DC and our dying blue cities

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an article describing how depressing and dangerous Washington DC has become.

Now, you might say that DC has been that way for a long time. But it’s clear that it’s recently gotten even worse.

You also might say “Who cares?” Well, I do. Not only is DC our capital, but it used to be a fun place to visit. And DC is hardly alone; there’s been a decline in so many of our big cities. And if you also don’t care about them – perhaps because such cities are Democratic strongholds or because you live far away? – I think you’re being short-sighted. Not only were many of these cities beautiful and lovely to visit – San Francisco being a prime example – but in each case a great many people are sinking with those cities, and a great many states. Coming soon to a city and state near you?

You might also say that if things get bad enough in those cities, maybe voters there will vote for something different; something better. Yes, every now and then a Soros DA is recalled, but I don’t see much changing in such cities as a result.

The combination of lengthy COVID restrictions, work from home, post-Floyd-riots’ relaxation of controls on crime, the demonization of police and their resultant flight, and illegal immigration and criminal gangs ha been a big part of the mess that so many of our cities have become. I wonder if this can be reversed, and if so how.

And in addition to the human cost and the economic cost, we have the undeniable fact that these blue cities have become the perfect venues for political trials against the right. Right now we see this especially in DC, New York, and Atlanta. Prosecutors there feel comfortable using twisted and novel legal theories to charge those on the opposing side, and confident in judges and juries to convict. This is a very ominous development.

These cities and their decline affect us all.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Here’s a good piece by Matthew Continetti:

… AEI researcher Nate Moore investigated Trump’s growing favorability rating and found that the former president is more popular now than at any point since he left office. The source of this newfound popularity is minority voters. “While his support has ticked up among white and black Americans,” Moore wrote this week in The Liberal Patriot, “the share of Hispanic Americans who have a favorable view of Trump has doubled over the last year from around 20 percent to 40 percent.”

John Burn-Murdoch, chief data reporter for the Financial Times, analyzed election surveys going back to the 1950s. He found that the Democrats’ advantage among nonwhite voters is at its lowest point since JFK was president. Black and Hispanic voters are matching their party preferences with their ideological preferences. Fewer self-identified conservative nonwhites vote Democratic for communal reasons.

This re-alignment has been predicted for many years, but will it really translate into votes this time? And if so, is it fairly permanent or is it dependent on Biden’s abominable performance?

(2)SCOTUS hears oral arguments on a case involving “suppression by the Biden Administration of social media speech Biden and his cronies don’t like.” I’ve read many discussions of how it’s been going, and it appears that a majority may be wanting to preserve the government’s ability to do this in a crisis. But I would caution about making predictions based on how oral arguments go.

(3) Hamas operatives returned to one of their favorite haunts: al Shifa hospital. The IDF was forced once again to attack them in the hospital:

The Israel Defense Forces early Monday morning launched a raid on Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital, amid intelligence that senior Hamas officials were in the area and using the hospital to plan and carry out terror activity, the military said. …

By Monday evening, some 20 Hamas gunmen were killed inside the hospital premises and another 20 were killed in the surrounding area, the IDF said.

In one incident inside the hospital, the IDF said troops of the Navy’s Shayetet 13 commando unit killed a senior Hamas commander, Faiq Mabhouh.

Mabhouh, who served as the head of operations in Hamas’s internal security, was armed and hiding inside the Shifa complex, “from which he was working to advance terror activity,” the IDF said.

Mabhouh was killed amid an exchange of fire during an attempt to arrest him, the IDF said. In a nearby room, the IDF said troops recovered a cache of weapons.

In the MSM, this becomes a story with a headline that Israel raided a hospital. Take a look, for example, at the BBC headline: “Israeli forces raid Gaza City’s al-Shifa hospital.” How many people read past the headline to learn that there were terrorists hiding there?

And in paragraph four they get the Hamas propaganda:

Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said Israel was committing a war crime.

The Israeli military said there was no obligation for medical staff or patients to leave, and that the hospital could continue its important functions.

But several medical staff inside the hospital told the BBC that the electricity had been cut and that they had been instructed by the Israeli military not to move, prohibiting them from properly treating patients.

“We are trapped where we are inside the department,” said Dr Amer Jedbeh, a 31-year-old surgical resident.

“A shell hit our building on the first floor, injuring several people. One man died – we could not save him. We are working only with first aid, essentially, we cannot operate because there is no electricity or water.”

Dr Jedbeh said two patients on life support at the intensive care unit in the same building had died because the electricity supply was cut ahead of the raid. “All the machinery is off,” he added.

