Trust in the integrity of the voting process

The New Neo Posted on by

Jeff Bezos wrote this in an op-ed that appeared in the WaPo on Monday:

Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.

Interesting. Let’s say for the sake of argument that the first requirement is actually met. How about the second? After all, there’s a certain black box quality to such machines – at least for the average person – that paper ballots don’t have.

But the machines are only a small part of what’s needed in order for voters to believe in the security of elections. That’s a multi-step process. Clean voter rolls. ID to vote. No vote by mail except under extraordinary circumstances. No automatic mailing of ballots to everyone on the voter lists. Reliable signature checking for the small number of votes that are allowed by mail, with bipartisan poll workers making the decisions about the validity of signatures. Witness signatures, too, for the mail-in ballots, as well as envelopes that are kept rather than being thrown away, and could be matched up if needed in a disputed election. Watermarks or other special identifiers on the ballots. No ballots allowed to be counted that come in after voting day, and postmarks necessary. No ballot harvesting. No ballot drop boxes. And – although I think this part is less important – one day for voting and have it be a national holiday. Or at least, a shortened period of early voting.

Maybe then people would gain respect for the results. But is there any chance the Democrats would agree to all of this? I strongly doubt it.

Kamala Harris: the living, breathing oxymoron

The New Neo Posted on by

Translated: I was powerless as VP, although I would do plenty of things differently than Biden as president, although Biden and I actually did just great. The specific thing I will do so very differently is that I, the heretofore powerless VP, will be even better than Biden.

“Even better than Biden!” That should have been Harris’ campaign slogan.

Speaking of Biden, he’s been extending the escalating trajectory of Democrat demonization of those with the audacity to support the right. First we had the condescending Obama’s “bitter clingers,” which then segued into Hillary’s basket of “deplorables,” which has morphed almost seamlessly into Kamala’s “fascists” and now Uncle Joe’s “garbage.” Hey, why not? It’s another oxymoron: We, the Democrats, the party of unity and civility, call you, our opponents, the evil and wretched scum of the earth.

NOTE: Speaking of which, I just noticed that Arnold Schwarzenegger has said he’ll be voting for Harris/Walz in the interests – get this – of bringing us all together and an end to division, insults, and anger.

I kid you not:

‘I don’t really do endorsements. I’m not shy about sharing my views, but I hate politics and don’t trust most politicians,’ the actor wrote.

Despite that, the Terminator star, 77, said that it’s time for the country ‘to move forward,’ and that ‘the only way to do that is with Harris and Walz.’

‘We need to close the door on this chapter of American history, and I know that former President Trump won’t do that,’ Schwarzenegger said.

‘He will divide, he will insult, he will find new ways to be more un-American than he already has been, and we, the people, will get nothing but more anger.’

Schwarzenegger is certainly one reason not to trust politicians.

The ACLU mailing that masquerades as a survey but is actually fear-mongering propaganda for the Democrats

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I got something in the mail from the ACLU that purported to be a survey. But although it had questions – all leading, all assuming I was on the left – it was the cover letter that grabbed my attention. Here’s how it started:

Dear Friend:

All across our country, an intense struggle is underway over the future of the rights and freedoms we cherish.

I can’t argue with that; seems fair enough.

Emboldened by the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, powerful forces in our country are driving to deepen their state-by-state assault on our civil liberties. They’ve made it clear they won’t stop until they’ve put abortion our of reach all across the country. And they aren’t stopping at abortion.

So they segue from Dobbs to the assertion that abortion will be banned everywhere if these nefarious unnamed “powerful forces” (which of course are understood to be the right) get their way. Of course, the lawyers at the ACLU are well aware that Dobbs actually gives each state control of its own policy on abortion, and that there is nowhere near majority support on the right for a national ban – and that Trump, for example, has made it crystal clear that he wouldn’t support one. But hey, it’s good fear-mongering for the left to assert otherwise.

And giving abortion decisions back to the states is just a gateway drug to the tyranny the right has planned for us all:

They’re attacking our right to use birth control and to vote.

No, they’re not.

They’re waging vicious assaults on the rights of transgender young people and using censorship and book banning to impose a whitewashed version of American history and current American reality on public school students.

The only “vicious assault” on transgender young people is the movement on the left to “treat” – with drugs and surgeries that often take away their “reproductive rights” to have children or to experience sexual pleasure – minors who lack the ability to consent. And the only strange and destructive version of American history and “current American reality” foisted on our young people is at the hands of the left.

