Going green in The Netherlands and Sri Lanka

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s hard to say whether a governmental policy of required Green farming – currently causing problems in The Netherlands and even bigger ones in Sri Lanka – is the result of wishful thinking on the part of the government or whether it’s a desire for willful destruction.

In Sri Lanka:

One-third of Sri Lanka’s farm lands were dormant in 2021 due to the fertilizer ban. Over 90% of Sri Lanka’s farmers had used chemical fertilizers before they were banned. After they were banned, an astonishing 85% experienced crop losses. The numbers are shocking. After the fertilizer ban, rice production fell 20% and prices skyrocketed 50 percent in just six months. Sri Lanka had to import $450 million worth of rice despite having been self-sufficient in the grain just months earlier. The price of carrots and tomatoes rose five-fold. While there are 2 million farmers in Sri Lanka, 70% of the nation’s 22 million people are directly or indirectly dependent on farming.

Things were worse for smaller farmers. In the Rajanganaya region, where the majority farmers operate just a hectare (2.5 acres), families reported 50% to 60% reductions in crop harvest. “Before the ban, this was one of the biggest markets in the country, with tonnes and tonnes of rice and vegetables,” said one farmer earlier this year. “But after the ban, it became almost zero. If you talk to the rice mills, they don’t have any stock because people’s harvest dropped so much. The income of this whole community has dropped to an extremely low level.”

But the damage to tea was the key to Sri Lanka’s financial failure. Tea production had generated $1.3 billion in exports annually. Tea exports paid for 71% of the nation’s food imports before 2021. Then, tea production and exports crashed 18% between November 2021 and February 2022, reaching their lowest level in 23 years. The government’s devastating ban on fertilizer thus destroyed the ability of Sri Lanka to pay for food, fuel, and service its debt.

Sri Lanka had other problems, too. But the Green anti-chemical-fertilizer laws seem to have been key in the destruction there.

The free part of the article ends with the questions: “What, exactly, were Rajapaksa and other Sri Lankan leaders thinking? Why did they engage in such a radical experiment?”

If any of you are able to access it, I’d be curious what the author’s answer is. But this article mentions some of the other problems and then characterizes the fertilizer decision as “ill-conceived” and “overnight.” So this was an impulsive move?

Gotabaya Rajapaksa had outlined his vision for an organic transition in his presidential manifesto. He was eager to rein in the use of chemicals that had been linked to kidney disease in Sri Lanka’s central and northern provinces, where they had washed into the water supply. Quixotically, this would have made him a global leader in going organic.

However, in a nation where more than 30 per cent of people are employed in the agricultural ukorale, a single 42-year-old farmer near Ballapana, a village 90 minutes’ drive north-east of Colombo, was floored when the ban was imposed in April last year. As urea, a key top dressing for rice paddy fields, and other fertilisers disappeared from shelves in less than a month, the remainder hoarded by those with the deepest pockets, Atukorale was forced to abandon a rice paddy she had leased after two successful harvests.

“The government told us to make our own organic fertiliser, from using dung from goats, from chicken and from cows and leaves from discarded material,” she says. “I didn’t have the means to make enough for two acres of paddy, so I left it.”

Manufacturers of organic fertilisers didn’t have the capacity to cover for chemical products coming off the market, Gotabaya Rajapaksa has since conceded, and what was provided by the government to farmers also proved nowhere near as effective. Atukorale has maintained another rice paddy in the area, afraid of losing the lease when it expires if she doesn’t, but after previously extracting 1000 kilograms of rice from it during a single harvest, it has since produced only 400 kilograms.

There’s much more at the link. The fertilizer decision was not the only factor in Sri Lanka’s fall, but it was a huge one and a self-inflicted one, top-down. The most benign explanation is that the leaders of the country are operating under a delusion or a set of delusions about how a change of such magnitude could ever be accomplished, and what its economic and physical results would be. And if so, they are hardly alone.

You can come up with the less benign explanations yourself.

