ANNOUNCEMENT: new comments system is now operating [scroll down for newer posts]

The New Neo Posted on by

[I’m planning to pin this post to the top of the page for at least a few days, so scroll down for newer posts.]

I’ve turned on the new comments system and I hope it goes smoothly. I’ve already tested it out in various ways and it appears to be operating pretty well, as far as I can tell. But if you have any problems with it, please let me know in an email. You can find my email address underneath the photo at the top of the blog (the apple, books, and pointe shoes on the table). Click where it says “Email.”

If you’ve been commenting here already you shouldn’t experience any changes when you try to comment. As long as you use the username you’ve been using right along, and the email address you’ve been using right along (even if it’s not a real one), your comments should post without any problems and you wouldn’t even notice anything new if I hadn’t posted this announcement.

However, new commenters – that is, people with new usernames and/or new email addresses – will find that their first comment goes into moderation. It will not appear until I approve it. When I see it – which would be the next time I check the moderated comments, so there might be a time lag of a few hours – I will either approve it or disapprove it. If I approve it, you become a regular commenter and your future comments should post smoothly without going into moderation again.

So, in summary: old commenters no problem. New commenters, the first comment is moderated and after that no problem.

At least, that’s the way it’s supposed to work.

There’s plenty of news on the Iran war

The New Neo Posted on by

You can find a good roundup at Ace’s. Plus, the Iranian president says that Iran is at “full-scale war” with the US.

Hasn’t that been the case for quite some time? Their approach at the moment continues to be to make passage through the Strait difficult and to bomb the Gulf States and other Arab countries in order to harm US military personnel based there and to get those states to pressure the US to stop.

None of this is new.

Two or three (two killed, one missing) US military members were killed over the weekend in Jordan:

The Pentagon said the soldiers were supporting Operation Inherent Resolve, the name for the U.S. mission against the Islamic State group.

One more military member died from a drone attack in Iraq. However, the article says that was a “controlled detonation” – so was it an accident in which an unexploded drone was being purposely detonated and something went wrong? Seems that way, but the articles I’ve found on the subject aren’t entirely clear.

RIP.

One more comment about comments

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m happy to say that, so far, the new comments policy has been going smoothly for the most part. Every now and then a comment gets trapped in moderation, usually for no clear reason. But that’s always been the case. I find it and I approve it, as I did before.

But let me know if you’re having problems with comments.

We knew there was Medicaid fraud. But THIS much fraud?

The New Neo Posted on by

Like, a hundred billion dollars worth?

A year.

At least, that’s RFK Jr.’s estimate. And that’s just Medicaid.

For example, from Kennedy:

“We found a hotel room with 29 hospices in it. I mean a hotel, every room was a hospice, and none of them had any patients. They were just addresses.”

“The guys who own them, they were Estonians and Armenians and people from Eastern Europe who were getting the patient numbers. They were stealing them from doctors’ offices.”

“They were also going into poor neighborhoods in Los Angeles and they’d say to the people, ‘We’ll give you this $375 flat-screen TV. You give us your patient number and we’re going to enroll you in this hospice. You don’t ever have to go. We’re just going to enroll you,’ and then we’ll charge Medicaid $6,000 a month forever. And the guy never dies, of course, because he was never sick.”

“We didn’t get a single call from a congressman or from a business owner saying, ‘Oh, you shut down my hospice and all these patients are on the street.’ None of them, because they were all crooked and they knew they were crooked.”

John Hinderaker, who wrote the post, adds that in Minnesota (his home state), it is estimated that “at least one-half of the total spending on 14 Medicaid programs went to fraud.”

I always knew there was some fraud, and that it wasn’t a small amount. But no, I didn’t think it was as large as that. Even worse, I think I had assumed that the fraud was at least somewhat difficult to detect. But that turns out to be wrong, too. It was ridiculously easy to detect, particularly in the computer age which we’ve been in for decades.

So why was it not detected? Is it a case of astoundingly colossal incompetence? Possibly, but I don’t think so. It’s more likely to be a case of winking at it in order to gain the support of those who participate in it – who are not limited to members of immigrant communities, but those communities seem to be over-represented in the fraudster population.

[ADDENDUM:

I was looking up earlier posts of mine on heath care fraud, and much to my surprise I found one from 2017 that contained that same $100 billion a year figure. I certainly hadn’t remembered that. Please take a look.]

Do the mullahs seek martyrdom?

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Athough I’m still just on the cellphone and therefore, at the moment, my posting capacity is quite limited, I found this old draft that was already written. So I’ve posted it while waiting for Comcast to fix the problem.]

From commenter “Gregory Harper”:

Do the mullahs really seek martyrdom? Probably not. They’ve had their chances and have always declined. They like wealth and power and martyrdom is for the gullible little people. Do I want them to obtain a nuclear weapon to test the theory that they wouldn’t actually use it? Nope.

