Maybe the Michigan prosecutor should charge the video game manufacturers with a crime

The New Neo Posted on by

That’s sarcasm, by the way.

I’m referring to this story;

Police say they have found a horde of graphic journal entries and disturbing videos made by Crumbley.

“I would characterize a lot of the stuff we’ve now seen as dark and as cold-blooded,” Sheriff Michael Bouchard told Inside Edition.

One post from Crumbley says, “Now I Am Become Death, The Destroyer of Worlds. See You Tomorrow Oxford.” The same words can be found in a gory video game.

For normal kids, as Kyle Rittenhouse said on the witness stand during his cross-examination: “It’s just a video game, it’s not real life.” For abnormal kids – and Ethan Crumbley was clearly an abnormal kid, although I still can’t find any behavioral signs of it, prior to those recent posts (which I read somewhere were on Instagram, and of which I bet the parents and school were unaware) and also the drawings on the day of the shooting – but for those very abnormal kids, video games can stir up violent imagery and contribute to aggression. The thing is, most kids fortunately are not capable of that, and people like Ethan Crumbley – whom I now believe is a sociopath – are often very good indeed at hiding the signs of their sociopathy in their interactions with those close to them, and even from schools.

When I read that “I am become death the destroyer of worlds” quote, I had a different reference for it. I’m not a video game aficionado, to say the least. But I remember that Robert Oppenheimer used the quote after first seeing desert tests of the atom bomb at the end of WWII. The quote’s origin is actually the Bhagavad Gita: “[Oppenheimer] later remarked that the [Trinity] explosion brought to mind words from the Bhagavad Gita: ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'”

I very much doubt Crumbley was aware of that particular reference.

The fall of the house of Cuomo

The New Neo Posted on by

Everybody’s writing about Chris Cuomo’s firing, so this is my post about it. But it doesn’t interest my much, so this will be cursory.

Why doesn’t it interest me much? Basically because (a) I’ve never watched him; and (b) I don’t think this is about what it purports to be about. It’s not about his offenses, whatever they may be. Like his brother, the formerly much-ballyhooed governor of New York Andrew Cuomo, the reason Chris Cuomo is being let go, IMHO, is that he became too big a liability in some way or ways, not because CNN is interested in ethics.

In other words, it’s a cost/benefit calculation for them, and for reasons we don’t completely know, the Cuomos became liabilities for the powers that be. Their corruption was already clear long ago, and neither the Democratic Party nor CNN gave a hoot. Now they pretend to care, but they don’t.

Was the liability the fact that they offended someone politically and/or economically big, or an important and influential group of people? Or was the liability a legal one – various sexual accusations were getting traction and might result in embarrassing lawsuits? I don’t think it’s really the latter, because such things would almost certainly have been successfully suppressed if the Democrats wanted them to be.

So I don’t know what happened, but it seems pretty obvious that the word went out that both Cuomos had to go. And so they went. And yet at the beginning of COVID, they were both stars. How the mighty have fallen.

[NOTE: For comparison, Joe Biden and his corrupt family are useful to the Democrats, so he’s still around – until he becomes un-useful.]

One of the only good things about the COVID lockdowns…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is that it’s been two years since I’ve had a cold.

Well, now I have a cold. It’s not COVID (I took a test) – but, like Joe Biden, it’s something I caught from my grandkids, whom I’ve been visiting.

I hate colds. Hate hate hate them, because mine tend to last a long time. But I plan to soldier on with no interruption of service.

Your Love Will Save the World

The New Neo Posted on by

Bee Gees time again!

The Bee Gees wrote over 1000 songs, and many of them were never released. Particularly during the early 70s, when their sound was in transition from their earlier baroque rock British Invasion sound to a more R&B and disco genre, their manager kept rejecting albums and songs. Some of the albums they did release were ignored, although many of those songs have since become big favorites with today’s Bee Gees fans.

At this point I know an awful lot of Bee Gees songs, but I keep discovering new ones from that era. Some are only so-so (although I have yet to find one I’d call bad). But some are quite good, and some of these previously-rejected songs are really really good. I recently came across the following one, called “Your Love Will Save the World” (a rather grandiose sentiment), and I like it quite a bit although it’s not up there with my favorites. But for a rejected song, it’s good, and it’s been growing on me.

