News roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) A near-beheading on the streets of Belfast – by a Sudanese “migrant”:

A Sudanese man has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after a knifeman appeared to try to behead a man in Belfast.

The suspect has been taken into custody after the victim suffered “significant injuries” to his face, neck and back in what police called a brutal attack.

The injured man, a resident of the area in his 40s, is being treated in hospital, where his condition is described as serious.

Footage shared on social media – which is too graphic to publish – appears to show the knifeman, in his 30s, pinning the man to the ground before repeatedly stabbing him in the head.

The video shows three apparently local men intervening, one hitting the attacker with a wooden hurling stick as others kick him to try to force him to release his victim.

Note that the three rescuers didn’t seem to have conventional weapons. Fortunately there were three of them.

(2) Steve Hilton will be on the ballot in California for the governorship. I guess his total was too big to surmount, since that particular primary is statewide (compared to the LA mayor’s primary, which was only in LA). So, to coin a phrase, for the post of governor California will have “a choice, not an echo.”

(3) Todd Blanche is nominated for the post of AG. Until now, he was the acting AG. I think Trump liked the job he was doing.

(4) The cellphone and fertility rates:

Caitlin Myers, an economist at Middlebury College, and Ezekiel Hooper, her student, used the spotty early rollout of the iPhone as a way to isolate the effects of the phone on fertility. The first iPhone was released in June 2007, they wrote, and was available only on the AT&T network until February 2011. The study compared fertility rates in U.S. counties that had near-universal AT&T coverage with counties that had little or none.

Their paper, published in the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that the iPhone caused as much as half of the fertility decline between 2007 and 2011. The most pronounced effects were among young people aged 15 to 24.

What happened in the counties with iPhones? One theory, Professor Myers said, is that young people began to socialize more on their phones and less in person, and consequently were less likely to have sex and become pregnant.

Professor Myers said iPhones may also have made pornography more accessible, which led young people to substitute it for sex, or young people may have used them to obtain better information on avoiding pregnancy, including contraception and abortion.
Researchers not involved in the study said the results were persuasive.

Makes sense. The lockdowns didn’t help, either. And, as Ace writes:

And what messages did they get over their cellphones 24/7? Constant crisis, constant fear, constant messaging that the world was ending and it was all due to human births, constant messaging in favor of hook-up culture and abortion and, for the boys, pornography, and constant messaging against marriage, the family, and humanity itself.

(5) Another horrible murder, this time on a Bronx bus. Jonathan Pettigrew, 41-year-old father of 7 was shot and killed by a teenager – as yet at large – whom Pettigrew had asked not to talk so loudly on a cellphone. There were plenty of witnesses. The news reports don’t mention the races involved, but Google AI said that Pettigrew was black. My guess – and it’s only a guess – is that both victim and perpetrator were black. This fits the pattern of an out-of-control teenager, armed and ready to kill any time he perceives anyone as insulting him or telling him what to do.

RIP Jonathan Pettigrew.

Karmelo Anthony is found guilty of murder

The New Neo Posted on by

It seemed extremely clear that “guilty of murder” should be the verdict. There was no defense offered except “after he provoked a dispute and refused to leave, for no particular reason he thought he was in danger of being killed and therefore killed another person.” Fortunately, the law doesn’t absolve you of murder by that sort of twisted reasoning.

But many of Anthony’s “supporters” do, because of racism, the perennial accusation:

Karmelo Anthony sobbed Tuesday as he was swiftly convicted of murder in the fatal stabbing of fellow high-school jock Austin Metcalf at a track meet — and his furious supporters raged, “This whole thing’s been racist!”

The jury in Collin County deliberated about three hours before finding Anthony, 19, guilty of first-degree murder in the death of the 17-year-old and must now decide whether to put him away for life — prompting the killer’s weeping mom to later take the witness stand and beg for mercy for her son, according to a report by NBC DFW.

“He’s my oldest. He’ll always be my baby. I love him very much,” Anthony’s mom Kala Hayes sobbed to jurors before they headed into further deliberations to decide his sentence.

As she spoke, Anthony also cried.

“I know my son, and he’s very sorry for what he did,” Hayes told the jury.

“Sorry” doesn’t cut it. That doesn’t mean this isn’t a tragedy all around. I don’t know enough about Anthony’s family to blame them for his behavior, and it’s certainly not the case that the family is always to blame. But in the end, he is guilty of stabbing another young man in the heart for no good reason on earth.

