And just like that, it’s time to end COVID restrictions

The New Neo Posted on by

Funny how you’re seeing calls to end restrictions – coming from the left this time, now that they realize how much it’s hurting the Party. Draconian measures weren’t a bad thing, I guess, when they were just hurting people in general, and children, and the economy, and not even seeming to be clearly related to any improvement in COVID numbers. No, it’s only now that the left is getting worried about the midterms that it seems there are lots of calls to change tactics on COVID.

But first, of course, we have a disclaimer:

In March 2020, I wrote that America should “cancel everything” in response to the acute threat posed by COVID-19: Mass events should be postponed, companies should send employees home from the office, and schools should move classes online.

I remain convinced that this was the right thing to do. Before anyone was vaccinated, and before doctors had even a preliminary understanding of how to treat the disease, these measures were necessary to save lives and avert a collapse of the medical system.

No proof of that offered. No comparison of how a country such as Sweden, which didn’t have that approach, has fared.

Furthermore:

The most severe government restrictions on everyday activities adopted at the height of the pandemic have since been lifted. So in response to my call to open everything, some will inevitably claim that America is no longer closed. Just this week, they will note, Democrat-led states including New Jersey and Connecticut announced that they would soon end some mask mandates.

Ah, those wonderful Democratic-led states, leading the way! No mention of all the states that never imposed mask mandates, or ended them long ago, and how those states fared in comparison.

Accepting restrictions that weaken our social ties when they seemed temporary was one thing. Putting up with them indefinitely is quite another.

Two years was fine? But now – now that midterms are coming and polls show Democrats in big big trouble, it’s time.

It’s pretty clear that the Democrats are going to try to loosen things up and declare that they, and Biden, have vanquished COVID (except for those troglodyte unvaccinated, who get what they deserve). Victory! What I wonder is how many people will accept that claim at this point. Will it seem reasonable, or will it seem profoundly and disgustingly mendacious and hypocritical? Are memories short or are they long?

The Biden administration: sympathy for the terrorists

The New Neo Posted on by

This is unsurprising:

Mohammed al-Qahtani, who planned to hijack planes on Sept. 11, 2001, for al Qaeda but was denied entry into the United States, will be transferred to Saudi Arabia following the Biden administration’s decision late last week to set him free. He is scheduled to be flown to Saudi Arabia and placed in a “custodial rehabilitation and mental health care program for extremists,” according to the New York Times.

Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Ala.), lead Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, called the Biden administration’s decision “an appalling capitulation to the far-left.”

“Letting a 9/11 hijacker walk free is an appalling capitulation to the far-left,” Rogers said. “On Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda terrorists killed nearly 3,000 people—Mohammed al-Qahtani was supposed to be one of the hijackers that day. He flew to America to participate in the attack and would have succeeded but for sharp-eyed INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] agents. The leader of the 9/11 attacks, Mohamed Atta, was waiting in the airport parking lot to pick up al-Qahtani when he was denied entry to the United States.”

Al-Qahtani is one of 39 accused terrorists imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. Most were freed and transferred to other countries during the Obama administration. Now the Biden administration is following suit as part of a bid by Democrats to shut down the facility.

This isn’t a person who was just thinking about it – this is a person who came very very close to participating in 9/11 and who was stopped only by other circumstances.

The article goes on to add that al-Qahtani is reported to be mentally ill. I’d really like to know more about that. One could argue, I suppose, that he was always mentally ill, but if he really was part of the plot and trusted by the other hijackers, I doubt he was mentally ill back then (unless one considers fanaticism a mental illness). My guess is that his mental illness is a claim but is untrue, but that in any event it doesn’t take away from his possible dangerousness. I certainly wouldn’t trust the Saudis and their rehab program to make a difference, either.

The US government admitted in 2008 that al-Qahtani had been tortured. Here’s what happened:

The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a “life-threatening condition.”

“We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani,” said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. “His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that’s why I did not refer the case” for prosecution.

