Obama and Biden: on weakening the US

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Frederick” asked:

@neo:This was part of Obama’s plan, I believe: to weaken the US on the world stage.

Probably too big for the comments here, but I’m curious about this. Do you think Obama and the people aligned with him deliberately seek to weaken the US? And if so, for what purpose: is it that they think the US is evil, or because they think Americans would be better off, or what is the motivation? And is this something they knowingly do, and talk about it amongst themselves? And how large is the inner circle that knows what the aim is and is on board?

In the thread that followed, there were some excellent responses. I’ll highlight a few here:

From Art Deco:

Obama is post-American. He doesn’t give a rip about ordinary people. He cares about the transnational cosmopolitan professional-managerial stratum (and celebrities). Vigorous national states are a bulwark against that stratum. Note his peculiar hostility to Bibi Netanyahu. Israel is unapologetic in its pursuit of national interests and Bibi’s impressive qualities remind Obama of his own inadequacies.

I would add that I don’t find his hostility to Netanyahu the least bit “peculiar.” It’s SOP for the left; Netanyahu isn’t just an Israeli – which is already a bad thing to the left – but he’s on the right and unabashedly so. To the left, the only good Israelis are those who are on the left and who are appeasers of the Palestinians.

Art Deco adds:

BTW, I think if you put them under sodium pentathol, you’d discover that Obama’s bad attitude is quite normal among professional-managerial types in this country.

No need for sodium pentathol. They’ll say it up front. Nor is it limited to “professional-managerial types.” Not long after my political change – which was close to twenty years ago – I began to notice that, in casual conversation among the people I knew, the US was routinely referred to in pejorative terms. These were not even deep geopolitical discussions, either; we’re talking about things like the fruit stands in Europe versus the fruit stands in the US. These people were neither managerial nor especially professional, intellectual, or leftist. A few were teachers, some were office workers, but all were regular Democratic Party voters without thinking all that much about it. Somewhere along the line – and maybe it was even long ago, during the Vietnam era – they had decided the US was uniquely awful and nationalism terrible as well.

And yet they’ve stayed in this country.

Obama was raised in an explicitly more leftist environment, as well as a state that only achieved that status about two years before Obama’s birth and was nowhere near the continental US. His father, whom he didn’t know, was a Kenyan national, and his mother lived the bulk of her adult life in Indonesia, a country where Obama lived as a child from about the ages of seven to eleven. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that his ties to the US are more those of an outsider; who would have given him any other perspective, or any positive perspective? (That has nothing to do with his birth certificate, by the way – I believe he was born in Hawaii and is a natural born citizen of the US).

Commenter “Don” adds:

Part of Obama’s view, I believe, is the left’s expectation of US decline. It was said that Obama viewed his role as managing the decline of the US. Many have been predicting a multipolar world where China is the major player. Before that in the 80s and early 90s pretty much the same people expected Japan to surpass the US…

A good illustration of this was Obama’s “red line” on Syria. He didn’t act when they crossed it, and when asked in an interview he stated that “it wasn’t his red line it was the world’s”.

I think the foundation of this type of thinking is a belief that the world is a nicer place then it really is. The left has tried to make it seem that the US causes all kinds of trouble, and we are hated because of what we do. If we left others alone, there could be peace.

In reality, the modern world is a much better place because, since at least 1805, the world’s oceans have been dominated by English speaking navies, with the exception of the first half of 1942 in the Pacific. England and the US are the key cause of the modern peace, prosperity and technical advancement.

Again, these are common views on the US left and not at all exceptional.

And from “Mike K”:

I think Obama has decided (maybe aided by his mysterious supporters) that the US is irredeemable and must be destroyed to save it, like the village in Vietnam. This is sort of a religion on the left who have no idea how things are built or where electricity comes from.

Many years ago I wrote a post on patriotism and nationalism, and I’ve reposted it many times on Memorial Day. Here’s one of those recent repostings; I suggest you read the whole thing if you’re not familiar with it, because it’s relevant to the present discussion as well. But here’s an excerpt:

…[P]patriotism and nationalism seem to have been rejected by a large segment of Europeans even earlier, as a result of the devastation both sentiments were thought to have wrought on that continent during WWI and WWII. Of course, WWII in Europe was a result mainly of German nationalism run amok, coupled with a lot more than nationalism itself. But the experience seemed to have given nationalism as a whole a very bad name…

…[T]he post-WWII idea [was] of nationalism as a dangerous force, mercifully dead or dying, to be replaced (hopefully) by a pan-national (or, rather, anational) Europeanism.

