Devastating tornadoes hit Kentucky and neighboring states

The New Neo Posted on by

RIP.

At least 70 people are feared dead:

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said at a news conference Saturday that the death toll may exceed 100.

“This has been the most devastating tornado event in our state’s history,” Beshear said.

The storms hit a candle factory in Kentucky, an Amazon facility in Illinois and a nursing home in Arkansas. Beshear said about 110 people were in the Mayfield factory when the tornado hit.

Kentucky State Police Trooper Sarah Burgess said search and rescue teams were going through the rubble Saturday but didn’t yet have a number for how many have died.

Tornadoes can strike almost anywhere in the US, although as just about everyone knows, they’re more common in the Great Plains. I hope that all my readers in the area struck by these tornadoes are alive and well and don’t have family or friends who were hit.

Here’s a tiny bit of good news:

Among those who helped rescue the trapped workers were inmates from the nearby Graves County Jail, she said.

“They could have used that moment to try to run away or anything, but they did not. They were there, helping us,” she said. Elsewhere in Graves County, the landscape was a scene of devastation with uprooted trees, downed utility poles, a store destroyed and homes severely damaged.

NOTE: Please see this 2007 post for some thoughts of mine on tornadoes and other natural disasters versus human-caused ones, as well as my reaction as a child on learning about the damage tornadoes could cause.

What Black Lives Matter has to say about the Smollet case

The New Neo Posted on by

I wonder how many people who say they support BLM are aware of the sort of position taken by one the organization’s LA founders.

And I wonder, if they are aware, whether they care [emphasis mine]:

“It’s not about a trial or a verdict decided in a white supremacist charade, it’s about how we treat our community when corrupt systems are working to devalue their lives,” the co-founder of BLM’s Los Angeles chapter said in a statement released Tuesday.

She said that Smollett should not be on trial, explaining: “We find ourselves, once again, being forced to put our lives and our value in the hands of judges and juries operating in a system that is designed to oppress us, while continuing to face a corrupt and violent police department, which has proven time and again to have no respect for our lives.”

“In our commitment to abolition [of the police], we can never believe police, especially the Chicago Police Department (CPD) over Jussie Smollett, a Black man who has been courageously present, visible, and vocal in the struggle for Black freedom.”

Taking a definitive stance, Abdullah said: “While policing at-large is an irredeemable institution, CPD is notorious for its long and deep history of corruption, racism, and brutality.”

“Chicago police consistently demonstrate that they are among the worst of the worst. Police lie and Chicago police lie especially.”

So there you have it. The police and the legal system are the enemy. Everything is stacked against black people. The facts and the trial and the evidence and the rule of law don’t matter. There is no rule of law. The individual cases don’t matter; the black person is by definition innocent and the police always lie.

One of many obvious results of this kind of rhetoric is the stoking of the anger of career criminals such as Darrell Brooks, the Waukesha murderer who apparently bought that sort of line. It’s simultaneously exculpatory and inflammatory – you, the criminal, aren’t guilty; you are the victim of racists who hate you.

And yet the PR of Black Lives Matter has been so good for so long, with incredible amounts of money being donated both by ordinary citizens and by virtue-signaling corporations, that the BLM line might just be one of the greatest and most dangerous con games in US history.

Which isn’t to say the Chicago police are angels. They are not. But what Abdullah describes is way over the top.

By the way, Abdullah has quite a personal background:

Melina Rachel Reimann [her birth name] was born on September 18, 1972 at East Oakland, Oakland, California, U.S. Her father, John Reimann, was “a union organizer and self-proclaimed Trotskyist.” Her mother is Linda Fowler Blackston and she was raised by Oji “Baba” Blackston. Her paternal grandfather was Günter Reimann (born Hans Steinicke), a German-Jewish Marxist economist and member of the Communist Party of Germany who opposed Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.

She graduated from Howard University, where she earned a bachelor’s of arts (B.A.) degree in African American Studies. She subsequently earned a master’s degree (M.A.) and doctoral degree (PhD.) in political science from the University of Southern California. Reimann changed her surname to Abdullah due to her marriage to filmmaker Phaylen Abdullah and kept the name after their divorce.

