The AP writes what it calls “news” about the election audits

The New Neo Posted on by

The headline reads, “It’s not just Arizona: Push to review 2020 ballots spreads.” Could have been an interesting and informative article. But the AP, under the guise of news, has published a piece that basically says, “A bunch of right-wing debunked conspiracy-theorist crazies have hired a bunch of other right-wing debunked conspiracy-theorist crazies to audit an election that has already been completely audited and proven to be perfectly fair and above-board.”

Not only that, but in the entire 1,000-plus-word article there’s no discussion of the actual bases for the right’s suspicion that fraud and/or important errors may have indeed occurred. I found this propaganda masquerading as news in the NY Post, which is a newspaper ordinarily on the right. Just goes to show what sort of reach and power the AP has.

I’ve written at some length about the New Hampshire audit (see this and this), inspired by a challenge from a local Democrat who had lost by a small margin and wanted a recount. The process uncovered huge anomalies, all in the Democrat’s favor and penalizing Republicans, and that’s what triggered the calls for a larger audit. This was no conspiracy theory; it was cold hard fact, and disturbing fact at that, fully justifying a closer look.

But this is how the AP article characterizes the New Hampshire effort:

A Georgia judge last week awarded a group the chance to review mail ballots in a large Georgia county that includes Atlanta. Officials in a rural Michigan county have expressed interest in a review of their voting machines.A similar debate has caused sharp divisions in a New Hampshire town.

The AP writers are banking on the fact that its readers are ignorant of what actually transpired in Windham, NH. The article adds:

Arizona has also inspired calls by pro-Trump groups to push for their own pick to take over a post-election audit of a statehouse race in Windham, New Hampshire — home of former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.

That sentence contains a link to this AP article that goes into more depth on the Windham situation but continues to couch it as the effort of crazy debunked conspiracy theorists. The logic of the calls for a widening audit that gets to the bottom of the problems is ignored, and the efforts are treated as bogus despite the anomalies found and the lack of knowledge about what other races were affected, and how much they were affected.

Nothing will stop the press from continuing to do this sort of thing, because it’s been so enormously productive for them in terms of political results.

“Lived experiences” are only relevant in therapy, in a memoir, between family members or close acquaintances, or to the individual…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and social policy isn’t any of those things.

But the phrase “lived experiences” is one of the mantras of the left – in particular, any movement that begins with the word “critical,” as in “critical race theory” or “critical legal theory.” The idea of paying attention to “lived experiences” comes at least in part from therapy, because hearing a person’s story (aka “narrative”) actually is important to understand what the individual believes is going on in his or her life. It doesn’t mean it’s objectively true, but listening to it not only is a guide to helping the client or patient, but it’s also a way to let the person know that someone is finally listening and trying to understand. “Narratives” can later be challenged, but they first must be heard.

“Lived experiences” ignore statistics; they are merely individual and should not be guiding public policy. But these days they are regarded as such a guide, and those who don’t agree are accused of “silencing” these important “voices”:

Activists, politicians, commentators, and others often say that we should judge policy issues based on the “lived experience” of members of various groups, particularly those that have been victimized by various types of injustices. Thus, if we want to understand and combat racism, we should rely on the lived experience of minority groups who are its victims. If the problem is sexism, we should credit the lived experience of women. Both left and right trot out victims of school shootings to use their lived experience to bolster their respective positions on how to combat gun violence.

In a recent article, philosopher Tim Hsiao highlights some of the shortcomings of this popular mantra:

“[A]re lived experiences really that special? No. Quite simply, appeals to ‘lived experiences’ are exercises in bad statistical reasoning….

“personal anecdotes do not invalidate statistical generalizations, which are by nature probabilistic….

“Lived experiences are often vividly used by progressive activists as evidence of widespread injustice, accompanied with a call for action and social change. Yet basing one’s entire case for widespread injustice and sweeping social change on lived experiences is, quite simply, bad statistical reasoning. Why should one’s personal experience of (say) racism carry any special weight?”

They shouldn’t, and it is a useful pretense by the left that they do. As the article points out, it’s not solely the left that does this. But it is far more common on the left, and the left is also inordinately fond of the jargon surrounding the practice.

