Tulsi Gabbard shows some good sense

The New Neo Posted on by

Tulsi Gabbard – who is no longer in office, having declined to run for re-election to the House – seems to be speaking reasonably about what’s going on these days in terms of restrictions on liberty. Tulsi appears to have entered Jonathan Turley and Glenn Greenwald territory on this issue.

No wonder she was persona non grata in the Democratic primary race. Remember when Hillary Clinton indicated Tulsi was being “groomed” by Russia to run third party? Good times; good times.

Here’s what Gabbard said recently:

…[L]et us be clear, the John Brennans, Adam Schiffs and the oligarchs in Big Tech who are trying to undermine our constitutionally-protected rights and turn our country into a police state with KGB-style ‘surveillance’ are also domestic enemies — and much more powerful, and therefore dangerous, than the mob which stormed the Capitol.”

Ms. Gabbard‘s video then cut to a recent appearance of Mr. Brennan on MSNBC in which he likened pro-Trump supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6 to “insurgency movements that we’ve seen overseas.”

“I know looking forward that the members of the Biden team who have been nominated or have been appointed are now moving in laser-like fashion to try and uncover as much as they can about what looks very similar to insurgency movements that we’ve seen overseas where they germinate in different parts of the country,” he said. “They gain strength and it brings together an unholy alliance, frequently, of religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians.”

Even libertarians.

Gabbard continued:

“President Biden, I call upon you and all of Congress from both parties to denounce efforts by Brennan and others to take away our civil liberties endowed to us by our Creator and guaranteed in our Constitution,” she said. “If you don’t stand up to them now, then our country will be in great peril.”

Brennan is a longtime viper (see this). But Gabbard’s appeal to Biden (and to both parties in Congress) reminds me of the old “if only Stalin knew!” plaint in the USSR. Unfortunately, President Biden is either fully onboard with this or far enough gone that he’s not even aware of it. Perhaps both at this point. As for the Democrats in Congress, most of them would consider it a dream come true to be able to silence the opposition.

Led by Rand Paul, Republicans say the Senate trial of Citizen Trump is unconstitutional (also, Leahy in hospital for observation)

The New Neo Posted on by

Of course it is:

Forty-five Senate Republicans voted Tuesday to dismiss the trial as unconstitutional. The motion failed by a vote of 45-55, enabling the trial to move forward. But it signifies that a critical mass are leery of the trial and underscores the unlikelihood of finding the two-thirds majority needed to convict.

So who were the five who didn’t vote that way? You already know who they were:

Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

“I think it’s pretty obvious from the vote today, that it is extraordinarily unlikely that the president will be convicted,” Collins told reporters. “Just do the math.”

It may even be that, in a trial, Collins would vote to acquit even though she failed to vote against the trial itself. That would be typical of Collins, trying to have it both ways – that’s how she has ended up as Maine’s representative for so long. Murkowski might have a similar trajectory, Romney might vote to convict, and I have no prediction about Toomey.

So once again, it’s a small group doing this. McConnell backed Rand Paul’s motion and voted for it, as well. So those MSM reports alleging McConnell was in favor of the trial seem to have been ways for the MSM to stir up the right against him, as I believe such rumor reports often (not always, but often) are.

Here’s part of Paul’s speech:

Here’s an excellent discussion by Alan Dershowitz on the legal wrongness of the recent impeachment in the House and the unconstitutionality of any Senate trial of Trump as non-president. I think it’s very clear – not that the Democrats care:

Meanwhile, Justice Roberts will not be presiding, because Trump isn’t president. I guess that, like Dershowitz, Roberts isn’t into show trials. A Democrat senator, president pro tempore Leahy of Vermont, was slated to take his place, but now it has been announced that Leahy (who is 80 years old) has been hospitalized for observation after having some troubling symptoms such as shortness of breath.

The Democrats may actually come to regret pushing for this show trial.

Deadly riots

The New Neo Posted on by

Have you noticed that very often when the MSM or Democrats refer to the Capitol riot the word “riot” is modified by the word “deadly”? And of course, this is correct: the riots were deadly. But what do we know about those deaths? Very little.

