Will the Times and the WaPo return their Pulitzers for Russiagate?

The New Neo Posted on by

That’s the question Roger L. Simon asks here.

The question is rhetorical, of course. They should, but they won’t.

There’s the old “fools vs. knaves” question, too:

[T]o what degree [did] these people knew they were lying at the time? Were they merely victims of extreme Trump Derangement Syndrome? Did they believe the ends, in this instance, justify the means?

They allowed themselves to be conduits for lies. Did they ask serious questions? “Informants, almost always anonymous,” were telling them things. (Collecting those anonymous informants has been the stock and trade of establishment journalists since Watergate.)

The most obvious conclusion is they wanted to believe the lies they were hearing, so they did not question them. To be blunt, they were lousy reporters and remain so because. most of them, all to my knowledge on the linked [Pulitzer] list, have not publicly acknowledged their faults.

I believe most knew and didn’t care, because the particular facts don’t matter in the service of a Higher Truth. Plus, I doubt they ever thought they’d be found out, because once the MSM unites on a false story, it can be difficult for the rest of us to discover and prove the truth. They never expected Hillary Clinton to lose in the first place, and the Russiagate story was initially concocted to hurt Trump in the 2016 election, and so they never expected (I believe) to have to continue it for all those years of the Trump administration, because they didn’t think there would be a Trump administration.

But they rose (sank) to the occasion after his election, didn’t they? Give them points for dogged persistence.

Hiding Biden’s decline

The New Neo Posted on by

I find it hard to believe that a lot of people were actually fooled during the 2020 campaign into thinking that Joe Biden was not sliding towards dementia. But apparently they were. I suppose it could be the result of a combination of wishful thinking, desire to get rid of Trump and the paucity of alternatives, and a resultant lack of close attention to Biden’s actual few and far-between appearances. Another factor may have been nostalgia for the Obama years (I find that inexplicable, too, but I do believe it occurred).

Now a lot of those people are catching onto Joe’s awfulness, because there’s only so much you can hide even from those who would like it to be otherwise.

What were the operatives behind Biden’s candidacy thinking would happen, once he was elected? Perhaps they thought his unraveling would proceed at a more stately pace. Perhaps they thought external events would go better, and so people wouldn’t care that much about the condition of Biden himself. Perhaps those operatives thought they’d be able to commit fraud in the next election, and the next, and so it wouldn’t matter. Perhaps they thought that once Biden undid – by executive order, if need be – Trump’s changes, that would accomplish many of their goals. Perhaps they thought that Congress would be able to pass HR1 (remember that?) in order to change all state voting laws in their favor. Perhaps they thought Puerto Rico and DC would become states, giving Democrats a permanent majority.

And perhaps they thought that, if all else failed, they could remove Biden for health reasons and Kamala Harris would become president.

They didn’t bargain on Manchin and Sinema obstructing their plans – so far, anyway. But what they especially didn’t bargain for (IMHO) was that Harris would be perceived as so repellent so quickly by so many people.

That’s the main bind they’re in right now. They can’t go with the “replace Joe with Kamala” plan because the public might perceive the cure as worse than the disease.

Rittenhouse was (and is) the designated prey of psychopathic wolves

The New Neo Posted on by

I was in transit yesterday out west, so I’m still catching up with yesterday’s news in the Rittenhouse case. Fortunately, others have done excellent work summing things up.

If you haven’t seen these yet, I highly recommend them: Andrew Branca at Legal Insurrection discusses the legal wrangling over the different video versions submitted by the prosecution as well as other legal issues, anti-Rittenhouse demonstrators are arrested for attacking pro-Rittenhouse demonstrators outside the courtroom (a courtroom which should have been cordoned off but was not) as the jury deliberates inside; MSNBC has been barred from the courtroom for having a producer follow the jury bus (see also this), and we learn more about the previously elusive “jump kick man.”

But if you read or watch only one thing about the trial, it should be this from Frei and especially Barnes. I haven’t watched the whole thing yet (it’s long) but it’s well worth your time. You can change the setting to 125% speed if you want to make it quicker.

Please watch for however long you care to. Barnes comes on around 7:27, so I suggest you begin there if you’ve got the time. Barnes describes quite well, I think, how the initial mindset of the judge and the defense played into what we’re seeing now and how out of control this trial has become.

