As the economy worsens …

The New Neo Posted on by

… Kamala blames Trump.

What a guy – is there anything he can’t do? Spooky action at a distance.

From Harris:

Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign is blaming former President Trump for the latest negative jobs report — nearly a full term after he left office.

“Donald Trump failed Americans as president, costing our economy millions of jobs, and bringing us to the brink of recession,” Harris for President spokesperson James Singer said in a statement.

“Now, he’s promising even more damage with a Project 2025 agenda that will decimate the middle class and increase taxes on working families, while ripping away health care, raising prescription drug costs, and cutting Social Security and Medicare — all while making his billionaire donors richer.”

Notice how she sandwiches Project 2025 in there, although Trump has never had anything to do with it and has explicitly disavowed it as well. But lies are Kamala’s stock in trade.

Speaking of stocks and trades, we now have this:

Nearly everything on Wall Street is tumbling Monday as fear about a slowing U.S. economy worsens and sets off another sell-off for financial markets around the world.
The S&P 500 was down by 2.4% in midday trading and on track for its worst day since 2022. The Dow Jones industrial average was reeling by 864 points, or 2.2%, as of 11:40 a.m. Eastern, and the Nasdaq composite slid 2.7%.

The drops were just the latest in a sell-off that swept the globe. Japan’s Nikkei 225 helped start Monday by plunging 12.4% for its worst day since the Black Monday crash of 1987.

It was the first chance for traders in Tokyo to react to Friday’s report showing U.S. employers slowed their hiring last month by much more than economists expected. That was the latest piece of data on the U.S. economy to come in weaker than expected, and it’s all raised fear that the Federal Reserve has pressed the brakes on the U.S. economy by too much for too long through high interest rates in hopes of stifling inflation.

The Fed might end up reversing itself on that, increasing inflation.

For many years, pundits on the right have joked about predictions concerning the economy, putting in their headlines “unexpectedly.” It’s a joke because the newspaper reports almost always use that word, which makes “experts” sound like liars or fools or both. Is their constant failure to predict such things the result of stupidity, wishful thinking, and/or the fact that they’re propagandists?

More:

The weak jobs data also triggered what is known as the “Sahm Rule,” seen by many as a historically accurate recession indicator.

“The July jobs report is being viewed as a recession warning, and the markets are responding accordingly,” said Bill Adams, chief economist at the Dallas-based Comerica Bank.

With the jobless rate unexpectedly rising, the so-called Sahm rule is now in play.

Unexpectedly.

Here’s what Trump had to say:

“Of course there is a massive market downturn. Kamala is even worse than Crooked Joe,” Trump, 78, wrote on social media Monday morning — after the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 1,000 points in morning trading after closing down more than 600 points on Friday.

“Markets will NEVER accept the Radical Left Lunatic that DESTROYED San Francisco and California, as a whole. Next move, THE GREAT DEPRESSION OF 2024! You can’t play games with MARKETS. KAMALA CRASH!!!” Trump added.

It was Alaska

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “om” was the one who guessed right about my trip: I went on a one-week cruise from Vancouver to Alaska. That sunset in yesterday’s photo was one of the highlights of the trip, and I almost missed seeing it.

Sunset comes late in the Alaskan summer. I was lying down in my cabin around 10:10 PM one evening. My cabin had something called a veranda, which is a small deck. I figured the last time I was on a ship was in the early 1960s, and I’d been wanting to go to Alaska for decades but now was finally doing it, and I thought it made sense to pay a little extra to be able to just step out and see the sights. After all, the scenery was the reason I was going.

