And then there’s the Tesla explosion in front of Trump Hotel in Las Vegas

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s hard to believe that this was an accident – the symbolic associations are so obvious. However, it nevertheless might be an accident:

Police are investigating the explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Police said a cybertruck pulled up in front of the hotel on Wednesday near a glass entrance, then smoke started coming from the vehicle and it exploded.

The driver was killed and seven people were injured, police said without naming any of the individuals involved. Officials said all injuries were minor.

ADDENDUM:

Terrorist attack.

The New Orleans car attack perp: what is known so far

The New Neo Posted on by

In no surprise whatsoever, the identity of the mass murdering terrorist in New Orleans is revealed to be a Muslim and perhaps an ISIS-follower; his name was Shamsud din Jabbar:

Inside Jabbar’s truck — a Ford pickup that “appears to have been rented” — was an Islamic State flag, weapons and a potential improvised explosive device, according to an FBI statement. The agency said it is investigating the slaughter as “an act of terrorism” and looking into how Jabbar gained possession of the vehicle. An FBI official said the agency believes Jabbar may have been working with accomplices, though none had been identified by Wednesday afternoon.

In a statement, the FBI’s Houston office said it was “conducting law enforcement activity” with the Harris County Sheriff’s Office near the intersection of Hugh Road and Crescent Peak Drive, the north Houston intersection where Jabbar’s most recent known address was located.

The possible accomplices supposedly placed IEDs in the area. Jabbar himself is an army veteran and was born in the US. This is not unusual for jihadis, who are at times native to the countries they attack but have been radicalized somewhere along the way, often in a mosque or online. Jabbar seems to most closely fit the profile of Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood attacker who was also born here and was in the military at the time he attacked (and in fact for Hasan, people in the military were his targets as well).

Some outlets are still reporting the death toll as “at least 10,” but the UK’s Daily Mail says fifteen:

Mechanical barricades which normally stop traffic from entering the street during pedestrian-only times are in the process of being replaced, per the city website, potentially leaving it vulnerable to such an attack.

A witness who was at the scene in the French Quarter on Tuesday night said the steel bollards were not raised in position at the time.

‘Those barricades were not up, period,’ New Orleans resident Jimmy Cothran told CNN. ‘They had the flimsy orange ones that you could just push over with your finger. We actually thought it was kind of odd.’

New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell said the suspect ‘went around our barricades’, suggesting there also may have been enough space between the temporary ones to plow a vehicle through.

As is so often the case, the Daily Mail already has a great deal more information than US papers. For example, here’s a video made by the perp for a previous real estate job, in which he seems totally normal and friendly. But there’s this:

The suspect’s love life was scattered – having been married twice. His first marriage ended in 2012, and his second in 2022.

His second wife’s new husband, Dwayne Marsh, said Jabbar had begun to convert to Islam within the last year and was ‘being all crazy,’ reported The New York Times.

Marsh said Jabbar had two daughters, one a teenager and one a young adult, and that they were ‘a mess’ after the attack.

Divorce and then Islamic radicalization, ending in mass murder and suicide by cop.

More:

The FBI confirmed Jabbar had attached an ISIS flag to the truck he used to plow through the crowd.

‘An ISIS flag was located in the vehicle and the FBI is working to determine the subject’s potential associations and affiliations with terrorist organizations,’ the agency said.

And in this article some of the victims are identified, all young people. RIP.

A New Year’s Eve terrorist attack in New Orleans kills ten and injures many more

The New Neo Posted on by

It seems to be a copycat attack:

A driver rammed a pickup truck into a crowd of New Orleans revelers early on New Year’s Day, killing 10 people and injuring more than 30 in what the FBI is investigating as an act of terrorism.

The driver was killed in a firefight with police following the attack around 3:15 a.m. Wednesday along Bourbon Street in the city’s bustling French Quarter, the FBI said.

Even with barriers erected, it seems to be relatively easy to drive through them and do great damage.

No more information is available on the perpetrator at the moment, but I assume it will come out some time today.

RIP to the victims.

Talk about euphemisms: Biden’s cognitive decline was under-reported

The New Neo Posted on by

I think it was really rather simple.

In 2020, the Democrats decided Biden was their most “electable” candidate, and that his cognitive challenges could be successfully covered up. COVID restrictions made that even more possible.

The did it more or less successfully for years, although the right certainly noticed. But the view of Biden from the right was dismissed as a partisan conspiracy theory, with the MSM backing that “debunking” up. You can get away with a lot when the MSM backs you up.

The reason they kept Joe in there for so long was also that his cognitive challenges made it easier for other party operatives to control him and be the powers behind the throne.

But in 2024 it became impossible to successfully cover it up anymore. So the house of cards collapsed, and all the cards regrouped to build another house for the new candidate, Harris. It wasn’t a very sturdy one, however.

What are you doing New Year’s Eve?

The New Neo Posted on by

And me? Glad you asked.

This year I’m visiting relatives and there’s actually a party tonight. So I’ll be attending.

Staying up till midnight is no problem for me, since I’m a night owl and always have been. Actually, even when young, I had somewhat of an aversion to New Year’s Eve. To the idea of a night when you were supposed to have fun or else. A reminder of the speedy passage of time. With alcohol drinking. And the obligatory midnight kiss, which wasn’t a fun moment if you didn’t like your date.

Once or twice I went to Times Square to see the ball go down in person and not just on TV. Curiously, those were some of my better New Year’s Eves. Maybe it was the people I was with those nights. We ate at Tad’s Steaks, just for laughs, but Tad’s wasn’t bad at all.

And five years ago the very last Tad’s in New York City closed down. I had no idea any of them had lasted that long.

So let’s drink to Tad’s:

The cafeteria-style chophouse is known for hawking inexpensive meat-and-potato dinners on red trays — meals that cost little more than $1 each when the first one opened in 1957. A steak lunch today can be had for as little as $9.

At its height, Tad’s had eight New York locations out of 28 nationwide. But come Jan. 5, 2020, the red neon sign in the window advertising “broiled” steaks at 761 Seventh Ave. will go dark — as will the vast grill that played host to smoky “steak shows,” where dozens of cuts could be grilled at once during the thick of lunch hour.

Happy New Year, everyone! I’m very grateful for all of you. Here’s to a wonderful 2025, full of love, joy, and good health!

[NOTE: Some of this appeared in previous posts.]

Saying goodbye to 2024

The New Neo Posted on by

The years go by way too quickly these days. So there’s that.

But 2024 has been a year of great surprises and reversals, many of them unexpectedly good.

These surprises and reversals started approximately at the year’s midway point. I date the very first as the Trump/Biden debate on June 27. It’s not that I expected Biden to do well, but I didn’t expect him to do so abysmally. And I didn’t expect the MSM to admit it, but the fact that they did admit it indicated that perhaps the plan always had been to ditch him after the debate. But plan or no plan, the ditching is what occurred – on July 21 – which was the third surprise.

You might think I skipped surprise number two. But no, that happened on July 13 in Butler, PA: the near-assassination of Trump. It was no surprise that someone would want to kill him. But it was a surprise that the Secret Service was so negligent (or worse) at protecting him, and an incredible surprise how close the would-be assassin came to achieving his aim but how a serendipitous turn of the head at the last minute meant that Trump only got wounded in the ear. If you saw that in a movie, it would seem highly improbable. And yet it’s what happened, and it made people even more sympathetic towards him.

Surprise number four was concurrent with number three: the anointment of Kamala Harris as nominee, without an open convention. She didn’t seem like the best candidate and certainly not the most popular at the time, although in retrospect I can’t say there was another good alternative.

Surprise number five was how truly terrible she was as a candidate. Again, I didn’t expect much, but I expected her to be able to be fairly coherent in interviews. She was not – although it didn’t matter to tried-and-true Democrat voters. Interesting to me is that fact that, among the Harris voters I know of whom I asked the question “did you watch any of her interviews?”, the answer was “no.” Why bother? They knew they weren’t voting for Trump.

Then there was another failed Trump assassination attempt on September 15 which was foiled. Shall we call that number six? And then, on September 17 we had number seven, the exploding Hezbollah pagers, followed closely by number seven and a half, the exploding walkie-talkies. Both were followed by a series of amazing Israeli feats which I’ll lump together as number eight: the destruction of most of Hezbollah’s armaments, the assassination of Nasrallah and of Sinwar, and the destruction of many of Iran’s armaments. Whether or not I have the order of things right, that was the general direction: again, right out of a very fanciful movie.

Later on we had two great PR stunts by Trump: his stint at McDonald’s and his time as a garbage man. We’ll call those number nine.

Followed by number ten: the Trump victory in the election. The surprise was the scope and clarity of it, plus the fact that the results were known on election night itself.

So tonight, let’s make a toast to an even better 2025!

More oopsies about job creation under the Biden administration

The New Neo Posted on by

O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright

The New Neo Posted on by

I felt a catch in my throat when I heard that Olivia Hussey had died at 73. She will always be Juliet to me, a role I saw her play in a movie theater in 1968 when the Zefferelli film first came out.

I was already very familiar with “Romeo and Juliet,” because we had studied it in depth in junior high school, acting out every scene in classroom readings. I described the process in this 2007 post:

[Our teacher] Mr. Jones tackled the whole thing by making us read every single word aloud. He called on some students to act out each part for a few pages, then switched to other students, and on and on, right to the last line. It took months. No matter how embarrassed we were, or what poor actors we were, or how we stumbled and faltered, we had to read those words. And he was big on non-traditional casting, too; he’d sometimes call on the boys to read the female parts and vice-versa. Talk about embarrassment!

One boy, Carl Anderson, who had the platinum hair and fair skin of his Norwegian forebearers, blushed scarlet every time he was called on to read. Then he’d blush even more startlingly scarlet as embarrassing words were revealed (“Sleep dwell upon thine eyes, peace in thy breast! Would I were sleep and peace, so sweet to rest!”). But read he did.

Some read in monotones, some gave it pizazz. And then, after every couple of lines, Mr. Jones would have them pause and try to explain the meaning. If they couldn’t guess, the class would tackle it. If all else failed, Mr. Jones would tell us. But, line by line, the wonderful and sorrowful story emerged, and we slowly got better at deciphering it.

As the characters came alive for us, line by line, Shakespeare (and Mr. Jones) managed that feat at which the writers of so many modern movies fail abysmally: making us care about the characters, and making us believe the lovers actually love each other, and showing us why. We loved Romeo and Juliet, too; and we could see that they were exceptionally well-suited to one another, each able to express emotions in ways no other teenagers ever have or ever will.

But when I saw the 1968 movie I was stunned at how beautiful both Hussey and her Romeo, Leonard Whiting, were. They were good actors, too, and the movie was heartrending at conveying the desperate intensity and joy of young love. I cried a great deal when I watched it, and you know what? I still cry when I watch it. Zefferelli cut some of the lines to make the movie’s pace quicker, but it’s a brilliant movie and the casting of Hussey and Whiting was especially so.

Here’s the scene where Romeo and Juliet first see each other:

And of course there’s the death scene. I can’t find a video that shows all the parts I want, so I’ll post this in two segments:

RIP, Olivia Hussey.

Jimmy Carter dies at 100

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ll start with RIP, as well as the observation that I voted for him twice.

And yet I think he did a lot of harm as president. The harm was not driven by animus towards America, however; it was just poor judgment.

