Applying the same principles to both sides

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the things that led to my political change was that I took the principles I’d always held dear and applied them to new information. That process led me to reconsider my political affiliation and changed my voting tendencies. It was lengthy process, but it was a rather simple one conceptually: if you believe in certain principles, you must apply them fairly.

I said it was simple conceptually. But that doesn’t mean it’s simple to execute. In fact, I’ve come more and more to believe it’s very difficult. However, although I probably err to a certain degree, it’s something I am deeply dedicated to attempting to do and I think I often come somewhat close to succeeding. But a lot of people don’t even try. They are partisans above all else, whether they are fooling themselves and thinking they’re being objective or whether they’ve jettisoned any pretense of objectivity and think that the ends justify the means.

That’s another reason I detest those members of the MSM who are partisan to the core but don a false cloak of objectivity without ever demonstrating it. And that’s why I especially value those writers and speakers who actually do stick to their principles no matter where it leads them. For some, it leads to supporting or at least defending people with whom they aren’t politically simpatico but whom they see as correct in a certain instance. And it leads them to criticizing the intense and duplicitous partisanship of much of the press.

Among such principled and objective people are Alan Dershowitz, Glenn Greenwald, Johnathan Turley, Sharyl Attkisson, Bari Weiss, and at times Matt Taibbi. This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list, but those are the figures who immediately come to mind. I don’t always agree with them, but I’ve been impressed by their often-successful attempts to be fair. It’s sad when people like that are the exceptions rather than the rule, but that’s the way it is.

Which brings us to this article from a few days ago by Jonathan Turley:

We have previously discussed the concerted and often embarrassing blackout in the media on stories involving Hunter Biden’s influence peddling during his father’s tenure as Vice President. That includes the burying of the laptop story and the growing contradictions over his father’s denial of any knowledge or involvement in his shady business dealings. Even recent reports that Hunter may have paid prostitutes with his father’s account were blacked out by mainstream media which exhaustively pursued any story related to the Trump children and their dealings and life styles. Now, however, there is a major allegation that Hunter used access to his father to seal previously unknown deals with Mexican businessmen, including Carlos Slim. A picture shows Hunter with the businessmen in the Vice President residence with his father.

As in the past, Americans interested in such stories have had to rely on the foreign press or a couple domestic sites for such information.

The new emails include references to the use of Air Force II by Hunter Biden to pursue the deals — a similar pattern revealed with regard to the China dealings. The emails detail a number of visits to Mexico, including a February 2016 flight on Air Force II with his father. On the plane was his business partner Jeff Cooper, who ran Illinois-based SimmonsCooper. That is one of the largest asbestos litigation firms in the country and Hunter was given 3 percent of Cooper’s venture capital firm Eudora Global, according to emails. President Biden’s brother (who featured in past controversial deals) was also reportedly involved in some of these efforts.

Turley describes the “blackout in the media on stories involving Hunter Biden’s influence peddling ” as “often embarrassing.” In this I beg to differ with him. Turley would be embarrassed to do this, but the members of the MSM and social media (let’s not forget the latter) who have instituted the bloackout are not the least bit embarrassed, although I’m pretty sure they’re not happy to be exposed as doing so. But I believe they are secure (and even proud) in the knowledge that their coverup was successful in electing Democrat Biden (and his aides) and in ridding the nation (hopefully permanently) of the dread Trump. They are also content in their belief that most people don’t even know how the media has prostituted itself along the way. That’s part of what a coverup is all about.

Happy Belated Birthday, Thomas Sowell

The New Neo Posted on by

Thomas Sowell turned 91 on June 30, and he seems sharp as a tack. I wish him many more healthy years, in part because I admire him so much and in part because we need him more than ever. As the linked article says:

Beginning in 1972 with Black Education: Myths and Tragedies, Sowell has weighed in on how to better the lives of Black Americans in a series of books that were mostly sneered at or ignored by the establishment left but are looking increasingly prescient in a new age of American race politics—this one propelled not by recidivist poor Southern whites but by power-seeking Northern white elites and their oligarchical sponsors.

Fifty years ago, Sowell was already denouncing the trends that now afflict fashionable movements like Black Lives Matter: pursuing symbolic results rather than real ones, choosing white guilt over Black advancement, and seeking special treatment instead of equal chances. Sowell knows that racism still persists, but he refuses to blame the gap between Black and white social outcomes on white supremacy, choosing instead to look to the ways that history shapes both group cultures and individual choices.

