The American descent into madness

The New Neo Posted on by

That’s the title of Victor Davis Hanson’s latest essay, and I think he’s got it right:

America went from the freest country in the world in December 2019 to a repressive and frightening place by July 2021. How did that happen?…

In the last six months, we have seen absurdities never quite witnessed in modern America. Madness, not politics, defines it. There are three characteristics of all these upheavals. One, the events are unsustainable. They will either cease or they will destroy the nation, at least as we know it. Two, the law has largely been rendered meaningless. Three, left-wing political agendas justify any means necessary to achieve them.

Hanson then proceeds to list and describe many of the details. I’ll just give the title headings here: “Citizenship as Mere Residency” (on illegal immigration), “The Campus Con” (the further leftist-driven decline of universities), “Commissars and Jacobins” (thought control through social media plus government), “Inflation Is a Mere Construct” (pseudo-economics to shrug away inflation), “Our People’s Military” (wokeness taking over the armed forces), “Keep Cuba Castroite?” (failure to support the demonstrators), “The United Nations Über Alles” (asking the UN to investigate our human rights).

The list isn’t exhaustive nor do I think it’s meant to be, and it certainly didn’t just start in the last six months. But Hanson’s general description is a good one, because person after person on the right has described this feeling of witnessing something crazy happening to the nation and to some extent the world. But radical leftism has never made much sense, although it often purports to do so. It actually rides on the idea that – as Orwell so aptly described – two plus two equals five if the Party decrees it to be so.

That’s already a form of madness, but it describes the left’s essential rejection of logic in favor of the quest for power and the consolidation of power, and the double-think required to maintain belief in the party’s goals despite contradictions and 180-degree switches that sometimes are quick enough to give a person what one might describe as concept whiplash. That illogic, boldness, and sense of whiplash is what the right experiences as “madness,” and part of the “madness” is that the left doesn’t experience it that way at all, and that the “left” (or useful idiots of the left) now constitutes half of America. For most of us, among that half are our friends and family, which only adds to the sense of bewilderment and confusion.

The perception of the world or the country having gone mad also has the effect of making it difficult to know how to counter it. It seems as though it’s already very far gone, and that perception is correct. I can recall, for example, noticing some of this – certainly at the university level – back in the late 80s and early 90s, and speaking out against it but not getting anywhere. There were attempts during the Obama years – the Tea Party comes to mind – but that movement was unsuccessful in fighting off the combined forces of the MSM and the Obama administration smearing it as racist, as well as persecution by the IRS.

One of the benefits of the current madness, though, is that many more people than before are noticing it and experiencing the effects of it up close and personal. For example, inflation can be redefined and excused by the left, but it still affects the pocketbook in ways that are hard to deny. And when CRT wokeness comes for the average schoolchild, parents can be mobilized to fight it off.

COVID fear was used to temporarily keep people in a state of obedient passivity, but for a lot of people (including some in the middle and even some reliable Democrat voters) that era is over. Is the madness of the Biden administration – which includes the bizarre Emperor’s-New-Clothes condition of its nominal leader, Biden – enough to wake the sleeping giant that is the American people?

MacArthur Park and Summer and melting green cakes

The New Neo Posted on by

I can just hear the cries of exasperation now: first the Bee Gees, and now Donna Summer? What is wrong with you, Neo?

Despite the common disdain I hear about disco music, I love Summer’s voice. It’s a force of nature, like a powerful river flowing to the sea and not letting anyone or anything (like mere notes that are very high or very low) stand in its way. Mock the genre of disco all you want, but this lady could sing better and more powerfully than almost anybody else. Little effort is visible. She just opens her mouth and out it pours, a golden stream of sound with a smoky timbre.

And then there’s the song she’s singing here, “MacArthur Park.” I’ve never cared at all for the song and still don’t. In fact, I rather dislike it. In particular, the image of the green cake melting in the rain seems ludicrous to me, although the composer/lyricist Jimmy Webb said it was based on something that actually happened:

Everything in the song was visible. There’s nothing in it that’s fabricated. The old men playing checkers by the trees, the cake that was left out in the rain, all of the things that are talked about in the song are things I actually saw. And so it’s a kind of musical collage of this whole love affair that kind of went down in MacArthur Park. … Back then, I was kind of like an emotional machine, like whatever was going on inside me would bubble out of the piano and onto paper.