So that evening when I was lying down, I happened to look out the window and see a tiny tinge of pink. It occurred to me that it might be a lovely sunset; I’d seen one two days before that was quite pretty. So I stepped out and, lo and behold, saw the most spectacular sunset I’d ever seen in my life. Here it is again in case you missed it:

This one is just of the sky, but it really emphasizes how incredibly intense the colors were:

Here’s another wonderful sight I saw from that veranda while cruising along Glacier Bay:

Why was I lying down that night? Well, for the entire cruise I had COVID. The experience was somewhat nasty but basically uneventful. However, it turned out to have been a really good thing that I got the cabin with that veranda, because I pretty much had to lay low.

To be continued in another post, with more photos …

The coup against Biden, according to Hersh

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t trust Seymour Hersh. But his report on how Biden was “convinced” to withdraw from the race, and how Harris became the nominee, is close to what I had already concluded for myself.

Here’s a discussion at RedState of Hersh’s description:

Here are the key points.

Biden’s staff, donors, and corporate media all covered up his declining condition. …

After the debate, donors panicked. …

According to Hersh’s latest reporting the Democrat inner circle plan was to keep Joe’s impairment covered up, apparently until he was re-elected …

The debate had made that impossible. Then:

The official story was that Biden had tested positive for COVID and had some symptoms, so was rushing back to Delaware to isolate. But everyone saw the writing on the wall, and the events in Las Vegas set off a cascade of events culminating just a few days later in Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 campaign.

[From Hersch]: “By Saturday, July 20, former President Barack Obama was deeply involved, and there was talk that he would place a call to Biden. It was not clear whether Biden had been examined or just what happened to him in Las Vegas. …

“‘The Big Three,’ the official said, referring to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, continued to be directly involved. ‘On Sunday morning,’ the official told me, with the approval of Pelosi and Schumer, ‘Obama called Biden after breakfast and said, Here’s the deal. We have Kamala’s approval to invoke the 25th Amendment.’” …

Within hours, Biden made the announcement that he was out.

Hersh adds that it’s not 100% certain that Harris will be the nominee, but it seems he’s wrong about that – at least, if this news is correct:

Vice President Kamala Harris has won enough delegate votes to secure the Democratic presidential nomination, Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison announced Friday, though the results are not yet official.

The DNC will not make an official announcement of results until Monday evening, when the virtual voting process closes for delegates to this month’s Democratic National Convention.

I have a minor quibble, though, with calling this an outright coup, although it certainly has elements of a coup. But they have been using legal rather than illegal means to effect the switcheroo, whatever you want to call it: the 25th Amendment, which is far more flexible than most people realize and basically legalizes couplike action by a president’s own party and former supporters, with the VP heavily involved in the process (see this previous post of mine on the subject). Biden was placed there to begin with by much the same people who removed him, anyway.

Maybe Khalid Shaikh Mohammad isn’t going to get that plea deal after all

The New Neo Posted on by

I guess the feedback on the plea deal was awful, because Secretary of Defense Austin has said not so fast:

The deal that stirred national outrage and took the death penalty off of the table has been revoked by Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III in a terse memo.

Secretary Austin III is now taking the lead on the case for 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin ‘Attash, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi.

In his order, Austin relieved the official in charge of the military commission who had signed off on the original plea deals. …

No explanation was given on why this was not settled earlier before the deals were signed off and publicly released. …

The powerful House Armed Services Committee announced earlier Friday it was launching an investigation into the plea deals, which Chairman Mike Rogers, R.-La., called “unconscionable.”

Did Austin not know what was going on until it became public? Or did he not realize what outrage it would cause? Who’s minding the store here?

The reason it’s Austin, by the way, is that the trial is a military one and so the military is in charge.

And this is the ostensible reason the plea deal was settled in the first place:

[The defendants’] past torture is largely responsible for bogging down the case, since prosecutors and defense attorneys have been arguing for years over whether evidence obtained through torture is admissible in court. In a recent ruling that did not bode well for 9/11 prosecutors, a judge in another different Guantánamo case — the U.S.S. Cole warship bombing — threw out a confession because he said it was a product of torture.

That legal development may have played a role in the U.S. government deciding to settle the 9/11 case.

