On media lies

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “steve walsh” writes the following about the press, on the Sicknick medical examiner thread:

Not only do they never suffer any consequences for telling their lies, they actually benefit from doing so. Thus lying has become a useful and common tactic.

Yes, there’s really no downside to it as far as the MSM is concerned. Now that they are activists who place party and politics above any journalistic integrity, lying becomes standard and very widespread. The fact that they back each other up in presenting a united front when they promulgate a lie is a very important part of it. Except for rogue reporters like Greenwald and a few others, the agreed-on story is told early and repeated often. After all, they’re just quoting each other – and they’re reliable sources, right? For the Sicknick fire extinguisher story, the initial disseminator was the NY Times, supposedly quoting two nameless officials. There was no other source, and yet the story spread far and wide and was assumed by most people (including many on the right) to be the truth.

It was not. It was a complete lie. And the facts that challenged it were out there from the start, and yet they were widely ignored except for rogue reporters such as Glenn Greenwald. As for Greenwald and the other rare reporters who actually are willing to question the accepted narrative and do some digging, the rest of the press gets together and accuses them of being racists and white supremacists and other such things. Once they’re been labeled that way, the public “learns” that there’s no reason to pay attention to the Greenwalds of the world.

How many times have you heard from Democrat friends, if you try to cite something from a Fox contributor such as Tucker Carlson for example, that it’s Faux News and it should be ignored because of course it’s a lie? They don’t need to see it or hear it; they simply know they can dismiss it.

And that’s what the MSM relies on. And when their stories are finally revealed to be false, they just move on to the next one. If Trump called them “fake news,” that means of course that they are truth-tellers – because we all know that Trump’s a liar, right? It still works that way for a lot of people.

Another topic that came up in the Sicknick medical examiner thread was the role of the Sicknick family. Some people are wondering why they didn’t speak up – or why they didn’t speak up more. They did speak up, but for the most part the MSM in the US would not give them the time of day, because they were contradicting the agreed-on narrative. I’m not so sure the family could have done more; I certainly saw their statements early on, but they were in places like – you guessed it – the British papers.

This phenomenon of the British papers tending to be much better than ours about reporting our news is one I’m remarked on before. It’s pretty consistent, and although I’m sure they’re not infallible, I can’t recall their having to retract anywhere near the number of stories that the US MSM gets wrong (or lies about) on a regular basis.

For example, regarding the Sicknick family and the press, please see this post I wrote on February 26. That’s about two months ago. I’ll finish up my post today by repeating the text of that February post of mine. Here it is:

Here’s a recent interview with Officer Sicknick’s mother. Note that it’s in the British paper The Daily Mail. It’s not unusual for British papers to cover events in the US more thoroughly than our own MSM, and to publish things the left wouldn’t be enthusiastic about here:

The mother of the US Capitol police officer who died following the riot on January 6 believes that her son succumbed to a fatal stroke – that he was not bludgeoned to death by a fire extinguisher as reported.

Yet more than one month after Officer Brian Sicknick’s death on January 7, she has admitted that they are still in the dark as to what exactly caused that catastrophic episode.

Speaking exclusively to DailyMail.com Gladys Sicknick, 74, was unequivocal in her assertion that Officer Brian Sicknick was not struck on the head and that as far as the family knows her son had a fatal stroke.

She said, ‘He wasn’t hit on the head no. We think he had a stroke, but we don’t know anything for sure.

‘We’d love to know what happened.’

Please let that sink in: apparently the family has not been told the results of any autopsy. Has there been an autopsy prior to Officer Sicknick’s cremation? I have never read anything that indicates an answer to that question.

More:

But in the six weeks since his death the truth has taken a backseat to the myth of the brutal attack. Democratic Impeachment Managers even brazenly cited the incident – that he was stricken in the head by a fire extinguisher – as fact in pre-trial articles filed February 2 despite already growing doubts.

Now DailyMail.com has unpacked fact from fiction in an attempt to extract Sicknick’s death from the misinformation in which it was mired before it even happened.

Please read the whole thing. You probably know most of it, because it’s been covered on this blog several times since January, but here’s an excerpt:

…January 8, Sicknick’s father, Charles, 81, told Reuters that on January 7, as they rushed from their homes in New Jersey to DC, the family were told that Sicknick had a blood clot on his brain and had suffered a stroke. He was being kept alive on a ventilator but was dead by the time they got there.

Yet these few publicly available facts were bulldozed over by political fervor and it was the unattributed account of a brutal attack, also reported by the Associated Press, that gained traction.

Less than 24 hours after his death, with no autopsy, no confirmation of any sign of blunt trauma, no investigation nor due process, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for the ‘perpetrators’ of Sicknick’s ‘attack’ to be brought to justice and vowed, ‘We will not forget.’