One of Sowell’s targets is equity, our current fetish—a word that now means trying to match the number of minority jobholders in every field to their proportion in the general population.

And yet most people probably have no idea who Sowell is.

Sowell was one of the very first thinkers I encountered during the course of my political change experience, and he was probably the most formative one. When I initially read his work – I think it was the book The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy – it was with a happy sigh of recognition and relief as well as admiration. Finally, here was someone who was voicing clear, intelligent, common-sense versions of thoughts, some of which were new to me but some of which I’d already had in extremely inchoate and amorphous form but had never been able to articulate or order. He made perfect sense, and I couldn’t imagine why everyone in the world didn’t agree with him.

Unfortunately, they didn’t.

Notice also that subtitle – of a book first published in 1996 – “Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.” That’s an excellent example of Sowell’s ability to distill – into a short phrase, sentence, or paragraph – a complex and highly insightful as well as illuminating idea. He’s been doing that for about fifty years, and his body of work holds up very well.

So Happy Happy Birthday, Thomas Sowell. Long may you live and grace us with your clear-headed wisdom.

Open thread 7/5/21

The New Neo Posted on by

Fred Astaire could play the piano well, could sing with a bit of Bing Crosby’s vibe on the low notes, and of course we know he could dance up a storm. Ginger Rogers was – IMHO – his best ever partner. When I was a kid they used to show their movies over and over on TV, and my favorite was “Follow the Fleet”:

The song “Massachusetts” comes full circle

The New Neo Posted on by

The Bee Gees’ song “Massachusetts” was one of the earliest of the group’s big hits (1967), prior to their going disco a decade later. At the time, eldest brother Barry was all of 20 and the twins were 17:

The song became the first of the group’s five No. 1 hits in the UK Singles Chart, [and] reached No. 1 in twelve other countries…

They’d never been to Massachusetts at the time; they actually wrote it on a visit to New York City. But they liked the sound of the word “Massachusetts.” An odd choice, I think, but it worked.

Robin Gibb – who died in 2012 – sang lead on the song. His voice is utterly unique and has a haunting quality, with a lot of fast vibrato. There is no falsetto singing on the cut; this song was way before the Bee Gees started singing in that style. But Robin’s voice had a huge range naturally although he was especially known for singing very high in his head voice.

Not everyone likes Robin’s voice, but for those of us who do – and I’m one of them – we really really really like it. I’ve tried to think if there’s any voice even remotely like Robin’s, and I came up with two: Edith Piaf and Judith Durham of The Seekers. The commonalities they share are a powerful voice that goes pretty high and that has a very fast vibrato and is good at expressing emotion.

So I did a search to see if anyone else saw any resemblance between Robin’s and Judith’s voice (both were Australian, in Gibb’s case not by birth though), or Robin and Piaf (who apparently share a birthday, along with Beethoven). No one else seems to have agreed with me on any resemblances, but in the course of the search I found out something else about “Massachusetts”: it was originally written by the Bee Gees for Judith Durham and the Seekers. When the Seekers didn’t record it, the Bee Gees recorded it themselves and had a smash hit with it.

The Bee Gees had an amazing versatility that meant that when they wrote songs for other singers and groups, the songs were just about perfect for those singers. They wrote “To Love Somebody” for Otis Redding, for example, and though he died before recording it, when you hear the song you can practically hear his voice singing it. “Heartbreaker” for Dionne Warwick had just the right lilting lightness that suited her voice.

Here’s “Massachusetts” as the Bee Gees recorded it back in 1967:

And here they are 22 years later, singing it live:

And in a rare case of closure, it turns out that The Seekers finally did record the song in 2003 as a tribute to Robin’s fraternal twin Maurice Gibb, a Bee Gee who had recently died. Durham’s voice is still astoundingly beautiful, and less eccentric than Robin Gibb’s. Her voice has a happy almost bouncy quality, however, and his is almost always sad, even when he’s singing a bouncy song (which this one really isn’t):

Here’s older brother Barry Gibb recently, talking about his brothers and in particular Robin’s voice:

More long knives coming out for Kamala

The New Neo Posted on by

It continues:

Democrats are increasingly fearful Vice President Kamala Harris’ missteps will open the door for Republicans to regain the White House, a new report said Friday.

