Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Reports are that Biden has yet to call Netanyahu to congratulate him on his victory. Not a surprise; the Biden group is probably very very sad that Bibi won.

(2) An anti-racist professor uses racial slurs to describe Herschel Walker. Another non-surprise: “Walker is ‘incompetent, subliterate and coonish,’ Professor Sundiata Cha-Jua, a history and African-American studies professor, wrote in The News-Gazette in his regular column on October 23.” Sundiata Cha-Jua is a man, by the way.

(3) If you want to know my take on why the Cheneys hate Trump so much, I explain it here, with links.

(4) Here we go again:

(5) Another example of the lack of accountability for New York City’s habitual criminals.

Biden’s Orwellian speech: all hail democracy!

The New Neo Posted on by

I have to say that this relentless emphasis makes me nervous:

I don’t just mean all the January 6th hype, or the “save democracy” stuff. It’s the preemptive election denial on the part of Democrats, which makes me think that after all their shrieking about the horrors and threat of “election denial,” they are stirring up their own troops to riot and form another “resistance” if the GOP wins in the midterms. I think that’s likely to happen anyway if the Republicans take over Congress, even without the stirring up, but the extra effort is extremely chilling.

Or, alternatively, the Democrats feel they have this election in the bag despite the polls that say Republicans are way ahead, and that confidence may come from the Democrats’ belief that they can engineer enough fraud to make up the difference.

Either way, it’s a bad deal.

Here’s the transcript of Biden’s speech:

You know, American democracy is under attack because the defeated former President of the United States refuses to accept the results of the 2020 election. He refuses to accept the will of the people. He refuses to accept the fact that he lost.

Like the Democrats in 2016. And they did something about it: Russiagate, for starters. But they are the big defenders of democracy, according to Biden.

More:

The great irony about the 2020 election is it’s the most attacked election in our history. And yet — and yet, there is no election in our history that we can be more certain of its results.

Every legal challenge that could have been brought was brought. Every recount that could have been undertaken was undertaken. Every recount confirmed the results.

Wherever fact or evidence have been demanded, the Big Lie has been proven to be just that, a big lie, every single time.

Speaking of great ironies and Big Lies, that’s what Biden is dishing out there. No court ever evaluated the voting because it was impossible to do so once mail-in ballots were removed from envelopes. It could not possibly have been proven that fraud upended the election results; that was a consequence of the rules changes. The court cases Biden referenced almost all were decided on mootness or laches or lack of standing rather than the merits. Recounts had little to nothing to do with the actual allegations and could not have been the answer.

Biden went on:

That means denying your right to vote and deciding whether your vote even counts.

Is that not preemptive election denial on the part of Biden?

Instead of waiting until an election is over, they’re starting well before it. They are starting now.

Who is this “they”? Sounds like it’s you, Biden.

We can’t ignore the impact this is having on our country. It’s damaging, it’s corrosive, and it’s destructive.

Isn’t he talking about his own speech?

Autocracy is the opposite of democracy. It means the rule of one: one person, one interest, one ideology, one party.

Biden and the Democrats are de-legitimizing – or trying to de-legitimize – the right, half the country, and attempting to set up one interest, one ideology, one party: theirs. Otherwise, democracy will die if those nefarious Republicans are elected:

This is the struggle we’re now in: a struggle for democracy, a struggle for decency and dignity, a struggle for prosperity and progress, a struggle for the very soul of America itself.

Make no mistake — democracy is on the ballot for us all.

I don’t doubt it – but not in the way Biden says. For example, if the Democrats were to hold on to the House, and to gain a few more seats in the Senate, we would see them muscling through with tiny majorities enormously radical “reforms” that the narrowness of their margins didn’t allow them to pass during the last two years: an end to the filibuster, the entrance of new mega-blue states such as DC, and HR1 which would forbid states from legislating their own laws to prevent voting fraud. These are very very specific threats – and the latter one is a threat to the republic – in other words, the rights of states vis a vis the federal government.

Notice how Biden continually speaks of democracy, democracy, democracy. The word occurs 38 times in the speech. But the word “republic” only occurs once, in this part: “We, the people, must decide whether we’re going to sustain a republic where reality is accepted, the law is obeyed, and your vote is truly sacred.” And even that single use of the word “republic” seems rather arbitrary, because none of those things has to do with the characteristics of a republic as opposed to a democracy.

[NOTE: A great deal of Biden’s speech was also taken up in condemning political violence, but acting as though it only comes from the right.]

Is it possible that Bob Dylan has never heard of Tom Lehrer?

The New Neo Posted on by

I once read that people either love Bob Dylan or hate him (kind of like pecan pie, only different). If that really is a Bob Dylan rule, then I’m an exception to it because I kind of like him, or at least I like some of his stuff but not to an extraordinary degree. I also think he’s a pretty good lyricist, but not all that special and definitely not a prizeworthy poet.

Now that that’s out of the way, today I noticed this quote at Althouse. It’s from a book Dylan wrote entitled The Philosophy of Modern Song:

For the most part, people are not going to like war, starvation, death, prejudice and the destruction of the environment. Then there’s the trap of easy rhymes. Revolution/evolution/air pollution. Segregation/demonstration. John Lennon got away with it by using his cheeky sense of humor to create a postmodern campfire song all about bag-ism and shag-ism. But in less sure hands one might as well write about the periodic table of elements with built-in rhymes about calcium, chromium and lithium.”

I don’t have the book and I certainly don’t plan to read it, but is it possible Dylan is unfamiliar with the work of that great satiric lyricist, Tom Lehrer? His hands certainly weren’t “less sure” and he certainly had a “cheeky sense of humor” – I’d say significantly “cheekier” than John Lennon. Also, he wrote lyrics about the periodic table of elements, set to a well-known Gilbert and Sullivan tune. Here he is, proving he can still do it live in 1967:

I was raised on Lehrer, and still know pretty much his entire oeuvre. He often wrote his own tunes, but with Lehrer the lyrics were definitely the thing, and he rarely fell into the trap of “easy rhymes” unless he did it deliberately, which he did on occasion. I think the following is his most impressive rhyming sequence, but there are a lot of them from which to choose. This song is a sort of wicked riff on the theme of Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.” Here’s the extended rhyming passage I’m talking about:

In the comments at YouTube, someone writes of Lehrer, “He sometimes said after doing this one ‘I wrote that song when I was 21, and it doesn’t seem so funny anymore.'”

Noted presidential historian Michael Beschloss has an alarmist prediction to make

The New Neo Posted on by

First, a little background on Beschloss. Nine books on the presidency. Graduate of Phillips Andover, Williams, and Harvard. He’s not a product of today’s “woke” education, either: he’s 66 years old. And yet this is the same man who said this right at the beginning of the Obama administration:

Another man entranced by Obama’s pants crease?

Fast forward to Beschloss speaking yesterday on MSNBC:

“[S]ix nights from now, we could all be discussing violence all over this country. There’s signs that may happen, may God forbid, that losers will be declared winners by fraudulent election officers, or secretary of state candidates, or governors, or state legislatures…

Another pre-emptive “election denier”? Beschloss is on the left, not the right, and he seems to be saying a version of “if Republicans win it’s because they commit fraud.” And this, despite the polls showing the GOP candidates ahead.

Next:

We could be six days away from losing our rule of law, and losing a situation where we have elections that we all can rely on. You know, those are the foundation stones of a democracy.

How many people already don’t think elections can be relied on? And many of them are Democrats. I would say, from his remarks, that Beschloss is indicating that he doesn’t think elections can be relied on – that is, unless the Democrats win despite the polls saying otherwise.

Then:

Joe Biden is saying the same thing tonight, and a historian 50 years from now – if historians are allowed to write in this country and if they are still free publishing houses and a free press – which I’m not certain of – but if that is true, a historian will say what was at stake tonight and this week was the fact whether we will be a democracy in the future, whether our children will be arrested and conceivably killed.

As Mary Chastain writes at Legal Insurrection:

I’m shocked he didn’t say the GOP will also eat them as the parents watch. Or go all Titus Andronicus and feed the kids in a pie to their parents.

Presidential historian. This is the sort of person who writes the histories so far. Some are saying he’s gone mad, but I don’t see him as deranged at all. I see attitudes such as his quite often in people who otherwise seem quite sane, a huge pocket of over-the-top terror at the prospect of the GOP taking power, which seems to be based on nothing more than years and years and years of listening to lies and inflammatory rhetoric from the left, and believing it. I think Beschloss is actually afraid and is afraid that enough Americans don’t share his fear.

But there’s more to it than that with Beschloss. I became curious about his background, and I found this article from 2012, about his father Morris Beschloss (who appears to still be alive ten years later; at any rate, I can’t find an obituary for him):

Morris Beschloss, a longtime resident of Southern California’s Coachella Valley, is a conservative economic and political expert who at 82 writes a regular column for the Desert Sun newspaper, blogs on the paper’s website, and hosts his own television show, The World Report, on the Time Warner network.

In 1939, at the age of 9, Beschloss, a German Jew, escaped Nazi Germany with his mother and older brother. His grandmother refused to leave, and several years later she became one of the six million Jews murdered at the hands of Hitler and the Nazi regime.

Morrie, as friends call him, spoke to me about his only son, Michael Beschloss. He is the Harvard educated, NBC News Presidential Historian. As the Presidential Historian, the younger Beschloss holds himself out as an unbiased, apolitical analyst of all things Presidential. Long ago, a political wedge was driven between the two, with Michael Beschloss strongly objecting to his father’s conservative politics.

Another family rift over politics.

If you’re wondering what’s wrong with Beschloss the younger, this is what his father said in 2012:

“Once you’re in bed with the devil, you begin to spout the devil’s bullshit,” he explained, when referring to what he calls NBC’s overtly liberal bias.

It seems about as good an explanation as any. But there’s more there from Morris Beschloss on his son’s wife and her leftist affiliations, as well as George Soros, whom he detests and in 2012 labeled “the most dangerous man in America.”

Michael Beschloss’ wife is Afsaneh Mashayekhi Beschloss, whose parents were refugees from the ayatollahs of Iran after the revolution there. My guess is that she has a similar beef with her parents as her husband has with his own father. The first generation has one experience and the second another, and experience is non-transferable.

The Katie Hobbs office break-in: accusations versus reality

The New Neo Posted on by

This is how it went.

First, the campaign office of Katie Hobbs, fading Democratic candidate for governor of Arizona, was burglarized on October 24.

Next, Katie’s campaign manager accused her opponent Kari Lake of somehow being responsible:

Let’s be clear: For nearly two years, Kari Lake and her allies have been spreading dangerous misinformation and inciting threats against anyone they see fit. The threats against Arizonans attempting to exercise their constitutional rights and their attacks on elected officials are the direct result of a concerted campaign of lies and intimidation,” Hobbs campaign manager Nicole DeMont said at the time.

Now the police have announced an arrest. And guess what, it’s not Kari Lake they arrested, it’s this guy:

The suspect who was arrested in the alleged burglary of Arizona Democratic gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs’ campaign office is an illegal immigrant from Portugal who is wanted by immigration authorities.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed to Fox News that 36-year-old Daniel Mota Dos Reis is a citizen of Portugal who came to the United States as a registered student in 2018 and is now violating “the terms of his admission.” …

Investigators named Mota as a suspect after a patrol officer saw a news story Oct. 26 featuring surveillance video from the crime scene. The officer recognized a man in the video as a suspect who was arrested earlier for another unrelated commercial burglary, police said.

The suspect, Mota, was in jail but was scheduled to be released. Authorities said the officer contacted the jail and was able to re-arrest Mota, who is charged with one count of third-degree burglary for the campaign headquarters break-in on Oct. 24.

I’m sure he’s a Kari Lake fan and hangs on her every word. And I’m sure you’ll be hearing an apology from Katie Hobbs or her campaign manager very very soon – right? Right?

Lest you think that Hobbs is a stranger to responsibility or to politics, she is the present Arizona Secretary of State. Let that sink in. She is also the former Minority Leader of the Arizona Senate. This is not her first rodeo.

Open thread 11/3/22

The New Neo Posted on by

Although they’re dancing together, the style is what Hines and not Baryshnikov specialized in. It’s hard to change styles, and Baryshnikov does a good job for a ballet dancer. But you can easily see the difference in training and approach. Going the other way – tap dancer to ballet dancer – is virtually impossible, except for someone like Tommy Rall who was highly trained and phenomenal in both styles (I’ve featured him here).

The origins of the word “disinformation”

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s such a popular word these days, isn’t it?

Ever wonder where it came from?:

“Disinformation” is not a word from the English language. It is a direct translation of the Russian word dezinformatsiya. It is a KGB form of tradecraft from the Red Banner Institute of the KGB First Chief Directorate, otherwise known as the KGB foreign spy academy.

Disinformation is definition 159 in the KGB’s “Lexicon of KGB Terms,” published internally by the Soviet foreign intelligence service before 1984. Here it is: “Misleading by means of false information; A form of intelligence work in the Active Measures field, which consists of the secret channeling towards an adversary of false information, especially prepared materials and fabricated documents designed to mislead him and prompt him to take decisions and measures which fit with the plans and intentions of the Intelligence Service.”…

“Misinformation,” of course, isn’t the same as disinformation. It is a mis-statement, or the inadvertent or careless spreading of inaccuracies or untruths, without malign intent. Yet Mayorkas and others have used the two terms interchangeably. So have many public “experts.”…

…DHS re-defined disinformation, sanitized the term of its KGB roots, and expanded the definition by removing the foreign element and applying the label to First Amendment-protected political discourse.

That article was written around the time of the governmental disinformation board. Remember that? There was such a backlash that it was disbanded after a few months. But the campaign against what is labeled by the government and the left (redundant, I know) as “disinformation” goes on, spearheaded by the MSM and social media.

And the war against the war against “disinformation” is ongoing.

Israeli election: Netanyahu seems about to return to power

The New Neo Posted on by

Most of the votes in the Israeli election have been counted, and it’s looking good for Netanyahu:

looked set to return to power on Wednesday after an unprecedented fifth general election in less than four years on Tuesday gave his Likud Party, and others loyal to him, a narrow majority in the country’s parliament, the Knesset.

A victory for the longest-serving Israeli leader, who was ousted to the opposition more than a year ago, means he will now be able to form a stable and ideologically aligned coalition, which critics are already calling the most right-wing government in Israel’s 74-year history. With over ninety percent of the votes counted it looks like the Likud leader will be asked to form the next government.

In his celebratory speech as the results became clearer, Netanyahu thanked those who supported him and called the win a “massive vote of confidence from the Israeli public.” He also declared he would form a coalition with the “national camp,” a collection of controversial right-wing religious and ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties that have committed to join him in forming a strong and stable government.

That Fox article I linked also mentioned Netanyahu’s legal struggles, but only way down in the article and quite briefly. But those legal difficulties actually were instrumental in causing his defeat by his predecessors, who also tricked those who voted for them by forming a coalition with groups with which they had promised not to ally. The corruption case against Netanyahu, not described in detail, was a lawfare hit job by his enemies and so far has gone nowhere when finally tested in court, as described by Caroline Glick in this article from last May:

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.

The whole thing is worth reading.

I read a number of other articles about the Israeli election and Netanyahu’s victory, and most omitted any mention of lawfare and why he lost power last time. Also, good old Google prioritized coverage from the left, and plenty of it. For example, the Guardian’s headline reads “Election result marks dangerous new turn in Israel’s rightward shift.” Oh ye self-styled guardians, “dangerous” to whom? To Israel’s enemies? The article goes on to detail the more extreme views of Netanyahu’s allies, and they are indeed extreme. But later, it mentions that Netanyahu doesn’t share these views. He’s a pretty strong personality and my guess is that he will continue the sort of thing that he’s done in the past and will not suddenly veer to the far far religious right.

Like Biden, Trump, and Lula, Netanyahu is no spring chicken: he’s 73. However, his mind is sharp, unlike the first man on that list. At some point, though, Netanyahu’s dominance of Israeli politics must end. But not now – unless one of those bizarre and tricky moves for which Israeli parliamentary politics is famous takes place.

Emily “Litella” Oster in The Atlantic: let’s have a COVID amnesty

The New Neo Posted on by

Let’s just forget about all that lockdown stuff Democrats pushed and pushed and pushed, that was so damaging to society and in particular to kids, writes Emily Oster.

Like another Emily:

From the article:

These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.

Who is this “we”? Medical authorities knew it was based on sheer speculation.

There was a strong and consistent choice to scare the public, and much of the information was very poorly substantiated. I’m talking about this sort of thing, or the matters discussed in this July 2021 post of mine, or this sort of thing, or this post of mine from way back in April of 2020.

From the article:

To take an example close to my own work, there is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high. The latest figures on learning loss are alarming. But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information.

That’s just plain wrong. Right from the very start, we had plenty of information that indicated that children were not succumbing to COVID nor were they a big vector for spreading it. Vaccines came into play relatively early on for the adults, and yet in many places schools stayed closed or partially closed. We had data from states that opened schools early, and the news was good.

Not only that, but we who were giving out warnings that the reaction was overdone might be more inclined to forgive and forget except for one thing: naysayers to the lockdowns and all the rest, as well as the unvaccinated, were demonized unmercifully by the left. No “amnesty” for them. Why should they forgive those who did it?

Because there’s an election coming up that Democrats might lose?