In further proof of the transformation of the federal judiciary into a political animal (not that we needed further proof), the Flynn/Sullivan case will be heard en banc

The New Neo Posted on by

Terrible news – the Flynn/Sullivan case will now be heard by the full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals en banc:

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has vacated the prior order of a panel directing Judge Emmet Sullivan to dismiss the case against Michael Flynn. Sullivan requested the full Circuit court consider the case (“en banc”).

The Court’s focus on “whether there are ‘no other adequate means to attain the relief’ desired” seems to be a clear sign that Sullivan’s argument that the panel order was premature, and that he should have been allowed to rule on the government’s motion to dismiss, is viewed as a problem by many if not most of the appeals court judges.

There are certain times I hate to be right, and this is one of them. On July 10 I wrote, in a post entitled “Judge ‘Ahab’ Sullivan keeps aiming his harpoon at General ‘Moby Dick’ Flynn”:

It is no surprise that Judge Sullivan filed for a full en banc hearing by the DC Circuit Court on the Flynn case rather than comply with the order of the three-judge panel to get off Flynn’s back.

No, no surprise at all. In several previous posts, I’ve compared Sullivan to Captain Ahab, and yesterday’s announcement is further indication that the analogy is pretty apropos. That doesn’t mean that Sullivan is acting on his own; I believe there are plenty of leftists/Democrats supporting him and guiding him in this noble endeavor. His crew, as it were: “To the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.”

My prediction now? I think the court will grant the hearing, and I think there’s a good chance – because of the political makeup of the court, which is heavy with Democrats – that they will side with Sullivan. That’s a travesty of justice, but we see a great deal of that these days, don’t we?

I hope I’m wrong. I’d like to feel a little less cynicism.

As it is, I doubt I could feel more cynicism about the way this case has gone.

Another roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

So much news:

Greatest hits from the Barr hearing.

Our math-challenged public is easy to spook. Math is hard. [Hat tip: commenter “Griffin.”]

The WaPo will be capitalizing “White.”

I cannot resist making a version of the old old joke: What’s White, Black, and Red all over? The WaPo. (And that’s not “red” as in “Republican” – it’s “Red” in the old-fashioned sense.)

Will I ever buy clothing again?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not what you’d call a fashionista. But I’ve always liked clothes, and I like to look nice.

Over the years, fashion has gotten less pretty and less formal. I used to have a raft of skirts and dresses, and many places to wear them. Years ago, even going to the theater – or flying on an airplane – was cause for dressup. No more.

Oh, some people always look great. But most people don’t. And COVID has reduced even that need and that opportunity.

After all, where is there to go? Most of my forays into the outside world are in my exercise clothes, to walk; in very casual clothes, to sit on a friend’s deck and talk; to the store; or to a medical appointment.

That’s it, folks. On a daily basis, there’s really little need to get out of my blogging clothes except to get into my exercise clothes, take a shower, and then back into the blogging clothes or what I’ll euphemistically call my sleepwear.

I long have said that as one gets older, it’s still important to try to dress a bit spiffily. Maybe especially as one gets older – unless:

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress…

I’ve got a closet full of clothes, including a few fancy dresses. Will I ever wear them again? I hope so. It was only last year when I went to several events – a wedding, a large family reunion – and I hope to do so again. But right now it seems long in the past or far away in the future.

Maybe I should at least dress up for the Zoom meetings.

Bolsonaro, the press, and hydroxychloroquine

The New Neo Posted on by

Brazil’s Bolonaro lives to fight another day – having recovered from COVID.

And to make matters even more tragic for the left, the Brazilian president does a Trumpish thing:

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro announced on Saturday he has tested negative for the new coronavirus more than two weeks after being diagnosed on July 7, attributing his recovery to an unproven malaria drug.

“RT-PCR for Sars-Cov 2: negative. Good morning everyone,” the 65-year-old tweeted, along with a photo of himself smiling and holding a packet of hydroxychloroquine. Its effectiveness against Covid-19 has not been demonstrated in clinical trials.

