This past Wednesday was the fifteenth anniversary of FredHJr’s death

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: The following is a somewhat revised version of a post that has appeared previously on this blog.]

Unbelievable that it’s been fifteen years since commenter FredHJr died suddenly and tragically. As time passes, the number of readers here who don’t remember Fred must necessarily increase, so for those of you who don’t know who FredHJr was, please see this and this, as well as these.

Fred’s death was extremely tragic for his family. But it was tragic for this blog, too, because he was an invaluable and irreplaceable member of our community, a “changer” who knew a lot about the Left, and a keen observer of politics, history, religion, culture—of life itself. I still think about him at times, wondering what he’d have to say about everything that’s happened in these last fifteen years.

Every year around the anniversary, I offer some excerpts from his many comments here.

This comment is from October 18, 2008, just a few weeks before Obama was elected president for the first time:

It’s the Marxist/Leninist ethics of expediency. No regrets. Whatever it takes to discredit anything the other side does and excuse the sins of your own side.

…this reveals a lot about who is about to take power and how they will wield it against the rest of us. They get away with it and many will not at all be troubled by it because they are shaped by the post-modernism, cultural Marxism that they imbibed during their formative and educational experience. If we as a people cannot name this accurately and expunge its corrosive influence over our lives, then down into the wages of perdition and disaster we go.

The comment is from October 28, 2008. The election was getting close:

Obama is part of a nexus of interests. What the American dopes who will put him in office are getting is a NETWORK of alliances and interests, running the gamut from Finance (Soros) to academia to media to law. Thus far, in order to appeal to the Middle Muddle he has been packaged as a moderate or centrist. But once in office the venomous swarm of this network will burst out of the nest and devour the host. You wait and see. And I’m not eager for the moment to say “I told you so.” I really would it be the case that it never happens at all.

This was a comment of Fred’s from the very beginning of the Obama presidency, but I think it’s worth mulling over today:

For me, Western Civilization is an incredibly complex work that has eclectically and also seamlessly borrowed the excellence and the virtues of Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, and the Enlightenment. The High Middle Ages and the Renaissance also made important contributions. In its totality it is a meritocracy and a liberation of humanity that has resulted in ever greater learning and material prosperity and health for most of the people who live under it. It is not an unblemished history. Yet in its totality it gleams with advancement when juxtaposed against civilizations which enslave humanity.

I think the beginning of the end of our civilization began with the French Revolution and The Terror. It was the beginning of the elaboration of totalitarian thought and throughout the 19th century this kept on finding newer permutations of elegant, intellectual terror. The 20th century was the culmination of the barbarity of totalitarianism.

These are chosen somewhat randomly, but so very much of what I looked at that Fred had written was on target.

RIP Fred, and may your family be comforted in their grief. We miss you.

Over the years there have been other commenters here who probably have died, and I would like to mention them too, but for no one else did I actually get official word of that person’s death. So it’s hard to be specific. One commenter who comes to mind is “strcpy,” who announced that he was very ill and then disappeared shortly thereafter, about fourteen years ago. I wrote him an email but never heard back, and I fear he’s gone. But I don’t know for sure. Another prolific commenter who disappeared many years ago was Occam’s Beard. I was never able to contact him after that, and so I fear something tragic may have happened. Same for parker.

There may be others, as well. I wouldn’t necessarily find out. Sometimes people just stop commenting here because they get busy or they get tired or they get turned off. But it stands to reason some of them will have died. So I’ll take this opportunity to say RIP for all of them.

And then there’s SCOTUS: on camping ordinances and “interference”

The New Neo Posted on by

The Democrats aren’t having what you’d call a good day. Mama said there’d be days like this, and mama was right.

SCOTUS has handed down some important rulings that didn’t go the left’s way. The first is to allow anti-camping ordinances, and the second is to more narrowly interpret the “interference” statute under which the J6 defendants have been prosecuted/persecuted.

Here’s the first:

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court decided whether cities should enforce anti-camping ordinances against the homeless in an Eighth Amendment challenge to an Oregon law. The Court held 6–3 that cities may enforce anti-camping ordinances against homeless people even when insufficient shelter beds are available.

Justice Gorsuch delivered the opinion of the Court, which the Chief Justice and Justices Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Barrett joined. Thomas wrote a concurring opinion. Justice Sotomayor wrote a dissenting opinion, which Justices Kagan and Jackson joined.

