Maybe Biden was referring to himself, not Putin

The New Neo Posted on by

There was a big brouhaha the other day over Joe Biden remarking about Putin, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” Way to go, Joe – make Putin even more paranoid and angry and certain that the US wants to unseat him or kill him.

But since Joe is addled, it occurs to me that maybe he was talking about himself, not Putin at all.

Rand Paul is right about this:

Well, you know, a lot of times when you’re around somebody who’s in cognitive decline, you find yourself trying to help them with a sentence, trying to help them complete it, and say, oh no, that’s not what you really mean. Let me help you complete the sentence. But we shouldn’t have to do that for the commander-in-chief. And it is actually a national security risk. Because he’s sending signals that no one in their right mind would want to send to Russia at this point. We aren’t trying to replace Putin in Russia, we aren’t trying to have regime change, we’re not sending troops into Ukraine, and we’re not going to respond in kind with chemical weapons. So, none of those things are true.”

Paul continued, “But, you know, he lives in an alternate universe where he just says they’re not true and he didn’t say them. So, I guess you’re supposed to look the other way. But even the left-wing media is noticing these gaffes. So, I do think that it is a real problem. And there’s a humorous angle to this, but it’s really not funny. I mean, because we’re worried about what he’s saying precipitating or escalating the conflict in Ukraine into a world war. That’s very serious.”

So serious that it’s dangerous.

And there’s a good question here – “was Joe Biden ever competent?” The question isn’t merely flippant; it’s worth pondering. I think that Joe used to be competent in the legal sense of a defendant about to be tried. But in the ordinary vernacular sense I’d say no, he was never competent, or perhaps he was just marginally competent. He also (as I’ve said many times) was mendacious, corrupt, full of himself, of dubious general principles, and kind of weird.

But now he’s truly dangerous and “cannot remain in power” – that is, should not remain in power, and even his own party must know that. But so far most of them have protected him from removal and have pretended he’s just a normal average president albeit with a speech impediment and some rather lovable eccentricities. That may be changing, as indicated by the fact that the NY Times and the WaPo are belatedly acknowledging that the Hunter Biden laptop is real and incriminating.

But in the meantime, Joe does great damage.

The only good thing about the Biden presidency so far, and I mean the only good thing, is that it has highlighted the utter corruption and destructiveness of the Democratic Party itself. More and more people are noticing this, and perhaps that will matter.

Gaetz, the FBI, and the elusive laptop

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the many odd things about the Hunter Biden laptop is the fact that, around when the story first broke in the NY Post – and was almost instantaneously suppressed by the rest of the press plus social media giants – it also came out that the FBI had had possession of the laptop beginning in December of 2019.

Note that was prior to Joe Biden being chosen as the Democratic presidential nominee. And it’s about ten months before the Post’s story on the laptop. And yet we’d not heard a previous word about any investigation or even the existence of the laptop, until the NY Post’s revelations came out.

Not that I’d expect the FBI to give an official report on what was supposedly or at least theoretically an ongoing investigation. But you’d better believe that, had the laptop been from one of the Trump offspring, the FBI would have leaked like a sieve. But for Hunter Biden and Joe, nothing.

Now we have this exchange in Congress between Matt Gaetz and FBI Assistant Director for the Cyber Division Bryan Vorndran. The latter certainly should know about the laptop, right? But apparently not, to hear him tell it [emphasis mine]:

Who has it?” Gaetz asked. “I don’t know who has it,” the witness responded to surprise.

Next, Gaetz entered into the committee record the contents of Hunter’s Biden’s Laptop and a receipt from Mac’s Computer Repair evidencing the FBI taking possession of the Laptop in December 2019. Still, the FBI Cyber Assistant Director testified that after three years in possession of the Laptop, no assessment had been made.

Apparently they had more important things to tend to, like chasing down parents who object at school board meetings to CRT or are upset by sexual attacks on their children in schools.

More:

“How are Americans supposed to trust that you can protect us from the next Colonial pipeline if it seems you can’t locate a laptop that was given to you three years ago from the First Family, potentially creating vulnerabilities for our country?,” Gaetz asked…

the FBI Cyber Assistant Director said Hunter’s Laptop was not in his “purview.”

It seems pretty clear to me that the FBI sat on the laptop and never had any intention of doing anything about it. As for Vorndran, I doubt he’s the fool he makes himself out to be. He just thinks the American public consists of fools – or perhaps just powerless peons who can’t do much about it even if they’re angry at the FBI. The FBI not only holds the laptop, it holds the cards.

Gaetz had another trick up his sleeve, though. He had a copy of the laptop’s hard drive and entered it into the Congressional record. Where I assume it will languish.