And then there are the Dutch farmers. What do Dutch farmers have to do with Sri Lankan farmers? This:

Roughly 40,000 protesters gathered in central Netherlands to protest plans to curb the emissions of nitrogen and ammonia last month. Weeks later, the protests have continued across the country with no sign of abating…

The Dutch government is aiming to cut nitrogen and ammonia emissions by 50% by 2030 in a bid to improve air, land and water quality. The plans include cutting back on fertilizer used on farms and ratcheting back the number of livestock by an estimated 30%.

The country is one of the largest agricultural producers in the world, exporting roughly $97 billion in 2020 worth of fruit, flowers, vegetables, dairy products and meat…

Farmers say they are being unfairly targeted by the rules while other industries, such as aviation, construction and transportation, are also contributing to emissions and face fewer rules. Farmers also argued that they have not been provided a clear picture of their futures in light of the reforms.

Again we have the same questions: are the people who run the government merely abysmally stupid and in the grip of fantasy? Or are they actively destructive as part of The Great Reset? I guess it’s not either/or, because the two are not mutually exclusive.

Here’s an article from about a month ago, attempting to explain:

Nitrogen pollution is caused by the burning of fossil fuels, which releases nitrogen oxide, and manure from farm animals (when dung and urine mix), which emits ammonia.

The Dutch use “nitrogen” (stikstof) as an umbrella term in order to add up and compare emissions from industry and farms. Industries cause a small share of ammonia emissions, mostly in waste management, and farms cause a small share of nitrogen oxide emissions, mostly from the heating of greenhouses with natural gas…

Farms cause 85 percent of ammonia emissions and 40 to 45 percent of overall nitrogen emissions.

But they cause 60 percent of nitrogen deposits in conservation areas (to which they are more likely to be in proximity than industry)…

Dutch animal farming is among the most intensive in the world…

…The Netherlands has 162 [conservation areas]. They range from the dunes of Holland to the Veluwe National Park to the Wadden Sea to tiny preserves that dot the countryside in the interior. All are protected by EU law.

Excess nitrogen deposits in those so-called Natura 2000 areas are the proximate cause of the crisis. They cause some plants, like grass, to grow faster, but others to wither and die.

That can wipe out entire ecosystems. When plants die, so do the bugs that feed on them, which in turns kills the birds and ducks that eat the bugs — and a major impetus for the whole Natura 2000 program in the 1990s was to protect European bird species…

That year, the Council of State, the Netherlands’ highest administrative court, ruled that more needed to be done. It took Rutte’s four-party coalition, which includes the traditionally pro-farmer Christian Democrats and the environmentally-friendly D66, almost three years to come up with a solution.

In the meantime, judges struck down construction permits for not only farms but energy companies, housing developments, infrastructure and industry, because building causes nitrogen emissions, and the Netherlands was already in violation of its commitment to protect the Natura 2000 regions…

That plan is for farms to cut nitrogen emissions by 12 to 70 percent, depending on their proximity to conservation areas. In exceptional cases, where farms are situated in Natura 2000 areas, they would have to cut emissions by 90 percent to stay — which is impossible.

Farmers who cannot meet their targets would be given three options:

Downside, or switch from animal farming to crops.
Relocate.
Quit.

There is so much more in the article; I suggest you read the whole thing. The author appears to be mostly in favor of the government restrictions and against the farmers, by the way, but it’s still an interesting look at the positions and arguments on both sides. But I’ll just add this, which indicates the role the EU plays:

Farmers argue the models to calculate pollution are imprecise, the standards for deposits are arbitrary and the whole problem only exists because the Netherlands declared so many areas Natura 2000 preserves…

Perhaps previous governments should have been more conservative about setting aside lands for conservation, but now the Netherlands would need the European Commission’s permission to remove Natura 2000 classifications — and it is in no mood to help out a country that predictably hectors others when they break (debt and deficit) rules.

As I read this, it reminds me a bit of Soviet collectivization efforts. Less obviously brutal, of course, but the product of people operating under a theory that ignores reality. They are either extremely disinterested in the plight of the ordinary human beings living in their countries or actively hostile to them. I’m not sure there’s much of a difference between those two concepts.

