Although other news has tended to eclipse Spygate…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and although I believe that is partly (or mostly) by design, what happened in connection with Russiagate/Spygate is nevertheless extremely dangerous and unconscionable, and should raise alarms with every American.

I know, I know; fat chance.

But here’s more on what went down:

Conald Trump was president for only 24 hours when then-FBI supervisor Peter Strzok sent an angry missive to his boss. A colleague had given the new White House a counterintelligence briefing and hadn’t consulted on how to use the meeting to further the Russia collusion investigation…

“I am angry that Jen did not at least cc: me, as my branch has pending investigative matters there,” Strzok added in his email to Assistant Director for Counterintelligence William Priestap. “This brief may play into our investigative strategy, and I would like the ability to have visibility and provide thoughts/counsel to you in advance of the briefing…

The email exchanges — and others like it made public on Friday — have shocked veteran intelligence experts, who told Just the News that any effort to use official briefings of the president and his White House to spy, investigate or gather information violated the necessary trust for keeping a president apprised of intelligence in a dangerous world.

“It’s unbelievable this kind of stuff was going on,” said Fred Fleitz, a longtime intelligence analyst…”He has to be able to ask difficult questions. You want him and his aides to ask hypotheticals during the briefings as they get up to speed. But if those questions are going to be leaked back to investigators, the president is not going to talk to the experts.”

Fleitz said the new memos show that Obama-era holdovers in the FBI and Justice Department have “used every element of the domestic intelligence services to destroy this president.”

And all of this was despite the fact that the FBI already knew at that point that there was no there there in terms of the dossier and Michael Flynn. They weren’t going to let a few little things like that deflect them from their goal of destruction.

I am so tired of evidence like this mounting and mounting and mounting and being utterly ignored by everyone who isn’t already on the right. That’s every bit as shocking as the actions themselves – at least, it was when it first began to be revealed. It’s no longer shocking at all, really. That’s how far we’ve slid down the slippery slope.

[Hat tip: commenter Barry Meislin.]

[NOTE: Much more here.]

Murder in New Jersey

The New Neo Posted on by

And no ordinary murder, either.

Last night a terrible and heartbreaking story emerged: the family of Esther Salas, a federal judge in New Jersey, was attacked. Her 20-year-old son was killed and her husband gravely wounded. It seemed to be a hit job, perhaps connected with her work.

Then again, some people were pointing out that if there was a hit man who wanted to get the judge, why leave her alive? One answer – that killing her son and leaving her husband for dead may have been even worse torment than killing the judge herself – made a certain amount of sense. But perhaps the husband was the target.

Nothing was clear except that a heinous crime had been committed.

Now we get the news that the suspected killer is alleged to have been neither a disgruntled client of the husband (a defense lawyer), nor a party to a case in which the judge had ruled or was going to rule, but another lawyer.

And that he has killed himself:

Authorities believe an attorney found dead in New York Monday was the shooter who killed a New Jersey federal judge’s son and wounded her husband a day earlier, law enforcement sources with knowledge of the case tell News 4.

The body, identified by sources as a Roy Den Hollander, was found on a property in the Sullivan County town of Rockland, near Liberty, which is in the New York Catskills. One senior law enforcement official says authorities are looking into whether there was a package or envelope addressed to the judge found near Den Hollander, who may have died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds…

They are also investigating whether a gun found at the scene matches the one used to kill Judge Esther Salas’ son and wound her husband, law enforcement sources say.

Den Hollander is a notorious “men’s rights” attorney, whose vitriolic website and book condemn women in rage-filled terms. In one of his books, he specifically blasted Salas by name as “lazy and incompetent.”…

Authorities are also looking into whether Den Hollander is related to the July 11 death of a well-known men’s rights activist in California.

If this is all accurate, it sounds like an unhinged person with a grudge rather than some sort of hit job by a more organized group. However, no doubt conspiracy theorists will differ.

It’s not the same old song

The New Neo Posted on by

Canadian sparrows have changed their tune:

A new bird song is spreading like wildfire among Canadian white-throated sparrows, at a scale not seen before by scientists.

