Cruising with Bond. James Bond.

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an article purporting to rank the James Bond films in ascending order.

I saw a few of the early films, but I haven’t seem most of them on the list. So I can’t do my own ranking. But I can say unequivocally what my favorite Bond film was, and I know exactly why.

A little background. My parents loved cruising. They usually went away for two weeks every February, allowing my father (who was a lawyer and CPA) to relax a bit before the huge crush of tax season, and to escape winter for a while. They ordinarily went with a host of other couples friends and had a great time.

But in 1962 they did something they’d never done before – and didn’t do after, either – which was to take my older brother and me on a Christmas week cruise to the Caribbean on board the Mauretania.

It was memorable for many reasons. One was of course that I’d never been on a huge ocean liner. Another was that my brother and I had a tiny inside cabin with the wonderful characteristic of being completely dark, so that we could sleep in on days when we weren’t in port. There were quite a few of those days, since the ship departed from and returned to a pier in Manhattan.

The ship was already old even then, having been launched in 1938. Unbeknownst to us, it was close to retirement and was taken out of service in 1965, just a few years after our trip. The Mauretania had very few of the extras that are standard on modern cruise ships. It only carried about 1,100 passengers at the time, much smaller than many of today’s gargantuan vessels that often carry four to five thousand people. The cabin my brother and I occupied on the Mauretania was tiny, containing bunk beds and almost nothing else. The bathroom was a dorm-type thing down the hall. Every night we weren’t in port we had to dress formally – and that meant rented tuxes for my father and brother and evening gowns for my mother and me.

There wasn’t much entertainment, and what there was didn’t interest my brother and me. Except for one thing: there was a little movie theater that seated maybe 75 people. And in that movie theater they showed movies that hadn’t been released in the US yet. The most memorable one was the very first James Bond movie, Dr. No, which had come out in the UK in October but wasn’t released in the US until 1963.

The wonderful thing about that movie was that we previously knew nothing about it. No hype at all. I think I did know that JFK supposedly liked James Bond books, but that was it. I’d never heard of Sean Connery or Ursula Andress. Never read that a Bond movie was being made.

So the whole thing was a great surprise. I well remember its slightly humorous tone, and from almost the very first frame there was that great theme music:

The movie had a Caribbean setting, too, which fit the cruise well. But what I most remember was a sense of fun, freshness, wit, and surprise. That’s why Dr. No would have to be tops on my rather short James Bond movie list.

The betrayal by and of the Palestinian workers

The New Neo Posted on by

There are so many aspects of the October 7 attacks that were horrific – but one element that can get lost in the focus on the more barbaric events involves the Palestinian workers who, prior to 10/7, were gainfully employed in Israel. Many of them (we don’t know how many, but a substantial number) acted as spies for Hamas while they were pretending to be friendly to the Israelis they would be helping to torture, murder, and rape.

The program was meant not only to help Palestinians economically, but to show goodwill and most of all to lay the groundwork for better relations between Israel and the Palestinians. The Palestinians’ betrayal of all this goodwill was profound; one can hardly imagine a worse one. The resulting destruction of all trust the Israelis might have still retained up to 10/7 in the word of Palestinians and the potential goodwill of the ordinary Palestinian “man in the street” meant that it would be difficult or actually impossible for any such program or any such rapprochement again.

All of this came to mind again when I read this recently:

On the eve of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Israeli authorities had issued work permits to some 18,500 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, according to the Israeli Defense Ministry’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), a body responsible for Palestinian civil affairs. Israel was forced to revoke the work permits for security reasons after the October 7 atrocities carried out by Hamas and thousands of “ordinary” Palestinians.

This was particularly true in light of evidence that some of the workers had used their time in Israel to gather intelligence on the Israeli communities that were targeted on October 7. The work permits of another 80,000 Palestinians from the West Bank have also been suspended in the aftermath of the Hamas attack. Prior to the October 7 massacre, more than 170,000 Palestinians were working in Israel, constituting an important source of income for the Palestinian economy. …

Palestinian trade unions had said the reopening of the border between Israel and Gaza was a “positive step:” the workers had far higher earnings in Israel than in the Gaza Strip, where salaries are low and unemployment is rife. …

The Israeli goodwill gesture of expanding the number of Palestinian work permits came only days after Palestinians had rioted near the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip and had attacked Israeli soldiers with stones, Molotov cocktails, and explosive devices. Palestinian workers were joyful over the Israel’s decision to overlook the riot.

