Lia Thomas’ Olympic hopes are dashed

The New Neo Posted on by

The international body has ruled:

Swimming’s world governing body, FINA, announced a ban Sunday on biological men competing in women’s events, unless they had “transitioned” before the age of 12.

In other words, transgender athletes who have experienced the enduring competitive advantages of a male puberty flooded with testosterone, such as greater muscle mass, lung capacity and height, will no longer have an unfair advantage in women’s competitions.

Leaving aside for the moment the question of male-to-female pre-pubescent transitioners and what rules should govern them, it’s a relief that FINA has done what the US agencies in charge have refused to do: re-apply common sense. The FINA ruling only applies to international competitions, however:

It does not necessarily apply to national or regional competitions or lower-level meets. National federations could apply their own criteria for their competitions.

The ruling also only impacts on transgender athletes in women’s competitions. Female-to-male transgender athletes (transgender men) will continue to be eligible to compete in men’s races without any restriction.

That last sentence is pretty darn funny, because I’m not aware of any female-to-male transitioners who would be competitive in men’s sports a high level. This is a one-way street on which only males-to-females have an advantage.

It remains to be seen whether US sports organizations will follow in the footsteps of FINA.

You can check in any time you want…

The New Neo Posted on by

…but they sure make it hard to leave.

That’s a slight variation on one of my favorite lines from the song “Hotel California.” What am I talking about? Oh, lots of companies that offer something free as long as you cancel before automatic payments kick in. And they are betting that you’ll either love their service so much that you’ll want it to continue and be willing to pay, or – and this is key – that you’ll forget to cancel.

Get enough people who forget, and you’ve got quite a tidy little sum of money.

Or if you do remember to cancel in time – and I write down the cancellation date on my calendar so I won’t forget – they make the process so confusing that you might just slip up and not accomplish it.

Recently it was the day before my one-month free Amazon Prime membership would stop being free. I had used it for a number of things that are hard to obtain elsewhere, but had no intention of continuing with it. But when I went to the cancel page and started the process of cancelling, an interesting thing happened.

First off, I found that when I checked off the first box saying I wanted to cancel, it led me to some other prompt (easily missed, I might add) where I had to reiterate that intent. Then on another page I had to do it again. And then again. I believe there was a total of four or five times that I had to click on boxes in order to actually accomplish the cancellation. Even then, I wasn’t 100% sure I had made it all the way to the end until I got an email confirming that I had opted out.

It’s not just Amazon Prime that does it this way, of course. There are plenty of other sites that do the same or worse. Sometimes they write things so confusingly that people probably often say they want to continue when in fact they don’t; something like “Yes, I want to stop cancelling” or some other slightly-convoluted construction. And unsubscribing from an email list is more of the same.

They are clever, no mistake about it.

Happy Father’s Day!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This a slightly edited version of a previous post of mine.]

It’s Father’s Day. A sort of poor stepchild to Mother’s Day, although fathers themselves are hardly that. They are central to a family.

Just ask the people who never had one, or who had a difficult relationship with theirs. Or ask the people who were nurtured in the strength of a father’s love and guidance.

Of course, the complex world being what it is, and people and families being what they are, it’s the rare father-child relationship that’s entirely conflict-free. But for the vast majority, love is almost always present, even though at times it can be hard to express or to perceive. It can take a child a very long time to see it or feel it; but that’s part of what growing up is all about. And “growing up” can go on even in adulthood, or old age.

Father’s Day—or Mother’s Day, for that matter—can wash over us in a wave of treacly sentimentality. But the truth of the matter is often stranger, deeper, and more touching. Sometimes the words of love catch in the throat before they’re spoken. But they can still be sensed. Sometimes a loving father is lost through distance or misunderstanding, and then regained.

There’s an extraordinary poem by Robert Hayden that depicts one of these uneasy father-child connections—the shrouded feelings, both paternal and filial, that can come to be seen in the fullness of time as the love that was always, always there. I offer it on this Father’s Day to all of you.

THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house.

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

The story of my left eye – so far: Part VII

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: [Part I can be found here.
Part II can be found here.
Part III can be found here.
Part IV can be found here.
Part V can be found here.
Part VI can be found here.]

The good news – really good news – is that my distance vision in my left eye continues to be fabulous. It’s 20/20 or even better, more clear than I ever remember it being, and this is after having endured quite a few years of 20/200 vision in that eye that glasses couldn’t correct except a tiny bit.

The second good news is that I even have fairly good computer-distance vision (mid-distance) in that left eye now. I still use eyeglasses at my computer because it’s a lot better than not using them, but I can actually read the print without them. It’s just not nearly as comfortable or clear as with the eyeglasses. But it’s a ton better than it was before even when I used glasses.

The less-good news, although it may resolve over time: I still have some irritation in that eye, and it’s been two and a half months since the surgery. I think it’s from dry eye – the eye doctor I saw at home said my eye otherwise looked fine – which sometimes occurs or is exacerbated after cataract surgery either for a few months or permanently. I’ve been holding off using drops for it because I tend to be allergic to a lot of things like that, and I’m hoping it might go away anyway by itself over time. But I may start using the drops soon.

Other less-good (but expected) news is that my operated-on eye, my left, has lost its ability to read closeup print without glasses. I was able to do that with the cataract due to a phenomenon called “second sight,” which sometimes happens with cataracts. As the person’s distance vision degenerates, sometimes the near vision gets quite good for a while. I was in that stage, but since I only was allowed to get a monofocal lens replacement, I chose a distance correction and lost the ability to read as well with the left eye. But reading glasses work very well now, which they hadn’t before.

But – more good news – my right eye, the unoperated one, is taking up the slack and I can still read closeup without reading glasses if only briefly, due to “second sight” in my right eye. I have a cataract there, not quite as bad as the one in my left eye was but bad enough. I’m waiting to have that eye operated on, though, because I need a longer break from eye surgery and also because I’m not too keen on losing that ability to read without glasses. It’s very convenient.

I also can’t decide what to choose in terms of lenses with that right eye. I’m not allowed to have a multi-focal lens because the problems in my left eye precluded one, and that sort of difference in the two lenses wouldn’t work well together. I could choose a close-up monofocal lens, and try to have monovision (which I sort of already have had anyway due to the differences in my eyes). Monovision means using one eye for distance and the other for close.

But sometimes I think I should just finally have the two eyes working together, have a monofocal distance lens put into the right one and surrender to the need for reading glasses every time I read anything close up. Another choice I might be allowed is what’s called an extended vision lens in that right eye, which supposedly would give me distance vision nearly as good as in the left, plus better middle-distance vision, but still not closeup vision. But that choice might involve slightly more night halos and glare.

Am I confusing you enough?

Speaking of night halos and glare, I still have them in my left eye. That doesn’t happen to most people who have cataract surgery, at least that’s what I’ve read. Most of them have had problems with night vision – halos, glare, starbursts – before the cataract is removed, but the problems go away afterwards. Patients with multifocal lenses are more apt to have those halo/glare type of problems continue, but I don’t have a multifocal lens; just a monofocal lens. And yet I, along with a certain percentage of monofocal lens recipients, continue to have halos and starbursts around streetlights and headlights at night, although not as bad as before the surgery.

There’s a possibility this condition will improve, but for a lot of people the problem is permanent. I’ve read tons of articles about it, because of course it affects night driving, but no one really knows why it sometimes happens. Some people are so bothered by it that they have the lens taken out and a new one of a different type put in, but there’s no guarantee that would work, and a second surgery has more risks in general. In my case, with the particularly challenging problems that existed in my eye prior to surgery, I think any surgeon would be even more reluctant to do such a replacement. They would just say to live with it, and I think that probably is the best advice.

