How can Fetterman be leading in the polls?

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “huxley” points out the strangeness of John Fetterman, the Democratic candidate for the Senate from Pennsylvania, and asks a question:

Then there’s this Fetterman character running for the US Senate in Pennsylvania who looks and dresses like a tattooed reboot of Lex Luthor, Superman’s arch-nemesis in DC Comics.

Fetterman has had a stroke, which seems to have left him with a large mysterious lump on his neck (usually concealed by his hoodie) and damaged his brain. When asked how he was doing in an interview, he responded bizarrely..

Yet Fetterman has been leading in the polls over his Republican opponent. The race has tightened, but this Fetterman could shortly become a new member of the US Senate.

How does this happen?

It’s an excellent question, and I’ll take a stab at an answer.

The first possibility is that the polls are wrong and that Dr. Oz, Fetterman’s Republican opponent, is actually ahead. But there’s an excellent chance that’s not the case, so let’s put that one aside.

Next, there’s probably a solid core of Pennsylvania voters – perhaps a quarter or a third, although that’s just a guess – who are hard leftists and cultural warriors who love both Fetterman’s look and his politics.

Then we have the sizable portion of the electorate who are what used to be called “yellow dog Democrats,” people who would vote for a yellow dog if it had the label “Democrat” next to it.

We also have low information voters who are not paying attention, and some of them are reliable Democrat voters as well. In addition, Fetterman has taken a leaf out of the Joe Biden campaign book in 2020, and to a certain extent has kept a rather low profile with the help of an enabling MSM. For example, there has been no debate, and Fetterman has only agreed to one debate (as opposed the usual two in Pennsylvania) late in the game (October 25, after considerable early voting will have occurred) with special accommodations:

He has done just a handful of media interviews and no press conferences since the stroke and has used closed-captioning in video interviews with reporters.

Lastly, Fetterman’s opponent Dr. Oz isn’t a traditional conservative and many people on the right aren’t enthusiastic about him.

The combination of all those factors could account for Fetterman’s lead in the polls.

Open thread 10/3/22

The New Neo Posted on by

I find this dance style strange yet rather hypnotic. It’s similar to certain other ethnic dance traditions in that it features a fairly rigid upper body with movement centered in the legs and feet. But in this case, the women glide along almost always on or near what’s called 3/4 pointe – that is, up on the balls of their feet. Women can do that for a long time with the support of high heels, but these women are doing it without high heels. In this clip they only put their heels down for short periods, and not at all often. I keep thinking they need to give their weary calves more of a rest by coming down and doing a plié (knee bend with heels on floor) now and then, as ballet dancers usually do:

Love before first sight: Felice and Boudleaux Bryant

The New Neo Posted on by

Being an Everly Brothers fan even as a child and seeing these two names – Felice and Boudleaux Bryant – on so many of their songs, I wondered about them for a long time. Who were they? It’s quite a story:

Boudleaux Bryant was born in Shellman, Georgia, in 1920 and attended local schools as a child. He trained as a classical violinist. Although he performed with the Atlanta Philharmonic Orchestra during its 1937–38 season, he had more interest in country fiddling. Bryant joined Hank Penny and his Radio Cowboys, an Atlanta-based western music band.

In 1945, Bryant met Matilda Genevieve Scaduto (whom he called Felice) when he performed at a hotel in her hometown of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She was born in the city in 1925 to an ethnic Sicilian family, and had written lyrics set to traditional Italian tunes. During World War II, she sang and directed shows at the local USO.

Bryant and Scaduto eloped five days after meeting. Boudleaux’s song “All I Have to Do Is Dream” is “autobiographical” for Felice. She was working as an elevator operator at the Schroeder Hotel when she saw Bryant. She has said that she “recognized” him immediately; she had seen his face in a dream when she was eight years old, and had “looked for him forever.” She was 19 when they met.

Now, that’s a romantic story. It’s even more astounding than that, though:

Felice (which was Boudleaux’s pet name for his wife) believed that the couple’s meeting was fate. “I had dreamed of Boudleaux when I was 8 years old,” she said. “When this man was walking toward me in the hotel I recognized him right away. The only thing that was wrong was that he didn’t have a beard. Although he grew one for me later. In the dream we were dancing to our song. Only it was our song.”

In other words, part of the dream seems to have been that they would write songs together.

More:

In the early years of their marriage, the couple settled in Moultrie, Ga. Boudleaux continued to work as a musician and a mechanic, while his wife started dabbling in songwriting. “I always wrote,” Felice said. “I wrote letters and poetry that I would tear up so that they couldn’t be found. I wrote all the time, even if I was only doodling. I had to have someone to talk to, so I talked to myself. I don’t read music. I don’t play an instrument. The words themselves will have a musical value. That’s how I can compose a melody. Then Boudleaux will write the music down, or I’ll turn on the tape machine.”

“We started writing for the hell of it, for fun,” Boudleaux said. “And after about 80 songs we thought, this looks like it could be a good thing. But we originally wrote them for our own amusement, and we’d show them to our friends.”

After months of writing letters to everyone he knew—and didn’t know—in the music business, Boudleaux placed a song called “Country Boy” with Grand Ole Opry singer Little Jimmy Dickens. The song went to No. 7 on the charts in 1949, and by the next year, the Bryants had upped stakes to Nashville…

“At the time, in the field that we flopped into, the artists wrote and performed all of their own material,” Felice recalled. “Then, after a while, the road got to them. They couldn’t think, they couldn’t doodle around on the front porch with a guitar, they couldn’t stroll through the woods and get inspired. So Boudleaux and I were the first people who came to Nashville who didn’t do anything but write. We were the factory.”

It can be difficult to predict which songs will be hits, even for people in the business:

The Bryants’ biggest song of all was one that had been turned down by everyone in the business. “‘Bye Bye Love’ was shown over 30 times before it was ever cut,” Boudleaux recalled. “It was even shown the very morning of the same day the Everly Brothers heard it in the afternoon. When it was turned down, the fella said, ‘Why don’t you show me a good strong song?’ So nobody really knows what a good song is.”…

Of their success, Boudleaux once said, “Unless one feels driven to compose and at the same time has all the instincts of a Mississippi riverboat gambler, he should never seek songwriting as a profession. Unless you know in your heart that you’re great, feel in your bones that you’re lucky and think in your soul that God just might let you get away with it, pick something more certain, like chasing the white whale or eradicating the common housefly. We didn’t have the benefit of such sage advice. Now it’s too late to back up. We made it. Sometimes it pays to be ignorant.”

Do you believe the story of their meeting? I do – perhaps because I have an ever-so-slightly similar story. When I was fourteen and attending an arts camp, I took a drawing and painting class and at one point was required to do a charcoal drawing of something I imagined. I drew a young man’s face; it wasn’t someone I’d ever seen before. I liked it well enough to save it. Seven years later, I met my husband-to-be, who looked very much like that drawing.

We certainly never wrote songs, though, together or separately. I’m in awe of people who can do that.

Weighing evil: Soviets and Nazis

The New Neo Posted on by

Some years ago I read Martin Amis’ book entitled Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, which deals with Stalin. At one point (I noted at the time that it was on pages 82-86, although I no longer have the book with me to check), Amis tried to differentiate between the evil done by the Nazis and the Soviets, and offered a reason why so many Western intellectuals sympathized with and/or excused the latter and not the former.

I agree with Amis’s conclusion that for those intellectuals it was not based on the violence or the amount of violence perpetrated by either, but on the differences between the stated ideologies used to justify that violence, which of course in the case of the Soviets become a travesty in operation but sounded superficially “good”—the equality and fraternity of humankind. The Nazis made no pretense of advocating those things. This is a very important distinction that I believe explains a great deal. The left is seduced by the facade of the stated intention and can ignore and/or justify or at least partially excuse the rest because of it.

Here’s Amis, quoting someone named Fige (about whom neither my ancient notes nor Google gives a clue):

…[T]he Russian revolution launched “an experiment which the human race was bound to make at some point in its evolution, the logical conclusion of humanity’s historic striving for social justice and comradeship.