Workers were quoted at the time as saying the riots had nothing to do with them – and perhaps, for some, that was the truth. Perhaps some really did just want to better themselves economically. But for too many of them, it was all a lie and a ruse.

More:

In 2022, then Defense Minister Benny Gantz revealed that Israel was planning to increase the number of work permits for Palestinians from the Gaza Strip from 5,000 to 20,000. The pan-Arab newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat reported:

“[Israeli] Political authorities believe the gradual increase in the number of Palestinian workers will prompt Hamas to consider any escalation since it will take into account that the thriving labor movement is a major factor in supporting the economy.

“Workers bring to the [Gaza] enclave up to 90 million shekels [roughly USD $24 million] per month, in light of the difficult and deteriorating economic situation there.”

Looking back, it seemed to make a certain amount of sense. But the Israelis were naive, putting too much faith in the idea that all human beings are motivated to better themselves economically, and that such goals can overcome jihadi hatred. Not every worker had to be a jihadi to make the situation extremely dangerous; just a critical mass of them. And that requirement was fully met.

Well, here you have the consequences:

Ibrahim, a father of four, sat with friends in his living room in the Palestinian village of Hizme, just outside Jerusalem, to talk about the hardship of unemployment over the past eight months: “The Israeli government cannot wage war on every Palestinian as if we are all guilty [of Hamas’s crimes],” he said.

Sure they can, and they should. Was the US supposed to ferry some Germans over during WWII to work in the factories? I think not. The concept of “enemy” precludes it.

More:

Within hours of the onslaught, the Israeli government announced the suspension of work permits for about 150,000 West Bank Palestinians who had been commuting daily to work inside Israel, plus another 18,500 Palestinians from Gaza, leaving an economic hole on both sides of the border.

It is estimated that besides permit holders, an additional 50,000 West Bank laborers were sneaking through the border illegally each day before October 7.

Among those who found themselves unable to work in Israel, where salaries are considerably higher than in the West Bank, were around 80,000 Palestinians who used to work on Israeli construction sites, many of them highly specialized in sectors such as ironwork, flooring, formwork and plastering. …

Today, Ibrahim spends most of the time at home, gripped by uncertainty for his and his family’s future. He occasionally gets work in the West Bank, but it pays half what he used to make in Israel — about NIS 300 a day ($80).

The article goes on to say that the Israeli building and agricultural sectors have been hard hit.

And the following is telling, although it doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know:

Like Ibrahim, other Hizme residents agreed to speak with The Times of Israel on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal for talking with the Israeli press. Their real names have been replaced.

The reprisal they’re worried about doesn’t come from Israel. It comes from Hamas and other Palestinians.

This is one of the reasons it’s hard to measure how large the “live and let live” Palestinian contingent is. It might be nearly non-existent, or it might be bigger than that. I very much doubt it approaches anything like a majority, although I also think it’s not zero.

But unfortunately it doesn’t matter – although it might matter in the future if Gaza is fully defeated and the re-education begins. The fewer who have to be de-cultified, the better.

But unless these people are presently numerous enough and powerful enough to overthrow the government and establish a new one with good relations with Israel, it doesn’t matter how many of them there are moderates about Israel. They are effectively impotent to change a thing. And Hamas and the other jihadis have sacrificed any moderates for the sake of perpetrating slaughter and mayhem on Israelis. But sacrificing Palestinians who aren’t sufficiently bloodthirsty – or even ones who are, through martyrdom – is part of Hamas’ game.

The new anti-Trump Resistance …

The New Neo Posted on by

… is all revved up and ready to go.

Actually, they never stopped. You almost have to admire their work ethic, even if you disagree with their goals and methods. The basic message: it’s possible that you peons may be able to elect Trump – although we’ll do our very best to prevent that – but he certainly won’t be allowed to govern. We know better than you, and when we say “our democracy” we mean ours, not yours.

Excerpt:

Opponents of Donald J. Trump are drafting potential lawsuits in case he is elected in November and carries out mass deportations, as he has vowed. One group has hired a new auditor to withstand any attempt by a second Trump administration to unleash the Internal Revenue Service against them. Democratic-run state governments are even stockpiling abortion medication.