Martine Van Hamel: the greatest Myrtha of them all

The New Neo Posted on by

Who’s Myrtha, you ask?

It’s a role in the famous Romantic ballet “Giselle,” one of the earliest ballets in existence and still performed today. Myrtha is the head honcho of the Wilis, those spirits of dead girls jilted by lovers, who waylay men in the forest and cast their spell in order to dance them to their deaths.

It’s one of those things that probably was easier to understand back in 1841, when “Giselle” was first produced. The amazing thing about this ballet is that it is still beautiful and still meaningful, once you enter into its world. It’s a tale of betrayal, and then love and redemption.

But back to Myrtha. The Wili leader’s role is extremely demanding technically, which is interesting because although technique has much advanced in the years since this ballet was choreographed and then revived, it’s still difficult for the dancer and maybe even more difficult now that artistry is less emphasized. The roles require enormous acting skill and the creation of illusions rather than pure athleticism.

I’ve seen the ballet many times, mostly with the 20th Century’s greatest dancers. I was very very fortunate in that regard, because “Giselle” without greatness can be tedious. The dancer Martine Van Hamel, who used to dance with American Ballet Theater, was the greatest Myrtha I’ve seen and perhaps even the greatest I can imagine. There’s a somewhat blurry video of Van Hamel in the role, and although it certainly doesn’t capture everything it captures quite a bit.

Van Hamel is perfect: a blend of austere, elegant, and commanding, with a back so strong and expressive it’s a marvel. She is unusually “centered” and despite the demandingly slow choreography at times there is no sense whatsoever of wobbling or even of being human, but without any histrionics about it. Van Hamel is power inside and out, as well as smoothness. You see absolutely no effort and it’s only towards the end of this variation, when the camera unkindly zooms in (at 7:15), that you see how hard she’s breathing although her face stays calm.

Please note in particular the sureness of Van Hamel’s arabesque promenade (circling) and then penchée (dipping down with the head and torso and the leg going up even higher behind) from 3:59 to 4:21. I have watched about ten videos of other famous dancers doing that move and they can’t compare. You can see them practically grinding their teeth in nervous anticipation of the challenge, and setting up with a pause first to “set” their balance for the trip. Van Hamel does none of that; she just plunges right in, boom:

You can find the continuance of Van Hamel’s role as Myrtha here. It’s wonderful as well, but I wanted to emphasize that first portion.

Compare Van Hamel to a more recent dancer who certainly isn’t bad but nothing like as good as Van Hamel. She seems tense, as do just about all of them. It’s hard to be austere without seeming tense, isn’t it? It’s almost painful watching her do that arabesque promenade because you can see the effort and the strain although she tries mightily to disguise it. But look at that supporting leg and the small movements with the ankle wobble, and how she keeps her eyes down on the floor. She only does one circle and then one dip, which is probably a mercy since it seems so difficult for her. She also is too pliant in her torso at certain moments, which doesn’t go well with the sternness. Van Hamel had just the right combination:

Here’s a Russian dancer from 2007. She seems to me to be posing more rather than under a spell or casting a spell. She seems to be concentrating more on her dancing as a physical endeavor. You can sense her thinking, and for some reason she flaps her wrists a lot more, which is both distracting and also makes her seem more human than spirit. There is also more of a start-and-stop quality rather than a single flow. The choreography is slightly different, perhaps to make it easier on her. There’s no arabesque promenade; just the penchée:

There’s very little other video footage available of Van Hamel dancing. But there are stills, and I think perhaps you can see from them what made her special. It was not her legs, although they were fine. Nor even her arms, which were finer. It was her core strength. Every pose emanates from that central core strength. All dancers have to have it to a certain extent, but Van Hamel had it to a remarkable degree and it’s what gave her a unique quality and was the reason she could calmly sail through Mytha (or appear to), which is a fairly brutal role.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Elon Musk wants to pull out of the Twitter deal because of Twitter bots.

