Letitia James was out to get Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

From Jonathan Turley’s “Letitia James exposed as fighting only for revenge, not justice”:

According to whistleblower Daniel Wiesenfeld, a former Brooklyn prosecutor who works in the Investor Protection Bureau, James produced her chosen defendant and ordered her staff to find a crime, any crime.

Wiesenfeld sent an email to call on fellow lawyers not to assist James further in weaponizing her office. He recounted his own experience as a prosecutor in her office and how Bureau Chief Shamiso Maswoswe allegedly directed him to target “Trump himself, Truth Social, Hewlett Packard (DOJ approved merger) . . . without having a credible reason for targeting the organizations and individuals.”

He added that “If you believe Trump is using the [Department of Justice] attorneys to prosecute his enemies and further his political interests, you should find it equally troubling that Tish [James] is doing exactly the same thing.”

In his blistering email, Wiesenfeld reminded his colleagues that they have other things to do than hunt down James’ enemies. While she wastes “significant public taxpayer dollars to target convenient public enemies,” Wiesenfeld reminded them that there is “rampant nonprofit homeless shelter fraud and antisemitic crimes in and around synagogues.”

Instead, James concentrated on an absurd civil case against Trump where the “victims” made money, lost nothing, and wanted more business from the Trump corporation.

We’ve known this for a long long time. The basic idea is not new and in fact, James campaigned on it. She had identified the criminal and all she had to do was find the crime. The one she and her underlings found was absurd, underscoring how difficult it was to come up with a crime for which to prosecute Trump. They had to essentially make one up.

So, what is new about this? The details are being fleshed out via a whistleblower.

Turley points out, correctly I believe, that most on the left still applaud her:

James is unlikely to be deterred by Wiesenfeld’s email. She knows that the far left still prefers performative lawfare to actual enforcement of fraud and other laws. Some voters would willingly watch billions stolen in program fraud in exchange for just one more trophy Trump conviction.

In fairness to James, she has always been open about what she is and what she was offering.

Absolutely.

Not only that, but some of the left are recipients of the largesse of that fraud. So of course they don’t mind – it’s a win/win situation for them.

[NOTE: I recently heard a bunch of very garden-variety non-DSA Democrats talk with relish about wanting to impeach Trump. Again. For what, they didn’t say; it was just assumed this would be a good thing.]

“Our democracy” in Germany

The New Neo Posted on by

In Germany, there are efforts to ban the AfD (or at least its more extreme elements) as it becomes even more popular with the volk:

With Alternative for Germany (AfD) surging in polls ahead of next month’s regional elections, establishment parties are calling for a ban on the right-wing party. “High-ranking German politicians have advocated for proceedings to ban the most radical regional branches of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party,” German public broadcaster DW News reported Sunday.

For years, the German left has called for a ban on the AfD, but these demands are now reaching a fever pitch as Berlin’s political class dreads a looming right-wing victory.

Over a year ago I wrote this post on efforts to weaken the AfD’s legislative power by denying the party the committee leadership to which it was entitled by its victories in elections. In that post, I quoted the following rationale that’s been given:

The rationale given for this anti-democratic coup is a recent designation of the AfD as a right-wing extremist party. On May 2, 2025, four days before parliamentary power was to change hands, outgoing Interior Minister Nancy Faeser from the Social Democratic Party announced that Germany’s domestic spy agency (the BfV) had slapped that label on the AfD, based on a 1,000-page secret dossier. According to press leaks, the dossier appeared to consist of public statements by AfD leaders, many already chewed over endlessly by the party’s opponents, relating to Germany’s mass migration problem.

AfD representatives have asserted, for example, that Germans have a cultural history tied to their ethnic and national identity; that this history and identity deserve protection; and that unchecked illegal migration threatens national cohesion.

The dossier also contained statements “implying,” as a scandalized Reuters put it, that “immigrants from Muslim countries were more likely to be criminals.” Actually, those AfD statements didn’t “imply” that immigrants from Muslim countries were more likely to be criminals; they asserted that fact outright, because that is what government crime statistics overwhelmingly show.