The legal definition of torture is not what most people think of when they hear the word:

Crawford, 61, said the combination of the interrogation techniques, their duration and the impact on Qahtani’s health led to her conclusion. “The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent. . . . You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual. This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive. It was that medical impact that pushed me over the edge” to call it torture, she said.

It also included various forms of humiliation, and insults to his family members. And yet at the time, Crawford added:

“There’s no doubt in my mind he would’ve been on one of those planes had he gained access to the country in August 2001,” Crawford said of Qahtani, who remains detained at Guantanamo. “He’s a muscle hijacker. . . . He’s a very dangerous man. What do you do with him now if you don’t charge him and try him? I would be hesitant to say, ‘Let him go.'”

That was in January of 2009. But now the Biden administration has done just that.

Distrusting health officials: what was the turning point?

The New Neo Posted on by

I think this was indeed a pivotal moment that made the situation starkly clear:

But there were earlier clues for me that all was not right, and that public health authorities weren’t leveling with us. The bottom line to all of it was that Trump was president and it was logical to assume that the majority of these government workers didn’t want anything to reflect well on him and in fact wouldn’t be at all disturbed if events came to hurt him politically.

Three early phenomena had made me uneasy about health authorities’ statements. The first was that they kept harping on cases and implying huge death rates even though it was clear almost from the start – based on the Diamond Princess data, which I analyzed here – that very many cases were asymptomatic or mild, and that deaths were concentrated in the very elderly and/or already ill although not limited to them. The second was the about-face on masks, which didn’t seem based on new information but instead on practical considerations of mask availability. The third was the vigor with which continuing lockdowns were embraced, long after the “two weeks to flatten the curve” period was over.

I don’t automatically assume that health care bureaucrats are lying and often doing so for political (and/or CYA) reasons. But I certainly understand why many people have come to that conclusion.

Tragique and triviale; weight and lightness

The New Neo Posted on by

On the previous thread on COVID hope and fear, David Foster offered this quote from Arthur Koestler, as related by Koestler’s friend Richard Hillary:

K has a theory for this. He believes there are two planes of existence which he calls vie tragique and vie triviale. Usually we move on the trivial plane, but occasionally in moments of elation or danger, we find ourselves transferred to the plane of the vie tragique, with its non-commonsense, cosmic perspective. When we are on the trivial plane, the realities of the other appear as nonsense–as overstrung nerves and so on. When we live on the tragic plane, the realities of the other are shallow, frivolous, frivolous, trifling. But in exceptional circumstances, for instance if someone has to live through a long stretch of time in physical danger, one is placed, as it were, on the intersection line of the two planes; a curious situation which is a kind of tightrope-walking on one’s nerves…I think he is right.

Then David Foster adds:

I think much Woke behavior is an effort by people to get more Vie Tragique in their lives, and this also describes those who seem to somehow *like* being afraid of Covid.

This all relates to something Sebastian Haffner noted in his memoir of life in Germany between the wars, which we’ve discussed here a few times. He said there were people who actually *did not welcome* the stabilization of politics and the economy that seemed to be happening at one point…

I think all of this is absolutely true for some people. Every now and then it happens to war veterans, as well. It’s not that they like war. It’s just that during wartime they are living on a different plane, where actions matter intensely, and the bonds forged among fellow “brothers in arms” can be much deeper. I think that perhaps firefighters, police, EMTs and emergency room workers, and in the psychology realm crisis counselors, all have some of that feeling as well.

I’m also reminded of the work of one of my favorite writers Milan Kundera. In the book The Unbearable Lightness of Being (and if you’ve only seen the movie it does not do the book justice at all) he divides the world and people into two realms, that of lightness and weight. It’s not the same as what Koestler is talking about, but I believe it’s related:

The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”

In another passage in his earlier work The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera deals with something resembling Koestler’s tragique/triviale “intersection line of the two planes; a curious situation which is a kind of tightrope-walking on one’s nerves…” that Koestler thinks occurs if a person lives through “a long stretch of personal danger.” Kundera seems to think that it – or something resembling it – is far more common than that, in fact nearly universal:

It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border; where everything – love, conviction, faith, history – no longer has meaning. The whole mystery of human life resides in the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter.

