Barr’s testimony and public opinion

The New Neo Posted on by

I didn’t watch Barr’s testimony yesterday, but he was apparently great—but only to those predisposed to agree with him:

Mazie Hirono of Hawaii either completely trashed Barr or made a fool out of herself. Ted Cruz positively owned the Democrats. Kamala Harris, oddly, gutted Barr like a fish? I dunno. That’s what one website said…

If you only paid attention to media takeaways and social media reactions, you have no idea what happened in yesterday’s hearing. It’s almost as if, now follow me on this, but it’s almost as if nothing substantive actually happened yesterday.

Because it didn’t.

These hearings are a joke, moreso now than they’ve ever been. There is no point to these hearings because they give us no new information. Everything we know about the Mueller report, his letter to Barr, and the actual investigation into Donald Trump are things we know based solely on what’s been publicly released. We didn’t need this hearing.

So why have it? Because Congressional hearings are publicly-funded campaign ads. They give politicians a chance to show off their best material to the people who watch not to learn anything but to see someone get “owned.”

Indeed. That’s why some people refer to these things as “theater.”

I used to think—long long ago—that people could be persuaded by logic, and that when it was obvious to me that someone had the better hand in an argument, the same would be crystal clear to the majority of people listening. Ha!

Bill Barr is testifying today in the Senate

The New Neo Posted on by

You can read about it here.

An excerpt:

Mr. Grassley said it was ironic that Mr. Trump has now been cleared of conspiracy with Russia to subvert the 2016 election, but the Clinton campaign who hired a foreign national — Mr. Steele — who relied on information that may have been planted by Russia has not faced the same scrutiny.

“That’s the definition of collusion,” Mr. Grassley said.

Mr. Barr said he doesn’t yet have conclusions, but said there is a real possibility that Russia used Mr. Steele as part of its disinformation campaign.

“That is one of the areas that I’m reviewing. I’m concerned about it, and I don’t think it’s entirely speculative,” he said.

Also see this:

During testimony on Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General William Barr expressed his surprise that special counsel Robert Mueller did not come to a conclusion on whether or not President Trump had obstructed justice. Barr had expected a decision from Mueller, which is the norm.

Barr told the senators, “We did not understand exactly why the special counsel was not reaching a decision. We don’t conduct criminal investigations just to collect information and put it out to the public. We do so to make a decision.”

Yes, Mr. Barr, that’s how it’s usually done unless a prosecutor knows he can’t make a reasonable case against a defendant, but is interested in maintaining pressure. Particularly if the defendant is President Donald Trump, whom you hate, and you’re hoping that if the case is left open, others will pick up where you left off.

[ADDENDUM: Also see this.]

“Support” can be an Orwellian word

The New Neo Posted on by

GRRRR! I am trying to decompress from dealing with some online “support” that is typical in that I suspect that, although it’s masquerading as a real live person with a real live first name, it’s actually a bot.

I sent an initial email, discussing the problem briefly and clearly, and I got a stupid boilerplate response that had little to no relation to my complaint. At the end, of course, it politely added, in the modern way of wanting feedback:

I hope you found this information helpful. Please let me know if you have any additional questions.

Best regards…

So I wrote back “No, I did NOT find the information helpful…” and then went into the problem again. This time I got a reply from a supposedly higher-up actual person who asked for some very specific additional information, which I then furnished.

Today I got a reply, which was essentially the same reply as before.

This time I responded even more clearly, with the most important points highlighted in ALL CAPS so that even a bot should be able to SEE THEM.

The modern world—the semblance of service without the actual service at all.

Have a nice day! 🙂

Venezuela news

The New Neo Posted on by

Why now?:

Russia, which often warns against anyone interfering in its “near abroad,” has no problem propping up hostile regimes in America’s back yard. “We’ll have military cooperation with whoever we want,” Maduro’s foreign minister, Jorge Arreaza, told UN reporters last week, confirming Moscow’s growing military support for his regime…

With foreigners solidifying their support for the regime, and as a political stalemate settled since January, Guaidó knew time wasn’t on his side. Sources tell me concerns that an emboldened Maduro would soon move to arrest or otherwise stop him prompted his Tuesday airbase video.