Only the left is allowed to sic the IRS on its opponents the conservatives. Nor did Trump do this during his first term, as far as I know. And Trump isn’t even against early abortions.

More:

A sprawling network of Democratic officials, progressive activists, watchdog groups and ex-Republicans has been taking extraordinary steps to prepare for a potential second Trump presidency, drawn together by the fear that Mr. Trump’s return to power would pose a grave threat not just to their agenda but to American democracy itself.

Talk about projection! And note, “democracy” is defined as the left wants to define it.

“Trump has made clear that he’ll disregard the law and test the limits of our system,” said Joanna Lydgate, the chief executive of States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan democracy watchdog organization that works with state officials in both parties. “What we’re staring down is extremely dark.”

Projection, projection, projection. I don’t even think most of them believe what they’re saying; it’s propaganda for the rest of us. But the ones who are far gone do believe it.

This one is unintentionally funny. Or maybe it’s intentionally funny and meant to taunt and mock anyone on the right:

If Mr. Trump returns to power, he is openly planning to impose radical changes — many with authoritarian overtones. Those plans include using the Justice Department to take revenge on his adversaries …

Anyone who’s been paying any attention to what’s been happening to Trump and his supporters at the hands of the DOJ and radical leftist state officials would recognize that they’re describing their own actions. And yet I believe that a significant number of people seem to be taken in by these accusations about Trump. And of course the left is afraid of payback, even though they don’t define it that way.

The leftists are the good guys, folks! We promise! I’ve highlighted the most important and most dangerous message, the one the left and many Democrats have been sending pretty much from the moment Trump declared his candidacy, and certainly from the moment he assumed the presidency:

Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, said the planning for how to resist such an agenda should not be seen as an ordinary policy dispute, but as an effort to defend fundamental aspects of American self-government “from an aspiring autocrat.”

“He is no normal candidate, this is no normal election, and these are no normal preparations for merely coming out on the wrong side of a national referendum on policy choices,” Mr. Bassin said.

Remember the calls for impeachment as soon as Trump took office? Here’s a memory refresher from around the time of Trump’s inauguration in 2017, in case you need one (emphasis mine):

Two civil rights groups trying to boot President Donald Trump from the nation’s highest office have launched an online campaign to get the brand new commander-in-chief impeached.

Their website, www.impeachdonaldtrumpnow.org, went live on Friday just as Trump was officially sworn in. It is run by two groups, Free Speech for People and RootsAction, which believe Trump’s possible conflicts of interest are grounds for his ouster, the Washington Post reports.

“The nation is now witnessing a massive corruption of the presidency, far worse than Watergate,” the campaign’s website says. “From the moment he assumed the office, President Donald Trump has been in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution. The President is not above the law. We will not allow President Trump to profit from the presidency at the expense of our democracy.” …

Earlier Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union said it has taken legal action to obtain government documents that may show Trump’s potential conflicts of interest.

And this is of the same vintage. The date is January 6, 2017:

The joint session of Congress is a legally required — and typically ceremonial — event to ratify the results of the presidential election. But members are permitted to challenge the validity of electoral votes, and for just the fourth time since 1877, they did so.

There was no expectation that the protests would succeed — backers acknowledged that the Republican-led House and Senate would never act to impede Trump’s imminent presidency. But it’s a continuation of efforts by Democrats to poke Trump in the eye before he takes office and undermine what his team has described as a “mandate” to govern. Democrats have routinely cited Trump’s 2.9 million-ballot popular vote loss to Hillary Clinton and pounced on Russian meddling in the election to undermine Trump’s victory.

Jackson Lee and her allies argued that widespread voter suppression in states won by Trump tarnished the results. They also pointed to research provided by a team of independent lawyers that found dozens of Republican electors were technically ineligible to serve. But their arguments failed to persuade their Senate colleagues to step forward.

But back to the present:

Many are also wary about discussing their contingency plans publicly, for fear of signaling a lack of confidence in President Biden’s campaign prospects. Their angst is intensified by Mr. Biden’s low approval numbers and by his persistent trailing of Mr. Trump in polls of the states that are likely to decide the election.

Interviews with more than 30 officials and leaders of organizations about their plans revealed a combination of acute exhaustion and acute anxiety. Activist groups that spent the four years of Mr. Trump’s presidency organizing mass protests and pursuing legal challenges, ultimately helping channel that energy into persuading voters to oust him from power in 2020, are now realizing with great dread they may have to resist him all over again.

