Obama’s birthday party

The New Neo Posted on by

It was big, and probably mostly maskless.

In the scheme of things, though, I find I don’t care. That Obama is a narcissistic hypocrite who likes to hobnob with adoring celebrities certainly isn’t what I’d call news. We absorbed that fact a long long time ago.

What actually does amaze me – although I shouldn’t be amazed – is that Obama’s sixty years old. Now, that is surprising. It seems like only yesterday he was a young guy, and although sixty is young to me (boy, is it weird typing that), I’m well aware that it’s not young in any objective sense.

But at my back I always hear. Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near…

John McWhorter: “Kendi and DiAngelo don’t debate people like me”

The New Neo Posted on by

John McWhorter writes:

If social media is any indication, many people seem to be of the opinion that people like Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo should want to “debate” people like me and Glenn Loury. These people are roasted endlessly on social media for not engaging in “debate.”

It isn’t fair. I completely understand why they don’t…

…[G]iven the way people like me or Glenn Loury have discussed people like Kendi and DiAngelo on line and in print, how reasonable is it to expect them to “debate” us? I wasn’t nice to White Fragility last year and meant it, as that review needed to be written – but fully get why DiAngelo thereafter did not want to appear with me on Morning Joe. I didn’t write that review expecting DiAngelo to put on the gloves and “debate” me – I knew full well it meant that sometime in the future we’d be in a talk show green room carefully avoiding eye contact. Glenn has called Kendi an “empty suit” in our conversations and it has gotten around; I guarantee that I would never appear on the show of someone who called me that.

Some may be thinking that people like that are responsible for defending themselves in public competition, that this is the burden of the public intellectual. But the question is why they are supposed to do this in a live, back-and-forth sparring match.

Life is short. Why should someone spend even an hour or two of their time engaging with someone who has given all indication that they heartily disapprove of their work and even find them off-putting personally? Whether it was about winning or losing, who does this?

It seems to me I’ve indeed seen people do that, although it doesn’t tend to end well. So yes, sometimes it happens, but since I don’t usually watch that sort of thing I can’t name anyone except perhaps William Buckley vs. Gore Vidal long ago.

But far more importantly, do Kendi and DiAngelo debate anyone who disagrees with them? If so, I’m not aware of it.

And it makes sense that they wouldn’t be willing to do so, but not for the reason that McWhorter gives. As post-modernists, isn’t it the case that they don’t really believe in debate? They don’t believe in meritocracy, they don’t think traditional logic and argument prove anything – and in fact they believe those things are examples of the systemic racism embedded in our entire society. So why would they subject themselves to being judged by rules and standards they reject as not just wrong, but racist? If they can get away it – and apparently they can, at least so far – they will continue to refuse.

Fred Astaire’s modesty

The New Neo Posted on by

Sometimes the great and the famous are arrogant, or they become arrogant. But not Fred Astaire:

His perfectionism was legendary, but his relentless insistence on rehearsals and retakes was a burden to some. When time approached for the shooting of a number, Astaire would rehearse for another two weeks and record the singing and music. With all the preparation completed, the actual shooting would go quickly, conserving costs. Astaire agonized during the process, frequently asking colleagues for acceptance for his work. As Vincente Minnelli stated, “He lacks confidence to the most enormous degree of all the people in the world. He will not even go to see his rushes… He always thinks he is no good.” As Astaire himself observed, “I’ve never yet got anything 100% right. Still it’s never as bad as I think it is.”…

Extremely modest about his singing abilities (he frequently claimed that he could not sing, but the critics rated him as among the finest), Astaire introduced some of the most celebrated songs from the Great American Songbook…

Although he possessed a light voice, he was admired for his lyricism, diction, and phrasing—the grace and elegance so prized in his dancing seemed to be reflected in his singing, a capacity for synthesis which led Burton Lane to describe him as “the world’s greatest musical performer.” Irving Berlin considered Astaire the equal of any male interpreter of his songs—”as good as Jolson, Crosby or Sinatra, not necessarily because of his voice, but for his conception of projecting a song.” Jerome Kern considered him the supreme male interpreter of his songs and Cole Porter and Johnny Mercer also admired his unique treatment of their work.

I love Astaire’s dancing, but I think he reached his peak – in terms of the performance, the choreography, the inventiveness, and the mood – in his duets with Ginger Rogers. She had a synergistic effect on him.

But his solos are great even though they don’t appeal to me quite as much. It’s almost as though Astaire had trouble being without a partner (after all, he started dancing professionally in vaudeville as a child with his sister Adele), and so if he didn’t have a human partner he came up with some sort of prop to make things interesting.