I’m putting it up here as an example of the sort of thing they regularly threw in the wastebasket. It features Robin’s warbly upper-range (but not falsetto) “blue-eyed soul” voice and Barry’s “raspy-gruff” voice. Each Bee Gees member had a large variety of voices he could employ, and if you’re only familiar with Barry’s falsetto, you’re in for a surprise here.

The song also shows how well the Bee Gees could sing not just the harmonies they’re known for as a group, but how they could use the unique solo voices of Robin and Barry to play off each other in contrast to add texture and interest. Robin sings the verses here and Barry the choruses; I think Maurice chimes in a bit, too, but I’m not sure. If you don’t like Robin’s voice – and many people don’t – you probably really won’t like this. But I love all their voices.

The song was written in 1975 and never released. But it’s on YouTube, and that’s where I found it (if you’re having trouble understanding the lyrics, you can find them here)

This is just a demo, by the way, not a polished and finished version:

It actually was soul singer Percy Sledge who first released the song, in 1994. Here’s his version, which I also think is good although I somewhat prefer the Bee Gees. Quite a few soul and R&B singers had success with Bee Gees covers:

Why were the parents of the Michigan school shooter arrested and charged with manslaughter?

The New Neo Posted on by

The recent Michigan school shooting was a terrible crime that resulted in the death of four high school students. It was terrible in a host of ways, first and foremost of course that result. But it was also terrible in the way the school treated the shooter prior to the event, and what appears to be – if reports are correct – the behavior of the parents as well.

However, not only has the 15-year-old shooter been charged as an adult with “one count of terrorism causing death, four counts of first-degree murder, seven counts of assault with intent to murder and 12 counts of possession of a firearm in the commission of a felony,” but his parents have been charged with involuntary manslaughter.

My first reaction to that last fact was astonishment, because although some extreme gun control advocates have discussed charging parents for the crimes of their children, I’ve never heard of it done, even in school shootings where there was some negligence involved. The most I’ve ever heard about would be a charge for improperly storing a gun.

What did these parents do to draw forth such charges from the prosecution in this case? If initial reports are correct, they seem to have had a remarkably cavalier attitude about their son’s cry for help, and they stored the gun in an unlocked nightstand drawer. But in Michigan, those are not ordinarily crimes:

Legal experts were quick to point out that such charges are far from the norm — it is James and Jennifer Crumbley’s 15-year-old son, Ethan, who is accused of pulling the trigger and killing four of his fellow high school students.

“It’s exceptionally unusual,” said Cassandra Crifasi, deputy director of Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence and Research. “We rarely hold people accountable for giving someone a gun who shouldn’t have one.”…

“These are extraordinary charges,” said CNN legal analyst Areva Martin. “We know that prosecutors have been reluctant to charge parents in these school shooting cases, even though in some cases, like the Crumbley cases today, parents seem to have some responsibility.”…

There are no safe gun storage laws in Michigan, the prosecutor said. “We are not legally required to store your weapon in a safe manner,” she said.

That’s certainly interesting.

My guess is that the prosecutors are choosing to highlight these parents and throw the book at them in order to tighten up the gun laws in the state.

I’ve read a great many articles in an attempt to get clear on the facts of the case, and it’s rough going because there are some contradictions in the stories and a general lack of clarity. As best I can piece it together, we have parents who “gave” a gun to the 15-year-old for Christmas, although it doesn’t seem to have been actually given to him but instead was stored in the parents’ unlocked nightstand, thus giving him easy access to it. Several days later, a teacher noticed a drawing Ethan had made of a shooting and blood, and also this:

Between the gun and the bullet was a drawing of person who appeared to have been shot twice. He also wrote, “My life is useless” and “The world is dead,” according to the prosecutor.

Classic signs of severe depression, among other things. This kid was clearly at risk, and the school knew it at that point (nothing has been said about what he was like earlier).

See also this:

The county sheriff has said that James Crumbley purchased the gun used in the violence just days before the school shooting. McDonald said the pair were made aware of disturbing, violent images on the day of the shooting and were urged to get him counseling.

“James and Jennifer Crumbley resisted the idea of their son leaving the school at that time,” she said during a news conference Friday. “Instead, James and Jennifer Crumbley left the high school without their son. He was returned to the high school.”