The melody shows off Summer’s glorious voice and in particular her lower register, and that’s why I’m paying attention to it. As a very different singer, Karen Carpenter, once said of her own voice, “The money’s in the basement.” As far as I’m concerned, the same was true of Summer, although she had a powerful upper register as well and that’s evident in the song, too. But it’s the lower register that gets me.

Here is a live rendition of the song by Summer when she was around 50 years old. I chose this later performance because I think her voice actually got better with time, although it was fabulous to begin with:

For comparison, here’s one from twenty-one years earlier, when Summer was close to thirty. I don’t think it’s as good at all, perhaps because she seems more affected and her voice seems lighter in her lower registers (and is the song also pitched a note or so higher than in the other video?). But she’s certainly a beautiful and sexy woman. Compared to the raunchiness of today’s performers, though, she seems positively sedate here:

There’s been a lot of rain here lately, but I’ll try not to leave any cakes out in it.

And speaking of damp green cakes – that is, singing of damp green cakes – this offering from my youth comes to mind. I was taken to see this live in NYC many a time as a child:

And I just learned from reading Cyril Ritchard’s Wiki page that he was Australian. I never would have guessed that.

The Arizona 2020 voting audit continues

The New Neo Posted on by

I keep reading about unofficial results of the audit that are quite alarming. However, the official report hasn’t been issued yet, and I’m skeptical about both what it will say and how much traction it will get if it does indicate fraud.

I’ve had many turning points in my political journey. One big one for me was the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story shortly before the 2020 election. The revelations were so obviously potentially damaging and yet the rush to coverup by nearly the entire media was so complete and so mendacious and shameless that, despite my already-existing substantial cynicism, I realized I wasn’t yet quite cynical enough.

So, that’s how I feel about the Arizona audit – that even if it uncovers terribly suspicious wrongdoing and/or chaos and incompetence in the 2020 election, that fact will be successfully covered up or shrugged away or both.

Given that caveat, however, here’s some recent news from Arizona. You should look at the whole thing, because there’s a lot of information there. Here’s just some of it, from an audit update briefing given by the Arizona Senate on Thursday:

Hand Count

Ballot duplication nightmare. Serial numbers are required to match the original and duplicated ballot. “Thousands” of ballots are either missing serial numbers or have unreadable serial numbers printed over a dark black ballot identification box. Ken Bennett stated that it’s impossible to determine whether a ballot was duplicated more than once.

Machine Analysis

Inferior equipment verification process. Senator Peterson noted that if the EAC equipment verification process cannot handle evaluation by an audit, then we need a new certification procedure.

Cyber security vulnerabilities, missing security event data, and suspicious logins. Ben Cotton of CyFIR emphasized the critical need for router and Splunk log data. He gave 4 reasons:

a) The November election system breach reported by Maricopa County and the SoS.
b) Extreme cyber security vulnerabilities: the last malware and operating system/ security patch update was in August 2019 when the Dominion software was originally installed. “It would take less than 10 min to gain system-level access.”
c) Security event data only goes back to 2/5/21. By design, the security log only holds 20 MB of data. Strangely, on 3/11/21, there were 37,646 queries for a blank password that had had the effect of overwriting the data prior to 2/5/21.
d) Suspicious anonymous logons. CyFIR has found anonymous logons at the system level that do not follow the pattern of normal Windows behavior.

Maricopa County is unable to validate the security of the election system. The evidence provided suggests that only Dominion is able to verify the ICP configuration. Cotton explains that it’s impossible to validate the security of an election system if you cannot independently validate the configuration. CyFIR needs the authentication fobs held by Dominion to check ICP configuration.

Paper Analysis

Ballot calibration was off by an average of 1000% in some batches leading to bleed-through, which can cause over-votes or inaccurate vote attribution. The County has stated that they use thick VoteSecure paper, which should limit bleed-through in the event of mis-calibration

However, the Cyber Ninjas team found a large number of ballots on very thin paper stock. The ballots printed on-demand at the voting centers on Election Day have the worst calibration issues. More than 168K ballots were affected.

