Trump and the hostages

The New Neo Posted on by

Recently Trump has reissued his warning to Hamas about the hostages:

When pressed by American political commentator Hugh Hewitt on the specific meaning behind his warning, Trump elaborated with characteristic intensity: “If those hostages aren’t released by the time I get into office, there will be hell to pay.

“I don’t think I have to go into it. … But it won’t be the word ‘don’t,’ you know. I heard the word ‘don’t,’ you can add that into it, but that would just be a small part of it. … Those hostages have to get out. They have to get out now.”

And now this news:

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, is scheduled to be in Doha, Qatar, on Wednesday to advance multilateral negotiations aimed at securing the release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.

During a press conference on Tuesday at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, Witkoff, a Jewish businessman and longtime friend of the president-elect, expressed optimism about the ongoing discussions.

I’d love to be privy to Witkoff’s instructions.

Meanwhile, the bodies of two of the hostages have been found in Gaza by the IDF. They are Yosef Al Zaydani and his son Hamzah, who until now were among the hostages believed to still be alive. The two were Bedouins, which is a reminder that Hamas also warred on Israeli Arabs as well as Israeli Jews:

RIP.

LA fires

The New Neo Posted on by

If memory serves, large California fires don’t ordinarily happen at this time of year, which is usually California’s rainier season; they happen in the fall and are usually over by early December. And I think that memory does serve, since because of Gerard I am intimately familiar with the Paradise fire. Not only that, but I lived in California for a while and have witnessed a few, as well as having a good friend whose mountain home in Malibu – looking out on the Pacific – was totally destroyed in 1993.

Large and destructive fires in California usually occur in the drier seasons and are often wind-whipped. The wind is definitely a factor in the current ones:

The Palisades Fire started burning around 10:30 a.m. Tuesday and scorched nearly 3,000 acres between the beach towns of Santa Monica and Malibu. Around 6:30 p.m., the Eaton Fire broke out in Altadena near Pasadena and swelled to more than 2,200 acres. By 10:30 p.m. a smaller blaze named the Hurst Fire had ignited in Sylmar, in the San Fernando Valley northwest of downtown Los Angeles and consumed about 500 acres.

The cause of all three blazes are still under investigation, according to Cal Fire. But the powerful Santa Ana winds are likely driving their rapid growth.

“The combination of low humidity, dry fuels and shifting winds has heightened the potential for spot fires and rapid expansion,” Cal Fire said in an update.

Governor Newsom and others on the left are of course blaming climate change. The story is far more complex than that, but it’s not politically expedient to emphasize the other reasons. I’ve written a lot about California wildfires, their causes, and how to control them: for example, see this and this. See also this article from 2017.

More about the present fire situation:

Jon Keeley, a senior research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, previously told USA TODAY climate change isn’t the only reason for the increase in large fires.

In California, population growth, increasing fire ignitions and the Santa Ana winds are bigger factors in wildfires, Keeley said.

This is from James Woods:

Having been very close to two people who “lost everything at once,” I’m well aware of how catastrophic it is. However, it pales in comparison to losing one’s life in a fire. RIP to the two people who have died in the present fires, which are as yet uncontained.

On ancient jewelry

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a post of mine from 2015. Why? Because I feel like it, that’s why.]

I’m not all that fond of precious jewels. That’s very fortunate, because I don’t own many.

Richard Burton would have gotten off easy with me. When I got married, I wore a plain gold wedding ring, one that had been in my family since the 1800s, and never missed or thought of a diamond engagement ring. It just wasn’t my thing.

I have plenty of non-precious pieces of jewelry, though, and I’m particularly keen on this guy’s work (if you’re interested in a gift for somebody—they look better in real life than in the photos, for some reason). On reading the maker’s bio [link broken], it occurs to me that the following may be the underlying reason I’m so fond of his jewelry:

I was inspired as a young boy by visiting the great art museums in New York City, and spent many hours in the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art looking at the gold jewelry.

Aha! Ancient jewelry was his inspiration. Now that, I’ve always liked. And the thing that has long fascinated and amazed me about very ancient jewelry is that the design of most of it could be easily worn today; it never dates. And what’s more, jewelry that is thousands of years old and displayed in museum collections looks, for the most part, practically new.

For example, please take a look at the stunning examples here and reflect on how very old most of them are.

Care to guess the age of this one?

lapis

Hint: it’s from Ur.

Which makes it about 4500 years old, give or take a few.

Here’s one that’s practically modern:

goldnecklace

And to the inhabitants of Ur, it would be futuristic. But to us, it’s a bit old: it’s made of emeralds, garnets, and gold, and is a Helenistic piece from about 200 BC.

And of course, the whole thing also reminds me of poetry, in this case Yeats:

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Although neither Grecian nor Byzantine (the latter being the site of where Constantinople and now Istanbul lies), and made in the late 1700s in India, this is something akin to the way I always pictured the artifact in the last verse of the poem:

humabird

Or this, also from India and the same period, which includes enamel and gold (as in the poem):

enamalparrot

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Dershowitz on the Democrats

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s an understatement to say that Alan Dershowitz sounds unhappy with Democrats these days. He is especially unhappy with their lawfare against opponents and particularly with their lawfare against lawyers who make arguments they don’t like. And he’s not the least bit keen on Kamala Harris, either.

I am convinced that Dershowwitz actually voted for Trump in 2024, although he’ll never tell.

New York City’s congestion pricing began this past Sunday

The New Neo Posted on by

Somehow I’d missed this news until right before it was about to go into effect. I had noticed something similar in European cities the last time I visited Italy, which was six years ago – either fines or surcharges for driving within what once was the city’s heart. Well, now it’s come to New York.

Here’s how it works in New York:

The decision Friday evening by U.S. Senior Judge Leo Gordon clears the way for the MTA to begin charging the toll as scheduled on Sunday, the culmination of a years-long planning process for a program designed to decrease traffic in Midtown and Lower Manhattan while raising billions of dollars for the MTA. …

Passenger vehicles with E-ZPass will be charged the base $9 toll from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekends. Overnight, the toll is $2.25. The toll is higher for commercial vehicles like trucks and buses, and lower for motorcycles.

Uber and Lyft trips into the tolling district will be charged $1.50, while taxis and cabs face a charge of $0.75.

Trump is against it, and it required federal approval so that might matter.

Of course, Manhattan traffic has been awful for a long time. Then again, the NY subway has gotten more dangerous. Will people feel forced onto it?

And it’s not just going to affect Manhattan. Here’s what’s also predicted:

Commuters to the Big Apple will be turning neighborhoods across the city into their own personal parking lots beginning this week, ditching their rides to save their wallets because of the $9 congestion pricing plan, concerned residents told The Post.

The plan is expected to upend neighborhoods closest to the 60th Street tolling zone with nightmarish gridlock as a surge of drivers begin scouring for free parking spots. …

The Upper West Side and Harlem are also expected to get slammed — a problem when parking spaces are already a precious commodity. …

Communities such as Long Island City in Queens, the South Bronx, and ritzy Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill and Park Slope in Brooklyn are fearing their quality of life will be uprooted — not only by their own drivers but also those schlepping to the Big Apple from New Jersey, upstate New York, Long Island and Staten Island.

Here’s a caption to a photo at the linked article:

“My constituents who still have no real public transit connection to Manhattan are looking forward to treating the posh, transit-rich, gentrified, brownstone Brooklyn as their new park-and-ride,” quipped NYC Council Minority Leader Joe Borelli (R-Staten Island).

I’m not sure what Borelli means by “real.” Staten Islanders have the ferry, which is plenty real but drops them off at the southern tip of Manhattan. They also have various buses that journey across various bridges.

As I said, driving in Manhattan has been a nightmare for a long time. This is an attempt to discourage people from even trying it. But the law of unintended consequences may make things worse. Actually, that may be the goal – making it so bad that cars are banned altogether in Manhattan.

I hadn’t heard of any other city in the US adopting this method, and in fact New York is the only one. So far:

Cold enough for you?

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s been very cold in New England for the last few days. Having returned recently from visiting family who live in climes with less chilly winter weather, I found it a shock to get to the Boston airport very late at night and wait outside for transportation. Somehow, I’d forgotten to bring my gloves and scarf along, too, although I had meant to.

Brrrr.

To top it all off, I’d caught a cold from my grandkids. I love my grandkids very much, but they’re at that age where colds are common and expected. And when I get a cold, it doesn’t last just a few days. It segues into sinus congestion and a cough that usually endures, all told, for about a month. I’m not usually very sick, fortunately, but I wonder why my colds linger that way and have done so since I was a teenager.

I’ve tried those zinc lozenges and all they seem to do is delay the amount of time I feel as though I’m getting a cold but haven’t really gotten it yet. I take Vitamin C. I inhale steam. Decongestants make me sicker so I avoid them. None of it seems to matter.

And yet I like the weather in New England. I enjoy four dramatic seasons – as long as the ice storms are kept to a minimum. So here I stay – so far.

Another F-you from the departing Biden administration

The New Neo Posted on by

It worked so very well for Obama:

When President Barack Obama released five Taliban commanders from the Guantanamo Bay prison in exchange for an American deserter in 2014, he assured a wary public that the dangerous enemy combatants would be transferred to Qatar and kept from causing any trouble in Afghanistan.

In fact, they were left free to engineer Sunday’s sacking of Kabul [written in August 2021].

Soon after gaining their freedom, some of the notorious Taliban Five pledged to return to fight Americans in Afghanistan and made contacts with active Taliban militants there. But the Obama-Biden administration turned a blind eye to the disturbing intelligence reports, and it wasn’t long before the freed detainees used Qatar as a base to form a regime in exile…

Earlier this year, one of them, Khairullah Khairkhwa, actually sat across the table from President Biden’s envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, in Moscow, where Khairkhwa was part of the official Taliban delegation that negotiated the final terms of the US withdrawal. The retreat cleared a path for the Taliban to retake power after 20 years.

We have two weeks to go till Trump is inaugurated, and the outgoing Biden & company – many of whom are probably the same people from the Obama years – have plenty of time to do more damage and remind us once again of some of the reasons Trump was elected to a second term. For example, this:

In the most dramatic step in years to reduce the population at the U.S. military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the Biden administration has transferred 11 Yemeni detainees to Oman, which has agreed to help resettle them and provide security monitoring.

All of the men, who were captured in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, had been held for more than two decades without being charged or put on trial. All of them were approved for transfer by national security officials more than two years ago and sometimes long before that — one had been cleared for transfer since 2010 — yet had remained behind bars due to political and diplomatic factors.

Their release leaves just 15 prisoners at Guantánamo, cutting the number of inmates nearly in half.

The article goes on to say that their release had been planned by the Biden administration for October of 2023 but oops! October 7 happened, and the plans were delayed “due to concerns in Congress about instability in the Middle East.” And now those concerns are gone? Hardly. Now it’s not the left or the Biden group that has to worry about what happens on their watch – they can bequeath the extra problems to the Trump administration.

Buh-Bye, Trudeau

The New Neo Posted on by

A sort-of goodbye, anyway. Trudeau is retiring as head of the party and then once the party figures out who his replacement might be he will resign as PM as well.

Or something like that:

From [a] Canadian friend: He’s effectively shut down government until March and then will slow rollout a leadership race that will push the election out as long as possible.

That means the election likely won’t happen until October.

—–

Trudeau told reporters he decided to step down now because it’s become clear that he would not be leader due to internal party conflicts that he cannot be the one to carry the liberal standard into the next election.

And of course it’s all-important to the left that conservatives must be stopped! The consensus is that conservatives under Pierre Poilievre are poised to win the next election.

If it seems to you that Trudeau has been in power forever, that might be because he’s actually been PM for ten years. And if you wonder how long a Canadian PM can serve, the answer is that there are no term limits in Canada. Trudeau has served long enough to have thoroughly worn out his welcome, but he’s not even close to beating the previous Canadian record:

Under this system, William Lyon Mackenzie King was Canada’s longest-serving prime minister, holding office for a total of 21 years and 154 days over three non-consecutive terms.

When I read that, I immediately suspected that (the aptly-named) King may have served at roughly the same time as our FDR, during the Depression and WWII. That turns out to have been the case, and he had other similarities to FDR as well:

William Lyon Mackenzie King OM CMG PC (December 17, 1874 – July 22, 1950) was a Canadian statesman and politician who was the tenth prime minister of Canada for three non-consecutive terms from 1921 to 1926, 1926 to 1930, and 1935 to 1948. A Liberal, he was the dominant politician in Canada from the early 1920s to the late 1940s.[a] King is best known for his leadership of Canada throughout the Great Depression and the Second World War. In August 1944, he ordered the displacement of Japanese Canadians out of the British Columbia Interior, mandating that they either resettle east of the Rocky Mountains or face deportation to Japan after the war. He played a major role in laying the foundations of the Canadian welfare state …

There are parallels and trends among Western countries. FDR and King, Reagan and Thatcher, and now – hopefully – Trump and Poilievre.

Today is the four year anniversary of J6

The New Neo Posted on by

And Trump has been certified as the next president, to be inaugurated on January 20.

What a difference four years makes, and what a long strange trip it’s been – and hardly over yet. The left tried everything – and I mean almost literally everything – to stop him, and yet he was re-elected and has managed to stay upright and sentient, at least so far.

Much is being made in some circles of the fact that Kamala Harris presided over the session. Also, of the fact that the Democrats aren’t really contesting these results. That doesn’t mean they didn’t contest results in the past; they certainly did, and we have the video compilations to prove it. But more importantly, one reason this election wasn’t contested is that the voting rules were mostly tightened up, and the percentage of mail-in ballots – although still too high IMHO – went down significantly. What’s more, because Republican voters are not concentrated in urban areas controlled by Republicans, the mechanisms for significant fraud are less available to the GOP.

Still, many on the left would like us to remember J6 of 2020 as a day that will live forever in infamy. By electing Trump, the majority of voters rejected that idea. But there’s no question that the left got much use out of it, and managed to pervert the legal system to harshly punish even those uninvolved in any violence that day.