Rollers and dryers and hair

The New Neo Posted on by

This post by Ann Althouse made me remember the hairdryers and roller settings of yesteryear that were replaced many decades ago by blow drying and those wand thingees that press the hair into a bone-straight (and in my opinion unflattering to most people, even the young and beautiful) sleekness.

I grew up in the era of the roller and the hairdryer, and I could really identify with this reminiscence about hours spent under a hood hairdryer, reading a magazine or just staring off into space.

Like many things that are supposed to be easier and better and more convenient, blow-drying really isn’t—although I suppose it depends on the kind of hair you’ve got. For my curly hair, blow drying makes it wild if I don’t use a diffuser and tons of glop. And blow drying makes it bushy if there’s an attempt to blow it straight, even in a salon (plus, I don’t like the way my hair looks straight). Even some professionals have agreed that the product of their attempts at blow drying with me are less than lovely, with the hair becoming more straight and yet bushy and even less shiny (and curly hair isn’t shiny to begin with).

I end up just a bit like this:

roseanna

Even for the person without my special situation, the heat from blow drying is damaging to the hair, and it also takes a great deal of technique and dexterity to do well. Plus two hands are busy all the time—no way to read, unless you have absolutely mad skills.

I never mastered it. And I know a lot of people who never did, either, and who go every week to the hairdresser for a professional blowout, much as my mother did to have her hair washed and then set in rollers.

I was inspired to buy a package of rollers a few months ago, after watching the Makeover Guy (those videos I love and sometimes post here), who sometimes sets the crown of women’s hair on rollers. I hadn’t seen or thought of rollers since around 1967. But I noticed that those rollers gave women’s hair more body and a nicely controlled wave/curl, and I thought “Ah, I remember that.” My hair has become frizzier over the years, as with many women, and it turns out that a few rollers on top really do the trick. And I don’t need a hood hairdryer at all; I just waft the blow dryer over it for a while and that works pretty well.

Setting hair on rollers is like riding a bicycle; you never forget. I had mastered the skill as a teenager, when I used to set my hair every single night and slept like a baby on those hard rollers. But I don’t have to do that now. I find that just a few rollers on top for just a few minutes keep the curls more controlled and smoother until the next washing, which for me (with dry, curly hair that almost never gets dirty) comes maybe once a week.

I did a Google search to look up current information on setting hair with rollers and discovered to my surprise that nearly every single site I saw was geared to black women. Well, many of the products I use on my hair are also marketed mainly for black women, as it turns out. But I see no reason why rollers should only be pitched to that particular group. Rollers certainly were a universal phenomenon when I was growing up. I had one of those home hairdryers, too, both a soft bonnet one and a hard hood one. The soft bonnet one was easily portable, and the hard hood one was for home use but it folded up in a nifty way, too, for storage. The latter hairdryer was a gift from my clients (yes, my clients) for my sixteenth birthday, because I used to cut the hair of many of my friends, just for fun.

As a pre-pubescent and in early puberty, I wanted to be a hairdresser, actually. My parents talked me out of it.

Here’s a modern version of the type of hairdryer they gave me, for those of you who haven’t the foggiest idea what I’m talking about. I’m astounded that they still sell these things:

dryer

Hey, you can even order it through Amazon. Will wonders never cease?

[NOTE: By the way, the title of this post, “Rollers and dryers and hair,” is meant to be modeled after the famous line in the movie “The Wizard of Oz”: “lions and tigers and bears.”]

The latest target chosen by the left: the Electoral College

The New Neo Posted on by

Eliminating the Electoral College is the next goal of the left in its never-ending quest for political domination, although at the moment it’s still reeling from the shock of losing the presidency and just about everything else. Attacking the Electoral College seems to make perfect sense for the left. However, as with the use of the nuclear option in the Senate, it could end up backfiring on them.

The NY Times is leading the way in the fight (as it often does) with Monday’s editorial entitled, “Time to End the Electoral College”:

By overwhelming majorities, Americans would prefer to elect the president by direct popular vote, not filtered through the antiquated mechanism of the Electoral College. They understand, on a gut level, the basic fairness of awarding the nation’s highest office on the same basis as every other elected office ”” to the person who gets the most votes.

The Electoral College, which is written into the Constitution, is more than just a vestige of the founding era; it is a living symbol of America’s original sin. When slavery was the law of the land, a direct popular vote would have disadvantaged the Southern states, with their large disenfranchised populations. Counting those men and women as three-fifths of a white person, as the Constitution originally did, gave the slave states more electoral votes.