So this one broke down in the usual 6/3 conservative/liberal split.

The reasoning:

The Court held that “[t]he enforcement of generally applicable laws regulating camping on public property does not constitute ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.”

The Eighth Amendment states, “[e]xcessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

The majority expounded on the history of the Eighth Amendment, which “has always been considered, and properly so, to be directed at the method or kind of punishment,” not what conduct may be punished.

The left continually tries to use the process of legal interpretation to expand the law in the ways the left wishes it would go. They didn’t succeed this time; this SCOTUS decision allows localities to stop their streets from becoming tent cities or worse.

The second decision was on something that should have been a no-brainer – the “liberal” interpretation and stretching of a law to new and partisan political purposes:

In a big decision today, the Supreme Court, in a split that saw KBJ siding with the Roberts majority and ACB writing the dissent joined by Sotomayor and Kagan, rejected the use of The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 against a J6 defendant, ruling the statute only applied to interference with records or evidence, not interference with an official proceeding. This has implications not only for other J6 defendants, but also the DC court charges against Trump.

Note the split there; highly unusual.

From the opinion:

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 imposes criminal liability on anyone who corruptly “alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding.” 18 U. S. C. §1512(c)(1). The next subsection extends that prohibition to anyone who “otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.” §1512(c)(2). We consider whether this “otherwise” clause should be read in light of the limited reach of the specific provision that precedes it.

This is a classic method of judicial interpretation of statutes. Again, the left wanted to use this statute in novel ways for political purposes to punish their enemies.

Good day for the Court, for the J6 defendants, and potentially for Trump.

ADDENDUM:

And then there’s the agency case, with a huge win for the right in overruling Chevron. This is a long-hoped-for victory for the right:

The Supreme Court upended the federal regulatory framework in place for 40 years, expanding the power of federal judges to second-guess agency decisions over environmental, consumer and workplace safety policy, among other areas.

The 6-3 decision, along ideological lines, discards a 1984 precedent directing federal courts to defer to agency legal interpretations when the statutory language passed by Congress is ambiguous. Conservative legal activists, Republican-led states and some business groups have argued in recent years that the 1984 case, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, allows agenda-driven regulators to push the limits of their power.

By abandoning the doctrine called Chevron deference, the justices have given parties unhappy with agency decisions more opportunities to overturn regulations by persuading federal judges that agency officials exceeded their authority.

Again the SCOTUS decision was split along the usual political lines.

The other day I said the Roberts court was cowardly at times, although it was brave in overruling Roe. I’d say this is another brave decision, and a potentially far-reaching one.

California really, really doesn’t want school boards to be able to inform parents that their own children are transitioning

The New Neo Posted on by

California gives an astounding slap in the face to parents:

So it’s come to this. In order to pass divisive legislation, the California Democrat Supermajority has devolved into fisticuffs when they are opposed. According to Capitol correspondent Ashley Zavala, Assemblyman Bill Essayli (R-Riverside) was debating in opposition to AB 1955, which makes it a crime for school boards to agree to inform parents that their child is being transitioned from one gender to another. The Chino Hills Unified School District is in Essayli’s district, and they are being sued by the State of California because it instituted a parental notification policy.

Just let that sink in: school boards in California may not have a policy to inform parents that their own children are being transitioned.

You can find more on the bill and the opposition to it here. This bill gives the idea of the school as being in loco parentis a new meaning.

How about the prospects of alternate nominees for the Democrats?

The New Neo Posted on by

After last night’s Biden debacle, there’s increased chatter about who might replace him if the Democrats can manage to give him the boot.

A great many people think that just about any replacement could beat Trump more easily than Biden could. I’ve long disagreed with that point of view. The reason I don’t think it’s any kind of slam dunk is that, if they’d had a good replacement for Biden, they would have gotten rid of him long before this.

Do you think other Democrats poll better than Biden? See this. Now, granted it’s from mid-February of this year, which is pretty old news. But it’s one of the few polls I could find that shows how Trump would do against leading Democrat contenders, and the answer is “pretty well.” Here are the stats at a time when Trump was leading Biden by only 1 point:

In a hypothetical match-up, Trump leads Vice President Harris 46 percent to 43 percent and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) 46 percent to 36 percent. He also leads Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) 45 percent to 33 percent.

Newsom and Whitmer have increasingly gained national attention as prominent Democrats, and pundits have included them as possible future presidential candidates.

Both of the governors are quite well known, and have vulnerabilities on the national level.

