The Covington chronicles: on hating the face of a teenage boy

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the most chilling aspects of the hatred fanned by the duplicitous reporting on the videotaped incident regarding the Covington students and the 60-something Native American has been the venomous rage directed against the face of one of the students, as well as the conclusions drawn about the expression on the face and what it might signify about the person.

I’ve talked about Orwell before in connection with all of this, and I’m going to bring him up again, because the anger unleashed resembles Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate (although this hasn’t been limited to two minutes at a time). In Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell wrote of the feeling stirred up in the audience—interestingly enough, by a propaganda film designed for the purpose:

A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.

The image that provoked a truly hideous rage in an enormous number of people on the left and some on the right was of a teenaged boy named Nicholas Sandmann, whose statement can be found here along with the video screenshot that seems to have sparked the most outrage:

“Bullying” doesn’t even begin to describe what has been done to Sandmann by supposedly responsible and thoughtful adults. Even if the original story of what occurred had been true—and it was most definitely not—the depth of the rage would be way out of line.

Here’s just one example:

From the article by Ruth Graham, which shows us what the author is fantasizing based on the manipulated story and video:

I think the real reason the clip has spread is simpler: It’s the kid’s face. The face of self-satisfaction and certitude, of edginess expressed as cruelty. The face remains almost completely still as his peers hoot in awed delight at his bravado. The face is both punchable and untouchable. Many observers recognized it right away.

What is it they “recognized”? A face that is now permissible to hate, apparently; they’re not shy about writing about their hate and signing their names to it. That face is white, male, and supposedly “privileged” (whether they know a single thing about that person’s actual life circumstances or not). I have come to think of it in a kind of shorthand as hatred towards the “frat boy” in their minds. And it’s not new, although I’ve never before seen a national eruption of this hatred expressed towards someone who is not yet an adult.

This hatred is bigoted and prejudiced, pure and simple. The hatred’s origins lie not just in the work the media had undertaken to shape its audience towards feeling this hatred—although that is most definitely part of it—but it also is an opportunity for the viewer to draw in all sorts of historical references to other white men and/or boys they have grown to hate, and to make often-absurd parallels.

Graham obliges by telling us who those other white men she hates might be, the ones Sandmann supposedly resembles and conjures up in her fevered brain [emphasis mine]:

The face is in this photo of a clutch of white young men crowding around a single black man at a lunch counter sit-in in Virginia in the 1960s, and in many other images of jeering white men from that era. The face is the rows of Wisconsin high school boys flashing Nazi salutes in a prom picture last year. The face is Brett Kavanaugh—then a student at an all-boys Catholic prep school—“drunkenly laughing” as he allegedly held down Christine Blasey Ford. Anyone who knew the popular white boys in high school recognized it: the confident gaze, the eyes twinkling with menace, the smirk. The face of a boy who is not as smart as he thinks he is, but is exactly as powerful. The face that sneers, “What? I’m just standing here,” if you flinch or cry or lash out. The face knows that no matter how you react, it wins.

There are hints there of what’s going on in the minds of the haters. A reversal in which the white Sandmann—who actually had been “crowded” by the Native American, Phillips, and was also the object of bigoted racial taunts towards whites from the Black Israelites—becomes falsely identified by Graham with bigoted white aggressors from the past, solely on the basis of their races. Blacks and Native Americans are victims, whites are victimizers, because of the way they look.

The Kavanaugh reference is obvious, and shows the damage done by that entire brouhaha—the stirring up of this same rage against the supposed predations of the “laughing” preppie. Before that, we had the “Jackie” lies in Rolling Stone and the demonization of a fraternity as a result. And prior to that, of course, the Duke lacrosse team falsely accused.

Graham also alludes to more personal origins of this feeling, which for some people at least comes from high school experiences in which some white jock or frat boy was mean to them. That has become a stereotype, reinforced by countless teen flicks and TV shows where this is a stock character. The person is seen as entitled, self-centered, rich, powerful. And hated, well into adulthood.

