Update on Gerard’s book

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m getting closer and closer to the time when I’ll be able to announce that the book is for sale. Yeah, I know, you’ve heard it all before. But it’s really true. All the editing is done. I’ve gotten the blurbs from a few other writers. I have a book cover design.

Lately, though, it’s been taking more time than I thought it would to create a website for selling the book. It’s a different skill from creating a blog, something I’ve done several times before. I thought “piece of cake,” but instead it’s been a rather tough bit of beef jerky. But I’m getting close to finished even with that. The stumbling block at the moment is setting up Woo Commerce for the sales, which is far more complex than I ever imagined.

Then it will be time or me to order a sample copy printed, and if that works out well I’ll have them do a print run. And then – voila! – I’ll announce on this blog and Gerard’s that the book is ready for sale.

In addition, I plan to ask some other websites to mention that the book’s for sale. I also have a list of email addresses of people who donated to Gerard after the fire, and I plan to email them with the announcement and instructions for ordering the book.

I don’t know the exact amount of time all this will take, and I’ve been wrong when estimating the time frame before. But my hope and expectation is that the book will be out by May.

Birx as the COVID villain

The New Neo Posted on by

This is an interesting documentary that makes the point that it was Dr. Deborah Birx rather than Fauci who set a great many of the COVID policies that hurt the nation. It also portrays Trump as a victim of Birx, helpless to effectively send a counter-message.

I see it as somewhat different: Birx was instrumental in the lockdown chain reaction, but so were many other players including Fauci and in particular many state governors (especially in blue states). Social media and the press were a big part of it, too, censoring and often ridiculing those who saw it differently. And although Trump tried to counter that, it was a relatively weak effort and not very successful – although granted, he wasn’t a health expert and was relying on those who supposedly were.

Dr. Scott Atlas was a dissenting voice of reason; I wrote about him in this post from December of 2021. Almost from the start, I was able to see that COVID fatalities were being over-hyped and were very much skewed to the elderly and already-ill, and that lockdowns longer than the first couple of weeks were dangerously counterproductive (I wrote about that, too, for example in this post from October of 2020). And even as early as February of 2020, when the best data we had were from the cruise ship Diamond Princess, I was able to write this post that made it clear the danger from COVID was not that severe.

I’m not saying I wrote these things because I’m so brilliant. I wrote them because they were obvious to anyone with a simple understanding of math. And yet, so many people acted on very different premises and under very different instructions. I’m putting this video up because I believe that Birx had an important role in all of that destructiveness, and I think it’s worth remembering:

The World Central Kitchen deaths in Gaza: the standard set for Israel

The New Neo Posted on by

This was tragic news:

Seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen were killed in an Israeli airstrike …

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed that the Israeli military was responsible for the unintended “tragic” strike and vowed to investigate. …

“It was a mistake that followed a misidentification – at night during a war in very complex conditions. It shouldn’t have happened,” he said, adding that a “thorough investigation” would be completed in the “coming days” by an independent body. …

The WCK said the convoy included armored cars clearly marked with the WCK logo and was in a de-conflicted zone. The organization said it also coordinated its route with the Israel Defense Forces.

It’s also a tragedy on which Israel’s numerous enemies will attempt to capitalize, although it is exactly the sort of tragic mistake that inevitably happens in wartime. But, unlike other countries, Israel is not allowed mistakes (it’s not even allowed to defend itself without mistakes, either).

And Isael’s enemies have also portrayed this strike as purposeful targeting. This tragic mistake and these very sad deaths have been a golden opportunity for Israel’s enemies to continue to spread the pernicious lie that Israel is evil and genocidal.

That lie is not just pernicious; it is Orwellian in its reversal of the truth. No country on earth has ever waged war as carefully as Israel in its ongoing attempts to spare civilians and certainly to spare aid workers. Israel’s civilian-to-combatant kill ratio is among the best in the world for urban warfare, and the IDF sustains extra casualties in its own ranks in order to keep it that way:

It is no accident that this reduced civilian death toll has been “somewhat overlooked” by the media and by Israel’s critics, including previously by The New York Times itself. Israel is subject to a discernible double standard when it comes to covering its military actions.