But I think that both Koestler and Kundera are wrong about how common this is. I don’t think it’s as rare as Koestler seems to think, or to require living through a long stretch of personal danger. But unlike Kundera, I certainly don’t think that everyone lives so close to that border, or that it takes so very little to cross it. In this, as in almost everything, I think there is great variation, and that some people are so grounded that no matter what happens to them they remain far from that border, while for others – for unknown reasons – something in their psyche obliges them to balance on that tightrope described by Koestler, even if the outward events of their lives don’t seem remarkable or especially dangerous at all.

Jonathan Turley on GoFundMe’s game

The New Neo Posted on by

By Jonathan Turley:

GoFundMe’s suspension of millions to support protesting truckers in Canada shocked many, particularly when the company initially announced its intention to distribute the money to other charities. It was less of a surprise for those of us who have criticized the company for years over its use of the platform to target and block funds for conservative and libertarian causes. Indeed, the company has revised an old practice known as the “Nag’s Head light” in luring the unsuspecting into what has become a liberal lockbox on funds.

I suppose Turley has been tracking this for quite some time because GoFundMe has targeted not just conservative causes but libertarian causes, and Turley is a libertarian. I suggest you read the whole thing.

There’s certainly been a theme lately, hasn’t there? Companies (including internet companies but not limited to them) and the state, and the media and the academy, working together to silence dissenting voices on the right.

The left has decided that Joe Rogan must go – and it certainly doesn’t stop there

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t watch Rogan, but I’ve certainly read about what he does in his podcasts. With a background as a comedian, he basically interviews a wide variety of people, lets them speak at length, and actually listens to them. That’s about it. He’s attracted an enormous number of viewers. And that kind of liberty and openness is a huge threat to our insect overlords, so at a certain point the word must have gone out that this could no longer be countenanced.

Initially the attack had to do with his supposed COVID “misinformation,” and it focused on banning him from Spotify. That didn’t work, and perhaps the people behind it were surprised. Then various Spotify personalities – mostly of my generation, the somewhat long-in-the-tooth one – pulled out of Spotify. That didn’t work, either, although perhaps it was just meant to be personal virtue-signaling on their part.

Now it has segued into an attack on Rogan for using the n-word quite a few years ago. The utterances – some or most taken out of context, apparently – have been compiled and shown, along with further demands that Rogan be gone:

The video compilation of Rogan saying the n-word was dropped by @patriottakes 6 days ago. You see the video in the tweet in pic 1, and patriottakes takes credit for “republishing” the information in pic 2…

As you can see in their bio, @patriottakes is partnered with @MeidasTouch. And this is where it gets interesting. Who is Meidastouch? Well, they are a professional political organization. In fact, they are a Democrat “Super PAC”…run by 3 brothers…

Patriottakes is bragging about their millions of views and how they made the video the center of the national conversation. They are bragging about their CLOUT Rogan is the one guy the leftists can’t cancel. If a group could cancel Rogan it would be a MASSIVE show of power.

Woke people and legacy media groups have been trying to cancel Rogan for ages because he steals their audience and doesn’t play by their rules.

He also influences people and even encourages them to think for themselves. And he is massively popular.

A new development:

Rogan has taken the ill-advised step of apologizing to the mob and promising to bring on more leftwing guests, which has only emboldened them further. By contrast, Dave Portnoy is much better at playing this game, himself having been the target of many cancellation attempts in the past.

