Hong Kong’s political prisoners versus our own political prisoners

The New Neo Posted on by

Note the similarity.

First, in Hong Kong:

Five speech therapists in hoods and handcuffs were led away by security police in Hong Kong yesterday for distributing “seditious” children’s books that depict China as a malevolent wolf…

The gesture of defiance came after a crackdown on dissent and free speech in the territory under Beijing’s new security law. Hong Kong’s protest movement has been shut down by the threat of jail and independent media outlets have been hounded into closure…

Pro-Beijing newspapers and politicians have called the books an attempt to ‘poison’ the minds of children by promoting freedom from Beijing in the territory. A senior Hong Kong education official claimed that they had used fables to spread political propaganda. The two men and three women arrested, who are aged between 25 and 28, are accused of “inciting hatred among the public, especially small children, against the Hong Kong government and Hong Kong judiciary, inciting the use of violence, and encouraging disobedience of the law,” according to the police.

The redefinition of mere criticism of a leftist government into actionable “hate” speech and speech that constitutes “incitement to violence” or hurts people’s sensibilities has been a leftist tactic for quite some time. Our own leftist government is well on the way to something similar, as this news (which I also put in one of yesterday’s posts) indicates:

When China opened up to the West so many years ago, it was thought by many “experts” that it would result in the Westernization of China. I don’t think most people thought the influence would go the other way. Our own traditions of liberty were stronger then, but the left has been carefully undermining them for many many many decades.

What oft was thought

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a comment about the song “Dust In the Wind,” on the thread about the death of Robby Steinhardt, the violinist for the group Kansas:

Sorry Neo, but that is about the tritest sappiest song there is. As if the thoughts therein had never occurred to everyone on the planet before.

Taste in music – and lyrics – differ, as the music threads on this blog amply demonstrate. But I take issue with that particular comment, and I’ll tell you why.

It’s not that the song is an absolutely enormous favorite of mine, although I do like it quite a bit and so do gazillions of people around the globe. The fact that it’s a very popular song doesn’t make it trite and sappy nor does it mean it’s not trite and sappy. But I submit that it is highly unnecessary for a thought – whether in essay, poem, or song lyric – to be utterly original in order to be worth saying again. As Alexander Pope wrote:

True Wit is Nature to advantage dress’d
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d;
Something whose truth convinced at sight we find,
That gives us back the image of our mind.

The new version of the older thought (or the older truth) can serve to create an “aha!” moment in the listener or reader that is sometimes profound – a kind of resonance and vibration at a different speed or pitch. There are few original insights (which is in itself an unoriginal insight), but that doesn’t negate art. Nor is restating them in different form a case of the creator trying to imply that the thoughts “had never occurred to everyone on the planet before.”

In the Byrds’ 1965 song “Turn, Turn, Turn” (there was an earlier one in 1962, but it was the Byrds who popularized the song), much the same ideas are expressed but keeping the words in a much earlier form, that of the biblical Ecclesiastes. The song was also very popular, and I wounder how many people recognized the source. No matter; it bears repeating – and when set to music the same thoughts acquire a different aspect and touch a different part of the heart and mind.

Music can reach us on a deep level. So can words alone, but words set to music enter by a different avenue. Music alone or music with lyrics can cause tears in the listener in ways that the same words alone are sometimes less likely to do. It’s true of classical music or pop music, and some people respond better to one over the other although some people are very fond of both.

You don’t have to like “Dust In the Wind.” You are welcome to think it trite and sappy. But “trite” – meaning “hackneyed or boring from much use : not fresh or original” – and “sappy” – meaning “overly sweet or sentimental” – can be synonyms for “wise” and “meaningful.” I also submit that there’s nothing sweet or sentimental about the “Dust In the Wind” lyrics, but that’s not the point.

The thoughts in that song have been expressed so many times I could not even begin to list them. And yet people seem to want to express them again, in different form. I’ll close the post with one of the more famous statements of the idea. I could have selected any number of verses, but here are a few:

The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon
Turns Ashes—or it prospers; and anon,
Like Snow upon the Desert’s dusty Face
Lighting a little Hour or two—is gone…

Why, all the Saints and Sages who discuss’d
Of the Two Worlds so learnedly, are thrust
Like foolish Prophets forth; their Words to Scorn
Are scatter’d, and their Mouths are stopt with Dust.

