Lebkuchen again!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Regulars here may remember that most years I put up a family Christmas recipe. And here it is again, with a slight but important change in the size of the baking pans.]

This recipe was brought over from Germany sometime in the mid-1800s, and was my favorite of all the wonderful treats cooked by my great-aunt Flora, a baker of rare gifts. She and my great-uncle were not only exceptionally wonderful people, but to my childish and wondering eyes they looked very much like Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus.

The name of the treat is lebkuchen, but it’s quite a different one from the traditional recipe, which I don’t much care for. This is sweet and dense, can be made ahead, and keeps very well when stored in tins.

Flora’s Lebkuchen:

(preheat the oven to 375 degrees)

1 pound dark brown sugar
4 eggs
2 cups flour
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
4 oz. chopped dates
1 cup raisins
1 tsp. orange juice
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. almond extract
1 tsp. lemon juice

Sift the dry ingredients together (flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon).

Beat the eggs and brown sugar together with a rotary beater till the mixture forms the ribbon. Add the orange juice, lemon juice, and extracts to it.

Add the dry mixture to it, a little at a time, stirring.

Add the raisins, dates, and walnuts.

Grease and flour two 8 X 8 cake pans [NOTE: In previous years I sometimes said 9 X 9, but 8 X 8 is actually much better and makes for a far moister product.] Put batter in pans and bake for about 25 minutes (or a little less; test the cake with a cake tester at 21 or 22 minutes to see if it’s done yet). You don’t want it to get too dark and dry on the edges, but the middle can’t still be wet when tested.

Meanwhile, make the frosting.

Melt about 6 Tbs. of unsalted butter and add 2 Tbs. hot milk, and 1 Tbs. almond extract. Add enough confectioner’s sugar to make a frosting of spreading consistency (the recipe says “2 cups,” but I’ve always noticed that’s not exactly correct). You can make even more frosting if you like a lot of frosting.

Let cake cool to at least lukewarm, and spread generously with the frosting. Then cut into small pieces and store (or eat!).

Enjoy!

Scott Johnson of Powerline makes a good point about the MSM and Russiagate

The New Neo Posted on by

Here it is, on the topic of the fact that media reports were almost uniformly wrong about Russiagate, the Nunes vs. Schiff memo, the Steele dossier’s reliability, and so much else:

If reporters were burned, they should be angry, and corrections should be forthcoming. If there isn’t an effort to reverse the wrong coverage, it will look like certain outlets (particularly cable channels) were complicit in knowingly giving oceans of airtime to shaky stories. It’s a bad look either way, but door number two is worse.

He’s right. If reporters were duped by the FBI and people such as Schiff, the MSM should be saying so and attacking those who deceived them, and trying to find out why it happened. The paucity of such articles, even now, suggests two things. The first is that it’s difficult for our self-righteous journalists to admit that they got this whole thing wrong, wrong, wrong. That’s hard because of both the natural human tendency to admit wrongdoing, as well as the fact that the truth goes in a political direction (defense of Donald Trump) that is anathema to them.

But the second is that they may indeed have known they were lying.

It’s another variant of ye olde “fools vs. knaves (or both)” question.

Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling gets a taste of the left’s medicine when she stands up for liberty

The New Neo Posted on by

At my son’s request, I read the first two Harry Potter books shortly after they first came out. They were okay as that sort of thing goes, but since I’m not keen on that sort of thing, I stopped reading them somewhere in the middle of the third book. The series just didn’t hold my interest, and I figured I’d sufficiently paid my Harry Potter dues – although my son felt I had shown remarkable dereliction of maternal duty.

I’ve also noted over subsequent years that J. K. Rowling, the books’ author, tended to voice the usual leftist line on many things. Rowling is a Brit and a writer, two reasons that stance didn’t surprise me.

But now that Rowling has stood up for liberty and freedom of expression against transgender orthodoxy, the hounds of war have been loosed on her – proving once again that, to the left, you’re only as good as your most recent party line:

She has been called a stupid cunt, a bitch, trash, an old woman and so fucking ugly by an army of tweeting sexists. Her crime? She defended the right of a woman to express her opinion about sex and gender without losing her job.

The witch-hunting of JK Rowling, the ceaseless online abuse of her over the past day and night, exposes how unhinged, hateful and outright misogynistic the transgender movement has become. Rowling’s sin was to tweet in defence of Maya Forstater, the charity worker who was sacked for her belief that there are two sexes and that sex is immutable. That is, a man cannot become a woman, and vice versa. This week, an employment tribunal outrageously upheld Ms Forstater’s sacking and in the process it decreed what it is acceptable for people in the workplace to think and say. The judge said the kind of views held by Forstater are ‘not worthy of respect in a democratic society’. This essentially gives a green light to the harassment, isolation and expulsion from the workplace of anyone who questions the transgender ideology.

This is a ruling by an employment tribunal and is not legally binding in terms of the British court system, but it’s a chilling development in line with some of the “pronoun” fights that have gone on in Canada and which catapulted Jordan Peterson into fame when he fought them in the name of liberty.

More about the Forstater case can be found here:

“It is a core component of her belief that she will refer to a person by the sex she considered appropriate even if it violates their dignity and/or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment,” [the judge] continued.

“The approach is not worthy of respect in a democratic society.”

Funny thing, but just a few short years ago this belief was standard and completely acceptable, and science agreed that transgender people never fully became a member (in the biological sense) of the sex to which they transitioned. More recently, transgender activists have openly pursued several goals on their agenda, and this is one of them: to force people to accept their view of things and to act accordingly or to have those people (or people such as Rowling who support their right to speak freely) pay a steep price in public shaming as well as suffer financial loss.

The United States has a legal tradition, as well as laws and presumptions, that favor the exercise and protection of free speech and liberty far more than anyplace in Europe (or perhaps even the world, although it’s Europe about which I know more). Although the curtailment of such liberty has been slower to come here, in part for that reason, there’s no reason to think it won’t happen here.

France’s rampant anti-Semitism

The New Neo Posted on by

I sometimes reflect on the fact that Hitler nearly succeeded in making Europe Judenfrei. He certainly succeeded in reducing the number of Jews there almost to the vanishing point.

But for the ones that remain, the present-day governments in Western Europe appear to be coming close to driving the remaining Jews away:

French political leaders often declare that fighting against anti-Semitism is of utmost importance; they say it every time a Jew is murdered in the country. The only anti-Semitism they seem ready to fight, however, is right-wing anti-Semitism. They seemingly refuse to see that all the Jews killed or assaulted in France since 2006 were victims of Muslim anti-Semites — and French political leaders never utter a word about it. They appear to hide Islamic anti-Semitism — embedded in the Qur’an and Hadiths and reinforced in the 1930s by the Nazis’ friendship with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini — under a Muslim hatred of the Jews based on a supposedly “legitimate” Muslim hatred of ‘Zionist crimes'”.

French political leaders also seemingly refuse to see another form of anti-Semitism that is on the rise: leftist anti-Semitism. It is precisely this leftist anti-Semitism that uses the mask of anti-Zionism to spread anti-Jewish hatred.

French political leaders also never speak about the way the French mainstream media talk about Israel, or about the consequences of those articles and reports. They constantly — and falsely — describe Israel as an evil country whose soldiers cavalierly kill Arabs on a daily basis and whose citizens “illegally occupy” territories (despite having been there for more than 3,000 years) that might belong to another people whom they cruelly deprive of everything.

French political leaders do not criticize anti-Israel articles and reports: the way most of them talk about Israel is just as anti-Israel as the worst anti-Israel articles. The government itself does no better…

The demographic transformation happening in France is also spreading throughout Western Europe, and the growing submission to Islam is being silently accepted by the ruling authorities almost everywhere. Political parties opposed to Islamization are pushed to the margins. Some Central European leaders – Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki in Poland and President Miloš Zeman in the Czech Republic — are the only ones explicitly to reject the Islamization of their countries and take measures to curb Muslim immigration. They are often condemned by Western European leaders who want to force them to welcome immigrants by the thousands.

Reports show, not surprisingly, that the rise in the number of Muslim immigrants has led to an even broader rise in anti-Semitism.

Here is what is meant by the “demographic transformation happening in France”:

Jews have become a shrinking part of the population — 0.6 % — and carry no political weight. The French Muslim population is quickly growing — to more than 12% of the total. It has become virtually impossible to win an election in France without now counting on the Muslim vote.

And it has become virtually impossible to discuss these things without being accused of the dread “Islamophobia.”

Some Democrats apparently think that the impeachment vote means that Trump is out of office

The New Neo Posted on by

My goodness:

It might be difficult to believe after weeks of talk about impeachment that there are people who still don’t understand the process, but on Twitter last night, “#ByeTrump” was trending because many believed that the House vote on impeachment meant that President Donald Trump was now removed.

Some had to be schooled then today when they found out to their surprise that lo and behold, Trump was still president and that no, being impeached is not the same thing as removal.

Although shocking, it’s not surprising. We’ve known for quite some time that the teaching of civics is nothing like what it used to be, and that many people schooled in the US grow up ignorant of even the basics of the way our government works. So, many people who seem to be politically active and involved – involved enough to tweet about politics on Twitter, anyway – appear to have thought that impeachment itself would remove Trump from office.

This isn’t just about Trump. Apparently, these people are so ignorant of the entire picture of how our government is designed that they think the Founders set things up so that one body of our legislature can remove a president by a simple majority vote. Poof, you’re gone!

I’ve seen analogies saying that idea about impeachment resembles what happens in the UK with a parliamentary vote of “no confidence.” But I beg to differ. Not only is it different because in the UK the executive is meant to serve only at the will of the legislature, but also because a “no confidence” vote occurs at the hands of the prime minister’s own party. The PM is always of the same party as the dominant party in Parliament (or a parliamentary coalition of relatively simpatico parties, with the PM’s own party having a plurality). So any “no confidence” vote is the result of a majority of MPs in the PM’s own party [ADDED NOTE, and see ADDENDUM below: and/or the coalition parties] turning against him/her.

That is night and day from what happened during the House impeachment vote, which represented the opposition party trying to throw the president out. His own party, the GOP, supported him 100%. The American system gives the House, when controlled by an opposition party, a perfect opportunity to try to weaken any president of the other party. Most Houses have resisted the temptation because they understand the danger of setting such a precedent (danger to them when the tables are turned) as well as the futility of it if they lack the votes of 2/3 of the Senate to convict. That’s why the Senate gets the last word, and it takes far more than a simple majority to get rid of a president.

[ADDENDUM: Here’s some further elucidation on no confidence votes in the UK and how they have worked in modern times, from a commenter named “London Trader”:

That’s not really how a no confidence vote works in the UK. First there are very rarely coalitions in the UK parliament. The only one in my lifetime was Cameron’s first term. There are occasionally minority governments but again not that frequently. The last parliament had a minority but the previous minority government was in the mid 1970’s I think. The only successful no confidence vote that I remember was in 1979 when Thatcher toppled the Labour government of James Callaghan. From memory he had a minority by that point because he’d lost his majority in successive bye elections from 1976 onward.

Here’s a description of a case in Israel in which a coalition partner of the PM’s own party forced a successful no confidence vote there against Shamir.

It is also clear that no confidence votes are extremely rare in those countries that have parliamentary systems and allow them.]

McConnell gives Pelosi some advice on the word “leverage”

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I wrote, concerning Nancy Pelosi’s decision to hold back on sending articles of impeahment to the Senate: “This is the Democrats’ idea of “leverage”? Why would the Republicans care if Democrats never send the articles to the Senate?”

Now Mitch McConnell weighs in:

McConnell said Schumer wanted “a special pretrial guarantee” that “House Democrats themselves did not bother to pursue as they assembled their case.”

McConnell also criticized House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., for taking the “highly unusual step” of waiting to transmit the approved House articles of impeachment against Trump to the Senate.

McConnell said he didn’t understand the move by Pelosi and said, while cracking a smile, that he didn’t agree with the idea that delaying the transmission might give her leverage in dictating the rules of the Senate trial.

“I admit, I’m not sure what leverage there is from refraining from sending us something we do not want,” McConnell said. “But alas, if they can figure that out, they can explain it.”

Impeachment has jumped the shark.

Pelosi now turns impeachment lite into impeachment weightless

The New Neo Posted on by

So Nancy Pelosi has decided to delay sending the articles of impeachment to the Senate, and her fellow Democrats are supporting her in that – or at least pretending to support her:

House Democrats on Thursday are rallying behind Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) after she said she’ll delay the delivery of impeachment articles to the Senate in an effort to ensure a fair trial.

President Trump has urged a speedy trial in the upper chamber, and Pelosi’s allies argue that delaying the delivery of the articles will put pressure on Senate GOP leaders to call witnesses and seek more evidence surrounding the president’s dealings with Ukraine — steps Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has said he’ll not take.

Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said Pelosi’s delay strategy made for “a very wise decision on her part.”

“I think it gives her leverage; it gives the House leverage in terms of making sure that it’s not going to be a kangaroo court over there,” she told reporters in the Capitol. “If, in fact, they intend to not be an impartial reviewer of the facts, then it becomes a joke. And we’re not party to a joke.”

This is just bizarre. I’ve heard analogies to the dog that chases the car and finally catches it but doesn’t know what to do with it. This is the Democrats’ idea of “leverage”? Why would the Republicans care if Democrats never send the articles to the Senate? Is this an admission on the Democrats’ part that a trial in the Senate would make Trump and the Republicans look good and the Democrats even worse than they look now? Or does it represent Democrats’ hope that they (and their buddies in the MSM) can spin this to suggest “The meany Republicans are so unfair!” after the US public has had a chance to see how unfair the Democrat-led proceedings were in the House?

As Ted Cruz says:

Or maybe it’s the Schrodinger’s Cat impeachment:

Comey: What did I know? I was just the FBI director [Part 2]

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Part I can be found here.]

In the following, I’m discussing the Chris Wallace interview of James Comey that occurred last Sunday. Here’s the transcript, and here’s the video.]

During the video, Wallace confronts Comey with the fact that IG Horowitz testified that the Steele dossier was the main element that drove the FISA applications, despite Comey having claimed otherwise for ages. Although Wallace does a good job of pointing out the enormous contradiction there (and shows patience by explaining it to Comey again and again, in several different ways), Comey just plays dumb:

“…I agree with [Horowitz’s] characterization. I’m just confused — I no — I don’t see the disconnect between the two of us. And I’m sorry that I’m missing it.”

This is a top lawyer? It’s an absurdity to think he doesn’t understand. Wallace tries again, and Comey’s answer is waffley and confusing:

“Chris Wallace: I guess the question is, it seemed that you were minimizing the role of the Steele Dossier, and he’s saying it’s a lot more important than you let on.

James Comey: Okay. If I was, then I’m sorry that I did that. But I meant it was one part of the presentation to the court. It was not a huge part of the presentation to the court, but it was the fact, according to his report, that convinced the lawyers to go forward.”

Note the “if” in the apology, which is a classic tell of an apology that is actually a non-apology and an acknowledgement that is actually a non-acknowledgement. The rest of Comey’s answer barely makes sense, but Wallace finally gives up pursuing that line of inquiry after that and goes on to the next point. In this case, one can hardly blame him – except perhaps to suggest that he might have added, “Excuse me, but you’re just not making sense. The Steele dossier was the basis of the presentation to the court.”

And the following should earn an award for Comey for buck-passing:

“Chris Wallace: But this isn’t some investigation, sir. This is an investigation of the campaign of the man who is the president of the United States. You had just been through a firestorm investigating Hillary Clinton. I would think, if I were in your position, I would have been on that, you know, like a junkyard dog. I would have wanted to know everything they were doing in investigating the Trump campaign.