So when it was announced that he was going on a live stream with the three brothers who run MeidasTouch, one of the groups at the forefront of trying to destroy Rogan, there was some question as to whether Portnoy was getting in over his head. It was going to be three-on-one, after all. Portnoy had something up his sleeve, though…

Apparently, instead of going into the situation empty-handed, he had in his possession a text message from one of the brothers using the n-word in 2014…

Portnoy continued the fireworks by lighting into his hosts for taking things out of context to attack him, including accusations of sexism. The entire podcast is worth a watch just to see the MeidasTouch guys squirm. Hypocrisy on the left is a way of life and these three brothers fully embody that.

I tried for a while to discover what Rogan had really said in terms of his use of the n-word and the full context, but it’s not been easy. As far as I can tell, it was mostly a decade ago or more when he was doing comedy, and this seems to have been the worst offense:

The apology video on Rogan’s profile is captioned: “There’s been a lot of s**t from the old episodes of the podcast that I wish I hadn’t said, or had said differently.”

Over the course of five minutes and 46 seconds, Rogan addresses his past controversial opinions and statements.

“It’s not my word to use,” Rogan said, referring to the n-word racial slur, in the almost six-minute long video shared to his Instagram account.

“I am well aware of that now, but for years I used it in that manner.”

Rogan continued: “I never used it to be racist because I’m not racist.”

He went on to address the 2011 podcast episode, saying: “I was trying to make the story entertaining, and I said we got out and it was like we were in Africa.

“It’s like we were in ‘Planet of the Apes.'”

Doesn’t sound the least bit funny, and it does sound somewhat offensive, but people used to think it was cutting edge and both funny and trendy to use the n-word like rappers did. If Rogan hadn’t ruffled the feathers of the left, it would stay in the vaults, ignored, just as it has been all these years till now. If Rogan was the darling of the left, it would be forgiven. But he’s not.

As one might expect, Glenn Greenwald – a libertarian – has been active on the Rogan story. Here are some of his tweets that focus on the blatant and cynical hypocrisy of the left in particular:

And this is the key to what the media often does – it counts on the fact that most people have neither the time nor the inclination to check things out for themselves:

Here Greenwald gives one example of a fuller context for one of Rogan’s supposed offenses:

And Greenwald also points out that current left darling Howard Stern has used the n-word in far worse ways than Rogan ever did, and yet there’s no attempt to cancel him.

Here is a longer piece from Greenwald that describes in greater depth how the left now uses censorship of its opponents as its main tool:

American liberals are obsessed with finding ways to silence and censor their adversaries. Every week, if not every day, they have new targets they want de-platformed, banned, silenced, and otherwise prevented from speaking or being heard (by “liberals,” I mean the term of self-description used by the dominant wing of the Democratic Party).

For years, their preferred censorship tactic was to expand and distort the concept of “hate speech” to mean “views that make us uncomfortable,” and then demand that such “hateful” views be prohibited on that basis…

Constitutional illiteracy to the side, the “hate speech” framework for justifying censorship is now insufficient because liberals are eager to silence a much broader range of voices than those they can credibly accuse of being hateful. That is why the newest, and now most popular, censorship framework is to claim that their targets are guilty of spreading “misinformation” or “disinformation.” These terms, by design, have no clear or concise meaning. Like the term “terrorism,” it is their elasticity that makes them so useful.

I will add that both approaches have now been used against Rogan: first the “misinformation” accusation and then the “hate speech” video. At the moment, he’s still standing. What will come next?

Greenwald points out that disinformation does not disturb the left at all when it’s their disinformation (Russiagate, the denial of the possible lab origins of COVID, etc.).

