Songs that just arrive – if you’re right there waiting

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve gotten fascinated by the process of songwriting, something I don’t understand. I think I can safely say I will never write a song. But there are people who do it from childhood on, over and over. Sometimes they never succeed, sometimes they’re one-hit wonders, and sometimes they seem to have the golden touch.

Sometimes they just know when something will be a hit. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they work a long time on the song, but often – more often than one might think – they describe the song as having arrived quickly, sometimes intact.

The prolific songwriting Bee Gees have spoken about this in interviews. They sometimes seem to be saying songs exist out there in some Platonic form and come to them in a mysterious way. It’s not just the Bee Gees, either; it seems to be a common perception among songwriters, and who am I to tell them otherwise?

Here’s a great story about a song like that, courtesy of song-receiver Richard Marx. I’m not keen on this particular song, but gazillions of people are:

He was waiting – for the song. And it arrived!

By the way, he looks really good in that video for 57.

Here’s the song itself:

And who was his fiance, and did she become his wife? I did some sleuthing around, and it seems very likely to have been actress/singer/dancer Cynthia Rhodes, whom Marx married around the time that song was released. Here are some interesting facts about her history:

Her most notable role was as dance instructor Penny Johnson in the hit 1987 motion picture Dirty Dancing with Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze…

Rhodes also appeared as a dancer in a number of music videos, including “Rosanna” by the band Toto, “The Woman in You” by the Bee Gees, and “Don’t Mean Nothing” by Richard Marx. She was a dancer for the glam rock band The Tubes when they toured in the early 1980s. Rhodes later joined the pop group Animotion, replacing their lead singer Astrid Plane, for the recording of their third album of original material. In 2002, Rhodes co-wrote the smooth jazz track “Perfect Day” with then-husband Richard Marx for December, trumpeter Chris Botti’s holiday album.

Rhodes and Marx were married for 25 years and had three children, but are now divorced. Funny thing, I was just watching that “Rosanna” video the other day. But although I’ve become familiar with a lot of the music of the Bee Gees, I didn’t previously know that Bee Gees song mentioned as having starred Rhodes in the video.

So of course I had to find it. It’s not one of my favorites, either, but the 1983 video is incredibly 80s in every way, and the brothers do a lot of funny bits in the first half (Barry’s hair toss at around 1:06 is especially amusing). The video’s a bit blurry, but it’s certainly viewable. Rhodes is – well, you’ll see her first in red, then in blue, and then in white. This came out the same year as “Flashdance,” in which Rhodes had a major role, and the second half of the video has a Flashdance vibe:

And just to round the whole thing off here’s Lucas Marx, one of Rhodes’ and Marx’s three sons, all of whom are musicians. He looks a fair amount like Dad and even has a similar high and light voice, but his voice has that modern twist that I can’t stand that makes it sound artificial to me. Is it a diction thing? Some technology they use with the voices to distort them, like autotune? It has that “slide-y” and metallic effect:

Obamacare was the turning point for the American left

The New Neo Posted on by

Why Obamacare as the turning point? It was a major transformative program passed by a narrow and partisan vote. Previously all such big legislation had bilateral support – at least, to the best of my knowledge (see this).

In the process the left learned that, with the help of a compliant press, they could get away with it. Sure, there was a bit of a backlash in the midterms, but Obamacare held and all they had to do was wait till they got more power.

They waited and concentrated their efforts on getting that power back. Everything they did to Trump was an effort in that direction. All the deference to Biden was a similar effort. The boycott on any news that might hurt the left might have made the MSM seem foolish and mendacious to a lot of people, but not to enough people to hurt the cause. Whether you believe Biden won in 2020 through a non-fraudulent voting process or whether you believe fraud enabled his win, he won and the Georgia victories put the left in the driver’s seat again. They will not hesitate to pass transformative legislation – even without much support from the public, or any support from Republicans – if they can accomplish it.

