More on the Moskva sinking

The New Neo Posted on by

We still don’t know exactly why the Moskva sank. But we do know that it did sink, and that the cause was a fire igniting munitions onboard and causing structural damage. The Russians say the cause of the fire was unknown; the Ukrainians say it was an anti-ship cruise missile they had fired.

It would be a little coincidental if a fire had broken out on the ship for no particular known reason right smack dab in the middle of a war, and therefore it makes more sense to me that it was more likely a Ukrainian missile. But either way:

“Both explanations for the sinking of the Moskva indicate possible Russian deficiencies — either poor air defenses or incredibly lax safety procedures and damage control on the Black Sea Fleet’s flagship,” analysts Mason Clark, Kateryna Stepanenko, and George Barros at the Institute for the Study of War wrote in their daily war briefing…

Carl Schuster, a former US Navy captain, said the doubts went all the way to the Kremlin.

“It raises questions about naval competence 10 years after (Russian President Vladimir) Putin announced he was going to restore the navy’s capabilities, morale and professionalism,” Schuster said.

Furthermore, other countries could learn something from this:

Timothy Heath, senior international defense researcher at the RAND Corp. think tank, said the strike on the Moskva would underscore to both China and the US “the vulnerability of surface ships” in any potential military clash.

The Moskva was considered “a symbol of Russia’s military power.” So the sinking has to be a morale-sinker as well for Russia, although it’s not clear how much strategic military importance it has.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Here’s a good summary of the Michigan “kidnapping” case and the FBI’s involvement. Perhaps we should rename it the FBE: Federal Bureau of Entrapment. Here are some interesting things that I hadn’t remembered. The first is that – if I’m interpreting this correctly – the future defendants were identified as suspicious by none other than Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook:

Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg testified to Congress in October 2020 that Facebook had “identified” the Whitmer kidnap plot “as a signal to the FBI about six months ago” regarding “suspicious activity on our platform.”

But the plot didn’t exist at that point.

The second is how SCOTUS enabled the FBI’s move towards more flagrant entrapment by making if far more difficult for defendants to claim it as a defense:

Prior to the 1970s, defendants often successfully challenged entrapment as a violation of due process. But in 1973, the Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, gutted most defenses against government entrapment by focusing almost solely on the “subjective disposition” of the entrapped person.

If prosecutors can find any inkling of a defendant’s disposition to the crime, then the person is guilty, no matter how outrageous or abusive the government agents’ behavior. Justice William Brennan dissented, warning that the decision could empower law enforcement agents to “round up and jail all ‘predisposed’ individuals.”

Justice Brennan would get to say “I told you so” if he were still around.

(2) Russia makes nuclear threats if Sweden and Finland join NATO. See also this:

One of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest allies warned NATO on Thursday that if Sweden and Finland joined the U.S.-led military alliance then Russia would deploy nuclear weapons and hypersonic missiles in an exclave in the heart of Europe…

Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, said that should Sweden and Finland join NATO then Russia would have to strengthen its land, naval and air forces in the Baltic Sea.

Medvedev also explicitly raised the nuclear threat by saying that there could be no more talk of a “nuclear free” Baltic – where Russia has its Kaliningrad exclave sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania…

Lithuania said Russia’s threats were nothing new and that Moscow had deployed nuclear weapons to Kaliningrad long before the war in Ukraine. NATO did not immediately respond to Russia’s warning.

Can’t imagine why they’d want to join up, right? As I’ve said before, in the Hotel Russian Empire you can check out any time you like but you can never leave.

(3) Elon Musk is trying to buy Twitter:

Elon has offered to buy Twitter for $43 billion in cash. He wants to take it private and “transform” it into “the platform for free speech around the globe” (his words).

The left thinks the idea of a Twitter that allow people like Donald Trump to tweet is anathema.