Although Obama has no particular historic ties to Europe, I believe that this is his orientation and that it was one of the reasons Europe adored him. Its opposite is also one of the reasons Europe hated his successor Trump.

As for Biden – he has no principles other than his own personal ambition. His present-day cognitive challenges aside, even when he was better in that regard he still followed Obama in everything when Biden was vice president. Biden’s anti-American actions now – and there’s almost nothing but anti-American actions – are what he thinks he must do to appease his base and to follow in the footsteps of Obama and company. There’s also the corruption angle, and we don’t know how broad and deep that is. But money, as well a covering his past tracks in that regard, may be a big part of Biden’s policies at present.

Ukraine, Russia, and Israel

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s complicated:

Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky declared Tuesday that, when the war is finally over, Ukraine would emerge from the rubble a “big Israel.”

He meant that the war would never really be over, that Ukraine would be on a permanent war footing, just as the Jewish state is. He meant that it would view its neighbors the way Israel has long viewed its own: As enemies waiting to pounce. Most importantly, he meant that Ukraine would never again rely on anyone else for its security: not the West, not the international community, not the so-called liberal order. It would be, like Israel, a nation apart, answering to no one but its people, in control of its own destiny.

The article then goes into the fact that Israel, despite being temperamentally and emotionally aligned with Ukraine in this fight, has diplomatically taken a less-aligned stance. The author adds:

How did Israel end up walking this tightrope? In part, it’s because Israel exists to be a safe haven for Jews everywhere, and there are still nearly half a million in Ukraine and Russia…

But the bigger reason is waning American hegemony. America’s post-Iraq war exhaustion with the Middle East led Israel to begin to see what Ukraine has just discovered: That it cannot rely on the assurances of an America that has turned inward—and away from the rest of the world. As the United States backed away from its “red line” in Syria and pursued a nuclear deal widely viewed in Israel as an existential threat, former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu shifted Israel away from relying on the vaunted special relationship, forging new ones with China, India, and Russia, among others. Israel’s position in the Ukraine war has brought the Jewish state’s new geopolitical reality into stark relief.

I would amend that and say that all of the listed actions – backing away from the red line, and pursuing the Iran deal – do not represent the US as a whole pulling away. They represent the position of the US left, which is in power right now even though the majority of the US population is against such policies. I’d add that even the majority of Congress is probably against such policies, if truth be told. It is the executive branch, and very specifically Obama and then Biden (or the people who dictate the positions Biden takes) who are implementing those policies. They have been able to do it because of the power of the president in the US to set foreign policy.

But in a certain way the author is correct, because quite a few people on the right have also turned away from foreign “entanglements.” Those people, however, do not favor the Iran deal at all – which is a sort of foreign entanglement all its own. Nor do they agree that once President Obama drew a red line he should have abandoned it. President Trump probably exemplified the present foreign policy aims of the majority on the right: economic pressure, consistency, know who our enemies are, and carry a big stick as a deterrent.

In addition, there used to be a bipartisan consensus on certain elements of US foreign policy, with only slight variations. For example, both parties held similar attitudes towards Israel, and also towards Iran, and therefore there was a certain basic reliability to US foreign policy that countries could rely on. That ended with Obama. I realized at the time that even if a successor were to reverse his policies, the world was on notice that the US was now unreliable, in the same way the South Vietnamese learned it in the 1970s.

This was part of Obama’s plan, I believe: to weaken the US on the world stage. As for Biden, whether he’s in control of his own presidency or not, remember that Biden was Obama’s VP prior to his more recent cognitive decline and he was fully onboard back then with what Obama did.

NOTE: Ukraine, by the way, along with Poland, was once the country in Europe with the highest percentage Jewish population. It lost the majority of its Jews during World War II.

Half of all the Jews murdered during WWII were from Poland:

Approximately 98 percent of Jewish population of Nazi-occupied Poland during the Holocaust were killed. About 350,000 Polish Jews survived the war; most survivors never lived in Nazi-occupied Poland, but lived in the Soviet-occupied zone of Poland during 1939 and 1940, and fled or were evacuated by the Soviets further east to avoid the German advance in 1941.