Dems, including senior White House officials, fear that Harris will lose to any Republican she faces — including former President Donald Trump — if President Biden does not seek reelection in 2024, Axios reported…

Right now, one operative told Axios, the feeling among Democrats isn’t “‘Oh, no, our heir apparent is f—ing up, what are we gonna do?’ It’s more that people think, ‘Oh, she’s f—ing up, maybe she shouldn’t be the heir apparent.’”

Ouch, that’s harsh.

Somebody doesn’t like Kamala Harris and really really really doesn’t want her to run for president. It’s probably not a single “somebody,” either; there may be several “somebodies” involved. None of these disclosures are without a purpose, nor are they likely to be the result of rogue actors. This is a campaign – or, rather, an anti-campaign. Be it Joe Biden, Jill Biden, Barack Obama, or some other behind-the-scenes mover[s] and shaker[s], the ground is being prepared for the political sidelining of Kamala Harris.

It shouldn’t be that hard to do, since she doesn’t have much of a constituency anyway.

Personally, I think the major player here is Obama. It’s just a guess; I certainly could be wrong. I don’t think Biden or even “Dr. Jill” has enough clout. I have long thought that Obama is at least one large factor in decisions that are made about who will be pushed forward and who would be edged out. I recall hints that he was the person who felt that Sanders would be a disaster as nominee in 2020, and who felt that Biden – as awful as he is – would be “electable” and also a malleable enough president that the leftist agenda of Sanders could be enacted anyway, without alerting the electorate in advance. Thus, Biden was pushed in the later primaries, when it counted, and when Sanders was the frontrunner.

This report about Harris’ lack of electability is much like what happened to Sanders, although for slightly different reasons. The Democrats are very concerned that they nominate someone who appeals to their base but also manages to appeal to enough people in the middle that the person has a good chance of winning.

Because HR1 didn’t pass, although there will be opportunities for voting fraud in the next election (2022), those opportunities will be more limited than they otherwise would have been had the bill passed. And unless the Democrats win the Senate in 2022 and also retain the House, and are therefore able to pass HR1 in time for the 2024 presidential election, nominating a candidate who is attractive to a goodly portion of voters is a very important goal for the left.

It’s becoming increasingly clear to them that Harris doesn’t seem to be that person.

The crime against the nursing home elderly

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the many horrible things about the COVID lockdowns was the plight of the elderly in care facilities. They were the most vulnerable to serious and even fatal cases of the disease, but they were also especially hurt by the stress and angst of extreme isolation. There are readers on this blog who expressed what is was like for their elderly relatives, and the emotional – and even physical – suffering that ensued from the increased isolation.

It made little sense because staff came and went, and were likely to spread the disease around anyway. But the fear of proprietors that their facilities would experience tremendous – and perhaps legally actionable – loss was understandable. Usually, Draconian measures were put in place, and often residents weren’t even allowed outside.

I have a friend who has a good friend living in an independent living facility who was nearly a prisoner in that place for around a year. At one point, my friend visited her clandestinely (I’m not sure how that was done) and they sneaked outside and slightly off the grounds. It didn’t take but a few minutes for staff to find them and give them a tongue-lashing, re-imprisoning her friend and increasing the quarantine she was under. And this occurred in a facility for healthy, wealthy, active older adults.

Here’s a description of what one man and his elderly parents suffered in the UK. It’s called “Lockdown killed my mother — and thousands like her – ‘It’s cruel,’ she would say, over and over again, in the painful phone calls from her care home”:
:

For my parents, like so many people of their generation living out their later years in care homes, lockdown offered not protection but imprisonment. ‘It’s cruel,’ Mam would say, over and over again, in the painful and awkward phone calls that we shared over the last year or so. ‘Just cruel.’ ‘What have you been doing?’ ‘Nothing. Staring at the walls.’…

Both my parents felt that throughout the pandemic, the balance of risks had been wrong. They could not understand why the focus on avoiding COVID-19 now trumped everything else. As care-home residents, they felt that they had become collateral damage in an increasingly politicized debate. More than anything, they felt forgotten.

Like thousands of other care-home residents, they were asked to sign Do Not Resuscitate letters at the outset. And like thousands of others, they agreed, because they didn’t want to be a bother to anyone. Those letters — and the decision to decant hundreds of untested pensioners out of their hospital beds and back into care homes — showed just how expendable they and their generation were considered to be.

