Another entry in the “there’s no problem with mail-in ballots” sweepstakes

The New Neo Posted on by

What’s a few misplaced ballots among friends?:

Authorities are investigating why 300 unopened vote-by-mail ballots for the upcoming recall election were found – along with a gun, drugs and stolen mail – in a car parked at a Torrance convenience store.

The discovery was made Aug. 16 when Torrance police were called around 10:45 p.m. about a man sleeping in his car at a 7-Eleven parking lot.

“Inside the vehicle, the officers found a loaded handgun, some narcotics, and then they found a bunch of mail and what turned out to be over 300 election ballots in the backseat of the vehicle,” said Sgt. Mark Ponegalek with the Torrance Police Department.

“They appeared to be in a box, but they were also kind of strewn across the backseat of the vehicle and so there was just a large portion of mail in that backseat.”

Police say the man was a felon…

The man was taken into custody, but has since been released on his own recognizance. Police still don’t know how he obtained the ballots and what his intent was.

Will they ever know?

It’s likely that this man had some sort of connection at the post office. My guess is that his plan was to sell the ballots to some enterprising Democratic operative. This may be a little side business he and/or others have been running for quite some time.

Afghanistan and the Surrender-Monkey-In-Chief: what’s really going on here?

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Today’s latest abomination:

President Biden on Tuesday said he will stick to an Aug. 31 deadline for removing US troops from Afghanistan after the Taliban said it would not allow him any additional time to evacuate US citizens and refugees…

He was scheduled to brief the US public with a noon speech, but his remarks were repeatedly delayed as criticism mounted.]

I have come to dread the news. I assume, and usually correctly, that it will rouse in me a very familiar sense of impotent rage. There are so many infuriating actions (or sometimes inactions) taken by the Biden administration in its precipitous surrender-retreat from Afghanistan that mentioning them all would make a lengthy list.

And that’s one of the odd things about it. It’s as though the “plan” was designed by a madman (certainly possible), an abysmally stupid person (also possible), or a saboteur (another possibility) – or a person or group of people having some combination of those characteristics (possible as well).

I have no military training or knowledge except what a person of reasonable intelligence would figure out through common sense. Certain things are so basic as to be obvious, such as the order of one’s withdrawal actions. For example, don’t leave your citizens in the country that you are abandoning to the enemy; get them out first. If you think you will have enough time to evacuate them safely because you calculate that the enemy will take a certain estimated amount of time to reach the capital city, and then you see that the enemy is advancing and taking territory ahead of your assumed schedule, beef up defenses and get those vulnerable citizens out of there, pronto. In other words, don’t leave before the task is complete, no matter how much you’d like to do so.

And don’t prematurely abandon your vital air base and leave it in the care of an armed forces you have trained to rely on your close air support, while at the same time withdrawing all that air support. Don’t expect them to be able to fly planes that they are unable to maintain, as you simultaneously withdraw maintenance crews (without telling them in advance). In other words, if you are relying on those forces to hold the line against the enemy, don’t make it impossible for them to do so.

And yet these are just some of the things the US seems to have done in Afghanistan. We have not been told why this administration has made these choices; all we hear is lying obfuscating gobbledygook, and then another heaping helping of the same.

It seems, as Paul Mirengoff wrote in this post, Biden chose to lose this war. It was stalemated prior to that with a very small force that really was more of a policing action, casualties had been very low for years, and the enemy we were keeping out of power was a particularly cruel one. So there was no special intense rush to get out and there was no obvious reason for the reckless speed other than the idea that Joe wanted to brag about the withdrawal in a speech on the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

It’s one thing for us to believe that a single addled, stupid, narcissistic old man might plan something this bad. But why would so many people go along with it? Are they all merely dumb? I doubt it. Frightened of Joe? I doubt it. The proper remedy, if they couldn’t change his mind or stop him, would have been to resign en masse – or begin to invoke the 25th Amendment. Or was this level of destructive stupidity intentional, in order to harm this country and keep it from ever being a world leader again? To get it to join the international world order chastened, its tail between its legs, a country on a par with any other, its people ready to meekly follow?

