What’s happened in the Ukraine negotiations so far, and what’s next?

The New Neo Posted on by

The MSM says “Trump got played!” in his meeting with Putin. But that’s meaningless, because it’s their kneejerk reaction.

Secretary of State Rubio called some of the recent coverage a “stupid media narrative”:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio didn’t hold back Sunday when CBS’s Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan tried to push the tired media line that President Donald Trump is “bullying” Ukraine into a bad peace deal with Russia. …

“This is such a stupid media narrative that [European leaders] are coming here tomorrow because Trump is going to bully Zelensky into a bad deal,” Rubio shot back. “We’ve been working with these people for weeks… We invited them to come.”

The truth is that we don’t know where this is heading. Even the participants probably don’t know, although they know more than we do (at least, I hope they do). My opinion? Trump is a good negotiator, but the situation seems intractable to me. If he can pull off something that is realistic and doesn’t badly hurt Ukraine I would consider that an impressive accomplishment.

Yesterday Zelensky said the following:

Speaking ahead of his meeting with President Trump on Monday, Zelensky told reporters in Brussels that while Kyiv would be open to “land swaps” in exchange for peace, Putin’s demands to cede the entirety of the Donetsk region — including parts under Ukrainian control — is off the table.

“We need real negotiations, which means they can start where the front line is now,” Zelensky said.

In other words, he’s willing to give up something, just not as much of Russia wants. This is no surprise.

More from Zelensky:

“Since the territorial issue is so important, it should be discussed only by the leaders of Ukraine and Russia at the trilateral Ukraine-United States-Russia,” Zelensky added.

“So far, Russia gives no sign that trilateral will happen, and if Russia refuses, then new sanctions must follow,” he added.

Trump and Zelensky are meeting in bilateral talks today.

The following seems important, or at least potentially important:

Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff said Sunday that Putin agreed to allow the US and Europe to provide Ukraine with assurances that it will never again be invaded by Russia, similar to NATO’s “Article 5” agreement that allows member nations to defend each other if one is ever attacked.

Right now, searching for what’s presently going on with that meeting, I see headlines such as this from the WaPo: “Live updates: Trump pledges ‘a lot of help’ to Ukraine in congenial Oval Office meeting,” and this from Newsweek: “Trump Refuses To Rule Out Sending US Troops to Ukraine: Live Updates.” Those are certainly more pro-Ukraine than the dire predictions from the MSM. And then there’s this:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky arrived at the White House on Monday wearing an all-black suit without a tie, a change of style after months of criticism over his usual military-inspired outfits. Trump greeted him warmly, placing an arm around his shoulder and praising the choice of clothing. “I can’t believe it, I love it,” the US president said as they entered the Oval Office.

.

Optics.

Time will tell. The meeting with the European leaders is going on right now. Will there be a trilateral meeting? Unknown.

“I’m going to grab your vitals”

The New Neo Posted on by

I recently had the experience of spending a great deal of time visiting a hospital and a rehab hospital due to the illness of my ex-husband and the fact that I was the only person geographically on the scene. I learned a lot of things, but one of the them was the current ubiquity of the phrase, “I’m going to grab your vitals” or the more polite “Is it okay if I grab your vitals?”

This was uttered many times a day, usually by young or middle-aged women to the older man who is my ex-husband. I don’t know what it conjures up for you, but to me it seems a bit – well, a bit forward. After all, as the very first Google result states, the definition is “the body’s important internal organs, especially the gut or the genitalia.”

Indeed.

Yes, I’m aware that these women meant vital signs such as blood pressure, temperature, and oxygen levels, which they proceeded to take (not to “grab”). But I find my levity where I can.

And then the other day, when I was waiting in the checkout line at the market, a young woman employee reached across me and bent down, asking, “Can I steal these baskets?” as she took the handbaskets that were on the floor near the counter.

Grab and steal. What’s with these young women today? – asks the old curmudgeon.

On the decline of The New Yorker: case in point, Doreen St. Félix

The New Neo Posted on by

I subscribed to The New Yorker from around 1975 to 2005. I loved the magazine for most of those years and if I recall correctly it was the only magazine to which I subscribed. Many weeks I read it cover to cover. The fiction was usually pretty good, as were the nonfiction and the reviews. For years it featured the best dance critic in the US, Arlene Croce. And then of course there were the cartoons, often funny and sometimes very funny. It was an event to get my copy in the mail every week.