That’s not a new position for the Times, but it’s the current party line the left is pushing, and I’ve read it over and over again recently in other articles too. That narrative purposely leaves just about everything out—but hey, what’s a few distorted facts or omissions among friends?

The Electoral College is actually a reflection of the reality—a reality known to the Times editors but perhaps not to so very many of its readers (the Times editors hope, anyway)—that the US is a republic and not a democracy. The reason for its design as a republic was not race—race, the original sin that leftists use to explain nearly everything—but a distrust of democracies and their possible (even probable) excesses and vulnerabilities to tyranny.

So the Constitution set up an each-state-is-equal Senate that is even less democratic (small “d”) than the House. And it used to be so very undemocratic that its members weren’t even elected, although I doubt the majority of people are even aware of that history any more:

The framers of the Constitution created the United States Senate to protect the rights of individual states and safeguard minority opinion in a system of government designed to give greater power to the national government. They modeled the Senate on governors’ councils of the colonial era and on the state senates that had evolved since independence. The framers intended the Senate to be an independent body of responsible citizens who would share power with the president and the House of Representatives. James Madison, paraphrasing Edmund Randolph, explained in his notes that the Senate’s role was “first to protect the people against their rulers [and] secondly to protect the people against the transient impressions into which they themselves might be led.”

To balance power between the large and small states, the Constitution’s framers agreed that states would be represented equally in the Senate and in proportion to their populations in the House. Further preserving the authority of individual states, they provided that state legislatures would elect senators. To guarantee senators’ independence from short-term political pressures, the framers designed a six-year Senate term, three times as long as that of popularly elected members of the House of Representatives. Madison reasoned that longer terms would provide stability. “If it not be a firm body,” he concluded, “the other branch being more numerous, and coming immediately from the people, will overwhelm it.” Responding to fears that a six-year Senate term would produce an unreachable aristocracy in the Senate, the framers specified that one-third of the members’ terms would expire every two years, leaving two-thirds of the members in office. This combined the principles of continuity and rotation in office.

Both the Times and all the other articles I’ve read from the left calling for the end of the Electoral College (and I’ve read many) say that the EC is a legacy of slavery and the 3/5 compromise. But that compromise at the original drawing up of the Constitution was about representation in Congress, and it was a way to reduce the power of slave states (and minimize their population advantage) rather than increase it:

The Convention had unanimously accepted the principle that representation in the House of Representatives would be in proportion to the relative state populations. However, since slaves could not vote, white leaders in slave states would thus have the benefit of increased representation in the House and the Electoral College. Delegates opposed to slavery proposed that only free inhabitants of each state be counted for apportionment purposes, while delegates supportive of slavery, on the other hand, opposed the proposal, wanting slaves to count in their actual numbers. The compromise that was finally agreed upon””of counting “all other persons” as only three-fifths of their actual numbers””reduced the representation of the slave states relative to the original proposals, but improved it over the Northern position.

The history of the Electoral College is long and complex and had little to do with slavery. It involves an evolution from a situation in which electors were autonomous, although elected by voters to represent them, to electors being more of less bound by the popular vote on a state-by-state basis. If the Democrats wish to go back to the original structure of the Electoral College, they would be moving further and further away from the democracy they profess to champion, and towards a system in which a small number of elite representatives would hold all the power to choose a president.

But that’s not what Democrats want. What they want is for the extremely blue states of California and New York to decide the election, because that’s the way it would probably be if the Electoral College were to be eliminated. Before the 2016 election, you didn’t hear all that many calls from Democrats for the end of the EC, in part because the EC arrangement was seen to favor Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. Remember all the cries that Trump had no Electoral College “path” to victory? I certainly do.

But since Trump somehow managed to blaze such a path, much to their intense astonishment (and somewhat to mine, I must say), they want the Electoral College gone. And because there is little chance of a constitutional amendment to that purpose passing (probably not enough states would support it), they’ve found a way around that little impediment:

There is an elegant solution: The Constitution establishes the existence of electors, but leaves it up to states to tell them how to vote. Eleven states and the District of Columbia, representing 165 electoral votes, have already passed legislation to have their electors vote for the winner of the national popular vote. The agreement, known as the National Popular Vote interstate compact, would take effect once states representing a majority of electoral votes, currently 270, signed on. This would ensure that the national popular-vote winner would become president.

I guess “elegant” is in the eye of the beholder.