I’m not sure I agree that it was inevitable, but I tend to think so. However, I agree that a Soviet experiment seems more inevitable as the end product of a long train of thought than does Nazism, which seems more random and eccentric (although if you look just at the long-lived phenomenon of anti-Semitism, you might say that Nazism launched an experiment which the human race was bound to make at some point in its [d]evolution, the logical conclusion of virulent anti-Semitism).

Also from Amis:

Nobody can be “against” the Just city. This is among the reasons people feel entitled to kill people who get in the way of it.

Another observation from the book:

Nazism did not destroy civil society. Bolshevism did destroy civil society. This is one of the reasons for the “miracle” of German recovery, and for the continuation of Russian vulnerability and failure.

Not so sure about that, either, because Germany was different in what psychologists might call its premorbid personality. Russia was in a worse state even before the horror that was the Soviet Union.

And perhaps we should conclude with this, from that supposedly kinder, gentler Trotsky (who was neither):

We must rid ourselves once and for all of the Quaker-Papist babble about the sanctity of human life.

What a guy. Is it any wonder the whole thing turned out the way it did?

More here from Trotsky:

The road to socialism lies through a period of the highest possible intensification of the principle of the state.” Just as a lamp, before going out, shoots up in a brilliant flame, so the state, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the most ruthless form of state, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction…

One can’t help but see the embrace and love of violence and power for its own sake, “justified” by a fantasy-ridden and unproven theory.

He knew exactly and precisely what lay ahead and embraced it:

In not more than a month’s time terror will assume very violent forms, after the example of the great French Revolution; the guillotine… will be ready for our enemies… that remarkable invention of the French Revolution which makes man shorter by a head.

Putin annexes four Ukrainian oblasts

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m only surprised that Putin didn’t do this earlier:

Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin formally accomplished what has been telegraphed for a few weeks, the annexation of four Ukrainian oblasts (provinces). Before a crowd of what passes for dignitaries in Russia, Putin announced that Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson were a part of Russia in perpetuity and not subject to negotiation.

Two of the oblasts, Luhansk and Donetsk, have been under partial Russian occupation since 2014 and were recognized as independent states by Putin in February (see Putin Gives a Bonkers Speech on Ukraine, Drops the Last Puzzle Piece in Place for War). Zaporizhzhia and Kherson were overrun during the Russian invasion that started on February 24. Putin recognized their independence yesterday.

The annexation was preceded by a pro forma “referendum” that produced a 95+% vote for joining Russia…

It marks a point where a negotiated peace is no longer possible unless another Russian stooge becomes president of Ukraine or Putin is removed from office.

But ever since Putin invaded Ukraine and the Ukrainians resisted with some success, I think it’s been apparent that a negotiated peace was impossible. Perhaps this latest move makes it even more impossible, but impossible is already impossible.

There’s also a lot of speculation that this annexation means Putin will use it to justify the use of nuclear weapons by Russia in Ukraine; now he will say it’s necessary as a defense of Russian territory. But Putin’s been threatening to use nuclear weapons ever since the start of the war, and has found various supposed justifications already. No one will suddenly buy this newsest justification for nuclear weapons’ use who didn’t already buy the previous ones. Actually, to a large extant I think it was always the case that Putin will do what Putin will do – including perhaps the use of nuclear weapons if Putin thinks such an act necessary or justified.

As for the plebiscite, as commenter “Turtler” writes (more at the link):

Firstly, [the plebiscite] was nakedly illegitimate due to being conducted during a time of war, under occupation by a foreign force…

And this is before I get into the utter lack of accountability and transparency, which in many ways make clearcut cases of fraud in places like Baltimore seem quaint.

Secondly: it is also telling that Zelenskyy actually offered a plebiscite for the Donbas to be conducted as a means toward ending the war. Which indeed led to a fair amount of complaining from Ukrainian hawks, as you can see here in this English language Ukraine-focused Soros front.