Oh, come with old Khayyam, and leave the Wise
To talk; one thing is certain, that Life flies;
One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies;
The Flower that once has blown for ever dies…

One Moment in Annihilation’s Waste,
One moment, of the Well of Life to taste—
The Stars are setting, and the Caravan
Starts for the dawn of Nothing—Oh, make haste!…

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

The kidnapping plot against Governor Whitmer – more evidence that it was entrapment all along

The New Neo Posted on by

We’ve already discussed this general topic here, but now there’s a new article with even more details of the enormous role of undercover FBI agents in the supposed plot to kidnap Governor Whitmer of Michigan.

It would be shocking if we still had the capacity to be shocked by something like this. But even if it’s no longer shocking, it’s outrageous, despicable, and should be condemned by every American.

But there’s no chance of that last bit happening, unfortunately.

Excerpt:

The audacious plot to kidnap a sitting governor — seen by many as a precursor to the Jan. 6 assault on the US Capitol by hundreds of Trump-supporting protesters — has become one of the most important domestic terrorism investigations in a generation…

The government has documented at least 12 confidential informants who assisted the sprawling investigation. The trove of evidence they helped gather provides an unprecedented view into American extremism, laying out in often stunning detail the ways that anti-government groups network with each other and, in some cases, discuss violent actions.

An examination of the case by BuzzFeed News also reveals that some of those informants, acting under the direction of the FBI, played a far larger role than has previously been reported. Working in secret, they did more than just passively observe and report on the actions of the suspects. Instead, they had a hand in nearly every aspect of the alleged plot, starting with its inception. The extent of their involvement raises questions as to whether there would have even been a conspiracy without them.

A longtime government informant from Wisconsin, for example, helped organize a series of meetings around the country where many of the alleged plotters first met one another and the earliest notions of a plan took root, some of those people say. The Wisconsin informant even paid for some hotel rooms and food as an incentive to get people to come.

The Iraq War vet, for his part, became so deeply enmeshed in a Michigan militant group that he rose to become its second-in-command, encouraging members to collaborate with other potential suspects and paying for their transportation to meetings. He prodded the alleged mastermind of the kidnapping plot to advance his plan, then baited the trap that led to the arrest.

The piece is long, and I haven’t read the whole thing although I plan to.

There’s also this, which is tangential but certainly interesting:

Meanwhile, Gregory Townsend, one of the lead prosecutors handling the cases against eight of the defendants in Michigan state court, was reassigned in May pending an attorney general audit into whether he had withheld evidence about deals cut with informants during a murder and arson trial in Oakland County in 2000. And on Sunday, in a matter apparently unrelated to the alleged kidnapping conspiracy, one of the lead FBI agents in the case, Richard J. Trask, was charged in state court in Kalamazoo with assault with intent to do great bodily harm.

We have certainly learned not to trust the FBI. But the need for distrust goes way back, and fifty years ago (!) I remember being very concerned when I learned about entrapment in law school. So there’s this:

Informants have helped make cases that averted terrible violence. But informants have also coerced innocent people, falsified evidence, and even committed murder while working for the FBI. The bureau’s reliance on informants, much criticized in the 1970s, received renewed scrutiny in the wake of 9/11, when they were used to probe Muslim groups for alleged involvement in Islamic terrorism.

I went to law school in the 1970s, and that’s when I realized how pernicious – and perhaps widespread – entrapment is.

The Whitmer “kidnapping” case is not directly related to the January 6th “insurrection” cases. But it rhymes. The latter even is being used to implicate those involved in the former:

In court, the government has drawn a direct line between the alleged kidnapping plot and the Jan. 6 insurrection, holding up the storming of the US Capitol as evidence that the Michigan defendants posed a profound threat.

Last month, Attorney General Merrick Garland stressed in a speech about the government’s approach to domestic terrorism that it is focused “on violence, not ideology,” adding that “in America, espousing a hateful ideology is not unlawful.” But if the defense is able to undermine the methods used to build the Michigan case, it could add weight to the theory that the administration is conducting a witch hunt against militant groups — and, by extension, that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a black op engineered by the FBI.