But in particular, and especially if you’re pressed for time, I recomment this part that I’ve cued up. In it, Barnes lays out the events of the evening the shooting occurred, giving us the big picture of the way in which a pack of criminal psychopaths selected the naive Rittenhouse to set him up and if possible kill him, and how the prosecution (and the MSM) is putting forward the version of reality the violent psychopaths created (and if you’re in a very very special hurry, just watch from about 45:30 to 51:49):

What Barnes is saying there is something I’ve thought about in recent days, although he says it with a great deal more knowledge of the facts and details of the killings and especially the prelude to the killings.

The point is that violent psychopaths are very savvy about choosing their prey, and if society winks at their violence they will escalate and escalate until they are stopped.

Politics sets the stage, pscyhopaths take advantage of the situation, and then politicians use the psychopaths to further their own ends, in a macabre dance. This is the mark of many totalitarian regimes, by the way (perhaps another post for another day): the use of psychopaths and/or sociopaths to meet certain nefarious ends.

Dancing and singing and drumming and bass playing in the rain: Part II

The New Neo Posted on by

[nOTE: Part I can be found here.]

Singing while doing much dancing is rare for several reasons. The first is that unless the dance is very simple and slow, the dancer gets out of breath (that also can be a problem for drummers, by the way, according to what I’ve read). In a dance you can hide being out of breath somewhat, but if you have to sing you can’t hide it. What’s more, though, there is a similar problem to that which some drummers face, especially when learning: it can be hard to do both simultaneously. You won’t see it much except for very simple dancing.

As far as Gene Kelly and “Dancin’ in the Rain” goes, his singing occurs when he is basically walking slowly down the street. There’s a little singing as the dance picks up, and then there’s a long pure dance part with no singing at all, which constitutes the bulk of the number. A person’s memory – and the lyrics “I’m singin and dancin in the rain” – might make it seem as though he’s doing both quite furiously at the same time, but he is not.

Plus I’m almost positive that at that point musical numbers like that were pre-recorded and lip-synced.

Astaire used to sing – and then he would dance. He could do both, but I don’t recall him doing them together. Here’s a typical dance number. Fred starts singing while they dance very very slowly and sedately (akin to Gene Kelly’s walking at the beginning of “Dancin’ in the Rain”). Then he stops and then they really start to dance. But no more singing.

Cagney could sing and dance, too. But again, not much together. Watch him in “Yankee Doodle Dandy”:

So much fun.

But Astaire could dance and drum at the same time. And what he does with both here doesn’t seem very simple to me at all. But hey, he’s not singing at the same time:

Remarkable.

Nick Sandmann reaches out to Kyle Rittenhouse

The New Neo Posted on by

And as so often is the case with news of special interest to the US right, it’s a British paper that publishes it.

Sandmann has learned more in a few years through the crucible of his personal experience than most people learn in a lifetime. He writes:

Kyle was 17-years-old when he became a household name after that terrible tragedy in Kenosha.

I was 16-years-old when I was catapulted into the national conversation by video of an encounter with a Native American activist on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

In only hours a CNN host tweeted an image of me, writing: ‘Honest question. Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid’s?’.

Kyle wasn’t given his day in court by his critics.

And neither was I.

The attacks on Kyle came from the national news media, just as they came for me.

They came quickly, without hesitation, because Kyle was an easy target that they could paint in the way they wanted to.

This is the problem with liberal media outlets in the United States. They want to get the story first, get the most views, make the most money, and advance the agenda from liberal patrons.

Absolutely true. And almost every word from the MSM was a lie in both cases, meant to defame and set the narrative at the outset:

Taking a life, for any reason, sticks with someone forever and yet the liberal elites would rather turn it into a joke for likes.

Not only does Kyle have to deal with that, but it is compounded with the overwhelming stress and trauma of the character assassination taking place against him.

From my own experience, the death threats, feeling of no future ahead, and that millions of people hate you, is enough to alter you in many concrete ways and permanently.

Make no mistake: even the strongest of people cannot resist the mental impact when the media war machine targets you.

There’s much more at the link, including a discussion of whether Rittenhouse could sue and what might happen if he does. Sandmann adds that he is still involved in six suits against the media for the defamation he suffered.

He adds:

One of the saddening parts of this media onslaught is that it has taken young people like Kyle and myself to expose how corrupt the media really is…

At this time I would like to use my platform to let Kyle know that I am here for you and if you ever would like to reach out to me, I am about the only person our age to have an idea of how the media is treating you. The way the media has treated you is terrible, and you don’t have to face it alone.

[Hat tip: commenter “AesopFan.”]

The Rittenhouse jury has gone home for the evening

The New Neo Posted on by

They’re not sequestered, so “going home” for the evening means going home-home.