Poor babes! I feel so sorry for them. And yet I believe they are fully up to the task, if the situation should arise.

Follow the money: capitalists selling the rope by which Western civilization will be hung (the Ford Foundation and others)

The New Neo Posted on by

I noticed a spate of articles recently on wealthy philanthropic foundations funding a host of radical leftist causes. This one focuses on the Ford Foundation. An excerpt:

It’s November 2023, and, following the October 7 attacks by Hamas terrorists that killed some 1,400 Israelis and at least 31 Americans, thousands of demonstrators march through New York City, calling for the destruction of the Jewish state. Chants of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” echo through the streets, along with “there is only one solution: intifada revolution.” Among the crowd is the infamous Palestinian American activist Linda Sarsour, who warns through a megaphone that a cabal of wily Jews has conspired to place “their little posters” (of kidnapped Israeli civilians) across the city, seeking to entice people to rip them down. While many onlookers might look like “ordinary people,” she says, the Jews have “their little people all around the city,” surveilling others. Sarsour is there to deliver such rhetoric in part because she’s been paid to be there: her nonprofit, MPower Change, has received $300,000 in grant funding from the Ford Foundation “to build grassroots Muslim power.”

“Grassroots Muslim power.” I know that Henry Ford was a not the least bit fond of Jews, but I doubt he’d be into funding Muslims in this country who want to kill them. At any rate, the current leadership is far far to the left of Ford:

It’s May 2023, and protesters have stormed the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., to demand that lawmakers not accept spending cuts during negotiations to lift the debt ceiling. Many are so disruptive that the police arrest them and drag them out. These are activists of the Center for Popular Democracy, an extreme left-wing organization that has collected $35.2 million from the Ford Foundation since 2012. Four months later, they will be imitated by 150 youth activists from the “climate revolution” group the Sunrise Movement, 18 of whom will be arrested after occupying the Speaker of the House’s office. The Sunrise Movement also receives Ford Foundation money—$650,000 for “training and organizing.”

The article goes on to say that the Ford Foundation’s average yearly giveaway is a billion dollars, and its mission statement says it is “guided by a vision of social justice.” Its grants are tax-exempt, and most people are unaware of any of this and how influential it is. I had heard about it before, but not in such detail. Please read the whole thing.

Here’s another recent article about the Ford Foundation, this time focusing on the post-10/7 demonstrations. An excerpt:

While the country’s leading universities have been under the microscope since Oct. 7, the nation’s top foundations have largely evaded scrutiny. Both, however, sit atop multibillion-dollar endowments and exert enormous influence on American politics and public policy: The Ford Foundation alone oversees the disbursal of approximately a billion dollars a year.

Where is that money going? A review of grants disbursed by the Ford Foundation’s team overseeing the Middle East and North Africa, led by Cairo-based regional director Saba Almubaslat, shows that several of the foundation’s grants have gone to organizations whose employees, events, and projects celebrated Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack and decried the “Zionist entity.” They make little effort to disguise their hostility to Jews and the state of Israel.

And here’s an American Enterprise Institute article on the funding and support, both domestic and foreign, for the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish demonstrations. An excerpt:

Begin with National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP), which is the parent of more than 250 campus branches of Students for Justice in Palestine; Jewish Voices for Peace (and JVP Action, its political-action committee); and Within Our Lifetime. They, in turn, are funded by George Soros Inc. ($650,000 to JVP), the Kaphan Foundation ($441,000 to JVP), and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (also JVP). SJP, which is a major organizer, trainer, and agitator behind campus protests, has donors that are more suspect.

SJP and National Students for Justice in Palestine are part of American Muslims for Palestine. That group in turn is part of the Americans for Justice in Palestine (AJP) and the AJP Educational Fund, which is represented on Capitol Hill by the AJP Action Fund. Their founder is Hatem Bazian, best known as a fundraiser for KindHearts, an Islamist nonprofit that in 2012 settled with the U.S. Treasury Department over claims it had raised funds for Hamas (though it admitted no wrongdoing).