Speaking of ideology, note some of the court proceedings yesterday involving a January 6th defendant:

One of the replies to that tweet is “Sounds like a charge of blasphemy.”

The internet and political censorship

The New Neo Posted on by

Years ago, when the internet really got going, one of its big attractions was that it gave everyone who wanted one a voice. For example, in the blogophere’s early days, different individuals would compete in the marketplace of ideas to be able to reach a segment of the far-flung public without going through the middlemen of agents and publishers or newspaper or magazine editors . Sometimes bloggers linked and promoted each other. Or sometimes a newspaper or talk show host would pick up and promote a certain blogger. But for the most part it was a decentralized system, and bloggers controlled their own sites in their own way. Each blogger made decisions about the rules for commenting and commenters on his or her own site, but no single blogger had that much power because there were so many blogs on which to comment.

Then it slowly changed. The number of individual political bloggers shrank and the number of aggregate sites grew, so that the blogosphere became more centralized although still somewhat spread out. A great many blogs stopped having comments, too, finding them too troublesome to monitor.

But then social media became more popular, and that came down to Facebook and Twitter for the most part. Very centralized. Social media was attractive to a lot of people – although it never attracted me because I felt it was mostly shallow and rewarded “gotcha!” attacks. But it quickly became the way to communicate with a huge number of people at once, if you could get followers, because all the Twitter leaders were on the same platform rather than separate ones.

Politicians quickly saw the advantages of Twitter and many started using it and attracting large followings. But I doubt they thought all that much about the amount of power they were giving a private company over their ability to communicate with the public. And that centralization of social media is now a big problem, especially for the right. It Twitter or Facebook decides to ban a person that person can still write and speak, but he or she loses out on a vital way to be heard and read in today’s world.

And now the heads of social media are apparently taking orders from the Biden administration. So they have become the mouthpiece that does the present administration’s bidding, a far cry from the original promise of the internet. Of course, they say they’re just refusing to spread “misinformation” – but who decides what that is? The people on the left who are in charge of social media, that’s who, as well as the currently leftist government.

But it’s not just Twitter and Facebook and other social media outlets. Conservative sites in general are now at risk; see this for some of the details, as well as the first part of this.

We’re getting closer and closer to the situation of government censorship of a huge segment of our communication, and it’s being done in a fascistic way through a partnership of government and private enterprise. And many people don’t seem to give a hoot, because it’s silencing the voices they want silenced.

Have ten thousand people died from the COVID vaccine?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve seen that figure touted here and there online, and the other day a friend of mine also insisted that people are dropping like flies from the vaccine. At this point, I see no reason to believe that’s true.

It’s not that I naively trust the government or the CDC or the MSM at this point; I don’t. But it stands to reason to me that if you give a vaccine to half the population and far more than half of the elderly population, you’re going to have a lot of “adverse events” coming afterwards.

The rumor seems to have come from the manner in which such events are being reported for COVID vaccines. This article makes sense to me, and until further evidence emerges that it’s wrong (and of course that could happen), I believe that this vaccine is not especially dangerous. Here’s an example of what I mean:

Deaths reported to VAERS are not a “death toll.” The database includes all serious adverse events following vaccination against COVID-19 — regardless of whether the vaccines are to blame. There have been more deaths reported to VAERS following COVID-19 vaccination than for other vaccines, but experts told USA TODAY that’s not because the vaccines are deadly. Anti-vaccine advocates have erroneously cited the database for decades…

VAERS relies on healthcare providers, vaccine manufacturers and vaccine recipients to submit reports of adverse events following vaccination. Those events are not called “symptoms” or “side effects” because events reported to VAERS are not all verifiably linked to the vaccines, as the CDC says on its website.

These reports are relatively rare for FDA-approved vaccines. Between 2000-2020, VAERS received 1,005 reports of death after vaccination, according to a USA TODAY analysis of VAERS data…

One reason for the inflated reports of death following COVID-19 vaccination is that healthcare providers are required to report all serious adverse events, regardless of whether they think they’re related to the shot.

“Healthcare providers’ reporting requirements (for COVID-19 vaccines) are much broader than for other vaccines,” Shimabukuro told USA TODAY.