Here’s a poll from March that shows an even greater margin for Trump over Newsom, and in the same poll Trump apparently also led Michelle Obama (I can’t find more details because it’s behind a paywall).

Of course, if any of these people – or some other Democrat – is nominated, I suppose they could start to grow on the American public. But I don’t see any reason to automatically assume that will happen. The Democrats are in disarray at the moment, and although they could regroup, it will take some doing.

The day after the debate: the emperor Biden’s new clothes

The New Neo Posted on by

Unlike in the Hans Christian Andersen story, there was no little child pointing and crying out, “But he’s naked!” But last night’s debate made quite a few things clear that apparently had been successfully hidden from at least some portion of the public.

The first is that Biden has lost even more cognitive and physical ground.

The second is that the leftist pundits, press, and politicians have been cynically lying about it in a power-hungry con game.

The third is that in this debate it couldn’t be hidden from the public. Until now, only the right has been reporting on the obvious, showing moments in which Biden seemed confused, physically and mentally froze, and was inarticulate or downright impossible to understand. The Democrats thought if they didn’t show it, the public wouldn’t notice, and people like press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre could do the Orwellian thing and accuse the right of lying with “cheap fakes.”

Even to those of us who have been watching Biden’s mental and physical condition sink and were aware of his cognitive challenges, it turned out that Biden had an especially bad night last night. The hour was late for him. He wasn’t reading from a script. Many people predicted he’d fade as the night wore on, because ninety minutes would be too much for him, but fifteen minutes turned out to be too much for him. Maybe even one minute. They may not have dosed him properly. The extra stress might have gotten to him. Whatever the reason, it was a perfect storm and he wasn’t just terrible, he was shockingly terrible in a way that could not be denied (although some will try, of course).

It couldn’t be denied because it was happening in real time, under a spotlight. This is the reality of Joe Biden, President of the United States, Commander in Chief, and leader of the free world. I think that the various MSM personalities didn’t have to feign shock about that. They truly were shocked, but they were lying about what caused their shock. They had known for a long time that Biden is befuddled and incompetent, and they had cooperated in covering it up for their viewers. But they had assumed that he would do well enough in the debate that they could continue with the con. Their shock was that they recognized almost immediately that the con was over.

There’s an alternative explanation, though, which is that the entire debate was a setup for getting rid of Biden. I think it’s probably true that the Democrats wanted the debate to be held earlier than usual in order to test him out and be able to ditch and replace him if absolutely necessary. But I also believe they didn’t think it would pan out that way; they didn’t think it would be absolutely necessary. But now they see that they have two choices: figure out a way to ditch him and replace him with someone who can win, or find a way to ramp up the fraud to previously unheard-of levels.

Getting rid of Biden as candidate won’t be easy, though. As I’ve said many times, if it were easy and the solution obvious, they would have done it sooner. That’s the big stumbling block. But waiting this long, even if they finally accomplish it, isn’t a good look for the party. The cynically deceptive game they’ve played has become more clear, as has the risk in which they’ve put the nation and the world.

The Democrats have been working the con for four years, ever since Biden was anointed the 2020 nominee. But after last night, I think the con is up – and most of them seem to think so, too. Now it’s time to get a new candidate and/or a new con, and they’re not so sure they can pull it off. I certainly hope they can’t.

NOTE: There’s also the fact that Biden’s decline is now out in the open for all to see. Around the world, every tyrant and enemy of the US is chuckling and rubbing his hands with glee. But you know what? I think they already knew Biden was pretty bad, even before this.

I’ll add that, although I’m not a doctor or a nurse and can’t diagnose anyone, I suspect that Biden has Parkinson’s Disease. How can I say that even though he has no tremor? Although tremor is usually a prominent symptom of the disease, it’s not a necessary one. Biden has many of the other symptoms: a masklike face, slowed gait and small steps, balance problems, cognitive issues, and weak voice.

Open thread 6/28/24

The New Neo Posted on by

I know I’ve previously shown videos of the Moiseyev Dance Company’s “Partisans,” which is a tribute to the partisans of WWII. But I’m going to add this one featuring section of a “Partisans” rehearsal. It’s minus the fancy lighting, the props are spotty – some dancers have them and some don’t – and they’re not giving it their full performance pizzazz. But it’s still impressive. I never tire of the way the dancers create the illusion of gliding. I pretty much know how they do it – small quick movements with their feet, while keeping their upper bodies calm and level. But I still can’t believe what I’m seeing:

After the debate

The New Neo Posted on by

I didn’t watch the debate itself. But I watched some subsequent commentary just now on ABC.