I could post hundreds of wonderful clips of Astaire, but I’ll limit it to these two. First we have Astaire with a host of props in an exercise studio:

And next we have a dance in which the prop is a room and its furniture. This video shows you the filmed dance on the left, and then how it’s done on the right:

[NOTE: I learned something new today from Astaire’s Wiki entry – which is that he is of Jewish heritage on his father’s side. Both of his father’s parents were Austrian Jews who had converted to Roman Catholicism in the mid-19th-Century. A lot of this history can be found here.]

Yesterday was the 76th anniversary of the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: The following is a slightly changed version of a post of mine. If you follow the links in the second paragraph, you’ll find three other pieces I’ve written about the decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima.]

Once again it’s the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Nagasaki followed three days later, and Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945.

To date these two bombs remain—astoundingly enough, considering the nature of our oft-troubled and troubling species—the only nuclear warheads ever detonated over populated areas. (I’ve written at length on the subject of those bombs: see this, this, and this.)

Oliver Kamm wrote a while back:

Our side did terrible things to avoid a more terrible outcome. The bomb was a deliverance for American troops, for prisoners and slave labourers, for those dying of hunger and maltreatment throughout the Japanese empire – and for Japan itself. One of Japan’s highest wartime officials, Kido Koichi, later testified that in his view the August surrender prevented 20 million Japanese casualties.

This context always needs to be kept in mind when evaluating any “terrible thing”—and there is no question that the dropping of these bombs was a terrible thing.

But critics who are bound and determined to portray the West as evil, marauding, bloodthirsty— whatever the dreadful adjective du jour might be—are bound and determined to either avoid all context, or to change the true context and replace it with fanciful myth. As Kamm writes, those who want to portray Hiroshima and Nagasaki as American crimes cite evidence of an imminent Japanese surrender that would have happened anyway.

Trouble is, available information points strongly to the contrary. It’s difficult to know whether those who argue that the bombs were unnecessary and the deaths that ensued gratuitous are guilty of poor scholarship, wishful thinking, or willful lying – but most likely it’s some combination of these elements.

Truth in history is not easy to determine (see this), although it helps greatly if conventions of scholarship (sources, citations) are properly followed. Oh, the main events themselves are often not disputed – except for fringe groups – although the details are often the subject of disagreement. But it’s the motivations behind the acts, the hearts and minds of the movers and shakers, the “what-might-have-been’s” and the “but-fors” that are so open to both partisan interpretation and willful distortion, and so deeply meaningful.

It’s hard enough to determine what happened. How many died in Dresden, for example? Do we believe Goebbels’s propaganda as promulgated by David Irving, or do we believe this work of recent exhaustive scholarship? The former “facts” have reigned now in popular opinion for quite a while, and although the latter mounts a far more convincing case, how many have read it or are familiar with the facts in it, compared to those who have been heavily exposed to the former?

There’s what happened, and then there’s why it happened—the meaning and intent behind the policy. A combination of the two is what propaganda is all about. It takes a lot of time and effort to wade through facts, make judgments about the veracity of sources, and be willing to keep an open mind.

Much easier to stand in a public square (as a bunch of nodding, smiling, waving, elderly peace-love Boomers regularly used to do in a town where I lived) holding huge banners declaring “9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB.” Repeat it often enough, and the hope is it will become Truth in people’s eyes.

Especially in the eyes of the young, and of future generations, who don’t have their own memories to go on. It’s much harder to convince a WWII vet that Hiroshima was an unnecessary war crime than it is to convince a young person of same; the former not only has the context, he has own personal memories of the context. World War II veterans are scarce these days and getting scarcer by the minute. And propagandists from the left are more numerous, with larger platforms from which to distribute their products. They are not just interested in changing opinions in the present, they’re interested in history and the future.

[NOTE: The definitive essay on the dropping of the atomic bomb by a contemporary and a fine historian is Paul Fussell’s “Thank God for the Atomic Bomb.” And for a good discussion of all the controversy about whether Japan was thinking of surrendering prior to Hiroshima, see this. For a discussion of the idea that Russia’s entry into the war against Japan rather than the atomic bomb was the cause of Japan’s surrender, see this.]

The vaccinated and the unvaccinated

The New Neo Posted on by

Some COVID statistics to ponder.

ADDENDUM:

A recent study from England with some interesting data can be found here. I can’t find any discussion of which vaccines were involved (if you see it, please let me know). But I have read that until fairly recently, a lot of people were receiving AstraZeneca, and I know that is a type of vaccine considered significantly less effective than those used in the US.

