It should come as no surprise that authorities are having trouble finding any evidence that Officer Sicknick’s death was caused by rioters

The New Neo Posted on by

On January 26 I wrote a post titled “Deadly riots” that explored the cause of death of the five people whose deaths have been claimed to have been caused by the January 6th riots and/or rioters. One was Capitol Police Officer Sicknick, and I concluded, based on all the information I could find at that time, that we have no idea whether he was actually injured by rioters, whether or how those injuries might have caused his death, or what his actual cause of death might have been. I based that conclusion on information available in the MSM and from official reports as well as statements from his family.

I updated that information on February 1 with this post that added that early reports in the MSM had been that he died of a stroke. These reports seem to have fallen by the wayside but have never been retracted; they merely were replaced with assertions that he’d been hit in the head by a fire extinguisher hurled by a rioter or rioters, and had died of this injury. You can find the details at the link.

Now I see this CNN article appearing on February 2, which is headlined, “Investigators struggle to build murder case in death of US Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick.” What is the struggle about, and what is the case for murder so far? Why, it’s about finding no evidence at all that Sicknick sustained any injury at the hands of rioters [emphasis mine]:

Investigators are struggling to build a federal murder case regarding fallen US Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, vexed by a lack of evidence that could prove someone caused his death as he defended the Capitol during last month’s insurrection.

Authorities have reviewed video and photographs that show Sicknick engaging with rioters amid the siege but have yet to identify a moment in which he suffered his fatal injuries, law enforcement officials familiar with the matter said.

Note how cleverly this is written. The reader might be forgiven for thinking that we know for a fact that there were such injuries, we know what they were, and all that’s missing is photographic evidence.

More:

To date, little information has been shared publicly about the circumstances of the death of the 13-year veteran of the police force, including any findings from an autopsy that was conducted by DC’s medical examiner.

That’s exactly one of the things that caught my attention, too. It seems to me that information should have been released. What’s more, it seems to me that so-called reporters should have been clamoring for it. But no.

Furthermore:

In a statement the day after the insurrection, Capitol Police said that Sicknick had been “injured while physically engaging with protesters” and collapsed as a result of his injuries sometime after returning to his office. He died the next day in a local hospital.

As I wrote in my earliest post:

The way [the Capitol Police statement is] 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…

In its February 2 article, CNN goes on to add some surprising admissions – surprising considering this is CNN, that is, not surprising to anyone following the case closely or reading this blog [emphasis mine]:

In Sicknick’s case, it’s still not known publicly what caused him to collapse the night of the insurrection. Findings from a medical examiner’s review have not yet been released and authorities have not made any announcements about that ongoing process.

According to one law enforcement official, medical examiners did not find signs that the officer sustained any blunt force trauma, so investigators believe that early reports that he was fatally struck by a fire extinguisher are not true.

One possibility being considered by investigators is that Sicknick became ill after interacting with a chemical irritant like pepper spray or bear spray that was deployed in the crowd. But investigators reviewing video of the officer’s time around the Capitol haven’t been able to confirm that in tape that has been recovered so far, the official said.

The case could also be complicated if Sicknick had a preexisting medical condition. It could not be learned if he did.

Byron York has also touched on some of the dogs that haven’t barked concerning January 6 in his Washington Examiner piece from yesterday, in which he lists nine question s he has submitted to Capitol Police (complete with follow up calls) that have gone completely unanswered. He points out that these are standard questions with answers that are usually released even at the start of investigations, and so the failure to answer is unusual. Although York’s questions are different from the questions I asked in my post of January 19 entitled “How little we know about what actually happened on January 6,” they are related and the idea behind the article is similar. It turns out that although two and a half weeks have passed since my piece we still know next to nothing.

Here are York’s unanswered questions:

How many Capitol Police officers were injured in the riot?
What were their injuries? What is their condition now?
Did Capitol Police confiscate any firearms from rioters? If so, how many and what types?
What is the status of the investigation into the killing of Officer Sicknick?
Is there an autopsy report for Officer Sicknick? If so, will it be released to the public, or will its key findings be released to the public?
What is the status of the investigation into the shooting of Ashli Babbitt? Has it been ruled a justifiable shooting?
Who was the officer who shot Ms. Babbitt?
Did any other officers discharge firearms during the rioting? If so, under what circumstances?
Did any rioters discharge any firearms during the rioting? If so, under what circumstances?

I think it’s very likely that the present administration, the Democrats, and the press are hoping that the narrative around Officer Sicknick’s death that they’ve already established in the minds of the vast majority of Americans – that right-wing Trump-supporting rioters killed him by bashing him in the head with a fire extinguisher – will continue to serve its purpose. In order to do this, it’s important to keep any information that might tend to undercut that narrative away from the public. If the Capitol Police are told to do that, I am assuming that they follow orders.