… Israel’s military actions produced far fewer deaths and a far lower ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths than in any comparable urban warfare. This is especially significant considering the reality that Hamas deliberately increases civilian deaths by using women and children as human shields and by hiding its military personnel and equipment among civilians. The current ratio of civilian-to-combatant is well below two-to-one, which compares extremely favorably with ratios achieved by other Western democracies in urban warfare.

None of this matters to most of the world or to most of the press, and I submit that even if the ratio were to be markedly reduced by Israel it still would not matter to most of the world or to most of the press.

I did some research on the World Central Kitchen, a group I’d never heard of before this. The organization sounds as though it does very good work around the world. Its main focus is on helping people visited by natural disasters – earthquakes, floods, fires, and hurricanes, for the most part. If you look at the list of the group’s previous operations at that link, you’ll see that the WCK served in Haiti after the earthquake, in Houston after Hurricane Harvey, in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, in California after the Thomas Fire, in Hawaii after the Puna eruption, and in many other similar situations after natural disasters. It also has provided food in the US to the poor in several places.

But what of war? I expected to find a long list of places where the group has provided food during armed conflicts, as well. But I only found two, and Gaza was one of them. The other – no surprise – was during the Ukraine War. Much of the aid provided there by WCK was not within Ukraine itself but in the refugee camps along the Polish border where Poland had taken in Ukrainian refugees, although some was also in Ukraine.

You probably are aware that, unlike the situation with the Ukrainian refugees, no one is willing to take in refugees from Gaza, although Egypt has a border with it. So any group seeking to aid the Gazans would have to be in Gaza itself, and although the vehicles were supposedly in a “de-conflicted zone” (however that is defined; I’m not sure what it means exactly), they were nevertheless in Gaza itself. Gaza as a whole is a war zone involved in urban warfare, and that of course increases the danger.

The WCK must know that. In fact, they had some bad experiences in Ukraine. A World Central Kitchen employee was killed in the Ukraine conflict earlier; it sounds as though he was a local man who had volunteered with the group:

In early June 2023, Igor—a WCK volunteer—was killed when a Russian missile hit his apartment building in Ukraine’s eastern Kharkiv region. Igor volunteered for months to feed neighbors in his community, and we are forever inspired by his bravery and compassion.

There also had been another Russian missile strike, this one on the Kharkiv kitchen in 2022, in which four WKK workers were injured. Fortunately no one was killed. But I can almost guarantee that even had they died as a result of the strike, the press and the world wouldn’t much care.

Here’s another page describing the WCK’s Ukraine efforts. In addition to the refugee camps in Poland, the organization delivered supplies to many Ukrainian restaurants that made meals for their fellow Ukrainians. There was definitely some risk involved, and in fact two volunteer workers (whom I believe were Ukrainian, and who were involved in serving meals) were killed in a Russian strike on a community center in Chuhuiv (near Kharkiv). We certainly didn’t hear much if anything about that, either – after all, it wasn’t Jews doing the bombing.

But back to the WCK’s efforts in Gaza. There are many armed conflicts in the world where people almost certainly need aid. The WCK can’t be everywhere, of course. But why, of all the other suffering people (besides Ukrainians) living in earth’s many war zones during the last few years, would the Gazans be the most deserving of aid and the most sympathetic? I’m not just talking about the World Central Kitchen, either; that group is just following the lead of so many NGOs, the press, the UN, and most of the nations on earth.

So, why the Gazans? After all, they elected a terrorist group to be their leaders, supported those leaders and even aided them in one of the most ferocious and barbaric terrorist attacks ever perpetrated in the modern age, cheered them on and taunted the hostages that were taken, and have continued to support terrorists as measured by opinion polls in the region.

Why the Gazans? It’s a rhetorical question, actually. I believe it is because they are fortunate enough to have declared war on Israel and the Jews.

I’m baaaack!

The New Neo Posted on by

All over New England there are power outages from a big storm. Typical New England stuff. There had been precious little snow all winter long, for the most part. And then a big storm in late March and one in early April. North it was all snow, then a line of mixed precipitation, and then all rain in the more southern parts. But there were high winds for all of it, and that’s what caused so many outages.