Of over 3,000,000 Polish Jews deported to Nazi concentration camps, only about 50,000 survived.

It was indeed The Final Solution for the Jews of Poland:

Prior to World War II, there were 3,500,000 Jews in Poland, living mainly in cities: about 10% of the general population.

This was the pre-WWII situation in Ukraine:

On the eve of the invasion in 1941, the territory of Ukraine in its current internationally recognized borders was home to one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe. The fate of those Jews depended on many factors, including the local occupying authority and whether they were among the very few evacuated to the interior of the Soviet Union ahead of the invading forces. While scholars are still researching the scale of the Holocaust in Ukraine, they estimate at least one and a half million Jews were killed there…

Most Jews in Ukraine were shot to death close to where they lived, not deported to distant camps. Their executioners were German but also Ukrainian, Russian, and other local collaborators.

More history here:

The history of the Jews in Ukraine dates back over a thousand years; Jewish communities have existed in the territory of Ukraine from the time of the Kievan Rus’ (late 9th to mid-13th century). Some of the most important Jewish religious and cultural movements, from Hasidism to Zionism, rose either fully or to an extensive degree in the territory of modern Ukraine. According to the World Jewish Congress, the Jewish community in Ukraine constitutes the third-largest in Europe and the fifth-largest in the world.

That last figure refers to recently. I had not known there were still that many Jews in Ukraine, although the percentage remains far far smaller than it once was:

Whilst at times it flourished, at other times the Jewish community faced periods of persecution and antisemitic discrimination…

During the conflicts of the Russian Revolution and the ensuing Russian Civil War, an estimated 31,071 Jews were killed between 1918 and 1920. During the establishment of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (1917–21), pogroms continued to be perpetrated on Ukrainian territory. In Ukraine, the number of civilian Jews killed during the period was estimated at between 35,000 and 50,000…

In 1959 Ukraine had 840,000 Jews, a decrease of almost 70% from 1941 totals (within Ukraine’s current borders). Ukraine’s Jewish population continued to decline significantly during the Cold War. In 1989, Ukraine’s Jewish population was only slightly more than half of what it was thirty years earlier (in 1959). During and after the collapse of Communism in the 1990s, the majority of the Jews who remained in Ukraine in 1989 left the country and moved abroad (mostly to Israel).

Israel is getting ready to absorb a lot more of them.

Here’s an article on the Jewish population of Ukraine in recent, post-Soviet years.

Shanghai: it’s a mad world

The New Neo Posted on by

The Ukrainians seem to have been catapulted by Russia into a World War II movie. Not a good place to be.

At the same time, the Chinese of Shanghai are living in one of those futuristic dystopian films:

Nearly all of Shanghai’s 26 million residents have been confined at home since last week, as the city aims to test, trace and centrally quarantine all people who test positive for the virus amid the spread of the highly infectious Omicron variant.

Only healthcare workers, volunteers, delivery personnel and those with special permission are able to move freely under the “no tolerance” policy.

The strict rules mean that quarantined residents have to order in food or wait for government drop-offs of vegetables, meat and eggs, BBC reported.

There have been protests, suicides, and young children taken from parents:

Under China’s unbending virus controls, anyone found positive — even if they are asymptomatic or have a mild infection — must be isolated from non-infected people. That includes children who test positive but whose family members do not, health officials confirmed on Monday, defending a policy which has spread anxiety and outrage across the city.

“If the child is younger than seven years old, those children will receive treatment in a public health center,” Wu Qianyu, an official from the Shanghai Municipal Health Commission, said Monday. “For older children or teenagers… we are mainly isolating them in centralized [quarantine] places.”…

“We have made it clear that children whose parents are also positive… can live in the same place as the children,” she added.

That last sentence – what a magnanimous concession.

Other countries locked down and emerged form lockdown a long time ago, but I don’t think there’s a single country that did what China is doing to its people in terms of the extremity of the control exercised. I believe that Quebec was close for a little while – Viva Frei documented the worst of times, if I remember correctly – and perhaps parts of Australia. But I don’t recall such problems with getting food, nor do I ever remember young children being taken from parents.

This behavior is literally insane, even for China. Especially with Omicron. What is the goal? Surely they must know that chasing “zero COVID” is a losing battle. Is it just the desire for control to the nth power, and the habit of it? Do they get off on this in some way? Did they simply decide quite some time ago that human beings are just pawns they can move around at will? Are they practicing for something else?

