It’s roundup time again

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) RIP actor Donald Sutherland, dead at 88. His career was long and varied; I’m pretty sure the first movie I saw him in was Mash. I see that three of his children are actors.

(2) It’s the 50th anniversary of that Boston travesty – forced busing – as this not very good Boston Globe article reminds us. I previously wrote about forced busing in this post.

(3) Some drugs for enlarged prostate seem to help decrease the risk for Lewy Body dementia. That’s related to Parkinson’s, and I wondered when I clicked on the article whether the same drugs help prevent Parkinson’s. Here’s what it said:

A new study suggests that certain drugs commonly used to treat enlarged prostate may also decrease the risk for dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB). This observational finding may seem surprising, but it mirrors previous work by the University of Iowa Health Care team that links the drugs to a protective effect in another neurodegenerative condition—Parkinson’s disease. The new findings were published online on June 19, 2024, in Neurology.

The UI researchers think that a specific side effect of the drugs targets a biological flaw shared by DLB and Parkinson’s disease, as well as other neurodegenerative diseases, raising the possibility that they may have broad potential for treating a wide range of neurodegenerative conditions.

That’s good, but can it slow the progression of the disease once it’s already gotten a hold? That would be wonderful news.

(4) The DA of Alameda County – of which Oakland, California is a part – is facing a recall election in November. Now the mayor of Oakland joins her. The reason is crime and the fallout from crime.

(5) Anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, by Melanie Phillips. An excerpt:

Antisemitism is the delusional hatred and fear of Jews, Judaism or the Jewish people. Unlike other prejudices, it has unique characteristics applied to no other group, people or cause. It’s an obsessional and unhinged narrative based entirely on lies about the Jewish people; it accuses them of crimes of which they are not only innocent but the victims; it holds them to impossible standards expected of no-one else; it depicts them as a global conspiracy of unique malice and power; and it invests them with diabolical influence over the entire world in order to serve their own interests at the expense of others.

Anti-Zionism has exactly the same characteristics. While criticism of Israel’s policies is entirely legitimate, anti-Zionism treats Israel and Jewish national self-determination differently from any other country, people or cause. Israel is demonised, dehumanised and delegitimised in order to bring about its destruction. Israelis are accused of crimes of which they are not only innocent but the victims; they are held to impossible standards expected of no other people, country or cause; Zionism is depicted as a global conspiracy of unique malice and power; and Zionists and Israelis are invested with diabolical influence.

I’m suddenly seeing polls that show Biden gaining on Trump …

The New Neo Posted on by

… and that fills me with dread.

But I’d been feeling dread about the 2024 election already, even when the polls were good. I have distrust for polls – although not as much distrust as some people have, because I think they sometimes measure something that’s valid, especially when they change. But how it translates to an election is anyone’s guess. The 2022 Red Wave is a good example; the GOP did much less well than predicted. And 2016 was a case where the GOP candidate did better than expected.

This year I remain astonished that Joe Biden has more than 20% of the vote. It should be a complete blowout for Trump, but I have no gut feeling that he’ll even win. There are so many ways this can go wrong. There’s the constant lawfare, which new polls indicate might be the reason Biden is doing somewhat better than before (see this). There’s the wild card of fraud and rigging; the only question being whether they will be able to do it effectively, not whether they would do it if they could. There’s the backlash to the repeal of Roe. And of course it’s a long way to November, and a lot can happen in the meantime.

In a very gloomy post, John Hinderaker also mentions that the polls for Congressional candidates aren’t going too well for the GOP either. I haven’t even begun to follow that, and I haven’t checked it out myself, but I don’t like hearing it.

But it’s not just the polls. As I said, I realize polls can mislead and it’s also quite early. What’s far more important to me is that so many people are willing to support another four years of Biden or of Harris. Is it just because they really really hate Trump? I don’t think it’s that simple. Hinderaker seems to think another GOP candidate – perhaps any other GOP candidate – would be blowing Biden away in the polls. I disagree. A great many people would never vote for Trump, it’s true. But a great many of those people wouldn’t vote for any Republican. And there are a significant number of Trump voters who wouldn’t be voting for any other person but Trump. So Trump repels and he attracts.

And yes, the left would try to destroy any other GOP presidential candidate.