Those days were gone by 2002 or so. I don’t remember the exact date, but I noticed that the subject matter seemed to become more political and more partisan; to the left, of course. I believe I noticed this even before my own political change, but I’m not sure and there’s nobody else to consult on the matter. What I do know is that I finally stopped my subscription around 2005 or so. I did it with a heavy heart. The divorce was painful but necessary, because it had gotten to the point where I was writing little messages in the margins of each article, and my copies were filled with those scribblings, which were far from love notes. The relationship had become toxic.

I’ve read random articles in the magazine in the years since. Therefore I’m aware of how DEI has taken over, and seems to reign. But I was unfamiliar with staff New Yorker writer Doreen St. Félix until now, when Ed Driscoll wrote this post about her writing, particularly her comments on X which are straight up anti-white and anti-Jewish. St. Félix was born in Brooklyn but is of Haitian parentage, and her X output (now shuttered) features pearls of wisdom such as these (see the Driscoll post):

Of course white people don’t bathe. It’s in their blood. Their lack of hygiene literally started the bubonic plague, lice, syphillis [sic] etc.

ALSO “all humans” are not the reason the earth is in peril. white capitalism is. we lived in perfect harmony w/ the earth pre whiteness.

And then there’s this gem:

it’s tricknological, when white people invoke the holocaust, allows them to step out of their whiteness and slip on fake oppression.

Needless to say, if she wrote anything of the sort about anyone other than white people in general (and Jews in particular, who are the implied though unstated subjects of that last quote), Félix wouldn’t be on the New Yorker’s payroll.

I see that most of these tweets seem to have been written in 2014 (or starting in 2014), three years before she was hired by The New Yorker. She is now thirty-three years old, so she was either twenty-two or twenty-three at the time; no child. As far as I can tell, neither she nor the magazine have made statements in response to the highlighting of these tweets, except that she has now deleted her X account.

Trump and Putin rendezvoused in Alaska and aren’t telling

The New Neo Posted on by

Their words after the meeting were cautiously optimistic and purposely vague. We don’t know if any real progress was made although they seemed to be saying there was: “productive” according to Trump; “a starting point” according to Putin.

I certainly didn’t expect much more, especially since – as I wrote yesterday – Trump tried to lower expectations prior to the meeting by saying it had a twenty-five percent chance of failure, and, “Twenty-five percent chance of failure is Trump’s version of ‘pretty high chance of failure.'”:

So what now? After the meeting, Trump stated:

Trump said Putin’s observations were “profound,” and added that he would talk to NATO and Zelenskyy to update them about the discussions with Russia. “It’s ultimately up to them,” he said.

“Many points were agreed to. There are just a very few that are left. Some are not that significant. One is probably the most significant, but we have a very good chance of getting there,” Trump said, without elaborating.

The two didn’t take questions.

NOTE: I don’t know where else to put this essentially meaningless observation, so I’ll put it here: Both Trump and Putin have surnames with five letters, and they share three of those letters.

And still another thing about the Democrats’ spin on DC crime – it’s imagology

The New Neo Posted on by

The Democrats’ message that violent crime isn’t bad in Washington DC is a prime example of what Milan Kundera called “imagology.” I’ve written about imagology before; it’s one of the earliest themes on this blog, with my first post on the subject occurring in 2005. Here’s an excerpt that’s very relevant now, twenty years later [emphasis added]:

Here’s a quote from Kundera’s 1990 work Immortality that I think bears another look. He is talking about the ascendance of imagery (which he refers to as “imagology,” meaning suggestive images and slogans) over ideology, or even over reality :

“For example, communists used to believe that in the course of capitalist development the proletariat would gradually grow poorer and poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe workers were driving to work in their own cars, [the communists] felt like shouting that reality was deceiving them. Reality was stronger than ideology. And it is in this sense that imagology surpassed it: imagology is stronger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving when people at home had nothing to eat. My Paris neighbor spends his time an an office, where he sits for eight hours facing an office colleague, then he sits in his car and drives home, turns on the TV, and when the announcer informs him that in the latest public opinion poll the majority of Frenchmen voted their country the safest in Europe (I recently read such a report), he is overjoyed and opens a bottle of champagne without ever learning that three thefts and two murders were committed on his street that very day.”

Democrats would like the American public to be like that Paris neighbor of Kundera’s, the one who doesn’t know about the murders in his own neighborhood because the government doesn’t want him to know and the press is cooperating with the government. The left believes it can create an alternate reality that would override the actual reality that people face, and/or convince them that their reality is an illusion, and/or get them to reframe their own reality. In other words, the left is counting on the idea that – as Kundera wrote – “imagology is stronger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was.” They are counting on people’s willingness to be shaped by the party line, and they are counting on the press (and leftist commentators on social media) to parrot and amplify the party line.

It’s apparent that the leftist imagology process hasn’t quite gotten to the point in the US that the left would prefer. The left keeps striving towards the goal, however, and I see no signs of them giving up. Trump’s election and especially his re-election – and his curious ability to tell blunt and basic truths in language anyone can understand – is a huge threat to them. Trump is counting on reality triumphing over leftist imagology; that is, if he fixes the border, if he reduces crime, if he helps bring peace to warring nations, the majority of Americans will reject the leftist imagology that says that he can’t do it or that it can’t be done or that it’s not even a problem that needs fixing.

Melania Trump might be suing Hunter Biden …

The New Neo Posted on by

… for defamation. Here’s the story:

Hunter Biden, in an interview with British journalist Andrew Callaghan, stated, “Epstein introduced Melania to Trump. The connections are, like, so wide and deep.” He doubled down with “Jeffrey Epstein introduced Melania, and that’s how Melania and the first lady and the president met,” repeating these false remarks despite their glaring lack of credibility. These inflammatory claims hinge on assertions made by Michael Wolff, an author with a notorious reputation for fabricating stories.

Wolff gained some notoriety back in 2018 with a book on Trump; I wrote about him previously in this post as well as this one.

Hunter Biden is quite a piece of work. It occurs to me that one of his most salient characteristics is his utter lack of shame. The laptop revelations seem to have scarcely made a dent in his willingness to give public interviews and in his arrogance, and his previous protection from legal consequences have emboldened an already very very bold and very corrupt man.

As far as stopping the accusations against Trump and Melania go and apologizing, Hunter’s answer is succinct and characteristically profane:

Note especially that duping chuckle at the end, and the pseudo-charming smile.

If it does come to a lawsuit, can Melania win? She’s a public figure – and so is Hunter Biden. As such, she has a high standard of proof over which to hurdle, because of Sullivan. She would have to prove Hunter’s actual malice, or knowledge that his assertion was a lie, or reckless disregard for the truth. Hunter is overwhelmingly malicious, mendacious, and reckless. But proving those things were operating in this case might be difficult.

Then again, Trump has long held that he wants to test Sullivan. So this case would test it, I suppose.

The Trump-Putin meeting looms

The New Neo Posted on by

Do they use the word “summit” anymore?

And can you imagine Kamala Harris meeting Putin?

Trump is trying to lower expectations somewhat:

President Trump estimated Thursday there is a 25% chance that his Alaska summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin will end in failure — adding that a “more important” meeting could take place later with both Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The dealmaker-in-chief insisted in an interview with Fox News Radio host Brian Kilmeade that he is the only reason the Russian dictator is coming to the table, and told reporters later in the Oval Office the sitdown in Anchorage would just be a first step.

Twenty-five percent chance of failure is Trump’s version of “pretty high chance of failure.”

There’s also this:

“I’m the toughest one that he’s ever had to deal with. He’s never had to deal with anybody like me.”

Whether or not Trump is the toughest person Putin has ever dealt with, it’s certainly the case that Putin has probably never dealt with anyone like Trump because Trump is sui generis. And it’s possible that Putin is the toughest person Trump has ever dealt with.

Trump is saying that this meeting with Putin is preliminary, and if it goes well there is likely to be a followup with Zelensky and Putin. If the meeting with Putin doesn’t go well, then “I’m not calling anybody, I’m going home.”

And indeed, some in the MSM are calling it a summit: here’s CNN with “Trump and Putin to meet in Alaska for historic summit,” and here’s The Hill with “New details emerge on Trump, Putin summit in Alaska.”

Why are the Democrats choosing to align with criminals?

The New Neo Posted on by

Isn’t that a losing game? Don’t the vast majority of US voters want to be safe from crime?

And after all, didn’t Democrats learn their lesson about this during the election of 1988, when one of the reasons Dukakis lost is that he was perceived to have been responsible for a prisoner furlough program that let a convicted murderer out for the weekend and the man then proceeded to commit assault and rape?

Well, 1988 was a long time ago and some things have changed – although not, I think, the fact that most people want to be free from violent crime. However, my guess – and it’s only a guess – is that Democrats are aligning with criminals for a reason, and the reason is that their constituency has boiled down to the following: actual criminals, aspirational criminals, the women who love criminals, rich people who have enough money to set up enclaves to protect themselves from criminals, people who hate the police for whatever reason, and virtue signalers for whom the perceived virtue of being forgiving towards criminals is more important than other considerations and whose own safety has never been seriously compromised (that is, they’ve never been mugged by reality).

Those groups added together may constitute the majority of the people in blue cities, and so this may be perceived by the left as a winning platform in such places. At the moment, Democrats seem to be concentrating on consolidating their power in blue blue areas and then hoping to fan out from there.

That’s the only explanation I can come up with right now.

Aiming towards evil: Lenin and music

The New Neo Posted on by

A while back I was looking up one of my favorite films, The Lives of Others, and I came across this quote at Wiki:

…Maxim Gorky [said] that Lenin’s favorite piece of music was Beethoven’s Appassionata. Gorky recounted a discussion with Lenin:

“And screwing up his eyes and chuckling, [Lenin] added without mirth:

“‘But I can’t listen to music often, it affects my nerves, it makes me want to say sweet nothings and pat the heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty. But today we mustn’t pat anyone on the head or we’ll get our hand bitten off; we’ve got to hit them on the heads, hit them without mercy, though in the ideal we are against doing any violence to people. Hm-hm—it’s a hellishly difficult office!'”

It’s not easy being a dictator. Apparently, one always has to make sure nothing soft enters the psyche.

And speaking of evil, the German police and SS men and soldiers who massacred unarmed civilians – including women and children – in Eastern Europe as part of the Einsatzgruppen had to be steeled to do their dirty dirty work. They didn’t start by murdering Jews; first on the agenda were the Polish leaders and intelligentsia. And in terms of “steeling,” this is how Hitler himself put it at that point:

As stated by Hitler: “… there must be no Polish leaders; where Polish leaders exist they must be killed, however harsh that sounds”.

“However harsh that sounds.”

They were given liberal supplies of alcohol. Later, after much brutal and barbarous killing of Jews including women and children, it was this way for the killers:

After a time, Himmler found that the killing methods used by the Einsatzgruppen were inefficient: they were costly, demoralising for the troops, and sometimes did not kill the victims quickly enough. Many of the troops found the massacres to be difficult if not impossible to perform. Some of the perpetrators suffered physical and mental health problems, and many turned to drink.As much as possible, the Einsatzgruppen leaders militarized the genocide. The historian Christian Ingrao notes an attempt was made to make the shootings a collective act without individual responsibility. Framing the shootings in this way was not psychologically sufficient for every perpetrator to feel absolved of guilt. Browning notes three categories of potential perpetrators: those who were eager to participate right from the start, those who participated in spite of moral qualms because they were ordered to do so, and a significant minority who refused to take part. A few men spontaneously became excessively brutal in their killing methods and their zeal for the task. Commander of Einsatzgruppe D, SS-Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf, particularly noted this propensity towards excess, and ordered that any man who was too eager to participate or too brutal should not perform any further executions.

During a visit to Minsk in August 1941, Himmler witnessed an Einsatzgruppen mass execution first-hand and concluded that shooting Jews was too stressful for his men. By November he made arrangements for any SS men suffering ill health from having participated in executions to be provided with rest and mental health care. He also decided a transition should be made to gassing the victims, especially the women and children, and ordered the recruitment of expendable native auxiliaries who could assist with the murders. Gas vans, which had been used previously to kill mental patients, began to see service by all four main Einsatzgruppen from 1942. However, the gas vans were not popular with the Einsatzkommandos, because removing the dead bodies from the van and burying them was a horrible ordeal. Prisoners or auxiliaries were often assigned to do this task so as to spare the SS men the trauma.

The Severity Order was issued to the army in October of 1941:

In this eastern theatre, the soldier is not only a man fighting in accordance with the rules of the art of war, but also the ruthless standard bearer of a national conception and the avenger of bestialities which have been inflicted upon German and racially related nations. For this reason the soldier must learn fully to appreciate the necessity for the severe but just retribution that must be meted out to the subhuman species of Jewry.

In other words, harden yourselves to the killing of innocent civilians, often women and children, not as unintended collateral damage but in cold blood. For some, this appears to have been rather easy:

British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper noted that although Himmler had forbidden photographs of the killings, it was common for both the men of the Einsatzgruppen and for bystanders to take pictures to send to their loved ones, which he felt suggested widespread approval of the massacres.

Few objected, very few.