Still working on fixing a few glitches

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been dealing with tech support for quite a while last night and this morning, and I finally ended up signing on for a higher level of support for a month in order to fix some of the problems. I’m curious whether any of you are still experiencing any difficulties getting to the site. For me it’s loading slower, at least sometimes. I’m also getting a cached version on my phone, minus today’s open thread so far, although I’m getting the correct updated version on my regular computer with the open thread showing up. And the redirect from the old URL is working at times but not working perfectly.

My goal while I have the higher level of tech support is to get these things fixed and to also tidy up other loose ends, such as getting the “preview” tab to work. High hopes, right?

We’ll see…

Liz Cheney says: I am big, it’s Wyoming that got small

The New Neo Posted on by

Looks like Liz Cheney will no longer be a member of the House of Representatives from Wyoming.

Pity.

But she’s not sad, not Liz. She’s leaving Wyoming behind in a cloud of dust:

“What’s remarkable is that in the face of almost certain defeat she’s never once wavered,” Republican Accountability Project Executive Director Sarah Longwell told RealClearPolitics. “We’ve been watching a national American figure be forged. It’s funny how small the election feels — the Wyoming election — because she feels bigger than it now.”

Earlier today Cheney said that this is “certainly the beginning of a battle that is going to continue to go on.” I have no doubt it will go on, but it’s certainly not the beginning.

Cheney was speaking just now and compared herself to Lincoln.

In closing:

This is the leading MAL-raid theory, shared by many

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “T J Olson” writes:

Federal defense attorney and aggressive Con Law advocate, Robert Barnes, has an unexpected take on the Deep State’s further engagement with ex-Prez Trump.

He believes that it wasn’t egregious overreaching. Instead, he argues that indications support his argument that Trump asked heads of Departments what documents they absolutely would not want to see declassified? (This has been mooted elsewhere.)

And then declassified them and secreted them away as insurance over the Deep State.

Thus, Barnes argues that the MAL raid was an aggressive attempt by the Deep State to regain possession of said documents from Trump and keep their wrongful heinous deeds hidden or simply destroyed outright.

The huge size and strategy of going in — hoping to be secretive and hoping that if discovered, it would redound against Trump, smacks of audacious desperation! In other words, incredibly risky.

Further, he thinks that an overly broad warrant is consistent with his theory.

He adds many details. I have to listen again to his development of his points, from around 20 to 60 minutes mark, in this recent interview hosted by Viva Frei.

I haven’t yet listened, although I plan to do so. Barnes is always interesting although I certainly don’t always agree with him, but I’ve found him to be best on this sort of thing: domestic legal matters of a political nature. What’s more, his explanation is actually one that I’ve seen espoused by quite a few other pundits, although the exact details might differ. In these scenarios, it is usually Russiagate that is the subject of the documents. But the basic idea is that Trump has documents that implicate the intelligence community in wrongdoing and they want to get them back and make sure they stay classified and hidden, as well as to discredit Trump and keep him from being elected again. It makes a lot of sense.

The thing is, just about anyone who’s going to believe that the intelligence community is implicated in wrongdoing towards Trump, based on such documents, almost certainly already knows it. After all, there’s been plenty of other evidence in that vein. And the vast majority of those who don’t realize it by now (or who applaud it) probably will never change their minds, no matter what evidence is presented.

Things have gotten very bad, and although I’ve been cynical about these things for a long time, I’ve only gotten more so. I’m sorry to say that and I hope my increased cynicism is not justified, but I fear it is.

[NOTE: If you want to become even more depressed about the state of the US, please read what Julie Kelly has to say. I believe she is correct.]

About those fourteen FBI whistleblowers

The New Neo Posted on by

Whistleblowers from the FBI have come forward recently:

“Fourteen FBI agents have come to our office as whistleblowers, and they are good people,” Jordan revealed to Fox News. “There are lots of good people in the FBI. It’s the top that is the problem.”…

“It’s becoming a well-worn trail of agents who say this has got to stop, and thank goodness for them and that the American people recognize it, and I believe they’re going to make a big change on November 8,” Jordan quipped Sunday, obviously referring to the 2022 midterm elections behind-the-shed ass-whoopin’ the Dems are expected to incur in 72 days (but who’s counting?).

I wouldn’t count those ass-whoopin’ chickens just yet. I expect a lot more effort from the left to try to make that result less likely. Whether their efforts will bear fruit or not I don’t know, but never never ever count the left out.

Back to the whistleblowers, though. Fourteen doesn’t seem like so many to me out of the many many thousands who work there. On the other hand, whistleblowing on such a corrupt and powerful institution can’t be undertaken lightly. But still, fourteen seems miniscule to me – and, unless they’re willing to come out of the closet, not all that meaningful except as a conduit of information to us on the right. To actually reform the FBI, or dissolve it, will take the right getting a great deal more power and demonstrating more boldness than it has up till now.

Then again, fourteen might be a high figure if the actual number of agents working on the suspect political cases is purposely being kept small, and especially if those agents are selected for their political sympathies with the left. If only the most loyal party members are chosen, you’d hardly expect any whistleblowers at all. But whatever the case, the ones who are coming forward so far had better blow those whistles a whole lot louder.

Fancy that: enough of the Gascon recall signatures have been invalidated to end the effort for now

The New Neo Posted on by

Not a surprise. I repeat: not a surprise.

I am always nervous about signature-gathering on important questions. For example, I learned long ago that in Obama’s very first political race, a Democratic primary, he managed the feat of disqualifying every single one of his opponents through signature challenges. It was one of the first things I noticed about his political modus operandi. It’s certainly legal, and particularly in Chicago I don’t think it’s that unusual, but the scope of what Obama did to his primary opponents (Democrats all) seemed larger and more organized. It also seemed at odds with his carefully cultivated nice-guy image. And of course one of the four people his legal efforts kicked off the ballot was his former mentor Alice Palmer. If you haven’t read the article at that link, please do.

Recently the same thing was done in Michigan to kick many of the Republican governor primary contestants off the ballot. As far as I know, it was not the left that initiated that one; it was some of the candidates on the right. However – and I keep meaning to write a “Part II” about this, but more pressing things have intervened – one of the reasons so many signatures were supposedly invalid is that the company hired to collect them was crooked. In addition, the method the state had of authenticating or de-authenticating the signatures involved taking a very small sample on each petition and then extrapolating the percentage of bad signatures on that sample to the whole. Although that’s an obvious time-and-effort saver, it seems to me it’s ripe for abuse or for error.

There has never been any allegation that the GOP candidates who had the fraudulent signatures knew about it, much less ordered it. But they are considered responsible anyway, even though everyone knows they’re not going to personally verify the signatures. Who in the campaign was in charge of doing that intermediate work and checking the names against the voter rolls? Whoever it was, that person or people slipped up.

But we don’t know how many fraudulent signatures there were, because no one ever went through that process. What actually happened (and the description is a bit murky, but I’m pretty sure this is correct) is that the Board of State Canvassers in Michigan checked some sheets of petitions and discovered a high rate of fraudulent signatures, and then extrapolated that number to the entire batch and to the other candidate who had used the same company and the same workers.

It was on the basis of that (which of course is nothing like the way fraud cases in the 2020 election were handled or every would be handled) that five of the GOP gubernatorial candidates were disqualified. And the process by which that occurred is interesting, as well. The Board of State Canvassers consists of two Republicans and two Democrats, and the vote on this was split along party lines, 2-2. But with a tie, the decision goes towards disqualification (which seems very odd indeed to me) because the rule is that the candidates must prove the signatures to be valid, and neither the Board nor the challengers need prove the requisite number of them to be invalid.

I find that rather stunning. But again, unsurprising.

Which brings us to the leftist Los Angeles Country DA George Gascon. Here’s what just happened with him:

Recall organizers needed to gather nearly 570,000 valid petition signatures to schedule an election. But county officials found only about 520,000 were valid, well below the threshold, after disqualifying nearly 200,000 signatures turned in.

That’s between a fifth and a quarter of the signatures. Interesting, no? And who were the “county officials” doing the checking? Why, look at this [emphasis mine]:

In July, the Los Angeles County registrar notified the Recall DA George Gascón campaign that a random sampling of signatures revealed a 22 percent rejection rate, 60 times more than the rejection rate for mail-in-ballots during the 2020 presidential election. In response, the recall campaign pushed the registrar to explain what they believed was a “shockingly large rejection rate.”

The campaign obtained public records that show the registrar’s office was training staff to review votes using outdated signature standards, which allow the disqualification of any signature for minor variations compared with the one provided on a person’s voter registration form. In a letter to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, lawyers for the campaign expressed concerns that these outdated standards were leading to an improperly high rejection rate.

Again, not a surprise. That’s the way power is wielded, and that’s the way the powerful stay in power if they’re willing to do whatever it takes.

More:

…Marian Thompson, the attorney who wrote the letter, told the Washington Free Beacon the county clerk has not been forthcoming about the reasons for the rejection rate and refuses to share the precise number of invalid signatures.

“If they didn’t follow the law and apply the same legal standards used for signature verification for vote-by-mail ballots, then we have a legal team assembled to resolve this matter in a court of law,” Thompson said.

No surprise here either. In fact, I’d be surprised were it otherwise:

The Washington Examiner reported the county has denied the Gascón recall campaign observation rights for the election’s signature count, further obfuscating the verification process.

I haven’t read anything that specifically addresses who the people supervising the counting are by party, but I think it’s a pretty safe guess that they are Democrats and not the least bit neutral in this matter.

[NOTE: This is only tangentially related, but it’s about the Lisa Murkowski campaign’s effort to change Alaska’s voting to rank-choice to help keep Murkowski in office.]

A blog glitch I’m going to be working to fix soon

The New Neo Posted on by

A couple of days ago the redirect command from my old blog stopped working. Ever since I started at this new URL a few years ago, I’ve had a redirect command put in that means that if anyone tries to go to my old blog, the redirect automatically sends them to this one instead. It’s worked perfectly for years. But now it’s on the fritz, so it has to be fixed. If any of you are still using the old blog URL and relying on the redirect, it’s probably a good idea to update to thenewneo.com . Sorry for any inconvenience.

Reading the Mar-A-Lago raid tea leaves: it’s the Netanyahu lawfare gambit

The New Neo Posted on by

Margot Cleveland speculates:

NONE of the three criminal statutes used to justify the search require materials to be “classified”…

Espionage Act’s plain language does not require material related to “national defense” to be classified. (Preliminary research confirms my reading but want to dig deeper).

Second criminal provision, also doesn’t distinguish between classified and unclassified.

Nor does the third. And IN FACT the third isn’t concerned about Trump’s possession of it, but his “destruction” of it…

…[I]t would seem that any document that WAS classified at some point between 2017-2021 would be definition be a Presidential Record, and viola a crime to keep.

And Nick Arama of RedState adds [emphasis mine]:

…[Trump] didn’t even remove the items — they were sent to him by the GSA. He likely didn’t even know what was there and was cooperating to give them anything they wanted. So it’s going to be hard to impute any kind of actions to him regarding removal. But the aim ultimately here might be to get an indictment and hang him up, even knowing they would likely lose.

I have no idea whether Cleveland’s speculations are correct, but they are certainly plausible. There is little question in my mind that they are willing to do virtually anything to stop Trump, and that they know they don’t need to make it fair because half the country thinks anything is justified in getting after that devil Trump.

And I bolded Arama’s final sentence there for a reason. Back in June I featured one of Caroline Glick’s articles comparing what was done to stop Netanyahu to what had been done to stop Trump. She didn’t foresee the Mar-A-Lago raid and the current renewed attempts to get Trump; she was focusing on what had already occurred, which was plenty. Here’s an excerpt from what Glick wrote about Russiagate:

One of the keys to understanding the Russiagate conspiracy is that it wasn’t only the FBI that operated as one with the Democratic Party. The media was also a full partner. It was a circular operation. Campaign operatives like Sussman farmed false allegations to the FBI to convince it to open investigations. Then they farmed the same fables to the Washington press corps and used the fact that the FBI was also looking into the allegations to convince the reporters to publish the allegations. They then used the media stories to persuade the FBI to keep investigating.

And again, the investigations went on and morphed into the Mueller probe and 24/7 media drumbeat of prejudicial leaks that paralyzed the Trump presidency. All along, all parties involved knew that the allegations against Trump and his advisers were false and originated from the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party.

It’s a good summary, but you already know those broad outlines. You may be less familiar with what happened to Netanyahu [emphasis mine]:

Netanyahu is standing trial for bribery and breach of trust. The “breach of trust” charge is a subjective catch-all concept that the prosecutors admit wouldn’t have sufficed on its own to bring Netanyahu to trial. The bribery charge was the key to Netanyahu’s political downfall.

Netanyahu’s trial opened last April. Last May he was ousted from office. To date, some 15 prosecution witnesses have taken the stand, and one by one, they have not merely demolished every aspect of the prosecution’s charges against Netanyahu, they have exposed the full partnership of police investigators and state prosecutions in their joint mission to “get Netanyahu,” that is, to oust him from power, at all costs.

To achieve their political goal, the police descended on Netanyahu’s advisers one by one, and gave them the treatment generally reserved for terrorists and violent criminals. They were dragged from their beds at dawn, in front of their families, and carted off to investigation rooms and flea-ridden jail cells. They were denied food. They were subjected to public humiliation in the media. Their electronic communications were illegally tapped. Their families were threatened. Their livelihoods were destroyed.

And the police didn’t let them go until they gave them something—anything—to incriminate the prime minister of Israel.

Since Netanyahu had committed no crime, then-Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit and State Attorney Shai Nitzan reinvented the bribery statute to claim that lawful actions Netanyahu did undertake were criminal.

Like every politician on the face of the planet, Netanyahu sought positive coverage from news organizations. The prosecution decided that this effort amounted to a solicitation of a bribe. Netanyahu signed regulatory decisions that affected a telecommunications firm owned by his friend. The prosecution decided this was a favor—a payment for positive coverage from his friend’s news website. Unfortunately for the prosecution, Netanyahu received terrible coverage from the website. But no matter, the prosecutors simply updated the definition of bribery. They said Netanyahu received “undo responsiveness” from the website’s management to his requests for better coverage, and that was now the definition of a bribe.

…They invented laws just for him. They defined politics and journalism as criminal enterprises to criminalize Netanyahu’s non-criminal actions—which, it turns out, he didn’t even take. They trampled the very notion of the rule of law in their “ends justify the mean” campaign to force Netanyahu from power.

…Just as was the case with Trump and the US media, so in Netanyahu’s case the Israeli media was a full partner in the plot to overthrow him. Throughout the two-year investigation, the media received a constant stream of illegal, and grossly distorted information from police interrogations which carefully selected reporters breathlessly reported daily on the evening news.

Israel’s prosecutors tied their actions to the elections calendar to tilt the results against Netanyahu. And they succeeded.

As I said, that was written in June. Since then, the trial against Netanyahu imploded – for now – and he may end up in power again after the next election.

I quoted liberally from Glick’s piece for reasons that I hope are obvious. The parallels are all too clear. When she wrote the piece, Russiagate was in the rearview mirror, and Trump had been ousted from office (and whether you think fraud may or may not have been involved in the results of the 2020 election that ousted him, it is unquestionable that Russiagate cost him many votes). Now, of course, the Biden administration’s DOJ and the aforementioned Trump-hating FBI are at it again, and this time they mean to do what was done to Netanyahu. They will use any convoluted and never-before-thought-of legal theory to trap him and make it impossible for him to win.

To do this, as Nick Arama points out, they don’t even need to a case that would ultimately hold up in court. He wrote, “the aim ultimately here might be to get an indictment and hang him up, even knowing they would likely lose.”

‘Tis enough, ’twill serve. And with the right (that is, left) judge and/or jury, they could even convict him of something and send him off to prison.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Some background on the Chautauqua Institution.

Also, here’s an interesting interview with Rushdie’s attacker’s mother [hat tip commenter “Miguel cervantes”].

(2) Al Franken, always making with the jokes:

(3) Exactly and precisely as expected, the FBI is warning us:

In the days since the warrant was executed, the FBI and DHS have seen an increase in “violent threats” against law enforcement, judiciary and government personnel, including a particular threat to “place a so-called Dirty Bomb in front of FBI headquarters,” according to the bulletin.

“General calls” for “civil war” and “armed rebellion” have also increased in recent days on social media.

The bulletin states that many of the threats include references to the claim that the 2020 election was stolen, in addition to other perceived claims of government overreach.

Perceived claims of government overreach. How far-fetched and deluded!

(4) If the name of the Inflation Reduction Act is “almost Orwellian,” what would it take for it to be actually Orwellian? An interrogation by O’Brien to go with it?

(5) Not your father’s Concorde, the newly-designed supersonic aircraft called Overture has some unusual features, including running on something called “Sustainable Aviation Fuel.” What is that?:

The fuel comprises different types of sustainable resources, such as used cooking oil and animal fat waste, to name a few.

More on SAF here – from the folks who produce it. It’s currently blended with regular jet fuel, and is (unsurprisingly) more expensive. A lot more information can be found here.

The story of my left eye – so far: Part VIII

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: [Part I can be found here.
Part II can be found here.
Part III can be found here.
Part IV can be found here.
Part V can be found here.
Part VI can be found here.
Part VII can be found here.]

I meant to include these pictures in my series of cataract surgery posts and forgot.

The first photo is a pretty close simulation of what I saw with my left eye at night around streetlights and car headlights prior to surgery. It’s also what I still see with each eye, although it’s considerably smaller now in my left eye than it was before the surgery.

“Halo” doesn’t begin to describe it, although that’s the usual term. This photo is the best approximation I’ve ever found of the gorgeous geometric pattern of little rainbow diamond shapes – thousands of them – that I see and saw. The phenomenon in my left eye prior to surgery was large and surrounded the lights about six feet out in all directions, and was far more precise, complex, and beautiful even than this photo. If I were a better artist I’d try to draw it, but even then I probably wouldn’t succeed. Now, as I said, it’s smaller in my left eye, and it’s of intermediate size in my right. If it weren’t so disruptive to night driving it would simply be amazingly and awesomely beautiful:

And the rays in this second picture are what I now see in my left eye around lights at night as a result of my surgery. They were not present before. I created this image at a site (see this; and by the way I had all the phenomena shown there except “trails”) that gives you tools to construct so-called “positive dysphotopsias” (see this article if you’re interested in learning more about the dysphotopsia phenomenon). This photo is very close to what I actually see around lights when I drive in the dark, combined with the rainbow halos. It’s still much better than my vision was at night before the surgery. The lights overwhelmed just about everything else back then, and of course the rest was blurry and lacked contrast. This is considerably easier to process out and focus on what I need to see instead:

I’ve been told if I want to have the right eye done, I might get more of these dysphotopsias in the right eye afterwards, but a silicon lens rather than an acrylic lens would probably be less likely to cause them. However, a silicon lens is a more old-fashioned type that can lead to other problems.

Right now I’m taking a break from the whole thing and enjoying the improvements, which are considerable. Scenery is sharp and beautiful, street signs are legible, it’s much easier to use my computer, and those signs in the supermarket that designate what’s in each aisle are quite readable. It remains amazing.