Cuba employs direct command and control over the Venezuelan military, says Stratfor’s Latin America watcher Reggie Thompson, but now units may start to switch sides. And then violence may well worsen as “security forces start to turn against each other,” Thompson warns.

Let’s face it: Venezuela was an unsustainable mess much before Tuesday. The currency is useless, food and medicine are scarce and street violence rampant. A Venezuelan friend says cartels have started distributing US currency, illegal inside the country, to ordinary citizens, so they can buy groceries. “These dollars aren’t given for nothing,” she said, indicating criminal gangs will only grow stronger.

But all that is nothing compared to what’s next. Unless either side can quickly shore up the entire military, street fighting is likely to become bloodier than ever. Heavy tanks and Russian-made air assets will come in.

And even if Maduro goes, chaos is likely to persist as Cuban-backed paramilitary gangs, known as “colectivos,” continue their violent activity.

Please read the whole thing.

Also see this:

On a day of high drama in Caracas, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Tuesday afternoon that Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro was believed to have been ready to leave the country hours earlier, but had been persuaded by the Russians not to go.

“It’s been a long time since anyone has seen Maduro,” he told CNN. “They had an airplane on the tarmac. He was ready to leave this morning as we understand it. And the Russians indicated he should stay.”

Pompeo said Maduro had been intending to fly to Cuba.

Ah, but Trump is Putin’s puppet, don’t you see?

It is outrageous that so many people angry for so long about Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia (remember that?) also support Bernie Sanders, who refuses to say Maduro must go, praises socialist Latin American regimes, and spent his 1988 honeymoon on a Burlington sister city trip to the waning Soviet Union.

Mayday! Mayday!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post.]

Today is Mayday.

As a child I was confused by the wildly differing associations the word conjures up. It’s a distress signal, for example, apparently derived from the French for “come to my aid.”

That was the first meaning of the word I ever learned, from watching the World War II movies that were so ubiquitous on TV when I was a tiny child. The pilot would yell it into the radio as the fiery plane spiraled down after being hit, or as the stalling engine coughed and sputtered. On the ship the guy in uniform would tap it out in code and repeat it (always three times in a row, as is the convention) when the torpedo hit and the ship filled with water.

But on a far more personal level, it was the time of the May Féte (boy, does that sound archaic) in my elementary school, when each class had to learn a dance and perform it in the gymnasium in front of the entire student body’s proud/bored parents. The afternoon was capped by the eighth-graders, who were assigned the only activity of the day that seemed like fun—weaving multicolored ribbons around the maypole.

Ah, the maypole. As children, who knew it was a phallic symbol? Or that maypoles were once considered so risque that they were banned in parts of England by certain Protestant groups bent on discouraging the mixed-gender dancing and drunkenness that seemed to go along with them (not in my elementary school, however; only girls were allowed to wind the maypole ribbons, and the mixed-gender dancing the rest of us had to do was decidedly devoid of frivolity)?

The other meaning of Mayday was/is the Communist festival of labor, or International Workers Day. In my youth the big bad Soviets used to have huge parades that featured their frightening weaponry. Back in the 20s and 30s the Mayday parades in New York City were fairly large. I know this because I own a curious artifact of those times—a home movie of a Mayday parade from the mid-1920s. I’m not sure who in my family had such an early and prescient interest in movies, but the film features my paternal grandparents on their way to such a celebration.

They’d come to this country from pre-revolutionary Russia in the early years of the century. Like many such immigrants, my grandfather became a Soviet supporter who thought the Communists had a chance of making things better than they’d been in the Russia he’d left behind. Since he died rather young, only a few years after the film was made in the 1920s, I don’t know whether time and further revelations of the mess the Soviet Union became would have changed his point of view. In the film, however, the family goes to view the Manhattan Mayday parade, which looks to be a very well-attended event with hopeful Communist banners held high and nary a maypole nor a Morris dancer in sight.

The footage of the parade seemed archaic even back when I saw it as a young girl, although it was fascinating to see the grandfather and grandmother I’d never known (not to mention my father as a handsome seventeen-year old). But the most puzzling sight of all was the attention paid to the Woolworth building. Whoever took the movie was fascinated by it; there were two slow pans up and down its length.

