RIP Representative Jackie Walorski

The New Neo Posted on by

Republican House member from Indiana’s 2nd Congressional district Jackie Walorski was killed in a head-on collision today in Elkhard Country, Indiana. It sounds as though it was a horrific accident. Everyone involved was killed, including two of Walorski’s aides (ages 27 and 28) and the driver of the other vehicle, which apparently “traveled left of center” – meaning perhaps that it crossed into oncoming traffic.

I had never heard of Walorski before today, but reports are that she was highly thought of and very popular in her district.

Thomas Sowell sounds the alarm

The New Neo Posted on by

Sowell remains clear-thinking at 92 – and he’s always been among the clearest of thinkers. His latest essay is called “The Point of No Return.”

Here’s an excerpt:

This is an election year. But the issues this year are not about Democrats and Republicans. The big issue is whether this nation has degenerated to a point of no return — a point where we risk destroying ourselves, before our enemies can destroy us.

If there is one moment that symbolized our degeneration, it was when an enraged mob gathered in front of the Supreme Court and a leader of the United States Senate shouted threats against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, saying “You won’t know what hit you!”

There have always been irresponsible demagogues. But there was once a time when anyone who shouted threats to a Supreme Court Justice would see the end of his own political career, and could not show his face in decent society again.

You either believe in laws or you believe in mob rule. It doesn’t matter whether you agree with the law or agree with the mob on some particular issue. If threats of violence against judges — and publishing where a judge’s children go to school — is the way to settle issues, then there is not much point in having elections or laws.

There is also not much point in expecting to have freedom. Threats and violence were the way the Nazis came to power in Germany. Freedom is not free. If you can’t be bothered to vote against storm-trooper tactics — regardless of who engages in them, or over what issue — then you can forfeit your freedom.

Primary reflections; plus Joe Manchin

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday was primary day in many states and a lot of Trump-endorsed candidates won. You can see some of the results here, here, and here.

There was also a vote in Kansas on abortion rights. The wording of the ballot measure was confusing, in my opinion, although I don’t know whether that was a factor. Here’s what happened:

Kansas voters came out in big numbers to support abortion rights on Tuesday, rejecting a ballot measure that would have said abortion rights are not protected by the state constitution.

Note the double negative.

The ballot measure—in language that abortion advocates criticized for being confusing—asked voters to decide if they wanted to amend the state Constitution to specify that it “does not require government funding of abortion and does not create or secure a right to abortion,” allowing the state to enact abortion restrictions.

Those who tout this as a repudiation of Dobbs either don’t understand Dobbs or are lying. What Dobbs did was throw the issue back to each state, and Kansas was making its own decisions as a state.

Other states will be voting on abortion, too, and that is exactly the way that Dobbs was meant to work, and exactly the way the entire process would have gone had Roe not interfered and created a federal right long ago.

The following is unrelated, but it’s as good a place as any to put it. Joe Manchin continues on his merry way, betraying his constituents in West Virginia, but (a) he’s done it before and been re-elected (for reasons I’ve never quite understood – the re-election part, that is); and (b) I’m not so sure he cares if he’s re-elected or not. He’s probably getting (or has been promised) some sort of reward for what he’s doing, plus most people may not realize he’s about to turn 75. He looks younger than that, but in 2024 he’ll be 77 and he may be fine with retiring at that point, even though he’s sometimes said he’d like to run again.

The war on lawyers who would defend the right

The New Neo Posted on by

The left doesn’t like the adversary system when it’s used to fight them, so they are determined to destroy the opposition’s ability to do so. From Legal Insurrection:

We covered the effort to attack Republican lawyers previously, Operative David Brock To Launch Attack On Republican Election Lawyers: “make them toxic in their communities and in their firms”.

The issue is even more important as we approach the November elections. Democrats are trying to deplatform the Republican legal team…

The home page of The 65 Project ever-so nobly frames itself as “A bipartisan effort to protect democracy from abuse of the legal system by holding accountable lawyers who engage in fraudulent and malicious lawsuits to overturn legitimate election results and fuel insurrection.” Bi-partisan, huh? Actually, it is “is a dark money-fueled nonprofit tied to Democrat Party bigwigs.”

Note the word “bipartisan.” The NeverTrumpers are incredibly valuable to the left, enabling them to claim bipartisanship in the endeavor.