I’ve written a great deal about Carter and Iran, which was probably his most serious and long-lasting mistake. You can find most of those posts here, as well as many others about Carter. Here’s a post from 2021 that features a comparison Trump made back then, comparing Carter to Biden:

“I see that everybody is comparing Joe Biden to Jimmy Carter,” Trump noted. “It would seem to me that is very unfair to Jimmy Carter. Jimmy mishandled crisis after crisis, but Biden has CREATED crisis after crisis.”

You might say, however, that in a way Carter helped to create the Iran crisis. This is what I’m talking about:

The Shah lived in what’s known as a “rough neighborhood.” This meant that, in order to implement the modernization of Iran, he felt he needed to be harsh in dealing with the opposition. Jimmy Carter was dedicated to the cause of spreading human rights throughout the world, and he decided to put pressure to bear on the Shah to expand civil liberties and relax his policies towards those in his country who were against him.

Carter threatened the Shah with cutting arms shipments, and in response:

“The Shah…released 357 political prisoners in February, 1977. But lifting the lid of repression even slightly encouraged the Shah’s opponents. An organization of writers and publishers called for freedom of thought, and 64 lawyers called for the abolition of military tribunals. Merchants wrote letters requesting more freedom from government controls. Some people took to the streets, perhaps less fearful of being shot to death, and they clashed with police. A group of 120 lawyers joined together to publicize SAVAK torture and to monitor prison conditions. Dissident academics formed a group called the National Organization of University Teachers, and they joined students in demanding academic freedom. Political dissidents started disseminating more openly their semi-clandestine publications.”

As events spiraled out of control, there were demonstrations throughout Iran. Police reacted harshly, and many protesters were killed, which led to more demonstrations and more deaths, which led to–well, you get the idea.

A genie of dissent had been unleashed–a valid one, because there was much to protest. But as things escalated, and the Shah eventually lost the support of the army and the police (a turning point), few seemed to be prescient enough to predict what forces would replace his regime–not what was hoped for, but what was likely to do so. There were only three choices, and two of them–the mullahs and the Marxists–could reasonably be expected to be far more repressive than the Shah.

Jimmy Carter was probably sincere in wishing that his pressure on the Shah would lead to greater civil liberties, not fewer. But if so, it was one of the gravest miscalculations in history. Be careful what you wish for.

And then there’s Israel. A great deal of the damage Carter did to Israel occurred after he was president, in particular around the time he wrote the book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, and called the wall Israel built to defend itself an “imprisonment wall” (the link and the following quotes are from a post I wrote in 2006) What a way with words Carter had:

Jimmy Carter, peacemaker extraordinaire, has called the wall Israel has built an “imprisonment wall.”

A strange notion of imprisonment, indeed. How can a wall designed to keep murderers out of a single small country (Israel), and yet allowing them freedom of movement elsewhere, be considered a prison?

I wonder if Jimmy locks his doors. Because if he does, isn’t he imprisoning someone? Locking out those who might want to steal from him, or murder him? Isn’t that the main reason we all lock our doors (although I have to say, in New England, I know quite a few people who don’t)?

Did Carter even notice the number of suicide bombers blowing Israelis to bits before the wall was erected, and has he compared it to the number of such bombings since?

But no. Carter is almost as demented as Gandhi was when he counseled the Jews to allow Hitler to murder them so that they might claim the moral high ground and set an example of peace/love. Ah, these wonderful peace advocates, always wanting the Jews to sacrifice themselves for the cause! Jimmy, likewise, would like Jews to die in order to give Palestinians freedom of movement within Israel–the freedom to come there and slaughter Jews with impunity.

I haven’t read Carter’s book, but according to this review in the Washington Post, he managed to write the entire thing–which focuses on the topic of the wall–without once conceding that it was built to prevent the murder of Jews.

Astounding. But not surprising.

[NOTE: on the topic of the inflammatory title of Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, read Michael Kinsley in Slate.]

There’s plenty more, but I’ll leave it at that.

ADDENDUM: More details here.