Trump’s 2018 warning to Europe and especially Germany

The New Neo Posted on by

Trump made some prescient – although obvious – points back in 2018. He was speaking to the secretary of NATO:

TRUMP: We’re protecting Germany, we’re protecting France, we’re protecting everybody and yet we’re paying a lot of money to protect…

So we have to talk about the billions and billions that’s being paid to the country that we’re supposed to be protecting you against. Everybody’s talking about it all over the world. They’ll say wait a minute we’re supposed to be protecting you from Russia but why are you paying billions of dollars to Russia for energy? Why are countries in NATO, namely Germany having a large percentage of their energy needs paid to Russia and taken care of by Russia?

Now, if you look at it, Germany is a captive of Russia because they got rid of their coal plants, they got rid of their nuclear plants. They’re getting so much of the oil and gas from Russia. I think it’s something NATO has to look at.

I think it is very inappropriate. You and I agree it’s inappropriate. I don’t know what you can do about it now but it certainly doesn’t seem to make sense that they’ve paid billions of dollars to Russia and now we have to defend them against Russia…

…[H]ow can [NATO] be together when a country is getting its energy from the person you want protection against or from the group that you want protection?

STOLTENBERG: Because we understand that when we stand together, also in dealing with Russia, we are stronger. I think what we have seen is that —

TRUMP: No, you’re just making Russia richer. You’re not dealing with Russia. You’re making Russia richer.

STOLTENBERG: Well, I think that even during the Cold War, NATO Allies were trading with Russia, and then there have been disagreements about what kind of trade arrangements we should (inaudible).

TRUMP: I think trade is wonderful. I think energy is a whole different story. I think energy is a much different story than normal trade. And you have a country like Poland that won’t accept the gas. You take a look at some of the countries — they won’t accept it, because they don’t want to be captive to Russia. But Germany, as far as I’m concerned, is captive to Russia, because it’s getting so much of its energy from Russia. So we’re supposed to protect Germany, but they’re getting their energy from Russia. Explain that. And it can’t be explained — you know that.

Just another reason Russiagate was absurd on the face of it. And destructive.

Did Ukraine sink the Moskva?

The New Neo Posted on by

Stephen Green reports, you decide:

Regardless of whether the Moskva is at the bottom of the Black Sea or the burned husk of what was once the pride of the Black Sea Fleet, the question remains: Did Ukraine do that?

The Kremlin admits that an ammunition explosion caused an onboard fire that “severely damaged” the Moskva, leading to the order to abandon ship.

But there’s good reason to doubt that the fire was an accident.

I have no idea and no expertise in this area, but I find Green persuasive in his argument that Ukraine’s claim is quite credible.

Spambot of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the hallmarks of the comment spam that bloggers get is that, in addition to advertising some website or other in an attempt to raise that site’s rating for search engines, it tends to compliment the blogger. This one, not so much:

The next time I read a blog, Hopefully it won’t fail me as much as this one. After all, Yes, it was my choice to read through, but I genuinely thought you would probably have something helpful to say. All I hear is a bunch of moaning about something you could possibly fix if you were not too busy looking for attention.

It was placed on a 2010 post about the plane crash that killed the Polish president.

COVID study

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a lengthy report that studied the effectiveness of different states’ reactions to COVID. It’s complicated and I’m not going to write about it in detail at the moment (maybe never), but it’s worth looking at.

Here are some of the findings:

Excluding the geographically unusual cases of Hawaii and Alaska to focus on the continental U.S., there is no apparent relationship between reduced economic activity during the pandemic and our composite mortality measure…

The one piece of good news in this study is that states which maximized the individual freedoms of business owners, consumers, workers and parents – and allowed their citizens to make their own risk assessments without government mandates – had the best performance. It turns out that in most cases, citizens living in states with minimal government interventions – including Nebraska, Iowa, Florida, and others – were able to make wise health-conscious assessments without an abundance of government rules and mandates. These states came through the pandemic with the least amount of collective damage to their economies, the education of their children, and with health outcomes that were in most cases no worse than states that used more heavy-handed tactics to slow the spread. From the start, there was an obvious and hard to determine balancing act between health risks and allowing Americans to go about their lives in a productive way. The states that tilted this balancing act toward more individual freedom and choice had far superior outcomes than states where politicians, government agencies and courts made these decisions for them.