An excerpt:

Participants who reported being vaccinated were at substantially reduced risk of testing positive compared with those who reported not being vaccinated. For round 13, prevalence of swab positivity among those unvaccinated was three-fold greater for all ages at 1.21% (1.03%, 1.41%) compared with 0.40% (0.34%, 0.48%) among those reporting two doses of vaccine (Table 3). The ratio of prevalence for unvaccinated to vaccinated individuals for round 12 was similar with a prevalence of 0.24% (0.18%, 0.33%) in those unvaccinated compared with 0.07% (0.05%, 0.10%) in those reporting two doses. However, these estimates conflate the effect of vaccination with other correlated variables such as age, which is strongly associated with likelihood of having been vaccinated and also acts as a proxy for differences in behaviour across the age groups. Specifically, in England, few children and young people under the age of 18 years have been vaccinated, while few over the age of 65 years remain unvaccinated. We therefore restricted the analyses to those aged 18 to 64 years (n = 64,415 in round 12, n = 57,457 in round 13), which permitted direct contrast of infection rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated groups. At these ages, we compared swab-negatives with i) all swab-positives and ii) the subset of swab-positives who were symptomatic, that is reporting one or more classic COVID-19 symptoms in the month prior to testing (fever, loss or change of sense of smell or taste, new persistent cough). After adjusting for age, sex, region, ethnicity and index of multiple deprivation (IMD) [14], for all swab-positives, we estimated vaccine effectiveness (VE) in round 12 of 64% (11%, 85%) and 49% (22%, 67%) in round 13. For those with symptoms we estimated VE of 83% (19%, 97%) in round 12 and 59% (23%, 78%) in round 13.

More COVID lockdown madness from Australia

The New Neo Posted on by

Wow:

Out of a population of 25.8 million, fewer than 1,000 Australians have died from COVID-19 to date. The latest uptick in cases, which has sent the country into a panic, is still only resulting in less than 5 deaths per day. Yet the Australian government has responded with a return to its past harsh pandemic restrictions—and is now even bringing in the military to police its citizens’ lockdown compliance.

“The Australian military began helping to enforce Australia’s strictest COVID-19 lockdown Monday, as a surge in delta variant cases in Sydney continued to cause problems,” Voice of America reports. “About 300 troops have been sent to Australia’s largest city to help overstretched police monitor home quarantine for coronavirus patients, and potentially set up roadblocks. The troops will help the police on a door-to-door search to check if people who have contracted COVID are isolating, police commissioner Mick Fuller told reporters during a press conference. Senior officials have said the soldiers will not be armed, and do not have special enforcement authority, but will be assisting the police.”…

…[T]here’s a bigger lesson we can take away from watching such a totalitarian policy descend upon a Western, advanced society like Australia. If we are not vigilant, it can happen here.

Can happen? Enough has already happened. But Australia is just that much further down on the slippery slope into the sewer (is that a mixed metaphor? So be it.)

I would not have believed any of this possible just a few years ago, but we’re seeing it with our own eyes now and it cannot be denied. The West has lost its way and lost what had previously inoculated it against tyranny of this type.

Cori Bush: I deserve protection, but the little people don’t

The New Neo Posted on by

Cori Bush has trampled on the preferred Democratic narrative, stating her opinion in no uncertain terms in a CBS interview:

I’m going to make sure I have security because I know. I have had attempts on my life and I have too much work to do there, too many people that need help right now for me to allow that. So, if I end up spending $200,000, if I spend 10 more dollars on it – you know what? I get to be here to do the work. So suck it up and defunding the police has to happen, we need to defund the police and put that money into social safety nets.

Security is not for the little people, it’s for important ones like Cori who are doing important work. The CNN article I linked takes the “Republicans pounce” attitude, with observations such as this:

Democrats have spent the last few months insisting that the dangers of “defund the police” movement are overblown because their party’s elected officials don’t even talk about it anymore – that the only people talking about it are Republicans.

[Cori] Bush’s pronouncement on Thursday puts lie to that idea. And hands Republicans a clip that they can wedge into dozens of attack ads linking swing-district Democrats to a deeply unpopular policy coming out of the month of a Democratic member of Congress.

Actually, it’s not just that she’s in favor of defunding the police, although that’s certainly part of it. It’s that the whole quote – and I’m not sure how many people will actually see or hear it – is an almost textbook example of the sort of sentiment for which Leona Helmsley was excoriated long ago: “We don’t pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes” (a statement Helmsley denied ever having said, by the way).

But Cori Bush’s statement is far worse than Helmsley’s. Bush is a public servant, for starters. Her inflated self-importance and sense of entitlement is coupled with a contempt for those who would criticize her and a denial of their need for the same sort of protection. And all of this is couched in nasty and juvenile language like “suck it up.”