After someone receives a COVID-19 vaccine, their healthcare provider is required by law to report all serious adverse health events, even if the provider does not think the vaccine caused that event. These events can include death, inpatient hospitalization or a serious case of COVID-19. That reporting protocol is due to the fact that the FDA authorized the COVID-19 vaccines for emergency use.

For other vaccines — such as the flu vaccine and the measles, mumps and rubella vaccines — the requirements are different. According to Shimabukuro, providers do not have to report deaths or other adverse events for FDA-approved vaccines unless they fit specific criteria of reportable events.

But that’s not all. It turns out that anyone – not just medical people, but anyone – can report to the system. Because the COVID vaccine is so controversial and there’s so much interest in it as well as political implications, it is probably the case that more people are reporting data to the system than with other previous disease vaccinations.

This all makes sense to me, as I said. Nevertheless I support the right of anyone to refuse to be vaccinated, for any reason.

What is Hunter Biden’s art really worth?

The New Neo Posted on by

This article is entitled “Pulitzer-Winning Art Critic Reveals What Hunter Biden’s Paintings Are Really Worth”:

Last month, we reported that Hunter Biden’s first solo art show was coming soon and that his paintings were expected to sell for between $75,000 and half a million dollars each.

From the pieces that I was able to see, I found them mediocre, but the media gushed over Hunter’s newfound art hobby, professed his talent, and some “experts” claimed his work is actually good…

Never mind the inflated prices and the whole thing about all the purchases being confidential…

In an interview with CNN’s Chris Cillizza, [famous art critic] Smee was asked outright: “Is Hunter Biden’s work any good, aesthetically speaking?”

“For me, not really,” Smee told him. “I’ve only seen it in reproduction, so I’m sure I’m missing a lot: texture, layering, detail. Parts of them look technically impressive. But the style is eclectic in a way that makes his work feel neither one thing nor another.”

But I submit that there’s no way to tell what Hunter Biden’s (or any other artist’s) work is really worth in some ideal Platonic sense. It’s worth what people will pay, and that can change over time. It’s worth – to each person – is what that person thinks of it. With the paintings of Hunter Biden, it’s even more difficult – in fact, well-nigh impossible – to get an objective sense because politics and the selling of influence enters into it so heavily.

But I have noticed that a great deal of recent art is political, both in concept and in the way it’s treated by museums and critics. I used to go to art exhibits regularly, but in the last decade or so it’s become so “woke” that I’ve stopped going. Even exhibits of older art are increasingly described in political leftist terms, and although that doesn’t completely spoil the art for me, it becomes a distasteful exercise in wading through the explanatory mire.

And new art? Much of it that I’ve seen seems utterly worthless to me, and I wouldn’t pay a dime for it. It’s not esthetic, it’s not appealing, and it’s often so “conceptual” (although that word is a bit passé) that it’s indistinguishable from political propaganda. The artists are also sometimes grouped and evaluated in terms of their ethnicity and sex (or “gender”).

That’s not the way I look at art. But it’s the way we increasingly are being told to see it.

The Delta variant and the vaccine

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday, commenter Edward R. Bonderenka wrote this:

As for the efficacy of the injection. I heard this morning that Israel, thoroughly injected, is seeing an upswing in ChiVi.
Now I hear it’s the Delta Variant (I shudder in fear).
But the injections were good against the DV.
Are they making it up as they go along?

I think the point of that comment was to say that the vaccine isn’t especially protective. It seems to me that the “shudder in fear” part might be sarcastic. But whether it’s sarcastic or not in that particular comment, “shudder in fear” is a good description of the effect that news of the Delta variant has on a lot of people, including a lot of people I know.

And it does seem as though quite a few authorities are itching to lock us down again, or at least to get us to all wear masks again.

It’s relatively early at this point in the life history of the Delta variant, but so far when I look at the actual numbers I see no cause for alarm. As has been true for the entire course of the pandemic, it’s the serious cases and the deaths that matter, and so far the rise in US cases is small according to the chart of cases per day. As for the rise in deaths, we only have data up to about three weeks ago, and there was no rise at that point.

But let’s take Israel, the country that was the subject of the comment. Israel is a good example because it’s compact and it’s easier to see the overall picture, plus it has a high percentage of vaccinated people.

The population of Israel is approximately 9,228,000. About 10% are over 65, and from this chart it seems that about another 450,000 are between 60 and 65 (that would add another 4.8%). So by my quick figuring, the total population over 60 in Israel would be about 1,373,000.