Despite the family’s earnest desire to the contrary, Sicknick’s death was politicized and seized on as an exemplar of all of the savagery of the pro-Trump mob’s assault on the temple of American democracy.

There’s a helpful timeline at the article, too.

The following is true of most press and pundits on both left and right, who for the most part swallowed the fire extinguisher story without checking it out or paying attention to the family’s statements of what medical authorities had told them:

…[T]he narrative continued to run unchecked with not one leader acknowledging the ongoing investigation or the complete absence of any certainty amid the melee of misreporting…

On February 2 CNN reported that investigators were ‘vexed’ by the lack of evidence linking anyone with Sicknick’s death. According to their source medical examiners had found no sign of blunt trauma.

Yet that very day Democratic Impeachment Managers filed their pre-trial articles in which they ignored all doubts and evidence to the contrary and stated as fact, ‘The insurgents killed a Capitol police officer by striking him in the head with a fire extinguisher.’

The left is now trying to work the pepper spray angle – the idea that pepper spray wielded by some of the rioters might have caused his death. In very rare cases it can cause a spike in blood pressure – perhaps that’s what happened to Officer Sicknick, although the blood clot story doesn’t seem to support that. At any rate, we’ve not heard anything about Officer Sicknick’s blood pressure when arriving at the hospital.

The Daily Mail article also mentions that pepper spray was used on January by both police and the rioters, so it would be next to impossible to say who wielded the spray that got Sicknick, and of course it was certainly a delayed reaction on his part if he had a reaction to it at all, because there were many hours between the demonstration and his collapse and in the meantime he reported feeling fine. Unless a video is found of someone spraying him directly, it may always remain up in the air, but the left is clinging to it as a possible way to continue to blame the rioters.
_________________________________________________________

That’s the end of my Frebruary 26 post. Yesterday the medical examiner also stated that bear spray did not kill Officer Sicknick.

I wonder – if you were to take a poll of your Democrat friends and ask them how Officer Sicknick died, would they continue to think it was a fire extinguisher or bear spray?

Official cause of Officer Sicknick’s death finally announced – and it’s about as you suspected

The New Neo Posted on by

No, Officer Sicknick didn’t die from a fire extinguisher to the head, thrown by Trump supporters on January 6th. Nor did he die from an allergic reaction to bear spray wielded by those same protestors. Here’s the actual story as announced by the medical examiner – which conforms to what for quite some time has seemed the most likely cause of his death to anyone paying attention to the facts:

Francisco Diaz, the chief medical examiner for Washington, D.C., told the Washington Post that Sicknick died on Jan. 7 after suffering two strokes and that he did not suffer an allergic reaction to any chemical irritants.

The medical examiner’s office told the Washington Examiner that Sicknick’s “cause of death” was “acute brainstem and cerebellar infarcts due to acute basilar artery thrombosis” — a stroke — and the “manner of death” was “natural.” The office said Sicknick was sprayed with a chemical substance around 2:20 p.m. on Jan. 6, collapsed at the Capitol around 10 p.m. that evening, and was transported by emergency services to a local hospital. He died around 9:30 p.m. on Jan. 7, the office added.

But the political damage was done by the Times reporting the lies about Sicknick’s death, and those lies almost immediately getting halfway around the world. I bet a lot of people will never read Officer Sicknick’s actual cause of death, and will instead continue to believe the lies.

And that’s the purpose of the lies in the first place.

I’ve written many times about Officer Sicknick’s death. It was already known shortly after he died that a stroke might have been involved. As early as January 11th, for example – just a few days after the January 6th event and Sicknick’s January 7th death – I wrote a post that included these words:

The cause of death of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick is still unclear. Early reports that it was from an injury have not been confirmed, and there are some reports that he died of a medical condition. I assume that some day we’ll learn more.

On January 26th I revisited the case at some length. We still had no further evidence about the cause of Sicknick’s death, but the fire extinguisher story had become even more suspect. By the time I wrote this January 30th post, I had learned that the original source for the fire extinguisher story had been anonymous “officials” talking to the NY Times. I also learned that ABC had reported much earlier on the stroke possibility, although by late January the MSM seemed to have conveniently forgotten about it and instead the fire extinguisher story was stated just about everywhere as though it were a proven fact.

My writing about this back then wasn’t an example of ESP on my part. Nor did it demonstrate amazing deductive skills. I was merely relying on basic information that had been right out in the open, easily available to anyone with curiosity and the ability to do a few searches. And yet there were very few people questioning the fire extinguisher story at the time, even on the right.

