wuhan lab leak. Now the authorities seem to be saying that was likely, but in the meantime the coverup was long and widespread. Here’s Jonathan Turley on the subject:

…[F]or my part, the most alarming aspect was the censorship, not the science…

For years, the media and government allied to treat anyone raising a lab theory as one of three possibilities: conspiracy theorist or racist or racist conspiracy theorist…

Others in academia quickly joined the bandwagon to assure the public that there is no scientific basis for their theory, leaving only racism or politics as the motivation behind the theory. In early 2020, with little available evidence, two op-eds in The Lancet in February and Nature Medicine went all in on the denial front.

The Lancet op-ed stated, “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin.”

I wonder why it’s even being allowed to come out now. After all, the MSM is still controlled by the left, and the lab leak theory was gaining more credence even before the GOP took control of the House.

(2) This medical development is certainly good news:

A stroke left Rendulic with little use of her left hand and arm, so she volunteered for a first-of-its-kind experiment that stimulates her spinal cord in spots that control upper limb motion. Credit: Tim Betler/UPMC and Pitt Health Sciences via AP
A stroke left Heather Rendulic with little use of her left hand and arm, putting certain everyday tasks like tying shoes or cutting foods out of reach.

“I live one-handed in a two-handed world and you don’t realize how many things you need two hands for until you only have one good one,” the Pittsburgh woman told The Associated Press.

So Rendulic volunteered for a first-of-its-kind experiment: Researchers implanted a device that zaps her spinal cord in spots that control hand and arm motion. When they switched it on, she could grasp and manipulate objects—moving a soup can, opening a lock and by the end of the four-week study, cutting her own steak.

Arm and hand function is more difficult for stroke victims to recover than leg function, so this is potentially groundbreaking.

(3) John Hinderaker discusses Scott Adams cancellation. I agree pretty much with Hinderaker here:

More newspapers say they are dropping the “Dilbert” comic strip after creator Scott Adams this week advised white people to “get the f–k away” from Black people…

So in [a Rasmussen survey Adams was referencing], 47 percent of blacks didn’t subscribe to the idea that it is OK to be white. That is the number that Adams picked up on…

I think it is indisputable that the 47 percent of blacks (as well as others) who don’t think it is OK to be white are racists; or, more accurately, expressed a racist opinion in this particular poll. Is it racist to react negatively to racism? Or, as in this case, to over-react to racism?

In his video podcast, Adams certainly does over-react. He calls blacks a “hate group” and recommends that whites simply stay away from them. He says he is going to “back off” on helping Black America, since it “doesn’t seem like it pays off.”…

I disagree with, and disapprove of, some of the things that Adams said, although I don’t think anything he said was as extreme as “It’s not OK to be white.” No one seems to have a problem with that particular bit of racism…

The question whether an artist should be canceled (or shunned, or ignored) on account of opinions or behavior not relating to his or her art is one that comes up over and over. Generally, the consensus has been that no, an artist should not be so canceled.

I don’t think that’s the consensus anymore. It’s certainly not the consensus on the left, anyway.

(4) The NY Times newsroom bears a resemblance to a “Maoist struggle session.” Of course it does.

(5) Men in drag seem to be more numerous lately on lesbian dating sites. Of course, men in drag are not necessarily identifying as transgender, but there’s long been a verbal war between many lesbians and the trans movement.

(6) An interesting take on Kevin McCarthy.

The kingdom where nobody dies

The New Neo Posted on by

I am grieving, and I assume I’ll be doing that for a long time, probably to some extent for the rest of my life.

I often get the urge to write and write and write about losing Gerard, but I don’t think it’s wise to harp too much on that note here. For one thing, as I’ve said before, I’ve been very private for so long that it feels odd to reveal myself. For another, a small dose of reading about another person’s pain is one thing, but it verges on the boring and the depressing if it becomes a single note repeated over and over. Also, writing about other things is a good distraction for me – for a while.

So I do plan to write about my mourning and Gerard himself from time to time but not as much – or nearly as much – as I think about the loss and feel it.

I know that many others have walked down the road of grief, but each grief is different. Gerard was certainly an unusual person with unusual gifts, as any of you who have read his work are aware. But in person he was also different than in his writing, although in all his many manifestations he was formidable, creative, intense, capable of great humor and playfulness, and very changeable.