I’m not sure why CNN would have even written that article, however, unless some of its readers were clamoring for more information. But how many people will read the article compared to the many millions for whom the narrative has already been firmly set? Probably relatively few. And even that that group will probably find what’s written there to be ambiguous enough that their minds are unlikely to change.

Everything I wrote about the gaps in this case back in January and a few days ago could have been easily noticed by any reader or any reporter willing to do a little online research into Sicknick’s death. All the information was easily available in the public domain. All it took was curiosity and a little time – not even a ton of time. But the left and the MSM and the Democrats are counting on a lack of curiosity and effort. The narrative is serving its purpose, and it’s important to set it early and to repeat it often. Mission accomplished.

[NOTE: As I’ve said in previous pieces on this, of course it’s possible that we’ll find out that Officer Sicknick was in fact killed by rioters wielding a fire extinguisher. I doubt it, but that doesn’t mean I know. I also wonder if they’ll ever release any more information to clarify what caused his death.]

The military purge

The New Neo Posted on by

Actually, the political purge of the military isn’t just beginning. Under Obama, there was a sea-change that involved the top brass, from what we might call “old school” to “new school.” There also was a general movement in the military academies to a more woke perspective. So the military has been changing for quite some time and become more leftist-friendly.

But now the serendipitous Jan 6 riot at the Capitol is being used by the new administration to extend the revamping of the military in a way that is described in vague but familiar terms [my emphasis]:

[Defense Secretary] Austin wants all military units to take an operational pause to discuss extremism as he works to grasp the full scope of the issue and better address the longstanding problem, John Kirby, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, told reporters Wednesday. The pauses are expected to occur within the next 60 days, but Austin has yet to determine how the stand downs are to be completed, Kirby said.

“The intent is to reinforce the [Pentagon’s] policies and values with respect to this sort of behavior and to have a dialogue with the men and women of the force and to get their views on what they are seeing at their level,” Kirby said. “He wants commands to take the necessary time to … speak with troops about the scope of this problem. It’s a two-way conversation.”

Austin spoke frankly with the acting service secretaries and uniformed service chiefs about his concerns about extremism in the military, including white supremacism, said Kirby, who attended the meeting. The new defense secretary, who is the first Black leader of the Defense Department, wants the service leaders to better grasp how pervasive the issue is within their formations and work with leaders to stamp it out, Kirby said.

My takeaway from the announcement is that, as with most present-day “dialogues” (which has become an ominous word), this will be nothing of the sort. Asking the men and women of the force “what they are seeing at their level” sounds like an invitation for members of the military to inform on each other about micro-aggressions or even about political affiliations. The offenders will either be booted or will be sent to the re-education camps. The entire operation puts the military rank and file on further notice that they should be suspicious of each other and cautious about anything they say.

In addition, one wonders why a stand-down is considered necessary. Perhaps as propaganda to underscore in the public’s mind the supposed widespread, deeply serious, and threatening nature of the problem. A great many of these early moves by the Biden administration and the Democratic Party as well are to whip the public into a frenzy of fear and downright paranoia against the right in general – while simultaneously talking about healing. This is a page out of a very old totalitarian book.

Another goal is to stoke reactive anger and fear on the right and even to provoke further violence coming from the most extreme elements of the right, in order to justify further draconian crackdowns on the entire right.

Rhetorical flourishes: remember when Obama named the opposition “the enemy”?

The New Neo Posted on by

At the time, it was looked on as something rather scandalous. This headline at Reuters tries to turn it into a Republican attack on Obama: “Obama seeks to blunt Republican attack over comment.” An excerpt:

President Barack Obama said on Monday he should not have used the word “enemies” to describe his political opponents as Republicans sought to make an issue of the comment a day before congressional elections.

Obama, in an interview with talk radio host Michael Baisden, said, “I probably should have used the word ‘opponents’ instead of enemies.”

He was backtracking from a comment he made a week ago in an interview with Univision radio in which he sought to persuade Hispanics to vote for Democratic candidates instead of Republicans.

“If Latinos sit out the election instead of, ‘we’re going to punish our enemies and we’re going to reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us’ — if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it’s going to be harder,” Obama had said.

Seems rather quaint now, doesn’t it? The idea that Obama might be criticized for calling Republicans “enemies” and that he might see the need to defend himself?

During his presidency Obama was usually careful not to let the mask slip, but now and then he accidentally showed the way he actually thought. At the time, he felt that a more moderate facade was needed. Note, however, his use of the word “probably” in his “correction.”