There’s much more, but I’ll stop there.

Masks, now and forever?

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Griffin” writes:

We are transitioning into the ‘vaccine is not enough must wear a mask forever’ phase of this nonsense.

Perhaps. But I don’t think so. The simple reason is that the American people have no stomach for it as this point, whatever the administration or the CDC might say.

I might be wrong. I’ve been wrong before. But I’ve been traveling off and on for a couple of months, and what I’ve seen everywhere – even in some liberal cities and among liberal friends of mine – is the vast majority of people walking around, faces exposed and breathing free, and even greeting each other with hugs and kisses.

And in my local supermarket the other day, where the employees have been masked since the earliest COVID days, only about half the people who worked there were wearing them. Clearly, the directive had gone out that they were optional even for the staff. The plastic shields at the registers are still there, and I bet they’ll remain. But the masks are no longer standard.

Of course, I don’t live in Los Angeles:

Los Angeles County will again require masks be worn indoors in the nation’s largest county, even by those vaccinated against the coronavirus, while the University of California system also said Thursday that students, faculty and staff must be inoculated against the disease to return to campuses…

The rapid and sustained increase in cases in Los Angeles County requires restoring an indoor mask mandate, said Dr. Muntu Davis, public health officer for the county’s 10 million people. The public health order will go into effect just before midnight Saturday.

This makes very little sense. If the vaccine works, certainly the vaccinated needn’t wear them. And even Dr. Davis seems to recognize this, because he also said that there really won’t be much enforcement.

That’s because people are tired of it and many will stop complying, I believe – even in blue blue Los Angeles.

This is interesting, too:

In San Francisco, cases are rising among the unvaccinated. Black and Latino people are getting shots at a lower rate than others, and Mayor London Breed urged them to get the vaccine.

She said Thursday that every person hospitalized with COVID-19 at San Francisco General Hospital is unvaccinated and most are African American.

A lot of people are afraid of the vaccine, and they are also tired of being told what to do. They don’t trust the government, they don’t trust the CDC, and it’s for a myriad of reasons.

Personally, I always felt that, unless the news on the vaccine was horrible, I’d be getting it shortly after it was available to me. And that’s what I did. But I understand the reluctance of many people to do the same.

Simply put, our institutions of government, the press, and health authorities have not earned our trust lately. From the time the first alarmist prognostications were issued and we locked down for two weeks “to flatten the curve” and then that turned into well over a year, to the ever-changing restrictions and recommendations and confusing statistics and research, to the constant politicization of the entire COVID pandemic, people are just plain fed up.

The situation at the border is about to get worse

The New Neo Posted on by

A lot worse:

A senior administration official told the Washington Free Beacon that border agents are preparing to process up to 1,200 families a day once the public health restrictions are lifted. That works out to about 375,000 families over the next 12 months — perhaps close to a million people. And that figure doesn’t include any surges in refugees at the border — something that many experts fully expect to happen…

“All of these people will become permanent residents. There’s no political will from the Biden administration to deport families once they’re already admitted. The White House knows that,” a DHS official said. “The end of Title 42 will result in de facto open borders.”

Those open borders may restart the pandemic. The Delta variant of the coronavirus has doubled positive tests in the U.S. in the last month, although deaths and hospitalizations have risen far less quickly. It’s not only idiotic public policy. Throwing open the borders in this way is a clear and present danger to citizens of the United States — especially in states along the southern border.

Biden’s dismissive attitude toward Cuban and Haitian refugees should now be seen in the context of his preference for Mexican and Central American refugees escaping poverty and violence as opposed to Cubans escaping Communist repression.

This is happening by design. There are so many things wrong with it, but just one glaring element is the utter hypocrisy about COVID policies shown on the part of the Biden administration.

Killer Facebook

The New Neo Posted on by

Some thanks Facebook gets for being Biden’s lackey.

Here’s what Biden said about Facebook:

A reporter asked President Joe Biden about COVID misinformation going around on Facebook.