Then again, does he really, or is this just a negotiating tactic?

More here:

Twitter initially rejected Musk’s $54 per share bid, called Musk names, told him to pound sand and pay more, and then grabbed the deal as it became clear Musk was grossly overpaying. It couldn’t last, and Musk is backing out, asserting that Twitter has refused to fully disclose the percentage of users who are bots, and for (allegedly) misrepresenting other information. In a role reversal, now Twitter says it will sue to force Musk to purchase the company per the inflated price previously negotiated…

Musk walking away puts Twitter in a tough place, a sinking stock price and no other viable option to realize shareholder value. Maybe it’s just to negotiate a more appropriate price.

Darned if I know.

(2) Sri Lanka is collapsing:

Sri Lanka is in the middle of a full-scale collapse after the president announced the nation is “bankrupt,” having run out of both money and energy. Hundreds of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets, and things have devolved into a dystopian nightmare.

In the last several hours, the presidential palace was taken over by a sea of people, angry at the government for putting them in such a precarious position. And as I’ll explain, Sri Lanka’s woes were not only avoidable but were purposely brought on to please climate change fanatics in faraway lands.

(3) COVID lockdowns have harmed children all around the world, as even the Economist recognizes:

When covid-19 first began to spread around the world, pausing normal lessons was a forgivable precaution. No one knew how transmissible the virus was in classrooms; how sick youngsters would become; or how likely they would be to infect their grandparents. But disruptions to education lasted long after encouraging answers to these questions emerged.

Make that long long long after. That data about children emerged extremely early. It seems to have been the teacher’s unions that kept pushing for the closings to continue, at least in the US.

More:

New data suggest that the damage has been worse than almost anyone expected.

Maybe worse than the left expected (or maybe not). Certainly not worse than the right expected.

Locking kids out of school has prevented many of them from learning how to read properly. Before the pandemic 57% of ten-year-olds in low and middle-income countries could not read a simple story, says the World Bank. That figure may have risen to 70%, it now estimates. The share of ten-year-olds who cannot read in Latin America, probably the worst-affected region, could rocket from around 50% to 80%.

Children who never master the basics will grow up to be less productive and to earn less.

Isn’t that part of the Great Reset, though?

(4) The Netherlands apparently doesn’t want to go the way of Sri Lanka.

More on the Alba case; plus the election of Manhattan’s DA Alvin Bragg

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s more on the genesis of the Simon/Alba confrontation, at least according to the deceased’s family (by the way, Alba’s age has been variously listed as 51 and as 61, but it appears to actually be 61):

Simon was killed July 1 when he confronted Alba over a bag of chips that his girlfriend had tried to buy for her daughter. The girlfriend said Alba snatched the snack from her 10-year-old daughter’s hand, according to a criminal complaint.

When the benefits card she tried to use for the purchase was denied, she told Simon, who went behind the counter where Alba, 51 [sic], was working.

So instead of telling the daughter they didn’t have the money for the chips, this woman becomes incensed that Alba (allegedly – I haven’t heard that there’s any video demonstrating this) “snatched” the snack from the girl’s hand.

Hey lady, you should have had the girl surrender it if your EBT card didn’t have the wherewithal to pay. And if the proprietor “snatched” it, report him for rudeness. Don’t have your career criminal boyfriend come to physically threaten and intimidate an elderly man.

In addition, apparently the girlfriend slashed Alba’s arm with her own knife – a different knife than Alba had grabbed – during the scuffle. It’s certainly possible she did this in order to protect Simon after he’d already been stabbed, however.

Simon apparently had nine children, although the article doesn’t say how many women are involved in that. As for his ex-wife, here’s what she had to say:

“Personally, I don’t feel like it was self defense,” she said.

“He stabbed him multiple times. That was overkill. Self defense for a push? You got pushed, you’re sitting there, going back and forth with words. He just was trying to make him apologize to the little girl.”