More from the project’s website, and note the re-framing of their endeavor as the protection of democracy against the Big Lie of the Right. And here I thought the goal of the adversarial system was to air disputes in an objective forum with both sides doing their best to plead their case, a process which, although imperfect, was supposed to end up with the closest we can come to truth and justice. But that’s so 20th Century. This is now:

Following Biden’s victory an army of Big Lie Lawyers filed 65 lawsuits based on lies to overturn the election and give Trump a second term. While the nation’s legal institutions stood up to this attempted “coup-via-courtroom,” Trump has worked to further seize control of state and local election processes and ramp up malicious election litigation efforts — which only embolden future fraudulent legal actions aimed at overturning legitimate elections. Simultaneously, the lies and disinformation included in these lawsuits continue to give oxygen to the Big Lie, which festers in right-wing political and media circles and social media discussions and is a long-term threat to American democracy.

When Trump supporters file cases it’s a “coup by courtroom” When leftists intimidate lawyers into not defending those cases out of threats and fear, this is the defense of democracy.

Got it.

NOTE: I happened to have been reading an article by Andrew C. McCarthy in National Review on a somewhat different topic, the FBI and its bias – something I plan to write about, probably tomorrow – and I saw the following paragraph in the comments there. I want to quote it because I think it encapsulates the mindset of a supposed Republican Never Trumper and how such a person somehow manages to justify what the left has been doing:

I…am willing to grant the deep state mob a little compassion. [I concede I’m a vociferous Never Trumper] I still believe if the Hunter laptop had been “discovered” by anyone other than Rudy Giuliani, and if the incumbent President had been anywhere close to being within the ambit of acceptable leaders, instead of a delusional nut out beyond the Van Oort belt, the trajectory of these events might have been different. Andy is a fine lawyer, and his talent in pointing out peccadillos and debater’s points is beyond complaint, but he ignores the elephant in the room. Trump was manifestly unfit to be the leader of the free world and had to be stopped.

This person is totally unaware that his/her statements about Trump are not “manifestly” self-evident. The assumption is that any thinking person can see their obvious truth, and that therefore anything is justified to stop him. The mindset is that expressed by Roper in this scene which I’ve embedded in blog posts here many times before:

Then again, it didn’t go all that well for Sir Thomas More, did it?

Spambot of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

When someone writes an paragraph he/she keeps the idea of a user in his/her brain that how a user can know it. So that’s why this piece of writing is amazing.

Okay, bot. I hear you.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s another one of those days with lots to talk about:

(1) Mark Judge on how pop music criticism has become wholly taken over by wokeness. An excerpt:

Spence Kornhaber almost got there. He almost let himself admit that “Renaissance,” the new album by Beyoncé, is awful. “Renaissance” is an hour of clattering dance beats with no melody or direction, lyrics that mine the same tired tropes about loving yourself, and dull profanity.

Sounds fab.

Kornhaber’s review notes that in “Renaissance” “conventional songwriting rules, polite-test paradigms, and the best practices for headache avoidance were clearly not priorities here. The songs scatter, wobble and lurch into each other while Beyoncé wavers between singing and doing silly voices, in multitrack.”

Even more fab!

But then Kornhaber adds as a corrective:

‘Renaissance’ will play, to many, as exhausting, as indulgent, as ridiculous, as childish, as oversexed, as too much. But committing oneself to pleasure as fully as Beyoncé has here takes defiance and guts—and, more deeply, faith in the preciousness of one’s own experience. Somehow she has found a way to make messages of individual empowerment, which can be so trite in pop, jolt again.

Count me as one of the “many” in that first sentence, and please don’t limit it to the music of Beyoncé. Almost all of music of the 21st Century leaves me cold, but then again I’m not its target market. And I would expand that to include all the arts today, and I mean that literally. I cannot think of an art that hasn’t been ruined by a combination of vulgarity, the need to shock, wokeness, and a vapid emptiness that speaks of a general cultural enervation and disintegration.

(2) Outsourcing Europe’s energy to Russia was a very obviously bad idea. But when Trump warned Europe about it, they mocked him. Has any European country’s leader ever apologized for that? No? Quelle surprise.

We outsourced our medical supplies (as well as computer components) to China, another obviously terrible idea that was highlighted during the COVID pandemic. Has it been corrected?

Apple may be “headquartered” in Cupertino, but more than 90 percent of iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks are made in China, albeit “designed in California.” Despite their endless virtue-signaling, these corporations are indifferent to the national economy. Instead, many have become China’s ultimate cheerleaders and enablers, with venture capital firms raising billions to fund new firms in the Middle Kingdom—in other words, subsidizing the competition…

De-industrialization means more than just losing some “crappy jobs.” It means losing the critical skills required to design and produce products…

In accordance with this trend, U.S. medical equipment producers have left en masse for abroad, notably to China. As a result, Chinese dominance of the medical supply chain undermined our initial pandemic response, exposing us to the reality that we’re unable even to produce masks for our own people. Instead, we were forced to genuflect to Beijing, while they refused to share critical information on the pandemic…

As observed by Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, “China’s decision to block exports of these goods led to widespread shortages.” Moving forward, “there is also the concern that an increasingly assertive China might seek to exploit the world’s dependence on it for political purposes.”