I think the thing that really disturbs me is that so many people aren’t disturbed by developments that, even a couple of decades ago, would have outraged a lot more people. The current widespread use of lawfare as a political weapon is a big one. Too many people are very happy with an “ends justifies the means” approach, and the very successful Gramscian march of the left through the institutions is responsible for that and so many other obviously reprehensible things.

I spend a lot of time on this blog analyzing why people think and feel the way they do, especially in the political realm. Sometimes I’m criticized for that, with the argument from the critics that it’s not worth bothering because it doesn’t do much if any good. I’m probably more sympathetic to that argument than one might think. Nevertheless my curiosity about people drives me to wonder and to speculate. Nearly everyone I know is politically on the other side from me, and if there’s one thing that’s been apparent for years it’s that, for the most part, nothing could change their point of view short of something catastrophic – and perhaps not even that. I find this stunning but true, and it seems to be a basic fact of human nature.

And then there are articles such as this one from the NY Post, which isn’t about an American but is relevant to the question of political change (the topic that propelled me to become a blogger in the first place). The article is about an Israeli peace activist who has changed her mind. She is hardly alone in that among Israelis, but she probably has the most dramatic reason for her change:

An Israeli peace activist who was kidnapped and held hostage for 53 days in Gaza said the horrifying experience shattered her longstanding belief that there could be peace between Palestinians and Israelis.

“I don’t believe in peace, I don’t, sorry. I changed my mind,” Ada Sagi, who was captured by Hamas on Oct. 7, at the start of the Israel-Hamas war, told the BBC.

Talk about getting “mugged by reality”!

She’s sorry, and I’m sorry too – sorry that reality dictates that peace there is a pipe dream, unless it’s ultimately accomplished by a larger war. The dream is so much more pleasant. But she had to give it up:

“For many years, I believed in peace. It’s the reason why I started to teach Arabic at school. Maybe it will bring peace between the Arab people in Israel and the Jewish people,” she recalled thinking. “But from year to year, I understand Hamas don’t want it.” …

Sagi recalled during the harrowing 53-day period she was held hostage, students were paid to watch over her and the other hostages inside an apartment in the southern city of Khan Younis.

“I heard them say… 70 shekels ($18.83) for a day,” she said.

It’s a short article and not very illuminating; you have to fill in the blanks yourself. But although it shouldn’t take being kidnapped and savagely treated to effect a political change like that, perhaps for most people it takes something just that dramatic or close to it. The terrorists’ worst tactical move on October 7 may have been that many (and probably most) of the people whom the terrorists tortured, raped, and murdered were on the Israeli left and were peace activists, like this woman. But the events of October 7 and beyond have convinced most of that population that a 2-state negotiated solution must be abandoned.

That’s political change resulting from catastrophe. It can happen. But I hope that’s not what it will take in this country.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) RIP Willie Mays at 93. I confess that I was previously unaware that he was still alive.

(2) Victor Davis Hanson writes:

… [The left] is in full panic that its unconstitutional efforts to destroy Trump will obviously be used against itself—given it knows that if it returned to power it would go after its enemies in precisely the same, any-means-necessary ways that it had sought to destroy Trump. That is, they have destroyed norms and have established dangerous new precedents that they just assume, given their Jacobin nature, must rebound against themselves.

(3) The Connecticut Bar Association warns its members not to point out the obvious about the NY kangaroo court that convicted Trump:

On the afternoon of Thursday, June 16th, the Connecticut Bar Association (CBA) sent an email to all of its membership, signed by the CBA President, Vice-President, and President-elect. The email, available here, warns all members of the CBA that they better not say, anywhere, in any form or forum, that Donald Trump’s trial, which, as you know, resulted in him being convicted of 34 felonies, was a “‘sham,’ a ‘hoax,’ [or] ‘rigged,’”, or that “our justice system is ‘corrupt and rigged,’” or that “the judge was ‘corrupt’ [or] ‘highly unethical.’” The email also stated that CBA members need to speak up in support of the Trump verdict because “[t]o remain silent renders us complicit in that effort,” i.e. the “effort” to damage the judiciary.

Wow.