Of course. When you can’t pay for something, and the clerk or store owner reclaims that thing you can’t pay for, instead of explaining to your 10-year-old that you can’t always get what you want and that’s why it’s good to have a job and make enough money to pay for what you want, you call your violent boyfriend to address this heinous wrong committed against your daughter by a guy nearly twice his age.

Simon was out on bail for having assaulted a police officer, and I keep trying to get more information about some of the details of that assault, but so far I haven’t found anything.

As commentary and background on all of this, I want to highlight this from commenter “Steve White,” who points out that the current regimes are interested in imprisoning political prisoners and freeing common criminals, which was a feature of the original Soviets as well:

In the old Soviet Union, the founders believed that criminals were the product of the old, evil system — they were victims, and thus required a certain leniency when held accountable for their crimes. Every so often Moscow would decree an amnesty for common criminals, after which the Militia (the police) would have to round them up all over again.

Whereas the innocents were political prisoners (Article 58 in the Soviet Constitution) and were deviants in the new system — by rejecting scientific socialism they were indeed criminals and thus deserved the harshest sentences and conditions. They were the ones sent to the ‘corrective’ labor camps in the Kolyma and other regions; they dug coal, mined for lead, and dug the canals, and died by the hundred-thousands.

The natural law of self-defense was likewise perverted in the Soviet Union; Solzhenitsyn outlines this very well in Gulag.

And that’s what the left has in mind in the US too, with Manhattan’s new DA Alvin Bragg as a practitioner of the approach. How does someone like Bragg get elected? Well, New York is a heavily Democratic city, and the key to getting elected is winning the Democratic primary.

One thing I have never understood is the extraordinarily low turnout in NYC municipal elections. In November of 2021, when Eric Adams was elected mayor and Bragg elected Manhattan DA, turnout in NYC was 1.1 million voters, or 21% of the over 5 million registered voters in the city.

Because Bragg is the DA for Manhattan, only voters in Manhattan were allowed to vote for him. There are over a million voters registered to vote in Manhattan. Bragg got 83% of the vote, which amounted to 182,828 votes out of about 220,000. That means that he was supported by about 17% of the voters eligible to vote for him.

I’m not sure why turnout is so low there for something so important. I’m not making excuses for it, but it’s one of the things that allows an extremist such as Bragg to be elected. Many voters probably didn’t follow the race because in the past it didn’t matter much who became DA because most DAs – even Democrats – were interested in actually putting criminals behind bars. Bragg ran as a reformist, but he doesn’t appear to have revealed the full extent of his extremism.

Plus, since Democrats almost always win in NYC, it’s really the primaries that count. But in NYC even the primaries have a very low turnout. When Bragg won the Democratic primary for DA, many of his opponents were even more leftist and “reformist” than he. He may have seemed like one of the more moderate choices of all the people running as Democrats.

What’s more, because there were seven candidates in the race, Bragg didn’t have to get a majority of the votes in order to become the nominee, just a plurality of them. He actually only won 34% of the votes, and that made him the Democratic nominee, which almost automatically made him the winner in November. The total number of votes cast in the Democratic primary for DA was 250,603, and Bragg received 85,720 out of about 1,051,000 enrolled active voters in Manhattan. This means that about 8% of NYC voters voted for Bragg in the primary, and that determined the outcome.

It’s not an excuse; voters need to be far more involved. But it certainly helps explain how it is that Soros chooses heavily Democratic cities, chooses a leftist candidate, and throws a great deal of money into the race to make sure there is name recognition for his candidate and to help that candidate win the primary and then the election.

The charging of Jose Alba and the war on self-defense

The New Neo Posted on by

The war on self-defense continues, in New York City this time.