However, I think the Times editors should be careful what they wish for; you know, unintended consequences and all that. If the Electoral College were to be eliminated, candidates will adjust by campaigning differently—concentrating all their resources on a couple of very populous states—and these are states the Democrats already almost totally dominate. I wonder if it has ever occurred to the left that perhaps the Democrats won’t dominate those areas so much any more when the Republicans start focusing on them, because in those states the Republicans pretty much have nowhere to go but up?

But there’s always cheating. If the popular vote becomes the only game in town, the Democrats—who control the apparatus in cities like New York—will have even more motivation to cheat than they did before. National recounts will become commonplace, extremely complex, and bitter. But the left probably figures that would be a small price to pay for the Democratic hegemony they believe will result.

[NOTE: See also this, on the same subject.]

So, why was Ivanka Trump flying coach?

The New Neo Posted on by

Ivanka Trump was reportedly harassed on a Jet Blue flight by a man who was then escorted off the plane (which had not yet taken off):

A male passenger was removed from a JetBlue flight on Thursday morning after reportedly “berating” Ivanka Trump and her family shortly before takeoff at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.

According to TMZ, the unruly passenger spotted the president-elect’s daughter in coach on the Florida-bound flight.

“Your father is ruining the country,” the man told Trump, according to TMZ. “Why is she on our flight? She should be flying private.”

As JetBlue personnel escorted him off the plane, he purportedly protested, screaming, “You’re kicking me off for expressing my opinion?”

No, they’re kicking you off for being a potential troublemaker. Do you really think they need wait till the plane is in the air? There is no inherent right to fly on a particular airplane (they later got him another flight) if you don’t behave yourself. Just try making a joke about terrorism and see where it gets you.

And what’s up with your proudly-tweeting wife/husband?:

“Ivanka and Jared at JFK T5, flying commercial,” Matthew Lasner, a professor at Hunter College, tweeted. “My husband chasing them down to harass them.”

Later, Lasner tweeted that “his husband [had] expressed displeasure about having to travel with Trump and Kushner ‘in a calm tone, JetBlue staff overheard, and they kicked us off the plane.'”

So, Lasner claims that his husband had harassed the Trump family in the airport, but on the plane everything was calm and just between the two of them. Hmmm. And then Lasner apparently deleted both tweets.

However—and this is not a defense of the guy thrown off the plane—it’s a good question. What were Ivanka and family doing on a commercial flight in coach? Were there no alternatives in first class? How do they ordinarily travel? is it wise for the president-elect’s immediate family to be doing this sort of thing without protection? Do they not have security guards?

Because it seems quite dangerous to me. There are a lot of people out there who absolutely hate Trump and who would like to do a lot more harm than verbally harassing his family.

When I first saw this story I wondered whether it was for real or one of those “fake news” things, because the fact situation (of Ivanka on the plane, not of a guy harassing her) seemed so improbable. If it did in fact happen, I certainly hope that Trump’s relatives make other arrangements in the future. It’s all very well to say you support the regular folk, but when you’re in the position they are in you can no longer do this sort of thing and not be at risk. The guy on the plane and his spouse were virtue-signaling in a big way, and very proud of themselves. Others may be moved to do more than virtue-signal.

ADDENDUM: More information here. I’m not sure whether it’s all correct; something about this story still seems fishy to me.

The man doing the talking was identified as Brooklyn lawyer Dan Goldstein, and he was apparently holding a child during the incident. Ivanka had her husband and three children with her. There are varying reports about Goldstein’s behavior and tone. The following is relevant to my main question:

Members of Secret Service were on the flight with the family, but did not intervene and instead chose to let the airline handle the issue.

That’s an indication to me that Goldstein was not directly and physically threatening the family.

Another man who was on the flight described Goldstein as not yelling, but agitated, and he wrote:

When the JetBlue staff went back to speak to the man I overheard Ivanka say to them “I don’t want to make this a thing.” My assessment is that she was happy to let the man take his seat. Security made a different call.’

Scheff later wrote: ‘Honestly, if I was her security I would have made the same call. I don’t _think_ the man was capable of violence, sure. But I would worry that he would leave his seat or cause a scene in some way.

‘And his husband had tweeted that he planned on doing that. So, again you know my politics, but I would have made the same call here.’

You know my politics he makes sure to say. Translated: I’m not one of those awful Trump supporters. But despite that bit of somewhat-understandable virtue-signaling (he doesn’t want the hordes to descend on him for siding with the Ivanka-protectors) he seems quite sensible about the incident.