At any rate – that was then; this is now, and it’s the way the entire Democratic Party rolls. We’re not just enemies, we’re terrorists:

From Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), to committee chairmen such as Homeland Security’s Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), with no dissent in the ranks, the House Democrats assert their Republican colleagues are “enemies within,” accusing them of complicity in the January 6 Capitol riot, and claiming that Republican members endanger their lives. That the Democrats don’t believe a word of this lie only underlines why they repeat it ad nauseam: to pin the label “terrorist” on Republican leaders and voters, thereby depriving us of standing as citizens who must be respected and justifying all manner of oppression.

See how that Overton Window thing works? The events of January 6th facilitated the process of demonizing the opposition, but it was always going to happen after Biden was safely in place as president:

The unraveling

The New Neo Posted on by

Long long ago I often used to travel by Greyhound bus. I was in college, and it was a lot cheaper than other forms of transportation. Some of those bus trips were very long, and I’d pass the time by knitting.

I remember one trip I took that lasted about sixteen hours, and I spent a good deal of the journey knitting a sweater for my boyfriend. It was a midnight blue color with an intricate self-pattern, and I knit an entire sleeve while my seat companion – a young man of about my age – watched. We had chatted a bit, and he had admired the sweater – and then I noticed a mistake that I’d made way down towards the beginning of the sleeve.

It probably wouldn’t have been noticeable to anyone but me. But I was seventeen and I was a perfectionist in those days, and there was only one way to fix it: rip the whole sleeve out and start again.

As I started on that task, the guy next to me begged me not to do it. He had watched me knit that thing for about twelve hours at that point, and he couldn’t bear to watch me undo it. But I was relentless, and I destroyed that sleeve and started all over again, while he shook his head.

I feel a little bit like that guy now, only much worse. And I’m not seventeen anymore.

The Trump administration was a very strange experience for me. As my longtime readers know, originally I was not the least bit keen on him. But quite early in his presidency it became clear to me that most of what he was actually accomplishing as president was good. Nevertheless, the whole time I was worried about the election of 2020. The hatred being drummed up for Trump by the MSM and the Democrats was phenomenal, and I couldn’t help but notice that most of my friends and family – mild-mannered though many of them may have previously been – were fully involved in thinking that getting rid of Trump was worth just about anything.

Now that goal has been accomplished. Do they notice what’s being unraveled – an entire sleeve of successful actions? Did they even notice the sleeve in the first place, or was it loaded with errors as far as they’re concerned and do they watch the unraveling with joy and celebration? Or are they unaware of what the Biden administration is engaged in doing?

Many of the new administration’s actions have been by executive order, an unprecedented number. Some are just the undoing of things Trump had done (which in turn were often the undoing of things Obama had done), but some are quite new and radical. Some are being done through the DOJ, for example this latest, which is the dropping of the government’s lawsuit against Yale for allegedly discriminating against Asians and whites.

The DOJ no longer cares about such discrimination. Correction: such discrimination is now the foundation of the policy of the Biden administration. Other recent changes that might be going unnoticed by most people are this and this. And I expect many more to come on a daily basis.

Watching the unraveling is hard, even though I fully expected this to happen. As for Biden voters, if any of the ones I know become distressed by anything Biden is doing and express that distress to me, I intend to ask them why they’re surprised, since this is what they voted for.

Canada is not happy with Joe Biden

The New Neo Posted on by

Even Trudeau is “disappointed” with Biden’s abrupt Keystone cancellation. But their disagreement is characterized as “minor” because really, what does Trudeau care?

On the other hand, Alberta’s premier seems to care considerably more, and is contemplating a lawsuit. It’s interesting that one of the things that might cause a ruling in Canada’s favor is something that was used against Trump in the DACA case:

A recent Supreme Court case that may provide guidance is Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California. In a 5-4 decision last June, the justices ruled that the Trump administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act by doing away with an Obama administration policy called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.

The key similarity is the concept of “reliance interest,” GianCarlo Canaparo, a legal fellow with The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal. The phrase is mentioned several times in the high court’s opinion in the DACA case.

President Barack Obama’s executive action, which allowed illegal immigrants brought to the United States as minors to stay legally under certain circumstances, created an expectation among people in the country. Thus, if the U.S. government wanted to scrap the DACA policy, it would have to go through an administrative procedure.

However, now the makeup of SCOTUS is different, and in the DACA case it was the conservatives who wanted to allow Trump to reverse the Obama decision. Now those conservatives could work against Canada’s side, and they are in the majority at the moment.