There was more to what Bush said:

“I have private security because my body is worth being on this earth right now. I have private security because [of] the white supremacist, racist narrative they drive into this country,” she said.

“My security is not to keep me safe from the people of St Louis … it is to keep me safe against the racist attempts on my life.”

Cori Bush has every right to hire security. And I don’t doubt that people have threatened her – as they’ve threatened so many people in government and elsewhere in these days of social media. No doubt some of the threats come from people who actually are racist, but it’s also highly possible to detest her, just for her policies and the things she says, without being a racist. But for her to protect herself as a Very Important Person and to deny others – including her constituents – the protection of the police is towering elitism and hypocrisy and disdain. The apocryphal Marie Antoinette quote “Let them eat cake!” can’t even begin to compare.

And not only that, but Cori Bush doesn’t think people should defend themselves, either, even in the absence of police. And they certainly shouldn’t defend themselves against a crowd of which she is part (the link is from August of 2020):

Bush, a nurse and pastor, was among the marchers who encountered the McCloskeys on June 28 when they entered Portland Place, a gated, private city street in the Central West End. The protesters were on their way to Mayor Lyda Krewson’s residence, and the unexpected confrontation with the McCloskeys, which was recorded, went viral.

So Cori Bush was in that crowd and in fact, according to the McCloskey’s, was the leader with a bullhorn:

“The Marxist liberal activist leading the mob through our neighborhood stood outside of our home with a bullhorn screaming ‘you can’t stop the revolution.’” Mark McCloskey said. “That Marxist revolutionary is now going to be the congresswoman for the 1st District of Missouri.”

The revolution.

In response, Bush said the following:

“They [the McCloskeys] just put a target on my back that was bigger than the one that I had,” Bush said. “They just made it really difficult for me to navigate, move around, simply because there are people who are looking at me — especially people who are white supremacists — as if I am a danger.”

So this is her modus operandi. Do something provocative, play the victim card (and in particular the victim of racism), and then accuse your critics of wishing for you to be attacked physically. It’s an extremely useful way to deflect criticism in this day and age, as Bush has learned (did she learn it from the master?).

[NOTE: Also, Bush said, “I have had attempts on my life.” If actual attempts have occurred in the past, I certainly can’t find anything about it in the news.]

The COVID variants will be used for propaganda

The New Neo Posted on by

The stage has been set for enormous fear around COVID. We’ve been conditioned to it and guided to it for almost a year and a half. At first it made some sense. The initial news and photos from China, and then from Italy and Spain, were horrendous and frightening and the death rates were climbing and climbing.

But over time the statistics have become clearer, although still not totally clear. We’ve grown to understand more about how the disease has been used to shape minds and accustom people to governmental restraints. And the death toll, although sad, has not been as high as the predictions. We’ve grown to distrust many of the medical authorities, as well as the press and the government in general, more and more.

COVID has been used to tear the fabric of the country apart and turn us against each other. It also was used to justify relaxing voting laws and increase distrust in the voting results and perhaps to facilitate fraud.

Once the vaccine began to be disseminated it was a relief. The original supposition was that if a great many people were vaccinated – say, 70% – we’d be able to open the country up entirely and go back to our previous existence or something akin to it, even though a lot of businesses would have failed and a lot of people would have suffered in the meantime. We threw off our masks with happy relief and hoped to never have to use them again.

Not everyone, of course. Some remained afraid, or some were unable to be vaccinated for medical reasons and still felt the need for extra protection. But most vaccinated people were ready to go about their business.

Then the variants began, and the drumming up of fear around them. Fear seems to have escalated even more around the latest one, Delta. Now that deaths are still low, the news seems mostly about cases. We really are not sure whether Delta will ultimately prove to be just a small blip or something more, but ignorance and fear is what the propagandists depend on to drum up fear.

In that way every new variant can be used to stir up fear, to blame the unvaccinated (falsely defined as the right), and to justify more Draconian measures of restriction of liberty as well as more government doles. More small businesses can go bankrupt, more large companies can get the spoils, Amazon will remain happy, local stores will be deserted, and people will have gotten used to being told what to do and what not to do.

And more variants will probably keep coming, so it can continue and continue. In particular, if that happens, the election of 2022 can be done by mail, too, with all the opportunities that affords.

The latest installment in the killing of Ashli Babbitt

The New Neo Posted on by

The wheels of justice are grinding very very slow.

Here’s some recent news:

Questions linger over the shooting, especially whether the officer who fired the fatal shot warned Babbitt to stop before he opened fire as she attempted to breach a barricaded door inside the Capitol Building.