And I couldn’t help but notice that the pundits looked and sounded very somber. It seems Biden was a disaster. They were talking about how he might be replaced on the ticket – except for the problem of who could replace him, and whether Biden could be convinced to give up his grip on the office.

And that was on ABC.

“

The debate tonight

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a thread to discuss it.

I fear I may be repeating myself – but I can’t stand debates. They make me a combination of nervous and angry as well as frustrated. Is a lot riding on this one? Biden’s supporters would never vote for Trump, and Trump’s would never vote for Biden. That said, there are the usual people in the middle who could be swayed. They tend to tip the balance of the voting in one direction or the other.

The expectations for Biden are so low that it’s easy to say he’ll probably exceed them. Then again, I don’t think the expectations are sky-high for Trump, either. I can’t put myself in the shoes of an “undecided,” so even if I were to watch the debate – which I might not – it would be hard for me to guess how that group would see it.

One interesting point is that this is a very rare situation – and no, it’s not just the advanced age of the two participants. It’s that they both have already served one term as president.

One of the things to watch is how the MSM will favor Biden, both during the debate via the moderators, and after the debate via the coverage.

Biden is “appalled” at violent anti-Semitism in LA

The New Neo Posted on by

Anti-Semitism was on display recently in Los Angeles, with keffiyehs and masks instead of brown shirts:

As RedState previously reported, disturbing scenes unfolded on a sunny Sunday in Los Angeles, where pro-Hamas agitators showed up to surround and harass worshippers at the Adas Torah synagogue while calling for a bloody intifada.

Chants of “Free Palestine” filled the air.

As we also reported, things escalated quickly as the worshippers attempted to defend themselves, each other, and the synagogue, “with eggs, pepper spray, and fists being thrown. Some people and journalists were thrown to the ground and kicked, while others were bludgeoned.”

Biden (or someone writing for him) made a comment on “X” to the effect that he was “appalled,” and Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz replied:

Good points.

Quite a few people affiliated with the synagogue fought back. This is an Orthodox synagogue in a Jewish area of LA, and my guess is that some of the members are either of Israeli origin, or the offspring of families who came years ago from Iran (LA is home to quite a few Iranian Jews from families who came here mostly after the Iranian Revolution). Those groups are not averse to defending themselves physically, if necessary.

It used to be that synagogues didn’t have to be guarded in this country. Then it used to be that a guard or two would do, because the threat was from a lone terrorist or maybe a couple working in tandem. Now it’s a mob. And if the police don’t defend the congregation – which they did not in this case, although they were present – the congregation must do so itself.

Here’s a more detailed story, including a description of the inaction of the police.

NOTE: Several sites covering the event have pointed out that the mob in LA that attacked the synagogue had many “regulars” who had earlier participated in anti-Semitic riots at UCLA, and that there’s a lot of overlap with Antifa. “Antifa” is one of those extremely ironic Orwellian names: anti-fascist, my foot.

SCOTUS is ok with government censorship via social media

The New Neo Posted on by

On yesterday’s SCOTUS decision in Murthy v. Minnesota:

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 6-3 to vacate a historic preliminary injunction granted by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in the case of Murthy v. Missouri, finding that the Respondents protected by the injunction lacked standing to support injunctive (that is, future) relief. The injunction had barred officials from the White House, CDC, FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Surgeon General’s office from encouraging social media platforms to censor constitutionally protected speech.

… The Court today protected the government’s ability to censor truthful speech that opposed the government’s false and manipulative narratives on multiple aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic, including our clients’ true statements challenging government falsehoods about natural immunity, vaccine efficacy, masking, the origins of the Wuhan virus, and many other topics.

I think it’s not that hard to figure out what happened. I noticed long ago that Chief Justice Roberts’ general judicial philosophy can be summed up as “find some reason to not rock the boat” – if the boat is the way the government is operating. Kavanaugh and Barrett sometimes follow suit, as they did here. I believe it was a cowardly decision to avoid an outright fight with the Biden administration. Here was the reasoning in the opinion:

“To establish standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a government defendant and redressable by the injunction they seek,” Barrett wrote. “Because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction.”

This tendency towards non-interference with the status quo is why I was surprised that the Court overruled Roe.