That is, unless the court-packing goes ahead as scheduled. And that in turn depends on the likes of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Simena.

Here’s a kulak complaining that Joe Biden put him out of business:

Joe Biden just put me out of business by suspending new oil and gas leases and drilling permits. I am a petroleum geologist and generate drilling prospects in the Rocky Mountains on federal lands. I worked six years to get a prospect ready to drill and Biden just illegally broke the terms of the lease, killing the deal.

This action was done under the guise of helping climate change but will not stop one CO2 molecule from being released, as there is nothing in the executive order to reduce consumption.

No one is going to drive less, fly less or stop heating their homes or businesses. The oil demand will remain the same and we will need to purchase oil from overseas. This decision is not based on science, logic or even common sense. Why do you want to put Americans out of work when you are not solving the problem?

I’m sure the administration really, really cares. The writer can learn to make solar panels, as Czar Kerry (whom I would guess never made a thing in his life, except hot air) suggests.

Legal Insurrection has put up a database about Critical Race Training in colleges around the country

The New Neo Posted on by

It you or your child or grandchild are contemplating choosing a college these days – well then, you have my sympathy/empathy. Legal Insurrection Foundation aims to help out with the announcement of a website to assist people seeking information on colleges and their commitment to Critical Race Training.

Here’s an article at Fox News:

Jacobson told Fox News on Tuesday: “The website is a resource for parents and students who no longer can assume they will be left alone … the entire ideology of CRT and ‘anti-racist’ training is that ‘silence is violence.’”

He added: “As we head into college application and selection season, we need to get parents, in particular, to focus on CRT that will be forced on their kids.”

Launched over the weekend, CriticalRace.org is the product of a six-month effort at Legal Insurrection and currently includes information on 200 colleges and universities, Jacobson said. In addition to cataloging CRT efforts, the website lists a series of resources purportedly “exposing the falsity and harm” caused by CRT. The homepage currently features a map that allows visitors to search for CRT incidents by state.

Families need all the help they can get in negotiating the propaganda terrain of college these days.

Protest in 2021 isn’t all about riots

The New Neo Posted on by

A good point is made here in some commentary on the GameSpot hedge fund wars:

One of the perennially frustrating things about “the people,” in their collective incarnation and also as individuals here in America, is that they are middle class at heart, which means that they tend to express themselves through things like buying stocks through free online trading accounts rather than by marching in the streets with banners and placards like they do in Venezuela and Cuba. They are also poorly educated about the revolutionary fashions of 75 and 100 years ago, and as a result tend to show little awareness of the slogans of the past, like “no pasaran!” Some people, and by some people I mean me, might see in this failure to endlessly repeat slogans from the past a good thing, given the reality of the past, which is fine enough as a closet for kids playing dress-up, but is not a very suitable guide for anyone interested in the American future.

Populist fighting back can take many forms, and one of them is economic. There’s strength in numbers.

And speaking of hydroxychloroquine…

The New Neo Posted on by

…which we haven’t done in quite some time – I thought I’d update.

Months ago I searched for clinical trials – which are usually considered the gold standard research on such things – and found a few but they all used a protocol for the drug that didn’t fit the recommendations of those who felt it to be useful. For example, the drug was used alone rather than with zinc, or it was used for people who were gravely ill, or it was used in the wrong dose for the wrong amount of time. I was looking for research that included zinc, that had the correct dose (or close to it, anyway), and that used subjects who were not yet gravely ill (because hydroxychloroquine’s advocates said it was not useful in such patients).

Looking again for a clinical trial with those characteristics. I searched in several different ways but could not find one. I didn’t spend hours and hours on it, so perhaps I missed something, but I did spend a fair amount of time on it. At this point, it may soon be moot as more and more of the population becomes vaccinated. So my curiosity may remain unsatisfied.

However, I did find several other fairly new studies which don’t appear to be clinical trials but seem (in my admittedly quick perusal) to be fairly well-designed and also to have at least some of the looked-for criteria. See this (note, though, that these patients were sick enough to be hospitalized at the outset of the study):

During the initial surge of the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020, Frontera and her colleagues at four hospitals in New York City collectively decided to see if adding zinc to their treatment regimens helped novel coronavirus patients. The physicians knew they needed something to help the patients absorb high enough levels of zinc to be effective, and at the time, many of their patients happened to be taking just the thing: hydroxychloroquine…

One thousand patients received a treatment of hydroxychloroquine and zinc and 2,500 (controls) did not. Exclusion criteria included death or discharge within 24 hours, comfort-care status, admittance into another clinical trial, and treatment that included an IL-6 inhibitor or Remdesivir. Patients in the treatment group received 400 mg of zinc gluconate by mouth on day one of the trial and 200 mg twice a day thereafter…

The researchers found a 24 percent reduction in mortality in the patients that received zinc with hydroxychloroquine compared with controls.