The exploitation of the transgender child

The New Neo Posted on by

You may have heard the news that a 9-year-old child who was born a boy but who identifies as a girl has been featured on the cover of National Geograhic:

Avery’s family only ever refer to her as ‘she’, and her mother said it would be ‘wrong’ for anybody else to do otherwise.

She has said Avery will take hormone blockers when she reaches puberty, and that if she wanted surgery in the future it would be something the family would consider.

National Geographic’s Gender Revolution issue, which is out on December 27, explores different aspects of gender identity through various stories – including Avery’s.

The magazine’s editor in chief Susan Goldberg tweeted: ‘So proud of our @NatGeo Jan issue. 100% devoted to exploring gender. We’re grateful to all who let us into their lives. #GenderRevolution.’

Here’s more on this particular child and the parents of the child, and why they made the decisions they made about the gender identification.

My views on the entire transgender question can be found here and here, and can be briefly summarized by saying I think it is a real and yet very poorly understand phenomenon (probably occurring somewhat less often than claimed), and that especially when dealing with children one must go very slowly and carefully because children are very suggestible and vulnerable.

But the purpose of this post today isn’t to discuss the transgender phenomenon. What I want to talk about is the cover of the magazine. To me, simply put, I don’t think it’s okay to use a child this way. Children cannot be properly thought of as giving informed consent to a photograph or a revelation about themselves that is ordinarily so private (I wrote about that question here). So it’s irrelevant whether Avery Jackson wants to be on the cover of National Geographic. It is my opinion that the adults involved here are exploiting the child or at least crossing some boundaries, whatever they may think they’re doing for her, for themselves, and for the world. And although I don’t think that such a form of exploitation involves doing anything illegal or technically abusive—it doesn’t—I still think it is inappropriate and a failure in judgment.

Gender reassignment is a very private thing, and parents who want to make it so very public for their underage children are somewhat out of line. Adult transgendered people are free to do whatever they want, of course, and to seek and win whatever publicity they desire. That’s a completely different thing.

And National Geographic is also at fault for publishing this cover. There are plenty of young adults able to give informed consent, and it might have featured any of them instead. So there was no need for this except sensationalism. And indeed they have gotten attention for it.

What’s more, the picture is strange for reasons having nothing to do with the transgender state of this child. Imagine, if you will, that this was a photo of a female child who had never been a male and is not transgender. There’s still something wrong with publishing it, in my opinion.

gendergeo

I realize that now I’m in iffy territory, but it is arguable that the choice of this photo may have an undercurrent of sexualization that is inappropriate. It’s the stare and the pose, particularly the right hand. And that would be true no matter what the history of this particular child is.

To give you a little background as to why I say that, the photo reminds me of the famous book jacket photo of the 23-year-old Truman Capote on the cover of Other Voices, Other Rooms. It caused a sensation when published in 1948 because of its suggestive, seductive nature, although Capote was an adult of 23 when it was taken and he was free to consent to put it on that book jacket.

youngtruman

To take it several steps further, it is also at least somewhat similar to a classic pose in art, used by Manet in his controversial painting “Olympia,” which caused a scandal in 1865 when it was first exhibited in Paris. The reaction was not because of the subject’s nudity, since nudity was commonplace in art. It was her bold and confrontational stare at the observer, and certain objects around the room that suggested she may have been a prostitute:

olympia

Of course, that’s a far cry from the National Geographic cover, which does not feature nudity. Nor am I saying that any suggestive nature of the National Geographic photo was purposeful on the part of the child or the parents. I actually don’t think it was. But I fault the photographer here, who probably took many photos of Avery and chose to select and publish this particular one, which probably had a more edgy quality than many of the others.

Of course, it’s no longer 1865 or even 1948, and times have changed. But I don’t think that has done away with the need to protect children from those who might exploit them in various ways, even if they get their cooperation in that exploitation.

Law enforcement and the new suspect in the Berlin market attack

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s some information on the new suspect in the Berlin Christmas market attack:

Anis Amri, 23, from Tataouine, Tunisia left his home seven years ago according to his father and travelled to Europe as an illegal immigrant.

Amri, who has a €100,000 reward on his head, spent four years in an Italian jail and according to his father moved to Germany last year.

Since his arrival in Germany, Amri was arrested at least three times and was due to be deported.

What was this man doing anywhere on earth outside a prison?

Good question:

Despite being an ISIS supporter known to have received weapons training, German authorities allowed Anis Amri to slip through their clutches time after time.

It is understood, Amri has used at least six different names under three different nationalities.