Surprisingly little, considering that nearly three weeks have passed, and the investigations and coverage have been nothing if not intense. And yet, for the most part, the initial “fog of war” reports have not been substantially modified.

By saying the riots were deadly – and often adding that five people were killed – the reader is encouraged to forget the extent and nature of the deaths and imagine that the rioters killed five people. If you stop to think about it you might realize that’s not the case, but who stops to think about it?

Three of those deaths were described this way in a January 7 article:

Those people were Rosanne Boyland, 34, of Kennesaw, Georgia; Kevin Greeson, 55, of Athens, Alabama; and Benjamin Phillips, 50, of Ringtown, Pennsylvania, the Metropolitan Police Department said.

Boyland collapsed at the Capitol, where police performed CPR, 11Alive.com reported. She was taken to a hospital, but did not survive.

Greeson’s family said in a statement that the Trump supporter suffered a heart attack during the chaos, The News Courier reported.

Phillips, who had organized a group to drive to Washington, D.C., from his home state, died of an apparent stroke after being taken to George Washington University Hospital, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

Those natural causes of death are rarely made clear or even mentioned in articles that focus on the riots themselves and call them “deadly.”

We know about the death of Ashli Babbit at the hands of a member of the Capitol Police. She definitely did not die of natural causes. But in her case it was actually the reaction to the riot on the part of authorities that was deadly. Her actions (trying to climb through a broken window inside the Capitol) seem to have precipitated that deadly force, but whether the force exerted had to be deadly is not at all clear and is currently being investigated. In any event, the mob didn’t kill her.

Which leaves Capitol Police Officer Sicknick as the one person who may in fact have been killed by rioters. But was he? And if so, by whom and under what circumstances? We know very little, officially, although there are certainly rumors.

Some people may think reports such as this one, of arrests of rioters who allegedly tried “to crush an officer who was pinned by a mob as it tried to break into the building,” are describing the death of Sicknick. There is video of that, and many people have seen the video – but that does not involve Officer Sicknick, and the officer in that video did not die. I have yet to see a single photo or video professing to document what happened to Sicknick, who did die.

Ah, but he was hit in the head by a fire extinguisher and died because of that, right? Many many news outlets and blogs have reported it that way, but I have yet to see anything about the source of that report. One thing that seems apparent is that the source was not the official statement of the Capitol Police. Their press statement can be found here. The way it’s written you simply cannot tell what happened, except that some injury to the officer seems to have occurred while the riot was ongoing and he was engaging with protestors. It doesn’t say his injury was sustained at anyone’s hands, it does not say what the injury was, it does not say how long it was between the injury and his death, it does not say why his injury did not cause him to go to the hospital and why he just went back to his division office, and it does not mention a fire extinguisher. It also does not say on what basis the Capitol Police concluded he died of that injury or injuries, as opposed to some other cause such as a heart attack:

At approximately 9:30 p.m. this evening (January 7, 2021), United States Capitol Police Officer Brian D. Sicknick passed away due to injuries sustained while on-duty.

Officer Sicknick was responding to the riots on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol and was injured while physically engaging with protesters. He returned to his division office and collapsed. He was taken to a local hospital where he succumbed to his injuries.

It is being investigated, but it’s been nearly three weeks and I’ve not seen any updates. It is certainly possible we will some day learn that he was indeed hit by a fire extinguisher or some other object at the hands of rioters, that such rioters were on the right rather than Antifa agitators, and that he died as a result of those blows. But none of that is in evidence now. And yet if you were to poll most people who know about Sicknick’s death at all, I bet the vast majority of them think that all of that has been proven already and that right-wing Capitol insurrectionists killed Sicknick by beating him with a fire extinguisher.

Here’s some typical coverage that attempts to link those dots. It’s from Yahoo:

Sicknick died last Thursday at the hospital, where he was being treated for “injuries sustained while on-duty,” USCP said in a statement. More specifically, this officer was violently struck with a fire extinguisher during the pro-Trump riots at the Capitol on Wednesday.

