Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

Once again, I’m resorting to a roundup because there’s so much important news. All of the following are such big stories that I may revisit one or more of them some time in the future:

(1) Please read this Victor Davis Hanson summary of stories pushed by the left since Trump became president. It’s a yeoman’s task, because there are so many, and most aren’t all that simple. You might want to send it to any Democrat you know who retains even a partially open mind.

(2) This chilling article is worth reading for the light it sheds on a seeming contradiction in the administration’s policy on Russia:

The Biden administration has spent the last two weeks publicly censuring and sanctioning Russia over its brutal invasion of Ukraine. Yet even as it engaged in evermore shrill public denunciations of the undoubted evils of Vladimir Putin, it was simultaneously working hand-in-glove with the Russian dictator to finalize a new agreement with Iran over its nuclear program. So how do we make sense of the administration’s public campaign to isolate Putin at the same time as it partners with the vilest man on the planet to cut a deal with a Russian client state? The key to understanding this seemingly erratic set of zigs and zags is the recognition that Team Biden is following the template that former President Barack Obama created in Syria a decade ago. Let’s call it the “Syria playbook.”…

At the heart of Obama’s maneuvering in and around Syria was the practice of strategic messaging, which allowed Obama to hold both ends of the stick while speaking out of both sides of his mouth—or rather, letting cynical or clueless members of his administration strike seemingly contradictory poses, each of which allowed him to advance toward his goal. He could be simultaneously moralizing and a cold realist—whatever it took not to be distracted from his main objective of a deal with Iran…

In August 2012, Obama made the blunder that he has since repeatedly said he regrets most of all out of every decision he made as president, when he boxed himself in by laying down a red line against Assad’s use of chemical weapons—a line Assad would cross repeatedly, all the way to a major chemical attack in August of 2013. Again, Obama turned to Russia to bail him out of a commitment he had no intention of keeping, as the rest of his presidency demonstrated quite clearly…

That Putin fully understood Russia’s importance in Obama’s Iran calculus could be seen by the fact that the Russian dictator immediately pressed his advantage by seeking compensation in Ukraine. In early 2014, he took the first small bite of the sovereign nation, invading and annexing Crimea. The United States’ reaction was rich in rhetorical condemnation and otherwise pointedly feeble…

As the talks with Iran entered their final stage, Putin began his preparations to move on Ukraine. No more amuse-bouches. Now it was time to Syrianize Ukraine—to consume it whole, as Russia’s main course at the Iran deal banquet.

Much more at the link. It explains quite clearly what we pretty much already knew – how the Russian demand to be allowed to be sanction-free in its dealings with Iran works, and why they felt confident that demand would be acceded to by the Biden [that is, Obama 3.0] administration. Note also the prominence of some familiar names from the Obama administration that are maneuvering things now as well.

(3) Okay, so the august NY Times has made a low-key admission that the Hunter Biden laptop was authentic after all. Now how about tackling the apparent crimes and corruption and scandals it describes, as listed by Margot Cleveland? The article deals with eight: pay-to-play in Ukraine; China gets in the game; Moscow, Kazakhstan, and more, Ukraine’s firing of the prosecutor investigating Burisma; Obama-Biden administration ignoring conflicts of interest; the intelligence community’s briefing of Biden (about the loss of Hunter’s laptop); possible collusion to interfere in the 2020 election; Joe Biden is a ‘Lying dog-faced pony soldier’.

(4) There’s a probe going on in Georgia of claims of ballot harvesting fraud in the 2020 election and the 2021 Senate runoffs in that state. The Senate runoffs in Georgia were exceptionally important, and the alleged conspirators had plenty of time to plan and plenty of money to use, money contributed by people who understood the stakes were enormous: control of the US Senate.

It’s a bit late, though. The damage is done, whatever is found.

Siege

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a report from the besieged city of Mariupol. It’s harrowing.

A companion piece to that is here:

Former UK veterans affairs minister Johnny Mercer, an erstwhile artillery officer who did three tours in Afghanistan, visited Kyiv/Kiev, and high-rise apartment blocks as they zero in on some Ukrainian secret military facility. They are landing right on target – often right through the front door – bottom centre of the block.

“These are no mistakes. It is deliberate targeting of civilians in their homes with the deliberate intent of breaking their will and accelerating the collapse of the Ukrainian state.”

In line with that, Rich Lowry has this to say:

An invading army surrounds a European city, cuts off its supplies, bombards it, and demands surrender.

Is it 1346? 1631? 1870? 1941? Or 2022?

