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Author: New Neo

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New Neo

Neo is a writer with degrees in law and family therapy, who blogs at the new neo.

Posted by New Neo on April 15, 2014 21 Comments

The left likes to argue that since there's no significant amount of voter fraud there's no need for voter ID laws, and that those who support them are inherently racist. But wouldn't even one case of voter fraud be an abomination that should offend all liberty-loving...

Posted by New Neo on April 10, 2014 13 Comments
The fact that Brandeis has bowed to pressure and canceled its plans to award Hirsi Ali an honorary degree at commencement should not be a surprise. It is merely a continuation of a decades-long trend in academia towards placating the left, and in favor of cowardice. It's an especially interesting incident, though, because it highlights the fact that, in a choice between protecting women's rights and protecting Islam---two causes beloved of the left---the latter apparently trumps the former in importance. Ali is a champion of women's rights, and that's one of the reasons she is so against Islam: because of its attitude towards women. She should know; she was brought up as a devout Muslim, born in Somalia and raised in Kenya, and subjected to genital mutilation surgery at the age of 5. This is no casual and uninformed critic of Islam:
By the time she reached her teens, Saudi-funded religious education was becoming more influential among Muslims in other countries, and a charismatic religious teacher who had been trained under this aegis joined Hirsi Ali's school. She inspired the teenaged Ayaan, as well as some fellow students, to adopt the more rigorous Saudi Arabian interpretations of Islam, as opposed to the more relaxed versions then current in Somalia and Kenya. Hirsi Ali had been impressed by the Qur'an before she could even read, and had lived "by the Book, for the Book" throughout her childhood. She sympathised with the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, and wore a hijab together with her school uniform, which was unusual at the time but gradually became more common. She agreed with the fatwa against British writer Salman Rushdie that was declared in reaction to the publication of his controversial novel The Satanic Verses.
There is no question whatsoever that Ali is a brave person.

Posted by New Neo on April 08, 2014 9 Comments
Stop the presses: the percentage of people without health insurance has dropped in the first quarter of 2014. But if a decline in the uninsured rate hadn't occurred when Obamacare began, now that would have been a shock. After all, if you give Medicaid to a whole new group of people, offer subsidies to a huge number of other lower-income people, and stick everyone else with penalties for not getting insurance, it could be expected that the rate of those without health insurance would go down. And I don't recall (although I could be missing something) that anyone on the right was suggesting that the total rate of the medically uninsured would fail to go down as a result of Obamacare. The real questions were and are (a) how much of a dent it would actually make in the uninsured (a figure that was probably somewhat elusive to begin with); (b) at what cost, both in money and disruption; (c) what quality of insurance would be the result; (d) what the effect on our health care system would be over time; and (e) the effect on our liberty. But anyway, here are the stats are from Gallup. Unfortunately, I can't find a link to the actual study, and I always prefer to look at the more complete picture, but let's look at the chart from the summary version:

Posted by New Neo on April 06, 2014 69 Comments
The people at Mozilla may yet live to regret their decision in cooperating with the forcing out of Brendan Eich. Apparently the internet giant has been getting a lot of negative reaction to its jettisoning of Eich for his contribution in support of California's Proposition 8 back in 2008. Whether or not this will actually end up hurting Mozilla, one wonders whether Mozilla even anticipated the possibility. The folks at Mozilla travel in a world in which PC thought dominates, and if you don't believe me, take Nate Silver's word for it (and after the 2012 election, I'm inclined to take Nate Silver's word for just about anything):
I checked the records for some of the largest technology companies in Silicon Valley: specifically those that were in the Fortune 500 as of 2008. The list includes Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Cisco Systems, Apple, Google, Sun Microsystems, eBay, Oracle, Yahoo, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Symantec. I limited the search to donors who listed California as their location. In total between these 11 companies, 83 percent of employee donations were in opposition to Proposition 8. So Eich was in a 17 percent minority relative to the top companies in Silicon Valley... At Intel, 60 percent of employee donations were in support of Proposition 8. By contrast, at Apple, 94 percent of employee donations were made in opposition to Proposition 8. The opposition was even higher at Google, where 96 percent of employee donations were against it, including $100,000 from co-founder Sergey Brin.