James Comey: Yeah. That’s not the way it works, though. As a director sitting on top of an organization of 38,000 people, you can’t run an investigation that’s seven layers below you. You have to leave it to the career professionals to do, to the special agents who do this for their lives. And if a director tires to run an investigation, it’ll get mucked up in all different kinds of ways, given his or her responsibilities and the impossibility of reaching the work that’s being done at the lower level.

Wallace’s question was a good one. Comey’s answer was unacceptable. This was a very special investigation that required his special attention. And it was not conducted “seven layers below” him. In fact, many of the people involved in the “sloppiness” were the higher-ups. For example, Clinesmith – the person who deceptively changed the meaning of an email about Page having worked as an agent for US intelligence – is often painted is a lower level lawyer at the FBI, but this was his actual role:

The reality is that [Clinesmith] was a member of the Hillary Clinton email investigation team (Midyear Exam). According to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’ June 2018 Report (on various actions by the FBI and DOJ in advance of the 2016 election)…he played a far larger role in the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign (Crossfire Hurricane). The report states Clinesmith was the “the primary FBI attorney assigned to that investigation beginning in early 2017.” He then joined Robert Mueller’s investigation team and was dismissed in February 2018 after his anti-Trump text messages had been revealed.

Perhaps the most cryptic and disturbing thing Comey said, though, was something Wallace failed to follow up on at all:

“There are mistakes I consider more consequential than this during my tenure.”

I’m sorry that Wallace didn’t ask him what they might be. Now, I imagine Comey would have shimmied out of that one, too, but his statement cried out for clarification.

I’m going to stop fisking Comey’s answers at this point; I think you get the idea. But I want to mention one other all-important question that Wallace never asked Comey: “If all of these are ‘sloppy’ errors, why did they all hurt Trump? If they were random errors there shouldn’t be a pattern like that, should there? How do you explain the sameness of the anti-Trump effect of every single ‘error’?”

Another Horowitz hearing, overshadowed by impeachment theater

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday Horowitz testified again, and said much the same thing as before:

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., was blunt in trying to get to the bottom of what happened during Wednesday’s Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing.

“Were they [the FBI] just all incompetent?” he asked. Hawley then noted that due to the complexities involved, “it doesn’t sound like they’re very stupid to me.”

Hawley ultimately asked why the members of the FBI would commit such failures to mislead a court multiple times.

“That was precisely the concern we had,” Horowitz said. The inspector general made clear that he did not reach any conclusions regarding intent, but he did not necessarily accept the reasons people gave him during his investigation.

“There are so many errors, we couldn’t reach a conclusion or make a determination on what motivated those failures other than we did not credit what we lay out here were the explanations we got,” Horowitz said.

This echoed what Horowitz said in his opening statement, where he made clear that “although we did not find documentary or testimonial evidence of intentional misconduct, we also did not receive satisfactory explanations for the errors or the missing information and the failures that occurred.”…

“We could not prove [FBI bias]. We lay out here what we can,” Horowitz [said].

More here:

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz clarified Wednesday that his investigation into the FBI’s FISA abuses “did not reach” the conclusion that the bureau was unaffected by political bias during its 2016 Russia investigation.

Following the release of the report, Democrats and former FBI officials were quick to point to Horowitz’s statement that he “did not find documentary or testimonial evidence” of political bias in the opening of Crossfire Hurricane, arguing that the statement proved President Trump’s claims of a politically-motivated “witch hunt” were false.

The Democrats know better, especially the lawyers among them. They know exactly what Horowitz was saying, and they know that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. They just hope you don’t know better, and that you will swallow the swill they dish out.

The inspector general also said during testimony that his team was looking further into whether the FBI’s “basic errors” in the case were potentially systemic.

When the errors all go in one direction, how could they not be?

Perhaps “systemic” means “present in investigations that don’t concern Donald Trump and his aides and advisors.” I suppose it’s possible that the FBI is riddled with such “errors,” and that the incompetence level there is so very high that they really are errors. I also think it’s possible these “errors” only affected Crossfire Hurricane. But there’s still a third possibility, which is that there are many cases with such “errors,” and that they all represent purposeful actions on the part of agents with the intent of framing targets, some for political reasons and some for other reasons.