RIP Robby Steinhardt, violinist for the rock group Kansas

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s Steinhardt, in a song that I particularly remember because it came out not long after the death of a family member of mine:

From the Rolling Stone obituary:

Steinhardt’s wife, Cindy Steinhardt, confirmed his death on Facebook. Cindy said Steinhardt was admitted to the hospital with acute pancreatitis in May. Not long after, he went into acute septic shock and was placed on life support, and although the outlook was “very grave” at he time, he managed to recover. However, several months later, just as he was about to be released from medical care and moved to a rehab center, Steinhardt suffered another sepsis.

I’ve written about the dangers of sepsis in this previous post.

This is interesting:

Steinhardt was born May 25th, 1950 in Chicago, and was adopted by his parents, Ilsa and Milton Steinhardt, when he was four days old. One year later, as a biography on Steinhardt’s website notes, the family relocated to Lawrence, Kansas, where Milton worked as a music professor and eventually became the Chairman of the Music History and Literature Department at Kansas University. Steinhardt grew up playing and studying classical violin, but in 1972, he joined a fledgling rock based out of Topeka, then known as White Clover.

So Steinhardt seems to have been fortunate to have been adopted by a very musical family, and to have been musical himself.

More:

Steinhardt shared vocal duties with Walsh, with the pair switching between backup and lead; but it was Steinhardt’s violin that helped distinguish Kansas’ sound from other bands…

In a 1992 interview, Livgren offered this assessment of Steinhardt’s contributions to Kansas, saying: “Robby had a totally unique function as a violinist, second vocalist, and MC in a live situation. Robby was the link between the band on the stage and the audience.”

Steinhardt also had major Big Hair.

The song “Dust In the Wind” is very evocative for me, and Steinhardt’s violin is a big part of it. RIP.

The vaccines and COVID and the Texas Democrats

The New Neo Posted on by

Quite a few of the Democrats fleeing the Texas legislature seem to have gotten COVID for their troubles. And yet they were all fully vaccinated.

To me, this demonstrates two things about the vaccine and COVID. The first is that – as was always said – the vaccines are not 100% effective and some vaccinated people will be getting COVID. But what does “getting COVID” mean in this context? Most – actually all, so far – of this group have no symptoms or what’s described as mild symptoms. So the second thing it seems to demonstrate is that even when the vaccine doesn’t prevent COVID, it reduces its more serious effects.

There’s been a lot of brouhaha about the fact that the fleeing Texan Democrats didn’t wear masks on the plane. I think that matters only in that it shows their hypocrisy and rules-flouting, because masks are mandatory on planes. I assume they’re mandatory even on chartered flights, but I’m not sure. At any rate, I think masks are only mildly protective, and even with masks quite a few of these people might have gotten COVID anyway.

Floods wreak havoc in western Europe; botched warnings

The New Neo Posted on by

Massive floods after torrential rains have affected Germany and Belgium, and to a lesser extent Switzerland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, with significant loss of life and property destruction.

European leaders have blamed AGW, as you might have predicted, although there is no way of knowing whether that has anything to do with this event. The beauty of AGW is that any extreme weather event can be blamed on it and no one needs to prove it, nor can it be disproved.

The photos show a lot of property destruction. Over a hundred people are dead and many more missing. Germany, one of the worlds’ most developed countries, is described as having been taken by surprise:

Professor Hannah Cloke, a hydrologist who set up and now advises the European Flood Awareness System – an EU programme designed to provide early warnings of dangerous floods – said alerts were sent to authorities in Europe over the weekend.

“There were alerts going out… saying there’s some very serious rain and floods coming: be aware. It’s then for the national authorities to take that information and go with it,” she said.

Prof Cloke said there were places where the system had “done what it’s designed to do”, with early warnings heeded.

But there were “also places where those warnings did not get through to the people and they did not know it was going to happen”.

Prof Cloke set up the warning system after deadly flooding in Europe in 2002, hoping to prevent such an event from happening again.

But she said the latest flooding had exposed “breaks in the chain”…

Prof Cloke says Germany has a “fragmented” system involving many different authorities in different states, resulting in varying responses.

A spokesman for the German weather service Deutscher Wetterdienst said it had issued a number of warnings about extreme rainfall. He said it was up to other authorities to determine the flood risk and act on evacuating people, or taking other measures…

Prof Cloke said there were places where people did not know the floods were coming, or did not know how to respond to protect themselves and their homes.

“They were putting themselves at risk, they were walking through the floodwater,” she explained…

Friederike Otto, associate director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford, said “urgent education” was needed on the risks of flooding.

“I think people are really not aware that weather can actually be deadly,” she said.

Where’s that vaunted German efficiency when you need it? What a terrible situation, and seemingly preventable if the warning system had done its job. Note also that this system was set up under the EU banner, and it doesn’t sound as though it filtered down to the more local authorities. Nor does it sound as though people have the old-fashioned common sense to understand what a flood is and what it can do – perhaps because we are generally so protected against things.

Unlike Germany, however, the Netherlands avoided fatalities:

The Copernicus Emergency Management Service said it sent more than 25 warnings for specific regions of the Rhine and Maas river basins in the days leading up to the flooding, through its European Flood Awareness System (EFAS), well before heavy rains triggered the flash flooding. But few of these early warnings appear to have been passed on to residents early — and clearly — enough…

In Belgium, too, communication and organization appear to have been problems…

In the Netherlands, just across its borders with Germany’s and Belgium’s flood-devastated areas, the picture is entirely different. The Netherlands too experienced extreme rainfall — albeit not quite as heavy as those in Germany and Belgium — and it hasn’t escaped unscathed. But its towns are not entirely submerged and not a single person has died. Officials were better prepared and were able to communicate with people quickly, said Professor Jeroen Aerts, head of the Water and Climate Risk department at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.

“We better saw the wave coming, and where it was going,” Aerts told CNN.

The Netherlands has a long history of water management and their success in the face of this disaster may offer the world a blueprint on how to handle floods…

Much of the [The Netherlands] is essentially sinking.

Its water management infrastructure is among the best in the world — involving giant walls with moveable arms the size of two football fields, coastal dunes that are reinforced with some 12 million cubic meters of sand per year, and simple things, like dikes and giving rivers more room to swell by lowering their beds — or floors — and expanding their banks.

Its strength lies largely in its organization. The country’s infrastructure is managed by a branch of government devoted solely to water…

Oh, and it had less rain.

However, unlike the Netherlands, most countries are not organized around water control. It seems that in Europe this time, all the information was there to have organized an evacuation and prevented the worst loss of life, although not the property damage. But it wasn’t done.

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?