That is a sobering thought, and it’s not the sort of thing I usually believe unless there really are few alternatives that make sense. Ordinarily I do not ascribe to malice that which can be explained by stupidity and/or ineptitude. And large conspiracies are difficult to control without leaks from someone.

But it’s hard to escape the thought of a planned takedown of the US from inside, as an actual working theory about the truly shocking level of seeming ineptitude and cowardice displayed here. It would explain what looks like a literally unbelievable level of destructive stupidity on the part of way too many people.

In closing, here’s someone with courage:

Question for Jen Psaki: can we at least call these Afghans “stranded” now?

The New Neo Posted on by

One of today’s many disgusting developments from our new insect overlords the Taliban:

The Taliban said Tuesday that the group will not allow Afghan nationals to leave the country and opposes any extension of evacuation flights, a development that comes one week before U.S. and coalition forces are slated to depart Afghanistan.

Actually, I was unaware that the Taliban were previously allowing Afghans to leave.

At any rate, yesterday Psaki had objected to the use of the word “stranded” to describe Americans in the country, upbraiding Fox reporter Peter Doocy for employing the expression – an expression which of course is completely appropriate, but that doesn’t stop Psaki from exhibiting her faux sense of outraged integrity. How I detest these lying self-righteous apparatchiks:

I think Doocy should have said any number of things that he didn’t say in response. One might be:

“The word ‘stranded’ has a meaning, and it is appropriately used to mean unable to leave because of some problem or impediment. Until a person is rescued or able to leave, then that person is stranded. When the Americans are out of Afghanistan, they will no longer be stranded. But till then, they are.”

Another shorter response would be:

“Have you no shame?”

Or:

“How do you live with yourself?”

[NOTE: If you look at those responses I suggested in terms of the content/process distinction I’ve discussed on this blog, the first response is a content response and the next two are process responses.

Here’s the definition, in case you want a refresher:

Content is just what it sounds like: the subject matter about which two people (let’s say, a married couple) are arguing. “Did you do the dishes last night?” Process is everything else – for example, the emotion with which something is said, the type of vocabulary used, tone, repetition, body language, and the unspoken subtext.

When arguing, it’s good to be aware of the difference, and to be able to switch back and forth at times.]

Open thread 8/24/21

The New Neo Posted on by

“The Lives of Others” was an incredibly good movie. I never gave a thought to how it was filmed in terms of technique. So while this analysis may be obvious to you, it was news to me.

[NOTE: The narrator makes an error at around 0:44 to 0:46. It’s not nervousness – although of course the man is nervous. But he has been ordered to put his hands there.]

Biden’s actions in Afghanistan have been shameful and destructive…

The New Neo Posted on by

…but his excuses and blaming and lies since then have been especially vile as well.

For example, yesterday’s appearance featured quite a bit of those behaviors. And why the laughter here (sandwiched between a denial and a strawman argument)? Is this just another way of saying eff you, America?:

Has he been around Kamala too much? The laugh, and then the transparent lie?

And even though some of Biden’s foggy dreadfulness may be senility and not his fault, a great deal of it is congruent with the personality Biden has always had: inappropriate affect, mendacity, intermittent callousness, defensiveness, and just plain stupidity. Those are some of the reasons his previous campaigns for president never got anywhere.

I was looking back yesterday at some of my old writings on Biden prior to the election. In one of them I called him loathsome. That has certainly turned out to be true.

Yes, he may be suffering from dementia. But than he should resign, or the people around him should force him to resign. Hasn’t he done enough damage to this country and to the world? That’s what I’m especially angry about. He has compounded the problems and made them 1000 times more difficult to solve – not that his party seems to be interested in effectively countering that. Even some Republicans don’t seem to have that priority, either.

