The computer program can’t be overriden

The New Neo Posted on by

I ordered three bottles of vitamins recently from Amazon. It seemed a simple transaction: Amazon would be fulfilling the order, and they had them in stock. They’re vitamins I happen to like and it’s almost impossible to find them elsewhere, so that’s where Amazon comes in.

Three bottles put me over the top for free shipping – supposedly. But the computer program didn’t seem to think so. I spent about 45 minutes trying to override it, but finally I gave up and called Amazon customer service.

That was marginally better. The guy on the other end explained there was nothing he could do to override what the program was doing, but he could give me a refund for the shipping. To get to that point it took about a half hour of explaining over and over, and listening to him give his required little spiel.

A couple of days later I noticed that I’d only gotten partial credit for the shipping. And then the vitamins – when they came – arrived in three separate packages, a row of identical triplets.

Another call to Amazon gave me a full refund for the shipping, and I disposed of all the extra and unneeded packaging. But the whole thing was frustrating and time-consuming.

Modern convenience.

There. I feel better now.

COVID-19 in Iran

The New Neo Posted on by

From Austin Bay:

When COVID-19 struck Iran, the ayatollahs followed the same script. They lied and denied, and the contagion began to kill.

Pompeo’s insinuation that the regime harmed its own people had a factual basis. The day before he offered help, evidence emerged that Iran was a COVID-19 hotspot. Moreover, infected Iranians had spread the pathogen to several other countries.

Pompeo challenged the dictatorship to act responsibly and let competent international actors provide direct aid. Dictatorships like Iran’s use aid as a political tool. They deny aid to dissidents. Iranian political authorities, from low to high, also have a notorious reputation for stealing food and medical aid to either sell on the black market or use themselves. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard is reportedly hoarding masks…

No one knows how many Iranians have contracted the virus, though that applies to 50 other nations as well. But Iran has a lot. Estimates range from 2,400 to 10,000. Senior leaders themselves may be responsible for spreading the disease. Iran’s Deputy Health Minister Iraj Harirchi and vice president for Women and Family Affairs Masoumeh Ebtekar have COVID-19. An Iranian website reported Ebtekar met with President Hassan Rouhani and other ministers shortly before testing positive. One report says 23 members of parliament have the virus.

We don’t know what’s happening in Iran, and not just with COVID-19. But there certainly are signs that the illness is worse there than in most countries. And there is no reason we should trust any report coming from Iran, as was demonstrated by their blatant and obvious lying about the downing of the Ukrainian airplane, Flight 752.

Warren drops out of the race

The New Neo Posted on by

And then there were two.

Or three – is Tulsi still hanging on? Hard to tell, but if so, her influence is negligible. It’s Biden vs. Sanders now.

Warren is dropping out but making no endorsement at this point. I’m not surprised at her stalling; it’s a tricky conundrum for her. If she endorses Sanders, whom she seems to detest (or is that fake, too?), she at least goes with her own basic ideology. But if she does that, the Democratic establishment will turn their backs on her. A Biden endorsement will get her a lot more later on.

I think it will be a Biden endorsement for Liz. It makes more sense in terms of her own self-interest. But she won’t do it for a while.

The current thought is that Warren dropping out helps Sanders, however, because her votes will go to him, and that her staying in through Super Tuesday helped Biden, because she siphoned votes away from Sanders.

I agree that that her leaving the race is more likely to help Sanders than Biden, but I learned from the GOP battle in 2016 that those sorts of predictions are very iffy. Every time someone dropped out of that race I thought his or her votes would go to someone other than Trump, but often Trump seemed to either get the lion’s share or a significant amount.

Trump had this to tweet:

It seems apparent to me that Trump is trying to fan the flames of anger in Bernie’s supporters, so that they are less likely to support the eventual Democratic nominee, who will almost certainly be Biden.

A couple of years ago Warren seemed like a rising force in the Democratic Party, but she was limited by her own grating personality. She’s one of those people who doesn’t grow on you, even if you’re a Democrat. She always reminded me of certain energetic gym teachers I had, full of wearyingly peppy harangues, and looking like if they had a makeover they’d look really pretty, or at least much prettier.

I can say that because I’m a woman. If Chris Matthews said it, he’d be fired.

And just for fun, we have:

Laurence Tribe on Chuck’s Schumer’s SCOTUS threat

The New Neo Posted on by

Laurence Tribe is as partisan a Trump-hating leftist law professor as you might ever find. And yet even Tribe cannot defend Schumer’s threats against Kavanaugh and Gorsuch.

