Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) I know someone who got this food allergy from a tick bite. It sounded so unlikely as a phenomenon, but apparently it’s quite real:

The ticks can pick up the Alpha-gal carbohydrate from a previous mammalian host and transfer the sugar to humans through saliva during a bite or feeding. The transfer can take hours or up to a day, according to the CDC.

Some people’s immune systems release antibodies to combat the foreign substances such as alpha-gal carbohydrates. As with Thomas, each time she eats meat, milk or gelatin, those antibodies attack and can cause hives, swelling, headaches and anaphylaxis. She has passed out before on the way to the hospital and had to call an ambulance after having trouble breathing because her throat was swelling.

Sufferers get tested periodically, and often after a couple of years the allergy wears off and they can eat meat again. If they dare to.

(2) The CIA knew all along:

Special Counsel John Durham asserted in a court filing Friday that the CIA concluded data from Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann alleging coordination between Donald Trump and Russia was “not technically plausible” and was “user-created.”

But hey, why let the truth get in the way of an extremely useful narrative?

(3) Victor Davis Hanson talks about nuke talk over Ukraine:

Ukraine nuke talk spins off into lots of other places. Nuclear North Korea is resuming its ballistic missile launches to intimidate non-nuclear South Korea and Japan. China is rapidly expanding its nuclear stockpiles and now talks openly of ending a free Taiwan, warning Taiwan’s friends and allies to keep out — or else.

Iran promises to become nuclear soon. Nuclear Russia has assumed the role of interlocutor of all discussions to restart a new nuclear “Iran deal.”

Russia controls Syrian airspace. In theory, Putin could stop nuclear Israel either from replying to terrorist attacks emanating from Syria, or from staging a preemptive attack on Iran’s nuclear bomb facilities.

But it was all worth it to get rid of Trump, right?

(4) About the Washington DC jury pool the January 6th defendants face:

Lawyers for two defendants, in a motion last week to move their trials out of DC, cited a poll by Inlux Research, which found nearly 75% of DC residents would find Jan. 6 defendants guilty, and more than 40% said the Capitol riot was “racially motivated.”As bad as the storming of the Capitol was, it had nothing to do with race, just anger at what Trump supporters believed was an unfair election.

Almost three quarters of DC residents believe that anyone inside the Capitol on Jan. 6, should be convicted of insurrection…

DC is an outlier when it came to American attitudes to Jan. 6, says the motion: “Unlike D.C. residents, most Americans . . . believe that J6 was a very large protest that got out of hand and turned into a riot.”

Speaking of January 6th, here’s a court filing that claims there were 20 federal assets present for the January 6th Capitol incursion. I wonder who they were and what roles they played.

(5) A very early Christian church found in Israel is about to be opened to the public [hat tip: AesopFan]:

A third-century church that experts believe is the first in the world will be open to the public starting this summer after the prison on top of the site is relocated.

About a 20-minute drive south from Nazareth, Megiddo prison is located on top of the church and the first known mosaic dedicated to Jesus…

“There was an early Christian community here way before Christianity became the official religion,” he said. “Through the excavations, we learned about all the connections between Samaritans, Jews, pagans, Christians, soldiers and civilians: It is a microcosm.”

A current sticking point of the Iran deal (also, how the Deal and the Ukraine War intersect)

The New Neo Posted on by

We still don’t know for certain what’s going on with the Biden administration’s Iran Deal negotiations. One thing we do know, however, is that we heard recently that the deal was a day or two from completion, and that was more than a couple of days ago. Yet there’s still no final deal.

Another thing we know is that Obama’s Iran Deal had bipartisan opposition, and yet it was implemented, whereas so far the Biden era deal seems to have even more opposition. And yet it also appears to still be going forward.

We also know that Trump undid the Obama deal, something he was able to accomplish because it only had the force of an agreement between the Obama administration and Iran’s leaders rather than having been supported by Congress. So it would make sense that Iran’s leaders, remembering that experience, might be wary of the latest deal which could be subject to a similar fate if the GOP takes control next.

That’s the peril of an agreement that goes against the wishes of most of the American public. You also might call the problem Trump’s Revenge.