Those who survived were shut away, denied visitors, left to believe that they had been abandoned. Many, like my mother, became profoundly depressed. They died in their thousands, often alone. My mother was right about how cruel this was.

I think that’s a good point – that people of that generation and that age were used to assuming many risks, often greater ones than COVID. Many probably did feel, like the author’s parents, that the effects of the lockdown were worse than the risks of the disease. But they were not consulted, and it didn’t matter what they thought. Ironically, in the end the lockdown probably didn’t even prevent all that much disease, and other policies (sending COVID patients back to nursing homes) put them at greater risk than necessary.

And then there were the funerals:

Everyone had to wear a mask unless they were standing to speak. Singing wasn’t allowed. We all had to be socially distanced. There were about a dozen people in attendance. In normal times, there would have been many more, because Mam touched the lives of so many people.

She had left a very clear set of instructions for a simple funeral and had asked for three hymns, including ‘Away in a Manger’, because it was a favorite and she was called Carol. As the curtains started to close around the coffin and the first bars of ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd’ were played on the organ, my dad said ‘To hell with this’, and we sang anyway. Just him and me.

It seems, from the author’s description, that his mother was beginning to suffer from dementia even before COVID and the lockdown. So she was on a downward trajectory anyway. But it also seems apparent that the lockdown shortened her life and made her last months much worse than they otherwise would have been been, both for her family and for her. And all of this was done by health and governmental authorities who did not seem to take the costs of their policies into consideration.

Israelis are assisting in finding bodies in the collapsed Miami condo building

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s a sorrowful task to find the bodies in the rubble of the collapsed Surfside condo, and not an easy one. A team of Israelis is helping. It’s an impressive operation:

“We analyzed the collapsed building and built a three-dimensional model of the structure. Our model will allow the Home Front Command delegation to further assist in the rescue efforts and navigate through the rubble more quickly and effectively,” said Lt. N. (full name withheld), Commander of the 9900 team on the ground in Florida.

IDF International Spokesperson Lt. Col. Amnon Shefler…[said] “The building was 40 years old, with 12 apartments on each floor, of different sizes.”…

The visual intelligence capabilities are enabling rescue forces to know who was in which room at the moment of the collapse, and to know how many people to search for in each apartment.

The team has generated 12-digit coordinates of the current location of each room, meaning they have an accurate mapping estimation with a margin of error of 1 meter (3.3 feet). The analysis also created a stage-by-stage simulation of the collapse, which assists in the tracking down process of the rooms and the victims.

“Based on that, they know exactly where to find the people. The rescue teams are working very accurately, going to specific places, and making efforts to be more accurate and efficient. We can say with a lot of sadness that more bodies were found because of that,” said Shefler…

“In addition, we are gathering information that will help us identify the people, such as what were they wearing, what did they look like, the artifacts next to them. This will help us to understand who we will reach,” [said another team member].

So they have a detailed map of the building, who lived where and with whom, and what furniture and other items might be near them. Of course, there’s also DNA, which is probably used for the final ID.

In related news, the part of the condo complex that didn’t collapse is going to be destroyed.

Bill Cosby has been released from prison

The New Neo Posted on by

The ruling freeing Cosby was handed down on Wednesday:

The court said Wednesday that it found an agreement with a previous prosecutor that prevented him from being charged in the case.

The disgraced actor has served more than two years of a three- to 10-year sentence at a state prison near Philadelphia. He had vowed to serve all 10 years rather than acknowledge any remorse over the 2004 encounter with accuser Andrea Constand…

The former “Cosby Show” star was charged in late 2015, when a prosecutor armed with newly unsealed evidence — Cosby’s damaging deposition from her lawsuit — ordered his arrest just days before the 12-year statute of limitations expired.

The trial judge had allowed just one other accuser to testify at Cosby’s first trial, when the jury deadlocked. However, he then allowed five other accusers to testify at the retrial about their experiences with Cosby in the 1980s.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court said that testimony tainted the trial, even though a lower appeals court had found it appropriate to show a signature pattern of drugging and molesting women.

The article is rather vague and sketchy on the legal issues involved. But I have written extensively on the Cosby trial, and I discussed those issues in previous posts. My conclusion at the time was that the trial in which Cosby was convicted was a real miscarriage of justice, whether or not he was guilty.