There are only three sentences in that quote, but there are at least two lies (or errors, or misrepresentations). The first is “unproven malaria drug.” It certainly is an extremely proven malaria drug. From the CDC:

Hydroxychloroquine (also known as hydroxychloroquine sulfate) is an arthritis medicine that also can be used to prevent malaria…Hydroxychloroquine can be prescribed for either prevention or treatment of malaria…Hydroxychloroquine can be prescribed to adults and children of all ages. It can also be safely taken by pregnant women and nursing mother.

Both adults and children should take one dose of hydroxychloroquine per week starting at least 1 week before traveling to the area where malaria transmission occurs. They should take one dose per week while there, and for 4 consecutive weeks after leaving…

Hydroxychloroquine can only be used in places where chloroquine (a related medicine) is still effective. There are only a few places left in the world where hydroxychloroquine is still effective including parts of Central America and the Caribbean.

So, to recap: it’s a malaria drug, quite proven, but only good in certain areas. It is also used for arthritis (and, if memory serves me, for certain other auto-immune diseases like lupus).

Ah, but maybe they meant “unproven in treating COVID”? Maybe they did, but that’s not what they wrote. However, that is more or less what they wrote in the last sentence I quoted from the Bolsonaro article: “Its effectiveness against Covid-19 has not been demonstrated in clinical trials.”

Which is confusing and misleading to the average reader, who almost certainly doesn’t know what a “clinical trial” is and how it differs from other types of studies that might show a drug’s efficacy. Let’s just say that clinical trials are a particular type of research, that they take longer to perform, and that in the case of hydroxychloroquine and COVID, the results of the bogus Lancet study (that one that had to be withdrawn) caused the panicked stoppage of a host of clinical trials around the world. And so clinical trials for the use of the drug against COVID have been even slower to come out.

Here’s one that still seems to be in the early stages, and so far they’ve only tested for safety and found it to be safe in COVID patients. Here’s another which, by the headline, seems to have found the drug not to be helpful with COVID, but if you read the actual study you might wonder – as I did – why it was even done, because the researchers did not use zinc. The people I’ve seen advocating the drug as a treatment for early cases of COVID have all emphasized that zinc must be part of the protocol. But that is often ignored. As one of several commenters to that study wrote: “This study and all others left out daily Zinc supplements! And it was given too late, meaning many patients already had a fatal viral load. Study is designed to fail.”

I don’t know about “all others.” But I’ve found plenty of studies (I’m not sure if they were all clinical trials, though) that have those two flaws as well.

Actually, the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine has been demonstrated in a number of studies (not necessarily clinical trials), particularly ones that use it early in the course of the illness, in the right dose, and which include zinc.

In addition, here’s one example of good results with the drug even in sicker patients, and even when taken without zinc:

Treatment with hydroxychloroquine cut the death rate significantly in sick patients hospitalized with COVID-19 – and without heart-related side-effects, according to a new study published by Henry Ford Health System.

In a large-scale retrospective analysis of 2,541 patients hospitalized between March 10 and May 2, 2020 across the system’s six hospitals, the study found 13% of those treated with hydroxychloroquine alone died compared to 26.4% not treated with hydroxychloroquine. None of the patients had documented serious heart abnormalities; however, patients were monitored for a heart condition routinely pointed to as a reason to avoid the drug as a treatment for COVID-19.

The study was published today in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases, the peer-reviewed, open-access online publication of the International Society of Infectious Diseases (ISID.org)…

“The findings have been highly analyzed and peer-reviewed,” said Dr. Marcus Zervos, division head of Infectious Disease for Henry Ford Health System, who co-authored the study with Henry Ford epidemiologist Samia Arshad. “We attribute our findings that differ from other studies to early treatment, and part of a combination of interventions that were done in supportive care of patients, including careful cardiac monitoring. Our dosing also differed from other studies not showing a benefit of the drug. And other studies are either not peer reviewed, have limited numbers of patients, different patient populations or other differences from our patients.”

So although these patients were sick enough to be hospitalized, they were treated early, and attention was paid to giving the right dose. On the other hand, zinc doesn’t seem to have been part of the study, and yet the results were good.

The bottom line is that results are encouraging in quite a few studies, particularly ones that involve less sick patients, but there haven’t been sufficent clinical trials to say that the drug has been proven to help COVID. This type of situation is not unusual with drugs, but in the case of COVID the political aims of the press have overshadowed any ability to report fairly on the results of studies of this drug.