There’s so much more at the link that I’m tempted to just go on and on excerpting it, including the fact that (of course) the platform on which Greenwald writes, Substack, has been attacked by the cancellation forces as well. But I’ll just add this:

Democrats overwhelmingly trust and love the FBI and CIA. Polls show they overwhelmingly favor censorship of the internet not only by Big Tech oligarchs but also by the state…

Democrats are not only the dominant political faction in Washington, controlling the White House and both houses of Congress, but liberals in particular are clearly the hegemonic culture force in key institutions: media, academia and Hollywood. That is why it is a mistake to assume that we are near the end of their orgy of censorship and de-platforming victories. It is far more likely that we are much closer to the beginning than the end. The power to silence others is intoxicating. Once one gets a taste of its power, they rarely stop on their own…

Beyond the personal interest in avoiding vilification, corporate executives can be made to censor against their will and in violation of their political ideology out of self-interest. The corporate media still has the ability to render a company toxic, and the Democratic Party more now than ever has the power to abuse their lawmaking and regulatory powers to impose real punishment for disobedience, as it has repeatedly threatened to do. If Facebook or Spotify are deemed to be so toxic that no Good Liberals can use them without being attacked as complicit in fascism, white supremacy or anti-vax fanaticism, then that will severely limit, if not entirely sabotage, a company’s future viability.

The one bright spot in all this — and it is a significant one — is that liberals have become such extremists in their quest to silence all adversaries that they are generating their own backlash, based in disgust for their tyrannical fanaticism…

In sum, censorship — once the province of the American Right during the heyday of the Moral Majority of the 1980s — now occurs in isolated instances in that faction. In modern-day American liberalism, however, censorship is a virtual religion. They simply cannot abide the idea that anyone who thinks differently or sees the world differently than they should be heard. That is why there is much more at stake in this campaign to have Rogan removed from Spotify than whether this extremely popular podcast host will continue to be heard there or on another platform. If liberals succeed in pressuring Spotify to abandon their most valuable commodity, it will mean nobody is safe from their petty-tyrant tactics. But if they fail, it can embolden other platforms to similarly defy these bullying tactics, keeping our discourse a bit more free for just awhile longer.

Those in power flex their muscles against the Freedom Convoy

The New Neo Posted on by

You’ve probably read about some of the developments in the ongoing saga of the Canadian government verus the people – that is, the Freedom Convoy. You can get up to semi-speed on the crackdowns by reading this as well as this (the latter article also delving into the “Trudeau is Castro’s son” meme going around).

The leftist leaders who for so many years pretended to be for the working class and “the people” never really were, as anyone who studies history knows. Or rather, they were for the people as long as they got to tell the people exactly what to do and what not to do.

The BLM/Antifa riots, which actually were destructive and violent – unlike the Freedom Convoy – didn’t really threaten those in charge. But those in charge are quite aware that the convoy and what it represents is a very direct threat – and a nonviolent one – to their power. They fear a general strike, although the way they’re treating the truckers and their supporters just might be the best way to precipitate one.

In the history of this sort of thing, a turning point usually comes when the police and/or army refuse to do the government’s bidding and refuse to clamp down on the people. We certainly haven’t reached that point. And I don’t know whether this will all fizzle out in the face of pressure and threats of January 6th type arrests, or whether it will grow. I do think that resentment will grow, however – even in a relatively polite place like Canada.

Christa Ludwig disagrees with Leonard Bernstein about tempo

The New Neo Posted on by

I had no idea why YouTube decided I would like this video called “Vocalist Disagrees With Bernstein’s Tempo.” But they recommended it, and I idly clicked on it and watched it:

“It doesn’t matter; who can hear the words anyway?” asks Bernstein. But according to several commenters on that thread, Bernstein and Ludwig were actually very friendly and had great professional respect for each other.

It turns out that YouTube knows me better than I know myself, because – even though I know very little about opera – I was surprised and pleased to see that the “vocalist” arguing with Bernstein was a singer of whom I’m aware and who is a great favorite of mine, Christa Ludwig. The reason I know about her is that, during the years when I developed a passion for the opera “Hansel and Gretel” (see NOTE below), I discovered that she was the most fabulous Hansel and Gretel Witch of all time. And believe me, I listened to many renditions.

