I think Harris is temperamentally unsuited to be president and she knows it

The New Neo Posted on by

That won’t necessarily stop her from being elected, of course. But I really wonder why she decided to become a politician. Among other things, although she lies and lies and lies, she – unlike most politicians – seems somewhat uncomfortable doing so. That discomfort gets transmitted in awkward body language and stress in her voice, as well as a lack of emotional match to the content of what she’s saying. That’s why the awkward forced laugh comes out sometimes; I think it’s nervous laughter.

And that is why Walz was part of her interview with CNN and why people joke that he’s her emotional support animal. And I don’t think Walz has any discomfort whatsoever with lying.

But this uneasiness of Harris’ is not her only difficulty when she’s playing the role of a politician (and on her it really does seem to be a role). Most politicians are verbally fluent. They may be lying through their teeth, but the listener has no trouble understanding what they’re actually saying. Kamala Harris, on the other hand, generates a lot of near-meaningless words in the process of trying to find her way to an answer that doesn’t implicate her. She is, to be blunt, BS-ing and stalling, and in the process leaves the listener scratching his or her head. Again, this is something most or all politicians do, but they ordinarily accomplish it with smoothness and finesse.

For some reason, Harris has trouble doing that.

I’ve seen pundits and commenters say that she did much better in her DNC speech than in her interview. Well, d-uuhh. Reading a speech off a teleprompter is a whole different activity than responding – even with canned answers – in an interview. In an interview, there’s always the chance of the unexpected. In a speech, the speaker is in control – especially when in front of a friendly audience lacking hecklers – and in an interview the control is partially ceded to the interviewer. In a speech, the task is simple: to read. In an interview, the person has to think on his or her feet (or while seated, as in Harris’ interview with Bash).

Many people describe Harris as stupid. I don’t think that’s it at all. She’s not brilliant by any means, but no one gets through law school being stupid. But most lawyers are far more verbally adept than Harris, I think that something else is going on with her. Yes, it’s possible she has some sort of problem with alcohol or other substances. But I think that deep down she lacks confidence and isn’t as good as most politicians at hiding that fact.

More interesting is why the Democrats have nominated two people in a row who aren’t good speakers and seem to have some challenges, whether cognitive or emotional or both. After all, it’s not as though the Democrats lack glib talkers. With Biden, who wasn’t doing well in the primaries in 2020 until everyone else was “encouraged” to drop out, he was chosen by the Democrat powers that be because he could be promoted as a moderate, a “nice” guy, and someone experienced. With Harris, as VP she was the obvious heir to Biden, and getting rid of a black woman would ruffle too many voters’ feathers. So, once Biden imploded, the Democrats were pretty much stuck with Harris and they are now deeply engaged in trying to make the best of it by pretending she’s something she’s not. But that only increases the emotional pressure on her, in my opinion.

The fact that polls indicate that Harris is basically tied in the race for the presidency reflects several things, the first being the strength of Trump Derangement Syndrome. For a great many people, all the Democrats need is a placeholder, and Harris or anyone else would do the trick. The second is the strength of identity politics: for many voters, the fact that she’s a black woman is enough to get their vote. The third is the role of the press and pundits in telling people that Harris is the best thing since sliced bread.

Once you look at the Harris interview, it’s more obvious than ever why she has been avoiding non-scripted events like interviews and press conferences, and probably will continue to do so for the most part. She’s trying to run out the clock.

Right now we don’t even seem to have a working president. Biden acts like he’s retired, and Harris is out campaigning. Someone or some group (I think the latter) is running the country, and already has been for quite some time. Biden did have some input, but for the most part he deferred to this group. Although Kamala is a lot younger than Biden, I think she’s okay with continuing the process if she’s elected, and with governing mostly as a figurehead who gives speeches now and then as the country continues on its present terrible trajectory.

Germany’s war on knives

The New Neo Posted on by

Germany is planning to curb the number of knife attacks in that country by a new law:

After laying a white rose at the site of the Diversity Festival slashing that left three dead and eight wounded, Chancellor Olaf Scholz promised rapid action would be taken against knives.