Of that 60-and-over group, more than 90% are fully vaccinated. Let’s lowball it and say that it’s 90%, which would mean that 1,235,700 are vaccinated in that age group. The Pfizer vaccine (used in Israel) is considered to be 95% effective. So I would conclude that 61,785 people over 60 in Israel who have been vaccinated would be expected to be susceptible to getting COVID despite the vaccine.

In populations over 60, what percent tend to have cases serious enough to be hospitalized? In the early days of the COVID pandemic (when there wasn’t good treatment and testing wasn’t so widespread), it was found that between 22% and 34% of people over 60 who got COVID needed hospitalization. I can’t find more recent statistics, but I’m pretty sure it’s a considerably smaller percentage at this point. I remember reading at one later time that it was 10% in the over-60 age group. So I’ll use that 10% figure.

If you look at the Worldometer charts for Israel, you’ll see that although case numbers have had a slight uptick there, they are still very low. Deaths haven’t even had an uptick (although deaths trail reporting of cases, of course).

Here’s an article describing the situation in Israel at present. Right now in the entire country there are 121 hospitalized COVID patients (it doesn’t say whether “from” or “with”) and 61 of them are in serious condition. All but one are over 60, and the other person is close to 60. There’s no information about their state of health otherwise, or their age distribution within that over-60 group. But this is a minuscule portion of the 61,785 Israelis in that age group fully vaccinated and vulnerable, of whom at least 6,179 might be expected to be hospitalized if they were to contract COVID.

Then there’s this:

One month ago, there were just 19 serious cases in the country; Sunday’s figure of 61 is the highest in two months. At its peak in late January, there were more than 1,000 serious cases.

So the caseload is still very low, even comparatively speaking. What’s more – and this is an important part:

The Delta variant is believed to be more successful in bypassing the COVID vaccines than previous strains of the virus. Health Ministry figures released in early July indicated that the Pfizer COVID vaccine is only 64% effective in preventing infection, but it remains 93% effective at preventing hospitalization and serious symptoms.

Some health officials cast doubt on these figures, noting that they were gathered only over a period of a month, and they maintain that the Pfizer vaccine is actually more effective against Delta than claimed. Nevertheless, Pfizer cited data from Israel in seeking authorization from the US Federal Drug Administration for a third booster dose of its vaccine.

Boosters are only planned to be given to people with extra health problems.

So it seems that the vaccine doesn’t protect perfectly, nor did anyone ever say it did. But it protects pretty well, especially against serious COVID. But that doesn’t mean such cases don’t happen in fully vaccinated people. They do and they will. The real question is whether their numbers will increase significantly and especially past the point that is to be expected given the fact that vaccines all have a certain failure rate. So far the numbers are not bad.

Part of the panic about this is that the MSM isn’t doing a good job of explaining the statistics. But what else is new? They have a vested interest in panic, too. And of course the Biden administration and some local authorities are ramping up the “Unvaccinated people are killers!” routine.

From the start COVID has been utterly politicized, which I consider reprehensible. From the start there also has been so much lying and coverup (as well as bona fide confusion) that it becomes harder rather than easier to sort out the wheat from the chaff. Social media and government officials (but I repeat myself) who purport to tell us what is “misinformation” and what is not have utterly failed to earn our trust. So apparently it’s up to us to figure out what the statistics actually mean, and that’s far from easy.

[ADDENDUM: I’ll add that headlines saying something like “COVID cases increase among fully vaccinated people” are confusing and even misleading for many people. Of course such cases are increasing among the fully vaccinated. More people have been fully vaccinated, and as I said in my post, at least 5% of the vaccinated will be susceptible to COVID. So as a greater percentage of the population becomes vaccinated, cases will increase among the vaccinated. But most people don’t think that through, and they conclude that the vaccine isn’t helping them against the new variant.]

RIP Robby Steinhardt, violinist for the rock group Kansas

The New Neo Posted on by

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

From the Rolling Stone obituary:

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

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

This is interesting:

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

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

More:

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

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

Steinhardt also had major Big Hair.

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

The vaccines and COVID and the Texas Democrats

The New Neo Posted on by

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

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

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