Open thread 4/11/22

The New Neo Posted on by

Two of my favorites – Fil and Robin Gibb. If you’ve ever wondered what made Robin Gibb’s vibrato so unique, Fil will show you beginning at 16:37:

His vibrato was unusually fast and unusually narrow in pitch variation.

Elvis and company

The New Neo Posted on by

In 1957, we see why Elvis was nicknamed The Pelvis.

We also see – or at least I think I see – the roots of his dancing in James Cagney. “James Cagney?” you ask, puzzled. Not in Cagney’s tap dancing or his jumps – I love Cagney’s dancing, by the way – but some of his odd shifts of balance, particularly those starting at 2:27:

One more influence – whether Presley knew anything about him or not – could be early Bob Fosse (I really don’t think so, but it’s an excuse to put the clip up). This dance number was choreographed by Fosse for the 1954 musical “Pajama Game,” although this is a clip from the 1957 film. Fosse is not one of the dancers:

That “Steam Heat” number reminds me of this from 1976, although it has zero to do with Elvis Presley (as was perhaps true of the previous two as well):

Putin’s endgame

The New Neo Posted on by

As soon as it became clear that the Ukraine war wasn’t going to end with a very quick Ukraine capitulation and Russian victory, I started to wonder how it was going to end. It seemed to me early on that without a face-saving out option, Putin was stuck in the need to continue and perhaps even to escalate to a nuclear option (a real nuclear option, not the metaphoric one in our Senate).

And in my opinion those who suggest Zelenskyy and Ukraine never should have fought for their autonomy in the first place have forfeited any right to call themselves defenders or supporters of liberty. But their fighting does mean that Putin might feel shamed by how the Russians are doing, and that could be dangerous for the world.

I agree with this quote from George Friedman:

This means that Putin’s war plan is shattered. The resistance has been effective and his troops need a relief he cannot provide. Putin will feint in other directions – perhaps in the Baltics or Moldova – but he lacks the force to fight on another front. He can’t sustain this war easily, especially in the face of NATO soldiers who have so far stayed out of the fray.

Even so, I cannot predict what a leader will do in the end. But for now, it’s clear to me that Putin will cling to power and blame everyone around him. But every day the war goes on, Putin gets weaker. Ukraine should not be able to resist, NATO should not be united, American economic warfare should not be so powerful. Putin is growing more desperate. He has mumbled about nuclear weapons, the sign of utmost desperation. But he knows he and anyone he may love will die in a nuclear exchange. Even if he is prepared to commit suicide rather than capitulate, he knows that the order to launch must go through several hands, and each of those hands knows that the counterstrike will kill their loved ones. Therein lies the weakness of nuclear war: Retaliating is one thing, initiating another. Putin trusts few people, and he doesn’t know how reliable anyone would be in this situation – nor what the Americans might do if they saw preparation for a Russian launch.

If Putin gives up his position, he is compromised, and perhaps lost. The buzzards are circling. So he must continue to fight until he is forced out and someone else not responsible for the disaster takes over and blames it all on Putin. I think that this can’t end until Putin is pulled from the game.

Obviously, I am moving here away from geopolitical analysis into the political. The former tries to minimize individual influence while the latter emphasizes it. That gives my forecast an inevitable imprecision. But given the situation on the ground, and given Russian internal dynamics, it does seem that all the forces coming to bear on Putin dictate a certain direction. The war will end, but the war is evolving in a way that creates unique pressures on the Russian political system, and, because of the nature of the system, that pressure pivots on Putin.

This is not the only outcome. Ukraine might collapse. Russia might collapse. The Russian army may devise a strategy to win the war. A settlement that is respected might be reached. All of these are possible, but I don’t see much movement in any of these directions. A political end is what I would bet on, with the Russians taking the short end of the stick. I wouldn’t have thought this on the first day of the war, but I think this is likely the shape of the last day.

This analysis from Donald Sensing is somewhat similar:

These massacres and casualty levels (on both sides) now mean that a negotiated peace is off the table. For Putin to make such an agreement would be seen by the senior military and civilian Russian leadership as an admission of Putin’s personal failure. And Putin would have to realize that making such a peace would be professionally and possibly personally lethal for him. Russians know good and well that the Czar/General Secretary/President is never the one who fails the country, ever. If Putin accepted a negotiated peace, everyone else within the senior reaches of government and the military would know that the scapegoating purges would come quickly. And Putin knows that they would know that. Who would act decisively first – Putin and his inner, purge-immune circle, or the intended victims?