I wonder sometimes if I’m getting the night vision halo/glare/starburst problems due to the interaction of the new lens with the much-larger-than-normal iridotomy hole I have in that left eye (see this), but no one has been able to tell me whether that’s the case because the size and shape of my iridotomy hole is apparently quite a unique feature. Fortunately I’m able to drive at night, but I just don’t think I’ll be doing lengthy trips at night out in the countryside – something I actually used to do, years ago, when I often visited friends who lived in rural areas.

Because I’m the type of person who seeks to know the why of things, I’m still troubled by the fact that no one knows why I got all that scar tissue in the first place. And why on earth did it suddenly gets so much worse last fall after having seemingly been stable for years? How could I have had uveitis (deep eye inflammation) and not been aware of it? It’s ordinarily quite noticeable and causes significant symptoms, but I didn’t have them. It’s a frightening thought that so much damage could have occurred silently, and it makes me worry whenever my eye feels even a little bit irritated, which sometimes happens (perhaps because of dry eye).

So I’m left with residual puzzlement and fear about how and why it happened. Was the scar tissue from the iridotomy? One doctor said no, another said absolutely, and a third said he didn’t know. And if it was, why didn’t it occur until years later (up to eight or so, by my estimation)? And also, should I have another operation to have the iridotomy sewn shut, and see if that improves things? The LA eye doctor says I could do that because once the natural lens (cataract) is removed and the artificial one put in, the narrow angles that necessitated the iridotomy in the first place open up and are no longer narrow. Therefore the iridotomy hole is no longer needed for drainage. But he also said that the tissue of the iris is fragile – “like wet Kleenex” – and if it’s sewn shut the iris tissue around it might feel the strain. And of course it might not solve the night light problem anyway, although it might. So far no one can say.

So I think I’ll pass on that for now. And I’ll pass on having my right eye done for a while, too.

That’s probably more than you ever wanted to know about my eye. But that’s the story – so far. I remain very grateful that I found a doctor who seemed to be eager to rise to the challenge, and seems to have had the ability to do so.

Why has the right judged the Uvalde police so quickly?

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “SHIREHOME” writes on the discussion of the Uvalde school shooting and the police reaction:

Instapundit commentors have been rabid in their comments about the Police. Started right away and no amount of REAL information will change their minds. I have always been in the “Lets wait” camp. I am not sure if we will every get a definitive answer to all of Neo’s questions, but at least she is asking them, not making judgements.

And of course it’s not just Instapundit commenters, it’s just about every blog on the right (and probably on the left, too, although I haven’t read those on the topic of Uvalde, and of course the left focuses mostly on their usual gun control push). It’s not every single commenter on the right, either, but as far as I can see it’s the majority of them as well as the writers. I can’t recall seeing any pundit on the right taking the more moderate position I do on this.

That has happened to me before on certain topics – just to take one example of many, whether Madoff’s sons were guilty. I thought most likely that they were not guilty and that they didn’t know about their father’s Ponzi scheme, and that he had betrayed them as well as betraying his clients. Time has proven me correct, I think; despite tons of investigators looking and looking and looking, no evidence was ever found against them.

I find it depressing that the right has been part of a rush to judgment to blame police in Uvalde. It’s not that I’ve idealized the right (or the police) after leaving the left; I try very hard to idealize no side and no group and I think I mostly succeed. But still, it’s hard to see so many people I respect do exactly what they excoriate the left for doing: rushing to judgment, and distorting facts or not paying attention to many, in order to get a preferred message across.

What is that message? For the left, every shooting is an opportunity to work towards achieving their goal of limiting the 2nd Amendment more and more. But a significant proportion of the right seems to take some of these incidents as an opportunity to vent contempt on the rescuers for not doing enough, or for being too “militarized” before they even know the details of what the rescuers did do and what was even possible for them them to do under the circumstances they faced with the equipment and knowledge they had available.

Sitting at home, safe in front of a computer, people can think of the ways they would have done it – successfully of course! – and their solutions have the advantage of not having to be tested under real-world conditions. These school shooting incidents are so terrible, so horrific, so heartbreaking, that people blame the rescuers because it gives them the illusion that we can control more than we can.