“Colleagues from the main building say there are many injured there who need surgery but we cannot get to them and they cannot bring the patients to us.”

Much more appears in the article of that sort of account – uncorroborated – than about the terrorists.

(4) A WaPo columnist calls for Kamala Harris to step aside for the good of the party. Prediction: she won’t.

(5) Trump’s lawyers say he can’t make bond in the civil fraud case against him in New York:

Donald Trump told an appellate court here Monday that he can’t obtain a bond for the full amount of the civil fraud judgment against him — more than $450 million, including interest — raising the possibility that the state attorney general’s office could begin to seize his assets unless the court agrees to halt the judgment while the former president appeals the verdict.

Trump’s lawyers said in a court filing that “ongoing diligent efforts have proven that a bond in the judgment’s full amount is a ‘practical impossibility,’” adding that those efforts “have included approaching about 30 surety companies through 4 separate brokers.”

One of the goals of these cases is to ruin Trump financially and make him radioactive to financiers.

BLOODBATH!!: the leftist MSM gives a classic course in how to lie with truncated quotes

The New Neo Posted on by

That icky horrible bloodthirsty Hitleresque Trump just promised a BLOODBATH if he’s not elected, screams the MSM and plenty of pundits. What could be better evidence of his dangerousness and his desire to spark a civil war of vengeance, as well as his desire to commit violence.

Except that of course that’s not what he said. That doesn’t stop the left or the MSM from distorting Trump’s words or the words of any other person on the right. They know that propaganda is sticky and lies are worth it.

Or are they? Is there a point at which you can’t fool enough of the people enough of the time?

If you want to get up to speed on what happened in this particular incident, see this, for example, which was posted yesterday:

On Saturday, you could watch the making of a hoax in real time. In the latest fake story that the media, the Biden campaign, and their fellow travelers are pushing about Trump, we don’t even have to wait that long, as the lie is obvious from the in-context video.

Here’s one of the main accounts that started spreading the b.s. out-of-context edited video. It has more than 13 million views and it’s still up, without correction.

That was followed by this:

In the comments at X, the longer excerpt from Trump’s speech was published in this response from Viva Frei:

Shorter version: Trump was talking about the auto industry. And he was using a common metaphor, not talking about workplace violence.

The Biden administration spread the lie (see also this):

The right sprang up to correct the lies on various media platforms. But I would wager that enormous numbers of people who saw the original “Trump calls for bloodbath!” story have not seen the corrections. As I’ve said many times, the left counts on this. They almost always know full well that they are lying; the full quote is ridiculously easy to find. They simply don’t care. They see an opportunity to use some out-of-context words to hurt the right, and they go for it.

Biden and company are still using what’s become known as The Charlottesville Hoax. It’s still one of the foundations of their campaign. They have carefully piled lie on lie on lie over the years, creating a very strong edifice of lies in which many voters believe. If not for this, Biden’s support would be much further down in the gutter than it is.

You’re the Piano Man

The New Neo Posted on by

One of Billy Joel’s most famous songs – his first big hit, “Piano Man” – was released when he was twenty-four years old. It was based on his real-life experiences:

“Piano Man” is a fictionalized retelling of Joel’s own experience as a piano-lounge singer for six months in 1972–73 at the now defunct Executive Room bar in the Wilshire district of Los Angeles. In a talk on Inside the Actors Studio, Joel said that he had to get away from New York due to a conflict with his then recording company and hence lived in Los Angeles for three years with his first wife. Since he needed work to pay the bills, but could not use his common name, he worked at the Executive Room bar as a piano player using the name “Bill Martin” (Joel’s full name is William Martin Joel).

Joel has stated that all of the characters depicted in the song were based on real people. …

The verses of the song are sung from the point of view of a bar piano player who focuses mainly on the “regular crowd” that “shuffles” into the bar at nine o’clock on a Saturday: an old man, John the bartender, the waitress, businessmen, and bar regulars like “real estate novelist” Paul and naval serviceman Davy. Most of these characters have broken or unfulfilled dreams, and the pianist’s job is to help them “forget about life for a while”, as the lyrics state …

I’ve noticed that quite a few people seem to find the song annoying. It does have a repetitive (and even earwormy) quality, as Joel himself said in an interview I saw about it (can’t find it at the moment). In that interview, he said it’s a very simple tune, which then repeats an octave higher – which, although he didn’t mention it in that interview, is something that highlights the strength and beauty of his upper range.