Here’s a report on what Iran is reportedly asking of the US in order to fix the problem. It’s quite something:

…Iranian officials from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on down are demanding “inherent guarantees” from the United States to ensure the latest version of the Iran deal doesn’t go the way of Obama’s version, which was junked by Donald Trump in 2018.

While U.S. government officials I have spoken to provided differing details of the “inherent guarantees” Iran is seeking, it appears they would be triggered if the United States reimposes sanctions. On the nuclear side, a semi-official Iranian government site reported that one such guarantee would allow Iran to rapidly reconstitute its ability to enrich nuclear material to the 60% purity level by keeping its advanced nuclear centrifuges inside the country. According to the same report, the highly enriched nuclear material Iran has generated in excess of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)’s limits could also be kept inside the country instead of being shipped overseas. An alternate version of this guarantee would allow excess material to be held by Russia, which would return it to Iran in the event of certain American sanctions.

According to remarks made last month by Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, the issue of guarantees on the economic side was one of two remaining issues in negotiations, alongside the Iranian demand for the removal of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from the U.S. list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Both Iran and Russia wanted guarantees from the United States that any economic contracts exempted from sanctions under the deal would remain immune under a subsequent administration.

It’s certainly possible that the Biden administration would love to oblige Iran in order to get their fabulous wonderful all-important Iran Deal accomplished. But I’m not aware of any mechanism by which they could tie the hands of a future GOP president on the matter, much as they might like to do so.

And then there’s Congress:

Because the U.S. negotiators are unable to provide such a guarantee, the Iranians are said to be seeking some form of economic compensation to be held in trust by a third party that would be paid to Iran in the event that U.S. sanctions are reimposed. In other words, the United States would pay into a giant trust fund to protect the regime from future sanctions presumably triggered by Iran’s own malignant behavior. One U.S. government official close to the negotiations told me they doubted the demand would ever be accepted or could even be fashioned in the first place in any way that wouldn’t cause even more Democrats to jump ship and oppose the deal…

In recent conversations with a number of Senate and House offices, it became clear that Republicans in the legislative branch are ready to flex their institutional muscles to shatter any deal that is reached, and will work to bring the Iranian regime’s economy back under sanctions should Biden lift them. Much has been written about Congress’ potential use of the 2015 Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act (INARA) to prevent any deal from lifting sanctions in the first place. Forcing a vote on the deal would show the Iranians just how deep congressional opposition goes, but the measure would be hard-pressed to overcome Biden’s veto.

While it would take a Republican in the White House again to officially cease participation in the new deal and fully return to a campaign of maximum economic and diplomatic pressure, it would only take Republican control of one chamber of Congress to dismantle a fledgling deal next year—which is precisely what top Republicans are planning to do. What follows is a look at the weak points in the new Iran deal’s construction, and how its opponents in Congress are planning to exploit them in order to destroy whatever agreement Malley and the Iranians have struck.

I suggest you read the whole thing for the details.

You may cynically say, “oh, it’s all just theater; the GOP will never do it.” I think the Republicans are serious about this, though, because these measures Iran is demanding would be so deeply unpopular. I also think the GOP would be able to get quite a few Democrats on board.

[NOTE: Two more articles on the current situation: this one from Melanie Phillips, and this one from Lee Smith. From the latter, which explicitly connects many dots between the Iran Deal and Putin’s attempts to take over Ukraine:

Because keeping Assad in power was an Iranian strategic necessity, the equation circa mid-2014 was clear to everyone involved: no Russia, no Iran deal. When Putin bit off Crimea and chunks of Donbas, Obama barely blinked an eye.

When Putin again escalated the number of Russian ground forces in Syria shortly after the JCPOA was struck, Obama administration officials celebrated Putin as America’s new partner in the fight against terror—that is, the war to defend Iranian interests in the eastern Mediterranean. If Iran couldn’t protect its “equities” in Syria on its own, then Russia could protect them, with American help.

