My grandmother and pencil sharpeners

The New Neo Posted on by

I recently stayed at an airbnb that was woefully understocked – and that was the least of the things wrong with it, alas. I did notice that one of the few pieces of kitchen equipment it had was a vegetable peeler. But one evening when I took it on myself to make soup and to peel several types of vegetables, I discovered that the peeler didn’t work.

Not that it didn’t work well. It didn’t work at all.

And so I resorted to something I hadn’t done in a long time, which was to peel carrots by scraping them with a knife. While I was engaged in that task, I suddenly flashed on a memory of my grandmother sharpening pencils with a knife.

My wonderful grandmother was born in the early 1880s, but this memory was from the 1950s. And I never ever saw her use a pencil sharpener, although she lived to be over eighty. She would whittle that pencil down with a knife. Her pencils bore the markings of her efforts, much like prehistoric arrowheads or flint tools.

Why did she do it that way? I neglected to ask her, and now I’ll never really know. When I began to write this post, I thought perhaps the pencil sharpener hadn’t been invented yet when she was in school. But in fact it had, and even the prism type (the small hand-held one still commonly used) was able to be mass-produced from 1851 on.

Apparently, even today artists still knife-sharpen their pencils at times. My grandmother was good at drawing and had had some formal instruction in it, so perhaps that’s where she picked up the habit.
There are plenty of YouTube videos on how to do this, but they don’t use my grandmother’s technique. She used a regular knife rather than the very sharp edges in the videos, and she laid the pencil on a surface rather than holding it in her hand (videos like the following one make me nervous):

I once tried to hand-sharpen a pencil and I was nowhere near as good at it as my grandmother was. When I contemplate the fact that she was born about 140 years ago, it seems wondrous to me that I have that window back to a distant time.

Here’s a photo of my grandmother on graduation from teacher’s training school around 1902 or thereabouts:

The world’s softest throw

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t usually promote random items. And I’m not a big Macy’s fan recently, having had a problem with a mail order.

But I have to say that this throw, which I recently encountered and gave as presents to several people for Christmas, is a wonderful item and is on sale right now for a great price. If you want to get the world’s softest throw under which to snuggle up, here it is. I think the plaid ones are especially attractive but it’s the tactile pleasure that makes the thing so wonderful.

Sentences in the Arbery case have been handed down…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and they are very extreme.

Ordinarily, life sentences – and especially life without parole- are reserved for the most heinous of premeditated, purposeful,, callous murders.

No more. If you’re a white guy who looks like he might be a member of the cast of “Deliverance,” and you killed a black man under the fact circumstances of the Arbery case – which involved an ill-advised attempt at a citizens’ arrest gone horribly bad, possibly self-defense for the actual killing, and even without self-defense involved probably no more than some form of manslaughter – you will be treated as though you were one of those vicious murderers. And that’s true even if you were just along to document the intended citizen’s arrest and had nothing to do with the killing – although that defendant got a life sentence with the possibility of parole.

Travis and Greg McMichael got life without parole plus 20 years for Aggravated Assault, to be served consecutively. William “Roddie” Bryan got life plus 5 years, with the possibility of parole, plus 10 years for False Imprisonment, which means he serves at least 30 years. They also all face federal hate crime charges.

This is a terrible result, just another indication of a double standard of justice in America. If the races had been reversed, such a harsh sentence would never have been rendered. In this case, the actual sentence was at least partly motivated by the fear of mob violence if the sentence wasn’t draconian enough. One of the other motives of several recent cases has been to threaten to mete out extreme over-the-top punishment to citizens who arm themselves, even if the crime obviously did not conform to the usual facts that would justify the extreme severity of the sentence.

A bit more about Joe Biden’s January 6th speech

The New Neo Posted on by

I didn’t watch it; I knew what to expect and that it would be disturbing and infuriating. But here’s the text of the speech if you’d like to take a look, and here’s the video (Biden’s speech starts at 9:18).

I’m wondering, though, how many people did watch it or read it? I bet not all that many. And did it change anyone’s opinion? I strongly doubt that it did. The left may succeed if they’re tricky enough – they’re certainly ruthless enough. But they don’t seem to be winning hearts and minds these days, and what’s more they know it.

Here’s an article on the subject of the January 6th anniversary histrionics and their goals, by the ever-sharp Glenn Greenwald, fearless libertarian of the left.

What does it mean for a politician to be a “good communicator,” and how important is it?

The New Neo Posted on by

You may have noticed that the left seems to think that politics mainly comes down to “messaging.” If something isn’t being accepted by the public, the left just needs to “message” it better – to communicate better with the public – perhaps to inform them, perhaps to misinform them, but in any case to affect their opinions by framing something with better words.