You know how it goes with these Soros-backed leftist DAs such as New York’s Alvin Bragg. When Bragg was elected in January, I wrote this post about his plans and what to expect. They’re the same sort of things we’ve become familiar with from the now-recalled Chesa Boudin of San Franisco, and from the hopefully-soon-to-be-recalled George Gascon of Los Angeles. In that post I mentioned that this was one of Bragg’s awful guidelines:

Armed robbers who use guns or other deadly weapons to stick up stores and other businesses will be prosecuted only for petty larceny, a misdemeanor, provided no victims were seriously injured and there’s no “genuine risk of physical harm” to anyone. Armed robbery, a class B felony, would typically be punishable by a maximum of 25 years in prison, while petty larceny subjects offenders to up to 364 days in jail and a $1,000 fine…

So recently Bragg finally found a criminal worthy of high bail and very serious charges: murder. Unfortunately – but not surprisingly – it was a grocery store worker defending himself against an attack:

Alba was manning the counter at Hamilton Heights Grocery on Broadway and West 139th Street Friday night when Austin Simon, a 35-year-old career criminal on parole for assaulting a police officer, stormed behind the counter and shoved him into a wall, surveillance video shows.

The ex-con then grabbed Alba as the frightened clerk tried to get past him — getting his hands on a knife and plunging it into Simon at least five times.

During the fight, Simon’s girlfriend allegedly pulled a knife from her purse and stabbed Alba three times in the shoulder and hand, according to his attorney.

She has not been charged, with the DA’s office saying only “we are continuing to review the evidence and the investigation is ongoing.”

She’d only be charged with a misdemeanor according to Bragg’s guidelines anyway, right?

I’ve read several articles about the incident, and it appears to have begun when the girlfriend tried to buy a bag of potato chips and her EBT debit card was declined. She left the store and called boyfriend Simon for assistance. He came and assaulted the older, smaller man, who grabbed a knife and stabbed Simon during the fight while Simon was apparently trying to drag him out of the store. There are also reports that the girlfriend stabbed Alba in the arm with another knife; I’m not sure what the time frame was for that, before or after or during the stabbing of Simon. The entire episode was captured on store security tape and can be viewed at many of the articles.

Originally, Bragg’s office asked for sky-high bail of $500,000; it was set at $250,000 and later, after an outcry, reduced to $50,000 of which only $5,000 had to actually be posted. Alba was freed with an ankle bracelet. Alba has no prior record, but note that Simon, the dead man, was out on parole after being charged with assaulting a police officer.

I don’t think that a grand jury would be likely to indict Alba for this, even in New York, and if indicted I don’t think a jury would convict him. Even the mayor has taken Alba’s side – although he also refused to condemn Bragg.

New York, unlike California, doesn’t have a recall provision for DAs. But there is a way to remove Bragg, although it’s not in Adams’ power. It’s in the hands of the governor, who happens to be the abominable Hochul. This was a campaign issue even prior to the Simon killing, and Hochul’s opponent Lee Zeldin is making sure the public is aware of it:

Among those who slammed Bragg on Thursday was Republican Gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin.

‘My first Day 1 action as Governor next January will be to fire Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg,’ he said.

The arrest and high bail of Alba was deliberate on Bragg’s part, meant to intimidate anyone with the temerity to defend himself or herself. If Bragg is allowed to remain in office, this sort of thing will recur. There’s a definite pattern, and it’s the same pattern that emerged years ago in Britain in order to discourage self-defense. We have a more robust self-defense tradition here than there, however, and that persists to a certain extent. But Bragg seems quite determined to end it.

That tradition of self-defense is reflected at least somewhat in a bipartisan call from some NY politicians asking Bragg to drop charges against Alba:

The bipartisan group of City Council members said the DA’s controversial, progressive approach to law enforcement was “rewarding the guilty and punishing the innocent.”

“The fact that you are even prosecuting Mr. Alba reveals how your perverse sense of justice not only protects violent criminals, but actively seeks to destroy the lives of crime victims,” the lawmakers wrote Bragg on Thursday…

“You are simply rewarding the guilty and punishing the innocent.”…

The letter was signed by Councilmembers Robert Holden (D-Queens), Joe Borelli (R-Staten Island), Inna Vernikov (R-Brooklyn), David Carr (R-Staten Island), Kalman Yeger (D-Brooklyn), Joann Ariola (R-Queens) and Vickie Paladino (R-Queens).