The 23-year-old even tried to recruit an accomplice for a terror plot ”“ and again the authorities knew about it ”“ but still he remained at large, it has emerged.

This is the sort of history we see time and again with these ISIS-inspired (or even at times ISIS trained and affiliated) so-called “known wolves” (a pun on “lone wolves”). Moreover:

He arrived in Germany in July 2015 and was given a hearing by immigration authorities in April this year. He was denied the right to asylum and was due to be deported before the end of the year.

But under a peculiarity of the German asylum system he was granted a ‘Duldung’ or toleration papers allowing him to stay for unknown reasons.

That sort of thing is, in a nutshell, why the people of Europe are joining the people of the US in demanding change in the suicidal policies of so many Western nations.

Amri was put on a danger list shortly after arriving – a move which meant authorities considered him prone to extreme violence. Yet just how much surveillance he was under remains unclear.

In July this year he got into a knife fight over drugs and was charged with GBH. But he went underground before getting to court.

Yet he surfaced again in August in Ludwigsburg when he was arrested for possessing a fake Italian document. Again, why he was allowed to slip through the fingers of the security services, given his known affiliation to hate preachers, is unclear.

One reads the article with mounting horror and rage. This guy was a terrorist attack waiting to happen, and authorities would be considered to have been almost comically inept at preventing it if the outcome weren’t so hideously and horrifically tragic:

He is known to have attended hate sermons by Abu Walaa in Hildesheimn, a recruiter for ISIS who now sits in jail on remand after being arrested last month for radicalising young men for the terror group.

Apparently Walaa wanted to send him to Syria. But he did not want to, preferring instead to formulate plans for an attack in Germany.

Another investigator said: ‘Supposedly the evidence was not strong enough to arrest him.’…

Amri…is believed to have entered Europe through Italy with Syrian refugees.

He is believed to have had a criminal record in Tunisia, having carried out violent car robberies. Tunisian police are now said to be speaking to his family.

And here’s the capper:

Despite an unfolding international manhunt the first pictures of him released in Germany have his eyes deliberately covered, thought to be because of strict privacy laws there. MailOnline has uncovered unblurred images.

The Daily Mail article from which this is all taken is a long one with many photos and much information, worth reading the whole thing to get an idea of the state of German law enforcement on terrorist matters. That state appears to be abysmal one, with the country locked into an ordinary business-as-usual application of the domestic criminal justice system. It’s not working, and it’s widespread across Europe and this country as well.

[NOTE: The suspect was identified from some ID papers found underneath the seat in the truck. I suppose it is possible that this was a purposefully false lead, planted there by the real perpetrator. However, Amri’s history certainly indicates that he is a likely perpetrator.]

Kissinger on Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

This clip from a recent interview with Henry Kissinger is interesting on several levels.

One of them is that Kissinger is still alive. But actually, he’s “only” 93. I would have thought him to be 193, since he seemed old to me when he served in the Nixon administration so many moons ago.

Then again, if you glance at that Wiki entry I just linked to, you’ll see that his father lived to be 95 and his mother to 97. So he’s got the good genes.

The second is that he’s exceedingly coherent.

The third is what he has to say, and the very dry way he says it. He starts with an understatement that I think could be true of 99.9999% of the people of America, both pundits and otherwise:

I had not thought of President Trump as a presidential candidate until he became a presidential candidate.

But then he goes on to say he gives him huge credit:

By the way, I learned a bunch of things from reading Kissinger’s Wiki entry that I’d never known before about his history. His family left Germany in 1938 when he was about 15, just in time to avoid the worst. He served with the US Army during the war:

The army sent him to study engineering at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania, but the program was cancelled, and Kissinger was reassigned to the 84th Infantry Division. There, he made the acquaintance of Fritz Kraemer, a fellow immigrant from Germany who noted Kissinger’s fluency in German and his intellect, and arranged for him to be assigned to the military intelligence section of the division. Kissinger saw combat with the division, and volunteered for hazardous intelligence duties during the Battle of the Bulge.

During the American advance into Germany, Kissinger, only a private, was put in charge of the administration of the city of Krefeld, owing to a lack of German speakers on the division’s intelligence staff. Within eight days he had established a civilian administration. Kissinger was then reassigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps, with the rank of sergeant. He was given charge of a team in Hanover assigned to tracking down Gestapo officers and other saboteurs, for which he was awarded the Bronze Star. In June 1945, Kissinger was made commandant of the Bensheim metro CIC detachment, Bergstrasse district of Hesse, with responsibility for de-Nazification of the district. Although he possessed absolute authority and powers of arrest, Kissinger took care to avoid abuses against the local population by his command.