Right now, people in Germany can carry knives up to 4.7 inches long. The law will be modified so that they can only carry knives up to 2.4 inches long. No one appears to have considered the possibility that Muslim terrorists on the way to killing as many infidels as possible might violate the law and carry a concealed knife of 4 inches or longer. Such thoughts are unthinkable.

Knives are ubiquitous; they are not the problem. And of course a murderer won’t hesitate to carry such a knife, which will be easily obtainable. Then again, maybe the next step for the authorities is to give us all plastic utensils and make all knives contraband, like in prisons.

More:

The ISIS terrorist [who attacked people at the Diversity Festival] was one of over a million migrants who had invaded Germany while claiming to be “refugees”. The migrant was also one of the many scheduled to be deported, but was not.

All that the Muslim terrorist had to do to evade deportation was leave government housing when the authorities came looking for him. And then when the military-age Arab Muslim migrant came back, the deportation order had expired and he couldn’t be deported. Undeported Muslim refugees have been one of the largest sources of terrorism, crime and violence in Europe.

Some statistics:

The mostly Muslim migrants were responsible for over 1 in 10 sexual assaults in just one year. They have carried out around 7,000 sexual assaults since the beginning of the migrant crisis. Half of gang rapists are foreigners, and there are on average almost two gang rapes committed in Germany every single day.

In North Rhine-Westphalia, the state where the latest Muslim terrorist attack took place, 1 in 3 sex offenders, half of shoplifters and burglars, and 4 out of 5 pickpockets were foreigners.

Typical of this kind of violence was an altercation between two Arab Muslims, which ended with one of them stabbed in Magdeburg, migrants fighting with knives in a refugee center in Bavaria, and a litany of young foreign men confronting and stabbing each other all across Germany.

But locating the source of the problem is probably “not a very helpful insight,” [the quote is from a German criminologist] … In the UK, people sharing such insights are being locked up even as Islamic terrorists are being freed.

Free speech is dead in Britain.

NOTE: While writing this post, the phrase “long knives” came to me, because Germany is aiming to ban the carrying of long knives. That in turn brought to mind the famous Nazi “Night of the Long Knives,” which took place in 1934 and was a mechanism for Hitler’s consolidation of power by eliminating the group in his own party known as the Brownshirts, as well as many others he considered enemies or rivals and expendable. I doubt that knives were the mechanism by which they died; I’m almost certain everyone was summarily shot. So whence comes the name? When I did a Google search, the AI function initially said the people were killed by knives, which I strongly suspect is one of those things AI makes up because it sounds good. A second Google search for the same thing had the AI function saying they were primarily shot, and the name “Long Knives” was symbolic. Make up your non-mind, AI!

This site says the name was given by Hitler himself, and that it was a phrase from a popular Nazi song. He explained after the fact in a speech: “In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I become the supreme judge of the German people. I gave the order to shoot the ringleaders in this treason.”

California bans local governments from requiring IDs in local elections

The New Neo Posted on by

Voters in the city of Huntington Beach, California passed an amendment to the city charter that would require ID in order to vote in municipal elections. Also:

The measure is slated to take effect in 2026 and would also allow Huntington Beach officials to “provide more in-person voting locations” and “monitor ballot drop-boxes.”

We can’t have that, can we? Let’s hear it for DEMOCRACY!! – that is, for the Democrat Party. Those Huntington Beach voters need to get in line with the Democratic Party, which immediately began legal action to stop the law from taking effect and presented the now-familiar argument that it is a form of voter suppression. You’ve heard that claim before – it’s become a foundation of the Democrats’ efforts to suppress voting security and voting integrity.

And then, when so many voters begin to doubt the validity of voting results, Democrats accuse them of crazy conspiracy theories.