On the other hand, Marjorie Taylor Greene has introduced articles of impeachment against Biden. It will be interesting to see whether they ever come up for a full vote, and if so (and I doubt they will) whether any Democrats will vote yes (the same people who impeached Trump for nothing). One thing I do know is that, if Biden is impeached or otherwise removed, it will be the result of the Democrats’ deciding they must do it in order to protect themselves and preserve the rest of their terrible agenda.

Australia continues its COVID insanity

The New Neo Posted on by

Gotta kill those shelter dogs:

According to Angus Thompson in the Sidney Morning Herald, the rural Bourke Shire Council “killed the dogs to prevent volunteers at a Cobar-based animal shelter from travelling to pick up the animals.”

A spokesman from Australia’s Office of Local Government (OLG) said that they had “been informed that the council decided to take this course of action to protect its employees and community, including vulnerable Aboriginal populations, from the risk of COVID-19 transmission.”…

NSW Health reports there have been no locally acquired COVID-19 cases in Cobar in recent weeks.

This may be as good a time as any to mention that I recently received an email from an Austalian reader who said it was okay if I excerpted parts. So here goes:

For the most part, Australians do not like direct confrontation. Instead, Australians generally just ignore rules which they don’t agree with.

For example, there are currently directives in Victoria to wear masks outdoors and indoors (except inside one’s own house). When Covid was thought to be a real threat last year, I roughly estimated that about 80 percent of people outdoors wore them. Nowadays, I think that only about 20 percent of people we see outdoors wear them. I think less than 10 percent of men wear masks (and those are almost exclusively in the company of women). I cannot recall the last time I saw a man wearing a mask when walking by himself.

Companies are required to enforce Covid location registrations when customers enter stores (i.e., customers must use their phones to register their attendance). The vast, vast majority of people simply wave their phones in the direction of the QR codes and the security guards don’t interfere. The process reminds me of the Soviet cliche that as long as they pretend to pay us, we will pretend to work. In this case, customers pretend to register and the stores can state they have guards in place. The entire process is a Potemkin village (with the active cooperation between customers and stores).

People are allowed outside of their house for up to two hours per day to exercise. In practice, there’s no limit. Unfortunately, golf courses and gyms are closed, but people walk, run or bicycle as much as they’d like. I suspect that the amount of people exercising is higher now than when the restrictions are not in place.

And so on. While I agree with your dismay about Australian restrictions based on reading news reports, in practice the circumstances are quite different. Australians aren’t very good at following rules which they don’t agree with and Covid isn’t any different.

Hopefully, there aren’t too many councils who have gone as crazy as the one in Bourke Shire.

This is important to watch: Colonel Richard Kemp speaks on the Afghanistan debacle

The New Neo Posted on by

Who is Colonel Richard Kemp? He’s a retired British officer who was had a long military career in combat as well as anti-terrorism operations. From July 2003 to November 2003 he was the head of the British effort in Afghanistan called Operation Fingal, whose mission was “to assist the interim administration with security and stability.”

Kemp pulls no punches. Here he says things that are in alignment with much of what I’ve been thinking about the repercussions of the recent Biden-administration-generated events in Afghanistan. But he speaks with far greater knowledge than I.

In a way, it was a relief to hear someone state the situation so well. But it was also very frightening and depressing, even it if isn’t new information. Here’s one excerpt:

What we’re seeing and what we’ve seen in the last few days is – it’s the greatest foreign policy disaster that I’ve seen in my lifetime of any nature from any Western country, and I would go so far as to say that this is the most disastrous foreign policy since at least the Second World War for the United States of America. It has unbelievable strategic consequences, well beyond Afghanistan itself, and I think, you know, people often compare Vietnam and Saigon in 1975 to the things they’re seeing on the television now. I think it’s worse than that and it’s very different to that.