I can’t predict what juries will do, ever. And in fact, I’m often wrong when I even try. I cannot figure out, however, why any thinking sentient being wouldn’t have returned a verdict of “not guilty” almost instantaneously. There is no credible evidence of guilt, must less guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. In fact, there’s hardly any evidence of guilt at all, credible or incredible.

But apparently there’s a lack of unanimity which could mean almost anything, but it certainly means that the jury isn’t composed entirely of people who think like me.

As for the fact that the jury has not been sequestered, I was listening to Robert Barnes talk with Frei about that. He said that most lawyers don’t ask for it because it’s been found that being sequestered makes jurors tense and stressed and prone to rushed decisions just to be able to finally go home. As for reading about the case or talking to people about it while they’re home, they’re told not to do it but of course some do. I think that in a case such as this, with so much prejudicial publicity having gone on for well over a year, the damage is pretty much already done and so it hardly matters what might happen now in that regard.

I’ve been extremely tense all day, for obvious reasons.

Why did the Zimmerman jury find him not guilty?

The New Neo Posted on by

In watching the Rittenhouse trial, I have sometimes thought of George Zimmerman. The fact situation in Zimmerman’s case was hardly the same, but it was at least somewhat similar in that each defendant was in a generally protective mode, and each one shot and killed an assailant (or in Rittenhouse’s case, several assailants) who were unarmed but were hurting them and might be intent on killing them.

There were a lot of differences. For example, Rittenhouse was set on by a mob in a riot situation, and his encounters were very comprehensively recorded by video cameras. For Zimmerman this was not the case. Rittenhouse and all his victims were white, but somehow the left has made racial claims about him and his motives. Zimmerman was Hispanic (or part-Hispanic) and the man he killed was black.

Both defendants were widely defamed and lied about, both by the general left, the MSM, the prosecutors, and other public officials. Therefore both jury pools almost certainly were tainted and compromised by this negative propaganda against the defendants.

The Zimmerman trial occurred in Florida, however, a somewhat more conservative state than Wisconsin (although Kenosha, where Rittenhouse’s trial is occurring, is purple as far as I can tell). And Zimmerman was tried in 2013, which seems like ancient times compared to now, because the atmosphere of the country has changed so much in the eight years since then. In fact, Black Lives Matter was formed as a reaction to the Zimmerman case, and Black Lives Matter was certainly a big part of the riots that led to the situation Rittenhouse faced in Kenosha in August of 2020. So the two trials are linked in that way, as well.

Despite the widespread hatred of Zimmerman and belief that he had murdered Trayvon Martin, the facts that emerged in the trial were very different than the left and the MSM had portrayed. This was true despite the fact that most of the actual facts were easily discovered prior to that trial, if a person read sources on the right. The same is true of Rittenhouse; most of us were not surprised by the trial because we had learned the facts long ago. It’s people who relied on the MSM for their information who were surprised.

I had expected Zimmerman to be convicted because of the widespread defamation mounted against him. I was relieved at the verdict but I don’t recall too much about what was said about the process by which it occurred, so I looked it up just now and found out a few things.

The first – and I think this is important – is that in Florida juries are composed of six people rather than twelve. It seems to me that that would mean it’s easier to get a unanimous verdict. That goes both ways, of course, because either “not guilty” or “guilty” must both be unanimous (otherwise the jury is hung and the person can be retried if the prosecutor so desires). But it does explain, at least to me, how it might be that Zimmerman could be found not guilty, if only six people had to agree.

The deliberations took sixteen hours and the verdict was returned on the second day, however, because initially the jury was hung [emphasis mine]:

Two days following the conclusion of the trial, one of the jurors (Juror B37) spoke with Anderson Cooper of CNN about her experience as a member of the jury. She said that in an initial vote, three of the jurors had voted to find Zimmerman not guilty, but two had voted to find him guilty of manslaughter and one had voted to find him guilty of second-degree murder: “there was a couple of them in there that wanted to find him guilty of something and after hours and hours and hours of deliberating over the law, and reading it over and over and over again, we decided there’s just no way, other place to go.”…

Juror B37 told Cooper that she believed “It pretty much happened the way George said it happened.”…

Four of the other jurors released a statement saying that Juror B37’s views should not be regarded as representative of their views on the trial.