Germany’s past causes it to be understandably wary of parties that speak of the special German identity and the need to preserve it. But what is the AfD actually advocating? From what I’ve read, it sounds somewhat similar to MAGA regarding immigration – but of course, the favorite tactic of MAGA’s leftist opponents here is to call MAGA “Nazis.”

In Germany, those who want to ban this wing of the AfD refer to it this way:

… that the party’s more radical, ethnically based wing rejects the constitutional principle. In their view, this wing should be subject to legal scrutiny.

They refer to this faction of the AfD as “völkisch” — a German adjective derived from das Volk, meaning “the people.” The völkisch movement was an ethno-nationalist movement and precursor to Nazism. Today, the AfD is often accused of holding völkisch views because its officials repeatedly distinguish between Germans with and without a history of migration.

Banning a very popular opposition party is highly unlikely to cause its members to just quietly take it.

Utopias and dystopias: the twain shall meet

The New Neo Posted on by

Recently I was thinking about Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and that led me to the following video. A relatively short portion of it discusses the more general topic of utopian literature versus dystopian literature, and the speaker points out that those visions share collectivist characteristics and that therefore utopias and dystopias are two sides of the same coin, and that efforts at creating utopias lead inevitably to dystopic nightmares.

Here’s the excerpt

I once attended a philosophy class of my son’s that consisted of a discussion of Candide’s Dr. Pangloss’ insistence that this is “the best of all possible worlds.” That statement seems absurd on the face of it – how could it be? But by the end of the class it seemed quite plausible that in fact, this is the best of all possible worlds – accent on the word possible.

NOTE: I wrote about Brave New World in this 2024 post.

All the lonely people

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a study indicating that Americans are lonely and young Americans are the loneliest of all. It’s from quite a while ago, 2018. But it’s not atypical of the sort of figures such polls often get, and this one has some interesting generational data:

More than half of survey respondents – 54 percent – said they always or sometimes feel that no one knows them well. Fifty-six percent reported they sometimes or always felt like the people around them “are not necessarily with them.” And 2 in 5 felt like “they lack companionship,” that their “relationships aren’t meaningful” and that they “are isolated from others.”

The survey found that the average loneliness score in America is 44, which suggests that “most Americans are considered lonely,” according to the report released Tuesday by the health insurer…

The latest survey also found something surprising about loneliness in the younger generation. “Our survey found that actually the younger generation was lonelier than the older generations,” says Dr. Douglas Nemecek, the chief medical officer for behavioral health at Cigna.

Members of Generation Z, born between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, had an overall loneliness score of 48.3. Millennials, just a little bit older, scored 45.3. By comparison, baby boomers scored 42.4. The Greatest Generation, people ages 72 and above, had a score of 38.6 on the loneliness scale.

I have no idea why anyone would be surprised at the fact that younger people are most lonely and older people least. I would bet that when the “Greatest Generation” members were young, they were even less lonely than they are now, because old age sometimes does lead to increased loneliness (and by the way, people over 72 are not Greatest Generation members for the most part; they are the “Silent Generation” and Boomers. The Greatest Generation is mostly dead, and its very youngest members are 97 at this point.) But as a generation, the Greatest and the Silents tended to have more ties to other people than young people do today.

I think of my parents and their friends. My parents were so old they weren’t even the “Greatest”—according to the chart, the were the “Lost” generation. They grew up in a certain community and lived there all their lives, although my mother briefly moved to New England to be near me in her extreme old age. The community in which they lived was tight – that is, few people moved away and the entire crowd had known each other since at least high school, with just a few newcomers who had entered mostly through marriage.

This community wasn’t just tight and stable, it was also enormous. My parents knew – really, really knew – hundreds of people. My mother spoke on the phone almost daily to ten people or more, and my parents socialized most nights of the week. Some of this socializing wasn’t strictly social, but involved projects and volunteer work and fundraising.