Here’s Tribe’s tweet on the subject:

If you look at the replies to that tweet of Tribe’s, the responses mainly come down to one of two things. The first is the idea of an equivalence (a fake one) between Schumer’s threats and Trump’s past criticism of some SCOTUS justices. The second is that all Schumer was doing was defending women’s reproductive rights (that is, abortion) in a perfectly reasonable manner.

There is no equivalence between a threat and a criticism. And trying to argue for a certain policy does not excuse making a threat.

Schumer the oracle threatens again [UPDATE: And Justice Roberts responds]

The New Neo Posted on by

[See also ADDENDUM below.]

Remember when Chuck Schumer threatened that the intelligence community would be out to get Trump if Trump did anything to restrict and even criticize them? Here it is, if your memory needs refreshing. Schumer made this statement after Trump was elected but before he even was inaugurated:

The new leader of Democrats in the Senate says Donald Trump is being “really dumb” for picking a fight with intelligence officials, suggesting they have ways to strike back, after the president-elect speculated Tuesday that his “so-called” briefing about Russian cyberattacks had been delayed in order to build a case.

“Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer Tuesday evening on MSNBC after host Rachel Maddow informed him that intelligence sources told NBC news that the briefing had not been delayed.

Of course, that was the least of it – the spying on Trump and his campaign had been well under way for some time, and that “briefing” was no real briefing at all.

Now Schumer is doing much the same to SCOTUS justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh:

In a bizarre speech at what appears to be a pro-abortion event, Senate Minority Leader Schumer accused either Republicans of “taking away fundamental rights.”

Schumer then threatened Supreme Court justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh saying, “you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price! You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions!”

I doubt anything will happen to Schumer as a result of such threats. But since SCOTUS justices aren’t elected but are appointed for life, it’s an especially ominous statement from Schumer. This is the leader of the Democratic Party in the Senate.

[NOTE: More here.]

[ADDENDUM: (Hat tip, commenter “Kate.”)

Chief Justice Roberts issued a rare rebuke to Schumer. Schumer’s spokesperson then insulted Roberts in a reply, and tried to claim that Schumer had only been talking about Republican lawmakers and not the justices at all.

Roberts replied in his remarkable written statement, obtained by Fox News: “This morning, Senator Schumer spoke at a rally in front of the Supreme Court while a case was being argued inside. Senator Schumer referred to two Members of the Court by name and said he wanted to tell them that ‘You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You will not know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.'”

Roberts continued: “Justices know that criticism comes with the territory, but threatening statements of this sort from the highest levels of government are not only inappropriate, they are dangerous. All Members of the Court will continue to do their job, without fear or favor, from whatever quarter.”

Schumer spokesman Justin Goodman quickly responded by accusing Roberts of bias, further escalating the confrontation. Goodman insisted that Schumer was addressing Republican lawmakers when he said a “price” would be paid — even though Schumer had explicitly named Kavanaugh and Gorsuch.

According to that article, what Schumer had said was this:

I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price!” Schumer warned. “You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

Unless there’s a missing ellipsis, this was a statement clearly aimed at the justices and not at Republican lawmakers in general.

Here’s what the spokesperson for Schumer said in his statement on Chief Justice Roberts:

“Women’s health care rights are at stake and Americans from every corner of the country are in anguish about what the court might do to them,” Goodman said in a statement to Fox News. “Sen. Schumer’s comments were a reference to the political price Senate Republicans will pay for putting these justices on the court, and a warning that the justices will unleash a major grassroots movement on the issue of reproductive rights against the decision.”

He added: “For Justice Roberts to follow the right wing’s deliberate misinterpretation of what Sen. Schumer said, while remaining silent when President Trump attacked Justices [Sonia] Sotomayor and [Ruth Bader] Ginsberg last week, shows Justice Roberts does not just call balls and strikes.”

And you know what? I just found a clip of Schumer’s speech, and you can watch it for himself. It makes it completely clear that Schumer’s threat was to the two SCOTUS justices and not to Republican legislators. This clip is freely available and both Goodman and Schumer must know that. But they don’t care, apparently. They would rather lie, and they believe (perhaps rightly) that they will get away with it:

More on November, 2020

The New Neo Posted on by

The near-certainty that the Democratic nominee will be Biden raises the specter of the Democrats coming back and picking up where Obama left off, only worse. We dodged that bullet in 2016. But the question has always been whether that was only a little blip on the long Gramscian march and the Democrats’ hope for permanent takeover of the American electorate. Simply put: will the US inexorably move further and further left?