Subway shooting suspect Frank James arrested: an equal opportunity hater, but you would have trouble learning that if you only read the MSM

The New Neo Posted on by

He was in the East Village when apprehended:

Frank R. James was arrested in Manhattan on a federal warrant and will face a hearing in Brooklyn Federal Court, with a police source indicating the 61-year-old suspect was busted after East Village residents spotted the wanted man and called police.

The article adds that “The motive behind the shooting spree remained unclear.”

Oh, really? Really? (More about that later.) The Daily News, the paper I linked to above, is a New York City newspaper and is a “liberal” daily. You’d think New Yorkers would want to know all there is to know about Frank James and his motives. And the paper almost undoubtedly would have said a lot more, had James been a man of the right.

The Gothamist adds an interesting tidbit:

Police officials have yet to identify a motive in connection with the shooting. But a YouTube account that police have linked to James includes hundreds of disturbing videos detailing a litany of personal grievances and violent fantasies.

In hours of monologues, the man who appears to be James describes his desire to “watch people die,” his hatred of other Black people, and his “emotionally violent” experience inside New York City’s mental health system. At other points, he praises the September 11th terrorist attacks and questions why Mayor Eric Adams isn’t doing more to address homelessness on the subway…

“We live in a violent society, where people are pushed to the edge of their f–king sanity by other motherf–kers,” James said in one video. “I can almost understand how a motherf–ker could go out here and just start shooting people for no f–king reason.”

He hates – black people? (More about that later.)

That there’s CNN’s coverage:

James has been linked to rambling videos posted on a YouTube channel…

Many of the videos that James uploaded included references to violence, including at a set group of people he believed had maligned him, in addition to broad societal and racial groups that he appeared to hate.

In that racist and rambling recording, James said the new effort was “doomed to fail” and described his own negative experience with city health workers during a “crisis of mental health back in the ’90s ’80s and ’70s.”

In a video posted last week, James, who is Black, rants about abuse in churches and racism in the workplace, using misogynistic and racist language.

After talking about community violence, James says, “We need to see more mass shootings. Yeah. … We need to see more, there has to be more mass shootings to make a n***er understand. … It’s not about the shooter; it’s about the environment in which he is, he has to exist.”

That speech was a common theme throughout James’ videos, in which he repeatedly espoused hatred toward African Americans.

Again the emphasis is on “racist” speech and the only group mentioned that James hated is “African Americans” (James is himself black), and James presents himself in these videos as a put-upon victim of society.

Then there’s the NY Times:

The motive behind the attack remained unclear on Wednesday.

But Mr. James appeared to have maintained a significant online presence in recent years, posting dozens of videos on social media. Some were featured on a YouTube channel belonging to the username prophetoftruth88, from which the police obtained a screenshot of him to release to the public. In at least one post, the man in the video identified himself as Frank James.

In the recordings, many of them between 20 and 50 minutes in length, the man offered lengthy tirades, often on subjects of race, violence and his personal life.

He disparaged Black people and particularly Black women. And he recently criticized Mr. Adams for his policies focusing on homeless people and safety in the subway system.

Are you getting the feeling that the Narrative has been decided on?

Then there’s the NY Post, NY’s newspaper of the right. Despite the paper’s being one of New York’s largest and oldest, the first Post story that my Google search showed was at the tail end of page 3 (I use a large font, so your computer may differ). But it’s just a general article about the arrest. I had to specifically search for articles in the NY Post about the arrest before I got this one:

Prior to the attack, James had posted several rambling YouTube videos where he railed against the city’s mental health services, complained about race issues and spoke violently against people who he believed wronged him.

He mentioned Mayor Eric Adams in one of his rants, in which he claims a race war will follow the Ukraine conflict.

“It’s just a matter of time before these white motherf—ers decide, ‘Hey listen, enough is enough, these n—-rs got to go,’” he says.

“And what are you going to do? You gonna fight. And guess what, you gonna die. ‘Cause unlike President [Volodymyr Zelensky] over in Ukraine, nobody has your back. The whole world is against you. And you’re against your f—ing self, so why should you be alive again is the f—ing question. Why should a n—-r be alive on this planet, besides to pick cotton or chop sugar cane or tobacco.”