That first link is about the Capitol Police report, which says nothing about the fire extinguisher (as I’ve already explained). That second link goes to a Business Insider article that, like so many similar articles, merely states the fire extinguisher story without sourcing it at all. The intent of the juxtaposition by the reporter seems clear to me, which is to get the reader to think the fire extinguisher story is official as well, and perhaps comes from the Capitol Police. But I certainly can’t find a link that would back that up. If you can find one, let me know.

It may be that in time we’ll learn this is actually a true story. We may even learn who is alleged to have struck Sicknick with a fire extinguisher. But maybe not. And I wouldn’t sit on a hot stove till we learn the truth, and my guess is we’ll never learn it. The “deadly riot” phrase is simply to be stored in our minds to form a certain picture. The narrative has already been set.

Founder of the WalkAway movement Brandon Straka arrested

The New Neo Posted on by

First they deplatformed him, and now he’s been arrested. The allegations are as follows:

Brandon Straka, 44, was arrested on a felony charge of interfering with police during civil disorder. The self-described founder of a movement to “walk away” from liberalism was also charged with unlawful entry into a restricted building and disorderly conduct.

He is not the “self-described” founder of the movement; he is indisputably the founder of said movement. And although at times it may have been described as a movement to walk away from liberalism, its main thrust has been to walk away from the Democratic Party.

Continued:

FBI Special Agent Jeremy Desor said that videos revealed that during the melee, Straka was part of a crowd pushing toward a Capitol doorway. Desor doesn’t contend that Straka went into the building, but says that as others tried to charge through the entrance, the activist shouted: “Go! Go!”

Desor said that as a Capitol police officer tried to make his way through the crowd with a riot shield over his head, Straka urged others to wrestle it from him…

During his speech the day before the riot, Straka referred to the audience as “patriots” and referred repeatedly to a “revolution,” Desor said. Straka also told the attendees to “fight back” and added, “We are sending a message to the Democrats, we are not going away, you’ve got a problem!” the agent reported.

More allegations against Straka can be found here, including that he allegedly wrote this on Twitter:

It was freedom loving Patriots who were DESPERATE to fight for the final hope of our Republic because literally nobody cares about them. Everyone else can denounce them. I will not.”

“Perhaps I missed the part where it was agreed this would be a revolution of ice cream cones & hair-braiding parties to take our government back from lying, cheating globally interested swamp parasites. My bad.”

Last night I also saw an article that I can’t locate right now, but it reported that a relative of Straka’s had seen some of the supposedly incriminating material (including the above quotes) on Straka’s social media (material that Straka is alleged to have removed in the interim) and oh-so-helpfully took screen shots and reported it all to the FBI.

From what I have read so far, I don’t see any allegations that Straka even entered the Capitol building, much less committed a single act of violence. I think of the many leftist rioters all over the country – including those destroying government property and actively physically fighting with police – who either were not arrested or who had charges quickly dropped by leftist DAs. Contrast that with what’s happening to Straka. The double standard is striking.

But I would expect nothing else.

Sarah Hoyt has some choice words on the subject of Straka’s arrest.

They not only want to silence Straka, who has been an outspoken thorn in their side, but more importantly they want to frighten others by making an example of him.

Washington DC, Biden, and the Democrats: security for me but not for thee

The New Neo Posted on by

It was understandable that Democrats wanted good security for the inauguration this year. So did Trump in 2017, who had plenty of death threats and hatred thrown his way. But although I’m sure there was security for Trump’s inauguration (and many riots, which were controlled by police but did property damage and caused personal injuries), Trump’s security didn’t even begin to compare to the preparations for Biden’s big day, which were worthy of a military campaign.

Not only that, but ever since the BLM/Antifa riots began over seven months ago, we’ve been told that seeking anything but the most minimal protection for our persons or property, and asking that rioters be arrested and actually charged rather than being released immediately, is bad. Bad bad bad – racist and everythingist that’s bad.

The damage done in those riots by the left, the property destruction and the number of people killed, completely dwarfed what happened at the Capitol on January 6, and even that latter damage could have been prevented if adequate security (not 25,000 troops, but more than the minimal forces that were present) had been provided. It was not, and we still don’t know why. We may never learn.