This is remarkably odd. The parents sound negligent, but it seems to me that the greater negligence may have been on the part of the school – unless, of course, school authorities had no choice legally but to bend to the parents’ wishes.

The fact that the parents “resisted” having their son leave school that day seems irresponsible to me, but hardly grounds for manslaughter. Did the school underline for the parents the fact that this behavior (the drawings) on the part of their son was very grave, or did Ethan say it was just a stupid joke and did the parents believe it? How much did the school authorities press it? What were they empowered to do? Was this kid a prior troublemaker, or had he hidden the enormous depth of his propensity for violence and probable mental problems? Had he ever been in counseling, and what was the responsibility of the counselor – what did that person know? Could the school have ordered a psych evaluation without the parents’ permission? Did the school even request that? Was there a school counselor? Had the boy been referred to counseling earlier, and if so what happened there? Did anyone at the school check his backpack for a weapon, and if so why not? The parents didn’t mention the weapon – and that is one of the reasons they were charged – but does that make them criminals or just plain stupid?

At any rate, after the shooting, apparently the father went home and checked to see if the gun was still in the drawer, and then:

James Crumbley called 911 to say that a gun was missing from their home and that Ethan might be the shooter. The gun had been kept in an unlocked drawer in the parents’ bedroom, McDonald said.

Why lay it all on the parents? Unless they are sociopaths – which I suppose is a possibility,considering a shocking text the mother is reported to have sent at some point that day but before the shooting, “L-O-L I’m not mad at you. You have to learn not to get caught” – they have just sustained one of the worst blows possible in life. And now they are in prison, probably separated from each other, and charged with manslaughter. I hope they are on suicide watch, because they are at risk for suicide.

Are there other children in this family? If so, they’ll need some heavy-duty counseling, too, after being taken in by relatives, friends, or foster care.

As for the charges against the parents:

Under Michigan law an involuntary manslaughter charge can be pursued if there’s evidence someone contributed to a victim’s harm or death. If convicted, the Crumbleys could face up to 15 years in prison.

And the school?:

Asked whether school officials may potentially be charged, [prosecutor] McDonald said: “The investigation’s ongoing.”

What can we find out about prosecutor MacDonald, the person who made the decision to charge the parents so quickly? She’s a Democrat who was a judge dealing with family issues, and then in 2019 ran for DA [my emphasis]:

In April 2019, McDonald took the unusual step of stepping down from her judgeship, announcing her intention to run for the Democratic nomination for Oakland County Prosecuting Attorney in the 2020 election, thus forcing the third-term incumbent prosecutor Jessica Cooper into a highly-contested primary election. McDonald campaigned on a progressive, reformist platform focused on limiting incarceration for non-violent crimes, and ensuring prosecutorial decisions are informed by racial justice considerations.

No surprise whatsoever there. I also wouldn’t be surprised if MacDonald had received Soros money, although I can’t find anything about that.

Here’s what MacDonald said a few days ago when she was contemplating charging the Crumbleys:

“We know that owning a gun means securing it properly and locking it and keeping the ammunition separate and not allowing access to other individuals, particularly minors,” McDonald said.

“We have to hold individuals accountable who don’t do that.”

Yes, that is good policy for gun owners. But apparently it’s not the law in Michigan. So it sounds as though MacDonald wants to act as though it already is the law, and make the unsympathetic Crumbleys the poster children for that.

I will also go out on a limb and say that, after reading MacDonald’s Wiki entry, I’m pretty sure that, had the perpetrator and his parents been black, he would have been charged as a minor and his parents would not have been charged at all. And no, I’m not defending the Crumbleys, who appear to have acted very poorly throughout. But I think they just may be the only people in the US in their position who have ever been so charged under similar circumstances, and that bothers me.

[NOTE: Why is a 15-year-old being prosecuted as an adult? I’m not saying whether I’m in favor of that or not, but I’m talking about Michigan law. It seems very unusual for this to have occurred, because the law reads this way:

Today [October 31, 2019] Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed 18 bills as part of the “Raise the Age” legislative package, which passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, to raise the age of who is considered an adult under the criminal justice system from 17 to 18 years old.