UNRWA Gaza chief stumbles across the truth and then apologizes…

The New Neo Posted on by

…to his real bosses, the Palestinians:

The head of the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency in Gaza apologized on Tuesday for comments he made to Israeli TV in which he said that IDF strikes on the Strip appeared to be “precise” and “sophisticated.”

UNRWA Gaza director Matthias Schmale’s interview on Sunday with Channel 12 prompted outrage from the Hamas terror group that rules Gaza and other Palestinian organizations, which accused him of exonerating Israel for the death of civilians in the 11 days of fighting that ended with a ceasefire on Friday.

In the interview, Schmale was asked about the IDF’s assertation that its military strikes were very precise. He responded: “I’m not a military expert but I would not dispute that. I also have the impression that there is a huge sophistication in the way the Israeli military struck over the last 11 days.”

He also said that there were not currently any shortages of food, medicine or water in Gaza as Israel had reopened the crossings.

The title of this post is a riff on Churchill’s saying: “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.” Schmale goes it one better by apologizing for his stumble, because in doing so he stepped on Hamas’ and other Palestinians’ toes:

“Recent remarks I made on Israeli TV have offended & hurt those who had family members & friends killed & injured during the war that has just ended. I truly regret to have caused them pain, & reiterate following points I have made through countless interviews & tweets,” he tweeted.

“There is no justification whatsoever for killing civilians. Any civilian killed is one too many. It is simply unbearable that so many innocent people have paid with their lives,” he said, adding that “military precision and sophistication are never a justification for war.”

“Many people were killed or have been severely injured by direct strikes or collateral damage from strikes. In a place as densely populated as Gaza, any strike will have huge damaging effects on people and buildings,” he said.

There is an old tradition of Palestinian encouragement of civilian casualties of its own people by placing military targets among civilians. This has been known for decades (I’ve written about it many times on this blog, for example in this post). Anyone who isn’t aware of this cold-blooded and yet effective ploy on the part of the Palestinians is ignorant or in denial.

The Israelis helpfully pointed it out once again:

The [Israeli] military describes such civilian casualties as being the unfortunate result of Hamas’s strategy of intentionally operating within densely populated areas to use the residents as civilian shields. Human rights groups, however, regularly accuse Israel of using disproportionate force in such situations.

“Disproportionate force” is garbage. Israel already shows remarkable forbearance in its strikes. But the Israelis are supposed to endure strikes on its own people from an aggressor, and not strike back – or strike back in some perfect way that satisfies its enemies?

As I said, it’s absurd. But it works as propaganda. The left in this country is fully onboard with the Palestinian narrative, and has been for years, and more and more people are now on the left. The UN has been fully onboard for decades, and is a great enabler of the Palestinians as well (here’s the latest from that august body).

And then there’s the current US administration, which is continuing in Obama’s footsteps of rewarding the Palestinians:

In the past two weeks, the Biden administration has rolled out pledges to deliver $75 million in assistance to Palestinian areas; $40 million for security assistance to the Palestinian Authority; $150 million to the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA; and $15 million for COVID assistance. Also pledged is $10 million that goes to Palestinian-Israeli people-to-people programs.

US officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have said the spending will comply with congressional restrictions, and comply with laws banning (with a few exceptions) direct assistance to the Palestinian Authority as long as it pays subsidies to the families of Palestinians who have killed Israelis or Palestinians — a longstanding PA policy.

That’s not enough to assuage skeptics, who cite a government watchdog report released last week that said that, from 2015 to 2019, US aid officials did not sufficiently verify whether money meant to reach only nongovernmental organizations in fact ended up with terrorists.

What’s more:

State Department officials have thus far declined to outline what mechanisms, if any, it has put in place to stop a tranche of aid money from reaching Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip and is responsible for initiating a deadly conflict with Israel this month. The State Department admitted this week that it could not guarantee the tranche of money will be kept from Hamas.

“As we’ve seen in life, as we all know in life, there are no guarantees,” a senior department official said.

U.S. aid money has reached Hamas and Palestinian terrorists in the past, prompting the Trump administration to stop sending aid in 2018. One of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s first moves after taking office was to resume the aid without preconditions.