Who made the decision to settle?:

In a statement, the National Security Council said that “the President and the White House played no role in this process” and learned of the plea bargains on Wednesday.

No one bothered to tell them? And they didn’t bother to keep tabs on what was happening? Excuse me but, WTF? We are supposed to believe they are mind-bogglingly negligent – or they are just plain lying. They are fully capable of either or both, as we’ve learned many times before.

NOTE: I’ve previously written on the subject of the KSM case. Here’s a post that explains some of the reasons it’s taken so long – including that Obama wanted these people tried in civil courts rather than military courts. Astounding. Fortunately, he lost that fight.

I also have written quite a few posts on the subject of torture: see this one, for example.

Will Harris choose Shapiro?

The New Neo Posted on by

I am heartily sick of writing about Kamala Harris or even thinking about her. Likewise with the 2024 election as a whole.

I sometimes believe that some combination of rigging and fraud moots everything I might say about the candidates anyway. I sometimes think well, perhaps not.

I didn’t want Trump to run again; he has too much baggage. But I plan to vote for him. However, I don’t fool myself into thinking the press and the left/Democrats wouldn’t have tried to destroy anyone on the right who might have run instead of Trump. We can see, for example, what they’re doing to Vance. But we also saw what they did to Romney, one of the most moderate of Republicans.

Contrast that to how they suddenly find themselves entranced with Harris. It reminds me of nothing so much as those old-time movies in which the eyeglassed secretary finally takes off those glasses and voila! Turns out she’s irresistible.

The MSM will cooperate fully in making Harris into something wonderful in many voters’ eyes. They may be low information voters who haven’t paid any attention to what Kamala has or hasn’t done as VP or earlier, and the press will make sure that only the right is discussing those negatives. And of course, Kamala would be the first female president as well as the first black female president. So she’s demographically even better than Obama, in a way.

The point Trump made the other day, that Harris is far more Indian than black, doesn’t matter with most people. She is at least part black, and that may be good enough – with the full cooperation of the media.

Also, the Democrats will make sure she isn’t too exposed, just as with Biden in 2020. They never would have swapped Biden out for Harris if Joe’s mask hadn’t dropped for all to see, but that’s what happened and now they are determined to keep Kamala’s mask on until Election Day.

So what of Harris’ running mate? Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania, makes some sense because the Democrats need Pennsylvania. But Shapiro has a big negative in terms of this particular race by this particular Democrat Party: he’s Jewish. He also has gone on record with some pro-Israel remarks – in particular, something he wrote long ago at the age of 21:

“Palestinians will not coexist peacefully,” Shapiro wrote in the piece. “They do not have the capabilities to establish their own homeland and make it successful even with the aid of Israel and the United States. They are too battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own.”

Shapiro’s spokesperson, Manuel Bonder, told Newsweek that the decades-old comments are not indicative of what Shapiro believes today. He said the governor supports a two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

Half of the Democrats are pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel, and anti-Jewish, and even that waffling by Shapiro would probably not be enough for them to approve of him. But would it matter? Would the costs of a Shapiro as VP candidate be greater than the benefits? That’s the calculus Harris and her advisors must weigh. She may end up avoiding the problem by choosing someone else, but it must be tempting to go with Shapiro because he would almost certainly deliver Pennsylvania.

The choice of Shapiro, who is what passes for a moderate Democrat these days, would also be a signal from Harris that she is moving to the center – or, more correctly, pretending to move to the center. But there are other “moderate” Democrats who aren’t Jewish, and they probably would be safer bets.

Striking an Olympic blow against women

The New Neo Posted on by

By now you’e probably read about the Olympic women’s boxing match in which a genetic male’s blows were so hard that the female opponent gave up after 46 seconds, in dramatic fashion:

Italy’s Angela Carini quit 46 seconds into her Olympic boxing match with Imane Khelif on Thursday, after the Algerian – who failed a gender eligibility test last year – landed the first significant punch of the fight.

The pair were competing in the women’s 66kg category, in a round-of-16 bout in Paris, but the fight had barely begun before it came to a premature end.

After an early pause in the fight, due to Carini needing to adjust her head guard, Khelif landed a clean right hand. Almost immediately, Carini motioned to her team and opted against continuing, with the referee waving off the contest. …

After Khelif’s hand was raised, Carini dropped to her knees in tears. Before and after that moment, the Italian twice seemed to ignore Khelif’s attempts to console her.

Carini could also be heard telling her coach, “It’s not right, it’s not right!” before promptly leaving the arena. The Telegraph and BBC reported that Carini had suffered a suspected broken nose, and the 25-year-old soon told reporters that she had never been punched so hard in her career. Khelif, also 25, did not stop to answer questions.

Initially I imagined – as you may have also assumed – that Khelif was transgender. But, although we don’t know the details, that’s apparently not the case. Khelif is definitely a genetic male: XY. But he may have something called androgen insensitivity syndrome, which muddies the waters somewhat.

When I was in grad school I had to memorize a huge list of such sex/gender anomalies. They are all rare but they are true cases in which it can sometimes be difficult to assign a sex. For example, for androgen insensitivity, the genetic male’s body cannot use its testosterone and the person becomes feminized to a greater or lesser degree. At times, the phenotype is completely female and such a person probably would do well and not have an unfair advantage if allowed to enter women’s sports. However – and it’s a big however – some people with the disorder are predominantly male in appearance. If Khelif has this condition, he would be of the latter type, and IMHO should not be competing against women.

You can read about it here:

There are two categories of androgen insensitivity syndrome: complete and partial.

In complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, the body does not respond to androgen at all. This form of the syndrome occurs in as many as 1 in 20,000 births.

In partial androgen insensitivity syndrome, the body responds partially to androgen. Partial androgen insensitivity occurs at about the same rate as complete androgen insensitivity syndrome.

Babies born with the “complete” type appear to be girls, are raised as girls, and often don’t find out they are XY until they try to have children. But babies born with the partial type exhibit a wide range of possible symptoms:

Babies born with partial androgen insensitivity syndrome may have sexual characteristics that are typical of a male, a female, or both. They may have a partial closing of the outer vagina, an enlarged clitoris and a short vagina. They may be raised as males or as females and have a male or female gender identity.

Other symptoms of partial androgen insensitivity syndrome include failure of one or both of the testicles to descend into the scrotum after birth and an abnormal penis in which the urethra opens on the underside, instead of at the tip. In the least severe cases, the only sign of androgen insensitivity syndrome is male infertility.

As I said, so far the Olympics officials are keeping mum on exactly what’s going on with Khelif, but my guess is that it really is a case of partial androgen insensitivity syndrome. But because Khelif appears to be quite far down on the “mild” scale of things, he (and I think on the whole that’s the proper pronoun for Khelif) should not be allowed to compete in women’s sports.

The Olympics officials probably based their decision on Khelif’s testosterone level. But that’s irrelevant at this point, because he quite obviously has a male phenotype in terms of musculature and almost certainly had enough testosterone getting into his system during adolescence to make permanent changes in his strength that make him more like a man than the women he is facing in the ring.

Back from my trip out west

The New Neo Posted on by

Bet you didn’t know I was away, did you? I’ve just returned from a fairly lengthy trip out west, and now I’m in re-entry: laundry, groceries, reconnecting with friends.

The trip was long because I combined a bunch of things, but mostly visiting friends and family – heavy on the family – in several places. Some of it involved seeing relatives who are ill and from my generation (there is no older generation anymore). Some of it involved my son and my grandchildren. And some of it involved an actual trip, which I may write more about in a later post.