As for Zelensky, to negotiate a peace with invaders who have mass murdered his people on repeated occasions would also be an admission of failure. Unlike Russia, he would likely remain in office until the end of his term, and even if he was forced out, his exit would have the façade not of disgrace, but of an exhausted hero of world significance, to whom the nation owes its everlasting gratitude.

Until a point, that is, And that point is if the war simply drags on. Putin cannot relent. Ukraine now must win. Before now, all Ukraine had to do was not lose, but that is no longer good enough. Now it must eject Russia from the country, and not slowly. But Putin cannot allow his army to be so defeated.

No one had any real hope for the negotiations occasionally held in Belarus, anyway. After the Bucha massacre, “Mykhailo Podolyak, one of Ukraine’s peace negotiators and aide to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said the tone of peace talks had forever changed because of Bucha…”…

The Ukraine war has now transitioned into a proxy war between Russia and the Euro-American alliance. Ukraine is tragically caught in the middle. The very difficult and very uncertain task before Europe and the United States now is to manage the war to keep it inside Ukraine. (But remember the caution attributed to Bismarck that starting a war is like entering a dark room, blindfolded, to look for a black cat that is not even there.)

Sensing thinks that with the atrocities in Bucha and the mass attack at the Kramatorsk train station, the Ukraine war “has transitioned to a new, much larger stage.” I don’t see this as a transition. As I said, from the start I didn’t see any way that negotiations were possible or that surrender by either side was possible unless one side scored an unequivocal victory. That’s one of the frightening things about this war: that a nation with enormous numbers of nuclear arms is led by a ruthless and brutal man who cannot countenance a military defeat and who has also tried very hard to protect himself from those who would either do him in or unseat him in a coup.

The 2020 election is still in the news

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember Maricopa County, Arizona, site of recounts and audits after Biden’s razor-thin win in that state? Here’s the latest from the ever-so-slowly grinding wheels of justice:

“We have reached the conclusion that the 2020 election in Maricopa County revealed serious vulnerabilities that must be addressed and raises questions about the 2020 election in Arizona,” said an “interim report” issued today by [Arizona] Attorney General Mark Brnovich…

The 12-page report, reviewed by Secrets, did not condemn the county’s handling of the election outright but raised enough questions about voter identification, ballot handling, and counting to prompt Brnovich to call for a vast tightening of the rules.

It also revealed that he is readying criminal and civil fraud charges against some individuals the attorney general’s Election Integrity Unit has probed…

Among the key findings in his report…:

–Maricopa officials were not cooperative with his demands for information.

–In many cases, election officials were given less than five seconds to verify voter signatures on file with ballots filed early.

–The number of ballots nullified because of problems dropped even though those filed nearly doubled in 2020.

–There were “multiple violations” in how about 20% of ballots in drop boxes were handled and delivered to election offices.

–Some $8 million in outside funds and grants were used in the vote count, now illegal under a recently passed law. Notably, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife funded more than half of that.

Speaking of Zuckerberg, please take a look at this report on Pennsylvania in the 2020 election [emphasis mine]:

With a series of PowerPoint slides, Shepherd revealed to lawmakers that beginning in July 2020, consultants working for leftist organizations coordinated with local election officials and Democrat Gov.Tom Wolf’s office to lobby five blue counties to apply for these private grants. While the grants originated with the nominally non-partisan Center for Tech and Civic Life—an organization that Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s private foundation later infused with some $350 million in cash—emails reveal that a main consultant involved in targeting select counties, Marc Solomon, worked for the Center for Secure and Modern Elections, or the CSME…

While the right-to-know requests revealed the targeted lobbying of blue counties, there were no emails showing any outreach to core Republican counties until after September 1, 2020. That proves significant, according to Shepherd’s testimony, because when the summer-time targeting of Democratic strongholds took place, the Zuckbucks cash infusion to the CTCL had not yet been announced. Without that cash, there may never have been a chance for the red counties to obtain any funds. (Shepherd also questioned where the earlier CTCL funding came from—something apparently still unknown.)