With Uvalde we are also hampered by the fact that the situation was chaotic and the facts are still being sorted out. Ordinarily, investigations of this sort take many many months to complete, and releasing information bit by bit prior to that can be (and has been) very misleading. The MSM jumps on anything sensational, and much of what they’ve published so far has been from unnamed and unidentified sources so that we cannot possibly judge its veracity. Now the police are understandably hesitant to stick their necks out even more by releasing more and more piecemeal information that will be used to fan hatred against them.

Personally, I’m very curious to get many questions answered, but I don’t trust the MSM and unnamed sources to answer them; I trust them to distort them. So I’ll wait for the report and in the meantime I’ll gather whatever information I can and try to look at it with an objective eye. And I plan to look at the eventual report in the same way.

Since Uvalde I’ve looked up all the famous school shootings (and other firearm mass murders) I can think of, beginning with Columbine, paying special attention to the issue of doors and locks, and what I’ve discovered is that analogies to other school shootings don’t really work in this case. For example, I’ve been trying to think of a single previous school shooting incident in which the shooter remained holed up in the same room as the victims, having locked the door behind him. Usually in such shootings there is no locked door involved, and often the perp kills himself as police enter the building (not the room; the building) or even beforehand. To go through the history of these shootings case by case would take a whole series of lengthy posts, and although I could do it (and it’s actually very interesting) I don’t know whether I have the energy to write so exhaustively on it.

We demand quick answers because we want them so badly. Sometimes police are really at fault, and almost always some mistakes are made by police because the situation is confusing and tense and police are humans under pressure and sometimes facing situations in which no course of action would have significantly changed things. We want to reach back and undo the horror and make it okay again, with these children alive and happy and living out their full lives without the intervention of a crazed and sadistic killer. But wishing it doesn’t make it so, and prematurely blaming the police – many of whom had relatives or children of friends at risk in Robb Elementary that day – saves no one and helps no one.

[NOTE: I have little doubt that some the comments to this post will be of the “what about this bad thing the Uvalde police did?” and “what about that bad thing the Uvalde police did?” variety. So far I’ve been trying to respond to each one, setting the record straight over and over and over. But I find I keep having to respond to the same questions. So I refer you to all my previous posts on Uvalde and the discussions in the comments there, particularly my responses. For example, there have been two such discussions already today here. It’s really important to read articles trashing the police carefully, and in particular who is the source of the information and what is being left out as well as what is being said by the writer.

Also, if you think back, the turning point against the police came early on with the release of videos of irate parents outside Robb Elementary that day, screaming that the police were just standing there. That release occurred on May 26, two days after the event, and highly influenced public opinion through emotion. It is another example of videos strongly influencing opinion before other things are known (in this case, that the entire school was being evacuated at the time and that most of the children had already been evacuated by police). Part of the news stories featured one mother who said she’d been handcuffed by police (actually, US marshals) and on being released went into the school and rescued her own children. This got a ton of press, but her story has never been authenticated and rests solely on her own description, and there are reasons to doubt her veracity. I went into some of them in this previous comment. That’s just one example of the type of thing I mean that shapes public opinion early on.]

Have you noticed…

The New Neo Posted on by

…that at several websites, the comments are now only open to paid subscribers? I don’t just mean the right to post a comment, I mean the right to read comments at all.

I’ve noticed it happening at RedState, at PJ Media, and at Hot Air. What do all those sites have in common? They’re owned by Salem Media Group.

This explanation appeared three days ago at Pajamas:

Though the decision to make comments exclusive for our VIP members was a difficult one, it will allow us to get away from Big Tech punishing us for user comments, as these accounts will be managed by Townhall Media directly. Through the direct support of our VIP members, we can do even more to fight back against the left while providing free speech to an exclusive conservative community free from leftist trolls, annoying spammers, and bots.