Biden’s supposed “moderation” is only such compared to Bernie. And I doubt that a single one of my Democrat friends (who are quite typical, politically, of much of the Democratic electorate) would hesitate to vote for either Biden or Sanders or any other sentient (or semi-sentient) being if that person becomes the Democratic nominee. They hate Trump with a white hot passion.

Biden’s running mate will probably be a woman, someone like Klobuchar or Kamala Harris (remember her?). Someone female and young, preferably ethnic although Biden really doesn’t need that since he already has the black vote pretty well sewn up because of his Obama connection.

I believe Biden as president would be more a less a figurehead, and the people in charge would be the same people who were prominent in the Obama administration, doing the same things only more so because they feel the country is ready for more open leftism. The Deep State will really go to town, as well. Legislation, however, depends on who controls Congress. If it’s the Democrats, the sky’s the limit.

Biden may not get a majority of the votes at the Democratic convention, of course. But unless Bernie does, it will be Biden all the way, because the establishment will make certain of it. The “interesting” result to watch would be if Bernie goes into the convention with a plurality and not a majority, and then the party manages to award the nomination to Biden anyway. But at the moment, it seems to me far far more likely that Biden will get the plurality and then the Bernie supporters won’t have as much to complain about if Bernie doesn’t end up as the nominee.

They’ll complain anyway, of course. But who are they gonna vote for instead of Biden? Trump? Not likely. In fact, highly unlikely. Most of them will capitulate, I think, just as most of the PUMAs did in 2008.

Would I prefer Bernie to be the nominee instead of Biden? Yes and no. I am terrified of a Sanders presidency. But I’m also terrified of a Biden presidency. I think I’m slightly more afraid of a Sanders presidency than of a Biden presidency. But I also think if Sanders were the candidate he’d be less likely to win the election. So in the graph of fear they’re probably equal: Sanders less likely to win an election but more frightening if he does win, whereas Biden is a bit less frightening if he wins (only a tiny bit) but somewhat more likely to win.

How likely is the eventual nominee to win? That will only become clearer as we get closer to November.

More on Super-dee-duper Tuesday

The New Neo Posted on by

Ah, how the worm hath turned! Biden was a nowhere man, and now he’s top of the world, ma, top of the world.

The MSM is treating Biden like he’s the comeback kid. Well, he ain’t no kid, and although it is a remarkable comeback, it’s not really due to Biden’s own efforts. The timely withdrawals of Klobuchar and Buttigieg were critical to Biden’s showing. Had they not done so, I think it would instead have been the dread Bernie who was a happy guy on Super Tuesday.

Another factor was Warren staying in. She quite obviously has little to zero chance of winning the whole thing, just like the dropouts, but she didn’t exit the race and that probably hurt Sanders the most. We can safely assume the other two were offered either threats or rewards (I think the latter) or both to drop out, and they acquiesced because they would gain more from leaving than from staying at this point. Maybe much more. But Warren is a bit different. I think – unlike Klobuchar and Buttigieg, whom I believe entered the race never expecting to win but just to gain exposure and perks – Warren (at least initially) thought she had a very good chance of becoming the nominee. So dropping out before Super Tuesday would have been harder for her. She may have also been offered something to stay in and cut into Bernie’s totals, but I don’t think the idea of remaining went against the grain for her. She probably also thought she’d do better in Massachusetts yesterday than she did, and wanted to test those waters.

Bloomberg, on the other hand, probably wasn’t offered anything by the Party to drop out. He’s really not a loyal party member, having been a Republican for quite a bit of his career. And at his age, the party probably wasn’t offering him anything he might want. He also wasn’t getting much support in most states, and therefore his continuing presence didn’t matter all that much to the Democratic establishment, although they probably would have preferred that he leave. So he stayed in through Tuesday just to see what would happen, and he didn’t do well. Now he has “suspended” his campaign. Maybe he thinks that at some point he’ll be called on to break an impasse. If so, he’ll be tanned, rested, and ready. The money he’s lost is just a small bite to him; I don’t think it matters all that much. The humiliation is probably more painful.

I think the writing’s on the wall: Biden will be the nominee. His strength was in the South, and most of the southern states have voted, and he may struggle a bit more in the states that remain. But I don’t think there’s any real chance of a groundswell of popular demand for Bernie – unless, somehow, Biden makes the Mother of All Gaffes at some point in the not-too-distant future and reveals his utter mental unfitness in a way that cannot be denied, even by the MSM and the party regulars. Even if Bernie has some sort of renascence (which I very much doubt, short of a total Biden meltdown), he would have to have a majority of the votes on the first ballot at the convention to avoid the superdelegates handing the nomination to Biden on the second ballot.