This is all very important stuff. There is an enormous amount of money flowing to leftist organizations and most Americans are unaware of it or of its horrible influence. The goal is not just to undermine Israel; it is to undermine the US and Western civilization and values. And at the moment its doing very well in that endeavor.

Black hole wakes up

The New Neo Posted on by

How? Why?

Here’s what I’m talking about:

Suddenly, in late 2019, the previously unremarkable galaxy SDSS1335+0728 started shining brighter than ever before. To understand why, astronomers used data from several space and ground-based observatories, including the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), to track how the galaxy’s brightness has varied.

In a study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics today (June 18), they conclude that they are witnessing changes never seen before in a galaxy — likely the result of the sudden awakening of the massive black hole at its core.

Did it hear some sort of cosmic alarm clock? Get a jolt of caffeine?

Some phenomena, like supernova explosions or tidal disruption events — when a star gets too close to a black hole and is torn apart — can make galaxies suddenly light up. But these brightness variations typically last only a few dozen or, at most, a few hundred days. SDSS1335+0728 is still growing brighter today, more than four years after it was first seen to ‘switch on’. Moreover, the variations detected in the galaxy, which is located 300 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo, are unlike any seen before, pointing astronomers towards a different explanation. …

Massive black holes — with masses over one hundred thousand times that of our Sun — exist at the center of most galaxies, including the Milky Way. “These giant monsters usually are sleeping and not directly visible,” explains co-author Claudio Ricci, from the Diego Portales University, also in Chile. “In the case of SDSS1335+0728, we were able to observe the awakening of the massive black hole, [which] suddenly started to feast on gas available in its surroundings, becoming very bright.”

“[This] process (…) has never been observed before,” Hernández García says.

As Hamlet said, ““There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Customer “service”

The New Neo Posted on by

Tired of politics? Let’s talk about a much more pleasant topic: customer service.

And yes, that’s sarcasm – although, come to think of it, as frustrating as customer service can be these days, it actually is more pleasant than politics.

I had ordered something from Amazon that was difficult if not impossible to obtain elsewhere, and I needed it by this coming Monday. I had ordered it nearly three weeks prior to that, and the Amazon algorithm had assured me it would get here in time.

I waited patiently. But each time I tracked my order it hadn’t shipped yet. So today I decided to give Amazon a call.

The experience I had with customer service is hardly unique to Amazon; I find that it’s fairly typical these days. First I got some sort of computerized voice telling me I had to verify my account – even though I was on the cellphone that is connected to the account. They sent me a text, I did what the text said – but not fast enough for Amazon, apparently accustomed to the more nimble-figured young. Even though I’d done it quickly (as far as I was concerned), and a text message from Amazon said “Thanks for verifying your account,” the bot on the telephone thought otherwise: “We’re sorry, but you did not verify your account.”

Another phone call, another wait, and this time I knew enough to be lightning quick and successfully verified the account. But this time I got someone on the phone – an actual person – who insisted that my phone number should be something else.

I tried again. This time the verification worked. The person I was talking to had an accent, like all the others, but I could understand what she was saying without much difficulty. She told me that my order had gotten “stuck.” That was the exact word she used. When I asked where it had gotten stuck – at Amazon, or in the shipping process – she reluctantly admitted it seemed to have been sitting at Amazon all that time. But now, now it was unstuck and would be on its way.

I expressed concern that it might not get to me by Monday. All she would say was that I’d get an email in a day or two confirming the shipment. She could not or would not tell me another thing. So I said I didn’t want an email, I wanted the package. She stonewalled. I asked to speak to someone who might know more and would be empowered to help with this. She said everyone there had the same authority as she.

I’ve discovered with customer service these days, in the information duel in which they are determined to give out the least possible amount of information and the customer is determined to extract more information, that there are magic words that act like keys to open locked doors. One of those keys is, of course, the word “agent.” Another is the word “retention” (that’s for Comcast, for example). In this case I realized I’d not said the word “supervisor;” I’d merely asked to talk to a person above her who was empowered to do more. That is a supervisor, of course. But now I uttered the magic words, “I want to speak with a supervisor,” and she immediately answered “Okay” and put me on hold.

Awful muzak and a wait, during which I pondered whether there actually would be a supervisor, or whether this was a cruel practical joke by my customer service representative and I would wait and wait and wait for the supervisor who never came.