They want to transform the US further, even if it’s only by a margin of one vote. Voting “reform,” DC statehood, court packing, etc. are all transformative proposals on the Democrat wish list, but at present they almost certainly must end the filibuster to pass them unless Biden can somehow accomplish the same through executive orders (or unless the reconciliation process can be sufficiently expanded). Ending the filibuster would allow simple majority rule and the tyranny of the majority we were warned against by Madison.

Oddly enough, for now the fate of the nation seems to rest on the shoulders of Joe Manchin and/or Krsten Sinema. If one of them refuses to vote to end the filibuster, at least some of the worst excesses of the left might be avoided. But only for a while, because the left will not give up what it considers a winning formula, and it will press on with vigor.

DeSantis will be a target for the foreseeable future

The New Neo Posted on by

As I wrote yesterday, the MSM and the Democrats are hard at work trying to discredit any Republican who might be a viable candidate in 2024. In DeSantis’ case, he’s also up for re-election as Florida’s governor in 2022. His star has risen lately because of his willingness to stand up to the left, and because so far his state has been doing (knock wood) rather well.

So we have efforts like this to make a vast number of American voters who’ve probably barely heard of him before think “Ick!” when they hear his name.

Biden and the Big COVID Lie

The New Neo Posted on by

You may wonder how it is that Biden (or those handling him) thinks he can get away with a lie such as this one:

Joe Biden is at it again with yet another lie about the vaccination plan, claiming President Donald Trump didn’t have a plan, despite the demonstrable fact that Trump was getting about a million people vaccinated a day by the time that Biden came in…

Here’s the Biden statement that’s being referred to:

The first point – an obvious one – is that there is no serious effort by the press to call Biden on anything he does or says. If Biden knows anything at this point (and he does still know quite a few things) he knows that. Here and there you may see some mild fact-checking, but the administration knows it has a general pass (what in one of my earliest blog posts I called a “press pass”) to make whatever claim it wants.

In addition, in the case of the COVID narrative, this idea – that Trump did nothing and had no plan, and Joe will do everything and has a plan – has long been a basic meme of the Biden campaign. And the American public appears to have bought it. I certainly know people who did, and most of them had been saying since last March that Trump was doing everything wrong regarding COVID. That’s what they read in the MSM, that’s what they heard their friends say, and everyone knew it was true. In vain I would point out certain facts – for example, I’d ask them when they thought Trump had appointed the Task Force on COVID. No one ever got it right, and they had trouble believing me when I told them that Trump had announced its formation quite early – on January 29, 2020 – and that Fauci and Birx were already onboard at that time.

But even learning that, or any other fact about what Trump had done early on to fight the disease, didn’t really change much in their minds. That’s because the media was relentlessly pushing another story, and to open oneself to the possibility that the media was lying was just a bridge too far and would require too great a reorganization of reality. If reality was that Trump was an incompetent liar, it would take a lot more than a few facts to change that idea, and why bother when all the smart people were on the “Trump is an incompetent liar” side?

So at this point it’s not all that hard for these same people to believe that Biden – or at least, the people under Biden who are really in charge – are finally going to fix everything that Trump did wrong. Declining numbers of cases will be used as proof. It isn’t really that hard to avoid the perils of cognitive dissonance because the MSM will guide and lead the way.

As for Joe Biden himself and the obvious indications that he’s cognitively challenged, I really haven’t had that particular discussion with any of the Democrats I know. But I think I can imagine what most might say: “It’s worth it just to get rid of Trump.” They also almost undoubtedly think that the people who will be running the show in the Biden presidency will be far better than anyone Trump appointed. Once Trump was successfully demonized, almost anything can be rationalized.

The same for the “insurrection” and the response of turning DC into an armed camp. The reasoning goes like this: Trump supporters are racist white supremacist fascists who want to take over the country, and January 6th was the tip of the iceberg. They must be stopped at all costs.

That message is reinforced by the MSM, Democrat politicians, academicians, people in the arts, and often a vast circle of friends and acquaintances (especially in blue states and cities). No one should underestimate the difficulty of thinking differently, or how hard it is to start doubting the story at this late date. Against the almost overwhelming force of the narrative, what potency do a few new facts have to change a person’s mind? It can happen, of course, but it’s not that common and it’s not that easy.