I agree that they don’t seek martyrdom. They could do that easily enough, by becoming suicide bombers or standing in the middle of the street holding a sign saying, “Great Satan and Small Satan, here I am!” What they do seek is the destruction of the Jews and the West, and the spread of Islam – particularly their own brand of Shia Islam – all over the world, with them in charge.

But despite this, they’re willing to become martyrs if along the way they happen to meet that fate. It’s a win/win situation for them. They try to avoid martyrdom because they like power, plus they think they will be able, while alive, to steer the world towards the glorious goal of Islamic supremacy and takeover for which they aim. So they try to stay alive if they can. But not at the expense of wreaking havoc and seeking to wreak more.

And they’re fine with martyring their own people, even children. Those supposed keys to paradise they gave the mine-clearing children during the war with Iraq, for example – I don’t think that was just a cynical ploy. They were fine with the children dying because their belief is that those children would become blessed martyrs, too. The children’s lives are cheap; their deaths would be in order to effect the same victory for which the mullahs yearn, and their deaths are of no real consequence to the mullahs. And of course killing infidels, or apostates, or Iranian women whose hair in insufficiently covered – that’s okay too, to the mullahs.

For the moment, the internet is down in my neighborhood

The New Neo Posted on by

[UPDATE 4:47 pm: It’s fixed!]

So frustrating. I’m outside now, using my phone to post this. Comcast says it’s “working on it.” So, since it’s nearly impossible to write anything of length and complexity on a cellphone, it could be an hour or two (or three?) till I do some regular posts. Apologies!

By the way, Comcast is the only game in town where I live.

And then there’s Mamdani

The New Neo Posted on by

Kulak landlords beware:

Mamdani’s plan is to have DCWP [Department of Consumer and Worker Protection] work with the City Council on new legislation that would stipulate landlords could require either a credit check — paid for by the landlord or broker — or proof that an applicant’s income meets the common 40-times-the-rent standard, but not both. …

The 68-page report laid out an ambitious slate of tenant-focused proposals, including legally recognizing tenant unions, directing HPD to investigate every heat complaint citywide and requiring landlords to disclose any AI-generated or digitally altered images and videos in rental listings so applicants are not misled by doctored apartments.

The report’s ideas came from “Rental Ripoff Hearings” where 2,300 of tenants across the five boroughs detailed housing conditions, fees and landlord practices they wanted City Hall to change.

The idea, as many people have said, is to reach the endpoint of city confiscation of these rental properties. Freeze rents on rent-stabilized apartment and make it almost impossible for landlords to get the money to pay for repairs and all the rest, and then as landlords pull out of the business entirely the city can take over. There seems to be little to no public acknowledgement by the present city administration that landlords are not money fountains, but that the rental business is subject to market forces and landlords have to make money in order to keep apartments in working order.

Oh, and Mamdani has some other plans of the more international variety:

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) says he is reviewing whether his administration could arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his anticipated visit to the city for the U.N. General Assembly this fall.

The mayor made these comments an interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro on Saturday episode of The New York Times’ “The Interview” podcast.

“I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in The Hague,” Mamdani said. “He’s a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court, and what you will find is that is an opinion that is held by many, purely because of what his actions have wrought over these past many years.”

No surprise there.

More reflections on Vance – and also on Rubio

The New Neo Posted on by

I already wrote a post on Vance’s Joe Rogan appearance, but it turns out I have more to say. The more I think about Vance, the more uneasy I become.

It’s been cumulative, but the Rogan interview is somewhat of a turning point for me. Initially, I was – if not a Vance fan, exactly – of the opinion that he might gain the sort of experience as VP that would make him a good presidential candidate in 2028. He’s clearly a smart guy, and he’s had a way with words when talking to the regular press and pointing out their illogic and lies. In his debate against Tim Walz he was excellent, and he used a delicate and deft touch. Among his other assets, he has a wife who seems as though she would make a wonderful First Lady.

But in recent months, Vance’s refusal to say something about Tucker Carlson’s horrendous viewpoints has been very disquieting. Carlson isn’t just anti-Israel and a spreader of classic lies about Jews, but he’s a historical revisionist, a Qatar and Putin shill, and has become a platform for some of the worst ideas around these days. For a while, Carlson’s son worked for Vance (although he’s quit now), and it’s long been known that it was Carlson who promoted to Trump the idea of Vance as VP. So in a very real way Vance owes his present job to Carlson.