The officer’s lawyer insists his client not only issued such a command, but did so loudly and clearly. However, in an interview with RealClearInvestigations, Babbitt family attorney Terry Roberts said he has gathered evidence indicating the officer, a plainclothes police lieutenant, remained silent. Far from warning Babbitt he would shoot, Roberts said the officer “ambushed” her from the side where she could not see he had taken up position in a hall doorway and had trained his weapon on her.

“It’s not debatable,” said Roberts. “There was no warning.”

It’s certainly debatable as far as the public is concerned, because we haven’t seen the many surveillance videos that undoubtedly exist.

More:

More than six months after the shooting, the U.S. Capitol Police still refuse to release the name of the officer. But several sources have identified him as Lt. Michael L. Byrd, a 53-year-old veteran of the force who was serving as commander of the House Chamber Section of the Capitol Police on Jan. 6. He has not returned to duty and remains on paid administrative leave. Attempts to reach Byrd were unsuccessful.

(I already wrote about Byrd in this post.)

Babbitt’s family is planning a wrongful death suit, and Roberts is their lawyer. He adds this:

Roberts said he has interviewed several witnesses who were standing outside the Speaker’s Lobby with Babbitt, and that they’ll testify they did not hear the officer issue “any kind of warning.”

He also said video recordings his investigators have analyzed reveal that other police who were in the hallway with the officer did not react as expected before he fired. He said they seemed to be caught unaware as he opened fire. Roberts said he has lined up expert witnesses, including ex-cops and use-of-force experts, who will testify that the officers behind him in the Speaker’s Lobby would have taken cover or crouched and pulled their own weapons if they heard the lieutenant give repeated warnings he was going to shoot. Instead, Roberts said, they appeared to be casually standing or walking around in the lobby in the seconds leading up to the shooting.

“Those other officers were within earshot. If he’s yelling, they certainly aren’t showing any reaction to it,” he said. “If he was giving any kind of warning, why didn’t they react?” Roberts added that no warnings can be heard coming from the officer in any videos taken at the scene.

The officer’s lawyer, Mark Schamel, insists his client issued verbal commands and warnings to Babbitt. “He was screaming, ‘Stay back! Stay back! Don’t come in here!” Schamel said.

Schamel said witness statements back him up. He explained the lieutenant’s commands were not picked up on video recordings because the footage was shot on the other side of the doors where dozens of rioters were shouting and banging and drowning out his words. And he said his client could not be seen yelling out the instructions because his mouth was covered by a mask he wore as part of COVID-19 protections.

One thing is pretty obvious: if he gave such a warning, there was no reason to suppose that Ashli Babbitt would or could have heard it.

And this is interesting as well:

“I’m not sure how he was justified shooting her when there was a SWAT team right behind her,” added a veteran Capitol officer, referring to three heavily armed USCP officers who had positioned themselves between the doors and the mob. “They saw no immediate threat.” The officer spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. A Capitol Police spokeswoman would not say if the officer’s actions were consistent with use-of-force policies, which are not publicly available. In a statement released earlier this month, however, USCP noted that it is “increasing its use-of-force … training.”

I’m going to hazard a guess and say it was inconsistent with their use-of-force guidelines, because if it had been consistent I think we would have heard a lot more about that.

The Capitol Police is not a force trained in riot-control techniques. That was abundantly clear on January 6th, and seems to be a glaring error because – especially in the wake of the leftist riots of 2020 – it is clear that a riot is a definite possibility. It doesn’t take a giant amount of prescience to realize that. But apparently no one did:

“This is not meant pejoratively but just as a fact, but the [Capitol Police] is far from being some kind of elite law enforcement body,” the inspector general said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Its principal function is to assist tourists, maintain decorum in a tourist environment, and help out members of Congress and their staffs.”

That would explain why so many of the January 6th demonstrators were indeed treated like tourists and ushered into the Capitol. And then the vast majority of them behaved like tourists. But they’re being treated like criminals.

The article goes on to discuss the violations of trigger discipline by the shooter that are visible in the videos, for example:

“His trigger finger shouldn’t be inside the trigger guard and the gun shouldn’t be pointed at other officers. He’s even pointing it in the direction of a member of Congress,” the fellow officer said, referring to Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), a former professional mixed-martial-arts fighter who had joined the scrum in front of the chamber doors.

“I can’t tell you how many officers have contacted me to say that what that guy did doesn’t pass muster,” Roberts said in an extensive interview. “No one has come forward to say this was justified homicide, not even the Justice Department.”

I’m going to assume that we’ll learn more as this lawsuit progresses.