“I’m proud that Michigan has joined 46 other states in ending the unjust practice of charging and punishing our children as adults when they make mistakes,” Whitmer said. “These bills will strengthen the integrity of our justice system by ensuring that children have access to due process that is more responsive to juveniles.”…

While most crimes will be subject to the updated age threshold, violent offenses could still be prosecuted as an adult under the prosecutor’s discretion.

Just as I thought, this was MacDonald’s decision because she apparently has discretion to charge Ethan Crumbley as an adult or as a minor.]

And once upon a time Australia seemed like such a nice place

The New Neo Posted on by

No more, though [hat tip: Gerard Vanderleun at American Digest]. This video is about 20 minutes long, but if you’re pressed for time you can pretty much get the gist of it in the first five minutes:

The accompanying article [emphasis mine]:

It all began when a friend of hers tested positive. She recounts how investigators came to her home shortly afterwards, having run the numberplate of her scooter to identify her as a ‘close contact’. They asked if she had done a Covid test, and in the moment she lied and said she had, when she in fact had not yet. This set in train an extraordinary series of events.

“So then the police officers blocked my driveway,” she says. “I walked out and I said, “what’s going on, are you guys testing me for COVID? What’s happening?” They said, “no, you’re getting taken away. And you have no choice. You’re going to Howard Springs. You either come with us now, and we’ll put you in the back of the divvy van. Or you can have a choice to get a ‘COVID cab’… I just said, “I don’t consent to this. I don’t understand why I can’t just self-isolate at home, like a lot of other people are doing.” And they just said, “we’ve just been told from higher up where to take you. And that’s all that there is.”…

She was tested three times during the 14 days, and on each occasion tested negative…

At no stage was she reminded of her rights or put in contact with a lawyer.

This has all taken place in a state that has recorded a total of 290 cases and no deaths.

I bolded that last sentence in the quote because it makes the whole thing even more astounding. But I actually think it’s part of the reason such draconian measures are being instituted in Australia, which has had so little COVID. They don’t think they’ve been lucky; they think they’ve been smart, and they think it’s even smarter to clamp down more and more and more. There’s also the usual thrill of the governmental power trip. And there seem to be enough people who are fine with it, or afraid to challenge it, so that it continues and even worsens as time goes on.

It’s no accident that public health is the way governments justify such strict and tyrannical measures. “For your own good” has long been the way to control people.

In line with that, you may remember some of the posts I wrote about a book by Sarah Conly titled Against Autonomy back in 2013, such as this one. And here’s a quote from a review of the book, which I quoted in that 2013 post:

[Conly asserts] that autonomy is “not valuable enough to offset what we lose by leaving people to their own autonomous choices.” Conly is aware that people often prefer to choose freely and may be exceedingly frustrated if government overrides their choices. If a paternalistic intervention would cause frustration, it is imposing a cost, and that cost must count in the overall calculus. But Conly insists that people’s frustration is merely one consideration among many. If a paternalistic intervention can prevent long-term harm – for example, by eliminating risks of premature death – it might well be justified even if people are keenly frustrated by it.

Even John Stuart Mill put his foot on the slippery slope with his harm principle:

[T]he only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or mental, is not a sufficient warrant.

Put those two quotes together and you get the way in which the state attempts to justify what is happening in Australia and many other countries, for our own good as well as to prevent harm to others. If COVID was something like the Black Death, which is estimated to have killed between 30% and 60% of Europe’s population, perhaps measures such as those in Australia would be justified. But COVID is absolutely nothing like that, and we’ve known that for a long long time.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

Once again, it’s roundup time.

(1) It’s sounds like a great career move for this U. of Pennsylvania swimmer:

A senior at the University of Pennsylvania who competed as a male swimmer for the last three years has now transitioned to female and is breaking records as a woman swimmer.

The situation has caused an uproar as people claim that this person now has an unfair advantage.

The leftist argument is that once the person is taking female hormones the advantage goes away. That’s obviously absurd, as this person’s athletic trajectory – and that of so many others – amply demonstrates. The musculature changes somewhat, but the added strength of a male past puberty doesn’t just disappear. I wrote about the issue before, in this post. Denying that fact hurts female athletes who’ve worked most of their lives to get where they are in women’s competitions.

(2) Jobs didn’t grow as much as expected for November – “unexpectedly.” Well, it makes it easy for the MSM to cover the news. They can just recycle their old reports.

