Reflections on the Reiner family tragedy

The New Neo Posted on by

Probably all of us know a family or families where lives have been upended by drug addiction – probably not as dramatically as the Reiners’ lives were, where the endpoint was apparently matricide and patricide – but badly enough, and with suffering enough. Sometimes it’s as it was with one old friend of mine who struggled for decades with the addiction of a beloved child and finally ended up winning the battle, for now. But only for now. As they say, one step at a time. Sometimes, as with a relative of mine to whom I’m not especially close, that same struggle was sadly lost with the death of that child from drugs.

In all the cases I know, the family tried almost everything under the sun to help that child get free: countless programs, rehabs, tough love, not-so-tough love, logical consequences such as jail time, all sorts of therapy, you name it. I think it’s easy, so very easy, to stand on the sidelines and give advice or judgment as to why it didn’t work out: I would have done this; I would have done that. Maybe it even worked for your child when you did it, but that doesn’t mean it would have worked for that other child.

I think it’s wrong to imagine we can say what causes a child – or anyone, for that matter – to become addicted to drugs, to spiral down and down and down, to come up again only to spiral down again, and to ultimately succumb to the darkest of forces or to finally emerge in the light.

I know that when I read the story of the Reiner parents’ attempts to help their son Nick, I felt I recognized heroic efforts to save him. It wasn’t enough, and maybe nothing would have been enough. Maybe he was a sort of sociopath from the start. Maybe not. Maybe family fame had something to do with it. Maybe not. I only know enough to say that I don’t know.

The survivors – the Reiners’ biological daughter and other son, as well as their adopted daughter (Reiner’s ex-wife Penny Marshall’s child from another marriage) – will almost certainly have a very tough road ahead of them, and I hope they get whatever help they need. As for the alleged murderer, their son Nick, he may finally kick his habit while incarcerated. Perhaps then the full weight of what he’s done will sink in. Would it be worse for him to get the death penalty, or to have to live with the knowledge?

A terrible tragedy.

Who is Mustapha Kharbouch and why are his pages being wiped?

The New Neo Posted on by

Mustapha Kharbouch is a student at Brown, but suddenly his social media pages and other articles about him are disappearing and people are speculating:

Social media users Tuesday claimed that a Brown University social media footprints were getting deleted as the manhunt for the shooter entered the fourth day, The law enforcement did not release the name of any suspect but social media users pointed out that the university removed the profile page of a student named Mustapha Kharbouch.

The page is alleged to have indicated, among other things, that “Mustapha is believed to be a first-year student studying International & Public Affairs” and that “He is a third generation Palestinian refugee born and raised in Lebanon.”

Hey, and I’m a third-generation Belarusian refugee. After all, my paternal grandparents were born in that benighted country and presciently left it well over a hundred years ago, for which I would like to heartily thank them.

“Third-generation refugee” is an oxymoron. There are no third-generation refugees, except for the propaganda wizards called the Palestinians.

Until something further is announced, I’m going to regard this Mustapha Kharbouch thing as a mere rumor. I put it up as a post because the “third generation refugee” phrase caught my attention.

Newsom and fraud in California

The New Neo Posted on by

Anyone surprised?:

Someone needs to make this make sense

“Tim Walz is getting destroyed for a billion dollar fraud scandal, but nobody’s talking about California

– Tim Walz lost only a billion dollars. Federal investigation, people going to prison

– Gavin Newsom, $32 billion in unemployment fraud, $13 billion in Medi-Cal, $6 billion in food stamps. That’s over $50 billion gone

– Tim Walz is facing house oversight, treasuries investigating terrorist ties

– Gavin Newsom, no investigation, no oversight, no consequences.

One party rule, zero accountability.

Well, both states have Democrat rule. But Walz is facing some accountability only because he is a political liability to the Democrats, not because of the fraud itself although that’s the ostensible reason. Walz is an odd bird who just isn’t politically viable outside of Minnesota, and probably not now even in Minnesota.

Newsom is another story, for the simple reason that he’s much better-looking and much smoother. He is considered the leading 2028 Democrat candidate for president (or certainly one of them), not for any actual accomplishments but for those two reasons: looks and smoothness.

More on the Bondi Beach shooters, heroes, and victims

The New Neo Posted on by

More facts emerge:

[The younger] Akram is an Australian-born citizen, while his 50-year-old father arrived in the country in 1998 on a student visa, which later transitioned to a partner visa in 2001, Australia’s Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke told reporters Monday.

Since then, the gun-wielding father — who was killed at the scene during a shootout with police — had made three trips abroad, returning each time on a resident return visa, Burke said.

The guns were legally owned. As suspected, there was an excuse, because gun ownership in Australia is very strictly regulated:

The father, who was killed at the scene during a shootout with police, was part of a “gun club” and held a recreational hunting license for over a decade, officials said.

“So the firearms license was to be for a recreational hunting license. There are two types of hunting license: the ability to hunt on a property or also as part of a hunting club — so a gun club. He was a member of a gun club and was entitled by nature of the firearms act to have a firearms license issued.”

Sajid has had his license since 2015, allowing him to legally own the “long arms that he had” as registered guns, Lanyon added.

“In terms of a firearms license, the firearms registry conducts a thorough examination of all applications to ensure a person is fit and proper to hold a firearms license,” Lanyon noted.

Of course, Australia plans to further restrict guns as a result. Why don’t they monitor what goes on in mosques instead? Too “Islamophobic” I suppose. And what’s a “watch list” – which at least one of the two was supposedly on – if not something to monitor?

In this case, the father had lived in Australia almost 30 years. I bet the pair were both radicalized within the last few years, or even since 10/7.

And the police – what gives? Completely unimpressive performance:

One of the survivors of the terror attack at a Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration said four police officers just “froze” during the 20-minute rampage on Sunday that killed 11.

Eyewitness Shmulik Scuri said he was with his family when the two suspects began firing at the crowd of worshippers from a nearby bridge.

“For 20 minutes. They shoot, shoot. Change magazines. And just shoot,” the witness told reporters. …

It wasn’t until a local good Samaritan, a local fruit seller, disarmed one of the terrorists that police appeared to return fire, taking out one of the shooters, video shows.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the police are taught that, because of draconian Aussie gun control, they will never face such a situation and won’t need training for it. On the other hand, I have read that two of the four police were targeted immediately by the gunmen, and wounded – although I also read that two others hid (possibly women?). There are still a lot of rumors swirling around, so it’s hard to know what to believe.

However, not only was there hero Ahmed al Ahmed who’s become well-known for disarming one of the shooters (and then being shot by another), but there was a second hero who tried to disarm the other shooter and was himself shot by police for his pains. You can find that story here. Granted, it’s not always easy to tell who’s who, but this guy apparently had his arms up when shot.

The saddest element of the whole thing are the victims. You can find some of their photos and stories here. Two rabbis, which indicates some careful aiming by the shooters. A ten-year-old girl, out enjoying the day with her family. An 87-year-old man who survived the Holocaust as a child. One thing that struck me but did not surprise me is the number of victims who had been born in other countries; Australia used to be a refuge for Jews. No more.

There are only about 120,000 Jews in Australia, and a great many came post-Holocaust. That means they represent less than a half a percent of the total population there. The Muslim population there is much larger, both for bad (the shooters) and good (the heroes): 3.2% in 2021 and probably more today, due to a high birthrate.

The Bondi Beach massacre is definitely an example of “globalize the intifada.” But it’s not new; not at all. I immediately thought of the 1994 bombing in Argentina, orchestrated by Iran (as Bondi may have been):

The AMIA bombing occurred on 18 July 1994 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and targeted the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA; transl.?”Argentine Israelite Mutual Association”), a Jewish Community Centre. Executed as a suicide attack, a bomb-laden van was driven into the AMIA building and subsequently detonated, killing 85 people and injuring over 300. To date, the bombing remains the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentine history. In 1994, Argentina was home to a Jewish community of 200,000, making it the largest in Latin America and the sixth-largest in the world outside of Israel. …

In 2024, an Argentine court ruled that Iran directed the attack, and that it was carried by Hezbollah. The ruling also characterized Iran as a terrorist state.

Argentina and Australia are far away from the Middle East. But even thirty years ago, jihadis were bent on globalizing the intifada, although back then it wasn’t a popular slogan on Western college campuses. Now it is.

[NOTE: I plan to write a post tomorrow on Australian gun control and its effects.]

Were the Brown victims targeted?

The New Neo Posted on by

Authorities are now saying that Benjamin Erickson was not the killer, and we don’t know who was:

[Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha] said that there was only “some degree of evidence” that led them to Erickson, but said their investigation “now points in a different direction.”

“I think it’s fair to say that there’s no basis to consider him a person of interest, and that’s why he’s being released. We still have a lot of steps to take in this case,” he added.

The authorities never gave out his name officially, but it was leaked.

I’ve seen a lot of online chatter about how long it’s taking to find the killer, and how incompetent the authorities are. That seems pretty impatient to me. Erickson was fingered as a person of interest through cellphone data and that sort of thing, but I’m going to assume that all the witnesses are being interviewed, more data is being crunched, and an arrest will emerge. It’s early yet, and life is not a CSI TV show.

It is reported that the murderer yelled something, and a lot of people seem to think that of course it was something Islamist and this is being covered up. Perhaps; it’s certainly possible. But I’ve read it was “something unintelligible,” which is possible as well.

This lovely young woman is one of the students who was murdered:

The first victim of the deadly school shooting at Brown University has been identified as a sophomore student and vice president of the school’s college Republican club, Ella Cook, according to her Alabama parish and a former classmate.

The news of Cook’s death was shared during a service at the Cathedral Church of the Advent in her hometown of Birmingham.

This is unusual; as with most Ivy League schools, active “out” Republicans are not all that common, and her role would have given her high visibility. Was she targeted for this? We haven’t a clue at this point.

Today they released the name of the second student who was murdered:

Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov was identified by the Uzbekistan Foreign Affairs Ministry on social media Monday as the second student who died in Saturday’s shooting at the Providence, Rhode Island university, according to NBC News. …

Umurzokov’s aunt also confirmed his death to NBC, telling the outlet that she found out the news when her nephew’s mother called her “in the middle of the night.

“He was very kind, smart. Attended talented and gifted schools,” Umurzokov’s aunt said, adding that he “wanted to be a neurosurgeon ’cause when he was 10 he had a very serious eight-hours-long brain surgery.”

“We hoped that he would have had a bright future,” the grieving aunt added, according to NBC.

Again: targeted, or random? RIP to both.

[NOTE: By the way, I have a lot more to say about the Bondi carnage. But not today.]

The Reiner murders

The New Neo Posted on by

Rob Reiner’s son Nick – who was arrested for the murder of his parents – had a history of severe drug problems and had been behaving strangely lately:

Family friends told The Times that Rob and Nick Reiner got into an argument Saturday evening at a party at Conan O’Brien’s home and that many people noticed Nick acting strangely at the party.

Nick Reiner, who had struggled with addiction for years, was living in a guesthouse on his parents’ property, family friends told The Times, and his mother had become increasingly concerned about his mental health in recent weeks.

The family friends, who did not want to be identified because of the nature of the crime, said that the Reiners’ daughter found her parents Sunday afternoon.

What a terrible terrible situation for the daughter – not just finding the carnage, but losing nearly her entire family (there is one other surviving brother as well as a stepsister) in one fell swoop.

Also:

By 2015, he had gotten clean, working with his father on “Being Charlie,” a semi-autobiographical film about addiction and recovery. Rob Reiner directed and Nick co-wrote the film about a successful actor with political ambitions and a son addicted to drugs.

At the time of the premiere, The Times reported that Rob Reiner and his wife at their worst moments “wondered if there was an end in sight, and whether it would be the tragic one that a voice in the back of their heads kept telling them was coming.”

It’s the tragic one – very tragic. RIP.

Friends were not all that surprised:

Rob Reiner’s son Nick was notorious for being violent, and those around him “instantly knew’’ he was the one who allegedly murdered his parents, friends, and neighbors, told The Post on Monday.

“This is not the first time their son has been violent,’’ a longtime neighbor of the victims said of Nick Reiner, 32, who is charged with fatally slitting the throats of his parents in the family’s Los Angeles mansion. …

A former classmate of Nick’s told The Post that the suspect — who had been in and out of rehab since age 15 — has “always been troubled’’ and that she “instantly knew it was him’’ when she heard the news.

Depressing. So many families have a child lost to drugs, and the struggle can seem endless. Fortunately, they don’t all end up this way.

[NOTE: And yes, Trump chimed in with an offensive take on the event. Although he called the murders “a very sad thing” and wished that they “rest in peace,” he also took the occasion to rail against Reiner’s TDS (which the man definitely had) and to suggest it somehow contributed to his murder. This seems absurd and stupid, although it’s not the first time and probably not the last that it’s true of some of Trump’s utterances.]

What a weekend: mere anarchy

The New Neo Posted on by

Too many murders, both of the public political and jihadi type, and of the private. They signify different things and threaten different things, but there’s this quality to it:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

I’ve posted that poem or parts of it many times on this blog. But unfortunately, it seems more appropriate than ever. I’ve never quite understood why Yeats uses the term “mere” to modify “anarchy” – is it ironic? But I won’t quibble with a masterpiece, written in 1919, over a hundred years ago.

I left out the first two lines, but they matter too:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

To me, this suggests not only that things are spinning out of control, but that the guiding principle has been lost. From the poem’s Wiki page:

[Yets] saw the age of classical antiquity as beginning with the Trojan War and then that thousand year cycle was overtaken by the Christian era, which is coming to a close. And that is the basis of the final line of the poem: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

I’ve long thought the answer is: Islamic bloodlust and revenge. Although then again, that’s certainly nothing new. How about “Islamic jihadist bloodlust and revenge, and the abdication of so many Western governments to a takeover by lies and a failure to protect the west’s previous values and present-day populations”?

The Jews are just the proverbial canaries in the coal mine, but so many people don’t see that. As writer Guy Goldstein (a man who grew up in Australia) writes, in a Substack essay entitled, “Can I Still Call Australia Home?”:

As I see the footage of the memorials [in Australia], I see Jews standing alone, a spectacle that the rest of Australia is watching. I see people talking about the impact on the Jewish Community, and what this means for Jews. I don’t hear anyone talking about Australians. I see politicians coming to politic, I see a few locals coming to spectate, what I don’t see is Australians embracing Australians. No “We are one, but we are many”.

This past few years has felt like something more than just a local conflict in the Middle East for Jews around the world. Watching my people being gunned down in Australia, I finally understood what it was. They have undone the emancipation of the Jews. The Jews have been restored to their rightful place as “other” in the eyes of the West.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve been a citizen your entire life. It doesn’t matter that you’ve been Australian your entire life. You’re a Jew now. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been American your entire life. It doesn’t matter that you bleed red, white, and blue. You’re a Jew now.

We see it in France. We see this in the UK. As an Australian, I never imagined that it would happen to us. I never imagined that the land that my grandmother worshipped as the font of all that is good in humanity, as her saviour and her true love, would turn into exactly the place that my family had to flee.

I don’t agree that this is true in the United States. Not yet, and I hope never. But it’s getting closer – too close for comfort. And if the bell tolls for the Jews, it tolls for thee.

Mass shooting at Sydney beach, mass shooting at Brown University [scroll down for UPDATES]

The New Neo Posted on by

Two gunmen opened fire on a crowd at Sydney’s Bondi Beach celebrating the beginning of Chanukah, killing an unknown number of people (presently reported as sixteen) and wounding many more. This is the embodiment of “globalize the intifada.”

One of the gunmen was killed by police and the other wounded and taken into custody, but they had free rein for many minutes before they were taken down. It’s not hard to guess at the background of the shooters, only one of whom has been officially named so far:

One of the gunmen who opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach has been named as Naveed Akram. …

The 24-year-old suspect, who was shot dead by police, was a bricklayer who had recently been laid off. …

Social media posts from an Islamic centre in Australia show Akram completed religious studies in 2022, raising questions about possible radicalisation and extremist networks operating in the country. Adam Ismail, the head of the Al-Murad Islamic Institute, where Akram studied, declined to comment when contacted by The Telegraph. …

Israeli authorities said they were examining responsibility for the attack amid concerns it may have been orchestrated by a foreign state or militant organisations. The shooting occurred against a backdrop of escalating tensions between Australia and Iran, following a series of suspected Iranian-directed attacks on Jewish targets in the country.