So there we have it. That enormous and enormously diverse Democratic field has suddenly collapsed down to two old white guys, with a frontrunner who was a mediocrity even at his peak, is loaded with allegations of corruption, is only in the running at all these days because Obama plucked him from near-obscurity in 2008, and is probably mentally challenged. But he has a chance of winning because the entire MSM, Democratic Party, and Deep State will do their level best to prop him up no matter what he does, and will continue to do their best to destroy President Trump.

A big night for Biden

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: See update below.]

Biden did very very well today, although there are no returns yet from the huge state of California and not all that many from Texas, which awards 228 delegates to California’s 415.

It’s a funny thing how, prior to South Carolina, almost no one gave Biden much of a chance. Now he’s suddenly the likely frontrunner. I think this reflects two things. The first is that a lot of contenders for the so-called “moderate” position have dropped out and thrown their support to Biden. The other is that most Democrats will vote for whichever candidate the party nominates – anyone, anyone other than the hated Trump. Once Biden won South Carolina, got those endorsements, and had fewer rivals still in the race, and once the MSM fully communicated that Bernie was too honest about his radicalism to win the election, it became much easier to say, “Biden? So be it.”

Almost nobody’s favorite, but a tremendous number of people’s safe refuge at this point.

I can’t find the link right now, but it’s pretty clear that the black vote is going overwhelmingly to Biden and the Hispanic vote to Sanders. The first apparently represents nostalgia for the Obama years. The second may represent some sort of yearning for Venezuela North. More moderate white Democrats are going for Biden and more radical white Democrats for Sanders.

Warren is nowhere. Even in Massachusetts, with 61% reporting, she comes in third (20.2%) to Biden (34%) and Sanders (27.3%). But her reluctance to drop out probably hurts Sanders more than it hurts Biden. And Bloomberg – well, suffice to say he gained some delegates but very few, and he’s going to “reassess” tomorrow..

Because the Democrats award delegates proportionately rather than winner-takes-all, tonight’s victories for Biden don’t represent such a lopsided win as it might seem. But tonight, Biden really does have Joementum.

UPDATE 11:45 PM:

Sanders wins California, as expected. It’s probably the Hispanic vote the determined that. But remember, delegates are awarded proportionately, so it’s not as though Bernie gets the whole 415. The important thing is the delegate count:

Who comes out ahead in the delegate race is still being assessed, because they are allocated proportionally and not all votes have been counted. Approximate total delegate counts through Super Tuesday are 640 for Biden, 577 for Sanders, 140 for Bloomberg, and 103 for Warren…

To win the nomination, candidates must receive 1,991 of the total 3,979 pledged delegates at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) this summer in Milwaukee, Wis.

If no candidate receives a majority on the first ballot, hundreds of so-called “superdelegates,” or party insiders, are allowed to cast their ballots. Roughly one-third of the 3,979 total delegates were at stake on Tuesday.

You best believe that if neither Biden nor Sanders wins on the first ballot, those superdelegates will be voting for Biden and will put him over the top, if possible.

Netanyahu leads, but needs some defections to create a coalition government

The New Neo Posted on by

Israeli politics is nothing if not complicated. And the last few elections – which have come with great rapidity, in an effort to break an impasse – have been especially complex in their results. But the upshot is that until now it has been impossible to form a coalition.

Yesterday’s election was still another attempt to break that jam. In the meantime, the anti-Netanyahu forces have mounted Lawfare against him, with multiple corruption charges that I’ve already discussed at some length in this previous post.

And yet, to the intense frustration of his enemies, Netanyahu appears to have gained seats in yesterday’s election rather than lost them. But feeding his critics’ hope is that fact that he still hasn’t won enough seats to not have to continue to wheel and deal to form a coalition government:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc of right-wing and religious parties remained on the edge of obtaining a blocking majority in the next Knesset late Tuesday night after the Central Election Committee completed counting 4,156,479 votes from 10,305 of the 10,615 regular polling stations, some 97% of all polling stations.

Among the votes that have already been counted, Netanyahu’s Likud won 36 seats, which together with Shas’s 10, United Torah Judaism’s seven and Yamina’s six would be 59 – two seats short of the 61 MKs needed for a majority.

Absentee ballots from IDF soldiers, prisoners, diplomats and other emissaries were to be counted Tuesday night…

Altogether there are some 400,000 votes that have yet to be counted.

Military votes tend to be on the right, but I have no idea whether there would be enough of them to make a difference.