The letter goes on it that general vein, segues into a pitch for donations, and then mentions the questions the survey will delve into. Note the way the conclusions are embedded in the questions:

– Are you concerned that, as state legislatures convene and as we look to the forthcoming elections, we are facing a new wave of efforts to ban abortion in state after state?

– Do you worry that racially motivated voter suppression could dilute the power of Black and brown voters in the 2024 presidential election?

– Are you alarmed by attempts across the country to censor talk about race and gender in our public schools, to muzzle schoolteachers, and to prevent students from having an open and equitable dialogue about our country’s history?

– Are you worried about efforts like the one in Texas to label gender-affirming medical cre as “child abuse” and to expose families to unwarranted government investigations?

After that, the letter goes on for some time about how the ACLU is fighting for abortion rights, and adds in bold letters for emphasis:

We don’t for a minute underestimate the seriousness of the threats we are facing – or the potentially devastating human impact of our opponents’ no-holds-barred assault. This upcoming election is not just about who will be president – it’s about our freedom, our future, and the trajectory of democracy.

Note the language in that first sentence, meant to panic women into feeling as though they and their children are under physical attack by the right and that it will only get worse: “threats,” “devastating impact,” “no-holds-barred assault.”

The ACLU and the Democrats know exactly what they’re doing with a pitch like this. They are purposely intensifying a primal type of fear. And I can assure you that the technique works. The women I know who are already voting for Democrats (and would never vote for Trump anyway) are fully energized to vote as though their lives and their children’s lives depended on it, and absolutely believe that the right is bent on the sort of program described in this letter and must be stopped at all costs. And from talking to some of them about this, I don’t think there’s anything that could change their minds.

And no, for the most part they are not and never have been radical leftists or especially politically oriented. For most of their lives, they voted for Democrats and followed the news in a surface manner, but didn’t hold especially radical views. And yet despite all of that, they accept radical moves on the part of the Democrats for whom they continue to vote, because pitches like the one in that letter strike them in very personal ways. The Handmaid’s Tale sort of scenario seems very real to them and exacerbates a primal fear of other people controlling one’s body and genitalia – and life – against one’s will. And the ACLU is one of many entities dedicated to fanning the flames of fear and dread.

Over last fifty or so years, women have become accustomed to abortion being legal everywhere, and states that are taking away what they see as a basic right feed into that fear, even if a woman lives in another state with unrestricted abortion. Harris’ recent Houston rally was an attempt to exacerbate that fear, as well. I think it may be that Draconian state abortion laws will backfire and cause the left to grow stronger.

I also believe that Trump’s approach is the correct one:

Trump, in the video, did not say when in pregnancy he believes abortion should be banned — declining to endorse a national cutoff that would have been used as a cudgel by Democrats ahead of the November election. …

While he again articulated his support for three exceptions — in cases of rape, incest and when the life of the mother is at risk — he went on to describe the current legal landscape, in which different states have different restrictions following the court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling on June 24, 2022, which upended the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

“Many states will be different. Many will have a different number of weeks or some will have more conservative than others and that’s what they will be,” he said. “At the end of the day it’s all about will of the people.”

But that’s nowhere near good enough for abortion absolutists on both sides. On the left we have those who want no restrictions, and on the right we have those who want an absolute ban.

On this blog I’ve discussed my own views on abortion many times, and so I’m not going to go into it again in any detail here. But I’ll add that, if we lose this election, I believe it will be due to this issue.

RIP Teri Garr

The New Neo Posted on by

Actress Teri Garr has died at 79, with her cause of death listed as multiple sclerosis. Garr started as a dancer but became known for mostly comic roles:

Garr’s big break came with her role as Inga, Frankenstein’s assistant, in Mel Brooks’ 1974 comedy horror “Young Frankenstein.” …

That same year, Garr starred in Francis Ford Coppola’s thriller “The Conversation.” She followed that up with Steven Spielberg’s 1977 sci-fi film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

Come the 1980s, Garr landed a role opposite Dustin Hoffman in the satirical rom-com “Tootsie.” Her performance as Sandy Lester earned Garr her first and only nomination for an Academy Award.

Garr was in many more movies as well. She had a deft comic touch that was often subtly deadpan. I think most people might remember her best from “Young Frankenstein,” but for me it was “After Hours,” the quirky and somewhat surrealistic Scorcese film about a really bad night in New York:

Israel makes life hard for the Iranian regime

The New Neo Posted on by

Israel continues to do some very impressive things:

Reports are that somewhere between one-third and one-half of the IAF took to the skies on Friday night — a remarkable feat in itself if you know anything about what it takes to ready and arm a sophisticated warplane — and every single one of them returned home safely.

An open-source intelligence writer who uses the handle Raylan Givens — I’ve followed and trusted him for a couple of years now — gave the rundown on the operation, “courtesy of IDF Radio and with the approval of the military censor.”

“The attack destroyed ALL of Iran’s long-range surface-to-air missile batteries,” according to Givens’ translation of the IDF Radio report. “All long-range detection radars were also destroyed. Iran is left with only short-range batteries of local Iranian models.”

Again bowing to Western pressure, Israel left Iran’s oil and nuclear facilities intact, but the IAF brutalized Iran’s missile production sites. While “Iran possesses more than 2,000 long-range ballistic missiles,” by most estimates, “the production of new missiles was crippled. From now on, Iran will operate with a finite supply because the stockpile it has will not be able to grow for months or years.”

In addition, reports are that Iran’s strategic defense was set back 2-3 years – and with the Ukraine war on its hands, Russia will have trouble stepping up to the plate and re-supplying Iran. In addition, a site that was struck was involved in nuclear weaponization, and there were strikes in Syria and Iraq which I’ve read had to do with disabling some of their ability to detect Israel’s airplanes overflying those countries.

All in all, quite an undertaking. It points out that Israel probably could have done all of this some time ago, but was apparently holding back until it could be fully justified. The other message it must send to terrorist sympathizers and enablers in Iran, Syria, and Iraq is: “we can get you any time we want.”

Truncated quotes from both sides now: “with a swipe of my pen”

The New Neo Posted on by

Please watch this ad:

Horrifying, right? As far as I can tell, about 90% of the ad is factual; Harris did arrest and prosecute some parents of truant children in California – twenty in all. In addition:

However, as the San Francisco District Attorney, Harris sponsored a state Senate bill — SB 1317 — that was introduced by state Sen. Mark Leno, who is also from San Francisco. The state bill was modeled on her truancy initiative in San Francisco, and did result in some parents being jailed.

So it’s not that part of the ad I want to dispute – it’s the interspersion of a speech Harris gave about “with a swipe of my pen.” You can see that part from 1:19 to 1:55. I had read about that “swipe” speech some time ago, and it occurred to me that it actually might have been a speech about the dangers of prosecutorial powers (it’s from 2019). And sure enough, when I looked it up, I discovered this sort of thing:

We found that rather than bragging about her prosecutorial power, Harris was discussing the importance of leaders using power responsibly because of the potential for harm if power is misused. She said that it was something she realized early in her 20s when she started work as a prosecutor.

In her 2019 speech, Harris sought to describe then-President Donald Trump as using his power irresponsibly. The viral clip ends before a crucial part of her speech.

“And I was just a lowly deputy DA,” she went on to say to laughter from the audience. “Yet we have a person in the White House who holds the office of president of the United States, who does not fully, or even partially, understand what it means to have power,” she said of Trump. “When you truly understand what it means to be powerful, you understand that the greatest measure of your strength is not who you beat down, it is who you lift up.”

You don’t have to agree with Harris’ comments about Trump to understand that her speech was meant to be a caution about power, and that in the ad it’s the right using the technique of the truncated quote in order to mislead. This is something the left does constantly and all-too-effectively, in particular against Trump but also against any other GOP candidate they see as vulnerable to it. The right uses the truncated quote much less often, but it still uses it at times.

It’s wrong to do it when anyone does it, but once one side uses it, what’s the other to do? “We can’t play by Marquess of Queensbury rules” and all that. “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its boots.”

So how do you fight such techniques – or any other duplicity – effectively if you play by the rules against an opponent who doesn’t? Must you fight fire with fire? Does airing the truth really work? Isn’t the truth always just getting its boots on?

I actually think that this particular ad would work nearly as well with just the truancy evidence, and that there’s enough footage of Kamala saying awful things without the need to use the “with a swipe of my pen” quotes. But the “swipe” footage intensifies the rest, and it must have felt like a nearly irresistible temptation to make use of it.