But I think the power of the song – which I happen to like, by the way – is in the simplicity and nostalgia of the tune coupled with the surprising depth of some of the lyrics. “Broken or unfulfilled dreams” is something to which many people can relate. And almost every stanza ends with a lyrical “punch” in its last line or its two last lines.

For example, right at the beginning, look at the last line of the first stanza. The first three lines are ordinary; the last is not:

It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday
The regular crowd shuffles in
There’s an old man sitting next to me
Makin’ love to his tonic and gin.

He’s not just drinking; he’s “making love” to his drink.

Next stanza:

He says, “Son, can you play me a memory?
I’m not really sure how it goes
But it’s sad and it’s sweet, and I knew it complete
When I wore a younger man’s clothes.”

Not the pedestrian “when I was young;” the much more interesting and evocative “When I wore a younger man’s clothes.” As we age we’re the same person – or very much the same, anyway – on the inside. But the outside changes.

It goes on and on like that, with poignant last lines for most of the story-telling character-driven stanzas. One of the best and most well-known 2-line stanza endings is this:

Yes, they’re sharing a drink they call loneliness
But it’s better than drinkin’ alone.

The last stanza prior to the final chorus reaches a crescendo, and the lyrics include Billy Joel himself in the category of people with unfulfilled dreams – reflecting the fact that, at the time, he hadn’t made a success of things:

And the piano, it sounds like a carnival
And the microphone smells like a beer
And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar
And say, “Man, what are you doin’ here?”

What was Billy Joel doing in the piano bar? Playing for all the lonely people. Observing their lives and interactions. Storing it all up to create the song that would catapault him from that bar into lifelong fame.

Not a bad gig.

Hamas makes up its casualty numbers and the world repeats them as truth

The New Neo Posted on by

This is an important article. It exposes the blatant deception inherent in those Gaza Health Ministry casualty figures issued by Hamas and printed and quoted as truth all over the Western world:

The number of civilian casualties in Gaza has been at the center of international attention since the start of the war. The main source for the data has been the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, which now claims more than 30,000 dead, the majority of which it says are children and women. Recently, the Biden administration lent legitimacy to Hamas’ figure. …

Here’s the problem with this data: The numbers are not real. That much is obvious to anyone who understands how naturally occurring numbers work. The casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the majority may be Hamas fighters.

If Hamas’ numbers are faked or fraudulent in some way, there may be evidence in the numbers themselves that can demonstrate it. While there is not much data available, there is a little, and it is enough …

The rest of the article crunches the numbers to show that they don’t resemble naturally-occurring statistics. Please read it and pass it on.

But understanding it requires at least a rudimentary knowledge of how math works and how statistics works, and many people lack those skills. It also takes the desire to confront the reality, which is that Hamas lies and lies and lies. If a person’s view of the conflict between the Palestinians and Israel is based on these lies, a mind is a difficult thing to change.

Why they are so determined to try Trump in Georgia

The New Neo Posted on by

There are four criminal cases now pending in the lawfare against Trump, an extraordinary, unprecedented, and coordinated drive to either stop him from running for president, stop him from being elected president, or stop him from serving as president if elected.

Two of the cases are in the federal court system, and even if Trump were to be convicted, if he becomes president he apparently could pardon himself. But two are in state systems where conviction would be immune to presidential pardon.

Of course, if convicted in any of these cases, a state appeals court could overturn a conviction in the state cases, and/or SCOTUS could do so if it decided to hear either case. SCOTUS also could overturn either of the federal cases, of course. But I don’t think that Democrats are so very upset by the prospect of any conviction being overturned if it happens after an election; the first order of business is to harass and distract Trump while he’s running as well as taint him with voters, and -they hope – keep him from being elected in the first place.

But if Trump doesn’t win an appeal, convictions in either New York or Georgia (the states involved in the state cases) would be subject to pardons only according to the rules of the state itself. New York has a Democrat governor unlikely to ever pardon Trump. Georgia has a Republican governor, but one who is not Trump-friendly – although that latter point is irrelevant because in Georgia the governor cannot issue pardons.

Georgia has a somewhat unusual system that goes like this:

Georgia’s RICO charge carries a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison if convicted.

In Georgia, a pardon is an “order of official forgiveness” only granted to those who have completed their sentence, according to the State Board of Pardons and Paroles’ website. …

In Georgia, pardon power does not rest with the governor (aka Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican) but with the State Board of Pardons and Paroles, a board within the state’s executive branch.

The State Board of Pardons and Paroles is made up of five members who are appointed by the governor and then confirmed by the state Senate for a seven-year term.