Please watch the whole thing, or as much as you can (the little woman in orange in the lower left corner of the picture wasn’t on the show as I watched it; just ignore her). Kemp’s segment is 24 minutes long:

Levin had another guest last night, and he also was well worth a listen. It was retired Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, who was Trump’s National Security Chief of Staff (you’ll see from his Wiki page that he is 77 years old and served in Vietnam long ago). During the interview he describes the plan the Trump administration had in place and how profoundly it differed from what Biden and company have done:

As I said, please watch the whole thing.

[NOTE: Regarding Kemp’s suggestion that Biden should be court-martialed: I don’t think that that can legally be done, because he’s a civilian Commander-in-Chief. Kemp may be unaware of the details of that. I’m surprised that Levin didn’t correct him, though, because as a lawyer Levin must know it, but my guess is that he didn’t want to interrupt the vehement point that Kemp was making, which was that he believes that Biden has committed a very grave act of aiding the enemy to the extent that it could be seen as treason. Another issue – if we’re considering the legal definition of treason itself, which includes giving aid and comfort to the enemy – is whether Biden possesses the requisite mental capacity to stand trial. But as I said, he certainly couldn’t be court-martialed for it anyway. And there is no way he will be tried for it in the civilian court system, although I suppose he could be impeached for it.]

Thank you, Don Everly and the Everly Brothers

The New Neo Posted on by

Don Everly of the Everly Brothers died last Saturday at the age of 84.

I was going to start this post with the sentence: “I loved the Everly Brothers.” But then I checked the post I published on the death of his younger brother Phil in January of 2014, and I saw that it began with that very same sentence: “I loved the Everly Brothers.”

So I guess it can safely be said that I loved the Everly Brothers.

That love wasn’t romantic, though; personally, I was never attracted to them in terms of sex appeal. It was their music that I loved, and my love was pure. I was a child rather than a teenager when I first heard them on the radio or saw them on television – don’t remember which it was – and theirs was the first rock and roll that ever really drew me in (although “rock and roll” is probably not exactly the right term; it was a blend of country and rock I suppose, but let’s not get technical) .

For whatever reason, I was never an Elvis fan at all. It was the Everly Brothers for me, and it was their sound that got me. In those days I didn’t have records; I used to listen to the radio and wait for the countdown of top 20 hits to come to theirs.

It was partly that sibling harmony that attracted me, of course – male sibling harmony at that, which I’ve always particularly loved. But it wasn’t just the sibling harmony. Both of Don and Phil’s voices had a great beauty and purity, as well as simplicity. It’s hard to explain to people who weren’t around then how different they sounded from what had gone before, at least to my ears. They influenced almost every later pop and rock musician who sang harmony: the Beatles, the Bee Gees, Simon and Garfunkel, and a host of others. They echoed down the decades in the most beautiful way.

They had sibling rivalry that became quite bitter as they aged, although they reconciled somewhat in later years and even performed together on occasion. But nothing can take away the greatness of those early days.

Don was the brother with the lower voice.

Here they are in one of their earliest hits, the upbeat and ever-so-slightly-risque (for its times, anyway) “Wake Up, Little Susie”:

Much much later:

This next one was my favorite as a child. This was the one I would wait for on the radio most impatiently of all. Its wistful yearning beauty still shines through:

Much much later:

RIP Don and Phil, and thank you for all the beautiful beautiful music.

Astaire vs. Kelly

The New Neo Posted on by

Let’s have a happier discussion.

In this thread, I was asked to give my opinion on Fred Astaire versus Gene Kelly. So here it is.

Kelly was excellent. Astaire was transcendent.

Kelly was a strong and very good dancer. Astaire was the personification of grace and ease.

Kelly was conventionally handsome, Astaire was not but he cultivated intense charm.

They were from somewhat different generations and embodied some of those generational differences (Astaire was born in 1899 and Kelly in 1912).

Kelly portrayed virility in dance, and he had significant sex appeal. Although Astaire was not androgynous, his dancing wasn’t about either virility or sex appeal.

Kelly was athletic. Astaire conveyed the feat of using every ounce of his body to seem almost bodiless and light as a cloud.

