History repeats itself in the UK: another child sex abuse ring and another coverup

The New Neo Posted on by

Seems to be Rotherham all over again:

The Sunday Mirror blew open ANOTHER child sex abuse ring in Britain. This 18-month investigation found up to 1,000 girls, as young as 11, raped, sold for sex, and even killed for over 40 years in Telford, located 146 miles southeast of London.

If you read about Rotherham you know what I’m talking about (I wrote about Rotherham here). The pattern in Telford seems to be the same: decades-long sexual abuse of many young girls who were essentially turned into sex slaves by groups of “Asian” men, with the authorities looking the other way despite numerous reports, and sometimes punishing those who tried to call it to their attention:

—Social workers knew of abuse in the 1990s but police took a decade to launch a probe
—Council staff viewed abused and trafficked children as “prostitutes” instead of victims, according to previously unseen files
—Authorities failed to keep details of abusers from Asian communities for fear of “racism”
—Police failed to investigate one recent case five times until an MP intervened
—One victim said cops tried to stop her finding out why her abusers had not been prosecuted because they feared she would talk to us

As for this “Asian” business (the men in both cases appear to be Middle Eastern), I discussed that already here. Although to people in the US it seems to be a word the British MSM is using to coverup the actual ethnic and religious origins of the perpetrators, in Britain it is not as complete a coverup as it seems, although it still is a coverup of sorts.

In Britain the word “Asian” is commonly used to mean people from South Asia (India and Pakistan, as well as Bangladesh). As I wrote in that post I just linked:

So it seems that the use of the word “Asian” itself, in reference to this story, is a way of at least partially hiding the origins of the criminals, because it lumps all South Asian Britons together, and they are most definitely not a unitary group. By doing so it not only hides the actual country from which these people came [in Rotherham it was Pakistan], but it hides the religion they practice, which is predominantly the Muslim religion.

It appears so far that this pattern of mostly Pakistini perpetrators is holding for Telford, as well. It is not bigotry to point out this fact; here’s a relevant article from last December:

In a new study, Quilliam says its researchers discovered differences in the way paedophiles from different backgrounds operated.

It said white offenders often acted alone, while child abusers from Asian backgrounds were more likely to work in so-called grooming gangs.

The organisation, which usually focuses on counter-extremism, said it found 222 of 264, or 84 per cent, of people convicted of specific grooming-gang crimes in the UK since 2005 were Asian…

The report’s co-author, Haras Rafiq, is from Rochdale, where 19 British-Pakistani men were jailed between 2012 and 2015 after a grooming ring thought to have abused at least 47 girls was uncovered.

Mr Rafiq told Sky News: “I’m from the heart of where one of the biggest high-profile cases has happened over the last few years, and I’m saying it’s very important that we do talk about it because the problem won’t go away.

“We didn’t want there to be a pattern of people from our ethnic demographic carrying out these attacks. But unfortunately we were proven wrong.”

Non-Asian men in Britain also abuse children, but the pattern is different:

… in “Type 1” offenders work in groups such as grooming gangs to target victims based on vulnerability, while “Type 2” offenders form paedophile rings to carry out abuse because of a specific sexual interest in children.

The “Asian” men tend to be Type 1 whereas the others tend to be Type 2. Although the article doesn’t mention it, I am fairly sure that authorities in Britain don’t look the other way and fail to investigate or prosecute the non-Asian men they way they did in Rotherham and Telford with the “Asian” men, for fear of being accused of racism. My guess is that this pattern existed in other communities in Britain, too.

The man who could do everything: Tommy Rall

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, maybe not everything. But an extraordinary number of things. And boy, could he do them well.

A while back I showed a clip of Rall in the barn dance from “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” in which he was the standout among other star dancers—although they never became “stars” in the sense of being household words. But Rall’s dancing is so superlative that I’m surprised he’s not the best known among them. In the dance sense, he really could do everything.