But for now, here’s a photo I took while on the vacation part. Can you guess where? There are no filters or special effects here; this was the true color as I saw it. If anything, it was even more intense, and of course the view was more panoramic than the photo shows:

And then there’s the plea deal with Khalid Shaikh Mohammad

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s what the Defense Department has to say about it: not much.

The Convening Authority for Military Commissions, Susan Escallier, has entered into pretrial agreements with Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin ‘Attash, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi, three of the co-accused in the 9/11 case. The specific terms and conditions of the pretrial agreements are not available to the public at this time.

Here’s more about the details, from less official sources:

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al-Hawsawi have been held at the US Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for years without going to trial.

In exchange for the prosecution agreeing not to seek the death penalty, the trio have agreed to plead guilty to all of the charged offenses, including the murder of the 2,976 people listed in the charge sheet.

Let’s assume that’s the case – it’s certainly what’s being widely reported. Among other things, it’s interesting to me that these guys who talk such a line about how wonderful martyrdom for the Cause is seem to nevertheless to value their own lives rather highly. The again, confessing to the murder of almost three thousand people is probably nothing to them, because they consider the murders highly justified.

More:

Brett Eagleson, the president of 9/11 Justice, an organisation that represents 9/11 survivors and relatives of victims, said in a statement provided to the BBC that the families are “deeply troubled by these plea deals”.

He said the process lacked transparency and urged the authorities to pursue more information on the role of Saudi Arabia in the attacks.

Terry Strada, who lost her husband Tom, told the BBC’s Today Programme: “It was a gut-punch to hear that there was a plea deal today that was giving the detainees in Guantanamo Bay what they want.”

Ms Strada, the national chair of the campaign group 9/11 Families United, added: “This is a victory for Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and the other two, it’s a victory for them,” she said.

Agreed.

This should be hammered home by Republicans during the 2024 campaign.

NOTE: Keeping them alive probably also encourages the taking of hostages by other jihadis, in order to make a deal during a Democrat administration to free them.

Russian prisoner swap releases WSJ journalist

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s the biggest swap with Russia since the Cold War days:

The Wall Street Journal has praised the release of three Americans, including reporter Evan Gershkovich, as part of a historic prisoner swap between Russia and the US.

Gershkovich’s release was negotiated along with that of former marine Paul Whelan and Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmashevas, as part of a major inmate swap with Moscow.

A total of 24 prisoners from seven different countries were freed – making it the largest and most complex East-West inmate exchange since the Cold War era.

It’s good that the Western prisoners are free now. But prisoner swaps are almost always bad, and they have very bad consequences: they encourage the imprisonment of Westerners by tyrannical governments in order to effect such swaps.

Who were the people freed by the West in exchange? We don’t know all of their identities, but we have an idea:

Four Russians detained in the US on charges including murder, cyber crime, smuggling and money laundering were thought to possibly be part of the exchange.

The Moscow Times reported the individuals recently disappeared from the federal inmates’ database in America.

Details of exactly who has been released have not been made public yet.

This guy seems to have been the star:

Krasikov, 58, was imprisoned in Germany for the Aug. 23, 2019, murder of Zelimkhan “Tornike” Khangoshvili, who was shot and killed in a park in Berlin, according to The Associated Press. Khangoshvili, 40, was a Georgian citizen who had fought Russian troops in Chechnya and claimed asylum in Germany.

Witnesses reportedly saw the shooter throw a bike, a gun and a dark wig into a nearby river. Police arrested him before he could make a run for it on an electric scooter.

Krasikov was convicted for the killing and sentenced to life in prison in 2021.

An assassin let go in exchange for a journalist imprisoned on fake charges? Fabulous. But that’s the main reason the journalist was sentenced in the first place – to be used as a pawn in just such a deal.

And I’m pretty certain the deal took place at this time because it met the needs of both Putin and Biden/Harris: Putin because if Trump gets elected the terms of the bargain would be more difficult for Putin, and Biden because he can get a lot of praise for it.