Beyoncé at the rally, versus Kundera: to dream the impossible dream of circle dancing

The New Neo Posted on by

Whose decision was it that Beyoncé appear at Harris’ Houston rally to endorse her but not to sing? Not even one little itty bitty song? After all, isn’t Beyoncé like, you know, a singer? And when singers appear at political rallies, don’t they usually like, you know, sing a song? After all, Willie Nelson – that quintessential old white guy – did some singing at the very same Houston rally where Beyoncé merely spoke.

There have been many articles mentioning the fact that Beyoncé didn’t sing and that some fans were disgruntled about it, and even booed Harris as a result. But I haven’t been able to find anything about why Beyoncé didn’t do even a bit of singing, and whose decision that was.

You may think this is an exceptionally trivial question on which to waste any time. But I think the phenomenon is emblematic of a certain general tone-deafness in Harris and her aides, although I actually think it happened because Beyoncé herself wanted to appear as a person rather than an entertainer. She said as much, although of course she wasn’t there because she was some Everywoman wife and mother. She was there because she’s a famous star. Here’s what she said, though:

“We are at the precipice of an enormous shift,” Beyoncé told the crowd. “I’m not here as a celebrity. I’m not here as a politician. I’m here as a mother, a mother who cares about the world our children live in, a world where we have the freedom to control our bodies, a world where we are not divided, our past or present or future.”

No, Beyoncé – you’re addressing the crowd because you are a celebrity, and a Harris supporter of course. Otherwise you wouldn’t be there.

The rest of her quote is interesting, too. We’re at the precipice? That doesn’t sound good; a precipice is a very high cliff with a sheer drop that would be calamitous if one more step forward were to be taken. And a precipice of a shift doesn’t make sense – unless the “shift” means to do a 180 and go back from whence you came. But that wouldn’t be the precipice of a shift, it would be a precipice that causes a shift in the opposite direction.

Then there’s the usual phrase about “freedom to control our bodies.” Texas still allows people to come and go as they please, get tattoos or piercings, have sex, get contraception, eat a lot or a little – well, you get the drift. Once a woman is pregnant there are two bodies involved, however. Whether you’re for or against Texas’ particularly restrictive abortion law, it’s misleading to pretend it’s only about women controlling their own bodies. But that’s the rhetoric of modern abortion, and abortion is the biggest selling point of the Democrats today by far. In fact, abortion was the theme of the Houston rally. And I believe the Dobbs ruling was why Democrats did much better than predicted in the 2022 midterms. They are counting on it in 2024 as well.

The rally was held in Houston because Texas abortion law is one of the most restrictive in the US. Abortion is not allowed starting with conception, unless pregnancy threatens the life of the mother (that was the standard in a lot of states when I was young, by the way). However, the law criminally punishes the abortionist and not the woman, and so in Texas – although abortion by pill is also illegal – a woman can actually get mail order abortion pills (which work till around week 11) as long as the provider is out-of-state. This article describes the situation, as well as this one.

Abortion is a complex topic I’ve written about many times before (see this). So all I’ll add here is that I believe that it is the Democrats’ strongest issue these days, and it especially resonates with women.

Which brings me to Beyoncé’s stated hope for “a world where we are not divided.” What does that really mean? Is there any issue on which people aren’t going to be divided? I can’t quite think of one offhand. But of one thing I’m fairly certain: that issue would not be abortion, one of the most inherently divisive issues of our time.

Whether Beyoncé wrote her own words or not, what is really being said? I think the world she’s describing is the world of Lennon’s fairy-tale “Imagine”. Or, rather, it’s the sentiment author Milan Kundera describes with great eloquence in his masterpiece The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, published in 1979:

Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. Madame Raphael had cut the picture out of the magazine and would stare at it and dream. She too longed to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring. First she looked for them in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then among the Trotskyites, then in the anti-abortion movement (A child has a right to life!), then in the pro-abortion movement (A woman has a right to her body!); she looked for them among the Marxists, the psychoanalysts, and the structuralists; she looked for them in Lenin, Zen Buddhism, Mao Tse-tung, yogis, the nouveau roman, Brechtian theater, the theater of panic; and finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.

Kundera revisits the idea in the same book, expressing it this way:

Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise– the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way. and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer.

And Kundera treats the theme once more in the same book:

…human beings have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of har­mony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.