Anthony must pay the price. But what will the price be? It really depends; he was 17 when he killed Metcalf and perhaps the jury will be lenient for that reason. I doubt his lawyer’s summation helped him much, though. Then again, his lawyer’s task was tough, because this was pretty much an open and shut case in the legal sense:

“Austin Metcalf had no legal right to use force to eject Karmelo Anthony from that tent,” Anthony’s lawyer, Mike Howard, said during closing arguments at the Collin County trial — as Anthony looked on intently from the defense table.

“He had the right to ask him to leave, but he didn’t have any legal right to use force,” Howard said of Metcalf, according to a report by the Daily Mail. …

Howard said Anthony “had an absolute right to defend himself.”

What is Howard talking about? After Anthony was asked to leave 15 times and refused to do so, while insulting and cursing at the group and threatening them, Metcalf gave him a moderate push. That is legally irrelevant and does not justify murder. And this was no accidental act of Anthony’s, either – no case in which someone caused a chain of events that led to death. This was a knife plunged deep and with great force into Metcalf’s heart.

Or, as the prosecutor said:

You don’t get to meet a shove with a stab, especially if you provoke the shove …

No, you don’t. That is quite literally overkill. But Anthony’s lawyers really had no other way to approach his defense, since his act was basically indefensible.

The prosecution added this:

The prosecutor told the jury they should consider Anthony’s mindset rather than his motive.

“It’s mindset, mindset,” Wirskye said. “He took a knife to a track meet. He of course felt empowered that he was going to come out on top of any encounter.”

I have a hunch, though, that if it’s possible Anthony will get less than the maximum sentence. No matter what, he will be a hero to some people, but I don’t think their numbers will reach the level of the Luigi-lovers.

You may have noticed …

The New Neo Posted on by

… that I haven’t written about goings-on in Iran for a few days. That’s because I have nothing to add to what I’ve said in the past. The situation is confusing and frustrating, plus it’s hard to know – very hard to know – what’s happening, who is trustworthy on the subject, and what if anything is planned. So at the moment I’m waiting.

But here’s a thread to discuss it, if you’d like.

Still having that intermittent “too many requests” error message

The New Neo Posted on by

Apologies for any inconvenience. It’s not fixed yet, although I’ve been struggling to eliminate it and have tried several suggestions.

Question for the techies among you: Today I was told something new by the host, which is that my own IP number is brute force attacking the site and that’s what sometimes makes it close down for a while for “too many requests.” This seems very odd; anyone have any suggestions as to what this might represent and how to fix it? Thanks.

The Karmelo Anthony trial in Texas

The New Neo Posted on by

You may recall the case: 17-year-old Austin Metcalf was stabbed by then-17-year-old Karmelo Anthony (now 19) at a track meet in front of many witnesses. Metcalf was white; Anthony is black.

The trial is not about whether Anthony stabbed him; it’s about why. And in that respect the Anthony defense is very much like the argument Vickrum Digwa tried to mount: that the stabbing was self-defense. Anthony’s definition of self-defense, much like that of Digwa, is the perception of danger even when no real danger was present or even arguably present. In other words, it rests on feelings.

That’s not the way the law of self-defense goes, even if you buy that that’s what Anthony felt in his heart. Mere perception is not enough; there must be some valid and objective reason for that perception. Karmelo’s defense lawyers are presenting this approach, and tomorrow will be closing arguments:

Prosecutors say the stabbing was an unjustified attack stemming from an argument over whether Anthony could be under the tent of Metcalf’s team.

Anthony’s attorneys have argued that he acted in self-defense and reacted in fear during a “split-second” moment after Metcalf made physical contact.

The jury heard from defense witnesses on Monday, including one of Anthony’s former teammates who was at the track meet when the fatal confrontation unfolded.

One of Anthony’s teammates, testifying Monday, said Anthony was “distraught” after the stabbing.

“I was hearing him say, ‘I told him not to touch me,’” the witness said.

So what?

From what I’ve read, evidence in this trial paints a picture of Anthony as the aggressor. He had come into the other team’s tent and refused to leave although asked many times, and then this happened:

Prosecutors previously called more than 20 witnesses, including students who were at the meet and a medical examiner who testified that Metcalf was stabbed through the heart. …

One teen recalled Anthony telling Austin, “Touch me and find out,” and described both teenagers as angry, though he characterized Anthony as the one provoking the situation. He said Austin eventually pushed Anthony, after which Anthony pulled a knife from his backpack and stabbed Austin in the chest.

It seems to me that, both in the Digwa case and this case, the person doing the stabbing was highly reactive and ready to kill at the slightest provocation, which included anything perceived as “dissing” him. That’s not self-defense in the legal sense. That’s a murderer in the making.