Kelly was of the earth and Astaire of the air, although both touched the ground and sometimes made tap-dance noises when they did it.

Kelly was more believable as a regular Joe, and although Astaire sometimes portrayed that (in “Follow the Fleet,” for example), usually he seemed vaguely upper class.

You noticed the musculature in Kelly’s body (his thighs, for example). But although Astaire clearly had muscles (he couldn’t have done what he did without them), you didn’t take note of them when you looked at his body moving in space.

They both could sing and act, as well.

At some future point I may take some time to search for videos that exemplify these characteristics. Right now I’ll just state them as my opinion, having watched many movies with each man and having enjoyed them all. There’s also this clip of both men dancing together, but I dislike the choreography and don’t think it really shows the strengths of either man, although it’s somewhat skewed to Gene Kelly’s style.

What was Biden’s all-fired rush to get out of Afghanistan about?

The New Neo Posted on by

There was nothing external pushing our exit from Afghanistan in terms of time. The deadlines were all self-imposed.

Ah, but we were there for 20 years, you might say. That is true. But there was no special crisis there anymore. We did not have all that many troops there either, and we hadn’t lost any military forces in over a year. And yet Biden was determined to get out entirely, and to do it as soon as possible.

But at the very least, once the decision was made to get out, why not do it so that there was enough time to get all the Americans and all the vulnerable Afghans out who had helped us, and then withdraw the military? That wouldn’t have taken so very long. And why not wait till winter was here before beginning to do the latter?

Apparently Biden was in too much of a hurry to worry about any of that:

One source familiar with the talks between the U.S. and Afghanistan told The Daily Beast that, in addition to requests for a conditions-based withdrawal, Afghan officials asked the Biden administration to delay the move at least until October. Fighting in Afghanistan is often seasonal with extended lulls in combat during the winter months when snow and cold weather makes movement more difficult.

Afghan officials had hoped that a drawback timed with the beginning of winter could buy them more time to strengthen defenses against the Taliban. But the Biden administration pushed ahead with its own timeline.

A “conditions-based withdrawal” was what the Trump agreement with the Taliban specified. It included contingencies that the Taliban had to fulfill before the US forces would be leaving. It’s the way agreements like this must be drawn up and implemented or they are an absurdity in which one side can give up everything and get nothing for it.

Here’s what Pompeo has said about that:

For his part, Mr. Pompeo has repeatedly suggested that the Trump administration would have thrown the brakes on an American departure from the country as the Taliban pursued military conquest.

“We made abundantly clear if they did not live up to that piece of paper, to the words that they had put on the ground, we weren’t going to allow them to just walk away from any deal that they had struck, we were going to go crush them,” he said on “Fox News Sunday” over the weekend.

But Mr. Pompeo did not offer specifics about how the Taliban had violated the deal. The next day, he told the Fox Business Network that the Trump administration “would have demanded that the Taliban actually deliver on the conditions that we laid out in the agreement,” saying the Taliban had agreed “to engage in a meaningful power-sharing agreement, something that we struggled to get them to do.”

During the four years of Trump’s administration – and even prior to that, in his long career as a businessman – Trump was never averse to walking away from deals if the other party didn’t live up to its side of the bargain. And he had no trouble pressuring and using force when necessary.

But apparently Biden wasn’t interested in enforcing those or any other conditions; that’s how badly he wanted out, and fast. And strengthening the Afghan government’s defenses – or at least maximizing them as much as possible given the circumstances – would have been key to allow them any chance of holding the line, or of even postponing an inevitable takeover (see this previous post of mine for some of the details of how Biden actually made things impossible for Afghanistan’s military to defend the country). But Biden wanted no more postponements, whatever the consequences.

Why did he do this? We can say it’s because he’s been losing whatever faculties and judgment he used to have, and he didn’t have much to begin with. And I while I think that is true – plus a great deal of impulsivity and impatience may have always been part of his personality but might be exacerbated by his age-related decline – I think there was more.