It’s a pernicious, dangerous game being played here. People such as Graham are now perpetrators who see themselves as the righteous ones. This hatred is growing thanks to the awfulness of Twitter, although it was around long before Twitter ever came to exist. One of the most memorable examples comes from 2003, when TNR’s Jonathan Chait wrote a piece that begins “I hate George Bush” and goes on to say [emphasis mine]:

There, I said it. I think his policies rank him among the worst presidents in U.S. history. And, while I’m tempted to leave it at that, the truth is that I hate him for less substantive reasons, too. I hate the inequitable way he has come to his economic and political achievements and his utter lack of humility (disguised behind transparently false modesty) at having done so. His favorite answer to the question of nepotism—”I inherited half my father’s friends and all his enemies”—conveys the laughable implication that his birth bestowed more disadvantage than advantage. He reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school—the kid who was given a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow earned it. I hate the way he walks—shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks—blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudopopulist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him. I hate his lame nickname-bestowing—a way to establish one’s social superiority beneath a veneer of chumminess (does anybody give their boss a nickname without his consent?). And, while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more.

There seem to be quite a few of us Bush haters. I have friends who have a viscerally hostile reaction to the sound of his voice or describe his existence as a constant oppressive force in their daily psyche. Nor is this phenomenon limited to my personal experience: Pollster Geoff Garin, speaking to The New York Times, called Bush hatred “as strong as anything I’ve experienced in 25 years now of polling.” Columnist Robert Novak described it as a “hatred … that I have never seen in 44 years of campaign watching.”

Bush, at least, was a grown man and a public figure who had put himself in the limelight. Sandmann is not. And yet the root of the rage appears to be the same.

The people hating on Sandmann ought to be ashamed of themselves, but there is no indication of even a flicker of that feeling. Nor are they likely to damp down their hatred based on the evidence of Sandmann’s innocence.

They know that face, you see, and it’s the face of their enemy.

[ADDENDUM: Some people on the left have been deleting their most rabid tweets, apparently. I would bet a large sum of money that this is because they are afraid of lawsuits. These boys were not public figures, so Sullivan would not apply even for the newspeople.]

Reporting on each other: the Covington boys, the Native American, and the smart phone vs. the telescreen

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This story brought me out of my usual Sunday blog-hibernation.]

The news story of the Catholic high school students in MAGA hats who were captured on video supposedly harassing a Native American Vietnam vet was a tale I ignored till now. As presented, it seemed relatively trivial to me—a group of teens acting like jerks. What’s more, I tend to follow the 48-hour rule on stories like that, because so many turn out to be fake or exaggerated.

Since then, it’s come out that the story was an excellent example of Fake News Tweaked to Advance the Narrative.

I’m not going to go into all the Byzantine details, but you can read them (and watch videos) here, here, here, here, here, and at plenty of other sites.

There are sites and people who ran the original story and have since issued corrections or retractions, but so far those sites do not include the WaPo, which has made a big big deal of the story. Even as I write these words the comments there are overwhelmingly in condemnation of the teens based on the original propaganda story, despite a few attempts in the comments by others to give the context and links to the corrective videos (those people are being called paid trolls or alt-right members).

Way too many people reporting this sort of thing and making it go viral on Twitter are uninterested in getting the facts right or telling the truth. They know from previous experience that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on. They count on it, and they know that most of the people ranting and raving about this and wanting to punch that Covington kid in the mouth and ruin his life will never, never ever, believe that the first story wasn’t the real story.

No surprise there. A great many of these bigotry stories are not only false, but they are inversions of the truth. Too many times the offense is actually self-inflicted and the so-called victim is actually the one who (for example) wrote the offending word or drew the offending graphic. And although a video would seem far less easy to fake (although with advancing technology it will become more and more easy to do so, and harder and harder to tell fake from real), it can be rather easily done with clever editing and attention to setting up certain expectations and interpretations.