Anthony has his champions among the public, and jury selection and race has been an issue. If Anthony is sentenced, I bet that will be one set of grounds for his appeal:

The trial, which is expected to last about two weeks, has drawn significant political scrutiny, with racially charged demonstrations calling for Anthony to ‘walk free.’

A panel of 12 jurors and six alternates was selected after roughly 600 prospective jurors were questioned during a selection process that began Monday. No black jurors were seated on the final jury.

Why no black jurors? Here’s some information on that:

Dewey had to remind panelists that nobody would get “in trouble” for revealing their feelings about the hot-button case, which the Anthony family, who are black, claimed is a product of “white supremacy.”

With that sort of attitude on the family’s part, it’s not hard to see why Anthony might have been so primed to strike.

As for the potential jurors:

“He looks like a child,” several said in questioning relayed by WFAA, when asked if they could consider a life sentence for the teen, who has been charged with first-degree murder.

“I don’t think I can make a decision about somebody so young. One mistake, one argument, one conflict, you can’t say he’s a bad person,” one potential juror told Assistant District Attorney Dewey Mitchell. …

Mitchell asked panelists how they feel about this statement: “I don’t feel comfortable finding an African American male guilty of murder.”

“I don’t know if I feel right putting a brother in jail,” one candidate stated, according to WFAA.

Perhaps they’re also afraid of being doxxed if they’re on a jury that convicts Anthony.

On the LA vote-counting process that is giving LA two leftist Democrats to choose from for mayor

The New Neo Posted on by

We knew it would probably happen; Pratt would be shut out of the election. The only question is whether the process was fraudulent, and if so what method was used. Although we cannot say for certain, it’s incredibly hard to maintain the idea that the post-Election Day surge for Raman was bona fide; the details point so strongly in the direction of fraud.

In other words, the process gives us the appearance of fraud. That is built into the system, which allows vote-counting of mail-in ballots a week past election day as long as they are postmarked on that day (and “postmarked” is rumored to be interpreted as including a handwritten note), and which features mail-in ballots to everyone on the rolls plus liberal ballot-harvesting.

For example:

California has some of the most permissive — if not the most permissive — vote-by-mail laws in the country. Every active registered voter is automatically mailed a ballot before each statewide election. Because the state has refused to allow the Department of Justice to review its voter rolls, there’s no way to know how many registrations belong to deceased individuals, voters who have moved, duplicate records, or were actually fraudulent registrations to begin with. …

Additionally, California accepts ballots that arrive as late as one week after Election Day. Although the law requires those ballots to be postmarked on or before Election Day, claims circulating on social media suggest that even a handwritten date may be enough to meet that standard, raising further questions about the state’s ballot-counting process. For obvious reasons, this is impossible to confirm.

That time frame is inherently untrustworthy and should never be allowed, unless perhaps for absentee ballots from military personnel. Why would anyone implement a system like that, with so few ways to check on it? Hard to believe it’s for any reason other than to make it more possible to cheat if necessary, once the counters know how many ballots they have to create in order to make up the difference. And with the universal mail-in voting and ballot harvesting, it’s even more suspect.

So either there was an amazing bona fide surge for the most far-left major candidate in the mayoral race, Raman – hard to believe – or there was cheating here. And the argument made by the left, that late-arriving mail-in ballots in California always go for Democrats, is unconvincing. Do such ballots go disproportionately for Democrats compared to the earlier mail-in ballots? More importantly, do they go for the non-frontrunner – the person in third place? And if so, does the phenomenon occur even when there is no threat from a Republican or a candidate the Democrat establishment doesn’t want – in other words, when there is no reason to manufacture votes? In the case of this LA mayoral primary, there wasn’t so much a late surge for Democrats as a late surge for Raman in particular, the third-place candidate prior to that, and the one who is most to the left.

Because only the top two vote-getters in the California primary advance to the general, if the counters of votes wanted to push Pratt out of the running, they had two choices to eliminate him. The first choice would be to help the frontrunner and incumbent Bass reach 50% and win outright; if a candidate gets over 50% in the primary that person is the outright winner and there’s no further voting [CORRECTION: This appears to be incorrect information, and therefore this option was not available]. But Bass was about 13 or 14 points away from 50% on election night, so that was probably a bridge too far. Too many votes to manufacture. But Raman and Pratt were only five or six points apart on election night. Much easier to make up that difference and set up an obligatory Democrat/Democrat twosome. And that’s what has happened.

Bass had been consistently beating Raman in the ballots arriving by Election Day. And then suddenly Raman beats Bass in the later ballots. See this:

The big tell about Los Angeles Mayor right now is not that Nithya Raman has gained massively on Spencer Pratt. It’s that she’s gained on Karen Bass *while Bass’ share actually declined* in two full days, Thursday PM to Saturday PM.