NOTE: Speaking of the press – later in the Bolsonaro article you can read this:

The pandemic has exploded in Brazil, the country with the most infections and deaths from Covid-19 anywhere in the world except the United States.

A relatively meaningless statistic, meant to sound worse than it is. Both the US and Brazil have large populations. The most meaningful number to look at is deaths per million of population. That metric puts the US and Brazil either even with or behind most of the countries of western Europe. Even Peru and Chile – if you’re going to look just at Latin America – have had more deaths per capita than Brazil.

Now lawful arrests are called “kidnapping”

The New Neo Posted on by

Leftists love to control the language, like Humpty Dumpty. If they re-label ordinary, customary things as being nefarious when done by the right, it helps their cause.

The new meme of “kidnapping” came to my attention last night, when I was on the phone with a friend who referenced it and was very upset. I didn’t know what she was talking about at the time – but now I realize it must have been this story, and that she believed that shadowy evil Trump agents were kidnapping people off the streets.

Of course.

See also this:

MSNBC Chris Hayes Spreads Fake News That NYPD Undercover Arrest Was A “Kidnapping” – Fresh off Russia collusion hoax, Hayes and Democrats like Jerry Nadler stoke anger at police — Reality is the “kidnapping” was an arrest of a woman wanted for multiple crimes carried out by undercover NYPD officers accompanied by uniformed officers.

Does the MSM report anything straight these days?

The people lack virtue

The New Neo Posted on by

People have lost their way, and the press fills their heads with propaganda. You could say it’s a vast conspiracy. And certainly the left is organized, and the internet helps spread the word.

But it wouldn’t matter so much if so many people weren’t already receptive to the message. You see can the evidence of this around you. Fifty years ago, Americans wouldn’t have been so cowed by a virus of this magnitude. In fact, in 1957 we weren’t cowed by one that killed the equivalent of well over 200,000 people in the US and about 3 million worldwide (when corrected for today’s population). Fifty years ago, we also knew much better what socialism and Communism were. We knew the value of free speech, and even the ACLU defended it (how quaint!).

In sum: we knew what we had, and we didn’t want to let it go.

What happened? The decline of family stability, religion, education, journalism, the arts, entertainment, morality, historical knowledge, language, dress – and I’m sure I left some things out.

And this above all:

To our Founding Fathers, it was obvious, or “self-evident,” that self-government, or a democratic republic, could only be perpetuated by the self-governed. Reflecting these precepts, a contemporary German writer to the Founders, J. W. von Goethe, stated: “What is the best government? — That which teaches us to govern ourselves.”…

John Adams stated it this way, “Public virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private Virtue, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics.”…

George Washington said: “Virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government,” and “Human rights can only be assured among a virtuous people.”

Benjamin Franklin said: “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.”

James Madison stated: “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical [imaginary] idea.”

Thomas Jefferson wrote, “No government can continue good but under the control of the people; and … their minds are to be informed by education what is right and what wrong; to be encouraged in habits of virtue and to be deterred from those of vice … These are the inculcations necessary to render the people a sure basis for the structure and order of government.”

Samuel Adams said: “Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt. He therefore is the truest friend of the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue.”

Patrick Henry stated that: “A vitiated [impure] state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom.”

John Adams stated: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

So wise, so true. I think that’s why the fingers we have had in the dike for so long just aren’t doing enough, and the onrushing water threatens to overwhelm us. Perhaps it already has.

It’s not surprising that now the Founders’ names are being tarnished and their statues toppled. It takes a group of people without virtue to do it, and a larger group without virtue to allow it. The irony is that these same people think of themselves as the most virtuous of all.

[NOTE: “Virtue” can be a tricky word. For example, Robespierre thought he was the very embodiment of it, and he justified the Reign of Terror as a necessity in order to further solidify virtue. He wrote, among other things: “Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue.”]

RIP Mike Adams

The New Neo Posted on by

Professor Mike Adams’ death has been ruled a suicide.

No doubt many people will consider this a coverup for a homicide. I am not one of those people, and it would take some new revelation to make me cross over to that camp.