It was only natural that the same people who relied on Russia to protect the Iran deal the first time around knew they could count on Putin once again when it came time for the United States to reenter the JCPOA. In December 2021, Putin and Biden aides met in Vienna to coordinate their negotiating postures over the Iran deal. Biden and Putin then discussed their arrangements together directly in a video summit. “Russia is an important partner in these talks,” a State Department spokesperson told the press in January. “We engage very constructively with Russia … on a mutual return to the JCPOA.”…

In the context of America’s use of Putin to negotiate and guarantee Obama’s “legacy” foreign policy initiative, it’s not hard to see the logic behind Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine when he did: The Russian leader knew that he had America over a barrel…

In January, Biden effectively signed off on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine—and the subsequent instability in the energy market—by signaling that a “minor incursion” into Ukraine would be overlooked by the White House.

Sure, Biden talked tough about imposing sanctions on Russia and called out Putin for his fiendish actions, but the Russians knew that his words were as hollow as Obama’s meaningless sanctions over Crimea.

Interesting, no?]

The Iran Deal – still pending

The New Neo Posted on by

From Caroline Glick:

Last week, the McLaughlin polling group published the results of a survey regarding Iran and the results leave no question about where the American people stand on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. A large majority of Americans strongly opposes the administration’s appeasement policies. 76 percent of Americans support escalating the nuclear sanctions against Iran. Only 14 percent support the administration’s intention to weaken them. Indeed, when asked directly about whether or not to weaken sanctions, 69 percent of Americans said not to. Instead, a plurality of 45 percent of Americans think the U.S. should attack Iran’s nuclear installations if sanctions fail to stop Iran’s nuclear operations.

As for the nuclear deal itself, 63 percent of Americans believe that the nuclear deal is a graver threat to U.S. national security than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

And yet the Biden administration is pursuing this terrible deal, just as the Obama administration did when Biden was vice president. They simply do not care what the public thinks, and they certainly are aware of what the public thinks. Likewise, even members of their own party have voiced reservations about the deal. They are worried about the midterms, and rightly so. The Biden administration doesn’t seem very concerned – or at all concerned – about that, either. That’s how important this Iran Deal is to them.

Glick describes the coalition of Israel-supporters in the US who oppose the deal:

The majority pro-Israel camp is comprised of many factions. The two most important ones are national security hawks and faith-based communities, particularly Evangelical Christians…As a nation who fights its own wars, and whose enemies are also America’s enemies, national security hawks recognize that the stronger Israel is, the more secure U.S. interests in the Middle East are.

Faith based voters and communities base their support for Israel first and foremost on their belief that the Jews are God’s chosen people and that the reborn Jewish state is proof that God’s covenant is eternal.

Those may be the two “most important” camps, according to Glick, but I would add that many Americans who don’t fit either of those two descriptions also support Israel, because they recognize it as a functioning democracy struggling to exist in a rough neighborhood, and they are also well aware of the lengthy and terrible history of anti-Semitism as well as the Holocaust.

Glick goes on to describe the anti-Israel camp:

…[I]ts factions can be roughly divided into three groups – hard right isolationists and white nationalists; progressives, and Arabists…

…[O]ver the past generation, progressives have taken over the institutions of the Democrat Party. They have become the dominant faction in the party and they control the Biden administration’s policies.

…The Arabist view posits that U.S. support for Israel undermines U.S. ties with the Arab world. Consequently, Israel is a burden, rather than an asset for the U.S. Arabists argue that U.S. ties with Israel should be downgraded.

Over the past decade, the Arabist camp has been weakened because its key regional anchor, Saudi Arabia has abandoned its hostility with Israel.

And yet, as Glick also points out, a revised Arabist point of view is strong in the Biden administration:

Tellingly, U.S. Arabists have not abandoned their anti-Israel position. Instead, they have turned on the Saudis and the UAE and now rely for justification on Iran’s closest Arab partner Qatar – itself a prolific supporter and financier of terror groups from ISIS to Hamas — and on Iran itself. It is hard to ignore that in their anti-Arab policies, the Arabists among the U.S. foreign policy elite expose a darker motive for their strident opposition to the U.S.-Israel alliance.