Open thread

The New Neo Posted on by

Just to see how it goes, I’m experimenting with a new feature suggested by a commenter.

Although I don’t habitually post in the mornings, for a while I’m going to put up a regular open thread in the morning, where you can talk about whatever you’d like – following the usual non-combat rules, of course. Sometimes I’ll add a photo or a poem fragment or some music, but there’s no need to talk about those particular things although of course you can if you’d like.

For instance, today it will be this video, to show you another example of Donovan’s remarkable naturally- produced tremolo, which I talked about recently in this post. The sound is live, by the way – not lip synced.

This song is dedicated to all night owls:

What could possibly go wrong with the appointment of General Honoré to oversee a supposedly objective review of the Capitol riot?

The New Neo Posted on by

No problem with this; no problem at all:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appears to be trying to rig an “independent security review” of the January 6th Capitol riots by appointing an extreme left-wing partisan to lead the investigation, and Republicans are starting to cry foul.

Retired Lt. General Russel Honoré, hand-picked by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last month to oversee the “9/11-style” commission, is under increased scrutiny after numerous crude, extreme, and profoundly partisan tweets and comments have come to light.

Here’s the general’s reaction to Trump’s response to Hurricane Maria:

The president has shown again, you don’t give a damn about poor people, you don’t give a damn about people of color and the SOB that rides around in Air Force One is denying services needed by the people of Puerto Rico.

And then we have this:

Since Monday, several more partisan and profane comments have come to light featuring Honoré blasting Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mis.) and other Republicans for objecting to the 2020 election results, blaming conservative Capitol Police for “allowing Trumpsters” to get into the Capitol, and savaging President Trump.

“That little peace of shit with his @Yale law degree should be run out of DC and Disbarred ASAP,” Lt. General Russel Honoré wrote of Hawley in a now deleted Twitter post on January 11.

Honoré is obviously an objective and independent observer, dedicated to uncovering the truth wherever it may lead him.

More:

…[T]he man chosen by Pelosi to lead the security review of the Capitol riots, agreed with left-wing talk show host Roland Martin in an interview on Jan. 10 that former president Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr., and Rudy Giuliani should all be arrested for “causing an insurrection.”

Honoré also told the host that the reason some people think the election was stolen is because “they don’t want to lose their white power. They don’t like the browning of America.”

More at the link.

One by one, the Democrats will be trying to destroy all the Republicans they fear for 2024

The New Neo Posted on by

Since the Democrats pretty much own the media, and since they are gatekeepers for social media as well, they are able to coordinate their tactics and timing. Right now, there’s a full court press on the ridiculously trivial Cruz-in-Cancun story.

A while back their rage was directed at Tom Cotton, who had the temerity to suggest that Trump had a right to call federal troops to stop the widespread destructive looting and rioting in American cities. This was, of course, before the Democrats decided to make Washington DC into an armed camp to supposedly protect their precious selves from right-wing rioters who had broken some windows and apparently killed and burned no one and nothing. But at the time of Cotton’s op-ed in the Times, its mere publication resulted in large numbers of hard-boiled young Times reporters getting the vapors, and in the demonization of the terrible tyrant Cotton.

Josh Hawley is in their sights, as is Governor DeSantis of Florida – really, any GOP member who is perceived as a presidential possibility and who is not a RINO. Come to think of it, there are no RINO presidential possibilities at the moment, and I would guess not in the foreseeable future. But the Democrats would dearly like to leave only the RINOs standing.

Number of COVID cases in the US dropping

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a discussion of why. It’s based on this WSJ article which I can’t reach because of a paywall. Here are some quotes from the WSJ piece, appearing in the RedState post:

Why is the number of cases plummeting much faster than experts predicted?

In large part because natural immunity from prior infection is far more common than can be measured by testing. Testing has been capturing only from 10% to 25% of infections, depending on when during the pandemic someone got the virus. Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans have natural immunity.