I thought this was normal. Maybe back then, it was. Now, it’s not. I have moved quite a few times, and what’s more many of my friends have moved away, so that now they are spread out (the survivors among them, that is) all over the country. Phone and email and internet can theoretically keep far-flung people in touch, but the reality is that distance and lack of community makes it much easier for friendships to fade. Proximity isn’t everything, but it’s a lot. And few of my friends know each other, so there’s little community there.

One of the things that article I linked to at the beginning of this post fails to mention is that loneliness has two basic dimensions. A person can score high in one but low in another. For example, I would never say my relationships aren’t meaningful or close. They are. Nor would I say that no one understands me, except in the general sense that no one completely understands anybody (including himself or herself).

What I would say, though, and do say, is that I lack acquaintances in the neighborhood, a social mix of casual friends who get together. This is despite a host of efforts I’ve made to join various groups and associations and develop such relationships. And although I have three good friends nearby, they are extraordinarily busy and/or quite ill and I don’t see them as often as I’d like.

So when I took that survey referred to in the study – the UCLA loneliness scale – I came out only “moderately lonely,” and just barely. In other words, apparently I’m actually a bit less lonely than most Americans. I’m almost positive that’s because my answers to all the questions about closeness indicated that I had quite a few people who are close to me, but my answers to the questions about socializing indicated loneliness.

Young people move around a lot move than people used to. They switch jobs more, they divorce more, they marry less and later, they have fewer children. Their entertainment and their affiliative behavior tends to be more solitary; the old Bowling Alone syndrome, which is about lack of community even more than lack of friends.

I have an online community: you. It’s wonderful, but it’s not the same.

Is it really the biggest oil deal in recorded history?

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, it’s big enough:

“At my direction, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, working closely with Highly Respected Interim President of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez, and, through a partnership with private business, have secured majority US control of more than 65 BILLION BARRELS of proven Oil Reserves in Venezuela, at no cost to the American Taxpayer,” the president wrote.

“This Historic Transaction MORE THAN DOUBLES American Oil Reserves, greatly increases our Oil Supply, and will substantially lower Gas Prices for all Americans, long into the future, while helping to continue to set Venezuela on a course toward Tremendous Success and Great Prosperity,” he added.

This was not on my bingo card when I voted for Trump in 2024. But if it’s actually true, it’s quite a development.

From Rubio:

“For the Venezuelan people, this deal will bring nearly $100 billion in private investment, support thousands of high-paying jobs, and drive the reconstruction of Venezuela’s economy,” the secretary of state said.

Win/win? Too good to be true?

I had a college roommate who was an American born in Venezuela, whose father worked in the oil industry there. That’s how I learned, long ago, that the US had been instrumental in developing that country’s oil production, although the Venezuelans always owned the oil fields. You might say it was a mutually beneficial relationship, but Chavez ended it and also instituted other changes that deeply harmed the industry. The blows came from many decisions of Chavez’s; you can find much of the history here.

As for “Highly Respected” Interim President of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez, she seems to be willing to deal.

There’s a bid to vacate Chauvin’s state conviction

The New Neo Posted on by

Prediction: it won’t succeed.

Opinion: it absolutely should succeed.

Here’s its legal basis:

In the petition, Joseph argued that Gov. Tim Walz broke the law in reassigning authority of the case to Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office, making Ellison’s involvement illegitimate. The petition also claimed “there was no medical evidence to support the bogus theory of ‘asphyxia’ advanced by the state,” and that the Hennepin County District Court should have convened a grand jury before charging Chauvin. …

Chauvin first filed a petition to overturn his conviction in 2023, stating that he would not have pled guilty if his attorney told him that a pathologist offered to testify that Chauvin didn’t cause Floyd’s death. The courts denied his petition. Chauvin and Joseph returned in 2025 requesting another review of his case, arguing his rights were violated by faulty testimony and jury instructions. The courts dismissed that petition, as well.