Here is the text of the study.

Here’s another study, this time with non-hospitalized patients. However, it seems to only involve hydroxychloroquine; I see no mention of zinc:

Among 1274 outpatients with documented SARS-CoV-2 infection 7.6% were prescribed hydroxychloroquine. In a 1067 patient propensity matched cohort, 21.6% with outpatient exposure to hydroxychloroquine were hospitalized, and 31.4% without exposure were hospitalized. In the primary multivariable logistic regression analysis with propensity matching there was an association between exposure to hydroxychloroquine and a decreased rate of hospitalization from COVID-19 (OR 0.53; 95% CI, 0.29, 0.95).

This study appears to involve both hydroxychloroquine and zinc (plus the antibiotic azithromycin) in patients who had what was considered “severe” COVID but were not yet hospitalized:

The aim of this study was to describe the outcomes of patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the outpatient setting after early treatment with zinc, low-dose hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin (triple therapy) dependent on risk stratification. This was a retrospective case series study in the general practice setting. A total of 141 COVID-19 patients with laboratory-confirmed severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection in the year 2020 were included. The main outcome measures were risk-stratified treatment decision and rates of hospitalisation and all-cause death. A median of 4 days [interquartile range (IQR) 3–6 days; available for n = 66/141 patients] after the onset of symptoms, 141 patients (median age 58 years, IQR 40–67 years; 73.0% male) received a prescription for triple therapy for 5 days. Independent public reference data from 377 confirmed COVID-19 patients in the same community were used as untreated controls. Of 141 treated patients, 4 (2.8%) were hospitalised, which was significantly fewer (P < 0.001) compared with 58 (15.4%) of 377 untreated patients [odds ratio (OR) = 0.16, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.06–0.5]. One patient (0.7%) in the treatment group died versus 13 patients (3.4%) in the untreated group (OR = 0.2, 95% CI 0.03–1.5; P = 0.12). No cardiac side effects were observed. Risk stratification-based treatment of COVID-19 outpatients as early as possible after symptom onset using triple therapy, including the combination of zinc with low-dose hydroxychloroquine, was associated with significantly fewer hospitalisations.

Make of it what you will.

These studies are not definitive, but they certainly favor the use of the drug regimen. One thing I do know is that the early politicization of this drug was extremely counterproductive to finding out the truth.

Texas pushes back against Biden’s deportation halt

The New Neo Posted on by

Texas has won a temporary victory over Biden’s halt to deportations:

Attorney General Ken Paxton today commended the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas for granting a nationwide temporary restraining order halting implementation of the Biden Administration’s unlawful order to the Department of Homeland Security to freeze virtually all deportations of illegal aliens.

The court’s ruling is here. I’m going to assume the case is far from over.

Here are Frei and Barnes on the matter, as well as Biden’s executive order frenzy in general:

Did most Biden voters really not see it coming?

The New Neo Posted on by

Are people this naive, this stupid, this gullible, this ignorant, or are they just pretending to be?

One twitter response:

What part of what he is doing is a surprise to you?

He telegraphed this throughout his campaign.

He is delivering what he promised.

And this will come on a daily basis. Some of it will be noticed, and some will slip under the radar. Nothing Biden (or those in his administration – I’m not going to nitpick right now about who is actually the principal agent here) has done so far has surprised me, and that’s not because I’m some sort of brilliant mind-reader. In fact, it was all obvious. Joe Biden was an unprincipled and mendacious mediocrity in his best days, and his best days are long behind him. The press will support him no matter what, and he knows it. Promises? Schmomises.

Then there are those $2,000 checks that Biden promised the voters of Georgia in order to win the Senate. Sweet. Now that the checks have been discounted to $1400 (after all, Biden doesn’t do math), some people are angry.

I can understand that someone who had been propagandized into hating Trump and thinking he was practically the devil incarnate might have voted for Joe Biden (or just about anyone) instead. What I cannot understand is why such a person would trust anything Biden has said.

Has Kamala been around Joe for too long already?

The New Neo Posted on by

I didn’t realize this sort of thing was catching:

Mine lands, land mines – whatever.

Harris has managed, among other things, to annoy Joe Manchin as well as being condescending to the people of West Virginia. Then again, she knows that the people of West Virginia will never be voting for her, so what difference, after all, does it make?

And then again, perhaps Manchin is just pretending to be annoyed.