Fortunately, after maybe a ten-minute wait, a bona fide supervisor came on the line. I went through my tale of woe again. He told me that the previous person had released my package for shipment and that it “should” be here by Monday. I expressed doubt. He repeated Monday. Then I asked him how the package would be shipped, and whether, since this had been Amazon’s mistake, the shipping could be expedited by Amazon.

This question seemed to function as another magic word. “Okay, I’ll check!” he said brightly. When he came back he said it would cost me an extra $11.50. “Do you mean to tell me,” I said, “that Amazon – which was at fault here – would not cover the mailing at this point?” He assured me that, although he wasn’t able to do that at this moment, Amazon would ultimately reimburse me.

Do I believe this? Perhaps. But I okayed the payment and the thing should come to me tomorrow.

And it only took about an hour and a half.

Hot enough for you?

The New Neo Posted on by

It certainly is in New England – hot enough, that is.

And muggy. The air is incredibly heavy, and thunderstorms threaten. I haven’t been outside today and maybe I’ll just stay indoors.

I went out yesterday, though, when the weather was very similar. As I stepped outside, I was reminded of a passage from a book I last read many many years ago and liked very much at the time, Arthur Koestler’s The Lotus and the Robot, a 1961 work about India and Japan. Here are the opening sentences:

The sewers of Bombay had been opened by mistake, I was told, before the tide had come in. The damp heat, impregnated by their stench, invaded the air-conditioned cabin the moment the door of the Viscount was opened. As we descended the steps I had the sensation that a wet, smelly diaper was being wrapped around my head by some abominable joker.

There’s no sewer smell here. But a heavy wetness in the air? Yes indeed.

It’s roundup time again

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) RIP actor Donald Sutherland, dead at 88. His career was long and varied; I’m pretty sure the first movie I saw him in was Mash. I see that three of his children are actors.

(2) It’s the 50th anniversary of that Boston travesty – forced busing – as this not very good Boston Globe article reminds us. I previously wrote about forced busing in this post.

(3) Some drugs for enlarged prostate seem to help decrease the risk for Lewy Body dementia. That’s related to Parkinson’s, and I wondered when I clicked on the article whether the same drugs help prevent Parkinson’s. Here’s what it said:

A new study suggests that certain drugs commonly used to treat enlarged prostate may also decrease the risk for dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB). This observational finding may seem surprising, but it mirrors previous work by the University of Iowa Health Care team that links the drugs to a protective effect in another neurodegenerative condition—Parkinson’s disease. The new findings were published online on June 19, 2024, in Neurology.

The UI researchers think that a specific side effect of the drugs targets a biological flaw shared by DLB and Parkinson’s disease, as well as other neurodegenerative diseases, raising the possibility that they may have broad potential for treating a wide range of neurodegenerative conditions.

That’s good, but can it slow the progression of the disease once it’s already gotten a hold? That would be wonderful news.

(4) The DA of Alameda County – of which Oakland, California is a part – is facing a recall election in November. Now the mayor of Oakland joins her. The reason is crime and the fallout from crime.

(5) Anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, by Melanie Phillips. An excerpt:

Antisemitism is the delusional hatred and fear of Jews, Judaism or the Jewish people. Unlike other prejudices, it has unique characteristics applied to no other group, people or cause. It’s an obsessional and unhinged narrative based entirely on lies about the Jewish people; it accuses them of crimes of which they are not only innocent but the victims; it holds them to impossible standards expected of no-one else; it depicts them as a global conspiracy of unique malice and power; and it invests them with diabolical influence over the entire world in order to serve their own interests at the expense of others.

Anti-Zionism has exactly the same characteristics. While criticism of Israel’s policies is entirely legitimate, anti-Zionism treats Israel and Jewish national self-determination differently from any other country, people or cause. Israel is demonised, dehumanised and delegitimised in order to bring about its destruction. Israelis are accused of crimes of which they are not only innocent but the victims; they are held to impossible standards expected of no other people, country or cause; Zionism is depicted as a global conspiracy of unique malice and power; and Zionists and Israelis are invested with diabolical influence.

I’m suddenly seeing polls that show Biden gaining on Trump …

The New Neo Posted on by

… and that fills me with dread.

But I’d been feeling dread about the 2024 election already, even when the polls were good. I have distrust for polls – although not as much distrust as some people have, because I think they sometimes measure something that’s valid, especially when they change. But how it translates to an election is anyone’s guess. The 2022 Red Wave is a good example; the GOP did much less well than predicted. And 2016 was a case where the GOP candidate did better than expected.

