And all through the house…

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post.]

…a creature was stirring.

On Christmas Eve I was expecting a visit from my son, who was flying in as a rare treat. I had tidied up, and was putting on the finishing touches while waiting for him to arrive from the airport. As I was poised at the top of the staircase on my way down from the second floor, I saw a movement on one of the lower steps.

A dark shape. A small dark shape—very still, and then in motion again. With tiny little ears, and a long tail.

A mouse. Very much stirring.

I let out a shriek, like in the cartoons. Yes, I know that mice do not hurt people. But yes, they give me the willies when they startle me and scurry around—like—mice. The few times when this has happened before, they’ve always sought the little opening from whence they’d come and scurried away, hardly ever to be seen again.

But this mouse seemed to be lost and disoriented. Maybe because it was almost midnight on Christmas Eve, and no creature was supposed to be stirring. In the midst of my unreasonable fear was a sort of amusement. What was it doing here, this evening of all evenings?

The mouse was still on the staircase landing, and although I assumed that somehow it had managed to climb the three stairs to where it was, it appeared to be perplexed about how to get up or down from there. I watched it from what I considered a safe distance at the top of the stairs, and I could see it moving back and forth, back and forth, first towards the wall and then towards the edge of the step, but it could not seem to get the courage to make a break for it.

What did I do? I called my son and asked how far away he was. Forty-five minutes. And then I settled in, not for a long winter’s nap but for a long viewing from a good vantage point to monitor the mouse’s position till my son would arrive. For the moment, the mouse seemed quite well-contained on the stairs, but I didn’t trust that—and sure enough, slowly but surely, with many fits and starts, it managed to get back down those three stairs to the ground floor.

Now, it turns out that watching a mouse is actually sort of interesting. This one darted from stair-bottom to hall to bathroom to bedroom and back again (my place is built upside-down, with the bedroom and bathroom downstairs and living room and kitchen upstairs). I had a special horror of the mouse being in the bedroom—so after its one foray into the bedroom for five minutes and then out again, I slammed the bedroom door shut and placed a thick towel to block the crack at the bottom. The towel seemed to act as an effective barrier, like a small mountain range, and the mouse didn’t venture into that room again.

But back and forth it went—along the wall in the hall, into the bathroom, up a few stairs and then back down them again. I noticed that it seemed to get smarter and smarter; each time it climbed the stairs it was better at it, until it seemed as though it had been doing this all its little life.

And then by trial and error it found the molding along the side of the stairs, which then acted as a sort of ramp by which the mouse could easily climb all the way to the top. This filled me with dread. I was conceding the downstairs for now, but the upstairs was my territory! But what to do? That molding-ramp made it so easy; the mouse was coming up in a determined sort of way, till I could look into its beady little eyes and it could look into mine. I let out another involuntary yelp, stamping my feet and clapping my hands, trying to make enough noise to frighten it off.

I looked and sounded completely and utterly ridiculous.

And yet it was effective; the little thing stopped in its tracks, then turned and went back downstairs again, to my great relief. Then a few minutes later it came up the ramp-molding again, and I re-enacted the same stupid pantomime I had before. The mouse kept coming—up up up, light and fleet of foot, relentless and implacable. I actually thought of throwing something at it to head it off—perhaps my shoe, like Clara in “The Nutcracker.” But oh, for a platoon of tin soldiers like hers! (I’ve cued up this video to start at the right spot, although it’s mistitled because these are not meant to be rats, they’re mice):

But alas, we were alone, just the two of us, mousie and me. And I didn’t really want to hurt it, which I thought might happen if I threw my shoe, so I reached for a pillow—and at that moment I heard the key turn in the lock and my son walked in.

I’m always happy to see him, but perhaps never so happy as this time, as I stood at the top of the stairs in a semi-crouch, clutching a small pillow and making silly-yet-hopefully-scary noises at a mouse that was climbing a molding-ramp on the edge of the staircase.

My son managed to keep his disdain under control long enough to catch the mouse in a plastic container and escort it outside to be released, but not before we took a photo though the plastic. Yes, the mouse is kind of cute. But no, I don’t want him in my house, not on Christmas Eve or any other time.

