Ceasefire announced between India and Pakistan – but does it have any meaning?

The New Neo Posted on by

Reports are that it was violated almost immediately, but who knows? This is from CNN, so take it with the usual grain of salt:

India and Pakistan agreed to an immediate ceasefire on Saturday, unexpectedly halting the worst fighting in decades between the nuclear-armed neighbors, just when their tit-for-tat strikes appeared to be spiraling out of control.

Although US President Donald Trump was the first to announce the ceasefire and claimed credit for it, India and Pakistan have offered contradictory accounts about the extent of US involvement in the agreement.

Just hours after the announcement there have been reports of violations from both sides.

Let’s make sure that Trump gets little credit if it ends up being a good thing. And let’s make sure he gets all the blame if it doesn’t hold.

More:

India’s Ministry of Information said the agreement was worked out “directly between the two countries,” downplaying US involvement and contradicting Trump’s claim. The ministry also said there was “no decision” to hold further talks.

But Pakistani officials have heaped praise on Washington.

“We thank President Trump for his leadership and proactive role for peace in the region,” said Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.

A Pakistani source familiar with the negotiations told CNN that the US – and Rubio in particular – was instrumental in striking the deal.

Time will … tell.

Ras Baraka, ICE, New Jersey, and dear old dad

The New Neo Posted on by

Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark, was arrested yesterday:

Authorities arrested Newark Mayor Ras Baraka for allegedly trespassing and ignoring warnings from the feds to leave an ICE facility.

The facility holds alleged violent criminals, such as MS-13 gang members and child rapists.

“Baraka reportedly entered the federal facility without authorization and refused to leave when ordered,” reported Shore News Network. “Homeland Security Investigations issued repeated directives for the mayor to remove himself from the premises, which he allegedly ignored.”

What a cause to choose.

Afterwards, he made this statement:

The U.S. attorney wasn’t there. She doesn’t know what happened. Clearly, that is not the context of what happened. I was there for over an hour in that space, and nobody ever told me to move. I was in there for over an hour, not a single person, not an officer from ICE, not any of the security guards. Nobody told me to leave that place.

Somebody from Homeland Security came in the end and began to escalate the situation, and we wound up being where we are today, and that’s frankly the extent of it. I didn’t go there to break any laws, I didn’t break any laws. I was there as the Mayor of the City, exercising my right and duty as an elected official, supporting our Congress people, preparing for a press conference that was supposed to happen there.

However, a video was released of the incident:

In the video, you can hear the Homeland Security agent asking Baraka to leave, and he also goes on to point out that multiple other warnings had already been given. …

Further, the fact that he was arrested outside the fence doesn’t change the fact that he was trespassing before that. If I break into your house but end up out on the lawn when police arrive, that doesn’t negate the crime that was committed.

Three House members – Democrats, of course – were also involved in the political theater. My guess is that Baraka was quite happy to be arrested so that he could claim he’s a persecuted hero.

When I first read the story, the name “Baraka” rang a bell, and it wasn’t just the resemblance to Obama’s first name. Back when Baraka had first been elected Newark’s mayor, in 2014, I wrote this post about him and his father. Here’s an excerpt:

So it appears that family, particularly Baraka’s father, and name recognition played a large part in Baraka’s victory. But in the entire 1000-word article, the Times somehow neglects to mention something I’d consider rather important about that family name, something that readers of a certain age (my age, to be exact) remember and that would enable newer readers to place Baraka’s father and understand who he was, and that’s his birth name, Leroi Jones, the name by which he first became famous as a “militant poet.”

The Times probably has good reason to leave this sort of thing out:

“Within the African-American community, some compare [Amiri Baraka, aka Leroi Jones] to James Baldwin and call Baraka one of the most respected and most widely published Black writers of his generation. Others have said his work is an expression of violence, misogyny, homophobia and racism. Baraka’s brief tenure as Poet Laureate of New Jersey (2002 – 03), involved controversy over a public reading of his poem “Somebody Blew Up America?” and accusations of anti-semitism, and some negative attention from critics, and politicians.”

If you follow the link to the poem you’ll find those accusations are hardly made-up, and you’ll find other examples on Baraka’s Wiki page to show that he was an equal-opportunity hater of almost everyone except black people, with “his advocacy of rape and violence towards, at various times, women, gay people, white people, and Jews.”