(4) In response to #3 above, Jonathan Turley writes:

My concern is not with the plea for lawyers to take care that their comments do not encourage such “aggressive tactics.” The problem is the suggestion that lawyers are acting somehow unprofessionally in denouncing what many view as a two-tier system of justice and the politicalization of our legal system.

Like many, I believe that the Manhattan case was a flagrant example of such weaponization of the legal system and should be denounced by all lawyers. It is a return, in my view, to the type of political prosecution once common in this country.

For those lawyers who view such prosecutions as political, they are speaking out in defense of what they believe is the essence of blind justice in America. What is “reckless” to the Connecticut Bar is righteous to others. Notably, the Bar officials did not write to denounce attacks on figures like Bill Barr or claims that the Justice Department was rigging justice during the Trump years.

Of course they didn’t. Those were good attacks from the left on the right.

(5) Climate activists vandalize Stonehenge. They remind me a bit of the Taliban.

(6) Netanyahu says that the Biden administration actually has been withholding weapons from Israel in recent months.

Reporting on the Gaza famine that never was: why does the MSM spread the lies?

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “Barry Meislin.”]

The UN says Whoopsies, probably no famine in Gaza. This of course is after many many months of worldwide reporting on the supposed famine, and plenty of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish demonstrations as a result. Here’s the latest from the august body, the UN:

A UN committee of experts said in a recently released report that there is “no supporting evidence” to conclude that there is a famine in Gaza.

The 18-page report, released by the United Nations Famine Review Committee on June 4, contradicted an analysis by the US-based Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET)**, which reported in May that northern Gaza was “possibly” already amid famine conditions that would continue to the end of July.

The UN committee’s report said it “does not find the FEWS NET analysis plausible given the uncertainty and lack of convergence of the supporting evidence employed in the analysis. Therefore, the FRC is unable to make a determination as to whether or not famine thresholds have been passed during April.” The UN cited data gaps and questioned FEWS NET’s reliance on “multiple layers of assumptions and inference.”

According to the UN report, “While the use of assumptions and inference is standard practice in [classifying whether a region meets famine thresholds] generally, the limitations of the available body of evidence and the extent of its convergence for northern Gaza in April leads to a very high level of uncertainty regarding the current food security and nutritional status of the population.”

In other words, there’s no evidence that there’s a famine, but since Israel is always guilty till proven otherwise (and often even when proven otherwise), we’ll hedge and say we just don’t have a clue but we can’t disprove it either.

This is the pattern with the UN. Sometimes they actually ultimately clear Israel’s name a bit, but only after the lies have gone not just halfway round the world but around the world many times over and become suitably entrenched in people’s minds. Then on to the next lie, and the next.

I first noticed this pattern with the fake massacre in Jenin in 2002 (see this for my post about it). It was quite instrumental in my political change and my realization of the many lies I had swallowed previously at the hands of the press. So it’s very easy to recognize the same pattern continuing ever since; it has definitely been present post-10/7 whenever the MSM and the left covers and describes Israel’s actions and the extent of Gazan suffering.

I firmly believe that most of those doing the initial reporting on deaths, atrocities, famines, and the like are not fooled by the initial reports coming from Hamas and Gaza and realize there are compelling reasons to doubt them. With the lengthy history of lying from those sources, they should be considered extremely suspicious at this point. I cannot help but conclude that people in the west report them as truth anyway because they want to do so.

And why would they want to support lies in order to harm Israel and increase sympathy for the Gazans and Hamas? Mix and match from the following:

(1) Anti-Semitism.
(2) Virtue-signaling and conformity – one must do this to be in with the current in-crowd.
(3) A subset of #2: proving one isn’t racist, since the Israelis are arbitrarily and erroneously defined as white and the Palestinians as brown. Therefore one must be on the side of the supposed brown people in order to not be a racist.
(4) Post-modern anti-colonist theory, ditto.
(5) Not only is it considered racist to doubt the word of the Palestinians, but even if a pundit knows the Palestinians are almost certainly lying, the lies are accepted through cultural relativism as a valid custom of downtrodden people. The “higher truth” is that the Israelis are bad and the Palestinians good, so lies are acceptable to further that “narrative.”

South Africa: the ANC and the DA made a deal

The New Neo Posted on by

Can it last?