When you watch him you can see he’s highly trained in ballet. So are quite a few movie dancers (Gene Kelly was, too). But the quality of Rall’s balletic movement is extraordinary—exceptional technique, exceptional attack, exceptional strength, exceptional height, exceptional turns, exceptional speed, exceptional clarity—well, you get the idea. He could have been a remarkable ballet dancer had he not turned to the theater and movies, and in fact he was an exceptional ballet dancer, turning pro ballet soloist in his teens:

…[H]e continued studying dance with Adolf Bohm, David Lichine, and Bronislava Nijinska, all of whom facilitated Rall’s conversion to the cause of ballet. On Lichine’s recommendation, the 14-year-old Rall joined the Ballet Theater company, a touring ensemble, in 1944. He spent three and a half years becoming a seasoned professional while still in his teens, and dancing principal roles. By 1947, he’d gone as far as he could with the company and, for the moment, with ballet, and was ready to make the jump to theatrical work.

Rall’s talent was too protean to be confined to ballet; jazz and tap and acrobatics were included in his strengths. But the following clip (in which he’s not officially doing ballet) contains the quickest, sharpest, and cleanest series of double air turns (a classic ballet step for men) I’ve ever seen. Rall is the one with the blue sleeves, and the air turns are the last steps he does in this number:

Here’s another dance competition, this time between Bob Fosse and Rall. Watch it—you’ll be glad you did. Fosse is great too, in his own distinctive way (a sort of twisted, slouchy style).

No discussion of Rall’s dancing would be complete without this, from “Kiss Me Kate.” Don’t miss Rall’s flying entrance at around 1:32. Not sure how he does it. Maybe a trampoline in the wings for the initial takeoff, and then he appears to grab onto the set to hang there for a moment. But if anyone could appear to fly without a trampoline, it would be Rall (the one with the little mustache). Fosse is in this number, too, and I left in a later show-stopper segment that Fosse choreographed for himself and Carol Haney:

Here’s a still of that flying leap:

But one of the reasons I said that Rall could do anything was that he also could sing. Well, what’s the big deal? So can quite a few dancers. But not like Rall. Not operatically. In fact, towards the end of his dance career, Rall sang with opera companies. And not podunk companies, either—the Opera Company of Boston, the New York City Opera, and the American National Opera Company.

Here he is, singing in the Broadway show “Milk and Honey”:

And of course he acted in all those movies.

What else? Well, he’s apparently a painter, as well:

Tommy Rall is also an accomplished visual artist. He began drawing and painting as a child and first studied formally with Sueo Serisawa in Los Angeles. He also studied drawing under Herbert Jepson at the Chouinard Art Institute for two years and at the Art Students League in New York.

[NOTE: More about Rall’s early life and ballet career here].

The world’s most violent cities

The New Neo Posted on by

I have to say that these findings somewhat surprised me, although on reflection I know they shouldn’t have: 42 of the 50 cities in the world with the highest murder rates are in Latin America.

I certainly was aware that a great many countries south of the US have experienced high rates of violence (lots of it gang- and drug-related). I just hadn’t realized how tremendously skewed towards that area worldwide violence is.

Of course, when we’re talking about statistics like that, we’re not talking about war or even civil war, although it could be argued that gang violence borders on that. We’re talking about the homicide rate in each city. We’re also talking about reported statistics rather than actual rates, and the two can vary. A nation has to have a certain amount of order to be able to even issue such statistics.

For example:

Another country which saw a drop in violence was Venezuela, although this was not a good thing, the report says.

The reason for the drop is not because of a fall in violence, but a weakening of government control meaning authorities can no longer effectively count the number of homicides in their cities.

Researchers point to two [Venezuelan] cities – Cumané¡ and Gran Barcelona – which were removed from the top 50 table but only because they could not effectively establish the murder rate.

Brazil and Mexico are very high on the list, but some US cities managed to earn a place on it as well: St. Louis at 13, Baltimore at 21, and New Orleans and Detroit at 41 and 42. South Africa scored similarly, with Capetown at 15 and two others towards the bottom of the list.

[NOTE: I tried to put the chart of countries here, but—as seems to occur more and more often these days—it got cut off at top and bottom when I tried to copy it. I think this has something to do with more and more sites protecting their photos and graphs, and so you’ll have to follow the link to view it there if you’re interested.]

Andrew C. McCarthy isn’t in favor of appointing a new special counsel

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s why.

Excerpt:

Why do we have guidelines and manuals? Because we want our law-enforcement officers to operate within clearly legitimate boundaries, not constantly to test the margins of their lawful authority. Having guidelines encourages this. It provides a standard for internal discipline when excessive or abusive conduct occurs. But if deviations from guidelines were to become a basis for legal action, including criminal prosecution, one of two things would happen: The guidelines would be repealed, or they would be rewritten in a broadly permissive manner, endorsing investigative behavior that might be justifiable in exigent circumstances but would be grossly inappropriate the rest of the time. If we want to have meaningful guidelines, the trade-off is that guidelines departures cannot lead to lawsuits ”” although they must lead to administrative discipline, including termination if the misconduct is serious enough.

Finally, it is a serious dereliction for the FBI and Justice Department to provide the FISA court with unverified information, such as the allegations in the Steele dossier (which, based on what is publicly known at present, were essentially uncorroborated). As explained in a letter Chairman Nunes sent to Attorney General Sessions last week, it is a violation of the FBI’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide to include anything other than “documented and verified information” in FBI applications for FISA-court surveillance warrants.

All that said, there is a big difference between (a) giving a court information that is unverified because it has not been adequately corroborated and (b) knowingly giving a court information that is false. The former is abusive; the latter is felony obstruction of justice.

You (or I) may not always like what McCarthy has to say, but I have found him to be consistently logical and fair—to both sides. That’s an unusual characteristic.

Three staff members killed at California veterans facility

The New Neo Posted on by

This is terrible:

A gunman and three female hostages were found dead at a military veterans home in Northern California on Friday evening, officials said, a grim end to a standoff that lasted nearly eight hours.

Shortly before 6 p.m., officers stormed into the room where the gunman had held the hostages at the Veterans Home of California in Yountville, said Chris Childs with the California Highway Patrol.

They found the gunman and the three hostages dead, he said. The coroner’s office identified the victims as Christine Loeber, 48; Jennifer Golick, 42; and Jennifer Gonzales, 29…

Loeber was the executive director of The Pathway Home and Golick worked there as a staff psychologist. Gonzales was a clinical psychologist with the San Francisco Department of Veterans’ Affairs Healthcare System.

The gunman, identified as Albert Wong of Sacramento, had been a resident at the facility until about two weeks ago when he left or was asked to leave for as-yet-undiclosed reasons. The facility treats veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Therapists who work with potentially violent clients—and that’s a great many therapists—are always at risk for becoming the target of that violence, although it’s certainly not a common occurrence. I am actually rather surprised that more such incidents don’t occur, and I’m not talking solely or even in particular about working with veterans with PTSD.

My guess is that these victims were not chosen at random. We also have this report:

Golick’s father-in-law, Bob Golick, said in an interview that she had recently expelled Wong from the program.

The program was featured recently in a nonfiction book entitled Thank You For Your Service that was later made into a movie (read more here).

RIP.

The Steele dossier’s credibility

The New Neo Posted on by

The Weekly Standard’s Eric Felten takes a good long look at the Steele dossier itself, and finds it impossible to believe on the face of it.

Forget all the brouhaha surrounding it. Just reading it should have discredited it and made it clear the allegations were absurd and almost certainly came from a Russian campaign of misinformation.

Scott Johnson of Powerline agrees.

Meanwhile…

The New Neo Posted on by

…the left is all excited (see also this) about Stormy Daniels, and hope that everyone will soon share that excitement, too.

Daniels has told a number of stories about whether she had an affair with Trump. But if I had to guess, I’d say she did. At this point, however, the news would make most people shrug.

What will come of her lawsuit to be freed of the non-disclosure agreement she signed I do not know, but I don’t think this is the thing that will finally sink Trump or even damage his reputation. His reputation in terms of affairs is pretty clear, and has been for decades.

North Korea agrees to talks with Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

It looks as though there will be a meeting between North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and President Trump:

News of the meeting was delivered by South Korean officials after talks with Mr Trump at the White House.

They passed a verbal message from Mr Kim, saying the North Korean leader was “committed to denuclearisation”.

South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in said the news “came like a miracle”.