There also have been several appeals; none have been granted. The bases for the appeals rested mainly on the following:

… that Chauvin wasn’t given a fair trial due to intensive pretrial media coverage over riots and civil unrest around the globe that followed Floyd’s killing; that the jury should have been sequestered during the trial; and that the trial should have been held outside of Hennepin County due to bias in the jury pool.

Once a person is sentenced, the bar is set very high for revisiting the issues and granting such requests. I believe that in the Chauvin case the requirements have been met, but it doesn’t surprise me that Chauvin has had no success in these efforts. I’ve written an enormous number of posts on George Floyd’s death and the Chauvin trial, so I won’t recap the details except to say that I’m with Elon Musk here:

“The facts show that [Chauvin] was not the cause of death, nor did he at any time intend for a death to occur,” Musk’s social media post read. “Whatever else he may be, he is not a murderer. That is the truth.”

On my ex and the moon

The New Neo Posted on by

Recovering from his recent surgery is still extremely difficult for my ex-husband and very stressful. He has post-surgery pneumonia as his most serious problem at the moment, although not his only problem.

Yesterday I was at the hospital much of the afternoon and came home around 8:30 PM, but he called me again at around 11:00 PM and sounded awful. I simply couldn’t relax about it, and since I live just a few minutes from the hospital I went back there to check it out.

Fortunately, he was asleep. And also fortunately, I had a long talk with the nurse and she reassured me about various things. He’s certainly not out of the woods, but she seemed competent and on top of things.

And then, when I returned home and got out of my car, I happened to look up to the sky. The moon looked very unusual, and it occurred to me that this might be a lunar eclipse. So I got out my trusty cellphone and sure enough, it was! Plus, just by chance I happened to be stepping out of my car at the exact peak minute of the eclipse.

So that’s the silver lining, I guess.

Whatever the verdict, Lindsay Clancy is extremely unlikely to be getting out quickly

The New Neo Posted on by

The jury is deliberating in the Clancy trial.

I am fairly certain she won’t be “getting off,” whatever the verdict. If she is found to have had diminished capacity due to psychosis, her stay in a mental hospital will be very long, IMHO. She brutally murdered her three young children. That is the reality, and they’re not just letting her out in a month. My guess is that she would be staying for many many years and perhaps even for life.

For example, Andrea Yates – who killed her 5 children in Texas in 2001, twenty-five years ago – and was found found guilty but ultimately found not guilty by reason of insanity (see this for the twistings and turnings of her legal situation), is still institutionalized in a mental hospital. Massachusetts is different than Texas of course, but here’s how it works in Massachusetts:

Massachusetts law says the court can order her hospitalized for up to 40 days for “observation and examination,” and prosecutors or hospital officials can then petition for involuntary commitment to a psychiatric facility.

If a judge determines Clancy is mentally ill and releasing her “would create a likelihood of serious harm,” she could be committed to a facility, the law states. The initial commitment is generally valid for six months and can be renewed in one-year periods.

“She’ll never be released unless there’s a finding by a judge that she doesn’t represent a danger to herself or others,” Rossman said.

She might never get out. Also, she’s probably still a suicide risk, although as a paraplegic she might have trouble accomplishing it.

If I had to guess, I’d predict the jury will be hung. But that’s 100% a guess.

Maybe it’s time to get a dashcam

The New Neo Posted on by

This sort of scam has been going on in California for decades; I first heard of it a long time ago, when a friend was a victim.

Now, though, with the advent of dashcams, it’s easier to prove it and even to find the perps:

A crew of bozos targeted unsuspecting drivers in a series of staged crashes on busy Big Apple highways — scoring more than $80,000 in insurance payouts before a viral video brought the fraud ring down.

Jaime Huiracocha, 53, and Victor Murillo, 34, will respectively serve at least one year and two years in prison after pleading guilty to insurance fraud charges, Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz announced Thursday.

Katz credited the TikTok clip — of a Honda Civic brazenly backing into another vehicle on the Belt Parkway after a near-miss collision — shown to her by her 15-year-old son with jumpstarting the investigation that uncovered three crashes staged by Huiracocha and Murillo.