The WaPo story from yesterday that announced Diaz’s findings also says this:

The ruling, released Monday, likely will make it difficult for prosecutors to pursue homicide charges in the officer’s death.

Yes indeed, it’s often “difficult to pursue homicide charges” when no homicide has occurred. But where there’s a will, there’s a way – as we’ve seen in the Chauvin trial, for example.

More:

Diaz also said there was no evidence of internal or external injuries.

No blow to the head. Nothing even remotely resembling the fire extinguisher story.

The WaPo article goes on at some length in describing the earlier reports about Sicknick having been injured. They even include this from Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey:

The senator described Sicknick’s death as a “crime” that “demands the full attention of federal law enforcement.” He said that “when white supremacists attacked our nation’s capital, they took the life of one of our officers. They spilled his blood, they took our son away from his parents. They took a sibling away from their brothers.”

I believe that is the narrative most people will continue to take away from this.

[NOTE: Glenn Greenwald, who has written a lot about the Sicknick case, has an excellent article about yesterday’s announcement, in which he states this:

It was crucial for liberal sectors of the media to invent and disseminate a harrowing lie about how Officer Brian Sicknick died. That is because he is the only one they could claim was killed by pro-Trump protesters at the January 6 riot at the Capitol…

…[C]able outlets and other media platforms repeated this lie over and over in the most emotionally manipulative way possible…

As I detailed over and over when examining this story, there were so many reasons to doubt this storyline from the start. Nobody on the record claimed it happened. The autopsy found no blunt trauma to the head. Sicknick’s own family kept urging the press to stop spreading this story because he called them the night of January 6 and told them he was fine — obviously inconsistent with the media’s claim that he died by having his skull bashed in — and his own mother kept saying that she believed he died of a stroke.

But the gruesome story of Sicknick’s “murder” was too valuable to allow any questioning. It was weaponized over and over to depict the pro-Trump mob not as just violent but barbaric and murderous, because if Sicknick weren’t murdered by them, then nobody was.

Much more at the link, including the fact that Greenwald had been derisively labeled by MSM reporters as a “Sicknick truther.” They will not be saying any mea culpas about that, either, nor about the other lies they promulgated. They will just move on to the next one.]

Judge Cahill’s comments on Maxine Waters’ inflammatory statements

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “Kate.”]

Jonathan Turley is covering this development through his Twitter feed, so I’m going to post some of his tweets on it. The summary version is that Chauvin’s defense lawyer Nelson raised the issue of Waters’ prejudicial and inflammatory public remarks, and the judge condemned what she said and took note of it as possible grounds for appeal, but the trial will go on as before.

No surprise there. Turley adds that such remarks usually don’t cause a reversal on appeal. Cahill must know that, as well.

Here are some of the tweets:

It is glaringly obvious that this jury should have been sequestered. And that’s not just in hindsight; it was obvious from the start.

I also think that Cahill’s statement that Waters’ remarks don’t matter a lot is a copout. In fact, it’s true that her remarks as an individual don’t matter all that much, but they are emblematic of what’s been going on with this case from the start, and which has tainted it tremendously.

Judge Cahill has not done what he should have done to protect the defendant as best he could, knowing that it probably was already too late to protect him even before the trial begin. Nevertheless, the failure of the judge to do so also has encouraged “contempt for the judicial branch.” My guess is that Judge Cahill is not immune, either, to the fear of the mob – the mob that Waters was encouraging to engage in violence if Cahill and the jury don’t do what the mob wants.

Annals of woke private school education: some more on Brearley and Dalton

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Please see my previous post on Gutmann if you’re not already familiar with it.]

From the paper that often covers US stories in far more depth than our own MSM does (and with far less of a leftist slant), here’s the Daily Mail [hat tip: commenter “AesopFan”] with some background on Gutmann and Brearley:

Gutmann said he he refused to sign the school’s anti-racism pledge in October.

The school had started the required pledge after black alumnae accused the school of racism in posts made to the Instagram account account ‘Black at Brearley,’ according to the Washington Free Beacon.

The school’s antiracism and diversity plans are extensively described on its website.

‘I thought they were going to kick my daughter out then,’ Gutmann said. ‘They didn’t but next year they have the pledge built into the yearly school contract.’

So he’d already drawn attention to himself by becoming a dissident months ago. Also:

Gutmann said the thing he resented the most about Brearley is that the school “has begun to teach what to think, instead of how to think.”

Jane Fried, Brearley’s head of school, sent a message to the school’s families on Friday in which she slammed Gutmann’s letter as “deeply offensive and harmful.”