Well, I suppose. Those sites have more readers than I, and it gets hard to police things and takes time as well. I certainly am aware of how much time it takes here. But they also have more staff to do it. And I wonder whether their gains from it will be offset by a significant loss of readers. I know that I most enjoy blogs and sites with comments. It’s not that I read every single comment, but I like to have the option, and I don’t want to have to pay just to look at them.

I seem to be more and more of a dinosaur these days. And I have no plans to make people pay to comment here.

Then again, if you’d like to pay me, of your own free will – you know where the Paypal button is (see how I snuck that in?).

Faint stirrings of life from the GOP in California

The New Neo Posted on by

Though California does have sections that are politically conservative, the left has an iron grip on the state’s politics because of its large coastal urban areas. The state has also instituted something called the jungle primary, which means that the two top vote-getters in the primary run against each other in the general, no matter what party they belong to. In California, that almost automatically means two Democrats will be running.

It’s ironic that the jungle primary, instituted in 2010, was supposed to help the state become more competitive for independents and moderates. But that didn’t pan out; no Republican has even been on the ballot in a US Senate race in the general election since 2010.

Until this year:

This was the first time in ten years that a Republican has been on the ballot for U.S. Senate in the state of California,” Meuser told me. “We did this despite the fact that there was a Democrat who decided to put $4 million of his own money into his campaign to try to split the Democrat vote so that there’d be two Democrats and no Republicans.”…

Consequently, not only is it a rarity that a Republican even got through the Jungle Primary for U.S. Senate, but if Meuser wins in November he’ll become the first Republican senator to be elected in California since the re-election of Pete Wilson way back in 1988…

Meuser, however, was undaunted by the recent history of Republican candidates in the state. A seasoned Constitutional law attorney, business owner, and ranked Ironman triathlete, Meuser is used to a challenge. He ran a strong campaign based in part on the name recognition he built during his 2018 bid for secretary of State, which took the native Californian by bicycle to each of the 58 counties in the vast western state. His history of fighting to protect American liberties post-pandemic doesn’t hurt either.

I hope he’s really really good at bicycling uphill, though, because a Republican winning a Senate seat from California seems well-nigh impossible. If it ever were to happen, though, this would be the year.

“Everyone Hates Soros-Backed LA DA George Gascon…Including His Own Prosecutors’

The New Neo Posted on by

That’s the title of this piece at BattleSwarm Blog about the possible recall of George Gascon.

I submit, however, that it actually should read “especially his own prosecutors.” Lawyers don’t – or at least, until the last few years, didn’t – go into the prosecution biz to wink at criminals, coddle them, and set them free to commit more crimes.

When Gascon was elected as LA’s top prosecutor, he immediately issued a pack of directives that sent the prosecutors under him reeling:

“So, filing deputies are forced to choose between obeying the special directive and decline filing the prior strike allegations — or — follow the statute and file the strike allegations. So the choice is horrible: Line DDAs (those with active cases) either decline to join the motion to dismiss the strikes, or make the motion to dismiss the strikes. In other words, here’s the choice as a sworn DDA: Disobey a written directive by your elected boss, or violate your oath and risk bar discipline for not following clear statutory and decisional law.

“No one should be put to this choice–and yet, 1,200 DDAs are now being asked to make these choices on the hour during the workday.

“This is wrong.”

Please also see this post of mine from shortly after his election.

Here’s a recent article at Substack:

In February, the prosecutors’ union, the Association of Deputy District Attorneys, conducted a vote to see where its members stood on the recall: Nearly 98 percent supported it…

To a person, these prosecutors said that the problem was that Gascon had portrayed himself on the campaign trail as a progressive, and they thought that was a lie. They thought that he was captive to a radical agenda; that he wanted to blow the whole place up; that Black Lives Matter was now in charge of the criminal-justice system in Los Angeles; and that all of this was hurting the people the activists claimed to care about the most…

Gascon didn’t see it that way, of course. He imagined himself a man of the future—forward-looking, free of the old assumptions about cops and prosecutors and the meaning of criminal justice…

Gascon…had caught a killer, 30-foot wave in the summer of 2020. “I think that it was something that helped Gascon get elected, but I don’t have any confidence that that’s who Gascon is,” said Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor who now runs Loyola Marymount University’s Project for the Innocent, which seeks to overturn wrongful convictions. “I think that’s the big question: do we know who Gascon is?”