Another motive was almost certainly his narcissism and desire to make a big splash on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 by being able to proudly claim that he was the person who ended the Afghanistan War after all these years. Furthermore, I think Biden wanted to leave in a hurried manner because he had chafed for eight years as VP under Obama’s rather large shadow. I have read that Biden wanted to end the war in Afghanistan even back towards the beginning of Obama’s presidency, but it never happened under Obama and my guess is that the continuation of the war and the ignoring of what Biden considered his own sage advice (after all, he was the big foreign policy “expert” in the administration) rankled him. Now as president he could finally do as he pleased. No one was going to stop him; that’s why he threw off all advice to the contrary as the sort of thing he’d heard before. He would show them, by golly.

When the Afghanistan fall began to be reported, I originally said I thought that, whatever other decisions have been made by Biden’s handlers rather than Biden, I believed that this was one he had made himself. It has his fingerprints all over it: his stupidity and poor judgment, and his stubbornness and narcissism. And as time has gone on, as I’ve read more in article after article about how the decision was supposedly made, I’ve become even more convinced that Biden was actually almost universally advised by other people (the military and the State Department) that the way he was going about this was a bad idea. He didn’t listen.

Until now Joe Biden as president has only seemed dangerous because of his leftism. Almost every decision he’s made until now has been in line with that. Most people thought that if he ever tried to do anything really dangerous, cooler heads would stop him. But this terrible terrible decision to leave Afghanistan in this particularly precipitous and exceptionally calamitous way was allowed to go forward. Its motives seem more idiosyncratic and personal, although there may indeed be much more behind it.

It is also very frightening. Biden needs to be removed from office – and there really is, or should be, that is – a sense of great urgency about that.

[NOTE: In a future post, I plan to take up the question of how Biden might be removed from office. I’m not saying it will happen, but it most certainly should happen – and yesterday. Who would replace him is another question I plan to take up.]

[ADDENDUM: Some further remarks on the subject of how much of this was done under Biden’s orders – my strong gut feeling is that yes, Biden set quite a few of the details about what had to happen first and what next. In other words, he set priorities. The military may have advised him not to do it that way, but he ordered them to do it the way he wanted. Their only recourse to obeying at that point would have been to disobey or resign, and they did neither.

I absolutely could be wrong about this; we simply don’t know. I’m quite aware of that. But it’s the most parsimonious explanation for what happened. It also fits with my sense of Biden’s psychological state and inclinations. Isn’t this a withdrawal that looks as though it were designed by a dementia sufferer? Well, maybe that’s because it was.

If you recall, someone commented here the other day with a reminder that for a while LBJ micromanaged the Vietnam War even to the degree of choosing the bombing targets. So it is my sense that presidents have some leeway about how much of the decision-making they will control and how much they will leave to the generals. If anyone knows more about that, please feel free to comment on it.]

Larry Elder, the white supremacist

The New Neo Posted on by

About Larry Elder:

A Friday column in the Los Angeles Times ran the headline, “Larry Elder is the Black face of white supremacy. You’ve been warned,” calling the conservative Los Angeles radio host’s candidacy “an insult to Blackness.”

That’s actually rather interesting, in addition to its obviously risible quality. The piece posits an entity, Blackness, that stands apart from actually being black and which an actual living breathing black person can fail to sufficiently demonstrate or to which he or she can even be in opposition.

This reminds me a bit of a conversation I had several months ago with a liberal friend of mine. When I mentioned that there are a lot of really intelligent conservative black pundits, this person responded by saying that those people must be “self-hating blacks.” And this was said confidently even though this person was unfamiliar with them and had never read their works or heard them speak. It was a sort of tautology that, if a black person is conservative, he or she has rejected Blackness, because Blackness automatically includes being a liberal or a leftist.

This was Larry Elder’s response to the LA Times piece:

You’ve got to be real scared and desperate to play the race card against the brother from South Central.

Boy, do I hope Elder wins. It would send shock waves through the left.