Losing power is a powerful (ha!) reminder of how dependent we are on electricity. The only thing that was getting through was text messages on my phone, and they were ominous. The power had been out since early morning, and at about 2:30 PM I got a text from the power company saying they were overwhelmed and full power restoration could “take days.”

Days. I’ve been in winter power outages that last days. No fun. Very cold. I was already planning a getaway – although I wasn’t sure exactly to where, although it had to be away from the path the storm had taken – when I got a reprieve. I heard a sudden noise and then the sound of the heating system, turned a light on and voila! Power!

What a sense of relief. And now I even have the internet. Such luxury. Thus, this post.

Another day, another distortion of what Trump said

The New Neo Posted on by

I think that about 95% of what Democrat voters think Trump has done or said is based on a lie about him:

Seattle would rather have racial “equity” than serve its gifted and talented students

The New Neo Posted on by

So sad:

[Seattle] began phasing out its Highly Capable Cohort schools and classrooms for advanced students in the 2021-22 school year because they found it had too many racial inequities. School bosses said black and Hispanic students were underrepresented at the schools.

According to Seattle Public School data, of the highly capable students in the 2022-23 school year, 52 percent were white, 16 percent were Asian and 3.4 percent were black.

During a January 22, 2020, school board meeting, parents of black students in the Highly Capable Cohort asked the board to consider finding ways to incorporate students of color into the gifted program rather than shut it down.

Then school board vice president Chandra Hampson slammed those parents saying, ‘this is a pretty masterful job at tokenizing a really small community of color within the existing cohort.’

Chandra Hampson is white, by the way.

More about the phaseout [emphasis mine]:

Three elementary schools, five middle schools and three high schools are currently highly capable cohort schools – all of which will be phased out by the 2027-28 school year.

The gifted and talented program has been replaced with the Highly Capable Neighborhood School Model which requires teachers to come up with individualized learning programs for all of their students.

According to Seattle Public Schools, the new model will be ‘be more inclusive, equitable and culturally sensitive.’ …

Some teachers said they felt they don’t have the time and resources to make learning plans for every student in a classroom of 20 to 30 students.

News station KOMO reported that anonymous teachers said the district is not providing them with extra resources.

‘No extra time, no aid in the classroom, no curriculum help, and no extra compensation to come up with these additional lesson plans for every level of learning in a single classroom,’ said the report.

But the aim isn’t to serve children. The aim is to check the right boxes and get those statistics in line with wokeness.

The slide down the euthanasia slippery slope continues: The Netherlands

The New Neo Posted on by

The Netherlands has been a leader in this particular trend. Here’s the latest:

This young woman is not dying of anything, nor is she in intractable physical pain. Apparently her psychiatrist told her that her depression was incurable and there was no hope for her, which is when she decided she would ask for assisted suicide. Needless to say, no psychiatrist should ever tell a patient such a thing; it is extreme malpractice, IMHO.

Assisted suicide seems to have actually become trendy among a certain set:

… [P]eople like Zoraya ter Beek … critics argue, have been tacitly encouraged to kill themselves by laws that destigmatize suicide, a social media culture that glamorizes it, and radical right-to-die activists who insist we should be free to kill ourselves whenever our lives are “complete.”

They have fallen victim, in critics’ eyes, to a kind of suicide contagion.

Statistics suggest these critics have a point.

In 2001, the Netherlands became the first country in the world to make euthanasia legal. Since then, the number of people who increasingly choose to die is startling.

You can find a chart here showing the trend. I am unable to embed it, but if you click on the link it is readily apparent that the growth is in a relatively steady line upward.

I would also bet that, just as with the trans epidemic, a disproportionate number of people who don’t have a terminal illness and yet ask for assisted suicide have a diagnosis that puts them somewhere on the autism spectrum.