Actually, everyone should have already known who Gascon was. There was no excuse for ignorance on that score. It’s not as though Gascon had never been a DA before; he had. He was the San Francisco DA from 2011 to 2018 (although he didn’t resign till 2019). He had a track record:

During Gascon’s time as District Attorney, property crime increased by 49%. Some of Gascon’s critics have blamed this increase on his office’s reluctance to file charges against “High-level” offenders; during Gascon’s tenure, misdemeanor charges were only filed in 40% of cases presented by the San Francisco Police Department. Having worked with Gascon, San Francisco Mayor London Breed and City Attorney Dennis Herrera declined to endorse him in his bid to become the District Attorney of Los Angeles County; Breed and Herrera instead endorsed his opponent, the incumbent Jackie Lacey.

There’s lot more at the link about his tenure as San Francisco’s DA, and all of it is very much in line with his performance in LA. If it’s a tad less extreme, that’s only because the left hadn’t gone full out yet, but it was certainly extreme enough to let the voters of LA know what they were in for.

Not only that, get a load of this:

…Gavin Newsom appointed him the interim District Attorney when Kamala Harris was elected to Attorney General. Even though he’d never tried a case, let alone prosecuted a case…

That fact alone should have been a red flag the size of LA itself. Apparently it didn’t matter. If you read the article from which it came, written on his departure from the San Francisco DA office and entitled “Don’t Let the Door Hit You on the Way Out: A former San Francisco prosecutor reflects on George Gascon’s time as District Attorney,” you get an idea of how awful his tenure was there and how much he was hated by prosecutors.

If no one in LA knew, they certainly should have known.

From the Substack article:

Since Gascon took office, roughly 300 deputy D.A.s have left. On top of that, job applications are down. The D.A.’s Office usually hires every two to three years, and it gets about 2,000 applications each hiring season. This year, 240 people applied for 60 spots, a longtime deputy D.A. told me. “And you should see who these people are,” he said. “It’s people who no one else will hire.”

Even if Gascon is recalled, his successor will have his or her work cut out trying to repair the destruction Gascon has wreaked.

Am I the only person on the right who has some sympathy for Biden’s press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a criticism that’s typical of what I read about her:

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre always manages to surprise me. I used to think that Jen Psaki was the worst White House Press Secretary I’d ever seen, but Jean-Pierre has changed my opinion in short order. Her tenure has been rocky from the get-go, with her performances widely panned for her lack of preparation, dodging of questions, and frequent need to read directly from her notes.

Other times she just beclowns herself. She recently claimed that the economy is in a better position now than it has been historically.

No, really, she did.

But she really proved how bad she was during an interview with CNN this week when she said that Americans should remember how things were when Biden took office.

“We have to remember where this country was more than a year ago when he walked into office,” she told CNN’s Don Lemon.

And she thought that was a good talking point?

Thing is, there are no good talking points for Jean-Pierre to fall back on. What can she say? Granted, I certainly don’t admire her for signing on to be an apologist for and booster of a corrupt president and a party dragging the country precipitously down. But whatever her reasons – personal belief system, personal ambition, all of the above or none of the above – her job is impossible. All she can do is preach to the choir, and weakly at that.

Plus – and this is actually the reason for my relative sympathy for her – she doesn’t have the snotty snark that Psaki had, the sheer duping delight I often saw in Psaki’s affect as she lied through her teeth without hesitation or shame. I think that what is perceived as Jean-Pierre’s failings may actually represent a problem she has with being required to constantly lie with no shame whatsoever (a problem that didn’t seem to perturb Psaki at all).

Maybe I’m giving Jean-Pierre too much benefit of the doubt; probably most of you think I am. But that’s what I see in her – or at least a glimmer of it.