As for Israel, Glick describes a pro-US-alliance faction that is fairly straightforward in its strategy of appealing to the pro-US majority:

The first camp, which we can call the American camp, recognizes that Israel cannot influence members of the anti-Israel camp in any of its various factions. But it also recognizes that this camp is the minority in the U.S. and while it is the dominant camp in the Democrat Party, it isn’t the only faction in the party. Members of the American camp believe that the way to preserve and expand U.S. support for Israel is to support and strengthen Israel’s supporters on both sides of the partisan aisle. The American camp advances this goal by speaking straightforwardly and unapologetically about Israel’s interests and actions, and how both advance U.S. interests and values.

And then Glick discusses an “elitist” faction whose position is more complex:

Members of elitist camp believe that the anti-Israel camp, particularly its Arabist and progressive factions is all-powerful. In their view, the State Department is the beginning and the end of U.S. foreign policymaking. Under these circumstances, Israel’s job is to foster good relations with the anti-Israel camp and seek to appease it, even if that appeasement undermines the credibility of Israel’s supporters.

Israel’s radical left supports the elitist approach because its members share the U.S. anti-Israel camp’s hostile ideological convictions about their country. The Lapid camp is a major faction of the elites camp because its members are elitists. Lapid and his supporters prefer the company of progressives and Arabs, who share their habits and personal preferences to the company of security hawks and Evangelicals.

Glick feels that because this second group is in power right now in Israel, it disempowers the American pro-Israel wing to fight off the Biden camp. Perhaps that’s true, but I don’t think it really matters. After all, back in the time of the first Iran deal at the hands of Obama, Netanyahu was in power and he was strongly against the Deal and reached out to the large pro-Israel community in the US – to no avail. Netanyahu even addressed Congress. The majority of the Senate was against the deal, but not enough of them to be able to pass some sort of legislation against it.

The same would be true now, in my opinion, with the Biden administration’s deal. It seems the administration is grimly determined to do this and unless enough Democrats join against them, they will do this.

What did the people who promoted Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee think was going to happen if he was elected?

The New Neo Posted on by

Did they not realize it’s dangerous to prop up a cognitively-challenged man of 78 who probably would be declining even more, who would have a lot of power even if others were at least partly controlling him behind the scenes, who would be the visible head of the party, who could not be hidden forever and would say unpredictable things, and who was never smart or especially appealing even when he had possession of all his faculties? (That he’s a liar wasn’t an issue; that was probably felt to be a feature and not a bug.)

My guess is that they thought some or all or any combination of the following things would occur:

(1) He’d be temporary, just a mechanism – not a great one, but the best one available – to beat Trump. Then once that all-important task was accomplished, they’d get rid of him and Kamala would become president (oops; they miscalculated on her attributes, as well). Turns out it’s harder than expected to oust him and come up with a better replacement. Also, Biden might not be as tractable about that as predicted. He might enjoy this gig, since he’s been chasing it for his entire adult life.

(2) He’d be good enough, and wouldn’t decline all that precipitously. Meanwhile, the Democratic-controlled Congress and his Cabinet would make decisions. They didn’t bargain for the defection of Manchin/Sinema on their most important actions, such as HR1 or ending the filibuster.

(3) They’d actually be running the show, competently, instead of Joe. But they didn’t bargain for their own inability to run a government competently. Bad judgment all around. After all, it’s not so hard to run a country, is it? Especially when you’re bunch of geniuses (in your own minds) – and with the press, social media giants, education, sports and business heads, and the population of Europe behind you. Turns out it’s harder than they thought. And people are actually noticing, which they didn’t bargain for either.

(4) None of this mattered because they would pass HR1 and permanently weaken the voting laws to give them the opportunity for fraudulently winning all elections hence if needed. Or they would make DC and Puerto Rico states, and that would give them a cushion. Or both. That was really the whole ballgame and nothing else mattered.

Passover and liberty

The New Neo Posted on by

[The following is a slightly edited repeat of a previous post.]

Tonight is the beginning of the Jewish holiday Passover.

I’ve been impressed by the fact that Passover is a religious holiday dedicated to an idea that’s not solely religious: freedom. Yes, it’s about a particular historical (or perhaps legendary) event: the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. But the Seder ceremony makes clear that, important though that specific event may be, freedom itself is also being celebrated.