“They are killing people,” claimed Biden. “I mean, it really…look, the only pandemic we have is among unvaccinated. And they’re killing people.”

So Facebook is allowing things to be said at the site that might discourage people from being vaccinated. Can’t have that in the new dictatorship!

What an irresponsible and vile thing for Biden to say. But we’re used to that – Biden says something vile nearly every day. But we’re free of mean old Trump, right?

Actually, if you listen to Biden, it’s not easy to tell what he’s talking about. And that’s often the case. There’s such a long pause between the question and his answer: “They’re killers.” Who’s the “they”? Does Biden even know? Is it Facebook? Or is it unvaccinated people? Or is it Facebook-reading unvaccinated people?

However, speaking of “misinformation” – it’s not just unvaccinated people who are getting COVID these days. Some vaccinated people are also getting COVID, just as the authorities said they would because the vaccine isn’t 100% perfect.

And as for “killing people” – is the COVID death rate going up? Let’s see. The data on deaths ends about two weeks ago, but any uptick in cases has been tiny and there is no uptick in deaths lately, or at least none has shown up in statistics so far.

But Biden doesn’t care about such details. First of all, he can’t do math; he messes up numbers constantly in his speeches. Second of all, his statement was reflexive propaganda. Republicans, anti-vaxxers, Trump, anyone who doesn’t obey the state – they’re all killers.

And come to think of it, hasn’t the CDC been an intermittent source of misinformation since this whole COVID thing began?

The Biden administration and Facebook: isn’t this fascism?

The New Neo Posted on by

Not “fascism” as in “mean people doing mean things that I don’t like,” but “fascism” in its economic sense of “large private businesses being in bed with government”?

Fascism as an economic system is sometimes described this way:

As such, scholars argue that fascists had no economic ideology, but they did follow popular opinion, the interests of their donors and the necessities of World War II. In general, fascist governments exercised control over private property, but they did not nationalize it. Scholars also noted that big business developed an increasingly close partnership with the Italian Fascist and German fascist governments. Business leaders supported the government’s political and military goals. In exchange, the government pursued economic policies that maximized the profits of its business allies.

Facebook is still considered to be a private company, but it does the government’s bidding – if the government is on the left. And right now, the government is on the left:

The Hunter Biden DOJ protection program

The New Neo Posted on by

Didn’t we already know this?:

U.S. Department of Justice officials deliberately delayed an investigation into Hunter Biden’s potential tax law violations and sketchy overseas business dealings because of the effect it could have on the presidential election, according to a Politico report.

Delaware’s U.S. Attorney David Weiss allegedly postponed allowing prosecutors to obtain search warrants and issue grand jury subpoenas last summer, after facing pressure from other officials who feared the investigation’s influence on the 2020 presidential election and now-President Joe Biden’s campaign.

And if we didn’t already know the details, we certainly could have and should have deduced the basic outline. I certainly imagined the investigation had been stalled for political reasons. It’s sad when our default position is extreme distrust of our leftist-partisan government institutions, agencies, and officials.

Are we in the Now It Can Be Told phase of the Hunter Biden story? For example [my emphasis]:

“They advised [Hunter] to avoid taking any actions that could alert the public to the existence of the case in the middle of a presidential election,” reported Politico, one of the many corporate media outlets that [had] brushed off the possibility of any wrongdoing by Hunter despite the discovery of his incriminating laptop.

The protection was activated:

Shortly before Election Day, prosecutors and then-Attorney General Bill Barr worked together to keep the investigation from going fully public and decided not to appoint a special investigator for the case.

I’m in agreement with this:

But I have a few questions: why is Politico reporting on this, even now? Are they offended that the DOJ protected Hunter and Joe? I very much doubt it. Or are they trying to get ahead of a story – meaning, is Hunter about to be indicted for something? Neither of these explanations seems quite satisfactory to me, but I can’t come up with any others.

Also: is there anything to be done about the DOJ? If the DOJ is so hopelessly corrupt (which I believe it is), could any Republican president effectively reform it? I have very strong doubts. It would involve getting a Republican president in there who is willing to fire nearly everyone and hire an entirely new crew, and even then it would be very difficult to find enough lawyers who are dedicated to objectively applying the law.