And then there’s this (I wonder whether all the soccer moms know?):

As a youth, Heinz enjoyed playing soccer, and even played for the youth wing of his favorite club, SpVgg Fé¼rth, which was one of the nation’s best clubs at the time…

Kissinger was described as one of the most influential people in the growth of soccer in the United States. Kissinger was named chairman of the North American Soccer League board of directors in 1978.

Since his childhood, Kissinger has been a fan of his hometown’s soccer club, SpVgg Greuther Fé¼rth. Even during his time in office he was informed about the team’s results by the German Embassy every Monday morning. He is an honorary member with lifetime season tickets. In September 2012, Kissinger attended a home game in which SpVgg Greuther Fé¼rth lost, 0”“2, against Schalke after promising years ago he would attend a Greuther Fé¼rth home game if they were promoted to the Bundesliga, the top football league in Germany, from the 2. Bundesliga. Kissinger is an honorary member of the German soccer club FC Bayern Mé¼nchen.

Somehow, I cannot imagine Kissinger as either young or athletic; he seems to have been born old. But here’s the proof of the youth and the military service:

kissingeryoung

kissingeruniform

If you were to change the hairdo on that second photo and to tell me it was an old photo of my maternal grandmother, I would have no trouble whatsoever believing you, although she did not resemble the elderly Kissinger at all. It’s a rather uncanny thing (because she didn’t look masculine), but she was actually a ringer not for Kissinger, but for FDR in his later years, including the jauntiness.

Update on the Berlin terrorist attack

The New Neo Posted on by

The 23-year-old Pakistini recent asylum seeker who is in police custody as a suspect in the Christmas market attack may not be the right man. Police aren’t saying exactly why they think he isn’t the perp, except that he’s denying that he is, which wouldn’t be enough. My guess is that there are multiple reasons they think they made an error.

Here’s something that caught my eye:

Obama offered condolences for the “horrific apparent terrorist attack,” it said in a statement on Tuesday.

Apparent? With a dead Polish driver in the car, the terrorist driver fled, and the obviousness of the motive, that’s being ridiculously careful on Obama’s part. At least the word “terrorist” is in there, which is progress for Obama.

And now we learn that the suspect has been released:

Federal prosecutors said Tuesday that that the man, a Pakistani citizen who came to Germany last year as an asylum-seeker, denied involvement in the attack that killed 12 people and injured nearly 50 others.

They noted that witnesses were able to follow the truck’s driver from the scene but lost track of him. The man arrested matched witness descriptions of the truck driver, but investigators haven’t been able to prove that he was in the truck’s cab at the time of the attack.

Under German law, prosecutors have until the end of the calendar day following an arrest to seek a formal arrest warrant keeping a suspect in custody.

Let us hope that this really is the wrong man. Or that they are tracking him within an inch of his life. Because otherwise it just points out the folly of dealing with terrorism as though it were an ordinary law enforcement issue.

Here is more information about the Polish driver Luckasz Urban and about the hijacking:

“It was really clear that he was fighting for his life. His face was swollen and bloodied. Police informed me that he had suffered gunshot wounds. Despite being stabbed he was shot dead,” Zurawski told Polish media.

Poland’s prime minister, Beata Szydlo, said that the Pole was “the first victim of this heinous act of violence.” Berlin police also said in a tweet that the man who was found dead in the truck did not control the truck that drove to the Christmas market.

Zurawski said Urban arrived with a delivery of steel at a branch of the Thyssenkrupp company in Berlin on Monday at 7 a.m. but was told to wait with his delivery until 8 a.m. the following day.

On Tuesday, Zurawski showed reporters a photo on his phone of his cousin in a kebab bar around 2 p.m., the last photo known of him still alive.

Berlin police chief Klaus Kandt said authorities have the “exact movement of the truck” from GPS but they are not giving details out and that it was only after the attack that the truck’s owner got in touch.

Zurawski said that Urban, who is survived by a wife and teenage son, last had contact with his wife at 3 p.m. local time, but that she couldn’t talk then because she was at work. She said she would call at 4 p.m., but at that point he was no longer answering his phone.

Zurawski described unusual movements on the truck’s GPS at 3:45 p.m. that indicate Urban was not in control.

“The car was started up, turned off, driven forward, then backward. As if somebody inside was learning how to drive,” Zurawski said in a separate interview broadcast on TVP Info, the state broadcaster’s all-news network.