Here are a few of the details (follow any or all of those previous links to find plenty more):

The teen is not smirking in this clip, and Phillips [the Native American who was supposedly harassed] has an entourage with cameras. One of the Native activists argues with a Covington teen, who argues back. This and other clips have shown the Indian activists racially taunting the teens, saying things like ‘go back to Europe.’ Phillips has claimed that the teens were chanting ‘build the wall!,’ but that isn’t in any of the videos that circulated Saturday. Based on what can actually be seen and heard, it’s looks as if Phillips and his crew sought out Catholic teenagers and tried to make them uncomfortable. And of course, they recorded it…

…[S]o far, there’s no evidence to support that scenario [that the teen students were the racists], only the words of Phillips and his associates. That hasn’t stopped blue-checkmark media figures like former CNN blatherskite Reza Aslan from not only branding the teens as racists but in Aslan’s case musing about inflicting violence on them:

A great deal of hatred has been directed at these kids, and all of this was going on more or less at the same time that the Buzzfeed story about Trump asking Cohen to lie to Congress was being exposed as a whole lot of hooey.

Several things made the Covington story absolutely irresistible to the left. The kids were white (most of them; not all, but the featured ones were). They were male. Some were wearing MAGA hats. They were Catholic. And they were returning from an anti-abortion rally. They were supposedly (according to Phillips, although nowhere in any video has any corroboration surfaced for his claim) chanting that we should build the wall. A perfect storm of terribleness on the part of the teens, right?

These boys weren’t accused of drunken rape, like Brett Kavanaugh and his teen Catholic school buddies. But what we are seeing is exactly the same venomous desire to brand and discredit them as nasty soulless thugs, and from similar motives: anti-white, anti-right, anti-male, anti-Catholic, anti-religion, anti-Trump.

One of the sadder things about this particular incident is that many on the right, as well as the boys’ Catholic school, jumped on the leftist bandwagon—at least to a certain extent. And some jumped on it to a greater extent and have yet (at least, as of this writing) to retract their words.

One of the latter group is Nicholas Frankovitch of National Review. Here is his Twitter feed linking to his terrible article at NR—an article which has very suddenly disappeared. I had read it just a little while ago, but when I checked back just now to link to it, it’s disappeared with no explanation. Maybe by the time I publish this piece, even his Twitter feed will have changed:

One person who did apologize, and quite profusely, was Scott Adams. I’m embedding his video in case you’re interested in watching. As Adams says, “This is fake news that actually damages the lives of children.” What I find especially interesting—and what I haven’t yet heard Adams explain—is how he, of all people, was originally among those taken in by this story:

When Orwell wrote his masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of his brilliant innovations was the telescreen, a way for the government to spy on its people twenty-four hours a day by placing a sort of reverse-TV in all homes and monitoring inhabitants for any un-PC actions or utterances. In the world of his novel (based on a futuristic view of the Communist regimes of the day with which Orwell was familiar), the telescreen’s ubiquity was combined with the always-existing possibility of being informed on by neighbors and relatives and supposed friends. In a Communist totalitarian dictatorship, you could trust no one. And of course, all media were organs of the state.

But at least everybody knew it. There was no pretense of free speech, and the press wasn’t free either. Now we have a pretense of both. And yet no government has to threaten or torture the liars and propagandists of the press; they do this of their own free will. Unfortunately, there are so many of them—they were always present in the MSM but in recent decades they have pretty much taken it over—that their noise has become deafening, amplified by the social media clamor of Twitter.

Today’s smart phones (not envisioned by Orwell) can record, as well. But what they record, how it is edited and used and described and slanted, is the task of social media and the MSM. If the viewers of such videos don’t have a huge amount of skepticism, they are easily taken in by people using videos to mislead. Even people with a great deal of skepticism, such as Scott Adams, can apparently be taken in by the right video presented in a very clever way.

This is obviously a grave danger, because videos (like photos before them) can easily give the appearance of being the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and can whip the crowd up into enormous hatred. And yet the actual truth can be something very, very different.

[ADDENDUM: I now see a too-mild apology from Rick Lowry at NR, and an acknowledgement that he took down Frankovitch’s article that had “relied on the incomplete video.” Kyle Smith has published this piece, also at NR, that discusses the fact that Phillips repeatedly lied.]

[ADDENDUM II: (Hat tip: commenter “Kate.”) The teen-aged Covington student featured in the video has issued a statement which you can find here.]

[ADDENDUM III: And then there are the tweets of this Buzzfeed editor (yes, Buzzfeed). She also appears to be, or to have been in the past, some sort of teacher.]