And now the state of California has passed its own state law forbidding municipalities from doing what Huntington Beach tried to do, even for local elections and not state elections. Democrats in California are so dominant in the state legislature that it passed overwhelmingly:

SB 1174 stipulates that local governments “shall not enact or enforce any charter provision, ordinance, or regulation requiring a person to present identification for the purpose of voting or submitting a ballot at any polling place, vote center, or other location where ballots are cast or submitted, unless required by state or federal law.” The measure cleared the State Assembly (57-16) on Tuesday and was previously passed by the state Senate (30-8) in May.

Now the question is whether Newsom will sign it into law.

The Harris and Walz interview was a lackluster and awkward affair

The New Neo Posted on by

In last night’s CNN interview with Dana Bash, Kamala Harris exhibited problems on two levels: content and process. Content is what a person says, and process is just about everything else, including tone of voice, facial expression, and posture.

It seems to me that, even objectively speaking, this interview wasn’t the sort of thing that would convince anyone not already a Harris voter to support her. Much of the content of the interview involved Harris trying to explain her past statements that are at variance with what she’s saying now, and her failure to do anything about so many of the country’s problems even though she’s been vice president for three and a half years. Although a very effective speaker might be able to give some sort of convincing explanations and/or excuses for those things despite the fact that it’s difficult to think of any, Kamala is not that speaker.

Which brings us to the second problem: process. Last night Kamala Harris transmitted a lackluster energy, a hesitancy, and a problem with what many pundits evaluating her performance called authenticity. Her words, and in particular her tone of voice and facial expressions, seemed manufactured and mismatched – not in the slick and practiced way of Hillary Clinton, for example, but in an awkward way that was unsettling to watch.

It didn’t help that Tim Walz was part of the equation, leading to the almost inevitable mockery of Harris as needing her Dad there for emotional support. The taunting boiled down to the idea that, if she’s such a strong woman, why would he be there at all for this interview? Good question, and to make things worse there was another problem: the seating and perspective. Harris was in the center of the three participants, but she looked somewhat shrunken not only because Walz is a much larger person, but also because she was further back from the camera than either Walz or Bash. Her position made it even more difficult to convey power, and only fed the perception of lack of force on her part. Here’s an article at RedState that gives many examples of people pointing that out.

As for the content of Harris’ message, here’s some fact-checking that shows that even CNN was at least somewhat critical:

When Bash again noted that Harris said in 2019 that she supported a ban on fracking, and asked Harris if she changed her mind during that campaign (which Harris ended in December 2019), Harris said, “In 2020, I made very clear where I stand. We are in 2024 and I’ve not changed that position, nor will I going forward.”

Facts First: This is misleading. Harris did not make her position on fracking clear during her only debate in 2020, the general election’s vice presidential debate against then-Vice President Mike Pence; Harris never explicitly stated a personal position on fracking during that debate. Rather, she said that Joe Biden, the head of the Democratic ticket at the time, would not ban fracking if he was elected president.

Harris has another built-in content problem when asked about her support of Joe Biden. She was a loyal VP who pooh-poohed any talk of him being cognitively challenged, and now she’s the current nominee because everyone saw how seriously cognitively challenged he actually is. But to turn on him now would be to exhibit disloyalty, as well as implicating her in the obvious coverup. Threading that needle is beyond her, and what she did in the Dana Bash interview was to reiterate her support of Biden – the person whose record has also been one from which she desperately wants to distance herself.

The Trump War Room quickly made use of a clip of that moment:

I had originally thought that Harris’ and Walz’s decision to appear together for this interview was an attempt to spark a perception in the viewer of a genial Mom and Dad taking care of America and Americans. They may have thought that the whole would be greater than the sum of its parts, but I don’t think they succeeded.

Or maybe they just wanted to get it over with. How many interviews will Harris give in the next two months? Or will she try to continue to convey a lukewarm version of Obama’s “hope and change” in 2008 while simultaneously hiding out like Joe Biden in 2020?