Posted by New Neo on April 03, 2014 13 Comments

The Supreme Court ruled today to eliminate the caps on total federal campaign contributions from individuals. The vote was the very familiar 5-4 margin: Wednesday’s decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission...

Posted by New Neo on April 01, 2014 22 Comments
You may be under the impression that Vermont and New Hampshire are similar, and it's true. But in certain ways they couldn't be more different. Yes, they're both small, long, and thin, cold, and mountainous (Green vs. White). But Vermont is the most leftist state in the union, while New Hampshire is slightly libertarian. Vermont is also a little bit larger than New Hampshire. Vermont has an area of 9,620 square miles, with only 626,630 people, whereas New Hampshire, with nearly double the population at 1,323,459, possesses only 9,304 square miles, a bit over 300 square miles less. So now, in a surprise move, New Hampshire's Attorney General Marc Lebensraum has announced that this geographic area differential is unfair, and has revived a long-running border dispute between the two that was thought to have been settled back in the 1930s when SCOTUS ruled on the issue:
The border between New Hampshire and Vermont was set by King George II in 1764 as the western bank of the Connecticut River. The U.S. Supreme Court re-affirmed this boundary in 1934 as the ordinary low-water mark on the Vermont shore, and markers were set.
Ever since, the two states have been required by their respective state laws to formally reaffirm the boundary every seven years. Here's a photo of the last time it happened, which was in May of 2012, and was obviously quite amicable: boundary

Posted by New Neo on April 01, 2014 8 Comments

...until people experience enough of it, that is: France's governing Socialists have suffered big losses in municipal elections, with the opposition UMP claiming victory and the far right celebrating further gains. These are local contests, but they indicate a dissatisfaction with the Socialists. However, the way voters...

Posted by New Neo on March 31, 2014 12 Comments

Except for the undetermined numbers of people who are getting an extension, it's Obamacare deadline day, and statistics and spin about it have been released. You can find articles nearly everywhere in the MSM on the success of the six million signups. Or the six million...

Posted by New Neo on March 29, 2014 10 Comments

This Bloomberg article by Margaret Carlson is disingenuous in a rather simple way: it discusses the Hobby Lobby case without once mentioning that the forms of contraception the plaintiffs are objecting to being forced to help provide funds for could at least arguably be called...

Posted by New Neo on March 26, 2014 15 Comments
Another day, another Obamacare extension decided by the president himself---thus further justifying the fact that the law is called by his name. The worst thing about this extension of the deadline to April 15 is, once again, the procedural overreach by Obama and the unconstitutionality of his declaration. The actual content of the change makes more sense than the March 31 deadline ever did because, pre-Obamacare, individual health insurance could ordinarily be purchased by the fifteenth of the month effective the first day of the next month. The new Obamacare extension only applies to people who've had trouble signing up on the federal website, so I assume that people in states with functioning state websites still supposedly have to sign up by March 31. I suspect such a distinction would be unconstitutional, but isn't most of what Obama's been doing with Obamacare rule changes unconsitutional (not to mention Obamacare itself, whatever SCOTUS says)? The deadline change is also on the honor system, which would make it almost humorous if this weren't a very serious business indeed. I'm with Boehner here:
“What the hell is this, a joke?” Boehner said at his weekly press conference. ...The Speaker called the move “another deadline made meaningless,” adding it to a litany of unilateral changes that the administration has made to the law.