The answer is any of the above, and all of the above. The Russian siege of Mariupol is shocking not because it is unprecedented, but because it is so traditional — a form of war that is grinding, brutish, and all too typical in European history…

Russia’s operation in Mariupol, the strategically located port city on the Sea of Azov, has been blatantly bloody-minded. It hasn’t even made a pretense of honoring basic decency, let alone the modern rules and norms around warfare. The Russians have cut off food, electricity and medical supplies, and been reducing the freezing city to rubble.

By some estimates, 80% of the residential buildings in the city have been damaged. The Russians, notoriously, shelled a maternity ward and a theater and a school where people were sheltering. Authorities have been forced to bury the accumulating dead bodies, wrapped in carpets or bags, in a mass grave…

Putin’s brutalizing of Ukraine is a reminder of how essential it is to support the Western order — the alternative is so much worse. It is a reminder of how human affairs can easily slide backwards — the history of civilization is of folly, catastrophe and decline, as well as of enlightenment, achievement and progress. And it is a reminder that when a nation is determined to rule by blood and iron, hard power is the only deterrent and recourse — if anything saves Ukraine, it will be missiles, drones and artillery, not norms or treaties.

I reluctantly agree – although I have no idea if Ukraine’s autonomy can be saved by anything, short of a change of plans on Russia’s part (including a coup against Putin, which I think unlikely but marginally possible). But even back when I was a liberal Democrat I was puzzled by the idea of international law – a subject in which I took a year-long course in law school. The thing I could never understand was how it could be enforced, because it seemed that it only worked among nations that already had reason to get along and to agree on a host of things. And without enforcement, law is hollow. The only thing that enforces international law is agreement or force, and force in international terms means either severe sanctions or arms and often war, or some combination of all of it. Law can only be enforced afterwards – as at Nuremberg – by the victors.

“Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime”

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter John Tyler reminds us of this famous saying by Beria, the notorious head of Stalin’s secret police: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” As with some of our current political prosecutors, the idea is that anyone can be framed, prosecuted, found guilty, and put away. Although in Beria’s case the “put away” part often involved murdering them under guise of law or without it, today’s US prosecutors of the left usually settle for imprisoning someone for a long time, perhaps even life if possible.

But let’s put our US prosecutors aside for a moment, because I have another observation on Beria. I strongly believe that Beria was a sociopath (or psychopath; take your pick). That’s one of those words that is merely helpful as a description of a type, because we understand very little about what makes a person that way. However, I have a theory about such people, and that is that two of the things they believe are as follows:

(1) Life is a power struggle in which everyone else is as corrupt and self-centered as they are, and those who seem otherwise are either pretending or are just weak fodder for exploitation by the strong.

(2) The sociopath has determined himself or herself to be that strong, smart, and superior person who will be doing the exploitation.

Therefore when someone such as Beria says “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime,” he’s not only referring to the fact that he, Beria, can manufacture charges against anyone – although that is indeed one of the things he is referring to. But I believe he’s also saying that there is nothing special about Beria except his own power, canniness, and acknowledgement of the amoral dog-eat-dog functioning of all society and all human beings. He believes that everyone is guilty anyway, and that if they’re not guilty of the exact crime for which Beria charges them, they’re guilty of something – if only stupidity and weakness, or thinking the world is a moral one. That’s for chumps.

The ordeal of Brady Knowlton

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s another January 6th defendant story that will chill your blood:

Brady Knowlton entered the U.S. Capitol building at 2:35 p.m. on January 6, 2021. Like hundreds of other people that day, he walked the halls of Congress — first the Rotunda, then the lobby, then the Senate chamber gallery.

A 40-year-old law student, Knowlton and a friend gained access to the Capitol through the Upper West Terrace doors. To do so, they and others passed several police officers walking in their opposite direction, according to footage and discovery materials reviewed by The Daily Wire. Knowlton told The Daily Wire that an officer said, “You can go in, as long as you don’t break anything.” He says he watched police shake hands with protestors. He broke nothing, and left after 18 minutes.

He now faces about 20 years in prison. His law degree has been withheld, his lawyers say, Airbnb has banned him and his wife, and, for reasons that remain undisclosed, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection has stripped his Global Entry access…

“He went to Washington to exercise his First Amendment right to petition the government for what he believed was a redress of grievances,” Alan Dershowitz, an attorney for Knowlton, told The Daily Wire in an interview. “And he’s been lumped together with people who caused damage or who intended to obstruct. He wasn’t intending to do that. He just intended to protest.”

The whole thing is well worth reading. But sadly, it’s a now-familiar story.

What have we become? I think I know the answer, and it’s not good.

Russia’s Ukraine war will probably spark nuclear proliferation

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s hard to conclude otherwise. It seems to me quite obvious that if Ukraine had kept its nuclear weapons, Russia would not have attacked it. Or at the very least, Russia would have been far more reluctant to have attacked it.

This lesson almost certainly is not lost on other non-nuclear countries that face the threat of attack from others – that they need some sort of nuclear umbrella to protect them from a nuclear rainy day. As the world watches Ukraine fight off a more old-fashioned type of invasion from a Russian aggressor unafraid of nuclear retaliation from Ukraine or perhaps even any other country (or NATO) – a Russia whose head also openly says he’s willing to use nuclear blackmail against any significant intervention that would send military or certain types of planes to assist Ukraine – there’s a feeling of impotence.

Nuclear weapons are most useful for deterrence. Putin is certainly using them that way against the west. Ukraine has none. NATO has some but is afraid of using them – or even threatening to use them – against Putin. That takes away much or all of their deterrence value for NATO.

Trump’s brag is that he said this to Putin:

In a recording of the phone conversation with pro-golfer John Daly on Friday, March 4, the former president said: “They’re all saying oh he’s a nuclear power, it’s like they’re afraid of him. You know, he was a friend of mine, I got along great with him. I say, Vladimir, if you do it, we’re hitting Moscow. We’re going to hit Moscow. And he sort of believed me like 5%, 10% – that’s all you need.”

He continued that Putin “never did it during my time John, you know. They were all talking about it, ‘Why didn’t he do this during the last four years?’ Because he knew he couldn’t,” before mentioning that China’s President Xi Jinping is also afraid of him. The Republican added: “Xi didn’t bother me either. I told him the same thing, that that’ll be next. You know that’s going to be next. Taiwan will be next. You won’t have any computer chips. They’ll blow them off the face of the earth.”

Did Trump really say that to Putin and/or Xi? Who knows? The point is that Trump understood the uses of keeping other leaders wondering. Whether or not he said this directly, it was implicit in his persona. That can be valuable. Of course, it could also be argued that it could be provocative.

When I was a child, nuclear weapons were relatively new. Many of us who were very young in the 1950s remember having intense fear of a worldwide nuclear war that would obliterate human life. The 1959 movie “On the Beach” was a fictional representation of that fear, and also quite a good movie. I saw it as a child and it was the stuff of nightmares – nightmares I was already having anyway.

As I grew up – something I hadn’t been sure would even occur – and then got sort of old, the fear receded because we had had these weapons so long and somehow they’d been kept in check. Cooler heads, saner times? It sure doesn’t seem that way anymore, does it?

[NOTE: There’s also the question of Russia’s claim to hypersonic weapons, as well as their possible use already in the Ukraine war. There’s a discussion and some links about this in today’s open thread, and it’s certainly a fit topic for this post’s comments thread as well.]

They’re still phishing

The New Neo Posted on by

Recently I got an email purporting to be from The Geek Squad. It looked very official, and informed me that my already-existent subscription would be auto-renewing soon, and mentioned a fee in the two hundred dollars range. The logos were there, and it also contained this message: “To Cancel The Subscription You Can reach Us at [phone number].”

It masqueraded as being from another real company, QuickBooks, and looked something – although not exactly – like this.

Clever, no? Nothing to buy; just a phone number to call to cancel an autopay. There’s also a handy attachment to click on.

Only thing is, the phone number isn’t the Geek Squad number, and – as with most phishing schemes – they don’t address you by name. Nor do they seem to have any other identifying characteristics of the recipient except an email address. For this particular scam, that’s the “tell.”

Oh, and another tell is that I’ve never contracted for anything from QuickBooks or The Geek Squad. But in this day and age, when so many of us have so many odds and ends of subscriptions and contracts and warranties and auto-renews, it’s not always easy to remember what’s what.

There’s no question that these phishing expeditions get a lot of customers, or they wouldn’t bother with them. I have a friend who got taken in by something like that, and she’s an intelligent person although not what I’d call computer-savvy. I think a lot of my readers are computer savvy, and often a lot more savvy than I. But I thought I’d just reminder people to beware of this pernicious stuff.

Did the COVID lockdowns make us look older?

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter Rufus T. Firefly asks a question that I find interesting:

Has anyone noticed EVERYONE seems to have aged 5 or more years during the two years of lockdowns? I first started noticing this in myself, prior to the lockdowns most folks would guess my age 10 – 15 years younger than I am and think I was joking when I told them my actual age. Now, no one bats an eyelash when they hear my age. I, of course, noticed it myself. I see myself in the mirror every day. My appearance has changed more in the past two years than any other time in my life, except in infancy. But I started to notice the same thing with everyone I interact with. Even people I know who always looked very youthful… Everyone looks 5 – 10 years older.

Anyone else see this? Is it COVID? The vaccines? The stress of lockdowns? Many people gained a lot of weight, is that it? Is it the lack of social interaction?

I’ve noticed long before COVID that the aging process seems to proceed in a series of discrete leaps rather than a slow linear progression. I even wrote a post that dealt with the topic. In it, I wrote this:

I’ve noticed in my own life and among my friends, as well as for public figures, that visible aging doesn’t progress in smooth linear fashion. It advances in fits and starts and discrete bumps.

One year I look around at my friends at the Christmas party and everybody looks pretty darn good. The next year I wonder who all these old folk are. In their thirties and forties the aging process seems so slow and gentle as to be almost stagnant; most people seem to go on and on looking almost like they did in their twenties.

There’s a group who hit the aging wall in their mid-to-late forties, going almost overnight from young to oldish. They’re the canaries in the mine. Another bunch “turn” quite suddenly in their late fifties, with the early sixties a time of particular peril for many.

Well, I was younger when I wrote that, and the peril only increases.

So if the COVID lockdowns coincide with one of those “quantum leap” aging times for a person, that person is going to look more than two years older on emerging from seclusion. I think some of the observed aging is accounted for by that.

But not all of it. I haven’t observed accelerated aging across the board, but I have observed a certain amount. Some of it may be due to people getting out of the habit of preparing “a face to meet the faces that you meet.” For women, that can mean makeup and hair and weight and clothing. For men it tends to mean the latter two on that list. When we seldom see anyone but those we live with – or if we live alone and hardly go out – many people dispense with those things that as we get older are even more important in looking good.

There’s also a lack of exercise. Some people have used the lockdowns to get into great shape, but I don’t think that’s common. I know more people who say they’ve cut back on exercising, whether through inertia or for some other reason I don’t know. And of course, many health clubs were closed for a long time, and I doubt that everyone went back even when they opened again.

Don’t discount the effect of depression, either. The lockdowns themselves have been depressing, including the lack of concerts and plays to attend, things that tend to perk people up. Depressing also is the political situation, and I find that’s true no matter what side of the political spectrum a person may be on. And then there’s inflation – depressing, as well.

Depression doesn’t make people look good or make them look younger. It drags the face down and can make it sag. When my father-in-law died I noticed that my mother-in-law appeared to age a decade in what seemed like a matter of weeks. It can happen.

I don’t think any of this was from COVID itself, nor from the vaccines. It was the lockdowns, and the perception that we’ve been lied to and manipulated, and the resultant grinding social isolation. It hasn’t affected everyone to the same degree, nor is it the only thing that causes people to age more quickly. But I think it’s real.

Lia Thomas and objective vs. subjective reality

The New Neo Posted on by

Lia Thomas has been declared an NCAA women’s champion:

Penn swimmer Lia Thomas won the women’s 500-yard freestyle championship on Thursday to become the first transgender NCAA champion in Division I history.

She finished the race in 4:33.24, beating Virginia’s Emma Weyant by 1.75 seconds. The time fell short of Katie Ledecky’s NCAA-record time of 4:24.06.

Thomas had been competing as a man until last season:

Her eligibility has come under scrutiny with critics arguing that she has an unfair advantage in the pool after she went through male puberty. She met NCAA standards to compete as a woman after undergoing testosterone suppression therapy for more than two years.

Since joining the women’s team, Thomas has broken two school records and posted the fastest times in the country in the 200 and 500-yard freestyle events. Now she’s an NCAA champion.

Look at any photo of Thomas and the ludicrous nature of allowing this person to compete as a woman becomes crystal clear. As a male, Thomas was a decent college swimmer. As a female, Thomas is a star. Whatever the reasons for Thomas’ declaration of womanhood – which we can speculate about but don’t know – elevation to athletic prominence from obsurity has been the result. But it’s a result that never would have happened if Thomas had not been allowed to compete as a woman, which is what the controversy is about.

Look at any photo of Thomas and you can see that this is a person who not only looks like a man but like a very strong, large, and powerful man, with enormous upper body strength. Thomas went through puberty as a man and trained for years as a man. The only thing that makes Thomas a woman is that Thomas has said so, plus some testosterone-suppressing hormones that do not alter those basics about Thomas.

Women’s sports are about separating out a class of people who in almost every sport would be bested by men, but who have skills nevertheless and should be competing against each other. Anyone is free to take an interest in watching women’s sports or to disdain them, but women’s sports have a valid reason for existing. I’ve always considered them somewhat the equivalent of weight classes in boxing or wrestling, in which like competes against like and there are pluses and minuses to watching each group. Thomas threatens the entire existence of women’s sports, or at least makes a mockery of them.

What interests me most about this situation is the insistence by the left and the woke that we ignore it and applaud Thomas’ victory, pretending that Thomas has achieved womanhood and that there’s nothing wrong with calling the woman who would have been the actual champion the runner-up instead. And why? Because of a perception in Thomas’ mind rather than a reality of Thomas’ body.

I have no trouble respecting the wishes of trans people to be called by their preferred pronouns. But I think that’s a personal decision on my part, and I am against anything that would compel a person to follow suit. But I do not support Thomas swimming as a woman, because that is elevating the subjective to the status of an objective truth that is in this case a falsehood about Thomas’ body. Nor do I support changing a person’s birth certificate to conform with that person’s later chosen sex, thus creating a fiction that the new classification had actually existed from birth.

I first encountered this idea that a subjective perception creates an actionable objective truth when I returned to the university during the 1990s to get my Master’s degree. I’d been away for two decades, and hadn’t closely followed what had been going on in universities in the meantime. When I returned, there was a big brouhaha going on at the university involving accusations of sexual harassment against
a professor who had said something ever so slightly risqué in a classroom and several students had objected mightily and charged him, and as a consequence he’d been suspended and ordered to re-education class.

To me, the situation was an absurd and potentially damaging elevation of a subjective perception – that this guy had said something offensive – to the status of an objective truth. In fact, we seemed to be losing the whole concept of objective truth versus the subjective feelings of the listener, and the superiority of the former over the latter for the determination of actual guilt or innocence. I stood up in class and pointed this out, thinking that I was speaking a nearly self-evident truth by saying so. But no one in the class even thought my little speech worthy of response.

At the time I didn’t understand the full significance of what was happening. Nor did I get its political nature or exactly where it would lead. But I knew it was wrong, and I knew it was dangerous.

Lia Thomas may identify as a woman. But the person known as Lia Thomas has the body of a man. Sports are about what bodies can do, and a sports organization such as the NCAA should not be elevating Thomas’ subjective perception over the objective truth of Thomas’ body.

Ukraine and Biden family corruption

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “physicsguy” writes:

Many seem to have forgotten how close the Biden family is to the corruption in Ukraine. I have kept that in mind as I look at the administration’s response. I’m definitely not letting Putin off the hook; he’s risking starting WW3 and doesn’t seem to care. What a CF.

CF indeed.

This war was begun by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and the timing probably seemed right to him because of this administration’s demonstrated incompetence and weakness in just about everything. We don’t know how the Biden family’s Ukraine dealings factor into that calculation of Putin’s. But it’s certainly possible and even probable that both Russia and Ukraine have damaging information about Hunter at the very least, and probably Joe as well.

One of many reasons that we should not elect corrupt and compromised people – and that the MSM shouldn’t cover up what those people have done just because they like their politics – is that it makes them vulnerable to blackmail. As I said, Ukraine may have the goods on Biden and it certainly has the goods on Hunter. I would also bet that China has the goods as well. Perhaps even Iran has been given the information; I wouldn’t be altogether surprised if that were the case. But some of this information is in the public domain already, especially now that the NY Times has belatedly admitted the laptop is valid.

By the way, just to clear up the time frame: after Joe Biden was no longer vice president Hunter’s salary from Burisma was cut in half and his term expired right before Zelenskyy took office. So at least during Zelenskyy’s administration there’s no evidence of the Biden’s being on the take anymore in Ukraine, although it’s always possible that there’s something of which we aren’t aware.

Not only have I not forgotten any of this, but I think it’s important to remain aware of it. How it factors into this war is anyone’s guess. However, I think a lot more than that is going on, and the events of the Ukraine war have been a long long time in the making and have multiple causes that have nothing to do with Biden. But I also think that Joe Biden’s vulnerability – a vulnerability that includes his leftist politics, his cognitive decline, his recent history in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and his family’s probable corruption in Ukraine and many other countries such as China who are at best our rivals and at worst our enemies – all factor into it.

Good luck sorting out this CF.

[NOTE: By the way, yesterday I wrote that I had a big post on Ukraine brewing and that I’d try to publish it today. This one isn’t it, though. I’ll probably get the bigger one posted some time early next week.]