Yes, I have little doubt it offended Fried and she felt harmed. Too bad; boo hoo. I’d wager that Jim Best, the head of highly exclusive Dalton, felt harmed, too, because he seems to have quit in response to the fallout from complaints described in a letter from a group (not just one) of anonymous Dalton parents complaining about his “obsessive focus on race and identity.” In his farewell note, Best seemed upbeat, and I bet it’s true that this inclusion hero really is being offered plenty of other lucrative opportunities to bring his social justice diversity to institutions beyond Dalton. He wrote [statements in brackets mine]:

…[H]e was leaving to pursue “other exciting and inspiring opportunities” after 16 years at the helm…

He listed [as his Dalton accomplishments]…“attracting and supporting a historically diverse student body, assembling a historically diverse faculty, staff, and Leadership Team; reenvisioning and reinvigorating curricula in science, math, world and classical languages, physical education and athletics; advancing an ambitious Diversity, Equity & Inclusion mission.”

No obsessive focus on race there, no sirree.

Apparently, the school’s diversity head had left previously in response to the parents’ complaints, also to pursue those other great opportunities elsewhere.

But back to Brearley and its head Jane Fried:

“This afternoon, I and others who work closely with Upper School students met with more than one hundred of them, many of whom told us that they felt frightened and intimidated by the letter and the fact that it was sent directly to our homes,” Fried wrote…

“The upper schoolers are afraid of getting a letter at their home?” Gutmann said Saturday.

“They’re frightened and intimidated? The school has said it’s number one priority is to teach the girls intellectual bravery and courageousness. Either they are lying or else they have done an atrocious job.”

How about “both”?

I had assumed that Gutmann had contacted the other Brearley parents through emails. It’s still not 100% clear to me that he did it through snail mail – but perhaps that’s the case. At any rate, Gutmann goes on to say that he’s received supportive emails from parents throughout the city, and that there’s a whole “underground-like movement” about this.

It doesn’t surprise me in the least, nor does it surprise me that the vast majority of these people have been publicly silent. But have they also pulled their children out of these exclusive schools, as Gutmann did? I doubt it. However, my guess is that it was the threat of that – the monetary issue – that caused some of these “resignations” at Dalton.

Victor Davis Hanson on the fake Joe Biden

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve long described Joe Biden as incompetent, corrupt, mendacious, and without any principle save the principle of advancing his own political fortunes – although, regarding the latter, until 2020 he’d never been very good at running for president even among Democrats.

There is nothing new in Joe Biden circa 2021, except for the addition of some cognitive impairment, and a change in the ideology he sees as furthering those political fortunes.

That’s why it has long puzzled me that Biden was ever seen as likeable or smart or competent – and certainly never a political healer who could bring people together. It was laughable that anyone would believe such a thing.

But that’s the way he was sold during the campaign and beyond, and whatever you think about the validity of the vote count and whether Joe really won or didn’t, a lot of people did vote for him. Did they vote because they bought the myth about him, or just because they hated Trump, or some combination of the two? I don’t know. But although I’ve never heard any of my Democrat friends and acquaintances say they admire him, many have indicated a slight liking for him and have expressed relief that he’s president now rather than you-know-who.

Here’s Victor Davis Hanson on the subject:

At an age when most long ago embraced a consistent political belief, late septuagenarian Joe Biden suddenly reinvented himself as our first woke president. That is ironic in so many ways because Joe’s past is a wasteland of racialist condescension and prejudicial gaffes. For much of the 1980s and 1990s, he positioned himself as the workingman’s Democrat from Delaware (or, as Biden once beamed, “We [Delawareans] were on the South’s side in the Civil War.”). In truth, he exuded chauvinism well beyond that of his constituents…

Add up what Joe has said about race and it is hard to find any major political figure of either party who has been so overtly race-obsessed…

As vice president, Biden condescendingly warned an audience of successful black professionals that a rather meek Mitt Romney had the superhuman ability to “put y’all back in chains.”

Indeed, he warned them in a fake black patois, reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s grating “I don’t feel no ways tired.” In Bidenland, donut shops are full of Indians and the sum total of Barack Obama is the fact he was supposedly “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”…

Joe has been exempt from any scrutiny because he is metamorphosed into a hard leftist and thus was still useful, despite Barack Obama’s earlier prescient warning to peers, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f— things up.”…

Calling opponents Neanderthals, chumps, dregs, and racists, and denigrating those who support modest requirements of presenting an ID to vote with slurs like Jim Crow are not lowering the temperature but vintage Biden.

NeverTrump conventional wisdom that Joe Biden would govern as a moderate four-year caretaker, restoring “decency” to the office and “normal discourse” had no support in anything Joe had said or done in the past.

More at the link.

Nothing the Biden administration has been doing lately should be any surprise to anyone who was paying attention before. The left is happy with the latest version of Joe, the middle may not be paying attention even now, and the right predicted it. I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again: Biden may indeed have some cognitive problems, but I believe he’s not so far gone that he doesn’t understand what he’s doing and he is fully onboard.

Biden may not even be intending to run in 2024 – I’m not sure about that. But he’s intent on making a name for himself, and he’s intent on furthering the power and dominance of the Democratic Party he’s served for just about his entire adult life.

VDH agrees, and he says it better:

Joe is liberated, not shackled, by his age and fragility. Just one term, the chance that he might lose the entire Congress in 2022, the left-wing, unhinged venom of the New Democratic Party—these were never reasons to reach out or find compromise.

Rather they were urgent goads to accelerate and ram through as many structural changes that would not just move the country leftward now, but become hard to undo in the future—even without a mandate, without a majority in the Senate, without a safe margin in the House, and without an agreeable Supreme Court. The more beat-the-clock extremism now, the more left-wing canonization later.

Biden thinks he knows who will get to write the history books.

Closing arguments in the Chauvin trial…

The New Neo Posted on by

…have been happening today.

You can find commentary at Legal Insurrection. Andrew Branca’s first post about it is here, but he wrote that prior to the beginning of the closing arguments.

A live YouTube video of the proceedings can be found here. The comments to Branca’s post feature a lot of people who are watching the arguments, as well, and there’s also live blogging at his post.

There’s a lot to take in. I’m not optimistic about this verdict, but I’ve already expressed that in previous posts. Here I’ll just add that recently the previous home of the defense’s expert witness on use of force was vandalized by being smeared with blood and by the deposit of a severed pig’s head on the porch (it turned out someone else lives there now, but those who are trying to intimidate witnesses seem not to have been aware of this).

As Andrew Branca writes:

…[S]uch acts of judicial terrorism have ripple effects that reach to every other high-profile case that may occur anytime in the living memory of anyone aware of this case. Every prospective witness, juror, even defense counsel in the next high-profile case—perhaps the rapidly approaching Rittenhouse trial?—will be fully aware of what they can expect if they play any role in the defense whatever.

That sort of thing is common in countries in which – for example – drug cartels are intent on intimidating those participating in the justice system. It often succeeds, and I believe that the Chauvin trial reflects the fact that now these tactics have probably become standard in the US in high-profile politicized cases such as this. I am guessing that the Chauvin defense had tremendous trouble finding expert witnesses willing to testify, not because their case was weak but because of such fear of retaliation.

And of course, it’s not limited to anonymous judicial terrorists. Some are easy to identify. Maxine Waters, for example, had this to say when visiting the city near Minneapolis in which the Daunte Wright killing took place (and note that, for whatever reason, the Chauvin jury was not sequestered over the weekend when she said it):

…US Congresswoman Maxine Waters has crossed state lines to incite violence among protestors in Minneapolis, urging the mob to “get more confrontational.”

Those words said in the midst of a peaceful protest could be interpreted as merely urging further peaceful efforts—when said in the midst of a protest already violent, it can only be interpreted as a call for more violence.

And, sure enough, shortly after Waters’ comments, shots were fired at Minnesota National Guardsman present to secure public safety from the violent mob.

In that same video clip, Waters can be heard demanding that the chaos occurring in the streets of Minneapolis and all over the country around the trial of Derek Chauvin continue, and intensify, unless Chauvin is found guilty of first-degree (pre-meditated) murder—an intentional killing charge not even the state of Minnesota thought appropriate to bring against him, and obviously one not even on the table for the jury’s consideration.

Video can be found here.

Not only that, but as shipwreckedcrew at Red State writes:

…[D]uring the course of the comments Waters made it clear that a conviction only on the charge of manslaughter should get the same response as an acquittal. In fact, in an express and profound confession of her own ignorance, Waters said that in her view, Chauvin was guilty of First Degree Murder, even though he is charged with only Second Degree Murder…

The law is meaningless to Rep. Waters, and it always has been. Her seat in Congress has been little more than a grift for the entirety of her time there. She’s used her campaign and staff payroll to enrich her children and barely makes any effort at all to hide it. Her race-baiting for three decades has kept her safe in office so the grift can continue.

But, it should not be overlooked that Waters made it clear by her comments that anything other than a conviction of Chauvin for murder is not acceptable.

So far I’ve not seen any reports of a single Democrat in office condemning Waters’ remarks, although there were quite a few Republicans (“Republicans pounce”) doing so.

At Legal Insurrection, there will be a post-Chauvin-verdict discussion featuring Andrew Branca and William Jacobson. The time will be announced, but the plan is that it will come not long after the verdict.