A Seder is an amazing experience, a sort of dramatic acting out complete with symbols and lots of audience participation. Part of its power is that events aren’t placed totally in the past tense and regarded as ancient and distant occurrences; rather, the participants are specifically instructed to act as though it is they themselves who were slaves in Egypt, and they themselves who were given the gift of freedom, saying:

“This year we are slaves; next year we will be free people…”

Passover acknowledges that freedom (and liberty, not exactly the same thing but related) is an exceedingly important human desire and need. That same idea is present in the Declaration of Independence (which, interestingly enough, also cites the Creator):

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

It is ironic, of course, that when that Declaration was written, slavery was allowed in the United States. That was rectified, but only after great struggle, which goes to show how wide the gap often is between rhetoric and reality, and how difficult freedom is to achieve. And it comes as no surprise, either, that the Passover story appealed to slaves in America when they heard about it; witness the lyrics of “Let My People Go.”

Yes, the path to freedom is far from easy, and there are always those who would like to take it away. Sometimes an election merely means “one person, one vote, one time,” if human and civil rights are not protected by a constitution that guarantees them, and by a populace dedicated to defending them at almost all costs. Wars of liberation only give an opportunity for liberty, they do not guarantee it, and what we’ve observed in recent decades has been the difficult and sometimes failed task of attempting to foster it in places with no such tradition, and with neighbors dedicated to its obliteration.

We’ve also seen threats to liberty in our own country – more potent in the last couple of years. This is happening despite our long tradition of liberty and the importance Americans used to place on it.

Sometimes those who are against liberty are religious, like the mullahs. Sometimes they are secular, like the Communists or their present-day Russian successors. Some of them are cynical and power-mad; some are idealists who don’t realize that human beings were not made to conform to their rigid notions of the perfect world, and that attempts to force them to do so seem to inevitably end in horrific tyranny, and that this is no coincidence.

As one of my favorite authors Kundera wrote, in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

…human beings have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of har­mony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.”

Note the seamless progression from lyricism to violence: no matter if it begins in idealistic dreams of an idyll, the relinquishment of freedom to further that dream will end with humans being crushed like insects.

Dostoevsky did a great deal of thinking about freedom as well. In his cryptic and mysterious Grand Inquisitor, a lengthy chapter from The Brothers Karamazov, he imagined a Second Coming. But this is a Second Coming in which the Grand Inquisitor rejects what Dostoevsky sees as Jesus’s message of freedom (those of you who’ve been around this blog for a long time will recognize this passage I often quote):

Oh, never, never can [people] feed themselves without us [the Inquisitors and controllers]! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man?

Freedom vs. bread is a false dichotomy. Dostoevsky was writing before the Soviets came to power, but now we have learned that lack of freedom, and a “planned” economy, is certainly no guarantee even of bread.

I think there’s another very basic need, one that perhaps can only really be appreciated when it is lost: liberty.

Happy Passover!

More on the Moskva sinking

The New Neo Posted on by

We still don’t know exactly why the Moskva sank. But we do know that it did sink, and that the cause was a fire igniting munitions onboard and causing structural damage. The Russians say the cause of the fire was unknown; the Ukrainians say it was an anti-ship cruise missile they had fired.

It would be a little coincidental if a fire had broken out on the ship for no particular known reason right smack dab in the middle of a war, and therefore it makes more sense to me that it was more likely a Ukrainian missile. But either way:

“Both explanations for the sinking of the Moskva indicate possible Russian deficiencies — either poor air defenses or incredibly lax safety procedures and damage control on the Black Sea Fleet’s flagship,” analysts Mason Clark, Kateryna Stepanenko, and George Barros at the Institute for the Study of War wrote in their daily war briefing…

Carl Schuster, a former US Navy captain, said the doubts went all the way to the Kremlin.

“It raises questions about naval competence 10 years after (Russian President Vladimir) Putin announced he was going to restore the navy’s capabilities, morale and professionalism,” Schuster said.

Furthermore, other countries could learn something from this:

Timothy Heath, senior international defense researcher at the RAND Corp. think tank, said the strike on the Moskva would underscore to both China and the US “the vulnerability of surface ships” in any potential military clash.

The Moskva was considered “a symbol of Russia’s military power.” So the sinking has to be a morale-sinker as well for Russia, although it’s not clear how much strategic military importance it has.