My UFO

The New Neo Posted on by

As part of a previous discussion about UFOs, commenter “huxley” wrote:

I must say, if one sees a UFO and takes it seriously, it’s a crisis. One asks, or at least I did, what is reality, how do we know what we know, and how much should we trust our authorities.

I never got over seeing that UFO.

Sagan’s response is I must have been hallucinating or lying. By Occam’s Razor that’s an understandable response, if one is merely listening to someone else’s account. I can’t dispute Sagan in terms of logic.

But I saw it and other people saw it with me. Occam’s Razor doesn’t help me, unless I want to live in a world where I can’t trust anything I see because I might be hallucinating.

I believe UFOs have an explanation. I don’t know how weird that explanation might be, though I doubt it’s alien beings flying super-alloy saucers out to say hello or study us.

I saw a UFO too, in 1984. I was with another person (my husband) who saw the same thing, and we later read about the sighting in the paper because it had been seen by so many people. For a while my husband retained an otherworldly explanation (I think he’s since revised it), but from the start I thought there was a much less weird explanation, one that we just didn’t know yet.

Two different personalities, same event. But I must say, it was a very strange sight nevertheless. Definitely gets your attention.

Here’s an article from the NY Times about what I saw:

Throughout northern Westchester County, Dutchess and Putnam Counties and western Connecticut this summer, thousands of residents have reported strange objects in the sky – each usually in a V-shape or a circle, about the size of a football field, absolutely noiseless and outlined in brilliant lights of white, red or green.

Later we had explanations such as this one:

Today we’re going to travel up the Hudson River Valley in New York, and back in time to the summers of 1983 and 1984. On many occasions, on clear summer nights, something terrifying and unexpected appeared in the sky. It was a gigantic craft, black as the sky, rimmed with bright lights in white, red, or green. It would drift over towns with a steady hum, witnessed by many. Police phone lines lit up every time it appeared, and the newspapers were choked with reports. It’s called the Hudson Valley UFO, and it’s one of the mainstays of evidence for those who believe we are not alone…

A year before, in the summer of 1983, Tony Capaldi was a local air traffic controller, and here’s what he told Unsolved Mysteries:

“There’s anywhere from upwards of seven to ten aircraft that fly around in formation, and this is visible from our tower… The first time I observed the formation flying, it looked a little peculiar. From our vantage point in the tower they just appeared to be just one big light because they are flying in tight formation. To estimate the size, maybe two football fields wide.”

And just to be clear, there’s no evidence that these pilots ever intended a UFO hoax. As Discover magazine put it in a 1984 article:

“The area abounds with amateur pilots who fly private planes out of a number of airports, including the strip at Stormville. Several years ago, it seems, a few of the Stormville pilots begin practicing formation flying, first in daylight, then, as their skills improved, at night. Before long, other pilots joined them, and what began as loose groupings of planes became tight formations of aircraft with as little as 6 inches between wingtips.”

If you’re inclined to believe that we have been visited by aliens and that the government knows and is covering it up, that probably won’t even make a dent in your conviction. I tend to believe the opposite, so it satisfies me.

The Dutch way of voluntary death

The New Neo Posted on by

This is a long and very chilling report on how legalized euthanasia operates in the Netherlands. I’ve read about the phenomenon before, but not in as much depth.

The suffering that can occur, particularly at the end of life, can be extremely profound. People want relief, relatives want help, and doctors are placed in the middle of it. Although they’ve taken an oath to help people and hope to save as many from illness and pain as possible, with doctor-assisted suicide doctors are called on to administer death.

Some will not do it, but according to the article, in the Netherlands only 8% of doctors say no. I find that a remarkably small number. We’re not talking about the administration of doses of morphine as life is ebbing and suffering increasing. We’re talking about something else entirely, something much more dramatic and more clearly willful killing, and the Dutch experience is that the slippery slope is very real:

“The process of bringing in euthanasia legislation began with a desire to deal with the most heartbreaking cases – really terrible forms of death,” Boer [an ethics professor] said. “But there have been important changes in the way the law is applied. We have put in motion something that we have now discovered has more consequences than we ever imagined.”

I think they lacked imagination—the basic consequences were quite obvious from the start, and those who didn’t see them were deluded. The article discusses some very harrowing “assisted” deaths that have occurred at the hands of doctors. This one in particular seems to have been horrific, so much so that the doctor is being charged with malpractice:

It involves a dementia sufferer who had asked to be killed when the “time” was “right”, but when her doctor judged this to be the case, she resisted. The patient had to be drugged and restrained by her family before she finally submitted to the doctor’s fatal injection. The doctor who administered the dose – who has not been identified – has defended her actions by saying that she was fulfilling her patient’s request and that, since the patient was incompetent, her protests before her death were irrelevant. Whatever the legal merits of her argument, it hardly changes what must have been a scene of unutterable grimness.

The underlying problem with the advance directives is that they imply the subordination of an irrational human being to their rational former self, essentially splitting a single person into two mutually opposed ones. Many doctors, having watched patients adapt to circumstances they had once expected to find intolerable, doubt whether anyone can accurately predict what they will want after their condition worsens.

Much more at the link.

One of the interesting things about the article is that it discusses an aspect of euthanasia that I’ve long thought was almost ignored: its effect on family members who may not agree with the decision (particularly in non-terminal cases) but cannot stop it, or even family members who agree with it but who are present at the death and traumatized. There are many dangers, in particular that a person who is primarily depressed uses a physical ailment to obtain the suicide he or she would want even without that illness.

Suicide, assisted or otherwise, nearly always hurts the surviving family members very intensely. But knowing that the doctors and the state are helping out must add an extra burden for some of these families. Of course, watching a family member suffer through a natural death (even with the help of morphine, something I’ve witnessed several times) is terrible as well.

[NOTE: Religion doesn’t seem to be much of a factor in the Netherlands.]

[ADDENDUM: Here’s a beautiful and relevant essay by Gerard Vanderleun of American Digest.]

Part umpteen of lies and the lying liars

The New Neo Posted on by

The Steele dossier was a lie.

Bruce Ohr told the FBI and DOJ at the outset that it was most likely a lie.

The FBI used the dossier anyway to apply for a FISA warrant, and did not disclose its shaky, suspect, and clearly biased origins and their specific knowledge of said origins, except in the most general and non-specific of ways.

After testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in which this was revealed, the Democrats (led by Schiff) issued a report supposedly debunking the Nunes (Republican) report. The Schiff report was loaded with lies and coverups.

This past Thursday evening, Buzzfeed issues a story alleging that Mueller has evidence that Michael Cohen was told by Trump to lie to Congress about certain financial dealings he had with Russia. The MSM (which has from the start been firmly in the “get Trump” camp) takes the extremely sketchy Buzzfeed story from the extremely sketchy Buzzfeed source and runs with it, giving it nonstop coverage for almost 24 hours. Their “if the Buzzfeed story is true” disclaimers don’t cause them to wait to see if it is true or to try to independently verify it, nor does it stop them from making it the centerpiece and focus of their constant speculation and condemnation, and airing of impeachment talk.

Mueller’s office takes the extraordinary step of issuing a statement specific to the Buzzfeed story, denying its accuracy. The most rabid members of the anti-Trump crowd tries to rationalize this away.

That’s about where we stand now. And what does the average voter think of it all?

Commenter “Michael” observes in the comments here that propaganda such as Buzzfeed’s often works, and I agree with that sentiment:

The point has been made…the President instructed his lawyer to lie under oath to the congress. That is all that matters.

The release of the retraction from Muller’s office was completely self serving. They had to release as the facts would have eventually come out and they had to get on top of it lest they look bad. But they let the speculation percolate for almost twenty four hours before issuing the denial on a late Friday afternoon thus projecting they image they are on the side of the angles while doing maximum damage to the President.

By Monday morning a whole new crisis will be in the forefront – perhaps it will be reported that due to the government shutdown Melania took the initiative to make the President a ham sandwich and the seven will go ape – and this incident will be nowhere to be seen.

But I guarantee that three weeks from now if asked the average person of democrat persuasion will assure you that the President ordered his lawyer to lie to congress under oath and is thus beyond evil.

However, I disagree with some aspects of that. I do think that Mueller’s denial was self-serving, but I also think it was extraordinary for him to issue it at all, and that it was issued in a fairly timely fashion. Mueller’s office isn’t supposed to comment on every news article that comes down the pike, or really any of them (also, it’s impossible to keep up with the volume). It was only after the MSM picked up on the Buzzfeed article and treated it as though it was the bombshell news of the day, with blanket and exhausting (and quite respectful) coverage, that Mueller’s office realized that this one was having an enormous effect. IMHO, they issued the statement fairly quickly, all things considered.

What the majority of people will take from this I don’t yet know. It wouldn’t surprise me if Michael is correct; I believe he’s most definitely correct about “the average person of democrat persuasion.” But what of independents, for example? What will they think?

It seems to me—and I realize I’m being optimistic here, perhaps foolishly so—that there’s at least a chance that with independents this will reflect very poorly on the MSM, who were given enough time to basically have made fools of themselves in an especially obvious and egregious way.

A person can hope, anyway.

Buzzfeed feeds the buzz: Michael Cohen says that Trump asked him to lie to Congress, and Mueller says…

The New Neo Posted on by

The left and Trump’s other opponents keep trying to find the fatal stake to drive through the vampire Trump’s heart. I have completely lost track of all the sequential stories that have gotten them so excited, thinking the task was finally about to be accomplished, which then fell though.

But the anti-Trump forces barely pause to muster their strength before going on to the next story, and then the next.

Some of these stories are more believable than others. Some are more well-sourced than others; some more plausible. None have accomplished the desired goal, and all have been either debunked or certainly revealed as less important than originally thought.

The latest of these bombshells—one that has had Trump’s enemies as excited as I’ve ever seen them—is the Buzzfeed story that erupted last night and goes like this:

President Donald Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, according to two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter.

William Jacobson summarized the story this way:

The short version is that two unnamed federal law enforcement sources told Buzzfeed reporter Jason Leopold, the leading reporter on the story, that Mueller has evidence both through testimony and documentation that Trump told Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about a potential Trump Tower Moscow hotel deal timeline.

The Buzzfeed reporters have not seen the evidence underlying their report.

Never mind that it was Buzzfeed, not well known for veracity (nor is Michael Cohen, for that matter). Never mind the shakiness of the reporters’ knowledge of the evidence and never mind the anonymity of the sources. The story was so very juicy that it was enough to send many who detest Trump into a feeding frenzy, calling for investigation and/or impeachment and/or Trump’s resignation.

But surprise, surprise, Mueller has issued an announcement:

BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate.

That’s somewhat vague. Which descriptions of which statement, which documents and which testimony? We probably will never know, and we probably don’t need to know the specifics (although it would certainly be nice) in order to strongly suspect that the Buzzfeed report is so inaccurate as to be virtually meaningless. Mueller’s office doesn’t ordinarily issue these sorts of denials. When it does, I can’t imagine that it would be for a trivial reason.

Here’s an interesting tweet from Ronan Farrow:

At the moment, it looks like this “Trump asked Cohen to lie to Congress about Russia” story will go the way of the rest. If people were sensible, this chain of events would make even Trump’s enemies look askance on future poorly-sourced stories of this nature. But that won’t be happening. For those people who believe Trump’s guilty, they just know the evidence is there, and all they have to do is finally find it. They believe that some day that will happen.

That’s some of them. Others don’t care whether he’s guilty or not, or whether evidence is true or not. He’s the enemy, and he must be destroyed.

[NOTE: Prior to the Mueller statement, I decided to check on what Alan Dershowitz had written about the Buzzfeed allegations. As usual, his article is a good one.]

Representative Adam Schiff: about Bruce Ohr’s testimony

The New Neo Posted on by

NOTE: This post is a companion piece to an earlier post of mine today describing how Bruce Ohr had informed the FBI and DOJ long ago about Christopher Steele’s bias and Fusion GPS’ conflicts of interest, and yet they concealed those facts from the FISA court when asking it to rely on the Steele dossier.]

One Democratic member of the House who was privy to Ohr’s testimony back then either “misremembered” or lied about its content (my money’s on the latter). Fancy that:

Oh, and by the way—Adam Schiff is the new chair of the House Intelligence Committee, replacing Nunes. That statement Schiff had made, reproduced in the tweet above, was issued in criticism of his predecessor Nunes’ report.

Nunes himself is still a member of the House and is still a member of that same committee, but now it’s under Schiff’s leadership because of the change of majority party in the House from Republican to Democrat. I wonder whether most Americans even know that this sort of shift is the consequence of their voting for local House members in high enough numbers to change the balance of power in the House (same, of course, for the Senate). My guess is that an awful lot of voters—maybe even a majority—either haven’t a clue or have only the vaguest of notions about how it works.

But that’s where we are now: Adam Schiff is in charge. And Adam Schiff would like nothing better than for Trump to be impeached, and if he has to lie to do it, that’s certainly an activity with which he’s both practiced and comfortable.

He’s not alone, of course. The Democratic Party has seamlessly morphed into The Resistance, and their helpmates in the press (and some in the DOJ and FBI) have been busy supplying them with ammunition against Trump. The latest, of course, is the Buzzfeed report that alleges (anonymous sources, naturalment) that Trump told Cohen to lie to Congress about Russian holdings. I’ll write another post on that one; it deserves its own.

So, was it aliens?

The New Neo Posted on by

And not the “illegal alien” kind—the extraterrestrial kind.

Avi Loeb, chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, thinks it just might have been:

On October 19, 2017, astronomers at the University of Hawaii spotted a strange object travelling through our solar system, which they later described as “a red and extremely elongated asteroid.” It was the first interstellar object to be detected within our solar system; the scientists named it ‘Oumuamua, the Hawaiian word for a scout or messenger. The following October, Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, co-wrote a paper (with a Harvard postdoctoral fellow, Shmuel Bialy) that examined ‘Oumuamua’s “peculiar acceleration” and suggested that the object “may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth’s vicinity by an alien civilization.”

There is no photo of ‘Oumuamua, but it apparently has a lot of anomalies that are difficult to explain. I wouldn’t jump to “extraterrestrials” as the most likely explanation, however, although of course it’s certainly a possibility. Loeb is apparently keenly interested in them.

I’ve written about a related subject before, the Fermi Paradox (see this), which I find troubling and compelling. There’s also Drake’s equation, if you like speculating about these things.

Note the two categories into which I’ve placed this post. These matters are where science meets the philosophical—although actually, science very often meets the philosophical.

The UN’s plans for the control of “migration”

The New Neo Posted on by

Get a load of this:

…[T]he United Nations is seeking control of migration policies worldwide, with a campaign configured to undermine America’s sovereignty and control over its own borders. And, yes, if the U.N. has its way, America will help pay for it.

As with many of the U.N.’s turf grabs, this campaign to co-opt national migration policy has been years in the making. Incremental in its origins, and swaddled in U.N. jargon and procedure, it has largely escaped the U.S. headlines…

this Global Compact would have the U.N.’s largely unaccountable, self-aggrandizing and often opaque bureaucracy, operating in service of its despot-infested collective of governments, set the terms for all.

The lengthy text reads like a template for setting up the world’s most politically correct welfare state, with a colossal menu of entitlements and central planning for migrants; never mind the cost to the pockets, rights and freedoms of the existing citizens. This “compact” does not restrict itself to refugees. It anoints the U.N. as arbiter of how to handle cross-border human mobility worldwide…

The UN will have no means of enforcing this, however. But why on earth should we have anything to do with this body anymore? Is it a case of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer?

Also, some of this was a parting gift from President Obama, naturally:

That all changed under President Barack Obama. During Obama’s final year in office, in 2016, with a nod from his administration, the IOM joined the U.N., which promptly declared plans to create a global plan for migration. For 2017, as a parting gift of the Obama administration, America’s $544 million contribution included $1.68 million earmarked for conferences and consultations supporting the creation of the Global Compact.

In late 2017, the Trump administration reversed that policy, announcing the U.S. would no longer support U.N. activities leading to the Global Compact…

…The U.N. pursued the compact regardless, with the IOM playing a major role in consultations and conferences around the globe…

Much much more at the link.

More on Fusion and FISA and the FBI and DOJ

The New Neo Posted on by

The plot thickens, and it was already plenty thick:

A senior Department of Justice official says he repeatedly and specifically told top officials at the FBI and DOJ about dossier author Christopher Steele’s bias and his employer Fusion GPS’ conflicts of interest, information they kept hidden from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. These conversations involved high-level officials, including some who are now senior officials in the special counsel probe. And the conversations began taking place in the earliest days of August 2016, much earlier than previously revealed to congressional investigators seeking to learn the facts about the FBI’s decision to spy on the Trump campaign.

Bruce Ohr is that “senior Department of Justice official.”

More:

Ohr is an interesting character in the Russia-Trump collusion investigation because his role was unknown for a long time. The former top career official at the Department of Justice was a 27-year veteran with no role in counterintelligence operations. Initially, the FBI and Department of Justice claimed he had no involvement in the probe, despite his marriage to a Fusion GPS contractor. Then they claimed his role was unique and was unknown by others in the department.

It turns out that Ohr kept top officials at both the FBI and Department of Justice apprised of his conversations with Steele, passed along electronic and written materials from multiple Fusion GPS employees, and shared key information that was excluded from the FISA application to the courts…

Ohr claimed he repeatedly made it clear to the FBI that the information was not verified, risked bias, and had been obtained under political circumstances.

He said he was open about his relationship with Steele and Simpson and about the fact his wife was on Simpson’s payroll, working on the same project Steele was. Asked if they were aware of Steele’s bias against Donald Trump, Ohr said “I provided information to the FBI when I thought Christopher Steele was, as I said, desperate that Trump not be elected. So, yes, of course, I provided that to the FBI.”

Sorting out the details of the lies and the truths on this entire “Russia collusion” story has been practically a full-time job. One thing that has been clear for a long long time now is that the FISA application process based on the Steele dossier stank to high heaven.

But is most of America following this outrage, or caring? My answer is “no.”

More from the Hill:

Ohr’s activities, chronicled in handwritten notes and congressional testimony I gleaned from sources, provide the most damning evidence to date that FBI and DOJ officials may have misled federal judges in October 2016 in their zeal to obtain the warrant targeting Trump adviser Carter Page just weeks before Election Day.

They also contradict a key argument that House Democrats have made in their formal intelligence conclusions about the Russia case.

Since it was disclosed last year that Steele’s dossier formed a central piece of evidence supporting the FISA warrant, Justice and FBI officials have been vague about exactly when they learned that Steele’s work was paid for by the law firm representing the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

The lies just pile up:

The FBI claimed it was “unaware of any derogatory information” about Steele, that Steele was “never advised … as to the motivation behind the research” but that the FBI “speculates” that those who hired Steele were “likely looking for information to discredit” Trump’s campaign.

Yet, in testimony last summer to congressional investigators, Ohr revealed the FBI and Justice lawyers had no need to speculate: He explicitly warned them…

And yet America has just installed a House determined to cover all of this up and to destroy Trump, which was the original idea in the first place.

He survived 9/11 but was killed in Nairobi

The New Neo Posted on by

Sad news:

Jason Spindler, a Jewish American whose life was changed when he survived the 9/11 attack in New York, was killed in a terrorist attack in Nairobi, Kenya.

The shooting attack Tuesday on a business complex, claimed by the Somali Islamist terrorist group Shabab, claimed at least 21 lives. Shabab said it was motivated in part to commit the attack by President Donald Trump’s recognition in 2017 of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Spindler, a young investment banker in 2001, helped save lives in New York on 9/11, friends told The Washington Post.

The experience led Spindler to leave investment banking, earn a law degree from New York University and join the Peace Corps. He was in Kenya as a social entrepreneur, helping others start small businesses as a means of alleviating poverty.

The Nairobi attack killed 21 people.

I call bullcrap on the “Trump and Israel” explanation from Shabab, by the way. This sort of attack is just what they do, and they did something similar during the administration of Obama the Great:

Al-Shabab — the Somalia-based group that carried out the 2013 attack at the nearby Westgate Mall in Nairobi that left 67 people dead — claimed responsibility for the carnage at the DusitD2 hotel complex, which includes bars, restaurants, offices and banks and is in a well-to-do neighborhood with many American, European and Indian expatriates.

Disgusting.