That’s all I’ll say for now. But here’s a poem that hits some exposed nerves in me:

Angela Davis, Pilgrim

The New Neo Posted on by

Angela Davis recently made an appearance on Louis Gates’ “Finding Your Roots” program. She got a bit of a surprise:

Angela Davis bought the guns used in a courthouse raid that murdered a judge, and she later served as Gus Hall’s running mate on the Communist Party presidential ticket. But the former member of the FBI’s Most Wanted list also hails from, much to her displeasure, a patrician lineage.

“Did you ever in your wildest dreams think you descended from the people who laid the foundations for this country?” Henry Louis Gates asks the professor on his PBS show Finding Your Roots. Davis laughs in disbelief and repeats, “Never.”

Gates informs her that William Brewster, the only college graduate among the pilgrims and the likely author of the Mayflower Compact, came before her in her family line.

She actually repeats “Never” five times, by my count:

Well, if she never thought of it, that was very dumb. I say that for two reasons. The first is that we all have enormous numbers of ancestors, if we go back a ways (I have somewhat fewer than most other people because of a tendency in one half of my family in the old country to have married cousins, over and over, so that three family names keep repeating themselves. But I digress.) The second is that most if not all black people in the US have a very significant amount of white ancestry. That’s obvious, and it’s especially obvious with someone who looks like Davis.

So why should a Mayflower ancestor have been so surprising to her? It shouldn’t have been. But it reflects the power of her political and racial and cultural identification with the left and with the oppressed, which meant she could not and cannot countenance such a fact. Actually, the early Pilgrims flirted with socialism themselves, until they discovered that it doesn’t work. And Davis also discovered that she has slave-owning ancestors. That should be no surprise, either, for reasons that I think are obvious.

The larger point is that we are not responsible for what our ancestors did. And we all have so many ancestors, even in just the last few hundreds of years, that we can pick and choose from a huge variety of them if we want to research things and claim a certain heritage. I don’t mean just ethnically – my ethnic heritage is about as unitary as it gets, for example. But the variety of personalities and lives is vast. None of my ancestors were on the Mayflower, either; of that I’m certain. Some of them were Communists, though, including one grandparent. But many loved liberty, as do I. We are all individuals, responsible for our own actions in the lives we live. As is Angela Davis.

Who’s Zoomin’ who?

The New Neo Posted on by

Joe Biden, that’s who. From a recent interview:

What an odd mind this guy has. What a bizarre and inadequate response. But that’s Joe.

“Who’s Zoomin’ Who?” is a song I have literally never thought of from the time since it was popular till today. Thanks, Joe! It’s not one of my favorites at all, and I hope the slight earworm I have is only temporary.

And here’s another Biden oddity – the song came out in 1985. In that year, Joe Biden was 42-43 years old. So what is this “my generation” business?

You want an earworm too? Be my guest:

Excess deaths, sudden deaths, and COVID

The New Neo Posted on by

I keep seeing people posting comments about excess deaths and COVID, for example this fairly recent one.

I’ve responded over and over to most of the points made, but usually my response has been in comments of my own. That makes them much more difficult to search for and consolidate, so I keep having to reinvent the wheel.

So in this post I’m going to try to tie in some of the points I’ve already made, in this particular case about cardiomyopathy, sudden death, excess deaths, and COVID shots.

The cardiomyopathy rate after vaccination is around 30 per million (shots). In addition, symptoms of post-vaccine myocarditis are usually mild and self-limiting. Lastly, having COVID itself – the actual disease- can cause heart inflammation as well. So the cost/benefit ration regarding the shots is hard to gauge.

As for sudden deaths of athletes, see this. It’s not happening in increased numbers, and there has always been a baseline of young athletes dropping dead, unfortunately, including cases I remember from my youth.

All the noticing and anecdotal reporting of more sudden death is simply confirmation bias unless it’s backed by statistics, and that goes for anecdotal reports from doctors and nurses, too.

Many people simply dismiss all the evidence I’m citing as government and/or health system lies. The government has certainly lied about a lot of things, so I think that attitude is somewhat understandable. I’ve spent literally hundreds of hours reading alternative sites with alternate number crunching, however, and I have seen nothing at any of them that isn’t deeply flawed. I have taken statistics courses at the graduate level, so I have a more-than-average ability to parse the numbers involved in such research. I’m not an expert, of course, but I am not naive about statistics and research.

Here are some links you might want to read: this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this.