But even after the new funds came in, the Democrat counties still received a substantially higher cut of the $22.5 million in grants spread across 23 counties…

Far from being an outlier, Pennsylvania’s experience matches the growing evidence seen in other states that the Zuckbucks and other leftist money funded state-run get-out-the-vote efforts for Biden. What makes Pennsylvania different, however, is that the emails connect the grant process to government actors and show the state’s collaboration with left-wing political activists to lobby Democrat-only counties. This evidence raises constitutional concerns under the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

There are many ways to illegally influence an election, apparently. Trust the left to know about all of them and to be willing to employ them.

Then there’s this general summary of many of the important and suspect irregularities in the 2020 election. It’s long, but here’s an excerpt:

COVID-19 and Mail-in Ballots: When the pandemic struck early in 2020, democracy assistance providers in the United States and other Western nations responded almost immediately. By April of 2020 USAID had produced a paper highlighting how authoritarian leaders and other malign influences might use the pandemic to undermine democracy and human rights, and provided advice on how civil society groups overseas might protect against or mitigate these abuses. Subsequent papers by the foreign policy establishment focused on how election processes could be modified to protect voters while ensuring integrity during the pandemic. During 2020, USAID provided substantial assistance to many countries to facilitate COVID adaptation, ensuring in-person voting could be conducted safely and more or less on schedule.

Within the United States, however, the immediate electoral response to the pandemic was a push by one party for mail-in rather than in-person voting. It is well known among election specialists that mail-based voting is much more susceptible to fraud and abuse than in-person voting, but it was argued that the pandemic made mail-in voting necessary (despite the examples of safe in-person voting from other countries). The new mass mail-in voting processes were conflated with existing systems for absentee voting, but the new systems lacked the checks and security features developed over generations for absentee voting. In the event, the public-health fears proved unfounded, as much of the country did vote in person without appreciably affecting the overall incidence of the disease.

In many parts of the country, matching a signature on a voter list with that on an absentee ballot was the only way to verify the identity of the voter. To handle the huge number of mail-in ballots compared to previous elections, signature matching processes were changed or eliminated without proper transparency or consideration, shortcuts were taken and safeguards dropped, which weakened security and diminished confidence in the validity of millions of ballots in Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. Mail-in or absentee ballots lacking an outer security envelope would normally be ruled invalid, but in Pennsylvania they were accepted, contrary to international practice and norms.

In most elections worldwide, mail-in ballots must be postmarked by a specified date (usually Election Day) to be counted, but in Wisconsin and Michigan employees of the United States Postal Service were instructed to backdate late arriving ballots so they could still be counted.

Mail-in ballots also facilitated a practice called “ballot harvesting,” in which political operatives go door to door picking up ballots from homeowners. This undermines the secrecy of the ballot and introduces opportunities for intimidation and vote buying, and in places like senior homes and apartment blocks enables one person to collect, fill in, and submit numerous ballots. Ballot harvesting decreases the security and credibility of election processes and is consequently contrary to international best practices.

Voter Registration and Voter ID: The U.S. government has provided hundreds of millions of dollars through its foreign assistance to support voter registration processes in other countries. An accurate voter list and effective voter ID are seen as essential for deterring malpractice and cheating, and for enhancing voter confidence in the integrity of the process. American foreign policy also promotes the Open Election Data Initiative, which advocates internationally for transparent and publicly accessible election data.
Domestically, again, the picture is quite different. The average accuracy of state-maintained voter lists is far below what would be considered minimally acceptable overseas. The update process is often non-transparent, and some states outsource their list maintenance to a private organization funded by a politically partisan billionaire. Many states restrict public access to some election data, and charge exorbitant fees for data they do release, limiting the public’s ability to verify the process, and violating international norms.

This is stuff we already knew, but it’s a good reminder and summary.

Boson mass: back to the drawing board?

The New Neo Posted on by

Unexpected news:

The scientists at the Fermilab Collider Detector (CDF) in Illinois have found only a tiny difference in the mass of the W Boson compared with what the theory says it should be – just 0.1%. But if confirmed by other experiments, the implications are enormous. The so-called Standard Model of particle physics has predicted the behaviour and properties of sub-atomic particles with no discrepancies whatsoever for fifty years. Until now.

CDF’s other co-spokesperson, Prof Giorgio Chiarelli, from INFN Sezione di Pisa, told BBC News that the research team could scarcely believe their eyes when they saw the results.

“No-one was expecting this. We thought maybe we got something wrong.” But the researchers have painstakingly gone through their results and tried to look for errors. They found none.