There was no more movement until 7.40 p.m., when the truck started and traveled some 10 kilometers (six miles), sometimes turning in tight spots or crossing the double line, and arrived at the Christmas market, Zurawski said.

RIP to all the victims.

[NOTE: I wonder why the market wasn’t closed to vehicular traffic. Or did the truck just drive past or through barriers? If so, the barriers were clearly inadequate.]

Terrorist attack in Berlin: nine dead so far

The New Neo Posted on by

A truck plowed into a crowd of Christmas shoppers, killing 9 and injuring 50. This is the new pattern of low-tech terror attacks: knives or vehicles, weapons found easily by almost anyone:

A man was arrested on suspicion of being the driver of the truck. Police said and were investigating whether he was the same man earlier seen fleeing from the scene of the attack on foot.

There were unconfirmed reports the arrested man was Chechen.

A suspected passenger found dead inside in the lorry was reportedly Polish. It is believed he may have been the original driver of the truck, which came from Poland and is thought to have been hijacked.

If that report is correct, it seems likely that the hijacker of the truck killed the original driver.

It followed warnings that Isil terrorists may target Christmas markets in Europe.

Witnesses of the Berlin attack described scenes of panic and horror as a lorry veered off the street and ploughed into the crowded Christmas market just off the famous shopping street of Kurfé¼rstendamm at around 8pm local time (7pm GMT).

The fact that it was a location described as a “Christmas market” is almost certainly purposeful and anti-Christian.

Horrific.

The deed…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is done:

…[T]he representatives designated to cast ballots in accordance with their states’ Nov. 8 decision mostly adhered to the results of the election. With several states still voting, Trump had 304 votes and Hillary Clinton had 169.

It takes 270 Electoral College votes to win the presidency. Texas put Trump over the top, despite two Republican electors casting protest votes.

Elector antics were few and far between, with most the disruptions occurring on the Democratic side. A Democratic elector in Maine tried to vote for Sen. Bernie Sanders, but switched to Clinton after it was ruled improper. Another who tried to vote for Sanders in Minnesota was replaced; a Colorado elector who tried to back Ohio Gov. John Kasich likewise was replaced. One of the biggest deviations was in Washington state, where three electors voted for Colin Powell and one voted for “Faith Spotted Eagle;” the remaining eight went to Clinton, the state’s winner.

I guess the Republican electors didn’t heed the wise counsel of their good friend Michael Moore.

Let’s canonize Obama

The New Neo Posted on by

Now that President Obama’s second and last term is about to come to an end, I’ve seen an increasing number of adoring essays such as this one, subtitled “Our outgoing leader brought out the best in all of us”:

The Obamas represented not just the best of black people, but the best of ALL people ”” white, black, brown and everything in between.

The Obamas are a credit to the race all right ”” the human race.

Yet President Obama, the most honest, decent President of my lifetime, who leaves with a 56% approval rating, is, if you listen to the right wing’s very mainstream media, a man loathed and hated.

How can that be?

Oh, you know how, right? Because there can only be one reason that anyone on earth can fail to see the astounding, most honest and decent president’s incredible wonderfulness, and that is this:

So ”” what is the cause for the hate?

Maybe, just maybe, the most decent President of modern times, a man without a whiff of scandal, who didn’t plunge the country into an unwinnable and unjustified war, a man who won’t be forming any billionaire’s family foundation, is hated simply because … he’s black, a black president in a white country? Likely.

This constant refrain began with Obama setting up the meme that the reason motivating his opponents was racism (I documented that message of Obama’s back in real time during his 2008 campaign, here and here). It’s apparently still one of the most basic of the stories that the left tells itself (and the rest of us) when evaluating the very flawed administration of President Obama, as was evident in the New Republic panel I wrote about just the other day.

I wouldn’t pay that much attention to it if it weren’t for an experience I had about a week ago, when I attended a gathering of about ten women, quite a few of whom were talking about Obama in reverent terms. I mean “reverent” quite literally. They were saying that he is one of their most admired people on earth, ever, right up there with Mother Teresa and Gandhi. These are not leftist activists; these are liberal women who are not especially political but who follow politics and world events in average fashion, and are quite intelligent. But they were very sincere about this, and waxed quite eloquent on the subject. In addition, they are completely convinced that Trump’s presidency will bring back another era of Jim Crow, lynchings, and the like.

These appear to be mainstream liberal thoughts at this point, as far as I can tell.