That’s life is not really an adequate response. But they have no intention of giving an adequate response, and they simply do not care what the Palestinians use the money for. It’s money that satisfies the left, and that’s good enough for this crew.

Are Democrats’ pre-election lies unraveling?

The New Neo Posted on by

Stephen Kruiser claims they are:

It wasn’t just the truth about the plague that Zuckerberg and Company had to sweep under the rug. There was also the matter of Biden’s sleazebag cocaine freak son Hunter. When the really bad news about him broke late in the campaign, Zuckey, Dorsey, and the rest of the Hitler Youth began shutting down anyone who truthfully reported it. We were told that it was a nothingburger of a story and that Biden was the most innocent of lambs when it came to any of the Burisma stuff.

Tyler wrote yesterday that that bit of fiction is falling apart now too…

My question is: falling apart with whom?

I have been specializing in the topic of political change for over fifteen years, and one thing I know is that people don’t change easily. Not only do they have to receive the corrected information, but they have to stop rationalizing it and excusing it. There’s a natural human reluctance in many people against doing that.

We keep reading about political change movements such as WalkAway, and they do exist. But so far the numbers of people affected have been too small to matter much (for example, whether the election of 2020 was valid or not, Trump should have won by a margin so vast that even fraud wouldn’t have overcome it – and that didn’t happen). One of the sad things about political change is that it often takes something cataclysmic to engender it, and by then it’s often too late because tyrants have an iron grip on power.

COVID and the Wuhan lab: and just like that, the debunkers debunked themselves

The New Neo Posted on by

There are fashions in words, and “debunked” has been the word of the day for the MSM during the Trump administration. It came to mean something like this: “A viewpoint we don’t like and that reflects poorly on the left and well on the right and/or Trump, about which we can find some experts who say the viewpoint is wrong, and so we pretend it’s been utterly disproved – and what’s more, it’s evil to even attempt to discuss what might be the arguments in favor of it.”

Now that Trump’s gone, and for other reasons that remain unclear, the once-“debunked” theory that COVID originated in a Wuhan lab is now rather bunked again (as I described in this post). So now even Facebook, those monarchs of debunking, have acknowledged as much:

“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made from our apps,” Facebook said in a statement. “We’re continuing to work with health experts to keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge.”

For those waiting for apologies – not just from Facebook, but from the entire MSM and Democratic Party that excoriated them for claiming a Wuhan lab origin was a possibility and wanting to discuss it – it’ll be a long wait. The left doesn’t apologize, it just moves on to the next attack/suppression cycle without missing a beat.

“Celebrities will lecture America, but apologize – like John Cena – to China”

The New Neo Posted on by

…is the headline of this NY Post article.

Yes, of course he apologized to China. This sort of behavior from celebrities first became particularly notable with the NBA, and it’s now clear that many celebrities know where the money lies. Personally, I don’t care what celebrities say, but I realize that – amazingly enough – some people do consider them to be role models of some kind. Although I didn’t have a clue who John Cena was prior to this, it seems to be big news:

Wrestler turned actor John Cena may look like the Rock, but when it comes to China he’s Pee-Wee Herman. Doing an interview for his upcoming film “F9” in Taiwan, he referred to that free and thriving democratic island, which has had a separate government since 1949, as a “country” instead of as a province of China.

When this led to an “outcry,” meaning it displeased the Communist Party of China, alleged tough guy Cena mewled and groveled and begged for forgiveness…

Cena volunteered for duty as a cog in the machinery of the Communist Party of China when he said, in the language of the world’s biggest oppressor, “I’m very, very sorry about my mistake. I apologize, I apologize, I’m very sorry . . . my apologies.” No 18th-century courtier, fraternity pledge or blob of plankton better exemplified spinelessness.

For me, it’s not about Cena himself. It’s about the fact that this Soviet-show-trial-style groveling has become commonplace. At least the defendants in those trials had usually been tortured and faced even worse. What’s Cena’s excuse?

The behavior of these elebrities reminds me of two statements by Winston Churchill. The first is “The Hun is always either at your throat or your feet” (see this). The celebrities like to lunge at America’s throat, rhetorically speaking, and bow down to China.

It also reminds me of Churchill’s statement to Chamberlain: “You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war.” To abase yourself in appeasement is to lose twice. But it seems to be a popular move these days.