Professor Adams fought the fight for so long against those who would destroy him, and he was about to leave the field and retire. Who knows what can spark feelings of depression powerful enough to cause a person, seemingly strong, to commit suicide? The human heart is a great mystery.

William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection – a man who knows something of the pain of being ostracized by colleagues for political positions – writes:

[Adams] “seemed like” a happy warrior, but who knows? It’s a miserable, unrelenting, stressful life, as the friends fall away and the colleagues, who were socially distant years before Covid, turn openly hostile. There are teachers who agree with Mike Adams at UNCW and other universities – not a lot, but some – and there are others who don’t agree but retain a certain queasiness about the tightening bounds of acceptable opinion …and they all keep their heads down. So the burthen borne by a man with his head up, such as Adams, is a lonely one, and it can drag you down and the compensations (an invitation to discuss your latest TownHall column on the radio or cable news) are very fleeting…

RIP, Mike Adams.

Election 2020: change one voter’s mind

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Eva Marie” writes:

Those of us who support Pres. Trump need to change the mind of one voter – to either vote for Trump instead of Biden or vote 3rd party instead of Biden. I did this prior to the last election and I think I was successful. This election I’m concentrating on a non voter who I hope to convince to vote Trump. If we all do this then Trump will win. It’s tedious work because the aim is NOT to win an argument. The aim is to affect behavior. But it’s worth it.

Even before I read that, I had decided to try the same thing. Actually, I’m working on two voters, each chosen because although they have always voted for the Democrats, they are more moderate in their opinions than other people I know. They are also friends who will tolerate a certain amount of political talk from me, and might even be persuaded to read an article or watch a video or two. But I have to be careful not to wear out my welcome; their patience with this stuff is not infinite.

I have no idea whether this has a chance of succeeding, but I feel the need – a strong need, at that – to try. This election is so important that it’s necessary for me to break my habit/rule of the last decade and risk being obnoxious to my friends, even though in the past it got me exactly nowhere to talk politics and that’s why I backed off in the first place.

The approach has to be tailored to the person. In both these cases, I began by asking them if they’d heard about certain things – for example, have they visited the website of Black Lives Matter and are they aware of the Marxist affiliation of its leaders and the extremism of some of its goals, as well as the goals of their partner organization M4BL, the Movement for Black Lives? To get up to speed, read that link I just gave.

Antifa is another group I don’t think many moderate liberals are knowledgeable about; the ones I’ve queried have thought it was about being anti-fascist, and had no idea it was a violent extremist anarchist group (or perhaps even what anarchists are or what they stand for).

Or perhaps, if the person you talk to likes to watch TV news, offer to watch one episode of Tucker Carlson (or another pundit of your choice) with the person, particularly if he or she has only heard about Big Bad Fox News and has never actually watched it.

The polls these days are puzzling. With overwhelming evidence of the utter destructiveness of today’s Democratic Party, and how far it has strayed from the beliefs of most Americans – not to mention that its figurehead leader is a senile man due to turn 78 shortly after Election Day, who was a strange combination of mediocre and corrupt even in his prime – the polls nevertheless indicate that Democrats are way ahead both in the presidential contest and in both houses of Congress.

How can this be? A lot of people reply that the polls are wrong, rigged to discourage Republicans as well as to set up the story, if Republicans somehow happen pull out a victory in November, that it was accomplished through foreign influence and/or trickery. But if the polls are correct or anywhere in the ballpark of correct, it’s extremely troubling. The troubling part is not just the prospects for disaster in November, but what it would say about the American people these days.

After all, it’s not like things aren’t clear. Defund the police? Abolish jails? Support rioters and looters? White people are all racist and need to take a knee for things they never did? Martin Luther King’s dream, dead in the water? George Washington, slaveholder and that’s all? Free speech at universities and elsewhere jettisoned in favor of “my feelings are all that count”? The Green New Deal?

I could go on, but you get the idea. If the American people have abandoned their traditional liberties and protections to this extent, when the dire alternatives are staring them in the face up close and personal, then there is no hope.

I refuse to believe that at the moment. So it’s worth the effort to try.

I titled this post “change one voter’s mind.” Obviously, if you can work on more than one, that would be even better.