Posted by New Neo on March 26, 2014 10 Comments
Sex, drugs, rock and roll. It's a winning combination, along with ignorance, and it may just keep the liberals and left in power, despite a few possible setbacks such as the 2014 midterms. It used to be that ignorant young people didn't much care about voting, so that acted as a natural bar to them exerting too great an influence on elections. But Obama was able to muster a campaign of getting out the vote that was wildly successful in getting enough of them to the polls in 2008 and 2012 to tip the balance in his favor. In 2008, this was done mostly through projecting himself as an inspirational and transformational persona. In 2012 the mechanism was more fear of the Other, those dread Republicans/conservatives bent on taking away the sex, drugs, and rock and roll, as well as the financial governmental largesse (as opposed to prosperity) that might accrue from the left remaining in power. The success of all of these efforts relies in large part on keeping the young voters dumb as well as happy with their pleasures. The "dumb" part apparently isn't all that hard to do if you take over the educational and entertainment systems, weaken the family and other institutions that used to teach values, and control the press. Here's some strong evidence that the efforts to do this have been hugely successful. Read it and weep:

Posted by New Neo on March 21, 2014 18 Comments
The wall-to-wall coverage of Flight 370, despite the relative absence of new information, is not all that surprising. Much of the other news of the day---be it Obamacare, the Crimea takeover and Putin's anschluss-type designs on other former Soviet satellites, Iran and its nuclear ambitions, or any other of several large stories both worldwide and domestic --- are undoubtedly bigger and more important in any objective sense. But once they are covered they are covered, until something new happens. The Flight 370 saga is different. It's a true mystery, at least so far, an international one. Although it directly affects fewer than 300 people and their families, that's a lot of people and we all can identify because nearly all of us fly in planes. That, and its aspect of Twilight-Zoneish unknown, grab people in a very different, and very visceral, way compared to a news story of the more conventional type. The search for Flight 370 "has exposed the technological limits of satellites" which can see the globe but are not designed to hone in on every section of it equally. Understandably, they concentrate their strongest attention on parts of the world other than the vast stretches of uninhabited ocean. As for those pieces of supposed debris spotted near Australia:

Posted by New Neo on March 17, 2014 30 Comments
Now that Crimeans have overwhelmingly voted to secede from Ukraine and join Russia:
Fireworks exploded and Russian flags fluttered above jubilant crowds... [as] the United States and Europe condemned the ballot as illegal and destabilizing.
There is no question that many ethnic Russians live in that part of Ukraine. To find out why, take a look at some history of the area:
The chart shows a collapse in the population of native Crimean Tatars from 34.1% in 1897 to zero in 1959, marking brutal harassment leading up to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's forcible deportation of the entire population in 1944, with nearly half dying in the process. It took decades for the population to climb back to 12% by 2001. While the population of Ukrainians and especially Russians rose, the percentage of the population falling into an unlisted category also fell from more than 20% in 1921 to around 5% in 1959. This was a consequence of the deportation of Armenians, Bulgarians, Greeks, and other groups.
Here's the chart:

Posted by New Neo on March 08, 2014 25 Comments

Or is this story even true? Is it actually one of those "good-cop/bad-cop" tales instead? It's difficult to say, but I vote ever-so-slightly for "true." My opinion of John Kerry is very low, but I think more of him than I do of Obama. The following seems...

Posted by New Neo on March 06, 2014 32 Comments

Why was our intelligence community caught so flat-footed about Putin's intentions in Ukraine? That's a question being asked on Capitol Hill, and in Politico. One possible answer to the query is, "No, it wasn't." That one was given by James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, and...

Posted by New Neo on March 01, 2014 38 Comments
NOTE: for previous coverage of the situation in Ukraine/Crimea, you can follow this live coverage post. Putin is no doubt quaking in his boots at this warning issued by President Obama:
"We are now deeply concerned by reports of military movements taken by the Russian Federation inside of Ukraine," Obama said in a hastily arranged public statement from the White House briefing room. "Just days after the world came to Russia for the Olympic games, it would invite the condemnation of nations around the world. And indeed, the United States will stand with the international community in affirming that there will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine," the president warned.
Costs...costs...what could they be? Here are some possibilities:
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