I bring you another musical genre: the stutter song

The New Neo Posted on by

I’d never really thought about it before, but there are quite a few songs that feature “stutter” lyrics. Why is it done? Emphasis, I think, and perhaps just in the name of variety. Songwriters and lyricists like to use different techniques so the audience doesn’t get bored. Stuttering might seem an odd method, but it does get attention.

I bring you:

And then there’s:

And of course:

You may have noticed something else I never realized till now – those are all stutters on the”B” sound. Makes a nice sharp effect.

But it’s not just the hard “B” sound that singers and songwriters use for the stutter lyric, as David Bowie demonstrates here with “Ch” (and another thing I just realized is that in the slow intro part here, Bowie sounds like David Cloverdale in the slow into part to “Here I Go Again“, which is not a stuttering song):

And also – yes – the Bee Gees show the stutter here with the “J” sound. This one’s sung by Robin and was a big hit in Europe in the 80s. It also demonstrates once again (as in “Barbara Ann” and “Benny and the Jets”) that the stutter lyric is sometimes on the person’s name, for emphasis and perhaps sometimes to show intensity of feeling as well:

And we really can’t forget Ray Davies of The Kinks, with an “L” sound:

And then there’s “M” for “my”:

I’ll close with this one, although there are plenty more stutter songs. However, I think this one just may be the absolute pinnacle of the genre. It’s a double stutter song, with the effect on the “B” (always a favorite, as we’ve learned) and also on the “N.” A bit tricky to perform:

[ADDENDUM: I just learned this about the stutter on that last song:

Bachman insists that the song was performed as a joke for his brother, Gary, who had a stutter, with no intention of sounding like “My Generation”. They only intended to record it once with the stutter and send the only recording to Gary.

Bachman developed the song while recording BTO’s third album, Not Fragile (1974). It began as an instrumental piece inspired by the rhythm guitar on Dave Mason’s “Only You Know and I Know”. Bachman says “it was basically just an instrumental and I was fooling around… I wrote the lyrics, out of the blue, and stuttered them through.” The band typically used the song as a “work track” in the studio to get the amplifiers and microphones set properly.

But when winding up production for the album, Charlie Fach of Mercury Records said the eight tracks they had lacked the “magic” that would make a hit single. Some band members asked Bachman, “what about the work track?” Bachman reluctantly mentioned that he had this ninth song, but did not intend to use it on a record. He said, “We have this one song, but it’s a joke. I’m laughing at the end. I sang it on the first take. It’s sharp, it’s flat, I’m stuttering to do this thing for my brother.”

Fach asked to hear it, and they played the recording for him. Fach smiled and said “That’s the track. It’s got a brightness to it. It kind of floats a foot higher than the other songs when you listen to it.”

Bachman agreed to rearrange the album sequence so the song could be added, but only if he could re-record the vocals first, without the stutter. Fach agreed, but Bachman says “I tried to sing it normal, but I sounded like Frank Sinatra. It didn’t fit.” Fach said to leave it as it was, with the stutter.

Nowadays, of course, he’d be pilloried for making fun of his brother.]

Another brave soul pushing back against CRT in elite private schools

The New Neo Posted on by

Bari Weiss has published another letter from a parent criticizing CRT in an elite school. The platform is Substack, which has now become one of the most important libertarian sources of information and opinion, frequently used by Bari Weiss and Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi and Andrew Sullivan (who is not always a voice with which I agree, to say the least, but who does have an interest in liberty and has written some good things lately). None of those people can be described as conservatives, but they are standing tall on the issues of liberty and free speech right now, and seem alarmed by the takeover of education by CRT and other “woke” philosophies.

The letter is written by Andrew Gutmann, and this time the school is Brearley, and apparently Gutmann emailed a copy to all the parents at the school. The letter is excellent and I suggest reading it in its entirety, but here are a few excerpts [emphasis mine]:

Our family recently made the decision not to reenroll our daughter at Brearley for the 2021-22 school year…[W]e no longer have confidence that our daughter will receive the quality of education necessary to further her development into a critically thinking, responsible, enlightened, and civic minded adult. I write to you, as a fellow parent, to share our reasons for leaving the Brearley community but also to urge you to act before the damage to the school, to its community, and to your own child’s education is irreparable.

It cannot be stated strongly enough that Brearley’s obsession with race must stop. It should be abundantly clear to any thinking parent that Brearley has completely lost its way. The administration and the Board of Trustees have displayed a cowardly and appalling lack of leadership by appeasing an anti-intellectual, illiberal mob, and then allowing the school to be captured by that same mob.