Here’s an interesting study from Minnesota:

COVID-19 comprised 9.9% of deaths in 2020. Other categories of causes of death with significant increases in 2020 compared to 2018–2019 included assault by firearms (RR 1.68, 95% CI 1.34–2.11), accidental poisonings (RR 1.49, 95% CI 1.37–1.61), malnutrition (RR 1.48, 95% CI 1.17–1.87), alcoholic liver disease (RR, 95% CI 1.14–1.40), and cirrhosis and other chronic liver diseases (RR 1.28, 95% CI 1.09–1.50). Mortality rates due to COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 causes were higher among racial and ethnic minority groups, older adults, and non-rural residents…

Deaths due to assault by firearms were increased in individuals 15–34 and 45–64?years of age, with the greatest increase among those 45–64?years (RR 2.30, 95% CI 1.23–4.32) and women (RR 2.28, 95% CI 1.24–4.22) (Supplemental Table 2). There were also significant increases in deaths due to assault by firearms among Black Minnesotans (RR 1.82, 95% CI 1.35–2.45), non-rural residents (RR 1.73, 95% CI 1.35–2.20), and men (RR 1.60, 95% CI 1.25–2.04). When firearms-related deaths were stratified by sex (Supplemental Table 3), we found that the majority of these deaths were among men, though women saw a larger increase in firearms-related mortality in 2020 relative to 2018–2019.

Deaths due to accidental poisoning/overdose increased 49% in 2020 relative to 2018–19 (RR 1.49, 95% CI 1.37–1.61). Although the category includes all types of poisonings, nearly all accidental poisonings included one or more drug (98.4% across the 3 years). The proportion of accidental poisoning deaths that included one or more opioids increased from 55.6% in 2018–2019 to 63.3% in 2020 (RR 1.69, 95% CI 1.52–1.88). Accidental poisoning deaths increased substantially in nearly all demographic groups (Supplemental Table 4). The greatest increases occurred among racial and ethnic minority populations…

Deaths due to malnutrition were increased among residents aged 85?years and older (RR 1.76, 95% CI 1.27–2.45), women (RR 1.64, 95% CI 1.23–2.19), White individuals (RR 1.44, 95% CI 1.13–1.83) and rural residents (RR 2.50, 95% CI 1.55–4.04) (Supplemental Table 6). Their rates of death in 2020 were 60.4, 2.95, 2.6, and 3.1 per 100,000, respectively…

We did not find statistically significant increases in deaths due to other causes, including those hypothesized to be affected by pandemic-related changes in daily life and access to health care including cancer, cardiovascular disease, cerebrovascular disease, dementia, kidney disease, motor vehicle collisions, and suicide.

And to repeat something I’ve written many times: no, I don’t agree with most of the government response to COVID, including lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, and school closings.

Biden is trying to enshrine “equity” more deeply as a national policy

The New Neo Posted on by

One way to subvert the will of the people is by executive order, and that’s what Biden and company have chosen to do about DEI:

Last week, President Joseph Biden quietly signed an executive order that promises to create a national DEI bureaucracy and embed the principles of left-wing racialism throughout the federal government.

The order, titled “Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,” relies on three key strategies: creating internal cadres and power centers through the deployment of “Agency Equity Teams”; funding third-party political activism through grants to “community[-based] organizations”; and weaponizing civil rights law by requiring federal agencies to use artificial intelligence “in a manner that advances equity.”

“Equity” is of course the tricky word the left has adopted, in part because it sounds so much like “equality.” It’s not; not at all – it’s the institutionalization of a policy that ignores merit and prioritizes some races over others.

Congress is bypassed, purposely:

…[T]he Equity Action Plans are not anything that is sanctioned or mandated by Congress, but is an internal executive mandate to say: We want to push this ideology through every facet of the federal government. We want to have all of our policies, and programs, and funding filtered through the ideology of DEI and enforced by DEI bureaucrats.

These are hidden expenditures. If you ask the White House today, “How much money does the federal government now spend on DEI programs?,” they would not have an idea, because the idea is to decentralize it, the idea is to have it embedded everywhere in a patchwork manner that can’t be then accountable to the Congress, that can’t be accountable to the people.

The entire article is worth reading. My sense is that this sort of thing has been going on for years, although the executive order codifies and expands it. I wonder whether the Supreme Court will ultimately have something to say about this.

One counterweight that has just been announced is that Legal Insurrection has launched something called the Equal Protection Project. “Equal Protection” is not “equity.” As William Jacobson explains:

So we are organizing to investigate these things, to expose them and if necessary, to litigate them. And one of the things we’re doing, and you can sign up at our website if you’re a lawyer who wants to help in this effort, at equalprotect.org, a lawyers network speakers Because this has to be a national effort.

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.