“If President Trump and Chairman Kim meet following an inter-Korean summit, complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula will be put on the right track in earnest,” he said.

I think it can safely be said that people on both sides of the political spectrum were surprised.

I linked to a BBC article because I wondered what their take on it would be in terms of whether to give some credit to Trump, and here’s what they said:

Is this a victory for Trump?

Mr Trump has repeatedly belittled Kim Jong-un, and last year threatened him with “fire and fury” if North Korea continued to threaten the US. He has at times said there is no point in talking to North Korea.

But Mr Chung made a point of saying it was Mr Trump’s “maximum pressure policy” which had brought the parties to this point, a gesture which the president is likely to appreciate.

Our correspondent says Kim Jong-un has also scored a propaganda win, first with the Olympics and now by being seen to reach out to the US.

You can almost feel the BBC’s reluctance to give Trump any credit at all, but they did manage to report the praise from South Korea’s Chung when he made the announcement.

Actually, what Chung said was this [emphasis mine]:

I explained to President Trump that his leadership and his maximum pressure policy, together with international solidarity, brought us to this juncture. I expressed President Moon Jae-in’s personal gratitude for President Trump’s leadership.

I told President Trump that, in our meeting, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said he is committed to denuclearization. Kim pledged that North Korea will refrain from any further nuclear or missile tests. He understands that the routine joint military exercises between the Republic of Korea and the United States must continue. And he expressed his eagerness to meet President Trump as soon as possible.

President Trump appreciated the briefing and said he would meet Kim Jong-un by May to achieve permanent denuclearization…

The Republic of Korea, the United States, and our partners stand together in insisting that we not repeat the mistakes of the past, and that the pressure will continue until North Korea matches its words with concrete actions.

South Korea certainly isn’t mincing words about giving credit to President Trump. That part about “not repeating the mistakes of the past” and continuing the pressure is, I believe, a direct reference to the lack of teeth in previous attempts to deal with the North.

It would be absurd to make any predictions about this meeting—including even whether it will actually come about. No one should trust the North Koreans, and I am virtually certain President Trump does not. One thing he is not is especially gullible.

Back in August, when the rhetoric between Trump and Kim was escalating, I wrote this:

Trump is a blowhard, but he’s also a wildcard, and that can work to advantage because instead of hearing a mere statement that some action is “intolerable” or “unacceptable,” the foreign leader to whom such statements are directed just might believe that a US president means what he says for a change, and that certain unpredictable but upsetting actions might follow on the heels of the “mere words.”

Of course, the danger is that the leader hearing those words may react in a way that escalates things mightily, and may not be particularly sane or rational. There’s not much indication that the current leader of North Korea is either sane or rational, and so any reaction on his part short of an extremely violent one could depend on others reigning him in, either China or “the North Korean leadership around” him.

And plenty of people in this country and abroad believe that it’s Trump who’s neither sane nor rational. But, as I indicated, that can work in several opposing ways—either to make people more wary of riling him up, or more desperate to fight fire with fire and not just limit the fighting to fiery words.

And of course “the foreign-policy elite…claim to be shocked.” I think they actually are shocked, and feel oh so superior in their own ability to deal with North Korea. But, as the editorial also said (and it actually understates the case) they don’t have much credibility either. In fact, they have next to none (with me, anyway).

That’s the problem with North Korea. No one understands enough about Kim Jong-un to be able to predict his reactions to what the West does. If anything, he appears to be even more unpredictable than his father was, and that’s saying something. Anyone seeking to evaluate the positives or negatives of what Trump said must take that into account.

I have little doubt that a great many things have also has been going on behind the scenes in diplomatic back channels. But if anything good ends up coming of all of this (and I deeply and sincerely hope it does), I believe part of the reason would be because Trump’s words of threat were credible and Kim understood that.

And if it actually turns out that the result is good, I would also dearly love to see the left’s reaction. Would it be something like what happened when the Soviet Union fell during the Reagan administration, when for the most part “experts” not only didn’t see it coming, but ascribed it to anything other than Reagan’s actions?

[ADDENDUM: Here’s a great and funny take on the Trump-haters’ fears that something good might come of this.]