(3) Alec Baldwin claims he didn’t pull the trigger. Is that possible? Did it happen?:

At first glance, this sounds far-fetched. It is exceedingly rare for a gun to fire without the trigger being depressed. Modern firearms, even replicas of antique guns, have safeties specifically designed to prevent them from firing without the trigger being pulled. It only really happens when the gun’s firing mechanism is damaged, or there is a significant design flaw.

That’s why most gun owners and firearms safety trainers are highly skeptical of any claim a gun just “went off” absent user error.

In Baldwin’s case, though, the claim is at least somewhat more believable. That’s because the gun involved is more prone to firing without the trigger being pulled. And, even though it’s a modern replica of an antique design, it’s possible it did not include modern safety devices.

Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza identified the gun used in the shooting as a modern Pietta replica of a single-action army revolver.

…[A] single-action revolver with the old-style firing mechanism can fire without either the hammer being cocked or the trigger being pulled. When the hammer is down on that kind of revolver, the firing pin protrudes and, if a live round is loaded in the chamber underneath, a sharp enough jolt can cause the pin to strike the round’s primer with enough force to set it off.

None of that means Baldwin’s story is entirely accurate. It’s not clear if drawing a gun from a holster in this state would be enough to set it off. It still seems more plausible Baldwin pulled the trigger. But, the gun firing without the trigger being pulled is not as far-fetched as it sounds at first.

Police should be able to determine what kind of firing mechanism the gun in question has and whether it could have fired in the way Baldwin described. However, even if the gun did go off without the trigger being pulled, it doesn’t negate the other negligence that contributed to the deadly shooting.

Interesting.

(4) Capitalists sell the rope with which BLM Marxists would like to hang them. [Lenin reference.]

(5) Perhaps this is true. Who can tell?:

Mossad recruited a team of Iranian nuclear scientists to carry out a covert operation which blew up one of the regime’s most secure nuclear facilities earlier this year, the JC can reveal.

Up to 10 scientists were approached by Israeli agents and agreed to destroy the underground A1000 centrifuge hall at Natanz in April, though they believed that they were working for international dissident groups.

Please read the whole thing.

Senator Shaheen, firebrand neo-revolutionary

The New Neo Posted on by

Those of you who aren’t from New England may be unaware of Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire. It’s an ignorance for which you are hereby wholly forgiven, because she usually presents as the most bland and boring of moderates and hardly ever makes the news.

But she is not moderate, and never has been in her entire Senate tenure, although her profile has been exceedingly low. Beneath that kindly and smiling grandmotherly exterior, she has never mounted an objection, as far as I know, to a single part of the extreme leftist program of the current Democratic Party, dutifully voting for all that they propose with nary a discouraging word.

Shaheen was elected in 2016 by a hair over incumbent NH Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte, who had been somewhat anti-Trump. Shaheen’s margin of victory was a mere 1017 votes (see the latter part of this post). Recently, Shaheen’s re-election chances had been threatened by the popular NH Governor Sununu, but a few weeks ago he said he would not be running for the Senate, dealing a major blow to chances of unseating Shaheen.

I have no idea why Sununu made the decision he did, but perhaps he just doesn’t relish the life of a senator and really does feel he can do more as the governor of NH. At any rate, if he had run, I believe that Shaheen’s campaign was going to rest on opposition to an anti-late-abortion bill he signed in NH, and I believe she will still use that approach to the eventual Republican nominee against her.

So now Shaheen pipes up with this [emphasis added]:

During a virtual event Monday featuring New Hampshire’s entire House and Senate delegation, WMUR reporter Adam Sexton had asked if public debate over abortion had “muted” due to many people in the U.S. only knowing life post-Roe v. Wade. Shaheen asserted that nothing would be muted about the reaction to a possible overturning of that decision.

“I hope the Supreme Court is listening to the people of the United States because – to go back to Adam Sexton’s question – I think if you want to see a revolution go ahead, outlaw Roe v. Wade and see what the response is of the public, particularly young people,” Shaheen said toward the end of the event. “Because I think that will not be acceptable to young women or young men.”

These sorts of threats to the Supreme Court have become rather common on the Democrat side, and now Shaheen has jumped aboard, showing her true colors. Apparently she sees a hard pro-abortion line as her ticket to re-election, and has no reluctance to threaten the Court with revolution to further the cause.