Birds rarely change their chirpy little tunes, and when they do, it’s typically limited to the local environment, where slight song variants basically become regional dialects. New research published today in Current Biology describes an extraordinary exception to this rule, in which a novel song sung by white-throated sparrows is spreading across Canada at an unprecedented rate. What’s more, the new song appears to be replacing the pre-existing melody, which dates as far back as the 1960s…

Traditionally, white-throated sparrows in western and central Canada sing a song distinguished by its three-note ending. The new song, which likely started off as a regional dialect at some point between 1960 and 2000, features a distinctive two-note ending, and it’s taking the sparrow community by storm. What makes the new ending so viral is a mystery to the study authors, led by Ken Otter from the University of Northern British Columbia.

Sparrows learn the songs from other birds, so it is possible for songs to change in this way. The whole thing is rather mysterious, because scientists don’t think the new song has any particular survival benefit. So perhaps the birds just prefer novelty after a while? This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense either, because each bird probably only sings one song per lifetime, although there may be a transitional generation that adopts the new tune because of the need for a change.

The whole thing reminds me – of course! – of a sonnet by Robert Frost:

NEVER AGAIN WOULD BIRD’S SONG BE THE SAME

He would declare and could himself believe
That the birds there in all the garden round
From having heard the daylong voice of Eve
Had added to their own an oversound,
Her tone of meaning but without the words.
Admittedly an eloquence so soft
Could only have had an influence on birds
When call or laughter carried it aloft.
Be that as may be, she was in their song.
Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed
Had now persisted in the woods so long
That probably it never would be lost.
Never again would birds’ song be the same.
And to do that to birds was why she came.

Old terrorists don’t die, they just go Gramscian

The New Neo Posted on by

And here we are, in a tremendous mess, according to Andrew C. McCarthy. Few on the right would disagree.

I’ve been writing about the Gramscian march through education for well over a decade. Others have been writing for longer. It didn’t stop it from happening; that would have taken an enormous and more widespread consciousness of the problem and action to change things before they got out of control.

When Barack Obama was running for office, I became particularly alarmed about his friendship with Bill Ayers. That was twelve years ago and in some ways it seems as though it was even longer ago. I refer you back to these old posts of mine about Bill Ayers and his influence, as well as this one that links in turn to this City-Journal article by Sol Stern, written in 2006:

Ayers’s spectacular second act began when he enrolled at Columbia University’s Teachers College in 1984. Then 40, he planned to stay just to get a teaching credential. (He had taught in a “Freedom School” during his pre-underground student radical days.) But he experienced an epiphany in a course taught by Maxine Greene, a leading light of the “critical pedagogy” movement. As Ayers wrote later, he took fire from Greene’s lectures on how the “oppressive hegemony” of the capitalist social order “reproduces” itself through the traditional practice of public schooling—critical pedagogy’s fancy way of saying that the evil corporations exercise thought control through the schools.

It hadn’t occurred to Ayers that an ed-school professor could speak or write as an authentic American radical…

Greene told future teachers that they could help change this bleak landscape by developing a “transformative” vision of social justice and democracy in their classrooms. Her vision, though, was a far cry from the democratic optimism of the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr., which most parents would endorse. Instead, critical pedagogy theorists nurse a rancorous view of an America in which it is always two minutes to midnight and a knock on the door by the thought police is imminent. The education professors feel themselves anointed to use the nation’s K–12 classrooms to resist this oppressive system. Thus Maxine Greene urged teachers not to mince words with children about the evils of the existing social order. They should portray “homelessness as a consequence of the private dealings of landlords, an arms buildup as a consequence of corporate decisions, racial exclusion as a consequence of a private property-holder’s choice.” In other words, they should turn the little ones into young socialists and critical theorists.

And so, indeed, they did (the “they” includes Ayers’ wife Bernadine Dohrn, among others I’ve chronicled here) – with greater success than perhaps even they could have imagined, but with the sort of success of which they must have dreamed. It’s not as though the public wasn’t warned, and not just by Sol Stern (or by me). It’s that not all that many people heard the news, and of the ones who did (and I include myself in that group), it wasn’t all that clear what to do about it.