Remember when Sixties hippies on the left wanted to “Question Authority”?

The New Neo Posted on by

If you’re of a certain age, like I am, you probably remember those bumper stickers that exhorted us all to Question Authority. It was the mark of a thinking person not to take everything at face value, in particular the words of the government or government agencies.

I remember once going to an SDS meeting when I was in college. I was never a leftist but I suppose I was toying with it a bit at the time (this was during the Vietnam War). But what I saw and heard at that meeting repelled me on a gut level and I never went back. That one meeting cured me of any interest in taking the left as an authority on anything, except their angry, ranting, incoherent, narcissistic selves.

I wish I could remember what was said, but I don’t. I only remember the sense I had of dangerous people who were also stupid, and yet very very arrogant. That just about summed it up.

And now we have those same people, grown old, but they’re not running social media. It’s a younger crowd, and they have decided not only that they’re not going to Question Authority when the Democrats are in charge, but they’re not going to let anyone else Question Authority either.

And so we have this sort of thing:

…[I]n April Facebook blackballed a mother for daring to criticize the radical Marxist and racist policies of her school board.

Since then, Facebook has shut down a pro-Israel Christian site with 77 million followers and blocked the viewing of reviews of a climate book by former Obama science advisor Steve Koonin that raised doubts about the theory of human-caused climate change.

Facebook has made this announcement:

During these initial tests we’ll explore a variety of ways to rank political content in people’s feeds using different signals, and then decide on the approaches we’ll use going forward. COVID-19 information from authoritative health organizations like the CDC and WHO, as well as national and regional health agencies and services from affected countries, will be exempt from these tests. Content from official government agencies and services will also be exempt.

This isn’t just Facebook; it’s everywhere. The left wants freedom of speech when the left is not in control. But once it does take control, the left wants to shut up anyone who disagrees or questions the authority of the left.

The Windham 2020 voting audit continues

The New Neo Posted on by

Last Friday I wrote about the voting audit currently going on in Windham, New Hampshire. To refresh your memory [emphasis added]:

This is the theory at the moment about what may have happened in Windham, and it could affect the whole state:

…“’Something we strongly suspect at this juncture, based on various evidence, is that in some cases, fold lines are being interpreted by the scanners as valid votes,’ said independent auditor Mark Lindeman.

“Auditors said the scanners could be interpreting the fold lines as a vote when they go through a ‘vote target,’ or a candidate’s name on the ballot. They said a lot of Windham’s ballots appear to have fold lines across the target of a Democratic state representative candidate.

“’Wherever the fold happened to be was, I guess, most commonly through my name,’ said the candidate, Kristi St. Laurent.

“Auditors said that could explain why St. Laurent [who had requested the recount because of the closeness of the vote] lost 99 votes in the hand recount last year, while Republican candidates gained votes.

“’Because if someone voted for all four Republican candidates and the ballot happened to have its fold line going through St. Laurent’s target, then that might be interpreted by the machines as an overvote, which would then subtract votes from each of those four Republican candidates,’ said auditor Philip Stark.”

As times has gone by, the auditors have become even more certain that this is what occurred. And yes, it does affect more than Windham:

The exact same pattern of high “overvote” ballots resulting in skewed tabulation results from specific machines has been identified in neighboring counties.

Have they checked more than the neighboring counties? Might it indeed affect the whole state? Made it also affect other states that use the same system, involving paper ballots and Accuvote optical readers?

This is even more interesting:

Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, the folding issue impacts all of the races on the ballots (local, state and federal) because the “overvote” ballots were disqualified.

If I’m understanding the situation, most of the disqualified “overvote” ballots were from people who voted Republican, because of the way the folds went. I would imagine most of them also voted for Republicans in other races, such as the presidential contest. Whether it would have made a difference depends on how many ballots were disqualified, but the numbers were pretty large in Windham.

This would never have been discovered if one of the local races in Windham hadn’t been exceptionally close. New Hampshire (and several other states) has used this voting method and these machines for a long time, and I wonder whether the problem affected other races in previous years. Seems to me it probably did, although wouldn’t the folds be mostly in absentee ballots? This year there were a lot more of those than usual.