Now add people getting vaccinated. As of this week, 15% of Americans have received the vaccine, and the figure is rising fast…

At the current trajectory, I expect Covid will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life.

But will the government allow Americans to resume normal life? I doubt it – and even if they do, the new thing that Americans are instructed to fear is Trump supporters, who are obviously violent insurrectionists as well as kulaks.

The Democrats’ most recent attempt to pass a Bill of attainder would be laughable…

The New Neo Posted on by

…if it was a joke. But this is not the Babylon Bee, and this is not the Onion.

What am I referring to? It’s so awful that even some Democrats are angry at the bill’s sponsors. The bill is called the “No Glory for Hate Act,” which is a pretty funny title in an Orwellian way, because if it were passed it would be an act of hatred if I ever saw one:

The ‘No Glory for Hate Act’, sponsored by Representative Linda Sanchez (D-California) and co-sponsored by 13 other Democrats, calls for banning any “twice-impeached president” from being buried at Arlington National Cemetery. The ashes of such a president couldn’t be inurned at Arlington, either.

The bill’s heading refers to prohibiting the use of federal funds for the “commemoration of certain presidents,” but only Trump fits the criteria of being impeached twice by the House. To the chagrin of Democrats, he’s also the only president to have been acquitted twice by the Senate. But ironically, like predecessor Barack Obama, Trump never served on active duty in the military and therefore doesn’t qualify for burial at Arlington anyway.

Not to be tripped up by that technicality, the Trump punishers went further in their bill, prohibiting the use of federal funds to create or display any symbol, monument or statue commemorating a twice-impeached president…

…Democrats…did make sure that “certain former presidents” will apply only to Trump – now and in the future. It specifies that it applies to any president who has been impeached twice “on or before” the date that the legislation is enacted. Future impeachers need not apply.

Bill of attainder.

Why don’t they just add “twice-impeached presidents whose name begins with a “T” and ends with a “p”? That’ll make it even more clear.

I’ve never been a big fan of most members of Congress. But these days we have an especially ignorant, tyrannical, brazen, hypocritical, and vindictive bunch on the Democrat side.

Remember my post about Trump as Hector? I wrote this on January 8:

I see so much hatred of Trump online today that it actually eclipses what I’d seen previously, and that’s saying something. Now it has the flavor of dancing on a grave. It disgusts me, but that’s the way it is.

When I was very young, I read a child’s version of The Iliad. I remember reading in it that after Achilles had killed Hector, he triumphantly and in rage defiled Hector’s corpse:

Hector lies slaughter’d here

Dragg’d at my chariot, and our dogs shall all in pieces tear

His hated limbs…

Even as a small child, I felt a horror so strong that I recoiled and had to put the book down for a while.

I don’t see the Democrats letting up for the foreseeable future. They are afraid of zombie Trump rising up to challenge them in 2024.

Is Cuomo in trouble?

The New Neo Posted on by

You may have noticed that I haven’t written many posts about the brouhaha surrounding Governor Cuomo of New York and the nursing homes. There are so many stories these days that I can’t deal with them all, and that particular one interests me less than a lot of others because it seems to me that the right has known about Cuomo for quite some time.

The only new thing is that the Democrats have now turned on him, at least somewhat, perhaps for things like this. Then again, I doubt such threats are new behavior for Cuomo.

For some reason, the left has decided he’s expendable – or rather, that it makes sense to allow him to get into a bit of trouble at the moment. Is this a “now it can be told” phenomenon, because Trump is safely out of office? Or is there more to it? Has Cuomo made a lot of enemies in the Democratic Party?

At any rate, Cuomo is now under official investigation for his behavior re COVID and nursing homes.

Who were the January 6th rioters?

The New Neo Posted on by

This article purports to answer a question I’ve been wondering about since January 6: who were the rioters? But there are some curious gaps in the story.

Here’s the general description of the group charged with committing violations at the Capitol that day:

So far, only about 10% of those charged have been found to have ties to organised far right militias or other right-wing extremist groups.

“What we are dealing with here is not merely a mix of right-wing organisations, but a broader mass movement with violence at its core,” wrote Dr Robert Pape, director of the Chicago Project on Security & Threats.