Open thread 3/30/22

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m left-handed, and in my family three out of four of us were lefties. My mother was left-handed but was switched as a child, so she wrote and ate with her right hand but did just about everything else with her left.

I’m not sure I buy the theory advanced in this clip about why left-handedness has persisted in a certain percentage of humans, but it’s interesting:

Double yolk eggs

The New Neo Posted on by

The other day I was about to cook a couple of eggs. When I got them out of the carton, I noticed that one of them was bigger the the others. When I cracked it, out plopped an egg with a double yolk.

I can’t remember the last time I saw one of those. But it made me feel as though I’d won a little prize.

And so of course I looked it up:

In many cultures and religions, a double yolk is a good thing; luck is on the way. Old folklore tells us someone close to you might be having twins or a new beginning is on the horizon. Or you just cracked into the about one-in-1,000 egg that has a double yolk.

The article says that young birds are more likely to lay eggs with double yolks, and the incidence of double yolks seems to be increasing, perhaps for this reason:

“If egg consumption is growing, which it did during the pandemic, then you need more birds,” Arnsperger said. “And so you’ll have a disproportionate wave of young birds.” This could lead to more double yolks (remember, younger hens lay more double yolks).

But because of the increased demand during the pandemic, there may be another reason you’ve gotten a lot of double yolks. Most of the time, double yolk eggs are sorted out by an egg sorter because of their size, Arnsperger told me. “It’ll screen out the size of the egg it doesn’t want,” he continued. “But if you’re short on eggs, like during the pandemic, companies will widen the tolerance of the sorter to include larger eggs that could have double yolks.”

So they screen out larger eggs? My double yolk egg was in a carton of jumbos, so they were all big. But that egg was bigger than the others, quite noticeably. And why, oh why, did egg consumption increase during the pandemic? Comfort food?

It turns out the Democrats aren’t soft on crime at all

The New Neo Posted on by

Forget these Soros DAs. Forget “defund the police” – you must have imagined it. Forget the Floyd riots and the open borders.

Forget it all, because of Biden’s proposed new budget:

The plan sent to Congress allocates more than $32 billion to fighting crime, especially violent crime, with $20.6 billion going to the Department of Justice and $3.2 billion in discretionary resources for funding local and state law enforcement, much of it in the form of grants to hire more police officers. About $30 billion in mandatory resources will be funneled to “support law enforcement, crime prevention, and community violence intervention.”

The proposal directs $17.4 billion, an increase of $1.7 billion above the 2021 amount, for DOJ law enforcement. That sum includes $1.7 billion for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) to crack-down on gun-trafficking. U.S. Attorneys will be given $72.1 million to prosecute violent crimes.

What could possibly go wrong? Well, for starters, increased federal government involvement for any policing that is done on the local level is worrisome. Federal money equals federal control.

Here’s an indication of the sort of thing going on:

While the budget appears to be aimed at boosting police numbers and resources to tackle crime, it does so while treating national gun proliferation as a primary culprit, promising to “increase regulation of the firearms industry, enhance ATF’s National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, and modernize the National Tracing Center.” The plan also emphasizes police accountability, acquiescing to progressive pressure after the wave of social justice riots during the summer of 2020 that alleged widespread police brutality.

There’s also this little tidbit:

The White House is also requesting funds for the Department of Justice for police reform, prosecuting hate crimes, and enforcing voting rights. The proposal is for $367 million, an increase of $101 million from fiscal 2021.

That would include $18 million for the FBI to investigate civil rights violations, $8 million for the U.S. attorneys’ offices to prosecute civil rights violations, and $1 million for the Criminal Division to expand its investigations of election related crimes, such as voter suppression.

I’d love to hear their definition of “voter suppression.” Could it possibly include things like voter IDs and other requirements the GOP is trying to protect in order to prevent voting fraud? And then there are those hate crimes. “Hate crime” is a category of crime that doesn’t add much to the criminal code except the opportunity to place people in double jeopardy by prosecuting them at the federal level if the state hasn’t managed to convict them.

Why was the intelligence community wrong about Putin?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve not been impressed by the intelligence community’s take on much of anything Russian (or maybe anything in general), and that’s not just lately. I’ve written before about how the intelligence community failed to accurately foresee and predict the collapse of the USSR (see this post, for example).

So this observation about the intelligence community, from former CIA officer Mike Baker, is unsurprising as well:

Putin has been “pretty damn consistent over the years.”

“If you look at what he did in Chechnya, if you look at what he did helping Assad in Syria, if you look at what he did annexing Crimea, if you look at Georgia, Abkhazia, South Ossetia. Every step of the way he’s been following in his mind this stated desire, that he’s made very public over the years, to rebuild his sphere of influence.”

