Happy Insurrection Day! says the left

The New Neo Posted on by

My gut feeling is that most Americans who are not on the left are heartily sick of hearing about the horrors of January 6th from the Democrats’ perspective, and have Moved On to more pressing concerns like inflation and crime. Democratic leaders, however, would like to stoke the memory of that day, when they were riding high – having just taken control of the presidency and both houses – and were scoring an anti-Trump anti-right propaganda victory as well.

The good old days.

It’s been a slide downhill for Democrats ever since, but they’re hoping that they can “reform” America’s voting through HR! or similar executive orders, and keep themselves winning no matter what the majority of Americans may want.

As for today, I haven’t listened to the over-the-top, self-serving speeches. As regular readers here know, I usually can’t stand political speech-making anyway, although I usually read transcripts. But today, after reading the descriptions of Biden’s and Harris’s divisive and mendacious rhetoric, I’ll leave it at that.

I’ve written many posts already on the actual events of January 6th and their aftermath, but I would recommend brushing up on this from RealClearInvestigations as well as this video featuring Glenn Greenwald. I haven’t watched the latter yet, but Greenwald has been spot on about this topic and I’m going to assume this is more of the same.

In sum, I’ll quote commenter “Cappy” who earlier today wrote: “It’s a Woodstock for paranoid leftists.” I will add that some actually are paranoid, but I think most of them are not the least bit worried about January 6th but are merely coldly calculating and hoping that frightened Americans will give them more power, or at least allow them to take more power. That’s actually what this is all about.

Chicago teachers go on strike

The New Neo Posted on by

The ostensible reason is COVID, of course, the all-purpose excuse. The real reason – IMHO – is they have gotten very very accustomed to just phoning it in (that is, computering it in), and being paid for it. So why would they want to return?

Even leftist mayor Lori Lightfoot isn’t happy with this. In retaliation, she locked the teachers out of their Zoom class access and says they will not be paid till they return.

How many people are weeping for them? Very few, I think.

New York may have gotten rid of de Blasio and installed a tougher-on-crime mayor, but…

The New Neo Posted on by

…it’s got a new Soros-backed DA named Alvin Bragg. And you know what that means:

Bragg took over on January 1. On January 4, Bragg promised to instill new rules similar to those in San Francisco and Philadelphia, both of which have DAs backed by Soros.

Just contemplate that for a moment. It’s one thing for voters to have elected people who espouse this philosophy when it was just a fantasy of some sort – although it still was profoundly stupid even as an idea. But now, to try to implement what’s already happening to destroy San Francisco and Philadelphia? Do Bragg (who is black, by the way) and his supporters want law-abiding black central city residents to suffer at the hands of criminals who are predominantly black as well?

Apparently, they do.

Bragg was running against other “progressive” DA candidates anyway in the Democratic primary (the winner of which would be virtually guaranteed to win the election), and apparently he was one of the less extreme of the lot. But here’s a recent statement of his plans:

In his first memo to staff on Monday, Alvin Bragg said his office “will not seek a carceral sentence” except with homicides and a handful of other cases, including domestic violence felonies, some sex crimes and public corruption.

“This rule may be excepted only in extraordinary circumstances…

“Carceral” means pretty much what you’d think it does: prison. Well, that’s one way to empty out the prisons – elect a DA who doesn’t believe in imprisoning the vast majority of criminals.

More details include the following: no prison sentences over 20 years without the possibility of parole, even in the worst cases. Sadistic mass murderer? No biggee, I guess. And except in extraordinary cases there will be no pretrial incarceration.

(Bragg is in charge of the office trying to prosecute Donald Trump, by the way.)

More here:

Armed robbers who use guns or other deadly weapons to stick up stores and other businesses will be prosecuted only for petty larceny, a misdemeanor, provided no victims were seriously injured and there’s no “genuine risk of physical harm” to anyone. Armed robbery, a class B felony, would typically be punishable by a maximum of 25 years in prison, while petty larceny subjects offenders to up to 364 days in jail and a $1,000 fine…

Convicted criminals caught with weapons other than guns will have those felony charges downgraded to misdemeanors unless they’re also charged with more serious offenses…

Drug dealers believed to be “acting as a low-level agent of a seller” will be prosecuted only for misdemeanor possession. Also, suspected dealers will only be prosecuted on felony charges if they’re also accused of more serious crimes or are actually caught in the act of selling drugs.

I wonder if New York will see a lot of resignations in the DA office of prosecutors who didn’t sign up for this sort of thing. And I wonder if a liberal backlash – such as I’ve witnessed from several liberal friends in other blue cities with Soros-backed prosecutors – will occur in New York, and whether it will ever result in a rejection of Democrat/progressive politics.