Why the Woolworth Building? Opened in 1913, it was a cool fifty-seven stories high, the tallest building in the world until 1930. It had an elaborate Gothic facade and was considered a monument to capitalism—the “Cathedral of Commerce,” although the Communist-sympathizing photographer of my Mayday movie didn’t seem to let those two offending words (cathedral, commerce) get in the way of his awe for the building.

I never noticed the Woolworth building myself until the day I visited the site of the World Trade Center a few months after 9/11. There were still huge crowds coming to pay homage, and so we had to wait in a long line that snaked around the nearby blocks.

That’s how I found myself in front of a familiar sight, the Woolworth Building, still Gothic after all these years, and still standing (although it had lost electricity and telephone service for a few weeks after 9/11, the building itself sustained no damage). No longer dwarfed by the enormous towers of its successor—that new Cathedral of Commerce, the World Trade Center—the Woolworth Building even commanded a bit of its former dominance.

Although it’s still dwarfed from this angle:

woolworth_wfc_s.jpg

And to bring this hodgepodge of a post round full circle, there exists a book of photos of 9/11 with the title Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!: The Day the Towers Fell, a reference to the myriad distress calls phoned in by firefighters on that terrible day.

Venezuela’s decline: the military hold the key

The New Neo Posted on by

“Decline” doesn’t seem to be a strong enough word for what’s been happening in Venezuela. It’s horrendous there, and somewhat unclear at the moment. It seems an attempted coup is underway, but whether it will gain any more traction than before is unknown:

Despite images showing some military members in support of Guaidó, Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro said he had spoken with military leaders that showed “total loyalty.” Maduro had not been seen in public as of Tuesday afternoon and its unclear where he is located at the moment.

Guaidó, meanwhile, addressed crowds in different parts of Caracas, rallying citizens to take to the streets. “Today it is clear to us that the Armed Forces are with the people and not with the dictator,” Guaidó told a crowd in Altamira.

Historically, in situations such as this, the support of the armed forces is always key. Dictators rely on force, and if that force turns on them, they’re generally finished.

From John Bolton:

We see this now is a potentially dispositive moment in the efforts of the Venezuelan people to regain their freedom which we fully support..We think it’s still very important for key figures in the regime who have been talking to the opposition over these last three months to make good on their commitments to achieve the peaceful transfer of power from the Maduro clique to interim President Juan Guiado.

And there’s this:

MSNBC reporter Kerry Sanders unwittingly made the American case for the Second Amendment during a report Tuesday on the political upheaval in Venezuela.

Anchor Andrea Mitchell introduced Sanders for his report by commenting on the surprising ability of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro to stay in power, despite the pressure on him to step down.

“Not only hanging on but he appears to still control the military,” Sanders said. “You have to understand, in Venezuela gun ownership is not something that’s open to everybody. So if the military have the guns, they have the power and as long as Nicolás Maduro controls the military, he controls the country.”

As long as Maduro controls the military, the people have little power.

Here’s an article that goes into why economic engineering such as that of Venezuela is not going to have good outcomes:

So many people enamored with long-debunked theories had high hopes that for Venezuela — despite the enormous historical and empirical evidence to the contrary — the promise of socialism would work and would not lead to the loss of liberties or drive the once-prosperous nation into poverty. Looking back on the 20th century, we should turn to some of the most prominent thinkers who lived under similar conditions and dissected their experiences for us to learn from. Venezuela’s crisis is a good example of harsh lessons learned by one generation but forgotten by the next.

In 1944, Friedrich Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom that tyranny inevitably results when a government exercises complete control of the economy through central planning. Over half a century later, beginning with Hugo Chávez’s revolution, Venezuela began its own road to serfdom by expropriating thousands of businesses and even entire industries. The more fortunate companies left before it was too late, while the businesses that remained were handed over to the Venezuelan military, under whose oversight they were neglected into ruins. In a typical demonstration of class warfare, the government publicly vilified these business owners as unpatriotic, greedy lackeys of American interests, claiming that Venezuela’s poverty had been a direct result of their existence.

Chavismo created an atmosphere of distrust in which no one felt safe enough to invest in Venezuela. More important, the courts were no longer the place to get redress. Since 1999, the Venezuelan judiciary had been systematically stacked with judges loyal to the executive. Twenty years after socialism took hold of the country, Venezuela has hit rock bottom on every possible development index. Today, 90 percent of Venezuelans are living below the poverty line and inflation rates exceed 1 million percent. Record numbers of children are dying from malnutrition, and nearly all of the country’s hospitals are either inoperative or in critical need of basic medical supplies. Frequent nationwide power outages have left, at times, up to 70 percent of Venezuela in darkness. Chávez’s socialist agenda purported to be in service of the entire nation, but as Hayek reminds us, “the pursuit of some of [the] most cherished ideals . . . [produces] results utterly different from those which we expected.”

Has anyone noticed whether those celebrities and politicians touting the wonders of Venezuela’s Chavez and then Maduro have commented on recent developments there?

All the News That’s Unfit to Print

The New Neo Posted on by

Does it seem as though the NY Times has had special difficulties lately in terms of blows to its lofty goal of being the unassailable paper of record?

The Netanyahu/Trump anti-Semitic cartoon, and then another anti-Semitic cartoon, both of which were noticed and to which enough people objected that the Times had to make some mild mea culpas. And now this (hat tip: commenter Barry Meislin):

The New York Times, which apologized yesterday for running “anti-Semitic propaganda” against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Trump, issued a correction about an article alleging Jesus was Palestinian and not Jewish.

The op-ed, titled “As a Black Child in Los Angeles, I Couldn’t Understand Why Jesus Had Blue Eyes,” read: “Jesus, born in Bethlehem, was most likely a Palestinian man with dark skin.” The New York Times issued the correction one week after it ran the story and received a barrage of criticism…

It was changed to: “But Jesus, a Jew born in Bethlehem, presumably had the complexion of a Middle Eastern man.”

What is “the complexion of a Middle Eastern man”? Well, I have “the complexion of a Middle Eastern woman,” more or less, which is about the same as the complexion of a Greek or Italian woman. Big deal.

I can’t say I care about Jesus’ skin color, but some people apparently do, and if you’re interested, here’s a big discussion of what Jesus probably looked like. It concludes that he probably didn’t have blue eyes, by the way.

And have you noticed a certain theme in many of the NY Times’ recent egg-on-face moments? They all involve insults to Jews, and one also involves an insult to Christians (a twofer, as it were).

Yesterday in the comments of this blog there was a big discussion of the supposed Jewish ownership of the Times. That used to be true, but it’s not true any more. Until 2018, this guy had been in charge for over twenty years:

Sulzberger’s mother was of mostly English and Scottish origin and his father was of Jewish origin (both Ashkenazic and Sephardic). His parents divorced when he was five years old. Sulzberger was raised in his mother’s Episcopalian faith; however, he no longer observes any religion.

So not Jewish at all in the religious sense, not Jewish in the group sense (passed down through mother, not father), and half-Jewish in the genetic sense. No Jewish identity, nor did he ever have one.

Since 2018 the owner is his son:

Sulzberger was born in Washington, DC, on August 5, 1980, to Gail Gregg and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. Through his father, he is a grandson of Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger Sr., great-grandson of Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and great-great-grandson of Adolph Ochs. His paternal grandfather was Jewish, and the rest of his family is of Christian background (Episcopalian and Congregationalist).

Not. Jewish.

Why this matters I know not, but people seem quite intent on figuring it out, so I’m providing the answer.

I also can’t help but notice a trend the last few days: a lot of posts here about Jews and Jewish concerns, be it anti-Semitism or Israel or vaccines. But that’s what’s been in the air. A lot of it has to do with press coverage of Jews, and how biased it is.

But that’s nothing new, either. Yesterday I pointed out how anti-Semitic cartoons have been winning prizes in Europe for decades, for example. And groups such as CAMERA have been grinding away at the incredibly mendacious anti-Israel reporting of the Times in particular for decades, too. In fact, in 2012 they wrote a book entitled “Indicting Israel: New York Times Coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict.

The bias of the Times used to be more subtle, and harder for the naive reader to detect. The paper seems to have slipped lately—just as the Democratic Party candidates have—into showing their hand more clearly.

Orthodox Jews and the measles outbreak

The New Neo Posted on by

When I first heard that the measles outbreak in New York was particularly bad among Orthodox (actually, ultra-Orthodox) Jews, I assumed it was because of some religious prohibition about vaccines in that group. That’s also what I read here and there in comments around the blogosphere.

But apparently it’s not true. There is no conflict between traditional Jewish law and vaccinations, even among the strictest sects.

So, what’s going on? It’s not easy to get an answer. But here’s an exceptionally interesting article:

… a careful look at the data available on vaccination rates in Orthodox Jewish communities, and reports by members of the community and their doctors, indicate that the Hasidic community is vaccinated on par with the rest of the city…

…[T]he vaccination rate [in Chasidic communities is] around 96 percent. The threshold for herd immunity for measles is presumed to be 93 to 95 percent.

That information also is supported by Jane Zucker, New York City’s assistant commissioner of the Bureau of Immunization. Zucker told Vox that most school-age children in the community are vaccinated at levels on par with other schools…

OJPAC also noted in a statement that in upstate Rockland County, where the Orthodox community is also in the midst of a measles outbreak, most schools now have a 95 percent vaccination rate for measles. One yeshiva had 100 percent compliance, as reported by health officials early in the outbreak.

So what really is going on?

The answer may lie in a combination of factors, including the large numbers of young children, delays in receiving the MMR, and vaccine failure.

OJPAC notes that large family size and frequent mingling during holiday and other events create an environment conducive to spreading an infection that is not present in other segments of society.

It’s worth noting here that the CDC has reported more than 400 cases of mumps in 34 states this year and that these outbreaks can occur in highly vaccinated populations, especially where people are in close contact with one another.

There’s also evidence that there’s a higher rate of delay in vaccination in this community:

“Williamsburg … has one of the lowest rates of vaccine coverage among young children, ages 19 to 35 months, in the city,” wrote Belluz.

Zucker told Vox, “We hear they want to wait until the child is older so they know the child doesn’t have autism, then get the child vaccinated.”

But that’s true in all communities these days—just thank the anti-vaxers.

There there’s this:

Another piece of the puzzle is vaccine failure. Recent data from the health department confirms that a known minority of cases are found in vaccinated people…

…[M]ultiple studies show that even two doses of measles vaccine do not appear to confer immunity in 2 to 10 percent of people, a phenomenon called primary failure. Secondary failure refers to the waning of immunity over time.

“Thus, measles outbreaks also occur even among highly vaccinated populations because of primary and secondary vaccine failure, which results in gradually larger pools of susceptible persons and outbreaks once measles is introduced.

But isn’t it much more attention-getting to blame the Orthodox Jews? Just to take one of many examples, this article seems to insinuate (without actually saying so, and without giving any hard facts, unlike the other article) that orthodoxy is to blame. This one, also from the Times, and headlined “‘Monkey, Rat and Pig DNA’: How Misinformation Is Driving the Measles Outbreak Among Ultra-Orthodox Jews,” talks a great deal about an anti-vaccine pamphlet being circulated among ultra-Orthodox Jews without giving the figures that in fact vaccination rates are typical among them, not atypical.

Even without articles like that, that’s a conclusion many people will come to on their own, erroneously—just as I initially did.

Well, this was inevitable

The New Neo Posted on by

Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg has been accused of sexual assault.

Is the accusation true? I have zero idea. But those who consider all such claims true must consider this one to be true. I’m not someone who considers all such claims to be true, so I’m under no such requirement.

I often wonder how it is that people who insist we consider all such claims as true think that it won’t come back to bite some favored candidate of theirs. Or does it matter that the accuser here is a man? Perhaps even a white man? Does that mean we needn’t trust him, according to the left? It’s so confusing.

Just to make it perfectly clear, I try to trust or distrust all accused people and all the accusers equally. I say: prove it (if possible, in a court of law), and I’ll believe it. Until then, all accusations are iffy, and although possibly true they’re possibly false. We simply lack any way to judge them, and I don’t believe we should make character assassination easy.