Two of the signers are Republicans from Staten Island, the only reddish borough in New York City, and the smallest. One of the signers, a Republican from Queens, is none other than Vickie Paladino. I covered her in this post from two years ago. She wasn’t a City Council member then, but apparently she is now. Extremely feisty lady.

Boris Johnson resigns

The New Neo Posted on by

I guess the pressure to resign was finally too much for Johnson:

After resisting calls to step down for nearly two days, Johnson admitted to the world’s media outside No. 10 Downing Street in London that “it is clearly now the will of the parliamentary Conservative Party that there should be a new leader and a new prime minister.”

“The process of that should begin now. The timetable should be announced next week,” added Johnson, who went on to thank British voters who propelled the Conservatives to their largest House of Commons majority for nearly four decades in the 2019 general election — a result Johnson had repeatedly cited as he sought to cling to power.

Things can change very quickly in politics.

Johnson was elected because of Brexit, and in a way that was his single mission and his raison d’être. He is a flamboyant and unusual character, and some of that is what brought him down. At least, that’s the superficial reason. The deeper one may be that once Brexit had been done, he seems to have governed mostly as a liberal.

That’s certainly what Mark Steyn thinks:

Shinzo Abe assassinated: RIP

The New Neo Posted on by

Former long-term Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated by a gunman while Abe was giving a speech in the city of Nara.

Japan is a society with a low murder rate and also what are perhaps the strictest gun laws in the world. And yet this happened. There was security there for Abe, but it’s hard to understand what it involved:

Witnesses saw a man carrying what they described as a large gun fire twice at the former PM from behind. Abe fell to the ground as bystanders screamed in shock and disbelief.

Abe had a security team with him, but it appears the gunman was still able to get within a few metres of Mr Abe without any sort of checks or barrier.

Photos circulating in the aftermath of the shooting showed the suspect standing just behind Mr Abe as he gave his speech.

How on earth did the assassin get that close with a weapon that seems to have been relatively large? In a photo at the link, you can see him standing just behind Abe, dressed in gray, and he is carrying a large black bag slung over his shoulder and across his body.

If you scroll down further, you can see a photo of a police officer confronting the assailant afterwards; he was taken into custody. I’m no weapons expert, but the assassin’s weapon has been described as “homemade,” and I’m not sure what that is on the officer’s right hip. Is he armed, or not? It seems pretty clear to me that, had the perp so desired, he could have blasted quite a few other people there away. That didn’t happen.

It is also ironic, although quite irrelevant, that every single person in that photo of the officer and the perp is wearing a COVID mask, even though it’s outside.

More:

Gun violence is extremely rare in Japan, where handguns are banned – and incidents of political violence are almost unheard of.

I’m not sure what the BBC means by “unheard of.” Japan has a low murder rate and very very little gun violence, but it is no stranger to political violence. This article discusses that history, and you can see that it certainly exists.

The motive for Abe’s assassination is unclear:

The suspect, named as Tetsuya Yamagami…told officers he had a grudge against a specific group he believed Abe was connected to, police said, adding that they were investigating why the former PM was targeted out of other people related to the group.

The gun is being described as both “handmade” and “homemade,” and several other weapons of that type plus explosives were found in the perp’s home. Not only that, but in addition:

The weapon used in the attack on Abe was probably a “craft-made” firearm, according to N.R. Jenzen-Jones, the director of Armament Research Services, a specialist arms investigations firm.

He compared the weapon to a musket in which the gunpowder is loaded separately from the bullet.

“Firearms legislation in Japan is very restrictive, so I think what we’re seeing here, with what’s probably a muzzle-loading weapon, is not just an attempt to circumvent the control of firearms, but also the strict control of ammunition in Japan,” he said.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Japanese police do carry guns when on duty, but they are rarely used.

The Bird of Time

The New Neo Posted on by

Today I was planning to finish and post a long essay that was about half done. Really, I was.

What happened? I decided to call my cell phone company and ask a few questions about changing my service and perhaps getting a new phone. After all, they keep sending me emails saying “Get a new phone – for free!”