Who could ever have imagined such a thing? And yes, that’s sarcasm. And Joe Biden is the last person on earth to address it, for a host of reasons – including his own enmeshment with China.

(3) Why is Pelosi in Taiwan? Byron York tackles the question – and fails to answer it. More speculation here, by Niall Ferguson. The bottom line? We don’t know.

(4) With monkeypox, the response is all about politics. There was a lot of this with AIDS, too, for quite a while.

(5) California’s war on independent truckers leads to demonstrations at the port of Oakland, but they’ve been dispersed and not covered much by the MSM. The Democrats want to destroy such entrepreneurship “for our own good,” and since in California Democrats have all the power, the truckers probably haven’t a chance. One-party Democrat rule, it’s great, isn’t it?

Nearly 21 years after 9/11, a drone takes out al-Zawahiri

The New Neo Posted on by

The wheels of retribution grind slow:

President Biden announced Monday that the U.S. government killed the leader of al Qaeda, Ayman Al Zawahiri in a “successful” counterterrorism operation in Afghanistan that removes the terrorist from the battlefield “once and for all,” and degrades the terror network’s ability to operate.

The United States government, on July 30 at 9:48 p.m. ET, and 6:18 a.m. Kabul time, undertook a “precision counterterrorism operation,” killing Al Zawahiri, who served as Usama bin Laden’s deputy during the 9/11 attacks, and as his successor in 2011, following bin Laden’s death.

Al Zawahiri was seventy years old. I can’t imagine he’s still completely vital to the terror networks.

Biden will of course brag about this and hopes it gives him a political lift, much as Bin Laden’s killing did for Obama. But I really don’t think it will matter much at this point, because people’s beefs with Biden are much more up close and personal – and recent – than anything about 9/11. I would guess that probably about a third of voters (or more?) don’t even know who al Zawahiri is[was] at this point.

Biden also tried to convince US voters that his shameful withdrawal from Afghanistan didn’t matter, and that this makes up for it:

The president, speaking to his decision to withdraw U.S. military assets from Afghanistan last August, said that he decided that “the United States no longer needed thousands of boots on the ground in Afghanistan to protect America from terrorists who seek to do us harm.”

“And I made a promise to the American people that we continue to conduct effective counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan and beyond,” Biden said. “We’ve done just that.”

Biden said that the killing of Zawahiri helps to “never again allow Afghanistan to become a terrorist safe have[n] because he’s gone.”

Krugman doubles down on his “O’Brien-crossed-with-Humpty-Dumpty” persona

The New Neo Posted on by

Paul Krugman is a case of someone who has no problem contradicting himself, saying inane things that defy common sense, and doing it all with no sense of shame or apology but on the contrary with a sense of proud superiority. He’s not alone in this, but he’s one of the most shameless practitioners, and he’s been given a bully pulpit to do it for a long time.

Does anyone consider this person an authority anymore? Probably.

I wrote about Krugman recently in this post, but I feel the need to do it again after reading this at Ace’s, a post that dives into an interview Krugman gave to CNN’s Brian Stelter Sunday. It’s worth looking at just to see the mental gymnastics involved, and the breezy dismissal of the common sense perceptions of most of us as well as a century of economic descriptive terms:

“Are we in a recession and does the term matter?” Stelter asked.

Krugman responded, “No we aren’t, and no it doesn’t.”

Such a relief to know.

Krugman has the Zen approach:

“None of the usual criteria that real experts use says we’re in a recession right now. And what does it matter? You know, the state of the economy is what it is. Jobs are abundant although maybe the job market is weakening. Inflation is high, although maybe inflation is coming down. What does it matter whether you use the ‘r’ world or not?” he said.

More:

“There’s been a kind of negativity bias in coverage. The press should be giving people – people have their own personal experience. And if you ask people how are you doing, they’re pretty upbeat,” Krugman claimed, adding that some will complain about gas prices. “If you ask people how is your financial situation, it’s pretty favorable. If you ask them how is the economy, oh, it’s terrible. That’s a media failing. Somehow we’re failing to convey the realities of what’s going on to people.”

I don’t know anyone who is “pretty upbeat.” But then again, Krugman and I run in different circles. I have no trouble assuming that the people he asks aren’t in financial difficulty, nor is he.

But it’s that last sentence that would serve as the motto of the left these days: “Somehow we’re failing to convey the realities of what’s going on to people.” That leads us to the question: What is “reality”? The left truly thinks it can define its way out of the reality of people’s daily lives with words. Perhaps they think that all reality is subjective and that there is no truth except how we define it, and that only people’s pesky and stubborn perceptions sometimes stand in the way of the leftist-intellectual-defined reality. And for a lot of people who support the current administration, Krugman and the others are not wrong, as more and more pundits and politicians jump onboard to tell people that their perceptions and memories are wrong and their betters are right.

Milan Kundera wrote about this over thirty years ago. I’ve quoted him many times before (for example, as early as 2005), and now I’m going to do it again. This appeared in a book of his from 1990 called Immortality:

For example, communists used to believe that in the course of capitalist development the proletariat would gradually grow poorer and poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe workers were driving to work in their own cars, [the communists] felt like shouting that reality was deceiving them. Reality was stronger than ideology. And it is in this sense that imagology surpassed it: imagology is stronger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving when people at home had nothing to eat. My Paris neighbor spends his time an an office, where he sits for eight hours facing an office colleague, then he sits in his car and drives home, turns on the TV, and when the announcer informs him that in the latest public opinion poll the majority of Frenchmen voted their country the safest in Europe (I recently read such a report), he is overjoyed and opens a bottle of champagne without ever learning that three thefts and two murders were committed on his street that very day.

Sometimes a conspiracy is really a conspiracy and not just a theory

The New Neo Posted on by

Saturday I wrote:

[quoting from this article in Time]”…[F]ar-right figures and conspiracy theorists have also gotten involved. Twitter is filled with posts linking the Netherlands’ nitrogen policy to the Great Reset—a theory that claims international elites are trying to use the COVID-19 pandemic to establish an authoritarian global government.”

Let me clue the folks at Time (not that they care): when you launch into that kind of language – “far-right” and “conspiracy theorist” and “claims” – it is a transparent attempt to label something false rather than demonstrate its falsity. The sad thing is that the Great Resetters have said plenty themselves that indicates they are indeed using the pandemic, plus climate change and other crises, to do just that: establish an authoritarian global government or at the very least a series of leftist national governments that are all on the same page. This isn’t some wacky hidden-conspiracy theory; this is what they’ve indicated by their own public words.

Today I see this essay called “How the World Really Works”:

The mere existence of the W.E.F., an international conference of billionaires and CEOs who fly in annually to a remote Alpine resort to discuss how the world should be governed, to which prime ministers, presidents, and “opinion formers” are flattered to be invited, arouses my curiosity. It sounds (and acts) like a sinister conspiracy in a dystopian novel…

Even so we shouldn’t exaggerate the independent power of the W.E.F. It exercises some power and more influence as the leading edge of the large overall institutional bureaucracy—including N.G.O.s, transnational bodies such as the European Union, multi-national corporations, and governments in whole or in part—that goes under the name of “global governance.” John Fonte, the Hudson Institute scholar, has revealed in detail how global governance really works: it proceeds issue by issue by making international treaties on everything from trade to transgenderism that commit the signatory governments to implement them in domestic law but that were negotiated secretively in a wilderness of committees in Brussels or New York and have never been the subjects of serious democratic debate.

We then enjoy the spectacle of government ministers being unable to explain why they are passing laws which they personally dislike as well as fear that the electorate won’t stand for them. Such treaties empower the bureaucrats who negotiated them, the corporations that influenced their drafting, the N.G.O.s that go to court to compel governments to implement them, and the courts that will finally interpret them. They disempower the voters, their elected representatives, the government ministers who have to tailor their policies to fit the undemocratic straitjacket of the treaty. And they lead eventually to a clash between the voters and the global governance bureaucracy.

…[W]hether or not those who protest are indulged or crushed depends in part on whether their demos and lawsuits are aimed at obstructing the global governance agenda or advancing it. The Dutch farmers trying to save their land from Net-Zero environmental regulations enshrined in treaties get crushed; the Extinction Rebellion protesters using violence and property destruction to ensure the enforcement of such property seizures are joined by dancing policemen at jolly street parties.

Democracy in these circumstances becomes a façade for authoritarian rule by remote bureaucracies…

…[T]he Progressive Left controls the unaccountable institutions of global governance along with cultural, legal, bureaucratic, and economic power almost all the time. So the Left is able to block most of the Right’s policies in government, but the Right has no similar restraints on the Left.

As with many movements on the left, the people who are part of this are a combination of those who are in it strictly for the power, those who believe they are superiors doing it “for your own good” and that the peasants and kulaks just can’t understand because they’re not bright enough, and those who are mostly clueless but to whom it sounds just fine.

Meanwhile, let’s hear from a Dutch farmer:

[ADDENDUM: Richard Fernandez explains how AI might fit in.]