With the huge number of troops in place for Biden’s inauguration, the feds were signaling that they were expecting an invasion. The message was that the right was planning to start a civil war right then and there – and I mean that in the literal sense – and that the threat remains enormous.

Therefore, of course, a huge future crackdown on the right will be necessary.

Chilling:

[Acting DHS Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli said that in DC there was] “A division. You have a division,” Cuccinelli said, “and the last up of thousands of these troops was requested by the speaker through the Capitol Police. She even wanted crew-manned machine guns in Washington. That was rejected. There’s simply no use for that in a security arrangement for a civilian undertaking. So some of this has gone beyond any legitimate security need…

…it all arose on January 6. Part of it is because Congress was the target. Now, there’s a special problem related to that from a threat standpoint in a Democratic constitutional republic. At the same time, where was this concern for the rest of America?” Cuccinelli said.

“But when their own butt was on the line, all of a sudden they want every troop and soldier they can find to protect them. We’re perfectly happy to contribute to keeping them safe. That’s our goal and our job but not at the sacrifice of the rest of America,” he said.

I wonder how many people actually found this necessary and have no problem with the enormous and obvious disparity in protective forces. I haven’t yet spoken to any of my Democrat friends about it, so I’m not sure. The “optics,” as they say, aren’t good. It projects fear, which I believe is the point of it – to magnify fear of the right and justify whatever the left does to surveil and punish them, as well as limiting their freedom of speech.

I did have a conversation with one Democrat friend who mentioned being troubled by all the free speech crackdowns and the firings of some people who had merely attended the rally. I don’t know how prevalent that reaction is, but I note it.

Glenn Greenwald – who’s been excellent lately on free speech issues – summarizes the Reichstag Fire aspects of what’s going on:

The last two weeks have ushered in a wave of new domestic police powers and rhetoric in the name of fighting “terrorism” that are carbon copies of many of the worst excesses of the first War on Terror that began nearly twenty years ago. This trend shows no sign of receding as we move farther from the January 6 Capitol riot. The opposite is true: it is intensifying.

We have witnessed an orgy of censorship from Silicon Valley monopolies with calls for far more aggressive speech policing, a visibly militarized Washington, D.C. featuring a non-ironically named “Green Zone,” vows from the incoming president and his key allies for a new anti-domestic terrorism bill, and frequent accusations of “sedition,” “treason,” and “terrorism” against members of Congress and citizens. This is all driven by a radical expansion of the meaning of “incitement to violence.” It is accompanied by viral-on-social-media pleas that one work with the FBI to turn in one’s fellow citizens (See Something, Say Something!) and demands for a new system of domestic surveillance…

First, much of the alarmism and fear-mongering is being driven by a deliberate distortion of what it means for speech to “incite violence.” The bastardizing of this phrase was the basis for President Trump’s rushed impeachment last week. It is also what is driving calls for dozens of members of Congress to be expelled and even prosecuted on “sedition” charges for having objected to the Electoral College certification, and is also at the heart of the spate of censorship actions already undertaken and further repressive measures being urged…

It is vital to ask what it means for speech to constitute “incitement to violence” to the point that it can be banned or criminalized. The expression of any political viewpoint, especially one passionately expressed, has the potential to “incite” someone else to get so riled up that they engage in violence.

If you rail against the threats to free speech posed by Silicon Valley monopolies, someone hearing you may get so filled with rage that they decide to bomb an Amazon warehouse or a Facebook office. If you write a blistering screed accusing pro-life activists of endangering the lives of women by forcing them back into unsafe back-alley abortions, or if you argue that abortion is murder, you may very well inspire someone to engage in violence against a pro-life group or an abortion clinic. If you start a protest movement to object to the injustice of Wall Street bailouts — whether you call it “Occupy Wall Street” or the Tea Party — you may cause someone to go hunt down Goldman Sachs or Citibank executives who they believe are destroying the economic future of millions of people.

If you claim that George W. Bush stole the 2000 and/or 2004 elections — as many Democrats, including members of Congress, did — you may inspire civic unrest or violence against Bush and his supporters. The same is true if you claim the 2016 or 2020 elections were fraudulent or illegitimate. If you rage against the racist brutality of the police, people may go burn down buildings in protest — or murder randomly selected police officers whom they have become convinced are agents of a racist genocidal state.