Traveling to Europe? It’s getting more “interesting”

The New Neo Posted on by

Even if you’re not Pavel Durov, you may get a surprise if you’re planning a trip to Europe. Beginning November 10, there will be mandatory biometrics applied to visitors:

Europe’s new Entry/Exit System is intended to replace passport stamping by electronically registering the arrival and departure of international visitors to and from most EU member states.

Upon arrival in Europe, passport control officers will scan your face, record a digital scan of your fingerprints—these scans will be mandatory—and not stamp your passport.

When visitors leave Europe, they’ll scan face and fingers once again to register their departure.

Visitors will be able to speed their first arrival at a European border by pre-registering using a mobile app (not yet available) or the automated kiosks (which the EU calls “self-service systems”) installed at major border entry ports such as airports.

Once you’re registered with EES, the next time you cross an external European border, you’ll only have to scan your face and fingers for reentry. …

One system (ETIAS) will validate approval to travel; the other (EES) is for registering a person’s arrival once travel begins and, later, departure once the visit is over. …

Every person crossing an external European border who is not also an EU national—which by definition includes every tourist staying for a maximum of 90 days in any 180-day period—will be required to register with the new EES. In other words, pretty much everyone who goes to Europe on vacation.

Travelers who carry biometric passports (all U.S. passports issued since 2007 are biometric) can also speed through the automated “self-service system” kiosks (a prototype is pictured above) once those travelers’ details have been registered in the database for the first time.

… The United States began requiring non-Americans between the ages of 14 and 79 to submit fingerprint scans and facial images nearly 20 years ago.

That’s a lot to digest. One tidbit that surprised me was the claim that since 2007 all US passports are biometric. I have a passport issued in 2015 and I was unaware of any biometrics involved in the document itself. But I do recall that, when I went to Italy in 2017, my face was scanned at the Rome airport coming and going. I also think my photo is sometimes taken at US airports, but I’m a bit hazy on that detail. But what’s in my actual passport that qualifies as biometrics? It doesn’t have my fingerprints, and I don’t ever recall giving fingerprints.

The larger picture, and what I’ve thought about many times before, is that these days there’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide – that is, if the state wants to find you. Funny thing is that the people they most want to find seem to be those on the right, and this involves Western Europe, too. The emphasis on getting the right in the US has already been proven – as though we needed more proof – by the incredible dragnet that hauled in J6 attendees whose “offenses” were limited to walking through open doors and entering the Capitol, and then peacefully exiting. I seem to recall that the mechanism for identifying most of them was facial recognition techniques through surveillance photos and videos.

I take all news about Sinwar with a grain of salt

The New Neo Posted on by

But anyway, for what it’s worth:

Palestinian factions in the Gaza Strip are mulling staging a coup against Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, according to a report on the UK new site The Jewish Chronicle.

This comes amid deep divides over the terms of a ceasefire deal with Israel to end the fighting, the report said.

Sinwar is also reportedly surrounded with 22 living Israeli hostages, who are handcuffed and used as human shields against assassination attempts. Israel, it is claimed, has had several opportunities to eliminate him, but has restrained itself due to the risk of harming its captives. The report also mentioned that the rest of the hostages are held by smaller Palestinian terrorist factions.

Something of the sort may indeed be true. Or not. And “the rest of the hostages” – the living ones – constitutes an unknown number.

We did get a report from newly-rescued hostage Farhan al-Qadi:

Aryeh Zalmanovich, 86, was named Thursday as the Israeli hostage who died beside Farhan al-Qadi, the hostage who was rescued alive on Tuesday, while the two were held captive together in Gaza.

Zalmanovich, who was abducted from his home in Kibbutz Nir Oz during Hamas’s October 7 terror onslaught, died about five weeks into his captivity, according to al-Qadi.

Zalmanovich, a father of two and grandfather of five, was already known to have died in captivity, with Kibbutz Nir Oz announcing his death on December 1, 2023. The terror group had previously published a video in mid-November in which it showed Zalmanovich looking ill.

