And now, finally, we get answers to the burning questions of our time

The New Neo Posted on by

See this:

The guy who created the Devil’s Triangle drinking game calls himself the “founder” of it in the yearbook, and a guy going to different college than Kavanaugh sent a sworn letter to the FBI states that Kavanaugh’s friend from high school taught him the Devil’s Triangle game, and it is in fact just quarters with three glasses.

Also, an old joke book about farts says that “boof” means “fart.”

One bit I think Sexton missed — Charles Lane, Washington Post reporter, and “Chuck” from the movie Shattered Glass — knew Chris “Squi” Garrett in high school, and says he does in fact say “fffffFUCK you.”

And so yeah, “fffffFourth of July” is just a reference to the way Garrett said the f-word.

I’m not going to bother to do any in-depth (as it were) research on this, but to the best of my recollection the whole idea that the terms meant something extremely R-rated came from none other than that fountain of truth and rectitude, Michael Avenatti. I wondered why everybody and his brother in the Democratic Party seemed to be adopting the arguments of that particular scumbag as though he was some sort of unimpeachable source, but I supposed they were just following the lead of party eminences, who were doing ye olde pig-f***ing thing again.

And here is Avenatti’s tweet about it, from September 23,which I think may be the origin of the charges:

By the way, my very first post about the Kavanaugh allegations, which I published when Feinstein dropped them in the eleventh hour and we didn’t even know the name of the accuser yet, was the one entitled “Dianne Feinstein accuses Brett Kavanaugh of having f***ed a pig in high school.” I don’t usually start out with that sort of tone, and none of the more salacious accusations had been launched yet, but it was already obvious what they were trying to do and that they were more than willing to go as low as they felt they needed to go in order to do it.

And that has turned out to be extremely low indeed.

The real collusion

The New Neo Posted on by

This:

Congressional investigators have confirmed that a top FBI official met with Democratic Party lawyers to talk about allegations of Donald Trump-Russia collusion weeks before the 2016 election, and before the bureau secured a search warrant targeting Trump’s campaign…

It means the FBI had good reason to suspect the dossier was connected to the DNC’s main law firm and was the product of a Democratic opposition-research effort to defeat Trump — yet failed to disclose that information to the FISA court in October 2016, when the bureau applied for a FISA warrant to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

“This is a bombshell that unequivocally shows the real collusion was between the FBI and Donald Trump’s opposition — the DNC, Hillary and a Trump-hating British intel officer — to hijack the election, rather than some conspiracy between Putin and Trump,” a knowledgeable source told me.

[ADDENDUM: I’m not sure where to put this doxxing story, but it’s horrific.]

[ADDENDUM II: More Lindsey Graham, here.]

“Key Republicans happy with report”

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, if they’re happy, I’m happy.

Happiness is relative, of course. I won’t be happy till Kavanaugh is voted in, which is not even remotely certain to occur. There have been so many ups and downs (mostly downs) in this case so far that I cannot trust any of the “key” players (the vulnerable Democrats and the GOP wafflers, that is) to do the right thing.

It’s interesting that Heitkamp, vulnerable Democrat of North Dakota, has apparently announced that she’s a “no.” It had been speculated that she might be a “yes” because polls had shown she might lose her seat because of a “no” vote. Her “no” decision (if it holds, which I’m assuming it will) indicates to me that she either doesn’t think it will cause her to lose in November, thinks she will lose no matter what in November, and that in any case she considers blocking Kavanaugh worth the loss for her. If the latter, she may know that she will have a nice cushy life afterwards; the Democrats will certainly take care of her. Taking one for the team isn’t really that arduous; maybe she’s tired of the Senate anyway (I could hardly blame her) and wants a change.

I noticed today that Steven Hayward at Powerline has written a post entitled “Let us now praise Democratic Party incompetence.” In it, he writes:

Amidst the justified outrage at the Democratic Party’s actions in the Kavanaugh nomination fight, let us step back for a moment and revel for a bit in the sheer political incompetence of Democrats.

He then goes on to list as demonstrations of that incompetence several reasons, chief among them the fact that the Democrats have lost voter support in the midterms as a result. I hope that Hayward is correct about all of this and maybe he is. But it strikes me that this is not an example of incompetence on their part—it’s an example of a choice.

Democrats are fighting a political war in the short term and would dearly like to win. But I think this Kavanaugh ploy was a gamble of theirs, and they are betting on the following: (1) they may be winning the cultural war, which is the long war compared to the short-term political war in the election of 2018, and (2) a very key part of that long war for the Democrats involves the courts. They rightly see the bulk of their power as residing there, and that power isn’t quite as subject to the vagaries of election years, particularly in the Supreme Court, where justices are appointed for life.

The Democrats are terrified of a conservative Court. The last time SCOTUS was conservative was before FDR, and that’s a long time ago. Not only have Democrats made a lot of strides because of Court decisions, but it may just be the main vehicle for the strides they have made. The Court is the branch of government least subject to the voters’ will. The voters cannot turn the justices out by voting against them. Impeachment is very very difficult because it requires such a huge majority in the Senate.

Simply put, the Court is the Democrats’ most powerful governmental weapon over time. They may feel that they simply cannot afford to let it go, and be willing to sacrifice short term goals to accomplish that. Hopefully, it will not work this time, but I think the idea that it will work is why they have pulled out all the stops on this one.

The fat lady has not sung.

In the piece by Steven Hayward, he quotes today’s article by Bret Stephens in the NY Times. You may recall that Stephens is a rabid NeverTrumper who has written he would rather Hillary Clinton had won. But this is what Stephens wrote today:

For the first time since Donald Trump entered the political fray, I find myself grateful that he’s in it. I’m reluctant to admit it and astonished to say it . . .

I’m grateful because Trump has not backed down in the face of the slipperiness, hypocrisy and dangerous standard-setting deployed by opponents of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. I’m grateful because ferocious and even crass obstinacy has its uses in life, and never more so than in the face of sly moral bullying. I’m grateful because he’s a big fat hammer fending off a razor-sharp dagger.

That is quite extraordinary. The transparent hypocrisy, viciousness, and injustice of the Kavanaugh attack (and recall that Kavanaugh is a moderate conservative formerly allied with the Bush family) seems to have brought the likes of Brett Stephens into the pro-Trump camp, at least temporarily. I don’t know whether he’ll be turning back, but eyes once opened can be difficult to close. The Kavanaugh attack has offended a lot of moderate Republicans on a very deep level, and they see the Democrats as a ruthless enemy whereas before they may have seen them as part of a genteel game.

This is no game.

The UN court, the US, and Iran

The New Neo Posted on by

This headline made me chuckle: “UN court tells US to ease Iran sanctions in blow for Trump.”

Why would anyone care what the UN says, or consider this a “blow”?

More:

It remains unclear whether the judgment will be anything more than symbolic because both Washington and Tehran have ignored ICJ decisions in the past.

To the propagandists who wrote that Agence France Presse piece I’m quoting: no, it doesn’t remain “unclear.”

More:

The judges at the court in The Hague ruled unanimously that the sanctions on some goods breached a 1955 “Treaty of Amity” between Iran and the US that predates Iran’s Islamic Revolution.

Those judges at The Hague; always making with the jokes.

Pompeo’s response was to terminate the 1955 treaty.

If you want to learn my general opinion of international law, please see this post I wrote back in 2005. Excerpt:

Why were we able to hold the Nuremberg trials, and to sentence Nazi war criminals and afterwards carry out the sentences? Quite simply, it is because we had won the war. That is what gave us jurisdiction, and that is what gave us the actual men to put in the actual docks. If we had attempted to put them on trial before that, it would have been merely a form of propagandist theater, a way to label them as war criminals but not to actually do anything about it. We would have lacked jurisdiction, one of the major elements of any case. Simply declaring that we had jurisdiction would not have made it so–except in our own minds, for propaganda purposes.

So, what of the International Criminal Court in the Hague, set up to try war criminals? It only has jurisdiction over those countries who consent to give it jurisdiction, because it has no natural territory (the Hague, after all, is rather small, as is the Netherlands) which it governs. Furthermore, it makes rulings only with the consent of the signatories, since it has no method of enforcement in the face of defiance (the order part of law and order). Therefore, the Hague court is merely a propaganda machine, albeit one with a large worldwide audience. As such, it can (and most definitely will), be used for propaganda purposes–to further a certain agenda or agendas, such as focusing on the actions of the US allies in the Iraq War. It would go after the US too, of course, if we had signed onto the Court, but we have not done so.

The Times is now accusing Trump of tax fraud

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s no surprise that the NY Times has obtained Donald Trump’s tax records, no doubt from some brave member of the The Resistance.

At least, the paper claims to have obtained them, and I’m going to assume that is the case.

Here’s the article, and a few excerpts:

But The Times’s investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.

Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.

These maneuvers met with little resistance from the Internal Revenue Service, The Times found.

Trying to interpret through the fog of the usual Times propaganda, I come up with this: Trump and the entire family set up a tax shelter of some sort, on the advice of attorneys and/or accountants. This was way back when the tax rate was much much higher, and complicated tax shelters were standard for anyone with a large amount of money.

And the fact that the IRS didn’t offer any “resistance” (interesting and revealing word, no?) means what? My guess is that the IRS always looked at the Trump tax return pretty carefully, as they do the returns of most mega-rich people with complex holdings and earnings, and the IRS decided the shelter was legal.

One of Trump’s attorneys has issued this statement:

The New York Times’s allegations of fraud and tax evasion are 100 percent false, and highly defamatory,” Mr. Harder said. “There was no fraud or tax evasion by anyone. The facts upon which The Times bases its false allegations are extremely inaccurate.”

Mr. Harder sought to distance Mr. Trump from the tax strategies used by his family, saying the president had delegated those tasks to relatives and tax professionals. “President Trump had virtually no involvement whatsoever with these matters,” he said. “The affairs were handled by other Trump family members who were not experts themselves and therefore relied entirely upon the aforementioned licensed professionals to ensure full compliance with the law.”

According to this article, the letter concludes with this sentence:

Should the Times state or imply that President Trump participated in fraud, tax evasion, or any other crime, it will be exposing itself to substantial liability and damages for defamation.

The Times is feeding its readers what they want. And it feels fully protected by Sullivan, which gave news outlets license to say virtually anything they want about a public figure they hate.

Christine Ford and truth

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not going to write much about Ford’s ex-boyfriend’s letter—the one that indicates she’s been telling many lies during her testimony—for the simple reasons that (a) others have done so quite thoroughly, and (b) I’m not sure that he’s telling the truth, although I hope we can find out soon. I also refer you to this article about her front doors. Make of it what you will.

But Rachel Mitchell’s report had already shed a lot of light on the inconsistencies, evasions, and in some cases lies (that flying to the hearing was not possible for her, due to her phobia about flying) that Ford has already told. These problems are important and material, not tangential. They cast doubt on her basic story and they indicate manipulative motives (quite possibly of the politically oriented variety) as well.

Initially I felt that Ford at least thought she was telling the truth, and that she probably had a distorted and/or “recovered” memory. Now quite a bit of doubt has been shed on that theory, as well, to be replaced by the very real possibility that she made it up out of the whole cloth, or certainly knew that Kavanaugh was not involved in whatever incident she may have experienced.

Another thing I haven’t seen too much discussion about is that Mark Judge had already provided her with all the information she needed to formulate an untrue accusation, if that’s in fact what she did. He went to school with Kavanaugh, and wrote a book about his (Judge’s) own drinking problems as a young man. I haven’t read the book, but it’s in the public domain and Ford had full access to it. Did she ever read it? That in itself would not be proof of anything much, because she might have read it with the completely innocent motive of reading a memoir by someone who grew up around the same time as she did and within the same milieu, and whom she knew at least slightly.

However, I’d love to know if she read it and when she read it. Did she read it at all? If so, was it not too long before she told her therapist about the Kavanaugh incident in 2012? Was it between then and the letter she wrote to her House representative that started this whole nasty mess?

And how odd that Democrats didn’t think this disqualified Obama

The New Neo Posted on by

But the real question is—did he throw ice in anybody’s face as an “excuse to brawl”?

By the way, Obama graduated from high school four years before Kavanaugh, so he’s roughly the same age although a bit older. A similar generation, really. As Obama present them, his high school years were a lot more “lost” than Kavanaugh’s.

Not that I care whether Obama drank or did drugs in high school. What I’m interested in is Democratic hypocrisy.

[ADDENDUM: I’m going to add something I mentioned in one of my comments to this post. It’s relevant to the subject at hand, but it’s from this post I wrote in 2006, about the Communist erasure of history by erasing photos of people who have become unpersons.

Excerpt:

So why was Clementis erased from the photo, if his presence was so easy to remember? For future generations, of course, it might be possible to eliminate even the appearance of any jarring notes in the supposedly harmonious symphony of the history of Czech Communism, and so some of the erasure was undoubtedly for them.

But for those contemporaneous with the incident, who knew better, those rewriting history must not have cared how transparent their actions were, because their real aim was probably to teach a different object lesson. Perhaps what they were really saying was not “Clementis the traitor didn’t exist” but rather, “Take heed: if you become a traitor like Clementis, you’ll become an unperson, too.” Perhaps they meant the erasure to be transparent, to demonstrate quite graphically how they had the power to crush a person–not just the body, but the history of the life, as well.

In so doing, they were also relaying another message. They were exhorting the Czech populace to practice what Orwell called “doublethink,” saying, in effect, “Even though we know that you know full well that Clementis existed and was even a member in good standing of the Party at one point, we are also saying that you must will yourself to unremember. If we say he didn’t exist, then he didn’t exist. Who are you going to believe, us or your lying eyes (and your lying memory)?”

Orwell wrote that “doublethink” requires a person:

“…to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.”

The havoc that such mind games wrought on the people of Czechoslovakia is a major theme of Kundera’s work. The effect was pervasive, and the tension reached into almost every endeavor, including love and sex–subjects that occur with great frequency in Kundera’s work, as well.]

Impeach them all!!! Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the lot of them!!!

The New Neo Posted on by

Why?

THEY WERE DRINKING!!!!!

Don’t believe me? Here you go:

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg admits to sharing some wine with her colleagues and not being “100 percent sober” for President Obama’s State of the Union address in January.

During Obama’s speech, which lasted just under an hour, many viewers on social media pointed out that the 81-year-old liberal justice appeared to be snoozing.

“The audience for the most part is awake, because they’re bobbing up and down, and we sit there, stone-faced, sober judges. But we’re not, at least I wasn’t, 100 percent sober,” Ginsburg said during a talk at The George Washington University on Thursday night, according to a report by The Blaze.

“Because before we went to the State of the Union, Justice Kennedy brought in … it was an Opus something or other, very fine California wine, and I vowed this year, just sparkling water, stay away from the wine, but in the end, the dinner was so delicious, it needed wine,” Ginsburg said.

Fortunately Kennedy just retired, saving us the trouble of impeaching him.

“Survivors” are the new sacred class in academia, and criticizing them the new heresy

The New Neo Posted on by

The pattern is clear.

Georgetown University refuses to sanction Professor Christine Fair for one of the most egregiously vile and violent comments I’ve ever seen on Twitter, whereas Catholic University comes down hard on Dean Rainford for merely stating a rather mild truth critical of already-debunked “accuser” Julie Swetnick.

If I had to choose only one of the two disparate responses, I’d chose Georgetown’s, which at least comes down on the side of liberty, and then let the market decide if students wish to attend Prof. Fair’s (a more inappropriate name was never seen) classes.

Catholic University’s response, on the other hand is craven and anti-liberty. And it’s not a one-off. A similar event has occurred at USC, where tenured professor James Moore is in trouble for saying that 2+2=4.

Yes, for merely stating an obvious, non-abusive, inoffensive (except to SJWs) truth about accusers (otherwise known as “survivors” and “victims,” because even false accusers are to be regarded as victims, right?):

Nearly 100 students at the University of Southern California attended a rally at noon on Monday demanding a tenured professor be fired after he sent a reply-all email last Thursday to the student body noting that “accusers sometimes lie.”

“If the day comes you are accused of some crime or tort of which you are not guilty, and you find your peers automatically believing your accuser, I expect you find yourself a stronger proponent of due process than you are now,” emailed Professor James Moore.

The email — in response to a reply-all email that urged students to “Believe Survivors” on the day of Christine Ford’s testimony — triggered what one school admin said was “hundreds” of emails from concerned students and alumni since Thursday.

USC students Audrey Mechling and Joelle Montier then organized a Facebook rally against the engineering professor, entitled “Times Up for James Moore.”

These anti-free-speech zealots can rally all they want; that’s free speech, too. It’s intensely depressing that they can draw any sort of crowd at all, but that’s what decades of leftist control of schools has wrought. The bigger problem is the response of USC’s administration in the person of Dean Jack Knott, the dancing bear du jour:

“What [Professor Moore] sent was extremely inappropriate, hurtful, insensitive. We are going to try to do everything we can to try to create a better school, to educate the faculty,” said Dean Knott to the crowd.

He then announced that USC would take action.

“This is going to be a multi-pronged effort. We are going to have a faculty meeting later this week around implicit bias, sensitivity towards [sexual assault]….” he said.

Isn’t that special, Dean Knott. Maybe the crocodile will eat you last. Send whatever portion of your faculty still retaining the values of logic and truth to the re-education camps for the proper training in right-thinking. And by the way, what Professor Moore said was actually extremely appropriate. If it hurt some sensitive SJW creatures who would like to do away with the protections Western civilization has struggled to put in place against false accusations, well then, tough.

Moore’s apology was tepid, and his defense of himself robust:

It is never my intention to hurt anyone. My intention is to protect more students than we currently do from being punished for acts of misconduct they have not committed. Any of us might stand accused of any number of misdeeds, and each of us at that point will want to be treated fairly under due process.

In light of all of this, consider the widespread criticism President Trump has gotten for mocking Christine Ford in a speech he gave recently. I happen to think he should have refrained for strategic reasons because (as the article demonstrates) the wavering senators who are gumming up the works didn’t like it. What he said may have essentially been true, but I think it didn’t help achieve the goal at all, and gave Ford’s defenders and Kavanaugh’s enemies grist for their mill. It was also unnecessary; Ford’s veracity problems and memory lapses have already been pointed out, and he was preaching to the choir.

On the other hand, I’ve been wrong many times about Trump’s controversial tweets and statements and their effect. I think he was trying to highlight the inconsistencies in Ford’s story in a way that really sinks in for people. He knew that his statements would get wide coverage, of course, much wider than if he’d said the same thing in a more restrained way.

Who knows? I suspect that on the whole what Trump did was a bad idea. But I also think that Ford’s lack of truthfulness is coming more and more into focus, and it should be fair game for criticism. Is she a “victim” of something? Who knows? But the lies of accusers are not to be afforded some special kid glove treatment merely because the accusers choose to couch those lies in accusations of sexual abuse, and/or because they are women. And yet that’s the hill most of our universities have chosen to die on.

Meanwhile, Catholic University slaps down speech that criticizes self-described “victims”…

The New Neo Posted on by

…no matter how illogical or implausible their stories.

Earlier today, I wrote about how a disgusting and violent, racist and sexist tweet of Professor Christine Fair got no flak from her employer, Georgetown University. Meanwhile, Dean Will Rainford received some harsh treatment from his employer, Catholic University, for the following tweet:

“Swetnick is 55 y/o. Kavanaugh is 52 y/o. Since when do senior girls hang with freshmen boys? If it happened when Kavanaugh was a senior, Swetnick was an adult drinking with&by her admission, having sex with underage boys. In another universe, he would be victim & she the perp!”

For this rather mild criticism of the abominable Swetnick, Rainford was suspended from his job for the remainder of the semester and apparently forced to apologize. I say “forced” because it’s hard to believe that he issued this statement voluntarily. I suspect he did it to avoid becoming a pariah (and perhaps to have his very own false allegations of sexual assault lodged against him). This is sickening, worthy of the Soviet Union:

Rainford issued an apology Thursday, saying that his tweet “unfortunately degraded” Swetnick.

“My tweet suggested that she was not a victim of sexual assault,” he wrote. “I offer no excuse. It was impulsive and thoughtless and I apologize.”

The excuse is as plain as the nose on anyone’s face: Swetnick is lying, and even those who originally believed her are well aware at this point that it’s all lies on her part. Her story has zero credibility on its face, she has recanted most of it, and her record gives her zero credibility in general (see this, this, and this). .

But this man is paying the price for even questioning her story. The university’s president John Garvey has called Rainford’s tweet “unacceptable” and says it “demonstrated a lack of sensitivity to the victim.”

What “victim” are you talking about? Swetnick is a victimizer, not a victim.

Garvey added:

“While it was appropriate for [Rainford] to apologize and to delete his Twitter and Facebook accounts, this does not excuse the serious lack of judgment and insensitivity of his comments.”

I wonder what Garvey would have had to say if he’d been the president of Georgetown. Would he have called Christine Fair’s comments “insensitive” and say they showed a “serious lack of judgment”? I doubt it.

Just to refresh your memory, here’s what Fair wrote:

Georgetown seemed to take it right in stride.

[ADDENDUM: I want to call your attention to this. It’s part of a post I wrote about a year ago:

As Allan Bloom wrote in the late 80s, describing events that had occurred at Cornell during the late 60s:

“[S]tudents discovered that pompous teachers who catechized them about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears.”

“Teachers” includes “administrators,” of course. One difference, though, between the 60s and now, is that I don’t think there’s quite as much talk by professors about academic freedom.

Except, apparently, at Georgetown—if you’re a leftist calling for the murder and castration of white males.]

And why should anyone on earth care?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s my question: why should anyone on earth care if college student Brett Kavanaugh once got into a bar fight that resulted in no charges—or once precipitated a bar fight by reacting to an insult by throwing the contents of a drink in someone’s face—about 35 years ago, and has done nothing of the sort since?

Why should we care? We shouldn’t. It is irrelevant. It is normal guy behavior. It is nothing.

What’s more, those who are trying desperately to make it out to be something don’t even believe that themselves. They are doing this solely—and I mean solely—for political reasons, and that fact is nakedly transparent.

No other SCOTUS nominee has ever been asked about anything of the sort, and if asked no one has cared about the answer. The FBI has looked with great thoroughness, many times over, into any police records or reports about Kavanaugh and found them to be a big nothingburger.

This is all a huge charade by the left to gain political power. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad and dangerous.

But it’s apparently a useful charade. One of its purposes is to provide cover for any senators who want to vote “no” on Kavanaugh. Another is to de-legitimize Kavanaugh forever in the eyes of half the public if he does become a SCOTUS justice. Still another is to serve notice on any future Trump nominees that they better not have a history of any altercations or transgressions in their lives back to the cradle, because the left will be uncovering anything other than Dalai Lama behavior. What’s more, if the transgressions don’t exist, the left will invent them.