The Bernie Sanders campaign volunteer and hard-core Democratic partisan, James Hodgkinson, who went to a softball field in June, 2017 to murder Republican Congress members — and almost succeeded in fatally shooting Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) — had spent months listening to radical Sanders supporters and participating in Facebook groups with names like “Terminate the Republican Party” and “Trump is a Traitor.”

Hodgkinson had heard over and over that Republicans were not merely misguided but were “traitors” and grave threats to the Republic. As CNN reported, “his favorite television shows were listed as ‘Real Time with Bill Maher;’ ‘The Rachel Maddow Show;’ ‘Democracy Now!’ and other left-leaning programs.” All of the political rhetoric to which he was exposed — from the pro-Sanders Facebook groups, MSNBC and left-leaning shows — undoubtedly played a major role in triggering his violent assault and decision to murder pro-Trump Republican Congress members.

Despite the potential of all of those views to motivate others to commit violence in their name — potential that has sometimes been realized — none of the people expressing those views, no matter how passionately, can be validly characterized as “inciting violence” either legally or ethically. That is because all of that speech is protected, legitimate speech. None of it advocates violence. None of it urges others to commit violence in its name. The fact that it may “inspire” or “motivate” some mentally unwell person or a genuine fanatic to commit violence does not make the person espousing those views and engaging in that non-violent speech guilty of “inciting violence” in any meaningful sense.

Greenwald’s analogy to the war on terror omits one thing – that was sparked by the murder of 3000 innocent civilians, and nothing even remotely like that has happened here. But I agree that the government used the laws passed then to harm some innocent people and to invade our lives electronically in ways we don’t even totally realize today.

And by the way, the present crackdown was not a result of the January 6 Capitol incursion; that’s just the excuse. This all was planned before January 6 (see also this).

One other thing – it’s a tried and true technique of the left to purposely escalate things in such a way that the opposition ( or counter-revolution) feels more and more as though violence is the answer, not less and less. Now, with the left in charge of all the levers of power, cracking down on those who would even try any sort of actual insurrection (as opposed to what happened on January 6) would be relatively easy to accomplish, IMHO. And then the entire episode could be used as a reason for more crackdowns on the entire right, and then more, and more, and more, in an escalating cycle that would ultimately justify nearly anything the left wishes to do. Thus are gulags made.

Viva Frei and Nate the Lawyer: where do we go from here?

The New Neo Posted on by

I haven’t watched this entire video; it’s very long. But the part I’m cueing up is much shorter, and it features a good discussion of the Capitol riots and the spin placed on them by the left, as well as the riots’ repercussions. “Nate the Lawyer” is the man in the middle, and he is also politically in the middle:

The Democrats’ plan wasn’t that hard to see even back in March of 2019

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I accidentally happened across this post of mine from nearly two years ago. The post was about the Democrats’ desire to abolish the Electoral College, and it was in that context that I wrote the following, which may seem familiar in light of recent events:

And since for the most part the Democrats control the voting in our biggest cities – not only because they have such large margins in those cities but because the entire apparatus of each city is set up by Democrats – if they want to skew things even further towards larger Democratic majorities through their rules about voting, or if they want to conveniently “find” more votes if they need them, or to allow vote “harvesting” and the like, they can do it fairly easily because of that control.

I wrote that passage in March of 2019, not long after a bill known as HR 1 or the “For the People Act” had been passed in the newly-elected Democrat House. In fact, that bill was one of the very first orders of business in that House. Here’s a description of its main provisions, and you can easily see that one of its goals is to federalize and expand the ability to commit voter fraud to every state in the Union – and to do this in the name of voting rights.

I plan to write a lengthier post on that, because the same basic bill is currently already under consideration in the new Congress. Now that the Senate is also held by Democrats (unlike in 2019, when the Republicans were in charge), due to the VP’s ability to break a tie, it will all really come down to whether or not the Democrats nuke the filibuster.