“Once confirmed, members would be insulated from political pressures by the fact that no one official could remove them from office until they completed their terms,” the State Board of Pardons and Paroles’ website states.

To qualify for a pardon in Georgia, according to the State Board of Pardons and Paroles’ website, you must have completed your sentence at least five years before applying. You must not have committed any crimes in those five years or have any pending charges, among other qualifications.

The power given to courts to mount political prosecutions is enormous. All that is needed is an unscrupulous politically-motivated prosecutor – there are plenty of those – and a venue in which most of the judges are biased in a certain direction and/or the same is true of the jury pool.

Both the Georgia case and the New York hush money case are considered novel interpretations of existing law. These convoluted prosecutions are being used against a political opponent. The Georgia case is considered at least somewhat stronger than the New York case, although both are weak in the legal sense. But that doesn’t matter if the court is biased enough. In the Georgia case, there’s another element too. From last October:

Texas attorney Sidney Powell pleaded guilty to election interference charges in Fulton County Superior Court on Thursday, one day before jury selection was scheduled to begin for her trial.

As part of the plea deal, Powell was sentenced to six years of probation for conspiring to interfere with the performance of election duties for orchestrating a Coffee County elections system breach following the 2020 presidential election. …

According to the plea agreement, Powell agreed to testify in other election interference trials about the hacking of voting machines and software that occurred in rural south Georgia shortly after the incumbent Republican president lost the state of Georgia by less than 12,000 votes to Democratic President Joe Biden. …

Powell admitted Thursday that she hired forensic computer experts to compromise voting software and other confidential voter information from the Coffee County elections office in early 2021. She also agreed that prosecutors would have proven during trial that Powell, along with several co-conspirators, plotted with Coffee County elections director Misty Hampton to illegally access election machines by tampering with electronic ballot markers, voting software and other equipment.

So Powell is poised to testify in at least some of these cases, although it appears from that article that her testimony may be limited to the hacking of voting machines; I’m unaware of any allegations that Trump was connected to any of that at all. So it’s possible that Powell’s testimony won’t hurt him. But the fact that she was at least briefly connected with his challenge of the 2020 election, and that she pleaded guilty, certainly doesn’t help him. Here’s an article discussing some of the possibilities.

Long COVID is no different than long flu …

The New Neo Posted on by

… we just don’t usually use the term “long flu,” or talk about it much.

So many things about COVID resemble other contagious illnesses, including common ones such as the flu. Some of these resemblances involve the possibility of serious consequences such as heart problems from the disease – or from the vaccine; see this for one of many posts where I discuss the issue. In that post I wrote:

From the start of the COVID phenomenon I’ve been reporting on things and crunching the numbers, and one thing I’ve noticed (both in the official releases and in the people who don’t trust them) is a great deal of failure to acknowledge the fact that all diseases and all vaccines can cause rare and troublesome reactions. That’s part of the risks of life, disease, and vaccination. …

… [I]t’s illustrative of something I noticed early on, which is that all phenomena relating to COVID have been treated as somehow uniquely awful. And yet the evidence is that they are not uniquely awful. The distrust engendered by the lies and exaggerations told by the CDC and government around COVID has resulted in a backlash that in my opinion is also an exaggeration, although an understandable one.

Which brings us to long COVID. From the start it has struck me that this phenomenon seems no different from what happens in certain cases with many other viruses. Once or twice in my life I’ve experienced a flu with symptoms that seem to drag on for many months, for example. In addition, I had a friend who was felled by H1N1 years ago, and it took well over a year before she felt completely better.

Therefore this news comes as no surprise:

Long COVID appears to manifest as a post-viral syndrome indistinguishable from seasonal influenza and other respiratory illnesses, with no evidence of increased moderate-to-severe functional limitations a year after infection, according to new research being presented at this year’s European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID 2024) in Barcelona, Spain (27-30 April). …

The findings add to previous research by the same authors and published in BMJ Public Health, which found no difference in ongoing symptoms and functional impairment when COVID-19 was compared with influenza 12 weeks post-infection.

As I said, unsurprising.

Open thread 3/16/24

The New Neo Posted on by

I find this amusing; this woman names her clothing! I also liked it because it reminded me of something I haven’t thought of since I was about seven years old: crinolines. They were great.

RIP Major Uri Moyal, Israeli killed in terrorist knife attack

The New Neo Posted on by

A career Israeli military man of 51, Major Uri Moyal, has died of wounds sustained in a terrorist stabbing in Israel.