I wrote about the results of the recent South African election in this post. The ANC, which has been in power for thirty years, had lost the majority and was forced into a coalition that had yet to be determined.

It turns out that the coalition formed is between the ANC and the more moderate DA (Democratic Alliance), the party which has been a major rival. The ANC leader and current president Ramphosa has been sworn in and employs some lofty rhetoric:

South Africa has begun a “new era”, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced as he was sworn in for a second full term in office.

He remains in office even though his party, the African National Congress (ANC), failed to secure a majority in parliament during last month’s election.

The ANC subsequently made a deal with its long-time rival Democratic Alliance (DA) and other parties to form a coalition government. …

“Through the ballots that they have cast, the people of South Africa have made plain their expectation that the leaders of our country should work together,” President Ramaphosa, 71, said solemnly.

“They have directed their representatives to put aside animosity and dissent, to abandon narrow interests, and to pursue together only that which benefits the nation.”

Wouldn’t it be nice if such a rarity came to pass?

Great video overview of Biden corruption from Miranda Devine

The New Neo Posted on by

Miranda Devine (literally) wrote the book on Biden corruption, and she was the original reporter of the Hunter laptop. Here she is interviewed by Caroline Glick.

Devine packs a great deal of information into this video, which is well worth watching. My advice – as usual – is that, if you’re impatient like me, click on “settings” and choose a faster speed for the video. I often listen at either 1.5 time or even 1.75 time, sometimes while taking a walk or doing chores around the house and listening through a bluetooth:

How many Democrats do you think are even aware of these allegations? A person wouldn’t know much about them if that person didn’t read or listen to sources on the right, so my guess is that a great many Democrats are ignorant of them and certainly know none of the details or how well-documented they are.

Biden gives amnesty to illegal-alien spouses of citizens

The New Neo Posted on by

We’ve been told that it was going to happen, and here it is:

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., vowed to investigate President Biden’s “lawless plans for amnesty” and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ “ongoing abuse of parole authority” hours after the administration unveiled new immigration rules shielding migrant spouses of U.S. citizens from deportation.

“Amnesty for illegal aliens is absolutely unacceptable,” Hawley wrote in a letter to Mayorkas on Tuesday morning. “It is a lure that will drive millions more illegal immigrants to flood across our southern border. It is a slap in the face to U.S. taxpayers. And it is totally unfair to immigrants who entered the U.S. legally. But apparently, you and President Biden now plan to do just that.”

Hawley called for Mayorkas to “immediately end” the new policy and said the administration “baldly defied” current immigration law, which permits parole for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit. …

Hawley warned the administration’s new amnesty proposal “is transparently an attempt to curry favor with far-left activist groups, who opposed even President Biden’s toothless rhetoric about border security,” and that “the far left always gets what it wants from this administration—amnesty and a functionally open border.”

The non-citizen spouses must have lived in the US for 10 years or more, which sounds like a somewhat limiting factor. However, I think it’s a case of the camel getting its nose into the tent, in that once this is implemented it can be expanded to include those who have been here a lot less than ten years. Or perhaps it won’t be properly enforced in the first place if it follows the path of so many of our other rules about entry into this country.

It also seems to me that this announcement can be looked at as an expansion of DACA, the policy resulting from an executive action of Obama’s in 2012. Trump tried to end DACA and there were a number of court challenges, but the policy is still in place. DACA didn’t involve spouses, and this new policy of Biden’s does. My guess is that this is another case of Biden trying to placate the left flank of his party – but they always want more.

Bounces off me and sticks to you! says the left of Biden and Trump and their mental and physical sharpness

The New Neo Posted on by

It gets more and more difficult for our Pravda-esque media to cover up for Biden’s increasing frailties, and so they’ve adopted a new tactic. In a way, it’s an old tactic, because it reminds me of the game we used to play as children when someone insulted us: “Bounces off me and sticks to you!”

A couple of weeks ago I suddenly noticed a large increase in the number of Democrat spokespeople and media outlets implying or outright stating that Donald Trump is senile. Or, as a variation on the theme, that he’s crazy. Or senile and crazy – and “crazy” not just as in “mildly eccentric” (which he’s long been) but “crazy” as in “demented and out of touch with reality.” Now, Trump is many many things, and a lot of those things are things a lot of people don’t like or even hate. But “senile” and/or “crazy” are not among them.

The message about Trump as crazy old coot was disseminated from too many people and in too many places to be an accident; it was obviously a coordinated approach. And now the Biden-defenders have unveiled a new tactic, which is to claim that videos showing Joe Biden to be old, infirm, addled, confused, or any of the things that have been readily apparent for a long time are fakes. It is Joe who’s actually sharp as a tack and able to leap off tall buildings in a single bound.

I now notice that, just a moment ago, Ace has put up a post on this very same topic, saying that the tactic is now just about everywhere in the MSM:

This is a full-court press throughout all the Regime media — they’re all claiming, at once, all using the same language, that all the videos showing Biden wandering off, freezing, and sitting (or shitting) in invisible chairs are “cheap fakes” spread by “right-wing media.”

They’re simultaneously claiming that Trump, who gives two hour speeches without a single note-card, is the Real Mental Invalid Here.

As I said earlier, I first noticed the MSM claiming the latter, starting maybe about two weeks ago. Then just in the last day or two, mostly since the G7 Summit, we’ve gotten the follow-up approach stating that the videos that make Biden look bad are right-wing fakes.

Of course, videos of that nature about Biden have been around for his entire presidency and – funny thing – it’s not been claimed till now that they are fakes. But the left counts on people to have a poor memory or no memory, just as the Soviets counted on their people. Actually, that’s not true; the left knows (and the Soviets knew) that many people do remember, and it doesn’t care. Its propaganda is aimed either at those who don’t pay attention, those who are gullible, and/or those who believe what they wish to believe and are adept at saying 2 plus 2 equals 5.

Orwell knew a lot about that sort of thing. The left practices a form not just of simple lying, but of truth inversion. And it often works.

The Gates of Vienna are open: Muslim schoolchildren in Vienna

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Hat tip, commenter “Snow on Pine.”]

The Gate of Vienna are wide open:

More than one-third of primary school children in Vienna are Muslims, representing the largest religious group among elementary schools in the Austrian capital.

According to figures published by the Education Directorate and cited by the Exxpress news site, 35 percent of primary school students are Muslims, while 21 percent are Catholic, 13 percent are Orthodox, and 2 percent are either Protestant or belong to another denomination.

Just over one in four pupils (26 percent) are classified as non-religious.

The figures show a considerable increase in the number of Muslim children frequenting Austrian primary schools compared to data published for the 2016/2017 academic year when Catholics remained the largest religious group at 31 percent compared to 28 percent of Muslims.

By my calculations, there are a couple of missing percentages. But the general trend is pretty clear, if the figures are basically correct.

Christianity has been experiencing a falling-off in many Western European countries, at the same time that Muslim immigration has been increasing. There is also a differential birthrate:

According to the Federal Agency for Migration and Refugees, between 2014 and 2021 over 2.3 mln alleged “refugees” came to Germany (first and following asylum applications). Around 86 percent of them were of Muslim faith, i.e., 2 mln, which is around 2.5 percent of Germany’s population in 2014. From all the applicants only 6.3 percent were actually deported, i.e., only 147 thousand.

During the same period over 263 thousand alleged “refugees” came to Austria, of which only 11.8 percent (31 thousand) were deported. Given that 72 percent of the asylum seekers were of Muslim faith, this results in a gross influx of 190 thousand Muslims, which corresponds to 2.2 percent of Austria’s population in 2014.

Research by Stonawski et al. (2015) shows that Muslim immigrants have more children on average than their native counterparts: in Germany and Austria the fertility rate for ethnic Germans was 1.4, while it was 2.4 for Muslims. In 2022 the total fertility rate of both nations was 1.5 and 1.44 respectively.

So immigration in these countries is predominantly Muslim, most of the people who come are not deported, and their birthrates are over the replacement rate whereas the birthrates of the native populations are significantly under replacement rate.

The concern isn’t racist, it is cultural. The immigrants tend to bring their culture with them, and it includes anti-Semitism, homophobia, and the like – including, for a not-small percentage, the desire for sharia law in their new home countries.

NOTE: It’s not always easy to get statistics on this, either. For example, Belgium has a law against religious censuses. So estimates are all they’ve got.