I plan to write more about the filibuster issue later, and more about that “voting reform” bill later, too. For this post, though, I want to emphasize that a great deal of what has happened was easily foreseeable because the goals of the Democrats, and even some of their methods, were readily apparent long ago. I did not foresee COVID, but once it came it’s no surprise that the Democrats were poised to take full advantage of it to push an already-formulated agenda regarding a change in the way America votes.

[NOTE: Not only that, but also in March of 2019 I discussed the Democrats’court-packing plans. These things were certainly not hidden, and if some people who voted for Biden or a Democrat in 2020 professes not to have known this, they are either woefully ignorant or lying. They should have known.]

[NOTE II: For those who say the GOP is no different than the Democrats, consider that in 2019 the Republicans in the Senate blocked that bill. It was by no means the only thing they blocked that the now-leftist Democrats were trying to do, either. The Democrats are determined to entrench changes that will make it impossible for the right to ever take power again. Splitting the right is also one of their goals, because they know that benefits the left.]

There’s no harmony like close harmony: Part I

The New Neo Posted on by

And the best of all is sibling close harmony. That’s where nature and nurture can combine to make different-yet-somehow-similar voices blend in a special way that creates a full and resonant whole that is far more than the sum of its parts.

Close harmony is defined this way:

A chord is in close harmony (also called close position or close structure if its notes are arranged within a narrow range, usually with no more than an octave between the top and bottom notes.

…It can follow the standard voice-leading rules of classical harmony, as in string quartets or Bach chorales, or proceed in parallel motion with the melody in thirds or sixths.

The Everly Brothers (discussed recently on the blog here) combined their distinctive close harmonies with early rock music, a fusion that differentiated them from predecessor sibling groups such as the Andrews Sisters of 1930s fame. The Andrews Sisters almost exclusively relied on parallel melody lines rather than divergent ones. I’ve cued up a short explanation of what the sisters did:

The Boswell Sisters hailed from New Orleans. They were famous during the 1920s and 1930s, and their harmonies were more unusual:

There are several patterns that keep cropping up in the backgrounds of these sibling groups: musical parents and a shared intense interest in music that starts at an early age, with harmonizing that likewise starts early and an almost ESP like connection. Nature plus nurture plus practice seems to create a bond that leads to fame but often also leads to friction and breakups, temporary or permanent.

The Mills Brothers were a long-running act that featured four brothers. For some reason – although they used close harmony as well – with the four Mills Brothers it changes the sound somewhat and makes it less interesting (at least to me), perhaps because the range becomes wider with four rather than three?:

Three somehow seems ideal to me. The trio is like a tripod; unusually sturdy. I’ve said it before and will probably say it again – I’m fairly ignorant about music theory, so I don’t understand the technical points, but I think I know what my ear is telling me. I agree with what the daughter of one of the Boswell Sisters says here:

The Beach Boys were not a trio. But the larger group did feature three brothers – Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson – who grew up sharing a bedroom and singing together in a musical family. This time it was a pretty dysfunctional family, but the music they made featured close harmony as well. Oldest brother Brian was the leader and songwriter, but they all were motivated. If the product ended up sounding casual – after all, they started their career singing fun songs about surfing and fast cars – it was hard work, as this audio of a rehearsal amply demonstrates:

In the end, the finished product sounded astounding, as you can hear on this vocal track from the Beach Boys’ song “God Only Knows.” They’re not actually singing a capella here; it’s just that this track has been isolated from the music tracks for the purposes of listening:

An explanation of their harmonies can be found here:

A standard root/third/fifth harmony (or some inversion of it) can be pleasing. But when you start working additional notes of the scale in, then one or more voices are going to be on notes separated by smaller intervals. If you know what you’re doing (as Brian obviously did), you can get some incredible effects in this way, and you can enhance those effects further if the harmonies “shift” within a passage…if notes come together and then separate again. There’s a warmth to this approach that you don’t get with more conventional harmonies.

I think on some subconscious level, when we hear close harmonies like that, something resonates within us. I personally believe that blending voices together in a group effort to achieve a unified result is one of the finest things human beings can do together. When those harmonies are close, it reinforces the closeness we yearn for in real life with others.