Ludwig somehow manages to be simultaneously scary and funny. She spits out the lyrics with remarkable clarity and force, taking incredible delight in sharply enunciating the sounds of the words (in German, of course), fairly smacking her lips with mock-evil glee. Since the subtext of the Hansel and Gretel story is hunger and even starvation, her delivery adds an added dimension.

It got to the point that I couldn’t bear to listen to any other version of the Witch but Christa’s.

It would help if you were familiar with the opera “Hansel and Gretel,” and it would help a lot if you were familiar with German. But even if you’re not, maybe this will appeal. It’s the scene where the Witch puts a spell on Hansel and Gretel:

You can find the complete opera in the following video. But since I’m highlighting Christa Ludwig’s Witch today, I’ll cue that part up. Here’s the part towards the end where she’s trying to get Gretel to bend over in front of the oven so that the Witch can easily push her into it, but Gretel turns the tables on her. The segment ends with Hansel and Gretel celebrating the Witch’s demise:

Looking it up now, I see that Christa Ludwig died last April at the age of 93; RIP. Her repertoire was vast, but in that entire Wiki article it doesn’t even mention this particular role. But she was superb.

I’ll close with…[quote from “Inside Opera” deleted because the story in it turns out to be untrue – thanks, readers!]

[NOTE: I’ve already written at length about other aspects of the opera “Hansel and Gretel,” which you can find here as well as here (that one featuring the wonderful Prayer Song), and also here.]

The internet has become a tool for government oppression

The New Neo Posted on by

And not just a tool for government oppression – a remarkably comprehensive and efficient tool. Companies such as Spotify and Twitter and GoFundMe and so many others have helped to centralize communication in the public square, which is increasingly the internet, and they increasingly do the leftist governments’ bidding.

In its early days, the internet was supposed to facilitate free expression of ideas around the world. Great! Fab! But over time it has featured platforms that have centralized that information and grown to huge size, allowing their private owners to have tremendous power to censor and to affect politics around the world as they see fit.

We certainly saw that during the Trump years. The process is now close to Orwellian in scope even though it’s not usually the government doing it directly. And as a telescreen-equivalent, the internet isn’t forced on people but is instead involuntary. We have forged our own chains – or at least, we’ve put them around ourselves.

At the moment, alternatives to big companies with leftist-based censoring such as Twitter or GoFundMe are allowed to exist online (although remember how Gab was closed down for a while?). How long will these alternatives be allowed? Even when they exist, however, they are smaller and weaker than their well-established and more powerful rivals who have already been building their user bases for many years while holding themselves out as welcoming nearly all and then later coming down hard on the right.

The internet has also greatly facilitated the ability to spy on people – in other words, to collect vast storehouses of information on them and to search it for whatever the government or the company is seeking. For example, GoFundMe has the personal information of everyone who donated to the truckers convoy; do you think they would protect that infomation if the government wanted it? I sure don’t. In fact, it’s likely that the government already has access to it. And such goings-on also discourage people from contributing to conservative causes in the first place, because they fear the government will retaliate. That’s one of the goals of this entire process, too – to induce fear and avoidance behavior.

Enormous amounts of information are on computers, far more than paper and pen could afford in the olden days, unless a person was a diarist suffering from OCD. Computers track what people read, buy and sell, wonder about, watch for entertainment, write, and financially transact. It all can be stored easily (none of the pneumatic tubes and paper archives of Orwell) and – perhaps most important of all – it can be accessed easily. A search for a certain word in all of someone’s correspondence – that would take years with paper – now takes seconds and can be expanded without much trouble at all to encompass many millions of people.

The internet is potentially (and perhaps already actually) the greatest totalitarian tool ever invented.

[NOTE: At the moment, the EARN IT bill has been introduced in the Senate by Blumenthal and Graham. It is supposedly meant to give the government the tools to investigate online-mediated child abuse, and if you read the material at that link, nothing about it sounds bad. But – although I’m not going to write a post about this right now – I’ve seen assertions online that it will give the government the power to scan all of our online communications. I have to say I’ve suspected it was already doing that.]