“Abdullah” is certainly much better for her street creds than “Reimann.” And this is no surprise:

[Melina] Abdullah is a supporter of Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.

Of course.

And here’s why I haven’t written about Biden and Putin and Ukraine

The New Neo Posted on by

First of all, because everything Biden touches turns to garbage, so why should this be any different? And why would anyone think Biden could handle such a situation – even when he was functioning a lot better? His supposed skill at foreign affairs was always a Democrat myth, one fostered by the MSM. And now, of course, he can’t even read a teleprompter correctly.

But I don’t want to totally ignore the topic, and so I’m linking to this:

The threat of sanctions is meant to deter a full-blown Russian invasion of Ukraine. But history shows that sanctions are no more of a deterrent to Putin than a speed bump to a monster truck. Just ask the good folks of occupied Crimea. Or occupied Georgia.

Indeed, sanctions are not for deterring bad behavior; they are a tool of coercion, meant to punish bad behavior. Totalitarian regimes have learned to live with sanctions. Just ask the ayatollah…

Rather than just threatening sanctions, the White House should be demanding immediate sanctions from Congress on the Nord Stream II pipeline. The administration should be working with our allies to determine who will send what to best help Ukraine bolster its air defenses, electronic warfare capabilities, and more.

Rather than dust off contingency plans for the emergency evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, the administration should double down on supporting Ukraine and reaffirm U.S. support of Moldova and Georgia (which also have territory occupied by Putin).

What’s needed most of all is leadership.

Dream on.

Abigial Shrier discovers it takes courage to tell a truth the left doesn’t want to hear

The New Neo Posted on by

Shrier writes:

The question I get most often—the thing that most interviewers want to know, even when they’re pretending to care about more high-minded things—is: What’s it like to be so hated? I can only assume that’s what some of you rubberneckers want to know as well: What’s it like to be on a GLAAD black list? What’s it like to have top ACLU lawyers come out in favor of banning your book? What’s it like to have prestigious institutions disavow you as an alum? What’s it like to lose the favor of the fancy people who once claimed you as their own?…

All of which is to say: I’m not a provocateur. I don’t get a rush from making people angry. You don’t have to be a troll to find yourself in the center of controversy. You need only be two things: effective, and unwilling to back down.

Why am I unwilling to back down? Why wouldn’t I prostrate myself before the petulant mobs who insist that my standard journalistic investigation into a medical mystery—specifically, why so many teen girls were suddenly identifying as transgender and clamoring to alter their bodies—makes me a hater? Why on earth would I have chosen to write this book in the first place and am I glad that I wrote it?

I’ve written a previous post about Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage. I’ve also listened to several lengthy interviews with her, some as long as one and a half hours, because the topic interests me. I find her very impressive and I was well aware of the problem she describes and was alarmed by it even before she wrote the book. I haven’t actually read the book, but I think I’ve gotten the gist of it and would highly recommend that you read the book if you have the time and the inclination.

That essay of Shrier’s at Substack is the text of a talk she gave to Princeton students recently, and it includes a call to courage:

I know why students keep their heads down. They are hoping for that Goldman or New York Times internship, which they don’t want to put in jeopardy. Well, any institution that takes our brightest, most capable young people—Princeton graduates!—and tells you can only work here if you think like we tell you to and keep your mouth shut, that isn’t really Goldman Sachs and it isn’t the paper of record. It’s the husk of a once-great institution, and it’s not worth grasping for. Talk to alums at these institutions: they sound like those living under communist regimes. That’s the America that awaits you if you will not speak up…

I didn’t write Irreversible Damage to be provocative…I wrote it simply because it was true.

Much more at the link.

I can identify with Shrier. My work has not attracted the same sort of attention, of course, but it’s attracted some, as well as some hatred. I’ve certainly dealt with the problems in my social life and family life, as I’ve written about many times.

But what I’ve actually done is not something I regret. I regret the upheavals and the isolation, and I certainly regret that the US has become a place where a book such as Shrier’s is considered blasphemous. But I write what I write because I’m striving for the truth as best I can, and that’s that.