Dr. Pape and the Project are affiliated with the University of Chicago, and I can’t find much about Pape’s politics. But I wondered two things: how he got access to the information on the arrested people, and what were they charged with?

The article doesn’t tell us. But it paints a picture of “insurrectionists” who are described as just ordinary Trump supporters, average age 40, quite atypical of the usual violent revolutionaries or rioters. The implication is that this is a frightening new phenomenon: your regular old conservative neighbor might well be an insurrectionist trying to overthrow the government.

But how do we know these people were actually bent on violence or insurrection? Were the people Pape studied charged with assault, for example? Were they arrested and charged merely because they were the people who were identifiable from photos and videos, or were they all doing something that distinguished them from the peaceful demonstrators? For example, how many of them were the people we’ve seen in some videos who were strolling into the Capitol because the Capitol police let them in – people who may not have even been aware they were trespassing? If the latter, it wouldn’t be surprising that they didn’t fit the profile of most violent rioters – perhaps because they weren’t violent rioters.

Fortunately I located another article, and this one (from the Atlantic) had more information about Dr. Pape’s research and about who these subjects might be.

The title is “The Capitol Rioters Aren’t Like Other Extremists.” Here’s the scoop [emphasis added]:

On January 6, a mob of about 800 stormed the U.S. Capitol in support of former President Donald Trump, and many people made quick assumptions regarding who the insurrectionists were. Because a number of the rioters prominently displayed symbols of right-wing militias, for instance, some experts called for a crackdown on such groups. Violence organized and carried out by far-right militant organizations is disturbing, but it at least falls into a category familiar to law enforcement and the general public. However, a closer look at the people suspected of taking part in the Capitol riot suggests a different and potentially far more dangerous problem: a new kind of violent mass movement in which more “normal” Trump supporters—middle-class and, in many cases, middle-aged people without obvious ties to the far right—joined with extremists in an attempt to overturn a presidential election.

To understand the events of January 6 and devise solutions to prevent their recurrence, Americans need a fine-grained comprehension of who attacked the Capitol.

I certainly agree with that last sentence: but what does it mean to “attack” the Capitol? I would assume we’re talking about those who were violent either towards the Capitol Police or towards the building itself (window breakers, for example).

I had previously read that there were thousands of people “storming” the Capitol, but this article says 800. That’s a group that could easily have been handled by a proper number of security people on duty, but we already know that despite warnings the security was very light that day.

Here’s how the subjects seem to have been chosen by Pape for study [emphasis mine]:

In recent weeks, our team of more than 20 researchers has been reviewing court documents and media coverage for information on the demographics, socioeconomic traits, and militant-group affiliations (if any) of everyone arrested by the FBI, Capitol Police, and Washington, D.C., police for offenses related to the January 6 insurrection. As of late last week, 235 people fell into that category, and the number is expected to grow.

Of these suspects, 193 have been charged with being inside the Capitol building or with breaking through barriers to enter the Capitol grounds. We focused our research on these 193.

I found the data here as well as here.

So the people in the study were arrested for trespassing and for getting through some type of barrier, although we don’t know how permeable the barriers were or what they did to pass through them (did only some break them, for example, and the rest just followed?). The research does not mention any of them being charged with violence against Capitol Police. Not even broken windows, as far as I can see. Not spraying pepper spray. Those things aren’t listed, although there must be some people at the Capitol that day who were arrested for that sort of thing. But it seems to me that those are the ones who should interest us.

Other all-important data I was looking for wasn’t there either. For example, how many were merely arrested for trespassing? How many for breaking through barricades? Why isn’t that data there? Surely the researchers ought to have discovered those figures.

It appears from the study and the articles that everyone in that building, even if only arrested for trespassing, is assumed to have been intent on violence and trying to overthrow the government. The entire set of conclusions – these insurrectionists were just regular Trump supporters, so be afraid, be very afraid – is based on that idea. But the study doesn’t demonstrate it. It doesn’t even deal with it; it merely assumes it.