Their influence had started during the 80s – although actually, that was just Ayers and his generation, and the problem had started long long before. But at that point the scope of it was still relatively small. It grew to reach critical mass over time, and has burst forth in the ugliness we see today. Now, nearly everyone is aware, but as with the pod people in some dystopian science fiction film, it’s not at all clear it can be stopped.

The Floyd/Chauvin transcript and what it reveals

The New Neo Posted on by

Till last night I hadn’t realized that a transcript of the police interactions with George Floyd had already been released over a week ago. I would have thought it would have created a far bigger stir than it did, and with an enormous amount of discussion.

Perhaps the coverage was relatively muted because both Floyd and Chauvin – as human beings – have now been largely eclipsed by the reactions that their encounter generated (or for which their encounter was used as an excuse). I feel confident in saying that if their paths hadn’t crossed on that fateful day and in that fatal way, something else would have sparked the conflagration we’ve seen for the last month and a half. That “something” might not have been quite as visually powerful as the Floyd video, but another spark would nevertheless have been found.

But the Chauvin/Floyd visuals were exceptionally useful to the left as a whole and to Black Lives Matter and Antifa in particular. Since the release of the video, I have heard nearly every commentater, and seen nearly every writer, assert some version of “Chauvin was a cold-blooded murderer.” Sometimes it’s “Chauvin was a racist cold-blooded murderer.” And often they add that the video is unequivocal on that score, and that anyone who watches it and doesn’t come to that conclusion is also sadly deficient in reasoning power and empathy.

But I’ve never said that, because I know that videos can give the appearance of telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but they can also lead to a false kind of certainty. In a trial they are not enough. And in this case there was (and remains) a lot of missing information.

One piece of important missing information is what transpired between the police apprehending Floyd and his lying on the ground, the life ebbing out of him. Why was he on the ground in the first place, for example? For that and several other important questions, we now have an answer – or at least, a lot more information than we had before. Continue reading →

I probably haven’t watched anything on CBS since Rathergate…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and even prior to that, I don’t think I had watched them for several decades. I watch very little network TV and not much TV at all.

I suppose somebody does, though. And now this:

For those of you not up-to-date on current nomenclature, BIPOC means “black, indigenous, and people of color.” “People of color” is my favorite because it’s most elastic. It includes tons of people who look exactly like me, but it doesn’t include me.

I sometimes wonder whether the people who are into this sort of thing – the left, that is – have fully taken into consideration what this constant and utter emphasis on race does. Could it not backfire on them? I doubt that using a racial bean counter approach to hiring writers, for example, is especially likely to lead to an improvement in the shows that CBS produces and therefore in their audience share. I think, though, that the policy is merely meant to signal some sort of goodwill on the part of CBS, a message to the crocodile that says “please eat me last.”

Until now, only a vanishingly small number of people in America who are in fact defined as “white” thought of themselves as part of a group called “white.” But this constant carping on race, combined with the blaming of whites for nearly everything wrong with America and the world, could certainly have the effect of calling forth a feeling of white consciousness and white victimhood. Does the left really want that to happen?

My answer is “perhaps.” Perhaps they see it as a plus, particularly if some skinheads decide to get violent one day. That would give the left even more ammunition for their campaign about how evil white people are. I don’t know, though. It would depend what form it all took.

The odd thing – or perhaps it’s the ironic thing – is that it seems to me that a lot of the people on the left driving this are white rather than black. A great many black people are upset that they are losing police protection and that violence in their communities has increased rather than decreased (see this, for example). But the leftists in charge really don’t care. The black people who are trying to tell them to stop have lives that truly don’t matter to the left, except as far as they can be used as propaganda to further the cause.

We get too soon old and too late smart

The New Neo Posted on by

It occurs to me, not for the first time, that the older a person is the more historical context that person has for any event. Except for the rare youthful history buff, most young people have little background knowledge to help them process and/or understand current events.

Santayana, anyone? Here’s the whole quote:

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

[NOTE: The title of this post is not, of course, from Santayana. It’s a Pennsylvania Dutch proverb.