How can Netanyahu get to a working coalition? Here’s an article about it:

The MKs decided that they would continue to coordinate as one bloc under Netanyahu’s leadership in order to form a right-wing government as soon as possible. They also decided to not rule out adding other parties except the Joint List…

Netanyahu said in his victory speech early Tuesday at Expo Tel Aviv that he would form a nationalist government. He did not rule out adding parties from the Center and Left, but the Likud crowd shouted at him not to form a national unity government with Blue and White…

Netanyahu’s spokesman Yonatan Urich told Army Radio on Tuesday morning that Likud officials had already spoken to four possible defectors from parties to the left of Likud. MKs suspected of being on that list issued denials.

Blue and White is a party that was formed for the express purpose of running against Netanyahu in the 2019 election, and the party’s head, Benny Gantz, is strongly opposed to Netanyahu.

Will Netanyahu succeed this time? Maybe:

It was not immediately clear who they could convince to defect from the opposition. Under Israeli law, Netanyahu will have 28 days to do so or risk the process collapsing, leading to the unappealing possibility of a fourth election later this year…

Regardless, Monday’s result – the best for Likud in all three [recent] elections – was a stunning turnaround for a man two weeks away from the start of a major criminal corruption trial.

Again, for details of the charges in that “major corruption trial” please see this previous post.

My gynecologist on the topic of “Medicare for All”

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I had my regular exam at the gynecologist. At the end of the visit, I was discussing with my doctor the issue of how often Medicare reimburses for visits at this point, and what are the reasons that restriction can be overridden.

She sighed in frustration and said that Medicare makes the doctors jump through a lot of hoops. And then added (even though she knows nothing of my politics), “If this Medicare-for-All thing passes, all the doctors are going to quit.”

I was surprised not so much by what she said as that she said it to me at all. I sort of chuckled and nodded, and then the visit was over. But where I live I just about never – and I mean never – hear anyone these days make an anti-leftist comment without prior knowledge that they’re talking to someone who already agrees with them. What’s more, this doctor is quite young; I’d say in her 30s. And yet she didn’t hesitate to say it.

I take that as a good sign.

Super-Duper Tuesday

The New Neo Posted on by

After the votes are counted on Super Tuesday the race for the nomination always starts looking more clear. So that should be the case by tomorrow, even in this murkier-than-usual season.

There are lots of prognostications; for example, see this from FiveThirtyEight:

Biden is now about twice as likely as Sanders to win a plurality of pledged delegates, according to our primary model, which gives him a 65 percent chance of doing so compared with a 34 percent chance for Sanders. This represents the culmination of a trend that has been underway in the model for about a week; it started to shift toward Biden once polls showed the potential for him to win big in South Carolina — and it anticipated a polling bounce in the Super Tuesday states if he did win big there. Still, even after South Carolina, Biden’s plurality chances had risen only to 32 percent, compared with 64 percent for Sanders. That means the polling bounce from the events of the past few days has been bigger than the model anticipated.

So they seemed to be saying that just a few days ago they were predicting a 2 to 1 chance that Sanders would win a plurality (not a majority) of the delegates, not just on Super Tuesday but on the first ballot at the convention. And now that ratio has suddenly reversed, more or less. Neither prediction is what you’d call very persuasive or powerful, and what’s more there’s this:

To be clear, however, there is still a lot of uncertainty. We’ve been talking about delegate pluralities, which obscures the fact that the most likely outcome in the model is still that no one wins a majority of pledged delegates. And we should note that the lack of a majority does not necessarily imply a contested convention. For instance, if Biden enters the convention with 46 percent of delegates and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg with 10 percent, they could strike a deal where Bloomberg delegates vote for Biden on the first ballot.

All of that is pretty obvious, IMHO. Of course Biden was going to get a bounce from his South Carolina victory plus the two dropouts (as well as others) suddenly endorsing him. That was one of the main points of Buttigieg and Klobuchar quitting – to elevate the sagging flagging Biden. But he doesn’t help his own cause by incidents like this:

However, it’s not like the Democratic voters have so many choices left that make any more sense than Biden. If I were a Democratic voter, I know I would be depressed right about now. Hey, I’m not a Democratic voter, and I’m still depressed that someone as obviously past his prime (and his prime was never particularly good) as Biden and/or as radical, raging, and just plain not healthy as Sanders can be the frontrunners in any major party. But that’s the way it is – unless someone from the outside swoops down and rescues the party, which I very much doubt will happen.

And another sad thing is that I think whoever is nominated, the 2020 election will be close. I know a lot of people think it will be a blowout for Trump, but I’m not one of those people. The nonstop propaganda war against Trump, plus his very own personality which some love and some hate, has made this election closer than I think it should be considering his accomplishments as president.