One of those posts of mine can be found here. It goes into the issues in some detail, so please read it if you’d like to understand why I think Cosby’s trial was unfair and why I support his release.

That post concludes with this paragraph:

Part II is coming soon. It concerns an agreement that may or may not have been made with Cosby in that civil trial, a deal that would have barred his deposition from being used in a criminal trial.

But I never wrote Part II – at least, I can’t locate it right now.

That is one of the main issues on which Cosby’s recent release was based. It’s not a minor thing, either – it’s actually very important. You can read about it at Legal Insurrection. An excerpt:

But Castor’s successors reopened the case and charged Cosby in 2015, just days before the 12-year statute of limitations expired and amid a barrage of new accusations from women across the country.

At the time, Castor objected to the new prosecution, saying he’d struck a deal with Cosby and his lawyers not to prosecute him for Constand’s assault if Cosby agreed to sit for a deposition in a civil case she had filed against him.

Excerpts from that deposition were ultimately used against Cosby at trial.

It all comes down to the 5th Amendment:

“The right against compulsory self-incrimination accompanies a person wherever he goes, no matter the legal proceeding in which he participates, unless and until “the potential exposure to criminal punishment no longer exists.” Taylor, 230 A.3d at 1065. It is indisputable that, in Constand’s civil case, Cosby was entitled to invoke the Fifth Amendment. No court could have forced Cosby to testify in a deposition or at a trial so long as the potential for criminal charges remained. Here, however, when called for deposition, Cosby no longer faced criminal charges. When compelled to testify, Cosby no longer had a right to invoke his right to remain silent.

“These legal commandments compel only one conclusion. Cosby did not invoke the Fifth Amendment before he incriminated himself because he was operating under the reasonable belief that D.A. Castor’s decision not to prosecute him meant that “the potential exposure to criminal punishment no longer exist[ed].” Id. at 1065. Cosby could not invoke that which he no longer possessed, given the Commonwealth’s assurances that he faced no risk of prosecution. Not only did D.A. Castor’s unconditional decision not to prosecute Cosby strip Cosby of a fundamental constitutional right, but, because he was forced to testify, Cosby provided Constand’s civil attorneys with evidence of Cosby’s past use of drugs to facilitate his sexual exploits. Undoubtedly, this information hindered Cosby’s ability to defend against the civil action, and led to a settlement for a significant amount of money. We are left with no doubt that Cosby relied to his detriment upon the district attorney’s decision not to prosecute him.”

Here’s another old post I wrote about the miscarriages of justice in the Cosby trial. Also see this post of mine.

The bottom line is that the release was the right decision, and it shouldn’t have taken this long to come to it. Why did the prosecution get away with their misconduct in the first place? For one thing, the conviction occurred at the height of MeToo. For another, Cosby had enraged the left by saying that black people should take more responsibility for their problems, and so corners were cut in order to convict him.

Sgt. Daniel Perry charged with murder for shooting an Austin protestor

The New Neo Posted on by

Here are some of the facts of the case:

Sgt. Daniel Perry, a soldier in the US Army, has been charged with murder after killing a BLM protester last summer. This happened during the months of violence and destruction that occurred last year following George Floyd’s death. Cities across the nation were inundated with demonstrations, many of which devolved into rioting.

But Perry didn’t just suddenly shoot a random protestor. He was being mobbed and potentially attacked:

Perry was making extra money by driving for a ride-sharing service at the time. After dropping off a fare, he turned onto a street that was being blocked by what was ostensibly a protest. When he attempted to make his way through, people surrounded his car, beating on it. That’s when Garrett Foster approached him with an AK-variant rifle, pointed it at him, and demanded the window be rolled down. At that point, Perry feared for his life and discharged his firearm in what he felt was self-defense.

There is video that shows the scene, confirming that the car was, in fact, mobbed.

So it doesn’t seem as though there was any way for Perry to retreat from the threat without mowing down some other protestors with his car. This is from Perry’s attorney:

“Sgt. Perry again simply asks that anybody who might want to engage in a hindsight review of this incident picture themselves trapped in a car as a masked stranger raises an AK-47 in their direction and reflect upon what they might have done,” Perry’s lawyer, Clint Broden, said in a statement provided to the Austin American-Statesman.

This is Texas, too – but it’s Austin, Texas, which is a special case.