Nick Freitas of Virginia on gun control

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter Geoffrey Britain.]

He’s talking about gun control, but it’s a primer on how to talk about heated issues in general:

Freitas bears watching. When I say that he gave a primer on how to talk about these issues, I certainly don’t mean that a productive talk ensued. In fact, a few Democrats walked out and accused him of—you guessed it—racism.

By the way, the pundits were wrong about Texas this time. I’ve always been reluctant to make political predictions, although every now and then I’ve gone out on a limb to do so. But it’s only become more difficult to make them, not easier, and the polls—always iffy in terms of predictive value—have become more and more discredited in my eyes.

Mind-reading machine

The New Neo Posted on by

This doesn’t sound like a good idea to me:

…[A] new artificial intelligence research project coming out of Japan…can analyze a person’s brain scans and provide a written description of what they have been looking at.

To generate its captions, the artificial intelligence is given an fMRI brain scan image, taken while a person is looking at a picture. It then generates a written description of what they think the person was viewing. An illustration of the level of complexity it can offer is: “A dog is sitting on the floor in front of an open door” or “a group of people standing on the beach.” Both of those turn out to be absolutely accurate.

“We aim to understand how the brain represents information about the real world,” Ichiro Kobayashi, one of the researchers from Japan’s Ochanomizu University, told Digital Trends. “Toward such a goal, we demonstrated that our algorithm can model and read out perceptual contents in the form of sentences from human brain activity. To do this, we modified an existing network model that could generate sentences from images using a deep neural network, a model of visual system, followed by an RNN (recurrent neural network), a model that can generate sentences. Specifically, using our dataset of movies and movie-evoked brain activity, we trained a new model that could infer activation patterns of DNN from brain activity.”

Nothing to worry about, he says, because it’s a long way from having any real-world applications.

Ah yes, that’s what they always say.

It all reminds me of a wonderful Ursula LeGuin story entitled “The Diary of the Rose,” which I’ve previously written about in a somewhat different context:

…[The story] appeared in [LeGuin’s] book The Compass Rose, one of my favorite collections.

This particular story is about a futuristic society in which a machine that images people’s minds and thoughts has been invented, and is being used for political indoctrination and control. People whose minds deviate too greatly from the PC norm are sent for a type of electroconvulsive therapy that destroys their memories and personality.

Here’s an excerpt from the story, which takes the form of a diary by the worker who operates the machine and writes reports on the brain readings:

Half-hour scope session with Ana J. at 8:00…

It is amazing how banal most people’s minds are. Of course the poor woman is in severe depression. Input in the Con dimension was foggy and incoherent, and the Uncon dimension was deeply open, but obscure. But the things that came out of the obscurity were so trivial! A pair of old shoes, and the word “geography”! And the shoes were dim, a mere schema of a pair-of-shoes, maybe a mans’ maybe a woman’s, maybe dark blue maybe brown. Although definitely a visual type, she does not see anything clearly. Not many people do. It is depressing. When I was a student in the first year I used to think how wonderful other people’s minds would be, how wonderful it was going to be to share in all the different worlds, the different colors of their passions and ideas. How naive I was!

I highly recommend the story, and the whole collection actually.

Intersectionality and anti-Semitism

The New Neo Posted on by

The author of this article in New York magazine is either clueless or disingenuous when he asks, “Why Won’t Women’s March Leaders Denounce Louis Farrakhan’s Anti-Semitism?” (the title of his piece).

The author can’t quite figure it out. But it’s rather easy if you’ve been paying attention at any time in about the last 50 years or so. The left is quite uniformly either actively anti-Semitic or passively so, and that even includes many Jews (almost entirely secular Jews) who are very much part of the left itself.

But Farrakhan is also the beneficiary of a concept that has recently become very hot on the left, and that’s something called intersectionality. If you haven’t heard the word before, it’s time to get familiar with it. Google it and you’ll find no end of articles about it, but the summary version is that it divides society into a series of groups based on a discrimination/oppression hierarchy, and then posits that one’s membership in each group determines the depth of one’s claim to victimhood as well as one’s right to speak about anything connected to that group.