The guy on the right has a charming set of tattoos:

A commenter there points out that retrofitting a car with a dashcam isn’t all that expensive.

Here’s some more information:

Do Dash Cams Work in Older Vehicles?
In most cases, the answer is yes.

Modern dash cameras are designed to work independently of the vehicle’s factory electronics. They require only a few basic things to function properly:

a 12-volt power source
windshield mounting space
cable routing through the interior
Because nearly all vehicles include these components, dash cameras are compatible with the majority of cars manufactured since the early 2000s.

In fact, older vehicles sometimes make installation easier because their electrical systems are less complex than those found in newer vehicles.

You can get a decent dashcam for under two hundred dollars, apparently. And installing it typically costs another $100 to $250 (depending on the type; see this, for example). Whether you might want one depends on where you live and usually drive.

Things that are no surprise

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) The Massachusetts judge who blocked Trump’s mail-in voting rules has blocked them again, despite the recent SCOTUS ruling lifting her first injunction:

Remember, the Supreme Court did not decide the rule on Monday. The majority said the states and District of Columbia sued over the new rule too early because the USPS had not finalized it.

Well, the USPS finalized the new rules on how to handle mail-in and absentee ballots on Wednesday.

The defendants returned to [US District Judge Indira] Talwani with the rule, arguing the USPS exceeded its authority and inserted itself into federal elections.

Talwani determined the plaintiffs will likely succeed on the merits and face irreparable harm. She also said the balance of harms and the public interest warrants the temporary restraining order.

It probably will go back to SCOTUS again. One of the left’s tactics is to try to run out the clock as much as possible.

(2) Even in golf, “trans women” (biological men) are winning:

At least four women’s golf tournaments in Canada have been won by men this summer.

At least golf isn’t a contact sport in which men playing alongside women can physically harm women. But men can still have somewhat of an advantage:

We conducted a natural experiment, using publicly available data, comparing world class men and women golfers’ performances on their respective tours. Performance and course data were collected on all 50 PGA and 32 LPGA Tournaments in the 2021-2022 season and differences between the tours were identified. The lengths of the courses and holes on the LPGA Tour were approximately 90% of those on the PGA Tour. Overall, women had better driving accuracy than men but scored fewer eagles and rounds in the 60s. Anthropometric and physiological differences likely contribute to women’s adapted movement strategies during the swing and cause them to choose playing strategies that men do not, primarily in driving and approach shots. Altogether, our results suggest that women’s golf courses are likely not sufficiently scaled according to anthropometry or physiology. Thus, golf remains more demanding for women, which may, at least partly, explain their differences in performance compared with men.

(3) Chinese bot farms are campaigning against US AI centers.

You don’t say.

Roughly 200 accounts from a suspected Chinese bot farm have quietly tried to influence Americans to oppose AI data centers on social media, X said Thursday night.

Why it matters: The U.S. and China are racing to build the world’s most advanced AI systems — and it appears Chinese propaganda has infiltrated American circles with the hope of slowing the U.S. down.

Driving the news: The X Safety team probed suspected Chinese accounts involved in influence operations and identified 200,000 accounts, including 200 accounts “posting in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy,” the team said in a tweet.

(4) Hand-washing is more effective against a wider range of pathogens than hand sanitizer. Duh.

(5) Mamdani seems to have more sympathy for the death of a killer than for the death of his victim:

Jose Miranda stopped by a laundromat in The Bronx to wash his clothes one hot August day two years ago, and was hacked to death, randomly, by a maniac with a meat cleaver.

He left ­behind two boys.

His convicted killer Clarence Woodward recently died at Riker’s; we don’t know how. Mamdani commented:

“I am deeply saddened by the death of a New Yorker in City custody at a jail on Rikers Island early this morning,” the mayor wrote.

“My thoughts are with his family and loved ones as they grieve this loss.”

But why would the mayor offer his solemn sympathies to the Woodwards while having nothing to say in support of the Mirandas?

The question answers itself. And it would have taken so little effort to have said something decent to the Mirandas as well.