The COVID vaccine and cancer treatment

The New Neo Posted on by

Surprise! The COVID vaccine may enhance the effectiveness of certain cancer treatments; see this:

Cancer patients who received mRNA COVID vaccines within 100 days of starting immunotherapy were twice as likely to be alive three years after treatment as those who never received a vaccine

These findings have prompted a randomized Phase III trial to determine if mRNA COVID vaccines should be part of the standard of care for this type of therapy

If validated, findings could significantly increase the number of patients who benefit from immunotherapy.

There are plenty of people who cite the vaccine as having an enormous number of bad effects. I’ve written countless posts on this blog refuting the evidence against the research they cite to supposedly prove this. The exception is myocarditis – which I’ve also discussed at some length, and is a danger which has been known for a long time for young men who receive the shot. Every study I’ve found of other serious effects of the vaccine either does not say what anti-COVID-vaxxers purport it says, or has a research design so poor as to make it meaningless. I’m not going to go over this territory again right now, but it’s all on the blog, some of it here but much of it in the comments.

I’ve never advocated the vaccine for children or healthy young people, however. Nor have I ever felt it should be required. Each person should make his or her own decision about it, and I am fine with a decision either way.

Hunting Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

They won’t give up until they kill him, or die trying.

This is very disturbing:

The US Secret Service is investigating what could be a sniper’s nest or a hunting stand near an area where President Trump’s Air Force One has recently been kept at Palm Beach International Airport, according to sources.

The suspicious stand, found Thursday, is in a tree and within the line of sight of the section of the airport where Trump exits the presidential jet, and was described to The Post by law enforcement sources as an odd collection of pipes. …

Authorities do not know yet whether it is a hunting stand or merely junk in a tree — or has a more nefarious purpose, sources said.

The area could be used by hunters who go after invasive green iguanas, the sources added.

Let’s hope the latter.

But it doesn’t stop so many people from openly wishing him dead.

NOTE: When I was at the article I linked in the above post, I saw a link to an article about a Trump-menacing interview with Colombia’s president. Not noticing the spelling of the word “Colombia,” I assumed it referred to the president of the NY college. That seemed highly plausible to me. Of course, that’s spelled “Columbia.” This threat came from the president of the South American country:

“The easiest way [to change Trump] may be through Trump himself,” Petro [president of Colombia] added. “If not — get rid of Trump,” he continued, snapping his fingers dramatically.

Petro later denied he’d been threatening Trump; he was just saying the American people should get rid of him. He didn’t say how, of course; there’s no election in the future for Trump. The American people can’t impeach and convict him; that’s for Congress to do and it’s not going to be happening (the conviction part, that is; the impeachment part will definitely happen if the Democrats get control of the House. They will be going for the Trump-impeachment hat trick, but without an enormous majority in the Senate it won’t matter any more than the previous ones did, and probably even less.)

What Bolton is alleged to have done

The New Neo Posted on by

Query of the day: is it a revenge prosecution when the person indicted really does seem to be guilty of something that’s not utterly minor and meaningless?

For extra credit: If any prosecution of someone who is or was your enemy is automatically defined as revenge lawfare and prohibited, then wouldn’t these people be getting off scot-free for their previous abuse of power? Wouldn’t it be a get-out-of-jail-free card to have been the enemy of or the persecutor/prosecutor of a person who later comes to power? Wouldn’t it mean there would be no consequences for bad actors who try to engineer a lawfare coup on someone they consider an enemy, or break the law (such as by leaking classified information), because after that it’s hands-off those people if the power balance changes and goes against them?

Let’s just say that if even half of this is true, the indictment of Bolton really doesn’t seem to me to be a revenge prosecution. Let’s see:

John Bolton launched a plan to document and transmit classified information before he even started his job as President Trump’s national security advisor, according to the federal indictment against him. …

Two weeks later, he made his first transmission using the encrypted messaging app to two people, a 25-page document “which described information” that Bolton learned in his first few days on the job, the indictment says. The indictment doesn’t identify those people, but the New York Times reports they were his wife and daughter.

For the next 17 months, Bolton regularly sent “diary-like” entries to them about what he saw and heard that included classified information.

So it was a plan from the very start to write a memoir. In connection with that, he sent highly classified information to his family, often through insecure and vulnerable methods. He also took some of this information home with him. As far as I know, he had no power to declassify these things, unlike a president.

More:

Some examples of that classified information, which was also found in his home:

Revelations of a “liaison partner sharing sensitive information with the U.S. intelligence Community

A foreign adversary’s plans for a missile launch and the sources and methods used to gain the intelligence.

Covert action planned by the U.S. and a covert action that was conducted by the U.S. and another country.

A foreign country’s intelligence describing an adversary’s planned attack on a facility.

On advice of counsel, he didn’t use this information in his book. But using it in his book isn’t what he’s been charged with.

You can also find Bolton opining on the classified information violations of others in a video at this link. I can’t seem to find a way to embed it, so you’ll have to watch it there. Needless to say, he thinks their violations are very serious.

Much needed rain

The New Neo Posted on by

It rained in New England today. Hard.

That’s not ordinarily news. But this summer there was a widespread drought in this area, which was unusual but made for a rather pleasant time in terms of planning outdoor activities.

But it also meant that rivers have been low, and many of the leaves this fall shriveled up prematurely, turned brown, and dropped rather than looking beautiful. It seemed to me that fall would be a total bust, but it wasn’t.

For example, I took this photo on Saturday:

Not too shabby, eh?

I don’t see any reduction in TDS (plus, MSNBC rebrands itself)

The New Neo Posted on by

Miranda Devine sees a reduction, though:

But as Trump chalks up wins against the odds, and as more people become aware of the Hillary-Obama origins of Russiagate and all the other attempts to sabotage his first term, bankrupt and jail him, character-assassinate him and then really kill him, irrational Trump hatred seems to be dissipating.

Liberal media outfits around the world have been doling out grudging praise to the president for his Middle East peace efforts.

Chris Cuomo and C-Span, to their own surprise, have been fielding calls from Democrats applauding Trump — not just for the Gaza deal but for his tough stance on immigration and the fact their 401(k)s haven’t collapsed like they feared. …

One sign was Brandi Kruse, a social media “citizen journalist” invited to the recent Antifa roundtable at the White House, who described herself as a recovered TDS sufferer.

Covering left-wing riots in Seattle the past five years had flipped her.

I see zero evidence of this change among people I know. A mind is not only a difficult thing to change, but it’s even more difficult on highly emotional issues such as TDS. What’s the different between someone who merely disagrees with Trump’s policies and someone who hates his guts and even might wish him dead, although not prepared to personally assassinate him? I submit that it’s the person’s degree of emotional involvement in politics.

Also, being an MSNBC watcher helps to foster the most intense TDS. By the way, did you hear that MSNBC is re-branding? They probably paid a pretty penny for this:

Later this year, MSNBC will take on a new name: My Source News Opinion World (MS NOW).

This name further underscores our mission: to serve as your destination for breaking news and thoughtful analysis and remain the home for the perspectives that you’ve relied on for nearly 30 years.

“MS NOW”? That conjures up the idea of promoting multiple sclerosis, or perhaps pushing the old feminist rag MS – and yes, that ancient periodical is still being published.

The present-day nihilists of Antifa and the nihilists of a half-century ago

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “huxley” draws our attention to an interview with a former Antifa member. Please see this comment and the following two: this and this. The link to the interview is here.

I haven’t watched it, but huxley’s comments give a summary of what is said. I’m not surprised by the content; it conforms with my previous statements that nihilism explains a lot of the impulse behind Antifa. In fact, I wrote a post about that just about a month ago, here.

I’ll add a few thoughts. I believe that there’s always a certain percentage of the population that trends toward sociopathy, but a society can nudge them along in that path or discourage them. Our current society seems to breed a lot of aimlessness and anger, and young men are especially prone to that although women are hardly exempt.

There’s a lot of mockery going around right now about the “No Kings” demonstrations. The crowds seem to be skewed to the elderly, otherwise known as “smelly old hippies/Boomers” But I know a lot of you are, like me, Boomers, and as such you remember the 60s and early 70s. It was a frightening time as far as I was concerned. Riots, assassinations (including of police), enormous societal changes, wars, and even terrorism.

Some of that terrorism was international in nature, as well, and some of it had Israel as its target. To refresh your memory, the 1972 Olympics massacre happened in Munich. And the 1972 Lod Airport massacre (now Ben Gurion Airport) featured an international cast of terrorist characters [my emphasis]:

The Lod Airport massacre was a terrorist attack that occurred on 30 May 1972. Three members of the Japanese Red Army recruited by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine attacked Lod Airport … near Tel Aviv, killing 26 people and injuring 80 others. Two of the attackers were killed, while a third, K?z? Okamoto, was captured after being wounded.

The dead comprised 17 Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico, a Canadian citizen, and eight Israelis …

Because airport security was focused on the possibility of a Palestinian attack, the use of Japanese attackers took the guards by surprise. The attack has often been described as a suicide mission, but it has also been asserted that it was the outcome of an unpublicized larger operation that went awry. The three perpetrators — Kozo Okamoto, Tsuyoshi Okudaira, and Yasuyuki Yasuda — had been trained in Baalbek, Lebanon; the actual planning was handled by Wadie Haddad (a.k.a. Abu Hani), head of PFLP External Operations, with some input from Okamoto. In the immediate aftermath, Der Spiegel speculated that funding had been provided by some of the $5 million ransom paid by the West German government in exchange for the hostages of hijacked Lufthansa Flight 649 in February 1972.

There was no internet back then, of course. But although that didn’t stop them from coordinating things, it helped make it more difficult. Nowadays it’s much easier to organize and to use propaganda and social media to stir up the requisite anger and stoke both the nihilistic impulses and the sympathy for supposed “causes” that the perps know little to nothing about. It’s not as though those Japanese terrorists had any special beef with the Israelis. Their actual motives? I bet you can guess [emphasis mine]:

The Japanese public initially reacted with disbelief to initial reports that the perpetrators of the massacre were Japanese until a Japanese embassy official sent to the hospital confirmed that Okamoto was a Japanese national. Okamoto told the diplomat that he had nothing personal against the Israeli people, but that he had to do what he did because “It was my duty as a soldier of the revolution.”

The other two were dead, so they weren’t talking. But I strongly suspect their motives were the same.

Oh, and speaking of “the same”:

Okamoto was tried by an Israeli military tribunal and sentenced to life imprisonment in June 1972. Okamoto served only 13 years of his prison sentence. He was released in 1985 with more than 1,000 other prisoners in an exchange for captured Israeli soldiers. He settled in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. He was arrested in 1997 for passport forgery and visa violations, but in 2000 was granted political refugee status in Lebanon. He is still wanted by the Japanese government as of 2021. Four other JRA members arrested at the same time were extradited to Japan.

It is thought that Okamoto is still alive and living in Lebanon; if so, he’d be 77 years old, which makes him the quintessential Boomer. His older brother was a terrorist, too. A few more details about Okamoto:

The name in Okamoto’s forged passport was Daisuke Namba, Crown Prince Hirohito’s would be assassin. …

In his final statement [at his trial] Okamoto told the court: “When I was a child, I was told that when people died they became stars…We three Red Army soldiers wanted to become Orion when we died”.

During the incarceration, he requested to convert to Judaism and tried to circumcise himself with nail clippers. He stated that he was tortured during his imprisonment, being “forced to eat like a dog” and emerged from imprisonment emaciated.

And what of the Japanese Red Army? According to this Wiki entry, it disbanded in 2001, but its stated goal was as follows: “to overthrow the Japanese government and the monarchy, as well as to start a world revolution.”

This particular group was hardly the only instance of international terrorism. I’m just mentioning them because they are good examples of how long ago this international nihilist impulse was wreaking havoc.

The Trump administration has recently designated Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization:

Antifa is a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law. It uses illegal means to organize and execute a campaign of violence and terrorism nationwide to accomplish these goals. This campaign involves coordinated efforts to obstruct enforcement of Federal laws through armed standoffs with law enforcement, organized riots, violent assaults on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other law enforcement officers, and routine doxing of and other threats against political figures and activists. Antifa recruits, trains, and radicalizes young Americans to engage in this violence and suppression of political activity, then employs elaborate means and mechanisms to shield the identities of its operatives, conceal its funding sources and operations in an effort to frustrate law enforcement, and recruit additional members. Individuals associated with and acting on behalf of Antifa further coordinate with other organizations and entities for the purpose of spreading, fomenting, and advancing political violence and suppressing lawful political speech. This organized effort designed to achieve policy objectives by coercion and intimidation is domestic terrorism.

What is meant by “organization” has been disputed, but although Antifa doesn’t have a webpage with a president, VP, secretary, and treasurer, there is some emerging evidence to support Antifa’s organizational nature, particular in its funding; you can find some details at the link.

Mark Twain is said to have uttered the phrase “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.” Whether or not Twain actually said it, it seem quite true, and there’s a lot of rhyming going on these days. We Boomers are well-positioned to notice that.

NOTE: The Manson family were another good example of nihilism from that era. You may recall that, through the horrific murders they committed in 1969, they wanted to ignite a race war they called “Helter Skelter.” Basically, extremely violent nihilists, helped along by drugs.

No doubt you’d love to hear about my root canal

The New Neo Posted on by

A couple of weeks ago it was decided – after some sort of panoramic dental X-ray on a machine that played “Fur Elise” in beeping digital sounds – that I needed to have a root canal performed on an upper back molar.

“You need a root canal” is a phrase that no one wants to hear. I had it done on Tuesday, and it was an “interesting” experience.

For one thing, the initially rather chirpy and perky endodontist worked in utter silence. I prefer dentists who give some sort of running account – not constant chatter, but just general intermittent guidance as to what’s happening and how far along in the process I might be. This dentist, a woman who came highly recommended, maintained a strict policy of no talking. I had no problem observing the rules myself, since she’d placed some sort of large rubber boot in my mouth, one that made me feel very grateful that we have noses and nostrils.

The noxious tuneless muzak played on, the dentist drilled and scraped and picked at my tooth, and the whole thing seemed to go on for a longer time than I had expected. Perhaps an hour and forty-five minutes? I keep telling myself, “don’t be a wimp,” but my efforts to relax were about as effective as my Lamaze breathing had been during labor many a long year ago – which is to say, not very.

I also kept hearing her sigh. Why is she sighing? I wondered. At the end, she told me that it had been a very difficult process and I’d have to return in two weeks for more. Why so difficult? Apparently my beleaguered tooth had thrown up barriers, surrounding the nerve roots with some sort of extra bony layer that took forty minutes (and lots of strength) to drill through rather than five. Plus, one of the roots seemed to have gone into hiding.

Please wish me luck.

The ceasefire and hostage release are challenges for the left – but they’re up to it

The New Neo Posted on by

The ceasefire is what they screamed that they wanted, for so long. But what they wanted far far more was for Trump to fail – hopefully, with a large dose of humiliation. So now they’re either ignoring the ceasefire, pivoting to how it will fail, or giving Blinken and Biden credit for it.

It’s not the first time they’ve had to be creative.

Tariffs were going to sink us immediately. Maybe they still will – the jury remains out on that. But it must be hard for the left to wait patiently in eager anticipation of catastrophe.

Many district judges have been ruling the left’s way, but appeals haven’t been going all that well for them.

Their own lawfare against Trump and those close to him has made their subsequent outraged cries of “Trump is weaponizing the justice system!” ring hollow to anyone who remembers the last few years. Fortunately, leftists are able to do that mind trick Orwell wrote about so well, where O’Brien counseled Winston on how to forget what the party doesn’t want him to remember.

With all the assassination attempts against Trump, Scalise and GOP members of Congress, and SCOTUS justices, only one attempt worked – that of Charlie Kirk – and he’s become more well-known and his videos have gotten more popular.

No new stars on the horizon except Mamdani, who’s only winning because New York is so deeply blue and perhaps because he has two opponents rather than one. I don’t think he’d work on the national level; at least, I sincerely hope not. AOC has big ambitions, but I don’t think she’d work on the national level, either.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

NOTE: I haven’t yet talked to any of my Democrat friends about the hostage deal, and not one has mentioned it to me, either. Interesting,no?

The feminization of everything

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s been a lot of buzz about this article. An excerpt:

This cancellation was feminine, the essay argued, because all cancellations are feminine. Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field. That is the Great Feminization thesis, which the same author later elaborated upon at book length: Everything you think of as “wokeness” is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.

Not everything. Many cultures have some form of shunning and some institutions have some type of ostracizing process, and both men and women participate. But I think there’s little doubt that women – and the fact that women now form the majority in so many fields in which that previously wasn’t the case – are key in the process. In particular, women tend to initiate canceling for petty reasons or idiosyncratic personal reasons. Yes, “mean girls” are a thing, and so are mean women.

Initially, when women were a minority in so many professions, women played by men’s rules. But, helped greatly by affirmative action and DEA, once they’ve become majorities or close to majorities the rules change more to women’s rules. I’m a women (I”m even a heterosexual woman, of all things) but I’ve noticed the problem with women’s workplaces for a long time and I’ve had my own difficulties in some of those environments; I’ve been targeted, and my sense is that it’s because of my unwillingness to play by those women’s rules.

I say I noticed the problem in workplaces. But actually, the first time I noticed the problem was in an all-female summer camp. When I was about ten years old and in a cabin with other girls for two entire months, they tried to pick on me. I had grown up in a harsher, more male environment than they, and so I fought back and they left me alone after that. But there was a more gentle soul among my cabinmates who became their natural target. Her persecution by them was an awful thing to watch, and I spent as much time as I possibly could elsewhere. I even tried to coach her in defying them. But she never could summon up the requisite defiance – she cared too much – and so finally I blew the whistle on them and told the higher-ups.

So I suppose I’ve long thought it’s obvious that female-dominated professions will have the problems inherent in female groups. It’s not that male groups don’t have problems – they certainly do – but they’re different problems.

In addition, it’s not just that we now have so many female-dominated groups, it’s that the females in them so often ascribe to leftism and its propensity to get rid of opposing points of view.

The essay goes on to track the process by which different professions became female-dominant. Law school, for example, something to which I can attest. When I entered law school my class was seven percent female, but within just a few years entering classes were nearly 50/50.

From the essay:

The field that frightens me most is the law. All of us depend on a functioning legal system, and, to be blunt, the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female. The rule of law is not just about writing rules down. It means following them even when they yield an outcome that tugs at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic.

It’s not so much women who are valuing feelings over rules – it’s leftist women. I think that’s quite clear if you look at judges. I’m not sure which is more important – the “women” part or the “leftist” part. I suspect they’re intertwined, as women are more likely than men to vote on the left these days. But I really don’t see any difference in the decisions of leftist female judges and leftist male judges.

NOTE: The author begins with a discussion of how Larry Summers lost his position as Harvard president back in 2005. I wrote on that at the time it happened, in this post.

On a personal note – you know why I originally put up a picture of myself on the blog? Because when I was first blogging and didn’t have a photo on the website, everyone assumed I was a man.