I don’t usually watch videos of killings, but I watched this one, which occurred in a coffee shop. I call your attention to it because it shows the speed of such attacks, as well as the speed of Moyal’s response. Mortally wounded, he managed to stand up and shoot the perpetrator, killing him, making further attacks by this particular person impossible. In the video you can find at the link, Moyal is the guy initially in the upper right side of the picture near the counter, somewhat blurred but dressed in dark green.

This show another angle as well.

The terrorist is dressed all in black, and initially enters the shop with a casual posture. His move towards Moyal is lightning fast. The perp was raised in Gaza but he married an Israeli citizen and so he had Israeli citizenship, but being raised in Gaza almost certainly exposed him to poisonous anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli pedagogy there while growing up.

You can also see that another man tried to intervene and take the knife from the terrorist, but runs clear when he sees that Moyal has a gun and is preparing to kill the assailant. You can see Moyal positioning his gun to shoot and the terrorist also sees it and starts to lunge again at Moyal, who gets off the shot before the terrorist can reach him, even though the distance is very short.

Moyal then left the building and collapsed off-camera. He was taken to the hospital but died there. RIP.

More news on the Georgia Trump case and Fani Willis

The New Neo Posted on by

As expected, Nathan Wade has resigned from the case. That should satisfy the decision laid down by Judge McAfee I reported on earlier today.

According to Alan Dershowitz (hat tip: commenter “Karmi”):

Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz blasted as “utterly dishonest” a judge’s “weaselly” ruling Friday to let Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis proceed with her election interference prosecution of Donald Trump and his allies.

In a brutal takedown of the 23-page ruling by Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, a Dershowitz asked, “Who are you going to believe, this judge or your lying eyes?” …

“We all know there was an actual conflict of interest here,” he added. “[McAfee] just doesn’t have the guts to say it. And I predicted he wouldn’t have the guts to say it. He has to live in Fulton County.”

Dershowitz conceded the judge “may have said some things that are very critical of her, but still, he should have removed [her] … from the case.”

He also lamented how the ruling “undercuts our legal system tremendously.”

“He should have ruled, honestly, yes, there’s a conflict. Yes, she committed perjury. Yes there was a conspiracy. Yes, she received financial benefit for this. That’s the truth and the truth matters,” Dershowitz said. …

“If anybody believes that she actually paid back every penny in cash, I got a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn,” he said. “There are people in prison, there are people in death row, based on evidence less strong than this.”

Yes, but those people aren’t trying to prosecute Donald Trump.

The truth should matter. It doesn’t appear that it does, however. Dershowitz believes “the ruling could be appealed on two issues: that the evidence is overwhelming that there was an actual conflict of interest, and that there shouldn’t have to be an actual conflict of interest.”

One thing that Dershowitz doesn’t mention is something I discovered just a little while ago by looking up McAfee’s Wiki page, which says this [emphasis mine]:

McAfee was an assistant district attorney in the Barrow County, Georgia, Piedmont Judicial Circuit. He joined the office of the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, in April 2015, initially working on the early stages of criminal cases. He later was promoted to working as a prosecutor in the complex trial division, which was then headed by prosecutor Fani Willis, who was later elected as Fulton County district attorney. McAfee was eventually promoted to senior assistant district attorney in the major case division, where he prosecuted felony cases including armed robbery and murder.

So McAfee worked under Willis for quite some time; it’s not clear exactly how long or how close they were.

McAfee was appointed to his present position by Governor Kemp, who recently signed the following law (hat tip: commenter “Banned Lizard”):

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed a law Wednesday that lets a state commission begin operating with powers to discipline and remove prosecutors, potentially disrupting Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ prosecution of former President Donald Trump.

“This legislation will help us ensure rogue and incompetent prosecutors are held accountable if they refuse to uphold the law,” Kemp said before signing the bill, flanked by Republican legislative leaders. “As we know all too well, crime has been on the rise across the country, and is especially prevalent in cities where prosecutors are giving criminals a free pass or failing to put them behind bars due to lack of professional conduct.” …

The measure is likely to face renewed legal challenges.

The Georgia Senate is also investigating Willis. It’s not at all clear whether any of these efforts can or will stop her, nor is the time frame obvious.

I believe I am correct in stating that, if Trump were to be convicted in the Georgia trial, Kemp could pardon him because it is a state prosecution rather than a federal one [CORRECTION: Georgia’s governor doesn’t have that power. It would be up to the Parole Board, and the way it works is that a person has to serve the sentence first]. I also believe I am correct in thinking it unlikely that Kemp – a Republican but not a Trump fan – would do so.

[ADDENDUM: More here.]