I object to the view that I should be judged by the color of my skin. I cannot tolerate a school that not only judges my daughter by the color of her skin, but encourages and instructs her to prejudge others by theirs. By viewing every element of education, every aspect of history, and every facet of society through the lens of skin color and race, we are desecrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and utterly violating the movement for which such civil rights leaders believed, fought, and died.

I object to the charge of systemic racism in this country, and at our school. Systemic racism, properly understood, is segregated schools and separate lunch counters…Systemic racism is unequivocally not a small number of isolated incidences over a period of decades. Ask any girl, of any race, if they have ever experienced insults from friends, have ever felt slighted by teachers or have ever suffered the occasional injustice from a school at which they have spent up to 13 years of their life, and you are bound to hear grievances, some petty, some not. We have not had systemic racism against Blacks in this country since the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, a period of more than 50 years. To state otherwise is a flat-out misrepresentation of our country’s history and adds no understanding to any of today’s societal issues. If anything, longstanding and widespread policies such as affirmative action, point in precisely the opposite direction.

I object to a definition of systemic racism, apparently supported by Brearley, that any educational, professional, or societal outcome where Blacks are underrepresented is prima facie evidence of the aforementioned systemic racism, or of white supremacy and oppression. Facile and unsupported beliefs such as these are the polar opposite to the intellectual and scientific truth for which Brearley claims to stand.

There’s a great deal more in that vein, and it’s well worth reading. Gutmann is another brave man, and what I wrote recently about Paul Rossi, a teacher at another elite school who wrote a somewhat similar letter, applies to Gutmann as well.

But what of the other parents? Are they silent? And if so, why? One voice crying in the Brearley wilderness – however on target, however logical – is not going to get anywhere. Why aren’t nearly all the parents incensed about this and doing something about it?

I think I know the answer. These parents are probably mostly in their 30s through 50s. As such, they themselves are the products of an educational system that had become far more of an indoctrination in leftism than ever was the case when I was in school long ago. So many may subscribe to things such as CRT, or at least be susceptible to them.

But many who might otherwise speak out are almost undoubtedly afraid, as I wrote in the Rossi post. The costs are potentially high, and most people are not willing to pay them. I’ve had personal experience with this in an academic (university) setting while in graduate school in the 1990s. My battle wasn’t primarily about politics, although it had political overtones of which I wasn’t aware at the time. I was able to be courageous for the simple reason that I didn’t much care if they threw me out or gave me bad recommendations; I was already older, and I didn’t need the degree in order to put food on the table. There was no social media back then, either, to spread the word about what an awful person I was.

And yet, although it didn’t cost much to be brave and stand up to some things I saw happening at the university that were wrong, I stood alone. Quite a few people would come to me in private and say they agreed with me, but none were willing to say it publicly and certainly not to the people in charge. They were scared that it would affect their future careers, and this was in a climate much less vicious than today’s. I was surprised at the time that I had no allies willing to speak out publicly, but it surprises me no more.

The stakes are much higher now. The hour is much later.

[NOTE: This is not merely a private school phenomenon, of course. CRT is in the public schools, and in some cases what’s being taught in its name is being kept from parents. i may write another post some time about what’s happening regarding CRT in public schools.]

Court-packing (Part II): Venezuela is the template

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Part I can be found here.]

For the moment, we seem to have dodged the court-packing bullet, because the Democrats don’t quite have the votes to pass it. But I believe it’s only a temporary reprieve. The Democrats are determined to win the 2022 midterms and beyond, and although I don’t know if this will happen I know it most definitely could happen. Then they probably would be able to end the filibuster and get court-packing passed.

In addition, they are probably hoping they won’t need to do it, and that enough members of the present Court are sufficiently intimidated by the threat that they’ll be ruling more favorably towards the Democrats in the future. Another thing I believe Democrats are hoping for is illness or death on the part of one or two of the conservative justices, enough to swing the Court back into their camp and do their bidding.

But I have very little doubt that if they feel court-packing is needed, the Democrats will do whatever they can to pack the Court.

In Part I mentioned Venezuela and Hugo Chavez. There are differences between the way Venezuela was set up prior to Chavez and the way the US is set up, so the parallel isn’t perfect. But it’s close enough to be alarming. Like many dictators before him, Chavez managed to use the law to circumvent the law, and one of the final steps by which Chavez solidified his rule was court-packing.

I wrote a post about that in October of 2020, before our own 2020 election, because it was obvious what the Democrats were thinking of doing if necessary. In that post I included this quote about Chavez’s tactics. It’s relevant [my emphasis]:

…Chavez decided to pursue the presidency (and dictatorship) through electoral politics.