That meant that there was a simple explanation for Vance not speaking out against Carlson as Trump had. That reason was loyalty. Blind and unwavering loyalty is not necessarily a good thing, but as long as Vance kept neutral on the subject of Carlson, I was willing to give him a pass and to wait and see. And then Vance decided to go on Rogan’s podcast, and he began to sound somewhat like Tucker himself. Not just that, but the interview was an exercise in buck-passing, which is not a good look.

This article by Lee Smith describes it quite well:

During his grievance-fueled performance on Rogan’s podcast, Vance lashed out once again at the Jews, alleging, among other things, that there’s an Israeli-funded plot to undermine his negotiations with Iran; some Israelis want war indefinitely for the sake of endless war; and the U.S. government has probably destroyed evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad operative. …

Now that the Iran deal that Vance favored has blown up and he’s taking heat for it, he’s showing that no one puts baby in a corner. So, he resurrects Epsteingate, predictably inspiring the dumbest people in America, and around the world, to flood social media with details from an information operation targeting Trump.

Epsteingate is a reboot of Russiagate, a conspiracy-theory template holding that Trump is controlled by a foreign power. During Trump’s first term, that power was Russia. Now, in the second term, it’s Israel. Epstein became crucial to the narrative because his supposed role in running a pedophile blackmail ring at the behest of the Mossad provided a mechanism by which Israel could extort Trump and other high American officials into doing its bidding.

Smith goes on to explain why this is preposterous, but I think it’s of great interest that Vance was willing to hint at this route despite – as he himself admitted – having zero evidence of it. Vance even explicitly said that there was no evidence Trump was involved in sex with minors. But Vance has to know – unless he’s stupid, which I submit he is not – that Vance’s wink and nod about Epstein and the Mossad, and Israeli influence on the US, not only appeals mightily to the Jew-hating Tucker wing but is an indirect way of saying Trump is controlled by Israel.

I very much doubt Trump is happy about that.

More from Smith, on the origins of the story Vance is pushing or at least nodding along when Rogan mentions it:

The rumor that Epstein was a high-level global intelligence asset—as opposed to a rich pervert and con man—seems to have started with Steve Bannon, who left the first Trump White House in disgrace after leaking to the press. Bannon has ignored calls to release the 15 hours of interviews he reportedly taped with Epstein, presumably because they show Epstein was not a spy—or, at the very least, because Bannon failed to press the late sex offender to address a rumor he continues to popularize. The idea the Jewish financier pimped out underage American girls to compromise liberal elites for the purpose of advancing Israeli interests was most ardently promoted by Vance’s political patron, Tucker Carlson.

This is the Jew-hating Tucker wing. They have their own agenda, and I believe it is somewhat parallel to the DSA agenda for the Democrat Party. The goal is to take over the Republican Party. I don’t think they’ll succeed, but it won’t be for lack of trying. And now I strongly believe that Vance has hitched his wagon to him.

Vance is pragmatic, and may back off from this. It’s a long way to 2028 and a lot can happen. But he has shown, at the very least, that he’s willing to go very low in his own pursuit of power and need to excuse himself from responsibility for the failure of the negotiations with Iran.

It gets worse [emphasis in original]:

And to explain why his memorandum of understanding failed, Vance sourced the reading at a supermarket checkout counter. “There’s a literal foreign influence campaign being funded to tank the very deal that I was pursuing,” said Vance, pointing to a recent article in Time magazine. In fact, the story is about a former Trump deputy paid by Israel to pay pro-Israel influencers to post pro-Israel content, to combat the rising tide of campaigners on the right targeting Israel and paid for by Qatar.

Tom Cotton, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told the media he is “not aware of any intelligence about a secret information operation to try to change American public opinion on negotiating under the memorandum of understanding.” Also, no one prevented Vance from negotiating the MOU, because it got signed. Yes, there was plenty of criticism on social media, but as Cotton said, it was the Iranians who blew up Vance’s deal by continuing to blow up ships in the Strait of Hormuz, which they declared to be their own private waterway—contrary to long-standing treaties that guarantee freedom of the seas.

But Vance insists it’s on Israel. “There are some people within their system, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt, who are manipulating and trying to change American public opinion to keep the war going on indefinitely,” he told Rogan. “Not toward any objective, but just indefinitely.”

Vance challenges anyone to show how he’s antisemitic. But claiming that Israelis want war for the sake of war, indefinitely, toward no specific objective, is a pretty good place to start. Vance’s denials are part of the act: I didn’t say something recognizably antisemitic; it’s on you to prove that the classic antisemitic conceit I used is antisemitic, you paranoid freak. My point is clearly just that Israelis simply kill people for no reason or purpose because they enjoy spilling blood, and they will continue doing so forever, to satisfy their perverted, inhuman lusts.

That is the part that seems to me to be the most revealing of Vance’s actual position.