A must-read interview with Glenn Loury on race and equality

The New Neo Posted on by

I wish everyone in America would read it, but alas, that will not happen.

Highly recommended. As you read the interview, now and then you may notice the influence of Thomas Sowell, if you’re familiar with his work on what he calls Cosmic Justice.

Both Sowell and Loury are black, and both are (in Sowell’s case “were”) economics professors. Loury is in his early 70s and Sowell just turned 90. Here’s an excerpt from the Loury interview:

I happen to be suspicious about the assertion of authority based upon personal identity, such as being black. Let’s take this example. Were the actions we’ve all seen of the police officer in Minneapolis, Derek Chauvin, expressions of racial hatred? I happen to think that we have no reason to suppose that about him, absent further evidence. There are plenty of alternative explanations for his actions that could be given, from negligence to him just being a mean son of a bitch…

You may or may not have an opinion about that, but suppose the question were to arise in the dorm room late at night. Suppose you have the view that you’re not sure it’s racism, and then someone challenges you, saying, “you’re not black.”…How much authority should that identitarian move have on our search for the truth? How much weight should my declarations in such an argument carry, based on my blackness? What is blackness? What do we mean? Do we mean that his skin is brown? Or do we mean that he’s had a certain set of social-class-based experiences like growing up in a housing project? Well, white people can grow up in housing projects, too. There are lots of different life experiences.

I think it’s extremely dangerous that people accept without criticism this argumentative-authority move when it’s played. It’s ad hominem. We’re supposed to impute authority to people because of their racial identity? I want you to think about that for a minute.

Please read the whole thing. And send the link out to others if you like it.

The left will not allow you to abstain from the anti-racist (that is, new sort of racist) movement

The New Neo Posted on by

Professor William Jacobson reports from the frontlines at Cornell:

The new activism surrounding race is completely at odds with the traditional goals of the civil rights movement — that all people be treated with dignity and afforded the protections of our laws without regard to race…

Not being racist is not enough. One must be “antiracist,” a term famously used in the book “How to Be An Antiracist,” suggested summer reading by Cornell University’s President Martha Pollack:

“As a campus community, we have a collective responsibility to engage in difficult but critical conversations – to listen genuinely to, and learn from, one another. To help bring focus to these conversations, I invite all of you to participate in a Community Book Read of “How to Be an Antiracist,” by National Book Award winner Ibram X. Kendi. We will soon provide all students, faculty, and staff with information about how to access an electronic copy of the book, along with a schedule of virtual discussions which will take place over the summer. I hope you will choose to read the book and to join in the conversation.”

President Pollack has additional “suggestions” for the Faculty Senate at Cornell to take up ASAP (apparently, Cornell is such a hotbed of racism that there can be no delay):

Development of a new set of programs focusing on the history of race, racism and colonialism in the United States, designed to ensure understanding of how inherited social and historical forces have shaped our society today, and how they affect interactions inside and outside of our classrooms, laboratories and studios. All faculty would be expected to participate in this programming and follow-on discussions in their departments. The programs would complement our existing anti-bias programs for faculty, such as those from the Office of Faculty Development and Diversity, the Cornell Interactive Theatre Ensemble, Intergroup Dialogue Programs for Faculty, and the Faculty Institute for Diversity…

Launch an institution-wide, themed semester, during which our campus community will focus on issues of racism in the U.S. through relevant readings and discussions.

I like the use of that word “expected” for faculty. Not required, of course; just “expected.” And if you refuse – well, that’s a nice little job you had there you, you RACIST! Because anyone who is anti the anti-racist program – which is the most utterly racist thing I’ve seen since Governor Wallace stood in the doorway at the University of Alabama in that year of ancient memory 1963 – is of course a racist.

The left used to be against loyalty oaths, as I recall. That’s ancient history. In fact, anyone in favor of free speech was against loyalty oaths. Ancient history as well.