Here’s how it’s defined by the left, when it began in the late 80s as a way for feminists to differentiate the experience of black women from white women:

The movement led by women of color disputed the idea, common to earlier feminist movements, that women were a homogeneous category essentially sharing the same life experiences. This argument stemmed from the realization that white middle-class women did not serve as an accurate representation of the feminist movement as a whole. Recognizing that the forms of oppression experienced by white middle-class women were different from those experienced by black, poor, or disabled women, feminists sought to understand the ways in which gender, race, and class combined to “determine the female destiny”.

Leslie McCall argues that the introduction of the intersectionality theory was vital to sociology, claiming that before its development there was little research that specifically addressed the experiences of people who are subjected to multiple forms of subordination within society.

The basis of the concept is in leftist thought, and is grounded in the left’s generalizations about group categories and a leftist postmodernist mindset that sees society almost solely in terms of power and oppression, with the oppressed groups as the only ones with legitimacy. In a way, it is an attempt by the left to act out “the first shall be last”—without its Christian associations and values, of course, and with “first” and “last” defined as the left wants to define them.

Individuals are no longer important, except as defined by their interlocking and sometimes-overlapping membership in various oppressed and/or oppressor groups.

Various people (see this by David French, for example) have called intersectionality a substitute for religion in the non-religious, and so my use of a Biblical phrase makes sense if you buy French’s analogy:

The [intersectionality] faith is fierce. Intolerance in the name of tolerance is the norm. Debate and dialogue are artifacts of scorned “respectability politics.” I’m reminded of the worst sorts of fundamentalist Christian sects, the kind that claim to take the Bible literally yet live as if mercy is alien to Scripture and that commands to “love your enemies” or “bless those who persecute you” somehow fell off the page. In the church of intersectionality, grace is nowhere to be found.

However, I don’t see intersectionality as a religion any more than any other theory on the left is a religion. What intersectionality (and other canons of the left) shares with religion is the possibility of fanaticism and intolerance within a belief system, and that is actually what French is describing in his analogy rather than religion itself.

I wrote this post so far before reading an article by Ben Shapiro that makes much the same point I’m making about intersectionality and the Woman’s March leaders (as well as other Democrats) who refuse to denounce Farrakhan, which is that intersectionality demands that Farrakhan’s blackness trumps any need to worry about his anti-Semitism. This would be true even if the left weren’t itself anti-Semitic, so the left’s failure to denounce is actually multiply-determined.

Being a spy is risky

The New Neo Posted on by

It was clear from the start that the recent severe and sudden illnesses of UK-dwelling former anti-Russian spy Sergei Skirpal and his visiting daughter Yulia Skripal were most likely the result of poisoning. Skirpal had been “convicted of passing the identities of Russian intelligence agents working undercover in Europe to the UK.”

Now it’s been announced that, “Scientists at the UK’s military research facility at Porton Down have been examining a substance thought to be behind their collapse.” A policeman who came to their aid is also seriously ill, and previously Skripal’s 43-year-old son died under mysterious circumstances.

Russia has a history of this sort of thing, including possibly helping the Bulgarians with this dramatic murder (an event that also occurred in the UK, in London to be precise).

But although it’s virtually certain that the Skripals were poisoned, and probably by some nerve agent, it’s not quite as crystal clear that the Russians did it, although there’s no doubt they would be capable of it. In Skripal’s case, however, someone else may be trying to kill him, and perhaps make us think the Russians did it. Here’s why:

The possibility of an unexplained substance being involved has drawn comparisons with the 2006 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko – a public inquiry concluded the killing of the Russian dissident was probably carried out with the approval of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin.

Former MI5 officer Annie Machon pointed out that the two cases were very different, however.

Mr Litvinenko was a whistleblower, dissident and consultant for MI6 actively at the time of his death, she said, whereas Mr Skripal has already been caught, convicted and pardoned [by Russia] and allowed to freely find safe haven in the UK.

“There’s no conceivable reason that I can see that the Russian state would have been targeting him at the moment,” she told BBC’s Breakfast. “That’s why we need to think about what else he might have been involved in.”

Maybe, however, the idea for the Russians is to just send the message, “If you turn on us, neither you nor your family will ever be safe, even after we pardon you.”