That call consumed about two hours. Now I feel quite wrung out, and quite happy to keep my old plan, which was grandfathered in from about the time of the Renaissance. I did learn a lot more than I knew before about current cell phone twistings and turnings, which have become far more Byzantine than when I last checked.

I’m writing about this because modern life seems increasingly filled with these contradictions. Save money! Get your new whatever! And hours and hours later you’re more confused than ever, after having researched and researched and researched. That appears to go for most purchases.

When I went to California for my eye surgery and got my flight reservations, the website kept breaking down right at the end of the transaction. Then, when I tried to call on the phone, they said there was a two-hour wait. But hey, you can do it by text! So I tried that, and it involved a two-and-a-half hour wait.

Convenience has somehow led to inconvenience for so many things.

Remember one-a-day vitamins? They used to be these tiny little pills that contained just the RDA for the basic vitamins, and I took them for years and years and years. Perhaps I don’t need them – I do eat my fruits and veggies and all that stuff – but I figure I’ll just continue. But over the years, vitamins have grown huge both physically and in terms of what they contain, horse pills with mega-this and mega-that and somewhat-mega-prices as well. Try finding a regular old vitamin these days.

I used to get mine at Walgreen’s and about a year ago they stopped making them. They came in a smallish bottle with a year’s supply, 365 petite easy-to-swallow pills for something like $8.99. Recently I spent about six hours online, spread over several days, looking for a substitute. Every search I could think of led me to only one rather expensive selection that wasn’t quite what I wanted, plus a ream of the expensive aforementioned mega-pills.

I gave up and ordered some gummy vitamins, which were more basic in their ingredients although not the least bit cheap. But when I received them and chewed the first one, I almost spit it out. Awful! Apparently even sugar can’t disguise the bitterness of vitamins.

And then, for no apparent reason, the next time I went on Amazon, the algorithm – which had stubbornly defied me previously in my quest – gave me a suggestion for exactly (or nearly exactly) what I’d been looking for in vain all that time. I bought a bottle. The pills look like my old buddies from Walgreen’s, and have a similar formula. They’re a bit more expensive, but what isn’t?

Go figure. At least I have them now.

Oh, and the title of this post? It’s from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:

Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring
Your Winter garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter—and the Bird is on the Wing.

Whether at Naishapur or Babylon,
Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run,
The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop,
The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.

The latest language lesson from the teaching profession

The New Neo Posted on by

Just brilliant:

Leaked documents from an assembly convened this week by the nation’s largest teachers union allege to show the National Education Association (NEA) is debating a proposal to begin pushing the use of “LGBTQIA+ inclusive” language, like “birthing parent” instead of “mother” and “non-birthing parent” instead of “father,” in formal language used by state and local educational entities.

“NEA will inform states and locals of the following sample language that may be put in contracts that is LGBTQIA+ inclusive,” an alleged NEA proposal for a resolution titled NBI 63 reads. “’Parental leave’ instead of ‘maternity leave,’ ‘parent’ instead of ‘mother’ or ‘father,’ ‘birthing parent’ instead of ‘mother,’ and ‘non-birthing parent’ instead of ‘father,’” the proposal, which asks for $5,000 to be implemented, points out.

“Mother” and “father” are two of the oldest words in every language, the most basic words of all and also the ones that most children learn first. And whatever happened to good old classics like Heather Has Two Mommies or the equivalent for two daddies? Well, trans parenting is more complicated, but I’m sure it can be worked out without torturing the language.

The terms “birthing parent” and “non-birthing parent” generate another huge problem that I haven’t seen discussed in several articles I read about this issue. It seems obvious to me that these terms completely ignore adoption, something that affects far more people than trans parenting issues do. They conjure up the older terms “birth mother” and “birth father” for the biological versus adoptive parents.

The left is deeply intent on changing language, which they believe is a big step towards changing perceptions and ideas and polities. We’ve seen it happen in many arenas, particularly immigration. When was the last time you heard the term “illegal aliens” used even by the right?

Perhaps we should replace the word “teacher” with the term “propagandist”?