But this was contingent on a mutual demilitarization of the Donbas and internationally observed votes.

Which the Kremlin never deigned to respond to. Precisely because it was not interested in an honest poll of who wanted to stay in Ukraine and who wanted to join the Rodina.

Also, the following may be a significant element of Putin’s motive for the annexation:

In the near term, Putin has opened a new manpower reserve. As the theater of operations is now, at least in Russian “law,” within Russia, the conscripts who were blocked from taking part in the “Special Military Operation” are now available for service in Ukraine. The men of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia are subject to mobilization, and the Russians sent that message today by killing a large number of civilians attempting to flee from Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia to Ukraine in a clearly designated humanitarian convoy.

Remember when even a divorce could hurt a politician’s chances of being elected?

The New Neo Posted on by

It wasn’t even all that long ago, either.

Now we have this brave new world:

A local Georgia lawmaker has come out as nonmonogamous and revealed plans to start a family with her two female partners, declaring, “I’m in love with two wonderful people.”

Atlanta City Council member Liliana Bakhtiari, who became the first gay Muslim elected official in the state when she was voted in last year, disclosed her relationship status in an interview with NBC News on Wednesday.

In the intersectional sweepstakes, I think Bakhtiari just may have won one of the grand prizes.

When is a democratic election not a democratic election?

The New Neo Posted on by

When Democrats don’t like the results.

I guess Biden isn’t worried about upsetting our supposed ally Italy, either – see this recent Biden speech (which, by the way, also features a repeat of the Charlottesville “fine people” accusation, one of Biden’s favorite attacks on Trump, as well as this other favorite of Biden’s about January 6th, “ultimately several police officers dying as a consequence”).

Here’s the portion of the speech referring to Meloni’s election, democracy, and Xi:

Well, folks, you know — and I mean this sincerely; you’re going to think this is a little out of whack what I’m going to talk about — but, you know, democracy is at stake. Literally, there’s a — there’s a case being made around the world, not just here, because democracy and autocracy. And there’s an awful lot of folks who believe that democracies can’t be sustained in the 21st century because there’s — problems are so — so much is changing in science and technology, the environment, a whole range of things, that it’s awful hard to reach a consensus in the short amount of time you have to reach.

And so that’s why I have these constant arguments. So I’ve had — I’ve met with Xi Jinping over 78 hours, 68 of which are in person, over the last 10 years. And he makes the case straight up that democracies can’t be sustained in the 21st century.

You just saw what’s happened in Italy in that election. You’re seeing what’s happening around the world. And the reason I bother to say that is we can’t be sanguine about what’s happening here either. I don’t want to exaggerate it, but I don’t want to understate it. And it’s the reason why I’m so concerned about and so interested in and so committed to seeing that the governors — Democratic governors are elected. Because, literally, the outcome of an election is going to be determined by how well the governors run their states, who’s in charge at the time, whether or not things are going to be — how we count the votes, whether or not it’s transparent, and a whole range of things.

A whole range of things, indeed – including “how we count the votes.”

FBI whistleblowers report an ideological purge

The New Neo Posted on by

Jim Jordan says that FBI whistleblowers are saying the FBI is conducting a political/ideological purge of the conservatives in its ranks:

“During the course of this investigation, we have received protected whistleblower disclosures that the FBI is engaging in a ‘purge’ of employees with conservative views by revoking their security clearances and indefinitely suspending these employees,” Jordan wrote, noting that “many of the formal notices” for those personnel actions had been signed by Moore [assistant director of the Human Resources branch].

Jordan also wrote that he has information suggesting Moore has “retaliated against at least one whistleblower who has made protected disclosures to Congress.”…

Jordan said that under Title 5 of the United States Code, once a whistleblower makes a protected disclosure, an agency is prohibited from retaliating against the employee for that disclosure by taking or failing to take a personnel action.

Jordan said that “the law is clear.”

The FBI of course has denied the charges.

What will Jordan and company be able to do about this? Nothing at the moment; they’re not in power:

“All we can do is highlight it, and if we get the majority, we’re going to do more investigations, where we can actually subpoena people to do depositions,” Jordan said, adding that he is sending letters to FBI officials now to let them know to “preserve documents, preserve information.”