I doubt whether that last bit – a more general rejection of Democrat/progressive politics – will be occurring in more than a handful of people.

I used to visit New York several times a year. I haven’t been there for two years now, and I doubt I’ll be going back any time soon.

Can any airplane experts out there explain?

The New Neo Posted on by

Recently I returned from a cross-country visit out west. The less said about the airport from which I left, and the crowds there and lack of decent signage, the better. And yes, wearing a mask almost unceasingly for close to twelve hours, all told (including long wait at airport and trip in bus from airport), is not the comfiest experience.

But the flight was great, and much to my surprise the pilot announced at the outset that we’d be arriving one hour early. And we did – exactly one hour earlier than scheduled. I know that when traveling west to east in the US there are tailwinds, but I thought those were factored in already. I also thought that if tailwinds were especially strong that day, the pilot would mention it as a reason we were making such good time. I’ve had that happen before.

But this pilot didn’t say a word about it. He was the laconic type.

Not only that, but I’ve never been that early for a flight landing because of tailwinds being especially strong – practically twenty percent early. What gives, oh you airplane experts?

And then, when we were getting off the plane, all its lights went out. It was very late at night and cloudy, and therefore the plane became nearly pitch black. I had been seated in the middle section of the plane and I was just starting to walk down the aisle to leave when it occurred. As I passed one of the flight attendants, she remarked that she’d never seen such a thing happen before. Clearly, the crew didn’t seem to be able to turn any lights back on, either, although people started using their cellphone flashlights to negotiate their exits from the plane.

I can’t find anything online to explain this. Why would the airplane lights go out like that? Why couldn’t the attendants turn them back on? Was this some sort of electrical problem? Or did the ground crew turn them off prematurely and is the crew unable to override that?

I know that someone out there has the answer. I’m counting on you, folks.

The James Webb Telescope sunshield has been successfully deployed

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE I wrote about the James Webb Telescope previously here.]

I’ve grown so used to assuming government incompetence (or worse) as the default position that I’m gobsmacked by this news:

The James Webb Space Telescope team has fully deployed the spacecraft’s 70-foot sunshield, a key milestone in preparing it for science operations.

The sunshield – about the size of a tennis court at full size – was folded to fit inside the payload area of an Arianespace Ariane 5 rocket’s nose cone prior to launch. The Webb team began remotely deploying the sunshield Dec. 28, 2021, three days after launch…

The five-layered sunshield will protect the telescope from the light and heat of the Sun, Earth, and Moon. Each plastic sheet is about as thin as a human hair and coated with reflective metal, providing protection on the order of more than SPF 1 million. Together, the five layers reduce exposure from the Sun from over 200 kilowatts of solar energy to a fraction of a watt.

This protection is crucial to keep Webb’s scientific instruments at temperatures of 40 kelvins, or under minus 380 degrees Fahrenheit – cold enough to see the faint infrared light that Webb seeks to observe.

“Unfolding Webb’s sunshield in space is an incredible milestone, crucial to the success of the mission,” said Gregory L. Robinson, Webb’s program director at NASA Headquarters. “Thousands of parts had to work with precision for this marvel of engineering to fully unfurl. The team has accomplished an audacious feat with the complexity of this deployment – one of the boldest undertakings yet for Webb.”…

The unfolding and tensioning of the sunshield involved 139 of Webb’s 178 release mechanisms, 70 hinge assemblies, eight deployment motors, roughly 400 pulleys, and 90 individual cables totaling roughly one quarter of a mile in length. The team also paused deployment operations for a day to work on optimizing Webb’s power systems and tensioning motors, to ensure Webb was in prime condition before beginning the major work of sunshield tensioning.

It certainly was a “bold undertaking,” and it’s not out of the woods yet, although I’m very impressed so far:

The world’s largest and most complex space science observatory has another 5 1/2 months of setup still to come, including deployment of the secondary mirror and primary mirror wings, alignment of the telescope optics, and calibration of the science instruments. After that, Webb will deliver its first images.

The goal is pretty darn comprehensive:

The telescope’s revolutionary technology will explore every phase of cosmic history – from within our solar system to the most distant observable galaxies in the early universe, to everything in between. Webb will reveal new and unexpected discoveries and help humanity understand the origins of the universe and our place in it.

We’ve been wondering about that last bit for a long, long time, and though I’m impressed with Webb so far, I think even after its data is collected we’ll have a long long way to go before we understand “our place” in the universe. Science can tell us a lot, but I think the answers to that one lie in a different realm, or at least in the arena where science, philosophy, and religion meet.

What would be the political consequences of a SCOTUS decision in Dodd to overturn or modify Roe?

The New Neo Posted on by

Food for thought:

Democrats backing abortion rights predict a “revolution” of outraged voters ousting anti-abortion Republicans in elections for state legislatures and Congress. At least some Republicans are nervous about such a backlash…

Today, the leading pro-abortion rights constituency is white college graduates, especially women (as have been most college grads these past 25 or 30 years). Many will probably be enraged by an overturning of Roe. But the potential for partisan upheaval is limited because over the past 50 years, views on abortion have increasingly followed party lines.

Affluent college graduates since the mid-1990s have trended Democratic, increasingly so since Donald Trump rode down his escalator in 2015. As a result, most of those who might be moved to retaliate against anti-abortion Republicans have been voting Democratic for years. They may be especially motivated to vote, but affluent college grads are already the most reliable turnout demographic.

You can expect abortion-rights activists to stoke fears that a reversal of Roe will criminalize abortion in all 50 states. Of course, serious Democrats know better. In states like New York, politicians have been pushing laws that declare abortions legal until the moment of birth. Overturning Roe simply means that states decide.

…Even states like Texas, whose recent abortion ban controversially authorizes enforcement by citizen lawsuits, are unlikely to ban abortion altogether. And the large majority of current abortions, as abortion-rights supporters often point out, occur before Mississippi’s 15-week time limit. Total abortion bans are likely to be passed only in states where almost no legal abortions are performed already or in the anti-abortion territory of Guam. The lion’s share of abortions currently legal will remain legal.

Milan Kundera on national memory

The New Neo Posted on by

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was the first book I ever read by Milan Kundera back when it was first published in 1980, and it probably is still my favorite work of his. It’s a very strange but wonderful book, really just a succession of loosely connected long short stories. The author constantly steps away from the storyline to offer political, historical, and philosophical observations, such as this.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

I would add that the memory involved is cultural or national memory. Personal memory doesn’t often falter in that manner (although sometimes it does). It’s the transmission of those memories and their lessons from one generation to another where the slip-up occurs.

Kundera also wrote:

The first step in liquidating a people,’ said Hubl, ‘is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.

1619 Project, anyone?

The thing about the US right now is that, without being conquered by a foreign country and without a huge majority of people supporting the left, we are currently doing it to ourselves and have for quite some time.

Medical discrimination on the basis of race

The New Neo Posted on by

White people in some states willl have a tougher time getting possibly lifesaving meds for COVID [emphasis mine]:

It takes a score of 4 or more to be somewhere on the list to receive monoclonal antibodies, the best treatment we have for covid, and being “Black, Indigenous or a Person of Color” gets you halfway there, counting as much as being over 65, having diabetes, and so on. Being white gets you nowhere. The Minnesota Department of Health, apparently with a straight face, calls this an “Ethical Framework for Allocation of Monoclonal Antibodies during the COVID-19 Pandemic.”

My friend comments:

“Hospital system protocols that use an algorithm to decide who qualifies to obtain the medication we know works best for treatment of COVID 19, monoclonal antibodies, now all include different weighting for patients of different races. While we have no evidence that I am aware of that shows BIPOC do worse than white people when controlled for other confounding factors, the Minnesota Department of Health believes it is more ethical to deny the treatment to white people based on the color of their skin.”

This seems to be illegally discriminatory on the face of it. Will it hold up to court challenges? Even if it does not, the institution of such policies in several blue states shows how far gone we are in terms of what blue cities and blue states consider racially fair. As long as it’s white people who are the targets of the discrimination, these states seem to think it’s not just okay but laudable.

And my guess is that government officials in those states will always be able to get the treatment they want, no matter what their race, both for themselves and their loved ones.

January 6th anniversary: the invented coup lives on…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and has a one-year anniversary coming up. The Democrats and the MSM are planning a big big celebration of their finest propaganda hour.

But how many people other than the leftist core care anymore? One of the problems for the left caused by the fast news turnover is that a year ago can seem like ancient history.

See this:

…[I]n the Orwellian world of Democrats, trying to prove that fraud was committed by someone else means you are yourself guilty of fraud. Believing the election was stolen means that you yourself tried to steal the election. And worst of all, asking people to march “peacefully and patriotically” to the Capitol means that you were instructing them to riot and overthrow the government.

NOTE: I’ve also written many posts on the possibility that many FBI agents and informants were involved in January 6th. Glenn Greenwald has been especially good on this subject.