And here is another popular message, although a less race-focused and worshipful one: Trump is already a tainted president, and the Democrats were just too nice and too compromising towards Republicans for too long:

Trump, with the heavy asterisks hovering over his Putin, FBI and 3-million vote deficit-tainted election, could finally put an end to our collective reverence for the presidency. That’s an outcome the country’s anti-monarchal founders might heartily endorse, and it’s the first step to fighting back. Come Jan. 20, many Americans will revere the presidency no more.

It’s a spell worth breaking. Reverence for the office has made Americans too compliant, too soft, too comfortable, and too ripe for autocracy.

Too great a love for the presidency has caused Democrats to neglect state and local politics and to overly prize compromise and a futile quest for bipartisanship. It has made liberals too allergic to federalism and too shy about grassroots politics.

Well, as far as I can see, reverence for one particular president (rather than the presidency itself) is higher than ever.

I agree with one part of that quote, though: the Democrats neglected grassroots politics—although actually, they didn’t neglect it, they compartmentalized it. They felt they had total control of populous blue states (California, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, and a few more) and that those were the states that counted, so they didn’t need to do much else. Meanwhile, Democrats at the state legislature level were fading away.

Oh, and Democrats are “too allergic to federalism” when it’s invoked by Republicans. Democrats have never had any problem using it when it benefits Democrats.

Electoral College voting day

The New Neo Posted on by

Usually when the Electoral College votes for president, it’s a non-event.

Today it’s a much bigger deal. Not in terms of the vote itself, the result of which is a foregone conclusion, but in terms of the ongoing propaganda war designed to invalidate the Trump presidency:

Presuming that mission is unsuccessful, prepare for the next phase: Jan. 6, when Congress formally tallies the results of those votes.

At that time, as few as two members of Congress ”” one in the House and one in the Senate ”” could lodge an objection to the results of the vote in a particular state or overall. While similarly unlikely to change the outcome, given current circumstances, it would be another wrench thrown into the transition of power ”” and another effort to make the case of opposition to the coming Trump presidency.

But even then, don’t expect it to end. Efforts to undermine Trump’s presidency by Democrats and those Republicans who believe Trump is unfit for office ”” or violating his oath of office ”” almost certainly will continue, a cascading series of constant challenges.

We’ve already seen quite a few; will the seemingly interminable election of 2016 ever end? First it was Comey who stole the election for Trump. Then the recounts were demanded. And now we’re in the midst of accusations that it was actually Russia that stole the election for Trump, as well as today’s Electoral College brouhaha.

These skirmishes will continue, probably unabated, during the Trump presidency. This sort of campaign of invalidation really got going with the 2000 election, which truly was a tossup (decided by the courts) but which the left continued to label as stolen when Bush was the victor. But, as I’ve said many times, I think the public’s reaction to Trump will depend on what Trump actually does as president and what effect his actions have both domestically and internationally.

Andrey Karlov, Russian ambassador to Turkey, assassinated

The New Neo Posted on by

The scene was an opening in an art gallery.

The perpetrator, according to some initial reports (this is a breaking story), was a police officer with a message:

According to Sky News, the attacker shouted: “We made an oath to die in martyrdom…it is revenge for Syria and Aleppo.”

He is believed to have added: “Until they are safe, you will not taste safety.

“Get back, only death will take me from here.”

It is understood the man was speaking in Arabic…

According to local reports, the attacker was a Turkish policemen who had been assigned to the security detail overlooking the event which Mr Karlov had been attending.

The event was being covered by the press, so there are many photos and also video.

Turkey is a country that has been less stable in recent years, and Russia and Turkey have been on opposite sides of the current conflict in Syria. It’s a good bet that the killer was an Islamist radical, but we don’t know exactly what was going on. Putin has not spoken to the public on the subject yet:

According to agency TASS, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said: “We qualify the events as a terrorist attack, we stay in contact with Turkish officials who have pledged that a through all-round investigation will be carried out.

“The attackers will be punished. Today this issue will be brought up at the UN Security Council.”…

Tensions between Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s leader Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan have been mounting since a Russian attack aircraft was shot down by the Turkish air force in November last year.

The Kremlin hit back with a string of sanctions against Turkey, such as banning Turkish exports of fruit and veg.

Earlier this year the leaders of the two countries met in a bid to repair the relationship.

But the ambassador’s killing is set to anger Russia and spark deadly consequences.

[NOTE: If the killer was actually part of the security detail, this sort of thing is nothing new. In 2007, I wrote a post about the phenomenon.]