Young men’s and women’s opinions differ all over the developed world

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not just in the US that young women lean more to the left than young men. It’s pretty much a worldwide phenomenon in developed countries, as well as a relatively new one:

The Economist analysed polling data from 20 rich countries, using the European Social Survey, America’s General Social Survey and the Korean Social Survey. Two decades ago there was little difference between men and women aged 18-29 on a self-reported scale of 1-10 from very liberal to very conservative. However, our analysis found that by 2020 the gap was 0.75. For context, this is roughly twice the size of the gap in opinion between people with and without a degree in the same year.

Put another way, in 2020 young men were only slightly more likely to describe themselves as liberal than conservative, with a gap of just two percentage points. Young women, however, were much more likely to lean to the left than the right, with a gap of a massive 27 percentage points.

In all the large countries we examined, young men were more conservative than young women. In Poland, the gap was 1.1 points on a scale of 1-10. It was a hefty 1.4 in America, 1 in France, 0.75 in Italy, 0.71 in Britain and 0.74 in South Korea. Men and women have always seen the world differently. What is striking, though, is that a gulf in political opinions has opened up, as younger women are becoming sharply more liberal while their male peers are not.

The phenomenon resides in the young – and if memory serves, I believe that in the US it is the young and unmarried, for the most part. Issues such as abortion are obviously a big part of this, at least in the US, but also perceived continuing injustices such as non-equal pay (which is a misunderstanding; the inequality has to do with women’s work patterns rather than discrimination, but widespread feminist propaganda says otherwise).

More:

One poll found that 72% of young American women who voted in House elections in 2022 backed the Democratic candidate; some 54% of young men did. In 2008 there was barely any gap. In Europe, where many elections offer a wide array of parties, young women are more likely to support the most left-wing ones, whereas young men are more likely to favour the right or even the radical right.

Remember that red wave that didn’t happen in 2022?

Also:

Although the men at the top are doing fine, many of the rest are struggling. In rich countries, 28% of boys but only 18% of girls fail to reach the minimum level of reading proficiency as defined by PISA, which tests high-school students. And women have overtaken men at university. In the EU, the share of men aged 25 to 34 with tertiary degrees rose from 21% to 35% between 2002 and 2020. For women it rose faster, from 25% to 46%. In America, the gap is about the same: ten percentage points more young women than men earn a bachelor’s degree.

So young women are more exposed than men to the leftist propaganda that dominates universities. My guess is that as a group they also tend to be more susceptible than men to propaganda that appeals to feelings, as leftist messages ordinarily do. And the disparity in education is probably contributing to a drop in marriage and childbirth rates, although there are certainly other factors as well:

In America, Daniel Cox, Kelsey Hammond and Kyle Gray of the Survey Centre on American Life find that Generation Z (typically defined as those born between the late 1990s and early 2000s) have their first romantic relationship years later than did Millennials (born between 1980 and the late 1990s) or Generation X (born in the decade or so to 1980), and are more likely to feel lonely. Also, Gen Z women, unlike older women, are dramatically more likely than their male peers to describe themselves as LGBT (31% to 16%). It remains to be seen whether this mismatch will last, and if so, how it will affect the formation of families in the future.

There’s much more at the link, none of it particularly encouraging.

On writing April Fools’ posts

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been writing April Fools’ posts for nearly twenty years now. Some are better than others; I think my finest hour was in 2010. That one also went viral, and tons of people came to read it due to many links, not perceiving it was a prank. Many of the newcomers (and even some regular readers) took me seriously and berated me for what they saw as defending the indefensible and/or publishing misinformation (although that term wasn’t used back then). There was so much furor about that post that I had to issue a disclaimer and explanation.

The best April Fools’ posts are built on a foundation of truth, as was that one. This year’s post also was built on a true story but was less clever and elaborate than the 2010 one. Nevertheless it still fit the bill by fooling some of the people some of the time, despite the fact that towards the end I even acknowledged the date as April 1 and despite the fact that many commenters realized it was a spoof and said so.

The thing about April Fool’s and blog posts is that people aren’t necessarily expecting a joke and people don’t necessarily read all the comments, some of which would have let them in on it.

Each year, though, I think it gets a little more difficult to surpass the foolishness of most of the actual news and actual happenings. That’s another reason it’s hard to tell the difference between truth and fiction.