So, according to James, the white motherf-uckers are going to kill all the black people.

Here’s anotherNY Post article [emphasis mine]:

The troubled 62-year-old — who was arrested Wednesday after a massive manhunt — posted the eerie, 47-second clip in July 2020 to his social media, which was full of violent threats and support for black power leaders.

More:

In one [posting], he sympathized with the cops’ shooter, career criminal Lashawn McNeil, suggesting he was only carrying out the purpose that a racist society had pushed him into.

“What can you expect?” he titled a Feb. 1 rant, blaming the “stereotypes” that “whit motherf–kers” have of all black men.

“Nothing else is encouraged, except violence,” he insisted. “I’m expected to be violent, I’m expected to be a criminal, and when I’m not there’s something wrong with me,” he claimed.

Got it? White people’s expectations force black people to be violent.

And lastly, here’s evidence that James’ hatred was fairly broad:

“F— you & your white ass too, you white racist mother f—ker”
“Slant-eyed f—king piece of sh—”
“You’re a crime against f—king nature, you Spanish speaking mother f—ker”

White people. Asians. Hispanics. But somehow the leftist press doesn’t want to talk about it.

Things I’m having to do more of lately

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Roundups. There’s just so much news every day.

(2) Closing down popups that ask me if I want “notifications.” No one ever wants notifications.

(3) Dealing with trolls and/or near-trolls.

(4) Deleting multiple campaign emails.

(5) Hearing about the illnesses of contemporaries.

On the much brighter side (literally), I’m still enjoying seeing better. I’m even starting to get used to my semi-bionic vision somewhat, although I hope I never take it for granted.

And spring!

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Hunter Biden’s “Big Guy.”

(2) Post-lockdown college students feel aimless and disconnected:

In 20 years of teaching at Doane University, Kate Marley has never seen anything like it. As many as 30 percent of her students do not show up for class or complete any of the assignments. The moment she begins to speak, she says, their brains seem to shut off. If she asks questions on what she’s been talking about, they don’t have any idea. On tests they struggle to recall basic information.

“Stunning” is the word she uses to describe the level of disengagement she and her colleagues have witnessed across the Nebraska campus. “I don’t seem to be capable of motivating them to read textbooks or complete assignments,” she says of that portion of her students. “They are kind kids. They are really nice to know and talk with. I enjoy them as people.” But, she says, “I can’t figure out how to help them”…

This entire generation is likely to be marked in some way – and not a good one – by their lockdown experience, and that experience was similar around the developed world.

(3) Mass shooting in a Brooklyn subway injures 28. The shooter is still at large:

A manhunt is underway in New York City for a suspect accused of donning a gas mask, setting off a smoke canister and opening fire inside a Brooklyn subway train and station during the morning commute Tuesday, injuring at least 28 people, five of whom are in critical condition.

The attack began around 8:24 a.m., as a Manhattan-bound N train approached the 36th St. station in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The suspect, described as an approximately 5-foot-5 Black male with a heavy build, is still at large and is “dangerous,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul told reporters nearly four hours after the shooting.

The suspect’s shots struck multiple people on the subway car and on the platform, New York Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell said. He was wearing a green “construction type” vest and a hooded gray sweatshirt. The suspect has not been identified by authorities, Sewell said.

A gas mask and a hoodie would make him very difficult to identify, although not impossible. I wonder how widely documented his movements were; it would depend on how many surveillance cameras there are in New York and how widely dispersed. It’s amazing that no one was has died yet in such a large attack – although there’s still time for that with so many in critical condition.

(4) New York’s lieutenant governor, Brian Benjamin, is indicted on corruption charges in a campaign finance scheme. The charges are bribery, fraud, and falsification of records. Sounds positively ordinary these days, doesn’t it?

(5) Oklahoma outlaws all abortions except the medically necessary. It does not criminalize the woman; only the health care provider. Nor does it criminalize drugs like the morning-after pill. I predict a court challenge. If I’m not mistaken, this new law is the strictest anti-abortion legislation in the US at present.