Note what’s missing: Akram’s country of origin (I’ve read Pakistan, but just as a rumor), was he a citizen or not, and what were his ties to the other shooter (I’ve read a rumor he was from Lebanon, but have read nothing official)? How did they obtain their weapons in a country like Australia, which has very strict gun control (I have no doubt criminals and terrorists can do it)? Why did it take so long for police to shoot the perps? What was the police presence at this event, an outdoor Jewish celebration that would obviously leave people highly vulnerable?

And then there’s the Brown University shooting, which we know even less about although it occurred slightly earlier. Two students were killed and about nine injured, and a “person of interest” is in custody. The police are being very tight-lipped, but there’s this:

At approximately 4:05 p.m. EST on December 13, 2025, a shooting occurred inside Room 166 on the first floor of the Brown University School of Engineering’s Barus and Holley Building, which also houses the university’s physics department and MacMillan Hall. The room had a capacity of 186 people according to Brown University’s website. At the time of the shooting, a review session for an introductory economics class was being held by a teaching assistant for Teaching Professor of Economics Rachel Friedberg.The building was unlocked, since it was the second day of the school’s final examinations for the fall semester.

Who is Rachel Friedberg, and what kind of economics does she teach? This kind:

Her research centers on the economic outcomes of immigrants in the United States and Israel, and on immigration’s impact on the labor market of the receiving country. She has testified before the U.S. Congress and participated in Israeli Knesset committee deliberations on immigration policy and reform. A faculty affiliate of the Program in Judaic Studies, she is currently studying the demography and economics of the American Jewish community.

I suppose all of this could be a coincidence. But I would bet not.

One bright spot is that the Bondi attack featured a hero named Ahmed al Ahmed:

Video verified by the BBC showed Mr Ahmed run at the gunman and seize his weapon, before turning the gun round on him, forcing his retreat.

Mr Ahmed, a fruit shop owner and father of two, remains in hospital, where he has undergone surgery for bullet wounds to his arm and hand, his family told 7News Australia.

RIP to the victims.

UPDATE 4 PM:

The Sydney shooters were father and son:

New South Wales Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon says that they believe there were only two shooters involved — a father and son who are ages 50 and 24.

The father was a licensed gun owner, Lanyon says at a press conference, saying that they believe all his firearms have been recovered.

The father has been killed and his son, earlier identified as Naveed Akram, 24, is “in critical but stable condition,” Lanyon says.

I know that gun ownership is extremely restricted in Australia. How was this guy a licensed gun owner? Seems very odd.

UPDATE 4:20 PM:

Footage of Ahmed al Ahmed wrestling the gun away can be found here. Ahmed was apparently shot in the hand by the other gunman afterwards. Note that he sneaks up on the shooter from behind; seems the shooter neither saw nor heard him. Amazing footage.

UPDATE 8:30 PM:

A person of interest in the Brown shooting has been identified as Benjamin Erickson. There’s a lot of information about him here, but nothing that would immediately suggest a motive except for a possible mental health history. He may have become a Brown student in the fall of 2025, but that’s not clear.

UPDATE 10:50 PM

This is probably totally unrelated to the rest of the news in this post, but Rob Reiner and his wife have been found murdered in their Brentwood, LA home:

On Sunday, Dec. 14, the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) was called to the home at around 3:30 p.m. local time to provide medical aid, and upon arrival, they found a man and a woman dead, the LAFD confirmed to PEOPLE.

Rob and Michele were found dead by apparent homicide inside their home, TMZ reported. According to the outlet, they suffered wounds consistent with a knife attack.

Terrible news. RIP.

UPDATE 12:20 AM 12/15/2025:

Now it’s been announced that Reiner and his wife were killed by their son Nick, who has a lengthy history of drug addiction and homelessness although in recent years was said to have been doing better. Horrific.

Progress on the poetry book

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m happy to report that I finally found a printer that can put out a version with which I’m satisfied, and I gave them the go-ahead. I originally thought the book would be available around Thanksgiving time, but that obviously never happened. But it should be ready around December 18, if there are no more glitches.

A preview of the cover: