Physicist Max Born is singer Olivia Newton-John’s grandfather

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s one of those random facts, perhaps meaningless, that I nevertheless find interesting.

From Born’s Wiki page:

Max Born was a German physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a number of notable physicists in the 1920s and 1930s. Born won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics for his “fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially in the statistical interpretation of the wave function”…

In January 1933, the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. In May, Born became one of six Jewish professors at Göttingen who were suspended with pay; Franck had already resigned. In twelve years they had built Göttingen into one of the world’s foremost centres for physics. Born began looking for a new job, writing to Maria Göppert-Mayer at Johns Hopkins University and Rudi Ladenburg at Princeton University. He accepted an offer from St John’s College, Cambridge. At Cambridge, he wrote a popular science book, The Restless Universe, and a textbook, Atomic Physics, that soon became a standard text, going through seven editions. His family soon settled into life in England, with his daughters Irene and Gritli becoming engaged to Welshman Brinley (Bryn) Newton-John (Olivia Newton-John’s parents; Born is Olivia’s grandfather and Irene is her mother) and Englishman Maurice Pryce respectively.

Not only that, but Olivia Newton-John is not the only one of Born’s descendants in the music or acting business. There are more:

Born was survived by his wife Hedi and their children Irene, Gritli and Gustav. Singer Olivia Newton-John is a daughter of Irene (1914-2003), while Gustav is the father of musician and academic Georgina Born and actor Max Born (Fellini Satyricon) who are thus also Max’s grandchildren. His great-grandchildren include songwriter Brett Goldsmith, singer Tottie Goldsmith, racing car driver Emerson Newton-John, and singer Chloe Rose Lattanzi.

Well, they say that an aptitude for music and math are often linked.

Another effort to get rid of my extra stuff – and this time a more successful one

The New Neo Posted on by

During the COVID lockdown time, some people engaged in self-improvement projects. They went on a diet and got fit. They decluttered their homes. They learned a foreign language.

Not me. I languished. Even though I was home practically all the time, it seemed to sap my energy. One of the things I knew I needed to do was to get rid of extra stuff and streamline and order my belongings. But with no one coming to visit, I lost some of the motivation I’d always had for cleaning up and clearing out: guests.

I’m not a hoarder, thank goodness, so the situation’s not utterly out of control. But instead of getting better, it got somewhat worse. Papers piled up. I’d start a cleaning task and run out of steam. Tomorrow I’ll do it, I thought. But tomorrow came and since there was no time pressure, I postponed things. Again. And again.

But now that we’re free to move about the country, and people are visiting once more, I’ve found a burst of energy. Suddenly I was able to do more decluttering in a day than I’d been able to do for months. I’m not finished, by any means. But at least I’m on the way to tackling a great deal of it.

At last.

And for quite a while, no masks either. In the market I would say only about 10-20% of the customers are wearing masks. I even was in a store the other day and not all the employees were wearing masks; that’s a first for me.

It’s a big relief, isn’t it, to see faces again?

Robert Woodson and The Woodson Center

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I saw Robert Woodson briefly on Mark Levin’s show, and the work he’s doing at the Woodson Center seemed impressive. So I’m calling your attention to the Center’s website. From the “about us” description:

Low-income individuals and neighborhood-based organizations should play a central role in the design and implementation of programs to address the problems of their communities.

An effective approach to societal problems must be driven by the same principles that function in the market economy, recognizing the importance of competition, entrepreneurship, cost efficiency, and an expectation of return on investment.

Value-generating and faith-based initiatives are uniquely qualified to address problems of poverty that are related to behavior and life choices.

The main focus of the center is youth violence intervention and prevention in inner cities. I don’t know much more about the Center except for what Woodson said, and what I’ve read on the website. But it seems like they’re doing worthwhile work, and there’s no question that it’s needed work.

Here’s Woodson’s Wiki page, and this is what he has to say about the genesis of something he calls the 1776 Unites campaign:

In February 2020, The Woodson Center launched the 1776 Unites campaign, with the support of scholars, journalists, and entrepreneurs like Carol Swain, Glenn Loury, John Sibley Butler, Clarence Page, Wilfred Reilly, Robert Cherry, and Coleman Hughes, among others. Woodson has stated that his central motivation in founding 1776 Unites was to counter the “lethal” narratives embedded in The 1619 Project. “This garbage that is coming down from the scholars and writers from 1619 is most hypocritical because they don’t live in communities [that are] suffering,” he said. In an interview with Fox News host Mark Levin, Woodson called The 1619 Project’s thesis “one of the most diabolical, self-destructive ideas that I’ve ever heard”. He argued that the assumptions behind The 1619 Project are actually a form of “white supremacy” as they are predicated on black Americans having no agency and being incapable of overcoming adverse circumstances.

Darryl Cooper explains what the right has been thinking for the last few years

The New Neo Posted on by

I highlighted Darryl Cooper’s explanatory Twitter thread in this post last Friday. I knew the minute I read the thread that it was something special, because it accomplished a task that had seemed extraordinarily difficult: explaining the genesis of the last five or so years of step-by-step deepening alarm and disillusionment on the right in a way that almost anyone could understand it.

Later, Tucker Carlson read the thread on his show and it went viral. Trump even cited it in a speech. The author probably didn’t know quite what hit him, but now he’s written an essay appearing on Substack that explains the whole thing further.

Here’s one of many highlights:

For two years, Trump supporters had been called traitors and Russian bots for casting ballots for “Vladimir Putin’s c*ck holster.” They’d been subjected to a two-year gaslighting campaign by politicians, government agencies, and elite media. It took real fortitude to stand up to the unanimous mockery and scorn of these powerful institutions. But those institutions had gambled their power and credibility, and they’d lost, and now Trump supporters expected a reckoning. When no reckoning was forthcoming – when the Greenwalds, and Taibbis, and Matés of the world were not handed the New York Times’ revoked Pulitzers for correctly and courageously standing against the tsunami on the biggest political story in years – these people shed many illusions about how power really operates in their country.

Trump supporters know – I think everyone knows – that Donald Trump would have been impeached and probably indicted if Robert Mueller had proven that he’d paid a foreign spy to gather damaging information on Hillary Clinton from sources connected to Russian intelligence and disseminate that information in the press. Many of Trump’s own supporters wouldn’t have objected to his removal if that had happened. Of course that is exactly what the Clinton campaign actually did, yet there were no consequences for it. Indeed, there has been almost no criticism of it.

Trump supporters had gone from worrying the collusion might be real, to suspecting it might be fake, to seeing proof that it was all a scam. Then they watched as every institution – government agencies, the press, Congressional committees, academia – blew right past it and gaslit them for another year. To this day, something like half the country still believes that Trump was caught red-handed engaging in treason with Russia, and only escaped a public hanging because of a DOJ technicality regarding the indictment of sitting presidents. Most galling, conservatives suspect that within a few decades liberals will use their command over the culture to ensure that virtually everyone believes it. This is where people whose political identities have for decades been largely defined by a naive belief in what they learned in civics class began to see the outline of a Regime that crossed not only partisan, but all institutional boundaries. They’d been taught that America didn’t have Regimes, but what else was this thing they’d seen step out from the shadows to unite against their interloper president?

Much of Cooper’s essay repeats his Twitter thread, but in less chopped-up form. I think it’s masterful. But again, there are some things with which I disagree. For example, Cooper still makes a point with which I took issue in my initial post when I wrote:

I don’t agree with everything [Cooper writes]; in particular, I don’t think that “the same institutions would have taken opposite sides if it was a Tulsi Gabbard vs Jeb Bush election.” No; Gabbard may be an unusual Democrat with a few conservative values, but she’s a Democrat and the press would have supported her win if it was her vs. Jeb.

There’s something else Cooper writes with which I disagree: “Some Trump supporters, unfortunately, thought the license for political violence applied to everyone; the hundreds of them now sitting in federal jails learned the hard way that it wasn’t true.” That’s true of some who actually did engage in violence, but it wasn’t true of the “hundreds” sitting in federal jails. Most of the people locked up right now for January 6th offenses engaged in no violence at all.

[NOTE: I also recommend this essay by Roger Kimball on the topic of Cooper’s Twitter thread.]

LEGO crimes

The New Neo Posted on by

Here are some of the allegations against January 6th demonstrator Robert Morss:

Federal agents seized a plastic replica of the Capitol building from the Pennsylvania home of Robert Morss during his arrest on June 11. Justice Department officials are citing the Lego model as evidence in the criminal case against Morss for his involvement in the January 6 protest: “During his arrest, law enforcement recovered some clothing and other items that appear to match those he carried with him on the 6th—including a ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flag, a neck gaiter, a military utility bag, a black tourniquet, and military fatigues. (Law enforcement also recoverd [sic] a fully constructed U.S. Capitol Lego set.)”

So wrote government prosecutors in a July 2 filing asking the D.C. District Court to deny Morss’ release while he awaits trial on nine counts, including assaulting police officers and disorderly conduct.

While dangerous criminals daily threaten the safety of innocent people in cities across the country—and many are released on bail—the FBI continues its nationwide manhunt for Capitol protesters while the Justice Department repeatedly petitions the court to keep the accused incarcerated for months on end.

Attorney General Merrick Garland, who despicably compares January 6 to the Oklahoma City bombing, recently bragged his office reached a “benchmark” of 500 arrests.

Please read the whole thing; it’s not just about Morss.

You will almost certainly be completely unsurprised to learn that the DOJ lied about the state of Morss’s LEGO set. It turns out that it was not assembled:

The US Capitol Lego set that federal authorities claimed to have recovered from an alleged rioter “fully constructed” was actually not assembled at all, according to new court papers.

An assistant US attorney in DC clarified in a letter filed on Friday that all 1,000-plus pieces of the plastic model seized from Robert Morss were still loose in the box.

“Please note that after a review of the photographs from the search, there appears to have been a miscommunication and that statement appears to be inaccurate,” prosecutors wrote.

“The Lego set was in a box and not fully constructed at the time of the search, as pictured below,” they added.

So, how’d they get it wrong? It’s not an easy error to make. And what else have they gotten wrong, and/or lied about?

Morss is charged with assaulting police officers. I wondered what the details were on that; did he hit anyone, for example? Here’s what I’ve found so far:

According to court documents and video footage, on Jan. 6, Morss was on the lower west terrace of the U.S. Capitol, where he led an assault on police and organized support from other rioters. In body-worn camera (BWC) footage, shortly after 2 p.m., Morss can be seen unsuccessfully trying to push through a fence separating the crowd from the Capitol while officers repeatedly asked the crowd to back up. As depicted in the BWC footage, after being asked to back up, Morss grabbed an officer’s baton and tried to rip it away. He is seen again attempting to rip items, including a metal fencing barricade and a helmet visor, from the hands of officers. At 2:57 p.m., Morss is visible in surveillance footage at the entrance of the tunnel to the Capitol. Morss is seen directly confronting officers, pulling against their shields and passing the stolen shields back into the crowd. Around 3:07 p.m., Morss yelled out, “Hey everyone with a shield, back up and organize! Make a shield wall! Organize right now and make a shield wall.”

Morss walked out of the tunnel around 3:14 p.m. and rejoined the crowd. At 3:48 p.m., he was captured on video near the archway entrance to the lower west terrace doors, where he and other rioters climbed through a broken window into the Capitol around 4:17 p.m. Video posted online shows rioters inside the room handing through the broken window furniture which other rioters used to attack officers guarding the lower west terrace doors. Morss can be seen around 4:30 p.m. inside the room and looking out after another window had been broken.

Is taking a baton from an officer and not using it on anyone “assaulting” the officer? It’s something, but is it assault?

And what if the LEGO set had been fully assembled? What would that have indicated of any import? Nothing. A LEGO set obviously is nothing like an architectural drawing. It gives no inside information beyond the most rudimentary nature of the building itself, familiar even to many children. In fact, it’s primarily a child’s toy.

It’s a ludicrous charge not worthy of mention even if true (which it wasn’t). We already know that Morss went to the Capitol to protest. Having an interest in the Capitol is a given, and meaningless. The charge is there in order to indicate some sort of thought crime in which even contemplating the building itself is considered evidence of some sort of evil intent.

And of course, as we already know, it was a lie anyway. Maybe the next thing the prosecutors will do is to claim that the fact that the LEGO set was still in pieces means that Morss actually wanted to blow up the building and render it destroyed – in small bits. No argument is too absurd for them.

Protests in Cuba: sanctions, COVID, and liberty

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What’s going on in Cuba?:

From the Malecón, Havana’s famous seawall near the old city, to small towns in Artemisa province and Palma Soriano, the second-largest city in Santiago de Cuba province, videos live-streamed on Facebook showed thousands of people walking and riding bikes and motorcycles along streets while chanting “Freedom!” “Down with Communism!” and “Patria y Vida” — Homeland and Life — which has become a battle cry among activists after a viral music video turned the revolutionary slogan “Homeland or Death” on its head.

“We are not afraid!” chanted Samantha Regalado while she recorded hundreds of people walking along a narrow street in Palma Soriano…

Images circulating on social media of angry crowds overturning police cars are unseen in a country where the communist government has kept a tight grip on the population for more than six decades.

Last time Cubans took to the streets to protest against the communist government was in 1994 and Fidel Castro was alive. But the uprising, known as the Maleconazo, only took place in Havana and didn’t last long, as the former Cuban leader quickly turned the demonstrations into a massive exodus after he opened Cuba’s maritime borders. Thousands of Cubans left the island in makeshift boats and rickety rafts, in what became known as the balsero crisis…

In an impromptu televised address later in the afternoon, Díaz-Canel blamed the protests on U.S. efforts to tighten the embargo, with the alleged intention to “provoke a social uprising” that would justify a military intervention.

Visibly upset and raising his voice, the Cuban leader warned that protesters would face a strong response and called “all revolutionaries” to confront them on the streets “with firmness and courage.”…

Cuba is in the throes of its worst economic contraction in over three decades, as chronic inefficiencies and paralyzing bureaucracy have gradually eroded the country’s production capacity, including the essential food and agriculture sectors. Trump-era sanctions have reduced access to vital economic lifelines like remittances, and foreign investment has plunged. Painful currency reforms this year have sent inflation soaring, and long lines for food have again become commonplace.

I don’t pretend to have any inside information on this, but here are my guesses: these protestors are generations removed from the initial Cuban revolution. The Castros are no longer in power – at least, in terms of holding the reins officially. The new leaders, even though under the sway of the same old Castroite forces, may be lacking that same combination of zeal, hardness, and charisma. Younger generations see the internet and know that they’re not doing well in Cuba, and some of them blame the many-decades-long regime much more than they blame any sanctions. Plus, among at least some people, there really is a hunger for liberty. What happens next to the protestors really depends on how hardline the regime is willing to get with them, and how much energy and coordination the protestors have.

Also, note the reference to “Trump-era sanctions.” The Biden administration initially reacted to the protests very tepidly, by issuing COVID-focused statements such as this one:

Biden himself finally spoke up with this:

“We stand with the Cuban people and their clarion call for freedom and relief from the tragic grip of the pandemic and from the decades of repression and economic suffering to which they have been subjected by Cuba’s authoritarian regime,” Biden said in a statement.

“The Cuban people are bravely asserting fundamental and universal rights. Those rights, including the right of peaceful protest and the right to freely determine their own future, must be respected,” Biden said.

“The United States calls on the Cuban regime to hear their people and serve their needs at this vital moment rather than enriching themselves.”

So Biden – or his speechwriters – have mentioned the regime and the call to freedom, putting COVID front and center again. I do predict that, if somehow the Cuban Communist regime were to collapse while Biden is president (something I do not think will happen), Biden and the Democrats would immediately take full credit for it. And yet the sanctions set up by Trump appear to have played a significant part in this so far, sanctions that many Democrats want removed (the link is from an article that appeared in March of 2021):

Eighty U.S. House of Representatives Democrats urged President Joe Biden on Tuesday to repeal Donald Trump’s “cruel” sanctions on Cuba and renew engagement, an early sign of support in Congress for easing the clamp-down on the Communist-run country…

Biden, a Democrat, vowed during his campaign to reverse policy shifts by the Republican Trump that “have inflicted harm on the Cuban people and done nothing to advance democracy and human rights.”

Trump’s tightening of the decades-old U.S. trade embargo on Cuba has inflicted further pain on its ailing state-run economy, contributing to worsening shortages of food and medicine.