[NOTE: Remember the DOJ’s treatment of Hillary Clinton’s emails?]

The woes of Africa

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday in a thread on the unrest and violence in South Africa, the perennial question of what’s wrong with Africa came up. It occurs to me that it might be time to recycle a post from seven years ago that I wrote on that very question. Rather than cutting and pasting the whole thing, I’ll just post this link to it, but I suggest you read the post in its entirety. An excerpt:

The entire question is a fascinating although depressing one, and it led me to a couple of hours of reading last night, with the Google query “Why is Africa such a mess?” leading the way. What I discovered was a certain consensus, and although I don’t think it goes deep enough it’s certainly a credible piece of the whole.

The gist of it is that, after colonialism ended, when Africa had a seeming chance to set its own trajectory, its countries rejected liberal democracy and capitalism in favor of strong men and socialism. The strong men exacerbated the corruption, and the socialism led to—well, the bad economies to which socialism tends to lead. Both choices (if you can call them that) almost certainly made things worse in Africa than they would otherwise have been.

And today I’d like to add some links to a discussion of Africa by Thomas Sowell. First we have this article from 2005 entitled “Geography and man have all but killed Africa.” Here’s an excerpt:

Almost every great city in the world has risen on navigable waterways — and such waterways are more scarce in Africa than in any other continent…

Even smaller boats can travel only a limited distance on most African rivers because of cascades and waterfalls. Most of the continent is more than 1,000 feet above sea level, and more than half of Africa is more than 2,000 feet above sea level. That means its rivers and streams must plunge down from those heights on their way to the sea.

Water transport was crucial in the thousands of years before there were trains or automobiles. It was crucial for developing an economy and crucial for developing a culture in touch with enough other widely scattered cultures to make use of advances in the rest of the world. But many African societies have been isolated by that continent’s dearth of both navigable rivers and harbors.

Isolated regions have almost invariably lagged behind regions in touch with a wider cultural universe…

Small, tribal societies were another consequence of geographic isolation — and the vulnerability of such societies to conquest by outsiders was another…

Many people expected great things from Africa when new independent African nations began to emerge from colonial rule in the 1960s, often headed by leaders who had been educated in Europe and America.

Unfortunately, what these new leaders brought back to Africa from the West were not the things that had made the West prosperous and powerful but the untested theories of Western intellectuals and ideologues who had taught them…

The net result was that African leaders, full of confidence because of their Western education and the adulation of the Western intelligentsia, made their people guinea pigs for half-baked theories that had contributed nothing to the rise of the West and had contributed much to its social degeneration.

And Sowell wrote this in 1996. Here’s a portion of it:

In narrowly economic terms, even though it is true that too many African nations had their standards of living fall below where they had been under European imperialists, still the 1980s and 1990s saw some turnarounds. The economies of Nigeria and Ghana, for example, began to grow after the statist regimes began to allow freer operation of the marketplace, often under heavy pressure from international aid agencies that finally stopped accepting excuses and started insisting on performance.

Comparisons with Asia are less apt than comparisons with the Balkans would be, both historically and currently. The clearest parallels in sickening atrocities and blind ethnic hatreds are those between the Balkan wars and tribal warfare in Africa…Historically, both areas have been culturally fragmented by their geography..The resulting poverty and disunity of both regions likewise made both vulnerable to the outside world and sources of slaves–the Balkans supplying Europe and the Middle East with slaves for centuries before the first African was taken in bondage to the Western Hemisphere.

Geographic handicaps do not merely limit economic opportunities or inhibit political consolidation, they limit the development of the people themselves by isolating them from one another and from the outside world. Such isolated peoples are almost invariably backward and often brutal, whether they are isolated in mountainous terrain or on small islands scattered across vast reaches of water or–as in sub-Saharan Africa–isolated by a painful combination of geographic handicaps, ranging from a dearth of navigable waterways to debilitating diseases that weakened men and made draft animals virtually impossible to use over large regions.

To me, these explanations make a lot of sense – as Sowell so often does.