Baker also says that “intelligence on what Putin actually wants is hard because his inner circle keeps getting smaller and smaller.” I have little doubt that’s the case, but as Baker said in the featured quote above, Putin’s actions indicated he would attack Ukraine at some point.

The Biden administration seemed an opportune time.

I think what should have been the biggest surprise was the scope and furor of the attack on Ukraine. But even that was apparently foretold in Chechnya, where apparently tons of civilians were killed. Russia’s actions in Syria, likewise. However, I suppose those were distinguished from Ukraine by being mostly Moslem populations, whereas Ukrainians are fellow Russian Orthodox. Perhaps our intelligence community didn’t think that Putin would unleash so much ferocity on a population that he claimed was a brother population to that of Russia.

But unleash it he did. Those who claim “well, he might have been even more ferocious than he has been” are mounting an argument that makes little to no sense to me. Hey, he might done any number of even more awful things. But the things he did have been awful enough.

[NOTE: Of course, all of this assumes that the intelligence community actually was wrong about Putin. I’m going to assume it was.]

Oscar Fight Night

The New Neo Posted on by

I used to watch the Oscars every year for the fashions. That was fun. And I even liked some of the movies.

Then it became way too annoying to watch the Oscars. I didn’t care for the new movies themselves, the fashions were mostly ugly, so many of the actors and actresses were self-congratulatory and ridiculously full of themselves, and leftist politics was an almost constant drumbeat.

So I wasn’t watching it this year when actor Will Smith sucker-slapped comedian and presenter Chris Rock, cursed at him after returning to his seat, and then went on to win Best Actor and continue to shame himself with a maudlin and over-the-top thank-you speech in which he apologized to just about everyone except Chris Rock and somehow made himself out to be both victim and hero, quite the combination. And quite the performance, as well. Ugh.

Authorities – bouncers? – should have escorted Smith out of the building after he slapped Rock, but of course that didn’t happen.

If you’re interested – and you might not be; I’m only marginally interested myself – you can find video about it on YouTube and elsewhere. For example, here’s Smith’s acceptance speech. But perhaps the most fitting commentary might be from good old Ozzy Man, no stranger to the F-word himself:

Biden then, Biden now

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Yawrate” writes:

But judging by what the president has said throughout his career in the senate when he was in complete control of himself he wouldn’t have bought into the wholesale destruction of our country. Which tells us that he really isn’t in charge.

Well, it depends what one means by “in charge.” He’s certainly not fully in charge, but as I’ve said before I think he’s significantly in charge of foreign policy and at least partly in charge of much of the rest. There are also plenty of advisors, both known and unknown, who have input. Their input is probably somewhat greater than in previous administrations, but not all that much greater.

But what’s more – and probably more relevant to what Yawrate wrote – although it’s true that when Biden was a senator, he “wouldn’t have bought into the wholesale destruction of our country,” that was a long time ago. The last time he was a senator was in 2008, wasn’t it? At that time, I would have said that Democratic officeholders in general “wouldn’t have bought into the wholesale destruction of our country.”

But the times they have a-changed. What happened between 2008 and now?

Why, first eight years of Obama and then four of Trump and Trump Derangement Syndrome. During the Obama administration the country “fundamentally changed” and many people grew to accept a leftward slide and a foreign policy that rewarded enemies and punished friends. In fact, to many of us on the right, the Obama administration seemed purposely destructive of our country.

And who was vice president then, going along just about every step of the way? Why, none other than a non-demented Joe Biden, that’s who.

My read on Biden is that he never had any principles save “what’s in it for Joe Biden” (and, at times, his relatives), and he was highly adaptable along the way. He was always willing to lie. He was always willing to do what was necessary, and his adaptation to the left happened during the Obama administration. He still is adaptable, even though his cognitive challenges are now greater. But his cognitive challenges were always substantial.

It is amazing and depressing – as well as dangerous – that someone like that managed to become president. But that’s the situation we’re in.

I’ll add that it seems ironic to me that whatever it was that people initially feared from a Trump presidency – chaos, stupidity, world crisis, economic crisis – has actually happened under Joe Biden and mostly as a direct result of Biden’s policies. Trump himself was quite the opposite, and his administration would have been very successful in most realms had it not been for the forces on the left (that includes the Democratic Party and the GOP NeverTrumpers) relentlessly trying to destroy him. Those same forces are mostly still trying to prop up and make excuses for his successor, Joe Biden.

Open thread 3/28/22

The New Neo Posted on by

A number of people on Saturday’s Fogelberg thread said they didn’t like his music because it was too “sweet.” I hereby offer you the following unsweet Fogelberg song – one of my favorites:

Same Old Lang Syne

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not the season for it, but oh well – I’ve always liked this song of Dan Fogelberg’s. Turns out it has an interesting story behind it, too: