Incredibly sad: the Texas flood victims

The New Neo Posted on by

We are getting more information on the victims of the Texas flash flood. It’s almost indescribably sad to see their photos and read their stories, including those of so many young girls. Many of the victims at the camp were around eight years old, which leads me to believe that particular cabin was hardest hit. There are also some sisters, including a pair of twins.

See this as well as this. So so sad. And now the governor of Texas is saying that at least 160 people remain missing.

And yet the left is trying to make political hay of such a tragedy. No surprise there; Katrina was the template.

The tragedy stirs up the age-old question of why bad things happen to good people. There are a number of choices. The first is that God exists but is not omnipotent. The second is that God exists but does not micromanage the world and create constant miracles; floods are the consequence of natural forces in nature. The third is to be an atheist. The fourth is the response of the Book of Job, which if I understand it correctly says that God exists but we cannot possibly understand His ways and should trust Him.

RIP.

The imperial judiciary strikes again

The New Neo Posted on by

A Massachusetts district judge has stopped Congress’ defunding of Planned Parenthood, at least for the next two weeks:

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani placed a temporary restraining order on the provision of President Donald Trump’s bill that defunds Planned Parenthood.

It expires in 14 days.

The abortion mill sued the Trump administration because the “big, beautiful bill” banned it from receiving Medicaid payments.

The organization claimed Trump’s administration targeted it “in order to punish them for lawful activity, namely advocating for and providing legal abortion access wholly outside the Medicaid program and without using any federal funds.”

How can the judge do that, in light of the recent SCOTUS limits on nationwide injunctions by district courts? I’m scratching my head on that, but perhaps because it’s not technically an injunction but instead a restraining order, which has basically the same effect? And in addition, this was a piece of duly-passed Congressional legislation, not a mere executive order.

So, on what basis did Judge Talwani make the decision? I searched around, looking at commentary that didn’t explain that, and finally I went to the judge’s order itself. No reason whatsoever is given. I guess Judge Talwani felt she didn’t have to do so.

As you might expect, Judge Talwani has the usual liberal/left bona fides. Radcliffe undergrad, Berkeley law school, Obama appointee. No doubt a heroine to many, but not to me.

Why do people care about the Jewish vote?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s commenter “Niketas Choniates” on the recent thread about the Jews of NYC not voting for Mamdani:

Probably this is because it’s a primary and only a small percentage of people voted at all.

If anyone is still paying attention at the time, we will learn the true answer after the election for mayor, presuming that someone bothers to poll NYC Jews to find out how they voted.

The votes of Jews, however, except in a few cities, are electorally negligible, there are not many of them to begin with and overwhelmingly concentrated in deep-blue cities. Chasing their votes seems to be to be outdated thinking, as there are other minority blocs that are larger and in places that matter more.

Pew estimated in 2020 about 6 million Jews in the US, 1.5 million of whom say they are not religious. They say a lot more than that of course because of the “who counts” issue.

This website has a different number but breaks down by metro area. New York, Los Angeles, and Miami account for just under half of the total. DC, Philadephia, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, and Detroit account for another quarter, which leaves something like 2 million more scattered across the country.

Jews in America are comparable in size to Chinese Americans and Indian Americans, each at about 5.5 million. It seems hardly anyone spends as much time talking about what Chinese and Indian Americans are going to think, as they spend talking about what Jews are going to think. Especially with Indians I think this a huge mistake, considering where Indians tend to concentrate in the economy. There are increasingly more Indians in C suites and in national office.

Of course Mexican Americans and Black Americans represent far larger shares of the population, each near 12% of the total population. There’s also a lot of outdated thinking on who Mexican Americans actually are and what is likely to appeal to them, but I bet some party is spending bezillions to try to figure it out, either now or very soon. It would be effort much better spent than worrying about if American Jews want to vote for socialist Democrats or not.

Good points. And yet people do seem to care more about how Jews vote for several reasons. One is Jew-hatred by those who like to blame them. As I said in my post, I often see comments on the right that say something like, “I’ll start caring about Jew-hating when the Jews stop voting for Democrats.” It’s the same with Israel – much of the world cares disproportionately about Israel because a great deal of the world hates Jews.

But it’s certainly not just that. Those who love and/or admire Jews care too, of course – but the point is that feelings about Jews are often hyper-intense, both positive or negative.

In addition, the post I wrote about Jews and Mamdani was about the NYC primary, a city where Jews are a very important voting bloc, about 11% or 12% according to most sites. That’s not as large as the city’s black or Hispanic population, but it’s still a large and influential group.

They are also an important voting bloc in the swing state of Pennsylvania. Also in Florida, which is not a swing state, and where Jews vote more for the GOP than in a state such as NY; see this about the 2024 election:

The AP/Fox News Voter Analysis Exit Poll has updated some of its numbers since yesterday, showing even better results than we quoted in the graphic above:

In Arizona, Trump won 38% of the Jewish vote.

In Nevada, he won 42% of the Jewish vote.

In Florida, he won 44% of the Jewish vote.

In New York he won 46% of the Jewish vote.

In Pennsylvania, where the Honan Group did a specific, state-wide exit poll, President Trump won 41% of the Jewish vote.

*Many polls (including CNN) don’t have a large enough sample of Jewish voters to be reliable. The AP/Fox News Voter Analysis Exit Poll is a national poll with a much larger sample size, making it possible to extrapolate data about some specific states.

It’s challenging to get figures for Jews, because of the sampling problem, but those figures for GOP votes among Jews in 2024 are probably significantly higher than most people imagine.

There’s another thing about Jewish voters: they tend to have high turnout.

And lastly, much of the emphasis on the Jewish vote, or appealing to the Jewish vote, is actually an appeal to Jewish donors.

Iran soldiers go over to the Mossad?

The New Neo Posted on by

Can this be true?:

A social media account, reportedly belonging to Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, has claimed it has been contacted by hundreds of soldiers and officers who wish to abandon Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

A Persian-language X/Twitter handle, which styles itself as an official Mossad account, wrote Thursday that it has been overwhelmed by the response it received from members of the IRGC, the Iranian regime’s military arm, and urged willing defectors to be patient and wait to be contacted by the intelligence agency.

“We expected it, but not to this extent!” the Mossad Farsi posted. “Hundreds of active IRGC soldiers and officers, fed up with this regime, are reaching out to us.”

I have no idea whether that’s true.

I do know that a turning point for any regime is when its own security forces defect and/or no longer will enforce the regime’s wishes. In the case of Iran, it may be that the IRGC no longer sees this regime as the strong horse.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) We already knew this, but there is more evidence coming out about the sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas and other Gazans on October 7, and later on directed at the hostages during their captivity. Many groups on the left seem not to care:

The research addresses criticism of inadequate responses from international organizations such as UN Women (full name the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women) following reports of sexual violence by the Sunday Times and other outlets.

The project also deals with questions raised by false claims from first responders and arguments that Hamas, as an Islamic organization, would not commit rape—despite examples from Islamic State (ISIS) in the Middle East and Boko Haram in West Africa.

Some critics argued that the sexual violence issue had been “weaponized” by the Israeli government to justify its actions in Gaza.

(2) Good news from Wisconsin:

On June 25, the left-leaning Wisconsin Supreme Court refused to hear two lawsuits brought by Democrats that challenged the state’s congressional district boundaries.

Wisconsin has eight Congressional districts. Republicans represent six of them.

The Democrats are desperate to flip the seats in 2026.

We are so used to judges on the left deciding cases based on politics that this decision is surprising.

(3) Roger L. Simon and Trump on Musk:

Elon Musk is an extraordinary entrepreneur having pioneered several companies of great originality with considerable influence on the future. Unfortunately, the obvious skills he had honed or was born with to do these things do not translate to politics where some degree of compromise comes with the territory. That he has made an ass of himself with his bravado is the least of it. It’s hard to see what he contributes to national discussion at this point. X, that he once laudably opened to free speech, has morphed into a home for the marshmallow-brained.

Did Donald Trump encourage this? A little. But Elon now behaves like the most pathetic of rejected sons. The America Party is an example of his flailing. I don’t know if it’s in the betting market yet but I would guess this party has somewhere around three weeks before its founder moves on to better things—like next year’s Tesla. He could be, already almost is, our Edison. Why is he wasting time on politics?

President Trump, who has a way of getting to the essence of a problem, responded this way when asked about Musk’s new political party: “It’s ridiculous.”

I hope that’s true, because Musk’s third party has at least the potential of helping Democrats take control of the House.

(4) Actions have consequences:

[Dr. Christina] Propst is a pediatrician responsible for the health of our smallest and some of our most vulnerable citizens. Presumably, she pledged an oath to do no harm at some point before her 25-year career began, but deep down, she feels that politics trump that (pun not intended). Over the weekend, she proved that she’s nothing more than a vile, disgusting excuse for a human being.

In a social media post that has since been deleted, Propst wrote (along with a prayer emoji):

May all visitors, children, non-MAGA voters and pets be safe and dry.

Kerr County MAGA voted to gut FEMA.

They deny climate change.

May they get what they voted for.

Bless their hearts.

While she may have deleted the post, screenshots last forever, and her statements went viral over the last 24 hours or so.

Initially, her employer, Blue Fish Pediatrics, said she’d been placed on administrative leave, but a new announcement on its website says she has now been fired …

In addition to the bile expressed in her tweet, did she not realize there might be blowback?

(5) Apparently the reason the NY Times published a report about Mamdani’s lying about his race on his Columbia application was that Christopher Rufo was going to scoop them. That makes more sense than any other explanation I was able to come up with. The Times is not in the habit of reporting on things that can hurt the left.

On appetite

The New Neo Posted on by

This article was linked at Althouse, and that’s how I came across it. It contains a curious narrative about what happened to one woman when she took weight loss drugs. The woman apparently lost not just weight but also her appetite for food, and stopped cooking for her family – which included adult children who got upset about her retiring from cooking the family meals.

Much of the commentary there focused on her family dynamics. But although somewhat interesting, that’s not what drew my attention. Her lose of appetite did:

It’s very hard to cook for people when you have absolutely no appetite. Every time I look in the fridge, I can’t see a single thing I want to eat. I go to the supermarket, the shops and the farmers’ market, and whereas in the past I was so inspired — buying forest mushrooms and fruit just picked from the trees — I now can’t think of a single thing I want to buy.

I’ll pick up delicious ripe apples and think, hmm … all those lovely fresh fish waiting to be grilled with lemon and butter and salt and pepper? Not one bit of me wants to eat it. I know we need to have food in the fridge but even red pepper hummus, a former favourite, leaves me feeling slightly queasy.

Then, given that I have no appetite, I don’t find cooking interesting any more. Food has become completely dull and I have begun to wonder why I’d liked it in the first place.

I don’t think this happens to everyone who takes these drugs. But for whatever numbers are affected in this way, it doesn’t sound as though it can possibly be a good thing. Oh, I understand that for those who are morbidly obese and whose lives are in danger because they do almost nothing but eat and are completely dominated by food craving, loss of appetite might come as a great good. But for those interested in more moderate weight loss – and from the photos at the article, this woman was not especially heavy before taking the drug – it seems like a nightmare to me.

I’m one of those people always trying to lose ten or fifteen pounds. But I also enjoy food, and I enjoy enjoying food. I’ve lost my appetite during a few highly stressful times in my life, and it was awful. I would stare at a plate of good food, wondering how I could muster the will to force a few bites down my gullet, and it was difficult and profoundly depressing. I wouldn’t want to lose one of the greatest pleasures in life: the desire to eat and the access to all the wonderful food we can get in this time and place. We are so fortunate to have so much abundance.

I don’t believe we should wage war on natural appetites. Yes, moderation can be difficult, but appetites contribute in no small measure to the energy that gives us pleasure and makes life worth living.

NOTE: More about weight loss drugs can be found here:

They work by mimicking the hormone glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) in slowing down stomach emptying, suppressing hunger and leaving you feeling full so that any urge to overeat is curbed. As calorie intake nosedives, so surplus pounds melt away with unprecedented speed. …

A team of US and UK researchers revealed in the Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism journal that up to one third of weight lost on GLP-1-based drugs is not body fat but other tissue, including muscle and bone. In addition a study of obese people in the New England Journal of Medicine suggested that an average of 15 lb of lean tissue as well as 23 lb of fat were lost during a 68-week trial.

That seems alarming, as well.

The Jews of New York didn’t vote for Mamdani

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the observations I often see from commenters on the right – not so much here, but on other blogs and articles – goes something like this: “I’ll care about anti-Semitism when the Jews stop voting for Democrats.” And while it’s true that until now the majority of Jewish voters have indeed voted for Democrats ever since FDR, it’s by no means as monolithic as many people seem to think.

I’ve tackled that topic before – please see this post as well as this one. Both have quite a few statistics, but the gist of it is that very religious Jews overwhelmingly vote Republican, and other Jews mostly live in blue cities and vote as most other residents of those cities vote, about a third Republican to two-thirds Democrat, and trending more to the Democrat side as time goes on.

And the Jews of Israel have been voting for governments on the right for quite some time now.

In Brooklyn over half of Jews are Orthodox; I’ve gleaned from previous surveys (some cited in my previous posts on the subject) that the vast majority of those people vote for Republicans, and many of the rest vote for more moderate Democrats. The Republicans would not be affecting the Mamdani vote because they ordinarily wouldn’t be voting in a Democratic primary.

Commenter “Jimmy” offered some statistics on the Jewish vote in the NYC primary, among Jewish Democrats who participated:

In fact, the heavily Jewish parts of Brooklyn voted overwhelmingly for Cuomo. From the NYT breakdown:

Midwood 72-20
East Flatbush 62-25
Borough Park 80-11

The vote totals in those areas were not large, perhaps because, as neo says, many are not Democrats, but there was a big push among religious and pro-Israel Jews to register as Democrats to vote in the primary. Cuomo even carried the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

There’s also this from the Jerusalem Post:

Saban is a District Leader in New York State’s 45th Assembly District. “This was a massive wake-up call for the Jewish community. Your vote counts, and you can’t sit this out,” Saban told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday, in the morning hours after the election, emphasizing the need for Jewish New Yorkers to become more politically engaged. He pointed out the relatively low voter turnout among Jews, with only a small percentage of the community casting ballots in the election. “There are 1.2 or 1.3 million Jews in New York, and probably half of them, if not less, voted in this election. That’s a huge issue.”

Other Jewish New Yorkers believe that many voters did not understand the “ranking” voting system used in the election.

Saban believes Mamdani’s success is rooted in what he perceives as a political miscalculation within the Jewish community. “The Jewish community entrusted Andrew Cuomo with defeating an anti-Semite, and we got screwed,” he stated. “This is what happens when you hide candidates from the voters instead of actively campaigning and fighting for every vote.”

It sounds as though the polls showing Cuomo in the lead – right up until very shortly before the election – lulled Jewish New Yorkers into a false sense of security. Perhaps they will be galvanized into being much more active in the general election.

I’ve seen quite a few statements that indicate that “many” Jews voted for Mamdani. No doubt “many” did – after all, estimates of the Jewish population (including numerous ethnic Jews who are not religious) of NYC range from about one million to about 1.3 million. “Many” can be found in such a large group who would vote for just about anything. But even the majority of New York’s Jewish Democrats did not vote for Mamdani, as the statistics quoted by “Jimmy” from the Times indicate – not even close.

I’ve seen zero evidence that Jews voted for Mamdani in any but small percentages. The estimate I’ve seen is that he got 20% of the vote of Jewish Democrats (see this, for example, but I’ve seen the same figure in many places). So NY Jews rejected him, even Democrats. And yet it seems the perception that Jews voted for him in droves persists.

Trump’s “mass amnesty” for illegal aliens: what is it?

The New Neo Posted on by

I have never thought that Trump and ICE would round up all the illegal aliens in the US and send them packing. My sense has been that they would concentrate on those who have violated other laws as well, and perhaps after that it would be those who came in more recently during the latter years of the Biden administration. The optics of deporting abuelas who’ve been here for twenty years just didn’t seem wise or even possible in the practical sense.

So this is quite okay with me, although many of you may be angry about it:

President Trump wants to deport illegal immigrants, but, paradoxically, he doesn’t want certain industries to lose illegal immigrant labor. As a result, DHS recently decided it would not conduct worksite investigations or operations on the agriculture, restaurant, and hotel industries.

The new policy is a form of “administrative amnesty” for illegal workers in those industries. As with any amnesty, the recipients are allowed to remain in the U.S. for now.

The author estimates this would cover about two million people. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the totals. Plus, note the words “for now.” In addition, it applies to workplace raids; these people are not protected in other contexts. Also, it is not a “path to citizenship”; it’s just relief from ICE raids at the businesses.

The author of the linked article thinks it’s a terrible idea, and that as a result people will stop self-deporting. I don’t agree, although no doubt some number will. But I think it will affect only those who want to work in these industries, and that even those people (in addition to others) know that the writing is on the wall in terms of benefits (such as Medicaid) under this administration. It’s not an illegal-alien-friendly federal government anymore. The policy also would take away some of the sting and fear-mongering of the Democrats’ rhetoric about the cruelty of the Trump policies. And it’s clear that it’s not a permanent amnesty, either.

Trump is – among other things – a practical person. I see this as a practical move. Your mileage may differ.

Deadly Texas floods

The New Neo Posted on by

Terrible news from Texas:

• Desperate search: Authorities say more than 25 girls are still unaccounted for at Camp Mystic in Kerr County, Texas, where the Guadalupe River rose more than 20 feet in less than two hours during torrential rains that triggered flash flooding in parts of the state yesterday.

• Death toll rises: At least 27 people, including nine children, have died in the flooding, according to local officials. A 9-year-old camper is among the victims, her mother told CNN.

• Massive effort: Rescue and recovery operations continue today after first responders worked through the night, with authorities saying more than 850 people have been brought to safety. The Trump administration is sending resources to help.

• One-in-100-years intensity: Parts of central Texas saw a month’s worth of rain in just a few hours, prompting multiple flash flood emergencies. Hunt, a town near Kerrville, received about 6.5 inches in just three hours early Friday, which is considered a one-in-100-years rainfall event for the area.

The death toll will undoubtedly rise, and some of the dead will be children – perhaps many of the dead. If the girls at the camp remain unaccounted for at this point, it is sadly probable that many of the missing are dead. The force of a flash flood can be tremendous, and some of the deaths come from being hit by debris in the water. This is a very tragic event.

RIP.