I certainly agree that communication is highly important. I wouldn’t be a writer if I didn’t think that, and I wouldn’t take time to craft my posts with care if I didn’t think that.

But there’s a great deal more than that to politics. The left has had a huge advantage in recent years because of the power to control the information that reaches the public in the first place, through control of the press, the entertainment media, education, and in recent years social media as well. It’s a huge power, and if the only communication that reaches the public is one-sided, it doesn’t need to be so very well done because it has no competition.

It also helps if the “message” makes sense and conforms to the observations people have in their daily lives, and that sometimes hurts the left. For example, saying that inflation isn’t really a Thing doesn’t convince people who are suffering from it in the real world, no matter how great your “messaging” is.

That brings us to a recent comment by “Bauxite”:

As a communicator, DeSantis is orders of magnitude more effective than Trump. I simply cannot fathom why anyone would support Trump over this guy in 2024. DeSantis has a chance to expand the base. Trump does not.

I partly agree and partly disagree. I like DeSantis and think he’s an excellent communicator: whip-smart and clear, tough yet not abusive. But I can easily fathom support for Trump: loyalty, fighting spirit, humor, foreign policy experience, just to name a few things. At the moment I lean towards DeSantis, but that could change.

I also submit that Trump did expand the base, particularly among minorities, although I think that DeSantis could expand the base among moderates.

Bauxite adds:

The last two Republican presidents were terrible communicators, not just below average, but really, unusually bad. That absolutely has something to do with why the left has been ascendent in the 21st century so far. I remember when the conventional wisdom was that the US was a center-right country. That was before Bush and Trump.

I disagree. Bush was a mediocre communicator – not “unusually bad.” And I think it has almost nothing to do with why the left has been ascendant recently. It was already happening for decades prior to his election, in education in particular, which indoctrinated the young who later became voters. And I think that the US is still a center-right country. It’s just that the media, education, and almost all other institutions (including many businesses) have become so indoctrinated by leftism that it’s hard for people to get straight facts.

Trump actually was able to cut through that; Bush was not. I think DeSantis can cut through it, too.

Are some of our SCOTUS justices dunces?

The New Neo Posted on by

Read the list of things that SCOTUS justices have gotten wrong about COVID during oral argument questioning today. It’s mind-boggling. The vast majority of the errors are from the liberal justices, and all in the direction of overemphasizing the dangers of COVID, sometimes to a remarkable degree.

What does this tell us? Probably not much that we don’t already know.

The first thing is that justices can find a way to justify any result they wish, and that this is a particular problem with liberal justices who feel unburdened by constitutional restrictions. The second is that if they get their facts from the MSM they will get incorrect facts, although I must say that the errors these justices (especially Sotomayor, but hardly limited to her) are making are more egregious than what I read in the MSM.

The third is that perhaps these errors of fact will be corrected either during the arguments or afterward. But don’t bet more than a few pennies on it.

I will add that Sotomayor seemed to also be making an error of law, which is even more distressing:

I’m not a SCOTUS justice, and my law is very rusty, but as far as I know the federal government doesn’t have what’s known as “police power” (which is not about police); that is reserved to state governments and under. And indeed, that appears to still be the definition, and it’s one of the most basic constitutional legal principles.

Another tidbit is that Breyer said there were 750 million new COVID cases yesterday. In the US? That’s many times greater than the population, and there have only been about 60 million diagnosed COVID cases in the United States total to date. I decided that perhaps he meant in the world, but he would be way overestimating there as well because there have only been 302 million COVID cases in the entire world to date, and about 2 and a half million new ones diagnosed yesterday worldwide.

In fact, if you look at that first link in the above paragraph and go to yesterday’s cases in the US, you’ll see that the actual figure is about 750 thousand new cases in the US. So Breyer appears to have adopted Biden’s type of math, mistaking thousands for millions. The math problem is more contagious in our “elites” than COVID, apparently.

Beyond noting the utter stupidity of some of the statements by the justices – read the entire Legal Insurrection link to get more of the details – I will add that whatever their reasons, factual or nonsensical, I would expect the liberal justices to uphold the mandates and the conservative ones to reject it. It’s the ones in-between who are unpredictable, and I’ve learned that predicting what they will do on the basis of questions during oral arguments is all too often a fool’s errand (although every now and then I take it up). So I’ll make no predictions on the eventual outcome here.

Open thread 1/7/22

The New Neo Posted on by

The evolution of a song, in reverse.

They made it famous:

He covered it even before that, without his brother:

But this guy wrote it:

For me, the Hollies’ harmonies win, hands down.