But Biden has not yet indicated whether he will fully revert to the historic detente initiated by Democratic former President Barack Obama when Biden was vice president.

So, Biden’s history is of supporting the lifting of sanctions, and this was part of his campaign. But nothing has yet happened on that score.

You may not like the song, but I think you’ll like the story

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember the piña colada song? I didn’t much care for it (or the earworm it sometimes gave me). I also didn’t even know its title was actually “Escape.”

But no matter. It was a huge hit and apparently has some staying power. Here the singer-songwriter Rupert Holmes tells us the story of how he came to write it and sing it, and I think you’ll be entertained:

[NOTE: Holmes (birth name: David Goldstein) has dual British and American citizenship. I see that, like so many people in the pop or rock music field (for example, the Bee Gees), he’s got a bandleader father and comes from a musical family, with a brother in the business as well.]

The majority of Americans don’t think Joe Biden is in charge

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a poll on the matter:

The national poll was released by the Convention of States Action in partnership with The Trafalgar Group. The poll, which was conducted toward the end of June, surveyed more than 1,000 likely voters for the upcoming 2022 midterm elections.

Key findings from the poll included:

56.5% of American voters do not believe that President Biden is fully executing the duties of his office, while 36.4% believe he is directing all policy and agenda
31.7% of Democrat voters do not believe that President Biden is fully executing the duties of his office, while 58.6% believe he is directing all policy and agenda
83.6% of Republican voters do not believe that President Biden is fully executing the duties of his office, while 11% believe he is directing all policy and agenda
58.4% of Independent voters do not believe that President Biden is fully executing the duties of his office, while 36.1% believe he is directing all policy and agenda

So the majority of Democrats think Biden’s in charge, the vast majority of Republicans think he’s not, and the majority of Independents think he’s not.

If you go to the poll results and take a closer look, you’ll see some things that are interesting (at least, I found them so). One is that respondents in the 18 to 24 age group had a lot more skepticism about Joe being in control. Another is that of all the ethnic groups queried, Hispanics were strongly skeptical of Joe’s control, right up there (almost) with white people. And males and females were almost identical in their responses.

I wish the poll takers had asked this followup question of those who don’t think Biden’s in charge: “Do you care?” I bet a lot of Democrats really aren’t perturbed by it, as long as some Democrats and/or leftists – and in particular, people who were in the Obama administration – are steering the ship. But of course that question was not asked.

What if the 2020 election audits end up revealing that Trump was actually the winner?

The New Neo Posted on by

In this American Thinker article, Andrew W. Coy points out that the Constitution is silent on the question of what would happen if, after a president has been declared the winner and taken office, it was discovered that he or she won through election fraud.

I have long thought that in such a scenario there would be no remedy that would undo the wrong. The remedy for such fraud after the person is already in office is to convict the perpetrators of fraud and to either fine them or send them to prison, or both.

Also, fraud is usually found in small, local elections, and it is difficult to prove even then. Nor does it need to have affected or changed the results of an election in order to be actionable fraud. Proving that without the fraud the results would have been different is even more difficult. But that is the situation that those challenging the idea that fraud occurred in 2020 would have the Trump-supporters prove in order to have any credibility at all, and even then it wouldn’t reverse things.

What might the now-ongoing audits show? Even with proof of huge errors and/or misconduct involving enough votes to have changed things, it would remain difficult to prove that those errors or that misconduct actually did change the results. Difficult, but not impossible. More likely, irregularities uncovered by any auditIt would only reveal that Trump might have otherwise won. But, as I stated earlier, I believe that the only remedy at that point would be a conviction for fraud of those who submitted fraudulent ballots (for example). However, it might be difficult to locate the perps, or to tell who it was who allowed bad signatures (to take another example). No one is going to imprison the whole vote-counting team at a certain site.

This is why fraud is so very tempting. This is why prevention is the only answer. If significant fraud is found to have occurred in 2020 – and if the media and social media don’t manage to cover up the news – at the very least it would strengthen the case for states’ passing laws that put in place tighter controls to prevent fraud in the future. And that’s about all it would do, I’m afraid. Would it anger the right even further than they’re angered now? I’m not sure, because the right is pretty angry already.