The result, published in the journal Science, could be related to hints from other experiments at Fermilab and the Large Hadron Collider at the Swiss-French border. These, as yet unconfirmed results, also suggest deviations from the Standard Model, possibly as a result of an as yet undiscovered fifth force

HORATIO:
O day and night, but this is wondrous strange.

HAMLET:
And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Whitmer case verdicts – 2 acquittals and a hung jury on the other 2 defendants

The New Neo Posted on by

First of all, although I had followed the Whitmer “kidnapping” case and written about it many times, I had no idea it had already gone to trial.

Just goes to show how much other news there’s been lately.

But I’m pleased to report this result:

In a huge defeat for the U.S. Department of Justice, a jury today acquitted two men accused of conspiring to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in the fall of 2020 and deadlocked on a verdict for two other defendants. The verdicts were announced at the Gerald R. Ford Federal Building in Grand Rapids after more than four days of deliberations; jurors heard 13 days of testimony in a case the government considered one of its biggest domestic terrorism investigations ever.

I’d say it’s a huge defeat for the FBI as well – although in terms of politics the damage was already done to the right when the case first hit the news.

One of the biggest issues in the case was entrapment, and that’s an affirmative defense that’s very difficult for defendants to prove. The deck is stacked in favor of the FBI and law enforcement on that matter. I wrote about the subject at some length; here’s an example.

But in the actual trial, according to Julie Kelly:

Defense attorneys had argued—successfully, it would appear—that their clients were entrapped by the FBI; at least a dozen FBI confidential human sources and undercover agents working out of numerous FBI field offices were deeply embedded in the plot.

Jonker ruled before the trial began on March 8 that defense counsel could not raise the entrapment issue until the government rested its case, but that plan was quickly scuttled when it became obvious the four defense attorneys were unable effectively to represent their clients without demonstrating the FBI’s extensive involvement. To prove entrapment, the defense had to convince the jury that the government induced the criminal behavior and the defendants lacked predisposition to carry out the kidnapping conspiracy on their own.

Against the objections of prosecutors, Jonker notified the jury last Friday they could consider entrapment…

A roster of FBI agents and experts took the stand during the three-week trial…

…[T]wo men charged in the same indictment had pleaded guilty and testified for the government in exchange for lighter prison sentences.

Those two might be kicking themselves right about now.

I agree with the defense here:

…[D]efense attorneys angrily condemned the FBI’s sting operation. “When I look at what happened in this case, I am ashamed of the behavior of the leading law enforcement agency in the United States,” Joshua Blanchard, Croft’s public defender, said during his closing argument. Christopher Gibbons, Fox’s public defender, called the government’s conduct “unacceptable in America. That’s not how it works. They don’t make terrorists so we can arrest them.”

And yet they do it quite often.

Here’s what I mean when I say the political damage was done, which I believe was really the point of it all:

The case produced damaging headlines for Donald Trump in October 2020 just as millions of Americans were already voting for president, including in the crucial swing state of Michigan. During a dramatic speech on October 8, 2020, Whitmer blamed Trump for “stoking distrust, fomenting anger, and giving comfort to those who spread fear and hatred” and for refusing to condemn “hate groups like these two Michigan militia groups.” Joe Biden accused Trump of sending “dog whistles” to white supremacist militias, later telling reporters it was “despicable” and “beneath the office of the presidency” that Trump allegedly encouraged the would-be kidnappers.

And these terribly dangerous “kidnappers” have of course been imprisoned since their arrests:

Harris and Caserta, who have been incarcerated since their arrests in October 2020, were released from custody. Fox and Croft will remain in prison as the government decides its next move.

Will the government keep going with this travesty of a case? I wouldn’t put it past them, although maybe they’ll just let it fade away. And go to the next travesty.

[ADDENDUM: Hat tip: commenter “Griffin.”

Here’s a piece that describes the trial in detail. Please read the whole thing. It’s almost as frightening as the case itself – really, maybe more so. It turns out that the defense was blocked from mounting much of a case at all, whereas the prosecution was given free rein. That was why two of the defendants made guilty pleas as they saw what was going on.

It’s amazing that the jury was able to penetrate the incredibly one-sided presentation and find these men either not guilty or refuse to give a verdict. Once you read the article I think you’ll be outraged at how this was conducted. I certainly am.]