The other element, as many have referenced, is Brian’s falsetto soaring high over everyone else. Males aren’t normally supposed to sing high like that, so when one has the guts to do it, I think some of us respond to that too…the vulnerability inherent in putting yourself up there and out there like that.

By the same token, some are very turned off by it. I’m always surprised when I hear people say they hate The Beach Boys, but I think those high vocals are probably one of the reasons. Some people just can’t deal with it.

Me, I find it moving…

I’m with that writer. The close harmonies seem to tune into something in the brain that resonates, and the falsetto gives the whole thing urgent emphasis.

“Close harmony” and “falsetto” brings us to the Bee Gees. They were also three brothers starting out at roughly the same time as the Beach Boys. I plan to discuss them in Part II.

Why is DC still an armed camp?

The New Neo Posted on by

Glenn Greenwald has some theories.

[NOTE: Although Greenwald doesn’t talk about this, I was just wondering how many Americans have any knowledge of what the words “Reichstag Fire” might mean. For those who know their history, the parallels can be understood whether they are accepted or rejected. But my guess is that the vast majority have no knowledge of the historical event to which the term refers, and therefore are unaware of what an attempt at comparison would even mean. A lack of historical context in general is a very big problem, and is not just limited to lack of knowledge of one particular event or another.]

Biden/China and our power grid: whatever could go wrong?

The New Neo Posted on by

One of so many things that Biden has been doing [emphasis mine]:

President Biden has revoked a Trump-era executive order that sought to keep foreign countries and companies out of America’s bulk power systems – principally entities associated with the Chinese Communist Party – as part of his “Executive Order on Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring Science to Tackle the Climate Crisis.”

The executive order, which executes key tenets of President Biden’s climate change agenda, was released on the former Veep’s first day in office…

Subpoint C notes that “Executive Order 13920 of May 1, 2020 (Securing the United States Bulk-Power System), is hereby suspended for 90 days.”

The Trump-era order sought to ban, replace, and set new criteria on bulk-power system (BPS) electric equipment coming from a foreign country or national that poses a national security threat…

[Trump’s] move [had] “prohibited any acquisition, importation, transfer, or installation of BPS electric equipment by any person or with respect to any property to which a foreign country or a national thereof has any interest, that poses an undue risk to the BPS, the security or resiliency of U.S. critical infrastructure or the U.S. economy, or U.S. national security or the security and safety of U.S. persons.”

The DOE was also tasked with identifying existing BPS electric equipment that violated the aforementioned prescription and “develop recommendations to identify, isolate, monitor, or replace this equipment as appropriate.”…

Now, according to Biden’s executive order, the fate of the executive order and America’s BPS rests in the hands of Biden’s Secretary of Energy and Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB):

“The Secretary of Energy and the Director of OMB shall jointly consider whether to recommend that a replacement order be issued.”

The National Pulse exposed Biden’s OMB Head as formerly serving as the president of the Center for American Progress (CAP), an establishment think tank that has taken trips to China and co-authored reports alongside a Chinese Communist Party-backed influence operation.

What’s more, Biden’s son Hunter was previously involved in several business relationships with CEFC China Energy Chairman Ye Jianming.

Whatever Trump was accused of regarding Russia is something that Biden probably is really guilty of with China.

Packing the Union: this is a test

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “D. Cohen” describes a problem:

One big lack in the constitution is a statement about how small a state can be…

Suppose political party A controls a state and both houses of Congress. It can then, constitutionally, have its state request to be split up into, say, 10,000 mini-states. Congress, also being controlled by party A, approves. Each state must be given two senators and at least one member of the House. As long as each mini-state has at least 3 people inside it — two to be state senators and one to be a member of the House — the constitution as currently written has no objection. The number of electoral votes each mini-state has is at least three — two for the senators and one for the member of the House of Reps.

Local politicians would be ecstatic — all those extra state governor and state legislative positions to be filled. In that sense it could turn out to be a very popular move!

Doing the math: That’s 20,000 additional votes for party A in the Senate; at least 10,000 additional votes for party A in the House; and at least 30,000 additional votes in the Electoral College. The first party to do this maneuver gets to control all three branches of the government indefinitely because, now that they always control Congress, they will not approve any similar split-up of states controlled by another party.