Love-gone-bad songs

The New Neo Posted on by

If you look at the topic broadly, probably more than half of popular songs are about heartbreak or love gone bad. But I was thinking about a particular sort of heartbreak – the lover who was never sincere, the one who was always fooling you right from the start, and you were the fool. I can think of three such songs that remind me of each other although they’re quite different musically:

The lyrics tell you right at the beginning:

Here the disillusionment takes a tiny bit longer. I love the biting quality Thompson puts into his voice:

And of course there are the Bee Gees, kings of the broken heart. They’re not quite as bitter, but still – when the singer wakes up, she’s gone, and he didn’t see it coming and doesn’t have a clue why. Maybe you can tell him:

This isn’t exactly about the same theme. But hey, I love it, and it’s close enough:

Back to the Bee Gees – as songwriters, anyway. The great Dionne Warwick here:

So, why did the LA Times and the WaPo decide not to endorse anyone this year for the presidency?

The New Neo Posted on by

The easy answer would be: they hate Trump and his deplorable supporters, but they’re too embarrassed to endorse Kamala Harris because she’s performed so poorly.

Of course, that didn’t stop them from endorsing Joe Biden in 2020 or carrying water for him right up to the point of his disastrous debate in June with Trump. Nor has it stopped them from continuing to cover the news – including, of course, the presidential race – with their usual leftwing bias. So, why not an endorsement of Harris?

I don’t think it’s because they fear Trump retaliation if he’s elected. They probably realize that (a) he wouldn’t really be doing much to hurt them because in general his past threats have been just bluster, or (b) Trump already has plenty of motivation to do whatever he might be doing to them if he became president, and a Harris endorsement would hardly add anything to it.

So, what is it? The WaPo says it’s “returning to its roots” of non-endorsement prior to 1976. That’s nearly fifty years of endorsements, though. One would think that, since Trump is Hitler, the WaPo picked a funny time to end the endorsement practice. It really does seem a slap in the face to Harris, the only person who might have been reasonably expecting a WaPo endorsement for president this year.

Typical of other papers is this article in the leftist Guardian, in that they all seem to mention that owners Patrick Soon-Shiong (LA) and Jeff Bezos (Post) are billionaires. Well, yes, but they previously were billionaires who owned papers that endorsed Democrats for president. The Guardian writer, Margaret Sullinvan, opines:

All of this may look like nonpartisan neutrality, or be intended to, but it’s far from that. For one thing, it’s a shameful smackdown of both papers’ reporting and opinion-writing staffs who have done important work exposing Trump’s dangers for many years.

It’s also a strong statement of preference. The papers’ leaders have made it clear that they either want Trump (who is, after all, a boon to large personal fortunes) or that they don’t wish to risk the ex-president’s wrath and retribution if he wins. If the latter was a factor, it’s based on a shortsighted judgment, since Trump has been a hazard to press rights and would only be emboldened in a second term.

When Sullivan uses the term “press rights,” I believe it’s actually a code for “the right of the press to lie about Republicans and to suppress any news unfavorable to the left or deemed disinformation by the left.” Any actual free speech advocate, especially involving social media, is a great danger to the left.

However, there is a kernel of truth in the “Trump is a hazard to press rights” accusation, and that is that in 2022 Trump did advocate jail time in order to pressure reporters to reveal sources in cases of perhaps criminal leaks, such as the leak of the Dobbs draft long before the decision was officially issued. But reporters’ privileges to protect sources are not absolute; read this for a discussion of the legal issues. And quite a few reporters have indeed been jailed for refusing to reveal sources; one you might recall was Judith Miller. And I can’t find a record of any reporters actually jailed by Trump for anything during his administration.

More about the WaPo‘s decision [emphasis mine]:

Colleagues were said to be “shocked” and uniformly negative. Editor-at-large Robert Kagan, who has been highly critical of Trump as autocratic, told NPR he had resigned from the editorial board as a consequence.

Former Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron, who led the newsroom to acclaim during Trump’s presidency, denounced the decision starkly.

“This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty,” Baron said in a statement to NPR. “Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidate The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos (and other media owners). History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”

“Democracy dies in darkness” – I guess Baron really took that slogan to heart. But it’s been quite a long time since the WaPo was “famed for courage,” and it’s interesting that that “courage” was demonstrated by the paper’s role in taking down a previous Republican president, Richard Nixon.