Standing in his way, however, were two barriers. First, Venezuela’s 1961 constitution was designed to be anti-authoritarian. Among other things, the constitution followed the American model of dividing power among a bicameral legislature, a supreme court and a president…[T]he Venezuelan Constitution also prohibited immediate presidential re-election (allowing only for the possibility of two nonconsecutive five-year terms with a 10-year interruption)…

To make these restrictions nearly insurmountable, the constitution specified in Articles 245-248 two onerous methods of change—amendment or general reform…

In the face of an anti-authoritarian constitution and an opposition-controlled Congress, Chavez ran on a platform of constitutional reform…Despite the lack of any constitutional support for this type of plebiscite, Chavez claimed that the people, through a referendum, could overthrow an existing constitution…

…A referendum that can override any constitution eliminates the boundary between constitutional law and politics…

Several groups challenged Chavez’s referendum in front of the Supreme Court. Facing significant political pressure, the Supreme Court allowed the referendum to take place regardless of the amendment restrictions…

…An abysmal turnout rate of about 38 percent of the electorate participated in the vote to create a Constituent Assembly…

…As soon as the Constituent Assembly was in place, Chavez called on it to suspend Congress and the Supreme Court. Arguing that the more recently elected assembly members better embodied the views of the people, the Assembly then declared a state of emergency, barred Congress from meeting or adopting new laws, formed a committee to remake the judiciary, and threatened to abolish all public organs of power…

Although the Supreme Court initially opposed the Assembly’s absurd claim to absolute power, Chavez and assembly members threatened any potential opposition with violence. In the face of these threats, the court allowed the emergency decree to stand. As a result of that decision, the chief justice resigned in protest, stating that “the court had committed suicide rather than wait to be killed by the Assembly.” Within two months, the court fully caved in, holding in one case that the new Constituent Assembly was a supra-constitutional body and thus “cannot be subject to the limits of the existing judicial order, including the current Constitution.” With this final blessing in place, the Assembly later sacked and replaced most members of the Supreme Court.

With all opposing institutions of power cowed, a new constitution, adopted after another simple-majority referendum—with a 44.3 percent turnout rate—gave Chavez sweeping decree powers and broader control over the military; abolished the Senate; extended presidential term limits to six years; empowered the president to call for constitutional amendments; and, critically, allowed for the possibility of immediate presidential re-election. As a whole, the new constitution heralded a “hyperpresidential” system that would lead to authoritarianism.

If court-packing occurs – or the Democrats get a majority on the Court in some other way – once the Court isn’t an impediment to the Democrats doing pretty much whatever they want, they will go ahead and do whatever they want. I only see very isolated opposition to that from their side. It’s interesting to see how some members of Congress have framed the recent court-packing proposal – for example, Elizabeth Warren has this to say: “Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has said ‘every option’ needed to be on the table to restore credibility and integrity to the Supreme Court.”

We’ve heard a lot of Orwellian language recently, but I think that deserves some sort of grand prize.

Almost exactly five years ago I also wrote a post entitled “The suicide of nations, Venezuela, and the US.” It gave me a cold chill to write it back then. It gives me an even colder chill to read it again now.

Here it is in its entirety; it’s mostly a quote from someone else:

Joel Hirst offers a description of what happened to Venezuela:

“I have watched the suicide of a nation; and I know now how it happens. Venezuela is slowly, and very publically, dying; an act that has spanned more than fifteen years. To watch a country kill itself is not something that happens often. In ignorance, one presumes it would be fast and brutal and striking – like the Rwandan genocide or Vesuvius covering Pompeii…

“No, national suicide is a much longer process – not product of any one moment. But instead one bad idea, upon another, upon another and another and another and another and the wheels that move the country began to grind slower and slower; rust covering their once shiny facades. Revolution – cold and angry. Hate, as a political strategy. Law, used to divide and conquer. Regulation used to punish. Elections used to cement dictatorship. Corruption bleeding out the lifeblood in drips, filling the buckets of a successive line of bureaucrats before they are destroyed, only to be replaced time and again. This is what is remarkable for me about Venezuela. In my defense – weak though it may be – I tried to fight the suicide the whole time; in one way or another. I suppose I still do, my writing as a last line of resistance. But like Dagny Taggert I found there was nothing to push against – it was all a gooey mess of resentment and excuses. “You shouldn’t do that.” I have said. And again, “That law will not work,” and “this election will bring no freedom,” while also, “what you plan will not bring prosperity – and the only equality you will find will be in the bread line.” And I was not alone; an army of people smarter than me pointed out publically in journals and discussion forums and on the televisions screens and community meetings and in political campaigns that the result would only be collective national suicide. Nobody was listening.”

Gives me the willies, because although we’re not nearly there yet, we’re already way too close for comfort.

And now we’re much closer.