I would be happy to be set straight about why this would not work — but isn’t it basically what the Democrats are trying to do now with turning DC and Puerto Rico into states? Really, it looks like they are being pikers settling for just two extra states when they could have so many more.

First let me say that I know of no constitutional impediment to that scheme. Unfortunately. But why hasn’t it been tried before? I think the main reason is that the far left has never been in charge of this country before. Previously, although politics has been hard-fought and often dirty, with shady machinations of one sort of other, there has never been a group in charge willing to do truly outlandish things to make its power permanent.

That’s what we have now – or close to it. We’ll see just how close as time goes on.

However, Puerto Rico has been a bona fide territory for a long time and I don’t think the idea of admitting it as a state is on an especially shaky level, nor does it resemble – except in political goals – the idea of admitting DC, a very different entity, as a state. Some of the constitutional impediments to making the District a state can be found in this 1993 article, from which you can see that Democrats have contemplated this move before.

Whether SCOTUS would be able or willing to bar the move is unknown, but one thing we do know is that the Democrats in Congress are very serious about this, having passed a bill this past June making DC (or most of it) a state, although the bill died in the GOP-held Senate. Rest assured that it would have a much better chance in the present Congress, and of course Biden would sign it with a flourish. And once a state is admitted it cannot be banished. I believe that the current Democrats are deadly serious about it, although I doubt that all that many people who voted for them last November were even aware of that fact.

D. Cohen mentions at the end of that comment that “it looks like [the Democrats] are being pikers settling for just two extra states.” My response is: what makes you think they plan to stop there?

I mean that quite seriously. Ideas once unthinkable are often first floated in op-eds and/or law review articles, to test the waters and in order to nudge that Overton Window a bit more open. In that regard, please note this article that appeared in the Harvard Law Review last January. It was published as an unsigned “note,” which means that it was the work of students.

It is titled “Pack the Union: A Proposal to Admit New States for the Purpose of Amending the Constitution to Ensure Equal Representation,” and I suggest you read it or at least part of it. Here is a small excerpt:

To create a system where every vote counts equally, the Constitution must be amended. To do this, Congress should pass legislation reducing the size of Washington, D.C., to an area encompassing only a few core federal buildings and then admit the rest of the District’s 127 neighborhoods as states. These states — which could be added with a simple congressional majority — would add enough votes in Congress to ratify four amendments: (1) a transfer of the Senate’s power to a body that represents citizens equally; (2) an expansion of the House so that all citizens are represented in equal-sized districts; (3) a replacement of the Electoral College with a popular vote; and (4) a modification of the Constitution’s amendment process that would ensure future amendments are ratified by states representing most Americans.

Radical as this proposal may sound, it is no more radical than a nominally democratic system of government that gives citizens widely disproportionate voting power depending on where they live. The people should not tolerate a system that is manifestly unfair; they should instead fight fire with fire, and use the unfair provisions of the Constitution to create a better system.

If you look at the history of modern tyrannies, many of them have seized absolute and long-term power through democratic means. So it’s not a new idea. One of those examples is Nazi Germany (please see this on the Enabling Act), but there are many others. Something can be legal while still being very very very bad.

The idea recommended in that law review article is obviously a tyrannical one: if you can’t get your way in the usual manner, use a legal trick to ram your way down the throats of America whether the majority of Americans like it or not – and better still, label it “democracy.” The Founders understood that democracy is very dangerous and almost inevitably leads to tyranny if unchecked, and although they tried to put enough checks and balances in the Constitution to protect us from our worst impulses, and they gave us a republican rather than democratic form of government (and it’s a republic that the authors of that “note” wish to do away with), the Founders knew they could not protect us forever.

The bottom line is that, if the Democrats are that far gone down the path of “ends justifies the means” tyranny, and if they are in control, then this sort of thing will happen. And if this particular thing (“packing the Union” though the creation of multiple tiny states) doesn’t happen, something else will happen (or many things) to solidify their control. The law and SCOTUS can protect us, but only to a point. The ultimate protection is the integrity and wisdom of our public servants and of the American people themselves. I wouldn’t bet much on the first. It remains to be seen about the second.