Speaking of ancient history:

The Levering Act was a law enacted by the U.S. state of California in 1950. It required state employees to subscribe to a loyalty oath that specifically disavowed radical beliefs. It was aimed in particular at employees of the University of California. in January 1950, 750 faculty members had approved a resolution to oppose the university’s regents and create a committee to coordinate legal action against the university should an oath be required. Several teachers resigned in protest or lost their positions when they refused to sign the loyalty oath…In August 1950, the regents fired 31 faculty members who refused to sign the oath. Those who were terminated sued, and by 1952 had been rehired when the university declined to pursue its case against them in court.

At least, back then loyalty oaths merely required swearing that the person wasn’t a member of certain radical groups. Now, loyalty oaths require that people actively teach and promote racist theories designed to (among other things) foster racism, this time against white people.

Ah, how far we’ve come!

By the way, this was the oath the Levering Act was requiring back in 1950, as a result of Cold War fears of Soviet infiltration (justified, I might add):

do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of my office according to the best of my ability; that I do not believe in, and I am not a member of, nor do I support any party or organization that believes in, advocates, or teaches the overthrow of the United States Government, by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional means, that I am not a member of the Communist Party or under any oath or a party to any agreement or under any commitment that is in conflict with my obligations under this oath.

I’m not in favor of loyalty oaths. Among other things, people such as Communists, who are actually working to destroy the US as we know it, can just plain lie. Oaths mean very little to them. I also really do favor free speech. If a university hires a Communist or anarchist (and it sometimes seems these days that universities hire nothing but) I’d like to know upfront that’s what we’re dealing with.

The North Hollywood shootout and the militarization of police

The New Neo Posted on by

As part of the current argument about what’s right and wrong with US police forces, a trend that often comes up is the greater “militarization” of police, which is seen by many people as part of the problem.

As commenter “F” writes:

Does anyone over 60 ever remember seeing a policeman wearing a ballistic vest? And nowadays, does anyone remember seeing an LEO without a ballistic vest? Or think back to armament 60 years ago and now: LEOs when I was young had a revolver, and possibly a shotgun in the vehicle. Now the LEO carries an autoloading pistol with a magazine holding 13-21 cartridges, and two extra magazines on his/her belt, along with a military long gun in the car, not to forget helmets and other accoutrements from the battlefield.

I am the first to admit, this is in response to a change in the bad guys’ change in armament: they are also carrying autoloaders with high capacity magazines and ballistic vests. We are also seeing more armored vehicles being used by law enforcement, and cops are able to tap into information data bases from their vehicle and communicate from their person to headquarters.

So the equation has changed on both sides. And legislatures appear more and more ready to handicap the police and allow law-breakers to go Scott-free when they’re apprehended.

I’m far from an expert on policing or weaponry. But I remember this incident in California in 1997 as a turning point. It left the two perps dead and twelve police officers plus eight bystanders injured, and it certainly got my attention:

At 9:17 am, Phillips and Mitasareanu entered and robbed Bank of America’s North Hollywood branch. The two robbers were confronted by LAPD officers when they exited the bank and a shootout between the officers and robbers ensued…

Phillips and Mitasareanu are believed to have robbed at least two other banks using similar methods by taking control of the entire bank and firing weapons illegally modified to enable fully-automatic fire, chambered for intermediate cartridges for control and entry past “bullet-proof” security doors, and were suspects in two armored car robberies.

Standard issue sidearms carried by most local patrol officers at the time were 9mm pistols or .38 Special revolvers; some patrol cars were also equipped with a 12-gauge shotgun. Phillips and Mitasareanu carried Norinco Type 56 S-1s (an AK-47 variant), a Bushmaster XM-15 Dissipator with high-capacity drum magazine, and a Heckler & Koch HK91 rifle, all of which had been illegally modified to enable fully-automatic fire, as well as a Beretta 92FS pistol. The robbers wore mostly homemade, heavy plated body armor which successfully protected them from handgun rounds and shotgun pellets fired by the responding officers. A police SWAT team eventually arrived bearing sufficient firepower, and they commandeered an armored car to evacuate the wounded. Several officers also appropriated AR-15s and other semi-automatic rifles from a nearby firearms dealer. The incident sparked debate on the need for patrol officers to upgrade their firepower in preparation for similar situations in the future.