COVID reveals propensities towards tyranny

The New Neo Posted on by

We know that China isn’t the least bit interested in liberty, and so policies such as these should not shock us:

Imagine a nation in such a state of distress that its citizens were reduced to bartering for food. A nation where women were so desperate for something to cook and eat that they started swapping sanitary towels for vegetables. A nation where families were so hungry that they would trade their cigarettes for a cabbage. This country actually exists. And it isn’t one of the poor, sometimes famished nations of the global South. It’s China. More accurately, it’s China under the policy of ‘Zero Covid’. …

The bartering for grub and other basic supplies is taking place in the city of Xi’an in north-west China right now. There has been a spike in community Covid infections in Xi’an and the authorities have responded with ferocious authoritarianism. Thirteen million people have been confined to their homes since 23 December. Initially they were allowed out once every two days to buy food, but even that infinitesimal scrap of liberty was done away with on 27 December. Since then, the people of Xi’an have been under literal house arrest. They are not permitted to leave their place of residence for any reason, not even to buy food…

To get around the rather important matter that people will become gravely ill if they don’t have food, officialdom in Xi’an has arranged to deliver essentials to people’s front doors. Not surprisingly, this hasn’t gone entirely smoothly. Residents have complained about not receiving enough to eat. Others say they have received no aid at all. Citizens have taken to Weibo to share images and videos of themselves bartering for foodstuffs…

Much more at the link.

The question of how far the leaders of a country will go in response to COVID – or with COVID as an excuse – is certainly not limited to China. We’ve learned a lot about the West as well, in the last two years. And a lot of it is very very bad.

The news from the northern part of Australia is more shocking than the news from China, because Australia used to be considered a country that placed some value in liberty:

Today, [Northern Territory Chief Minister Michael] Gunner announced that due to Omicron, he is taking the concept of lockdowns one step further. Effectively 1pm today, anyone who is not vaccinated is, by decree, designated as locked out of civil society in the region. Without notice, and effective almost immediately, the unvaccinated citizens in the Northern Territory are to remain confined in their homes and are not permitted to work.

At 1pm on Monday the lockout will be lifted; however, a mandatory vaccine passport process will be fully implemented in the territory, and the unvaccinated will continue to be locked out of all non-essential, businesses, operations and services in society.

And then there’s France. I’m not sure whether this comes under the heading of liberté, égalité, or fraternité, but I suspect it’s “none of the above”:

French President Emmanuel Macron feels emboldened by the rise of COVID fear. Pretenses are being dropped as these words were spoken yesterday about the citizens of France:

(EuroNews)”Macron told Le Parisien that he had decided to act against the non-vaccinated, by ‘limiting as much as possible their access to social life activity’. ‘The unvaccinated, I really want to piss them off. And so we will continue to do so, to the bitter end. That’s the strategy,’ the head of state said. ‘When my freedom comes to threaten that of other people, I become irresponsible. An irresponsible person is no longer a citizen.’”

“An irresponsible person is no longer a citizen”? Extraordinary. Does he realize the line he’s crossed? I suppose so, and I suppose it’s intentional. The inner tyrant emerges into the light of day. This happens all too often nowadays, but it’s still quite astounding to see in countries such as Australia and France, and even parts of the US.

[NOTE: This focus on vaccines is particularly odd considering that they really only mitigate the serious effects of the illness, on average. But to tyrant wannabees such observations are irrelevant.]

Happy Insurrection Day! says the left

The New Neo Posted on by

My gut feeling is that most Americans who are not on the left are heartily sick of hearing about the horrors of January 6th from the Democrats’ perspective, and have Moved On to more pressing concerns like inflation and crime. Democratic leaders, however, would like to stoke the memory of that day, when they were riding high – having just taken control of the presidency and both houses – and were scoring an anti-Trump anti-right propaganda victory as well.

The good old days.

It’s been a slide downhill for Democrats ever since, but they’re hoping that they can “reform” America’s voting through HR! or similar executive orders, and keep themselves winning no matter what the majority of Americans may want.

As for today, I haven’t listened to the over-the-top, self-serving speeches. As regular readers here know, I usually can’t stand political speech-making anyway, although I usually read transcripts. But today, after reading the descriptions of Biden’s and Harris’s divisive and mendacious rhetoric, I’ll leave it at that.

I’ve written many posts already on the actual events of January 6th and their aftermath, but I would recommend brushing up on this from RealClearInvestigations as well as this video featuring Glenn Greenwald. I haven’t watched the latter yet, but Greenwald has been spot on about this topic and I’m going to assume this is more of the same.

In sum, I’ll quote commenter “Cappy” who earlier today wrote: “It’s a Woodstock for paranoid leftists.” I will add that some actually are paranoid, but I think most of them are not the least bit worried about January 6th but are merely coldly calculating and hoping that frightened Americans will give them more power, or at least allow them to take more power. That’s actually what this is all about.