Mouse 2

Mouse 1

Happy Chanukah!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a slightly edited version of a previous post.]

This is the seventh night of Chanukah, and I wish everyone a happy one. Chanukah is about a successful revolt and a miracle of light:

The miracle of the one-day supply of oil miraculously lasting eight days is first described in the Talmud, committed to writing about 600 years after the events described in the books of Maccabees. The Talmud says that after the forces of Antiochus IV had been driven from the Temple, the Maccabees discovered that almost all of the ritual olive oil had been profaned. They found only a single container that was still sealed by the High Priest, with enough oil to keep the menorah in the Temple lit for a single day. They used this, yet it burned for eight days (the time it took to have new oil pressed and made ready).

The words of this Chanukah song are in Yiddish—written in 1924 before the Holocaust and before the establishment of Israel—and they are not happy. But I didn’t know that when I first heard it, and I post it anyway because I think it’s very beautiful:

Here are the lyrics, loosely translated by Theodore Bikel:

O little lights of mystery
You recall our history
And all that went before
The battles and the bravery
And our release from slavery
Miracles galore.

As my eyes behold your flames
I recall our heroes’ names
And our ancient dream:
“Jews were learning how to fight
To defeat an awesome might
They could reign supreme”

“They would rule their own domain
When the enemy was slain,
The Temple cleansed and whole.
Once there was a Jewish land
And a mighty Jewish hand.”
Oh, how it moves my soul!

O little lights of mystery
You retell our history
Your tales are tales of pain.
My heart is filled with fears
My eyes are filled with tears
“What now?” says the haunting refrain.

Written in 1924, and it seems prescient.

Bikel translated the song that way in order to make the rhymes come out in the English version. But a more literal translation of that last verse might be this [NOTE: that link isn’t working anymore, but here’s the translation I had found there]:

Oh little candles,
your old stories
awaken my anguish;
deep in my heart there
stirs
a tearful question:
What will be next?

Indeed.

I decided not to post about politics today

The New Neo Posted on by

We all could use a break from it, right?

The storm here is over, it’s a sunny, cold, and apparently icy day. I haven’t been out yet but plan to emerge later to get some sunshine. Amazingly, I didn’t lose power yesterday except for about two minutes, although there were quite a few local outages and at least six text alerts from the power company.

Tonight is not only Christmas Eve but it’s also the next-to-last night of Chanukah. So over the weekend I’m planning to post some old favorites for the holidays. Having been blogging for so long, I have a nice little storehouse of them.

To everyone: Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, and speedy recovery from bad weather!

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Here’s the most ludicrous January 6th prosecution of them all. Not the worst, but the most ludicrous, and bad enough:

Antionne DeShaun Brodnax, who goes by the stage name “Bugzie the Don,” was charged with multiple misdemeanor counts after posing on top of a SWAT vehicle at the Capitol on the day of the now infamous events. He used the photo as the cover of his album, “The Capital.”…

Brodnax says he was in the area that day to shoot a video. As the rally intensified, the independent rapper decided to head towards the action in hopes of capturing video and photos…

The Justice Department asked for a sentencing enhancement that would have led to at least a 21-month sentence, asserting the artist deleted videos and photos from his phone after agreeing to forward them to federal authorities. They also pointed to Brodnax’s previous criminal history, one that includes charges for manufacturing a controlled substance, felony firearm possession, and probation violation. Federal authorities also claim he presented a litany of “disciplinary” issues while in custody.

Brodnax was sentenced to five months in prison and ordered to pay a $70 special assessment and $500 in restitution.

He’s probably sorry he didn’t burn down a building during the Floyd Antifa riots; he would have been A-okay.

The people in charge of these Jan 6 prosecutions are petty little tyrants drunk with vindictive power. They’re just toying with people.

(2) Pelosi had a major role in the inadequate security for January 6th.

(3) I haven’t yet covered the Biden Purple Heart tall tale, but here it is. Quite a whopper. And although the “fact-checking” sites all agree that it isn’t true, they are so delicate about the way they say it. Here’s a typical treatment [emphasis mine]:

U.S. President Joe Biden is an inveterate storyteller, but more than once has misstated the facts during the course of his stories and speeches, a pattern for which he has been criticized…

There are a number of inaccuracies in this story.

Good old Joe that great storyteller, just getting a few little details wrong. Like the entire story. Oh, but he did get one thing right: he had an uncle who served in the military during WWII.

(4) Here’s an article on rising “food insecurity” (how I hate this Newspeak!) due to inflation. I have no doubt it’s happening. I have enough money for food, but although I shop in the least expensive grocery store and have cut way back on big budget items like meat (I wasn’t a huge meat eater to begin with), my grocery bills are about twice what they used to be not long ago.

Twice.

(5) I recently got a clever scam email. It masqueraded as a note of Merry Christmas wishes, and came from the person’s real email address. But it was from a relative I pretty much never hear from, who didn’t greet me by name, and signed with her formal first name rather than the nickname she goes by. It also had a couple of odd misspellings uncharacteristic of this person, and the sentence right after the Christmas greetings was one that asked if I could do her a favor. I think the scam in this case involved having somehow gotten access to the email address, and then if the person targeted replied to the initial note, to follow up with a new email that contained some sort of suspicious link to click on, or a request for money. Needless to say, I didn’t reply.

More on Kari Lake’s election challenge trial

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s another fairly comprehensive summary of the proceedings at Powerline.

To me, it seems pretty obvious that this lawsuit by Lake inevitably suffers from the built-in handicap of all such suits, which is that proof is well-nigh impossible. The type of election fraud lawsuit that tends to succeed is one in which the alleged fraud is on the micro level: for example, such-and-such person submitted three ballots instead of one.

But that’s not of great import in the scheme of things in terms of election outcome, although it needs to be prosecuted in order to serve as discouragement to and punishment for the behavior. In contrast, although the sort of large-scale fraudulent behavior that Lake is alleging seems very plausible, and her lawyers have amassed a lot of evidence that it probably occurred, they cannot prove it for the very same reasons that it’s possible and perhaps even likely that it happened in the first place: for example, chain of custody problems plus a ridiculously unwieldy and complex set of procedures that seem far more bizarre than in most states. The secret ballot adds to all of this difficulty in proving anything, because the number of votes lost for candidate A versus candidate B cannot be reconstructed after the fact.

The election process needs to be made more secure and more simple. Until and unless this is done, these problems will recur. With voting, an ounce of prevention is worth ten thousand tons of cure, because there is no effective cure possible in court after the fact – unless this court really really surprises me. Courts don’t want to undermine faith in the process by invalidating it, but faith in the process is already undermined by learning about the vulnerabilities inherent in the process itself.

The omnibus bill and Republican betrayals

The New Neo Posted on by

Yes, they passed it, and just about everyone on the right is angry and shrieking “Betrayal!”:

Despite the outcry, though, Republicans in the US Senate soldiered forward to stab their voters in the back, and now, we have their names.

The writer then links a tweet by Greg Price, giving the names of the eighteen GOP senators who voted for the bill. Some are the usual: Romney, Collins, Murkowski. Some are not, such as Cotton.

Am I angry? Yes, but not in exactly the same way as a lot of the people on the right who are outraged at it. I’m angry first of all that the GOP didn’t win the Senate in 2022 so that we would have gotten a chance to see what they would have done had they taken power. That would have been a much better test of their mettle at this point than this monstrous bill – which, by the way, I also wanted them to fight against much more strongly.

But I believe I somewhat understand the reason for their acquiescence. I don’t agree with it and I don’t like it. But it’s not preposterous and it really is possible they avoided something even worse, which is the argument they give for having done what they did.

What am I talking about? This (from streiff at RedState, who is not a McConnell fan):

My point being that McConnell is duplicitous and can’t be trusted, but he does enough bad crap that it isn’t necessary to invent stuff to blame him for.

Yesterday, the Senate passed a massive, bloated spending bill. They did so when they could’ve killed the bill, passed a continuing resolution, and let a GOP House craft an alternative spending bill next year. McConnell spoke in support of passing the bill from the Senate well.

Streiff then links to the full text of McConnell’s remarks. I’d like you to actually read them and think about what is being said. Do I agree with it? As I said, not really. Do I think it’s an absurdity? No, I don’t. Because the reality is that when the next Senate is seated, the GOP will be in an even worse bargaining position in the Senate and the situation might have become even worse. Despite the fact that the GOP would also then be controlling the House, any decent House budget bill could not have gotten past the Senate.

Here’s another McConnell statement on the same subject:

Month after month, year after year, competitors such as China are methodically pouring money and planning into upgrading and modernizing their own militaries. They are constantly probing new ways to expand their military, intelligence, economic, and political reach — indirectly or directly threatening American forces and our allies’ and partners’ forces.

“Under these perilous circumstances, cutting defense spending in real dollars, as Democrats first wanted to do, is not an option.

“And embarking on a potentially endless cycle of continuing resolutions that give our military real-dollar funding cuts because of inflation, and give Defense Department leaders no certainty to plan and invest — that is not an acceptable option either.

If you don’t control the Senate or the presidency, and only control the House by a few votes – and this will be the reality in January of 2023 – how do you get what you want? A person might respond to that question by saying that some how the Democrats would figure out a way to do it. But you know what? Even the Democrats weren’t always able to do it in this past session of Congress although they controlled both houses as well as the presidency. Remember the votes on ending the filibuster and on HR1, their pet project? They couldn’t accomplish either.

I want to add one more thing. A lot of people are very angry because they believe that McConnell stated the following absurdity:

If I had a dime for every pundit on the right who quoted that, enraged, I’d have a fair amount of money. In my post yesterday on the budget vote, I didn’t get into that issue, but I did include a quote from a Mollie Hemingway article that mentioned it in passing. Here’s what she wrote about that particular remark:

Many Republican voters support helping Ukraine fight Russia’s unjust invasion, but it is absolutely nowhere near their top issue, contrary to McConnell’s false claim…

But it turns out that the McConnell quote is a truncated one. I’m not sure who it was who originally put forth the truncated version – it might have been the tweeter Greg Price, or it might have been someone else or several other people – but it’s misleading.

So let’s set the record straight. You’re still free to detest McConnell and/or to think the budget bill is absolutely horrific and he should have waited, but he didn’t say that arming Ukraine was the most important issue to Republicans. Someone truncated the quote in order to drive Republicans even further apart than they already are, and I’ve seen this many times before and it’s usually successful.

Here’s the fuller quote:

This omnibus bill — it’ll be on the floor — provides a real dollar increase for the Defense baseline and a real dollar cut for the non-Defense baseline — if you exclude veterans. That is absolutely critical and breaking the pattern we’ve had in the past when we’ve ended up in one of these situations where every time Republicans tried to get an increase in defense, we would in effect have to pay a ransom to the Democrats on the domestic side, wholly aside from the needs of the country. So let’s step back and say, “What are the real needs of the country right now?” In the defense part of our expenditures, making sure the Defense Department can deal with the major threats coming from Russia and China — providing assistance for the Ukrainians to defeat the Russians. That’s the number one priority for the United States right now — according to most Republicans. That’s sort of how we see the challenges confronting the country at the moment. So admittedly, I’m pretty proud of the fact that with a Democratic president, a Democratic House, and Democratic Senate, we were able to achieve through this omnibus spending bill, essentially all of our priorities.

To paraphase: he’s saying that the GOP got what it basically wanted for defense and at least didn’t get an increase for non-defense items (and even got a “real dollar cut” for non-defense items). Then he goes on to refer only to the defense side of the bill, and says we need to make sure the Defense Department can deal with “major threats” from Russia and China; that’s obviously not about Ukraine, because China is not involved there and he also has talked about China being a big defense issue in a related statement I’ve already quoted in this post. And then he adds “providing assistance for the Ukrainians to defeat the Russians.” When he then says “that’s the number one priority for the United States right now,” it should be clear that he means number one defense priority, and he’s speaking primarily of threats from both Russia and China to the US and then adding on the Ukraine part as a threat from Russia under the “defense against Russia” category.

So what’s up with the truncated quote? Why make things even more bitter on the right than they already are, by not at least giving the context? I can almost guarantee most people so very angry about what he said will never learn what he actually said.

There are many reasons to be angry with McConnell, but let’s stick to what he actually does and what he actually says.

The tide turns against Sam Bankman-Fried

The New Neo Posted on by

Two of his associates have pled guilty and probably will get a break in their sentences in exchange for cooperative testimony:

“I’m announcing that the Southern District of New York has filed charges against Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of Alameda Research, and Gary Wang, a co-founder of FTX, in connection with their roles in the frauds that contributed to FTX’s collapse,” the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York said on Wednesday night. “Both Miss Ellison and Mr. Wang have pled guilty to those charges, and they are both cooperating with the Southern District of New York.”

“Let me reiterate a call that I made last week, if you participated in misconduct at FTX or Alameda, now is the time to get ahead of it,” he continued. “We are moving quickly, and our patience is not eternal.”

The prosecution seems to be holding a good hand right now.

Bankman-Fried is in custody in the US but is about to be released on $250 million bond. No, that’s not a typo. It’s also “the largest-ever pretrial bond,” and I can well believe it. Other terms of the agreement include wearing an ankle bracelet, going for counseling (for what, I have no idea), and staying in the northern district of California.

How was the money secured? In this way:

A recognizance bond is a written commitment from the accused to appear in court when ordered. In return, Bankman-Fried’s camp would not be required to meet the full collateral requirements on the bail.

The bond was secured by equity in his family home, and by the signatures of his parents and two other individuals with “considerable” assets…

Judge Gabriel Gorenstein said that Bankman-Fried would require “strict” supervision following his release to his parents’ home in California.

His parents, both Stanford Law professors, were present in the courtroom.

Bankman-Fried is thirty years old, but he joins a substantial number of people of that age living with parents. My guess is that his digs will be cushier than the usual, at least for a while. But I would love to be a fly on the wall for some of those heart-to-heart talks he will almost certainly be having with his parents.

Previous bonds under similar circumstances don’t begin to compare, even adjusted for inflation:

Bernie Madoff posted a $10 million bond while awaiting trial on his multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. Jeff Skilling, former Enron CEO, posted a $5 million bond, while Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos founder, posted a scant $500,000.

Kari Lake’s election challenge trial so far

The New Neo Posted on by

There is no question there were major irregularities in the 2022 election in Arizona, and many of them are being revealed in the ongoing trial. But it’s always an enormously uphill battle to prove there was intentional fraud that mattered in terms of the outcome.

I haven’t watched any of the trial myself, and from the accounts I’ve read I’m a bit confused as to what actually must be proved in this case in order to win, and what the court would be willing to apply as a remedy if that burden were met. Maybe it’s because it’s not been made clear?

At any rate, here are some links to articles on the proceedings: this, this, and this.

There certainly have been witnesses alleging to the strange goings-on, which were egregious. Some of them have said that these things could not have occurred unintentionally and must instead have been intentional, but I don’t know whether the judge will buy it. Then of course there’s the aforementioned question of how far the plaintiff (Lake) has to go to prove she would have won the election otherwise.

My gut feeling is that despite the strong evidence of chicanery and even more powerful evidence of egregious negligence in the way this election was run – almost certainly contributing to and perhaps determining Lake’s loss – the court will be reluctant to do anything about it except some sort of mild admonition to Maricopa County to clean up its act.

In general, courts do not want to decide elections and there is an enormous presumption in favor of letting things stand no matter what. As I’ve said before, the only way to deal with these things is to prevent them from happening.

Of course, if Lake wins her case and a new election is called, I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Storm on the horizon

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t mean a metaphorical one; I mean an actual one.

It’s not predicted to be so cold here in New England. In fact, we’re supposed to get a warmish spell with rain and even thunderstorms. Strange. Then on the weekend it’s supposed to turn cold, but not unseasonably cold. Just in the 20s.

However, yesterday I got a sudden flurry (pun intended) of texts from my power company. Six in rapid succession, all warning me that there might be a power outage Thursday night or Friday because of the storm. A sort of preemptive lowering of expectations, I guess, so that we’ll be happy if we don’t lose our power rather than upset if we do.

I’m hoping we don’t lose it, of course. And I hope all of you don’t have a lot of weather problems, although I know they’re reported to be widespread.