He added: “If in fact the American people put us in charge, we’re going to want access to the information.”

If Republicans end up “in charge” of Congress, they will hold hearings. But what effect can that have, when the DOJ and much of the judicial system – in particular, in Washington DC, where legal action and remedies would often be sought – have already undergone their own ideological purges?

Voters on the right often say that the Congressional GOP has no real interest in changing things, no fighting spirit. I agree that’s true of some. But certainly not all. And even if more and more Republicans are actually determined to change things, undoing the institutions’ strongly leftist ideological makeup is an extremely formidable task.

Obama the racial healer

The New Neo Posted on by

President Obama could really have been a positive and healing force in America, and he presented himself that way. Some people even believed that he fit that description, and continue to believe it.

They weren’t paying attention then and they’re not paying attention now.

One of the earliest things I noticed about Obama during his 2008 campaign was the way he called Republicans racists. The accusation had a regretful tone, as if he really didn’t want to have to say these things about what bigots Republicans are but circumstances forced him to do so. He played this theme early and often. My first post on the subject was in June of 2008:

Barack Obama, the candidate who wants to end divisiveness, and who wants to run a clean and honorable campaign without negativity, said the following in a recent campaign speech at a Florida fund-raising reception:

“It is going to be very difficult for Republicans to run on their stewardship of the economy or their outstanding foreign policy. We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”

We have here a truly masterful attempt to flames of paranoia on the part of his followers and adopt the mantle of victimization for himself, thus raising rather than lowering the amount of divisiveness and vitriol in the campaign. Pretty good for just a couple of sentences.

Obama is correct in saying that there have been racist remarks against him. These have originated from fringe elements and/or commenters in the blogosphere and/or anonymous email campaigns. They focus on his “funny name,” for example, or the fact that he’s black.

But in this speech he appears to attribute—or to encourage his supporters to attribute—these charges to the entire Republican Party, couched as a threatening “they.” At the same time, he fails to differentiate these attacks—and actually connects them as part of an undifferentiated list—from extremely legitimate concerns that people have voiced about other characteristics of his, such as his inexperience.

In the final sentence of the paragraph he slyly encourages a phenomenon I’ve noticed happening more and more: the charge that any criticism of Obama emanates from racism.

I wrote a second post on the subject about a month later because I noticed Obama continuing in the same vein:

The Obama camp says the McCain campaign is wrong to accuse him of playing the race card in the following remarks Obama made while addressing a crowd in Missouri yesterday:

“Nobody thinks that Bush and McCain have a real answer to the challenges we face. So what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, ‘he’s not patriotic enough, he’s got a funny name,’ you know, ‘he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.’”

Yeah. You know.

It’s not that Obama can cite anyone officially connected to the McCain campaign actually making such a statement. Apparently. Obama doesn’t need to back up his accusation; it’s just a prediction, you see. He just needs to say that they will—and some people will nod sagely, just as some people consider any criticism of Obama to be racially motivated.

Ah, but it’s not about race at all, say Obama’s spokespeople. Not in the least; how could John McCain think such a thing?

And then of course there was Obama’s grandma, the “typical white person” who supposedly had a kneejerk, “inbred” fear of black men.

What a healing force he remains. Last Sunday he had this helpful comment to make:

“Right now, the biggest fuel behind the Republican agenda is related to immigration and the fear that somehow America’s character is going to be changed if, people of darker shades, there are too many of them here,” Obama told moderator Gary Acosta, the co-founder and CEO of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals.

“I wish I could be more euphemistic about it except (they’re) not that subtle about it — they’re just kind of saying it,” Obama said. “You hear it on hard-right media, you hear it from candidates and politicians, you hear things like ‘great replacement theory’ — I mean, this is not subtle. Unless we’re able to return to a more inclusive vision inside the Republican Party, it’s going to be hard to get a bill done.”

Same modus operandi, same regretful above-the-fray tone, same everything. He so very much wishes he could be more “eupemistic” about it, but those darn Republicans are just kind of saying it. Not actually saying it, you know, but kind of.

Here’s the sort of thing Obama is referring to:

Three weeks ago in Arizona, Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters accused Democrats of trying to flood the nation with millions of immigrants “to change the demographics of our country.” A few days later in Missouri, Senate hopeful Eric Schmitt, the state attorney general, said Democrats were “fundamentally trying to change this country through illegal immigration.” And in Ohio, Republican Senate nominee JD Vance accused Democrats of trying to “transform the electorate.”

Warning of an immigrant “invasion,” Vance told Fox News Channel that Democrats “have decided that they can’t win reelection in 2022 unless they bring a large number of new voters to replace the voters that are already here.”

None of these candidates gives a rat’s patootie what color these “immigrants” (that is, illegal immigrants/aliens) are. It is crystal clear that the demographic they are talking about is a voting demographic: the Democrats’ calculation that these are people who will (or whose offspring will) ultimately keep voting for Democrats. Thus, they are being allowed to enter illegally and even encouraged to do so in order to increase the Democrats’ voter rolls.

It may not work out exactly as Democrats have planned, but that is certainly the plan.

NOTE: The word “demographics” is defined this way: the statistical characteristics of human populations (such as age or income) used especially to identify markets.” Race or national origin is just one of an enormous number of variables that constitute a population’s demographics, and political affiliation is certainly another. This is about political affiliation and predictions about political affiliation made by the Democrats themselves.

The Webb, the early galaxies, and the Big Bang

The New Neo Posted on by

“Science deniers” is a phrase that’s anti-science, because scientists are always supposed to entertain disagreements and answer them with facts and proof – unless you apply “science-denier” to those people who literally say that all science is bunk and must be ignored. But that’s something very few people actually say. The rest of “science denial” is usually disagreement with and challenge to science orthodoxy, and it’s part of the manner in which science has always advanced.

This article about science denial, the Webb telescope, and the Big Bang theory focuses on the word disproven. But discoveries that don’t conform with the predictions of a theory- therefore representing at least somewhat of a problem for that theory – either have to be resolved and reconciled with the theory or it’s generally back to the drawing board for that theory. The Webb has indeed presented some problems for the Big Bang in that regard, particularly about early galaxy formation, which is both fascinating and exciting. Its findings have certainly not disproved the theory, but they certainly haven’t confirmed all of its predictions either.

Here’s an article in Scientific American about the Webb’s findings concerning early galaxies:

…[I]nitial projections [for the Webb, here referred to as JWST] estimated the first galaxies would be so small and faint that JWST would find at best a few intriguingly remote candidates in its pilot investigations. Things didn’t quite go as planned. Instead, as soon as the telescope’s scientists released its very first images of the distant universe, astronomers like Naidu (at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) started finding numerous galaxies within them that, in apparent age, size and luminosity, surpassed all predictions. The competition for discovery was fierce: with each new day, it seemed, claims of yet another record-breaking “earliest known galaxy” would emerge from one research group or another. “Everyone was freaking out,” says Charlotte Mason, an astrophysicist at the University of Copenhagen. “We really weren’t expecting this.”

In the weeks and months following JWST’s findings of surprisingly mature “early” galaxies, blindsided theorists and observers alike have been scrambling to explain them. Could the bevy of anomalously big and bright early galaxies be illusory, perhaps because of flaws in analysis of the telescope’s initial observations? If genuine, could they somehow be explained by standard cosmological models? Or, just maybe, were they the first hints that the universe is more strange and complex than even our boldest theories had supposed?…

…“You build these machines not to confirm the paradigm, but to break it,” says JWST scientist Mark McCaughrean, a senior advisor for science and exploration at the European Space Agency. “You just don’t know how it will break.”

The whole article is worth reading.

This quote in particular caught my eye: “were they the first hints that the universe is more strange and complex than even our boldest theories had supposed?” The first hints? Hardly. Shakespeare had Hamlet say it long, long ago: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”