Following his rescue on Tuesday, al-Qadi asked to connect with Boaz Zalmanovich, the late hostage’s son, Boaz told Kan radio on Thursday. “It was very important” to al-Qadi to speak with the family, Boaz said, and they spoke briefly even as al-Qadi was being welcomed back to Rahat on Wednesday. “I hope we’ll have a more organized conversation” in the future, he said.

Al-Qadi told Boaz that he and Zalmanovich were taken to a hospital in southern Gaza, where they were kept for the first few weeks of the war. In captivity, Zalmanovich told al-Qadi about his family and community. …

Boaz said al-Qadi told him that there was a special connection between the two hostages.

“Dad was in a hospital the whole time, he wasn’t moved, and Farhan was with him for certain stages,” Boaz said.

“I understand from Farhan that they had a special bond. [Farhan] was also wounded, but he still helped take care of Dad — not in a medical way, more in terms of giving him support.” Boaz said that learning of al-Qadi’s support for Zalmanovich in captivity was “very important to us.” …

The conditions in which the hostages are being held are clearly not tenable “for a man of 86, or a man aged 20, or a baby…,” he said. “There is no [proper] care… Even if some of the hostages have had wounds bandaged or had surgery, that does not prevent their murder in captivity… in the tunnels or wherever they are. (Zalmanovich was beaten during his abduction, and was taken to Gaza without his glasses or his hearing aid, according to Channel 12.)

When you beat and then kidnap a man of 86 and he dies in captivity you have murdered him. But I believe Hamas is responsible for any deaths of hostages. It strikes me that it’s been almost a year now, which is mind-boggling.

I’m very happy for al-Qadi and his family. And here are a few details of the story of al-Qadi’s rescue:

Israeli special forces, acting on intelligence, were combing a network of tunnels in southern Gaza when they found Al-Qadi, two Israeli military officials told CNN. Al-Qadi was alone, without his Hamas captors, when Israeli forces found him, one of the officials said.

Al-Qadi is the eighth hostage to be rescued alive in Gaza by the Israeli military since the beginning of the war, in four separate operations – but he is the first to have been reclaimed alive from inside Hamas’ tunnel network underneath Gaza, the IDF told CNN.

“He was dead and is now brought back to life,” Al-Qadi’s brother, Juma’a, told CNN after Al-Qadi met family members at the Soroka Medical Center in Beer Sheva, where he is being cared for following his rescue. He added that his brother had not expected to come back alive.

“It was all tears. Tears of joy. What matters is that we saw him,” Juma’a said during an interview in the Bedouin village of Tarabin, in Israel’s Negev desert. …

Al-Qadi was discharged from hospital on Wednesday afternoon, the Soroka Medical Center said. In a press briefing, Al-Qadi expressed his gratitude to the soldiers who rescued him and the medical team at Soroka, the same hospital where he was born. Already making use of his new freedom, he said “I got shawarma at 2 a.m.” …

“It is hard for him to erase the things he saw there,” Juma’a said, adding that he too would never fully recover from losing his brother for nearly a year.

I can well believe it.

One of the things this story underlines is that yes, there are plenty of Arab citizens of Israel. They are Israelis, too:

[From the former mayor of Tarabin]: He told me that captivity was brutal. Constant darkness, did not see the light of day. He was treated like the rest of the hostages, like an Israeli in every way.

Like an Israeli in every way.

The article also says that al-Qadi’s captors may have fled at the approach of the Israeli soldiers in the tunnel. If so, the minders apparently weren’t so keen to martyr themselves:

Another one of Al-Qadi’s brothers, Abu Mohammad, suggested to CNN that his captors had fled when they heard Israeli troops approaching the tunnels, saying his brother had heard Hebrew voices and shouted out to communicate his whereabouts.

Asked by CNN’s Jim Sciutto on Tuesday if he believes Al-Qadi’s captors abandoned him, IDF spokesperson Nadav Shoshani said that was “one of the options that are being looked at.”

It seems – and again, there’s no way to know if the details are true – that al-Qadi may have been found during a tunnel-clearing operation and that the troops had not already been aware of his presence through previous intelligence. But we don’t know – and may never know.