You bet it did.

Please read the whole thing. I recall it being covered in real time, and being horrified at the amount of firepower and protection the perps had.

Also this:

The shootout contributed to motivating the arming of rank-and-file police officers in Los Angeles and nationwide with semi-automatic, selective fire, and automatic rifles.

The ineffectiveness of the standard police patrol pistols and shotguns in penetrating the robbers’ body armor led to a trend in the United States toward arming selected police patrol officers, not just SWAT teams, with heavier firepower such as semi-automatic AR-15 style rifles. SWAT teams, whose close quarters battle weaponry usually consisted of submachine guns that fired pistol cartridges such as the Heckler & Koch MP5, began supplementing them with AR-15 rifles and carbines.

Seven months after the incident, the Department of Defense gave 600 surplus M16s to the LAPD, which were issued to each patrol sergeant; LAPD patrol vehicles now carry AR-15s as standard issue, with bullet-resistant Kevlar plating in their doors as well.[42] Also as a result of this incident LAPD authorized its officers to carry .45 ACP caliber semiautomatic pistols as duty sidearms, specifically the Smith & Wesson Models 4506 and 4566. Prior to 1997, only LAPD SWAT officers were authorized to carry .45 ACP caliber pistols, specifically the Model 1911A1 .45 ACP semiautomatic pistol.

Times were different back then in other ways, as well. For example, “The year following the shootout, 18 officers of the LAPD received the departmental Medal of Valor for their actions, and met President Bill Clinton.” You may recall that Clinton was a Democrat.

Becoming a police officer should not entail signing up for suicide by perp. Obviously, though, most encounters between police and civilians are not going to involve this sort of shootout – at least, not yet. However, police have become understandably wary and police forces have felt the need to prepare to meet the possible worst-case threats.

The “defund the police” advocates have responded in a profoundly illogical and destructive manner, but they have their own agenda which is political and deeply leftist and radical. I don’t have a solution; but I know that defunding the police is not it.

[NOTE: For those too young to remember incidents such as North Hollywood – and that represents a sizeable portion of the voting public – it may seem as though the police just woke up one day and decided to escalate things. And the left has an investment in letting them (or helping them) think that way.]

Police union endorses Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

Good:

The National Association of Police Organizations endorsed President Trump’s reelection Wednesday, citing his “steadfast and very public support” for law enforcement.

In a brief letter to Mr. Trump, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times, NAPO President Michael McHale said the president’s support was critical in the wake of the attacks on law enforcement following the death of George Floyd…

The decision to side with Mr. Trump this year delivered a blow to presumed Democratic presidential nominee Joseph R. Biden, who prides himself on being a “union man” and longtime ally of police.

The group didn’t endorse anyone in 2016, and endorsed Obama/Biden in 2008 and 2012.

Twitter is a security threat

The New Neo Posted on by

Actually, Twitter is a threat in many ways, in particular the spread of cancel culture and the increase in the ability to organize riots, as well as offering great rewards for animus in general.

But this is what I’m referring to in the title of this post:

On Wednesday, a spike of high profile accounts including those of Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Uber, and Apple tweeted cryptocurrency scams in an apparent hack.

“We used a rep that literally done all the work for us,” one of the sources told Motherboard. The second source added they paid the Twitter insider…

Whereas in other cases hackers have bribed workers to leverage tools over individual users, in this case the access has led to takeovers of some of the biggest accounts on the social media platform and tweeted bitcoin related scams in an effort to generate income…

Within an hour of the breach, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley wrote a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey asking for more information about the hack, including how the hack occurred, how many users were compromised, and whether the hack affected President Trump’s account. Hawley said “please reach out immediately to the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and take any necessary measures to secure the site before this breach expands.”

In 2017, a Twitter worker briefly deleted President Donald Trump’s account before it was quickly reinstated…

All tech companies face the issue of malicious insiders.

How are employees of such companies vetted? I doubt there’s a way to stop this sort of thing; it’s baked into the cake, as it were. Most world leaders have accounts on Twitter, and the potential for mischief (too mild a word) of all kinds is enormous.