Rubio, on the other hand, seems to actually have some integrity, and to have thought more deeply on these sorts of issues. Not only that, but he has a great deal of experience in government and in particular in foreign policy. He’s the child of Cuban refugees, and knows a lot about Communism and its effects. Plus, he’s quite expert on Latin America and has been active in dealing with that part of the world.

Rubio recently gave a much-praised speech on left-wing violence (you can find the text here). And he also gave a speech in Germany against 3rd-world migration that got a standing ovation [ADDENDUM: The video at that link, of the ovation, might be of an earlier speech; hard to say, but I’ve seen some statements to that effect].

The contrast between the two men is stark.

Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson recently said this about J. D. Vance [emphasis mine]:

I think if JD Vance were president, of course he would not be at war with Iran.

It’s impossible for me to imagine JD Vance standing up and saying we need to have two wars to defeat a phantom nuclear program.

It’s too insane. I think he has too much self-respect to say something like that.

I wish he had been elected president in 2024, but that didn’t happen. I love JD.

I don’t agree with him on everything, of course, but I think he’s an honest, very smart, decent person. That puts him above almost all politicians I’ve ever met.

That’s an endorsement.

Will Democrats ever take a stand against DSA candidates?

The New Neo Posted on by

A question from commenter “F”:

Apparently the DSA thinks they’re on the ascendent right now, and they’re prepared to swing for the fences. Ironically, they are damaging their relationship with the Democratic part in doing so, and (as Neo points out), their numbers are too small to be a real national party. If they swing and miss they will damage not only their own brand, but that of the Democrats too. My question now is, how long will it take Democrats to see this and tell them to get lost, as people like John Fetterman is doing already?

I suppose it depends at least partly on what is meant by “swing and miss.” On the local level of city government in very blue cities, or representation in state legislatures from certain very blue districts, they seem to be batting over 500. As long as they choose their battles carefully and limit them to such places, they will win.

It’s when it gets to the state and national level that the results are unknown. So far, it’s instructive to note the campaign of Michigan’s El-Sayed for the US Senate seat. The approach is that, although he clearly is simpatico with the DSA’s goals, he is not a member and they have not endorsed him. That is a case of obfuscation, because they are invested in his win and support it:

DSA officials have “already shifted organizers, volunteers and resources” into Michigan as El-Sayed squares off against the more moderate congresswoman Haley Stevens in a bruising Democratic primary, Politico reported. El-Sayed’s campaign has also held discussions with the DSA about holding rallies in the state with left-wing officials like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), who recently endorsed El-Sayed, according to Politico.

“It’s DSA summer. We can’t stop racking up wins,” left-wing media host Emma Vigeland told the outlet. “We’re seeing the culmination of 10 years of democratic socialism becoming more mainstream.”

The DSA’s organizing in Michigan is notable given that El-Sayed is not officially a DSA member—and that he’s running for Senate in a swing state that narrowly backed President Donald Trump in 2024. Socialist candidates like Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez in New York City and Melat Kiros in Denver, by contrast, won primary elections in deep-blue districts that are almost guaranteed to send them to Congress come November.

“Abdul El-Sayed is not DSA affiliated, but he’s a progressive fighter,” anti-American streamer Hasan Piker, who campaigned with El-Sayed in April, told Politico.

“Everybody in the coalition is on the same page, whether it be Justice Dems, whether it be [the Working Families Party], whether it be DSA,” added left-wing consultant Vincent Vertuccio, who said that Michigan is “absolutely the next focus of this national movement.”

Michigan also happens to have one of the larger Muslim population percentages in the US: it is fifth, according to a chart that can be found here, after Illinois, New York, New Jersey, and Maryland. The would also help El-Sayed in the primary.

I think the general Michigan approach, which is to run a candidate for statewide office who is definitely aligned with DSA goals but not officially DSA, is the way it will go in the future in many states for state-level campaigns. I don’t know whether El-Sayed will win; it’s still early, but at the moment (now that a third candidate has dropped out) he is trailing his Democrat opponent Stevens.

So Michigan may not be ready for El-Sayed just yet. But one thing to remember about the left is that they take the long view and are extraordinarily patient. They have been preparing the ground for many decades, in particular through their outsize influence on our system of education, and it has borne fruit these days.

So, why don’t more people speak out a la Fetterman? For one thing, Fetterman is sui generis. For another, they are afraid of being primaried, and the far left is a very significant part of the Democrat base these days. I believe very many Democrat members of Congress, and governors, feel it’s in their personal interest (if they wish to get re-elected) to lay low on this issue and to inch closer to the far left agenda in order to keep as many voters as possible in their own camp. It’s a tricky balancing act for many, especially is blue areas. In purple ones, there is more to be gained by condemning DSA positions – and then voting for them in Congress when they are told to do so.