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), the link to the poem that I originally provided is dead, and in a quick search I haven’t found the complete text of the poem anywhere. But there’s this:

The pushback was related to a poem he’d written in response to the September 11 attacks, “Somebody Blew Up America,” targeting forces of global oppression and singling out white men, who, according to Baraka, had committed the most crimes against humanity. Demanding its audience re-think assumptions, the poem fires a barrage of powerful statements and urgent questions, often in dramatic repetition: “Who? Who? Who?”

National public outcry against the work came after he read it at the 2002 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Stanhope, New Jersey. The poem includes the line “Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers to stay home that day?” Accusing him of anti-Semitism, critics demanded he be removed from his post as New Jersey Poet Laureate. With no legal mechanism in place to unseat Baraka, the governor simply eliminated the position. The poet refused to apologize: “I don’t have regrets about writing the poem,” he said. “Because the poem is true.”

But really, his anti-Semitism was just the tip of a very large iceberg of hatred. See the plot of his 1964 play “Dutchman.” Part of the plot, which takes place on a subway (Clay is a young black man; Lula is a white woman:

Clay launches into a monologue. Clay suggests that whites let black people dance “black” dances and make “black” music. He explains that these segregatory actions assuage black Americans’ anger towards whites and distracts them from accessing the “white man’s intellectual legacy”. Clay states that if black people stopped trying to heal their pain through dance, music, civic participation, religion, or focusing on moving upwards in American society, and became coldly rational like white people, black people would just kill all the whites and be done with racism in America. Clay says that if he were to take Lula’s words to heart, he should just kill all the white people he meets.

Although Clay says all this, he deeply rejects this plan of action. He states that he does not want to kill and that he prefers to be ignorant of the problem. He says he would rather choose to pretend to be ignorant of racism, not try to get rid of it by fighting with whites.

Once Clay makes his confession, Lula changes strategies again. Clay makes as if to leave, but Lula coolly, rationally, stabs him twice to the heart. She directs all the other passengers, blacks and whites, in the train car to throw his body out and get out at the next stop.

How much of his father’s philosophy does Baraka the Younger share? I don’t know, but there’s this about his college days:

… [Ras Baraka] also began to synthesize his father’s militancy and start to define his own brand of activism. He was concerned about the apathy of his generation, that the Black movement his father and others had led in the ’60s and ’70s was foundering. He started a dorm-room meeting group, which in 1987 would provide security for Public Enemy when they visited the campus.

He transformed that group into a formidable student activist organization — Sons and Daughters of Panthers, later renamed Black Nia F.O.R.C.E. (Freedom Organization for Racial and Cultural Enlightenment), which met every Friday night on campus. The group’s philosophy was shaped, they said, by Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan — a wide variety, indeed. The structure and tone of the meetings were influenced by Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers, while at the same time resembled his father’s gatherings in Newark.

Later, Baraka headed a large protest at Howard when Lee Atwater was appointed to the Board:

At one point, police were ordered to storm the building. They dropped officers on the roof, who cut open a hole for entry, and rappelled inside, Baraka recalls. On a side entrance, they used a battering ram while football players on the inside leaned against the door. But then Washington Mayor Marion Barry arrived and called off the attack, aborting what could have been a deadly confrontation.

“From that point on, I was a Marion Barry supporter. I don’t care what he did,” Baraka said.

In the end, it was the university administration who blinked. Atwater resigned from the Howard board. The next month, the university’s president resigned. Foreshadowing his path toward politics, Baraka was elected as vice president of the Howard University Student Association.

The demonstration gave him name recognition and led to a political office within the university. It is apparent that Baraka’s current “protest” and arrest is aimed at positioning him as the frontrunner in the primary for the governorship:

With pollsters saying it’s still anyone’s ballgame, the final weeks will come down to the hopefuls energizing their followers and winning over undecided voters who don’t like President Donald Trump but have trouble distinguishing one Democrat from another.

While every Democrat has commercials saying they’ll fight Trump, Baraka’s arrest at the hands of the president’s ICE agents puts him in another league. It could anger Democratic voters and will energize his base. And with all this attention, everybody will know Baraka’s name.

“He was already over-performing,” the Democratic operative said of Baraka. “This is where our party is right now: looking for a fight with Trump.”

That’s what it’s come down to for the Democrats. It didn’t work for Kamala and Walz, but it just might work for Baraka in New Jersey.

US higher education is no meritocracy, and that doesn’t seem to be changing

The New Neo Posted on by

That’s the premise of this article:

For most of its history, America’s higher-education system, for all its flaws, operated around a hard but fair rule: Raw intellectual firepower mattered. Talent mattered. The ability to retain information and apply it correctly mattered. Academic excellence was the surest path to opportunity. You didn’t need family connections (although they certainly helped). You didn’t need a billion-dollar last name (again, that didn’t hurt either). You needed results.

Academic brilliance is now, in many cases, a liability unless paired with the “correct” ideological identifier.

Today, that operating system is being systematically dismantled. Academic brilliance is now, in many cases, a liability unless paired with the “correct” ideological identifier. In the modern Ivy League, identity is currency. Grievance is gold. Merit, once the only metric that really mattered, is treated like a relic of an oppressive past.

That’s been true for quite some time, and the article indicates that despite Trump’s efforts, nothing has really changed. Well, it’s early yet. But it wouldn’t surprise me if it doesn’t change, because colleges are now dedicated not to learning but to destructive leftist goals.

The article doesn’t say too much else although it does give some details. But it brought to mind once again the fact that one of the main goals of today’s education in most Western countries is learning to hate your own country. It’s taught in lower levels and in higher ones, and it’s certainly not unique to the United States. In fact, it’s not only the US that is labeled hateful; it’s western civilization as a whole, and all its traditional values – one of which is meritocracy.

Which in turn reminds me of an old post of mine based on some work by Allan Bloom. I reproduce the relevant portion here (it constitutes the remainder of the present post), but you might want to read the whole thing.

[Here’s Allan Bloom] again [emphasis mine], with an important and telling anecdote from his own past: …

Civic education turned away from concentrating on the Founding to concentrating on openness based on history and social science. There was even a general tendency to debunk the Founding, to prove the beginnings were flawed in order to license a greater openness to the new. What began in Charles Beard’s Marxism and Carl Becker’s historicism became routine. We are used to hearing the Founders being charged with being racists, murderers of Indians, representatives of class interests. I asked my first history professor in the university, a very famous scholar, whether the picture he gave us of George Washington did not have the effect of making us despise our regime. “Not at all,” he said, “it doesn’t depend on individuals but on our having good democratic values.” To which I rejoined, “But you just showed us that Washington was only using those values to further the class interests of the Virginia squirearchy.” He got angry, and that was the end of it. He was comforted by a gentle assurance that the values of democracy are part of the movement of history and did not require his elucidation or defense. He could carry on his historical studies with the moral certitude that they would lead to greater openness and hence more democracy. The lessons of fascism and the vulnerability of democracy, which we had all just experienced, had no effect on him.

I find that passage about the obtuseness of Bloom’s history professor astounding as well as very descriptive of how we got here. The complete dominance of the radical professors as far as numbers go are a more recent manifestation, although there have long been some. But Bloom was a student of that history professor back in the mid-1940s, having been born in 1930 but having also been precocious enough to get his undergraduate degree at the age of eighteen from the University of Chicago after having entered at fifteen. The unnamed history professor Bloom describes in that passage was almost certainly not a radical. At most he was probably only mildly liberal. Perhaps he even passed for what was then known as conservative. If so, he was also unaware of the lessons to which Bloom refers to in that last sentence I quoted, even though – as Bloom notes – they had just experienced those lessons in WWII. The professor did not see any relation between what he was saying about the Founders and what would ultimately undermine our republic and all the values he probably held dear.

But Bloom, his student, saw it, even back then, even at so young an age.

Note also the tone of barely-restrained sarcasm; Bloom seems to have had a certain amount of contemptuous anger at those academics who could have been so stupid as to not have realized the effects of their throwing out the precious baby and leaving the dirty bathwater (it seems his first history professor was none too happy with his challenges, either). As the book goes on, some of the best passages involve Bloom’s description of the faculty’s craven abdication during the student uprisings of the 1960s, when he was one of those who tried (in vain, as it turned out) to hold his finger in the dike of the best traditions of Western Civilization. If you read the book [The Closing of the American Mind], pay particular attention to those uprisings, which were the template for what’s happening today.

Melatonin: not so great?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an article saying that melatonin has not been shown to help with chronic insomnia:

In a culture that believes there’s a pill for every problem, melatonin seems just what the doctor ordered. It’s a natural hormone whose production the body increases in response to darkness and decreases whenever there’s light. It works to regulate the body’s 24-hour internal clock, also known as circadian rhythms. Decades ago, travelers embraced it as a proven way to recover from jet lag. It’s easy to see how such a pill transformed from a treatment for the ravages of long plane rides into a nightly sleep aid. A study reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that its use quintupled between 1999 and 2018.

“Melatonin is a sleep regulator, not a sleep originator,” Breus said.

If melatonin is not an effective sleep aid, why has its use exploded? Experts point to a variety of factors. Foremost is the strong placebo effect when it comes to insomnia treatment. Believing that melatonin will improve sleep can help people feel more relaxed when they get into bed, and they feel as if they can stop trying so hard to fall asleep. Couple that with the misery that insomniacs suffer in their frantic search for a solution, and they become vulnerable marks.

Insomnia is both a common and an awful experience, and many people will do almost anything to try to eliminate it. I had bad bouts of it as a result of chronic pain from a series of injuries many years ago, and among other things I tried melatonin. For me, it not only didn’t work; it seemed to have a paradoxical effort. In other words, it made me nervous in addition to everything else I was going through, and so I never took it again. But I know people who rely on it on a nightly basis.

I imagine a great many of you have opinions on the subject, so fire away.

Art for non-art’s sake: the Times Square monument to our age

The New Neo Posted on by

A recent development in the world of art is the installation of a statue in Times Square. While the virtue-signaling have been busy pulling down heroic statues of white men, they are erecting this sort of thing in their stead:

New York City’s Times Square installed a statue of a 12-foot-tall Black woman in casual clothing that its creator hopes will encourage people to reflect on “greater cultural diversity.”

New York-based Times Square Arts recently put up the new statue display, titled “Grounded in the Stars,” by artist Thomas J Price, along with his “Man Series” animated billboards, both of which are temporary, but causing a stir online.

The Times Square website states, “Price’s multi-channel presentation on the screens and sculptural installation on the plaza below forms a two-part takeover in Times Square that foregrounds the intrinsic value of the individual and amplifies traditionally marginalized bodies on a monumental scale.”

Note the style of the writing. It’s a very typical Newspeak that originated in academic circles and functions as a sort of “I’m highly educated and oh-so-virtuous” tell.

The statue is neither attractive nor heroic, which is the point. It happens to be of a black woman or “woman of color” – another point. But if the race of the person depicted had been white, it certainly would not have been any more attractive. Is this the current urban Everywoman? I suppose. Her gaze is either blank or slightly defiant, but she looks like anyone you could see walking on the street. The statue’s only raison d’etre seems to be its anti-heroic and woke nature – that, and to conjure up controversy.

It reminds me somewhat of a trend I’ve noticed in advertisements and even some store mannequins that feature models who are not the least bit remarkable and only of very ordinary and average (or less than average) attractiveness. The only thing different about this woman is that she’s not in a store advertising anything; she’s supposed to be purely art plus politics.

By “traditionally marginalized bodies,” the author of that deathless descriptive prose I quoted can’t possibly mean “women who are a bit heavy.” There’s a lengthy art tradition for that, and even a more recent one. As a native New Yorker, I immediately thought of the Nadelman-inspired sculptures in the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center. I’ve always liked them, although I wasn’t sure why. Here’s one:

These women are also of the overweight variety. They’re white because the stone is white, but to me at least they seem beyond race and time. They’re supposed to be circus performers, but they certainly don’t look like any circus performers I’ve ever seen. There’s something monumental about them, something that isn’t political.

Speaking of old traditions, the image of the overweight ( that is, fat) woman has enormous antiquity. In fact, such sculptures are among the oldest art we have. I bring you as an example, the Venus of Willendorf, thought to be about 30K years old. The sculpture is only about four inches tall:

Then of course the overweight woman has a prominent place in painting of yesteryear from the Renaissance to Renoir and beyond, almost a cliched place. But none of these images have anything like the aura of the Times Square sculpture, which is anti-art or perhaps art as pure politics. As such, it’s emblematic of our times.

India avenges Daniel Pearl

The New Neo Posted on by

The murder of Daniel Pearl seems like ancient history now; it happened early in 2002. However, a few weeks after the October 7, 2023 massacre in Israel I took a look back at Pearl’s murder and wrote this:

Remember Daniel Pearl? Why do I start this post with him? He was the first terrorist victim – at least the first I can remember – whose death contained that special element of horrific sadism and psychopathic brutality crossed with modern technology, in that his beheading was videoed and purposely broadcast by the perpetrators. This was way before ISIS, but it foreshadowed the behavior of that group. It was something out of a psychological horror movie, and yet it was real.

Pearl was held hostage first, too. And then before the terrorists killed him he was forced to say things such as, “I am a Jew.” That was very very important to the terrorists, although the US seemed to be their main target for the moment.

Here’s an interesting fact that I never knew before, about Daniel Pearl’s mother, which is that she was an Iraqi Jew [born in Baghdad] who fled that country in the 1940s because of persecution and violence …

During the video, Pearl was made to say at the outset:

“My name is Daniel Pearl. I’m a Jewish-American from Encino, California, USA. I come from, uh, on my father’s side the family is Zionist. My father’s Jewish, my mother’s Jewish, I’m Jewish. My family follows Judaism. We’ve made numerous family visits to Israel.”

Jewish, Jewish, Jewish; Israel, Israel, Israel. That was no mere detail to Pearl’s killers. It’s not that they won’t kill non-Jews; they certainly will, and with relish. But it is Jews they wish to eliminate from the earth first.

I go on to add that the who killed Pearl want killing Jews to be a worldwide effort.

Now we learn, however, that as a result of India’s retaliation against Pakistani terrorists who murdered civilian tourists in Kashmir, the killer of Daniel Pearl has been, as they say, neutralized. Here’s the story:

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), India’s governing party, said that the Indian army killed Pakistani terrorist Abdul Rauf Azhar in “Operation Sindhoor.”

A group of Islamist terrorists, including Azhar, kidnapped and murdered Pearl in 2002. The terrorist was affiliated with al-Qaeda and Jaish-e-Mohammed, an Islamist terror group that aims to separate Kashmir from India and fully incorporate it into Pakistan. …

In the BJP announcement, the party said that Azhar was involved in a number of terror activities, including the 1999 hijacking of an Indian Airlines flight, the 2016 Pathankot Air Force base attack, and a 2001 terror attack on the Indian parliament.

Azhar’s involvement in the 1999 hijacking freed Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British-born al-Qaeda member who formerly served in Pakistan’s intelligence agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

Azhar wasn’t targeted because he killed Pearl. He was targeted because of his terrorism against India. But as you can see, it’s all connected. And I wonder whether India got some help from Israeli intelligence.

I would add the old saying “The wheels of justice grind slow,” but it doesn’t seem like “justice” when this person and his colleagues have been walking the earth for over 20 years since the beheading, and have recently managed to kill 26 innocent people more.

NOTE: See also this article in the India Times.

Papal surprise

The New Neo Posted on by

The surprise? The newly-elected pope is an American from Chicago. I don’t think that was on the radar screen of any predictions I ever read or heard.

His name is Robert Prevost, to be known as Pope Leo XIV. It doesn’t sound to me as though he’s a conservative; sounds somewhat in the mold of his predecessor, and he even has a South American angle because he was a missionary in Peru for many years and later became a citizen of that country, and only recently a cardinal.

More here:

President Trump sent his well wishes to the new American Pope, Robert Prevost — even though the new pontiff has been critical of the president, his administration and his treatment of migrants.

Prevost, who has taken the name Pope Leo XIV, has shared several highly critical posts about Trump and his immigration policies on X.

One scathing post Prevost retweeted read: “There is nothing remotely Christian, American, or morally defensible about a policy that takes children away from their parents and warehouses them in cages. This is being carried out in our name and the shame is on us all.”

The MSM seems to be his main source on that issue. And is he the first pope with a history of tweeting prior to his election to the post? I think maybe.

Here’s his Vance reference:

The new pope also previously shared an op-ed from the National Catholic Reporter titled: “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others,” following comments the vice president made on Fox News in February.

During the interview, Vance said, “There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.”

I’m going to assume the Pope-to-be knows a great deal more about Christian concepts than I do, but strangely enough I’ve written something related to that very topic, which you can find here.

AI taking over education?

The New Neo Posted on by

This is a problem – a big problem:

Some teachers have responded by having many in-class essays, with electronics banned. I wish them well.

I see the AI phenomenon as the next step – albeit a huge one – in the dumbing-down of education that’s been going on for many many decades. My ex-husband was a university professor in the late 1970’s to the mid 1980’s, and it was evident even then that many many university students couldn’t write. That trend accelerated, but now with AI they mostly don’t even have to try. Calculators have made it so that most don’t seem to know basic math or even arithmetic. General knowledge – especially of history – has fallen by the wayside. If you don’t have a background of knowledge, what on earth could you write knowledgeably about?