Could this be true?

The New Neo Posted on by

It could be true. I want it to be true. But I don’t think it’s true:

A British aerospace engineer claims to have pinpointed the precise coordinates where Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 crashed and dropped to the bottom of the southern Indian Ocean, injecting new hope one of aviation’s great mysteries might finally be solved.

According to revolutionary aviation tracking technology used by Richard Godfrey, MH370 hit the ocean 1933km west of Perth, at 33.177°S 95.300°E, with the plane falling a depth of 4000 metres to the floor below.

“The prime crash location is at the foot of the Broken Ridge in an area with difficult underwater terrain,” Mr Godfrey’s report, released today, claimed…

Mr Godfrey’s research, which he claims will lead to the discovery of MH370 next year, is based on Global Detection and Tracking of Any Aircraft Anywhere (GDTAAA) software and Weak Signal Propagation Reporter (WSPR) data.

It’s astounding that it’s been almost eight years since that plane vanished.

Jussie Smollett found guilty on 5 of 6 counts

The New Neo Posted on by

It certainly sounds like the correct verdict to me.

I think the judge should take this case very seriously in terms of sentencing. In today’s world, pretending to be the victim of a vicious racist and homophobic hate crime is potentially lighting a match in an oxygen-filled room.

I doubt, however, that he’ll get much if any jail time. I also doubt that he will ever admit that he lied, or that his supporters – and I include Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in that group – will ever own up to their own destructive rush to judgment.

Instant cultural gratification

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Zaphod” offers this quote:

“Now, if you will excuse me, I am going to pour a drink for myself and my wife, and we are going to watch The Magnificent Ambersons. One wonders what Tarkington would have thought of the ability to view nearly any movie at any time. He probably would have viscerally recoiled, and perhaps it is corrosive, allowing too much private gratification, and too easy gratification, both of which erode a society’s fiber. Yet streaming of films does not have the huge drawbacks of much other technology, and allows worthwhile cultural enrichment not otherwise possible, so in this, as in most else, I will not follow Tarkington’s prescriptions.”

I wrote some related thoughts many years ago in this post from 2007 when I had first gotten an iPod (seems archaic, doesn’t it?). I’ll now reproduce a portion of that post here:

Much as I love my iPod, I’ve perceived over time that it has its own subtle drawbacks. Continue reading →

What are those leftist DAs thinking?

The New Neo Posted on by

You might think it’s rather simple: their goal is chaos and suffering, the better to demoralize people and make them amendable to more power grabs.

Perhaps. But I think it’s more complex than that.

I think those “progressive” prosecutors are true believers, and my experience with true believers on the left is that theory is all and reality can be talked away by theory. Suffering and crime is the result of their policies? No, don’t believe your lying eyes; believe us when we say it’s not what it seems.

And I don’t even think they perceive themselves as lying. They are that far into their immersive dedication to a theory of human behavior, crime, poverty, and societal rather than personal wrongdoing that it cannot be given up in this lifetime.

Part of this theory is that criminals are victims. Even if that is sometimes true – after all, many criminals have had hard lives and especially hard childhoods – it explains little because most people with hard lives don’t become criminals. Most poor people don’t become criminals. Because we know little about causes and because we have yet to be able to prevent crime except by locking people up who commit crimes, such efforts at releasing criminals in some supposed flow of kindly goodwill is doomed to only encourage criminal predation. Until we really can prevent crime, there is no alternative to locking criminals up in order to protect the innocent.

Those prosecutors don’t believe that. Race is part of their belief system: because black people are highly overrepresented in the criminal population, that must be because of racism. No need to prove it; it’s just an obvious fact to them, and their remedy is to pretend that allowing such criminals to roam free doesn’t hurt the black communities of inner cities more than it hurts anyone else.

You might disagree with me and say no, these prosecutors don’t really believe in what they’re doing. And maybe you’re correct. But I learned long ago that the capacity of a leftist to believe, believe, believe and to deny actual reality is vast.