UPDATE 4/30: The accusation was untrue. No surprise there.

Why the international NY Times didn’t think twice about printing that anti-Semitic cartoon

The New Neo Posted on by

When the international version of the NY Times decided to publish an anti-Semitic cartoon by the Portuguese cartoonist Antonio Moreira Antunes, it was just following a long-established European post-WWII tradition. Antunes has been in the anti-Semitic image business for decades, and won an award in 1983 for his appropriation of a Warsaw ghetto photo, changing the victim of Nazis into a Palestinian victim of Israeli Jews. For this, Antunes received the top prize at the 20th International Salon of Cartoons in Montreal.

Note that word “international.” The international community, of which western Europe is a big part, has not only been exhibiting this sort of anti-Semitism for a long while (even post-WWII, I mean) but rewarding it.

So that’s the identity and history of the cartoonist who drew the more recent cartoon with Trump as blind Jew being led by the dachshund Jew Netanyahu. So far, though, the Times hasn’t seen fit to name the person or persons who decided to publish the Trump/Netanyahu cartoon in their paper. But my guess is that this person or people who made the call is/are European as well (or, if American, at least have lived a long time in Europe or abroad). To Europeans, that cartoon would be ho-hum, just business as usual—or maybe even worthy of a prize or two.

I don’t even think many Europeans would see the recent Trump/Netanyahu cartoon as anti-Semitic. After all, it’s just conveying ideas that are very standard there. Trump is a blind man—and that’s one of the nicer things they might say about him. Netanyahu is an ugly little weiner dog, very low to the ground (I happen to love dachshunds, but I can’t say I’d be all that attracted to a person who looked like one). The Star of David on the collar around Netanyahu’s neck is a religious symbol but they’d say it is also on the flag of Israel, and they’d be correct about that. And of course, everybody knows that those conniving Jews are leading the stupid blind Trump around and telling him what to do, rather than that there would be any independent reason to support the nefarious state of Israel.

Oh, and the kippah (in Yiddish, yarmulke) on the top of Trump’s head? That’s—well, that’s the only thing that keeps the Times from successfully claiming this is just the usual anti-Zionist cartoon rather than an anti-Jewish one, because the kippah is both gratuitous in the picture and religious. So if they’re trying to claim that the kippah’s about Zionism they haven’t got a leg to stand on.

But none of the anti-Semitism obvious in the cartoon would be likely to register with a European at this point—or even an American leftist. They have lost the ability to see what the cartoon looks like to others, because they are so used to what’s being expressed there.

It’s not as though any of this is new in Europe, although it may be somewhat new for the NY Times to publish this sort of thing. Prior to doing the research for this post, I had never heard of Antunes’ reworking of the Warsaw ghetto image. But for me, that blind-Trump/dachshund-Netanyahu cartoon had already conjured up the memory of another cartoon, one that had appeared in 2003 in the British newspaper The Independent and was drawn by the British political cartoonist Dave Brown. That one I remembered quite well.

It was early in 2003, during the Second Intifada, when Palestinians had been deliberately targeting and blowing up Israelis civilians (including Israeli children) at a rapid clip for three years. The wall had been started but was far from completion at the time the cartoon was published (January of 2003). One would think that if anyone was going to be depicted as deliberate and ghoulish child killers it would be the Palestinians, who not only supported suicide bombers who murdered children but who purposely used their own children as sacrifices, putting them in harm’s way (see also this) to make it more likely that defensive retaliatory measures by the Israelis would result in the inadvertent death of Palestinian children.

But ghoulish Palestinians wasn’t the image Brown was after (and here the reference is to the famous Goya work “Saturn Devouring His Son“):

See? He’s naked, except for that little Likud rosette instead of a fig leaf. Not a kippah or a Jewish star in sight. So that makes the blood libel perfectly okay.

The cartoon was so highly thought of that it was awarded the 2003 first prize by the British Political Cartoon Society. In his acceptance speech, “Brown thanked the Israeli Embassy for its angry reaction to the cartoon, which he said had contributed greatly to its publicity.”

If you think about it, it’s a wonder that the international NY Times took so long to get with the program.