Juror B29, a 36-year-old Puerto Rican mother of eight children…was interviewed about the trial on July 25. She said, “George Zimmerman got away with murder, but you can’t get away from God. And at the end of the day, he’s going to have a lot of questions and answers he has to deal with.” She said that as the jury began deliberations, she wanted to convict Zimmerman of second-degree murder, and she held to her position that Zimmerman should be found guilty even after all the other jurors had decided to find him not guilty. However, she said that after nine hours of deliberations, she realized that there was not enough evidence to convict Zimmerman under Florida law: “As the law was read to me, if you have no proof that he killed him intentionally, you can’t say he’s guilty….you can’t put the man in jail even though in our hearts we felt he was guilty.” The juror said that she felt like she owed Martin’s parents an apology because she felt she had let them down.

That gives us some insight into the winding ways in which juries arrive at decisions, even a jury so small as six people. Zimmerman’s future hung in the balance among people who strongly disagreed on his guilt vs. innocence (despite what I think was overwhelming evidence of his innocence). He was fortunate that Juror B29 actually understood – and applied – the doctrine of presumed innocence of the defendant and the prosecution’s burden of proof.

I fervently hope that sort of approach hasn’t fallen by the wayside in the eight intervening years. I fear it has.

Paralyzed mice walk again

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: Instapundit.]

This sounds extraordinary:

Samuel Stupp at Northwestern University in Chicago and his colleagues created a material made of protein units, called monomers, that self-assemble into long chains, called supramolecular fibrils, in water.

When they were injected into the spinal cords of mice that were paralysed in the hind legs, these fibrils formed a gel at the injury site.

The researchers injected 76 paralysed mice with either the fibrils or a sham treatment made of salt solution, a day after the initial injury. They found that the gel enabled paralysed mice to walk by four weeks after the injection, whereas mice given the placebo didn’t regain the ability to walk.

The team found that the gel helped regenerate the severed ends of neurons and reduced the amount of scar tissue at the injury site, which usually forms a barrier to regeneration. The gel also enhanced blood vessel growth, which provided more nutrients to the spinal cord cells.

The article cautions that what works in mice may be difficult to scale upwards for humans. But I’ve never read anything about the treatment of paralysis that sounds as promising as this.

Also, as a person who has had a number of nerve injuries (one at the lumbar spinal level, and a couple that are more peripheral), I wonder if this might also be a treatment for that sort of thing, since it helps nerves heal and regenerate.

Reflections on the larger anti-self-defense goals of the left in bringing Rittenhouse to trial

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s waiting time, and I’ve been reflecting on the big picture of where we are right now. I don’t think there’s any way the Rittenhouse trial would have occurred ten years ago and certainly not twenty years ago, and the fact that it’s occurring at all is a bad sign.

Not that we need any more bad signs. But this trial is a reflection of the ways in which the left has gained power lately, despite the fact that there’s been a backlash against it.

The left wants power to be invested in the state and they intend to control the state – and by “state” I obviously don’t just mean an individual state such as Wisconsin, although there’s that too. The preferred repository of power is the federal government and the tentacles with which it grasps the states. That means that the right to bear arms and the right to self-defense must be quashed or at least greatly weakened, and that only certain people will be allowed to have that right.

Someone like Kyle Rittenhouse – a young white man of conservative leanings – is not allowed to have that right. But this trial isn’t even about him primarily; he’s just the vehicle for delivering the message, which has several parts:

(1) Rioters in causes that the left deems righteous are allowed to destroy cities and ordinary citizens must lay low and take it. They may not defend property or even person. The most they can do if attacked is take a beating and hope to not be killed, throwing themselves on the mercy of the mob.

(2) It’s not part of the trial of Rittenhouse, but my guess is that if he had fallen into a protected minority ethnic group or persuasion, he might have been spared the wrath of the prosecutors. Then again, maybe not – ask “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman.

(3) The MSM and the left will mount a defamatory campaign against their designated enemies (in this case Rittenhouse, but it could be anyone who meets their criteria). That will taint jury pools so badly that a lack of evidence to bolster the prosecution’s case (in Rittenhouse’s case, a complete lack of evidence favoring the prosecution) won’t matter. This is especially true if the goal isn’t necessarily conviction, because a hung jury will do. The principle is that the process is the punishment, and the state will not relent in its pursuit of its quarry – multiple trials if necessary.

These messages are for the general public and don’t really have much to do with Rittenhouse himself.

Do the prosecutors realize Rittenhouse is not guilty and is in fact innocent? I think they do and simply don’t care about his actual innocence because he is guilty of being who he is, and that’s enough. Plus, he’s useful to them as an object against which to stir up hate and to deter self-defense, which is their larger goal. And they care about usefulness rather than the individual.