This year I remain astonished that Joe Biden has more than 20% of the vote. It should be a complete blowout for Trump, but I have no gut feeling that he’ll even win. There are so many ways this can go wrong. There’s the constant lawfare, which new polls indicate might be the reason Biden is doing somewhat better than before (see this). There’s the wild card of fraud and rigging; the only question being whether they will be able to do it effectively, not whether they would do it if they could. There’s the backlash to the repeal of Roe. And of course it’s a long way to November, and a lot can happen in the meantime.

In a very gloomy post, John Hinderaker also mentions that the polls for Congressional candidates aren’t going too well for the GOP either. I haven’t even begun to follow that, and I haven’t checked it out myself, but I don’t like hearing it.

But it’s not just the polls. As I said, I realize polls can mislead and it’s also quite early. What’s far more important to me is that so many people are willing to support another four years of Biden or of Harris. Is it just because they really really hate Trump? I don’t think it’s that simple. Hinderaker seems to think another GOP candidate – perhaps any other GOP candidate – would be blowing Biden away in the polls. I disagree. A great many people would never vote for Trump, it’s true. But a great many of those people wouldn’t vote for any Republican. And there are a significant number of Trump voters who wouldn’t be voting for any other person but Trump. So Trump repels and he attracts.

And yes, the left would try to destroy any other GOP presidential candidate.

I think the thing that really disturbs me is that so many people aren’t disturbed by developments that, even a couple of decades ago, would have outraged a lot more people. The current widespread use of lawfare as a political weapon is a big one. Too many people are very happy with an “ends justifies the means” approach, and the very successful Gramscian march of the left through the institutions is responsible for that and so many other obviously reprehensible things.

I spend a lot of time on this blog analyzing why people think and feel the way they do, especially in the political realm. Sometimes I’m criticized for that, with the argument from the critics that it’s not worth bothering because it doesn’t do much if any good. I’m probably more sympathetic to that argument than one might think. Nevertheless my curiosity about people drives me to wonder and to speculate. Nearly everyone I know is politically on the other side from me, and if there’s one thing that’s been apparent for years it’s that, for the most part, nothing could change their point of view short of something catastrophic – and perhaps not even that. I find this stunning but true, and it seems to be a basic fact of human nature.

And then there are articles such as this one from the NY Post, which isn’t about an American but is relevant to the question of political change (the topic that propelled me to become a blogger in the first place). The article is about an Israeli peace activist who has changed her mind. She is hardly alone in that among Israelis, but she probably has the most dramatic reason for her change:

An Israeli peace activist who was kidnapped and held hostage for 53 days in Gaza said the horrifying experience shattered her longstanding belief that there could be peace between Palestinians and Israelis.

“I don’t believe in peace, I don’t, sorry. I changed my mind,” Ada Sagi, who was captured by Hamas on Oct. 7, at the start of the Israel-Hamas war, told the BBC.

Talk about getting “mugged by reality”!

She’s sorry, and I’m sorry too – sorry that reality dictates that peace there is a pipe dream, unless it’s ultimately accomplished by a larger war. The dream is so much more pleasant. But she had to give it up:

“For many years, I believed in peace. It’s the reason why I started to teach Arabic at school. Maybe it will bring peace between the Arab people in Israel and the Jewish people,” she recalled thinking. “But from year to year, I understand Hamas don’t want it.” …

Sagi recalled during the harrowing 53-day period she was held hostage, students were paid to watch over her and the other hostages inside an apartment in the southern city of Khan Younis.

“I heard them say… 70 shekels ($18.83) for a day,” she said.

It’s a short article and not very illuminating; you have to fill in the blanks yourself. But although it shouldn’t take being kidnapped and savagely treated to effect a political change like that, perhaps for most people it takes something just that dramatic or close to it. The terrorists’ worst tactical move on October 7 may have been that many (and probably most) of the people whom the terrorists tortured, raped, and murdered were on the Israeli left and were peace activists, like this woman. But the events of October 7 and beyond have convinced most of that population that a 2-state negotiated solution must be abandoned.

That’s political change resulting from catastrophe. It can happen. But I hope that’s not what it will take in this country.