Bass and the Normie Dem Adam Miller both dropped slightly in share while Raman essentially took all the net gains.

Thursday Left, this morning Right. Raman gained 3.1 points on Bass. Conventional wisdom was that late voters would’ve consolidated around the incumbent, not bolt for the upstart extremist.

More here:

A candidate who was getting around 20% of the vote is suddenly getting 40% of the vote, and those votes are coming at the expense of Spencer Pratt.

Not her Democrat opponent, whose vote percentage has remained steady.

Not a “Democrat” surge; a Raman surge.

I’m not sure where this guy gets his information, but it’s certainly interesting:

As @BoredElonMusk & the data show, Raman’s late mail in ballot surge was fueled in large part by ballots from Skid Row.

Tens of thousands of homeless whose ballots are sent to central addresses (not the sidewalk) & can be filled out/returned by someone else.

There’s also this:

Many have been asking me describe the potential signature verification loophole for Los Angeles mail in ballots.

It says: “If a voter is unable to sign, the voter can make a mark witnessed by one person.”

Here, the person drew a happy face & “witnessed” it with a scribble. That scribble isn’t validated as being a real person. No name, nothing.

While a happy face may draw scrutiny, a plain line would not.

This could hypothetically enable mass harvesting where the voter never fills out, signs or even sees their own ballot.

We should be told how many ballots show up without the voter’s signature.

A hundred, two hundred years ago, a lot of people couldn’t even sign their name. Today? No excuse for this except in extremely rare circumstances. Combined with ballot harvesting, it’s an obvious travesty. And yet how can the fraud be proven in such a situation? It can only be inferred, but there’s no way to check on who made that mark.

More numbers here:

Mail-ins arriving before Election Day:
– Bass: 38.1%
– Pratt: 27.9%
– Raman: 20%

Mail-ins arriving after Election Day:
– Raman: 37% (+17% surge)
– Bass: 34.9% (-3% drop)
– Pratt: 19% (-9% drop)

In addition:

Add to all this a fact that many have not considered: you don’t even need to manufacture ballots after election day. All you need to know is the approximate results beforehand (Raman comes in third), and fill out the harvested ballots from the homeless, apartment buildings, and fake voters, ensuring that the correct result is overturned after the election is held. You have over a week to get them in, so you can even wait until the polls close and initial results come in and still get that vote counted “legally.” …

Most of the “cheating” can be done legally, save for the actual filling out of the ballots, which is practically impossible to detect. Simply have the harvested ballots ready to fill out when the initial results come in on election night, vote the ballots, and send them in. No magic USB drives necessary. No video trail. No paper trail. No examination of the ballots. …

As far as I can find, which is not admittedly definitive, there is no case where a third-place candidate far back vaults into first place in ballot counts days after the initial results come in. It beggars belief, violates common sense, and depends on the belief that late-breaking voters surged to a candidate everybody knew was rightfully dead and buried. That pattern is never observed in the wild. …

But it is the pattern necessary to kick Pratt off the ballot, giving Karen Bass a clear and easy path to victory over a candidate few people like, and nobody is enthusiastic about, and with the charisma of a rock.

I don’t see any remedy possible for this particular election. One very slight comfort (very slight) is that, if Pratt had been allowed to get on the ballot against Bass in the general, I think it’s highly likely he would have lost the election. I suppose it’s theoretically possible he could have won if he ran an amazing campaign in the next few months. But we haven’t been allowed to find out; it was too dangerous to let us see what he was saying, or to have another debate where he might show Bass up to be a fool. And the Democrats couldn’t even risk the remote possibility of a Pratt win.

However, for the future, there’s this possibility:

The case before the Supreme Court is Watson v. Republican National Committee. The question is direct: When Congress established a national Election Day for federal elections, did it mean ballots must be received by Election Day — or merely mailed by Election Day?

During oral arguments in March, Justice Samuel Alito warned that confidence in election outcomes can be seriously undermined when the apparent result on election night is later flipped by a large batch of late-arriving ballots.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh likewise pressed attorneys on whether history supports requiring ballots to be received by Election Day. Their questioning reflected broad skepticism from the court’s conservative majority.

Sacramento should be paying attention.

Most Americans understand Election Day to mean the deadline. California’s system tells them otherwise.

When vote totals keep changing for days after the polls close, suspicion naturally grows — because the process looks like it has no real endpoint.

I would say it has no objective endpoint other than 30 days after Election Day. It does have a goal, though – which is to select and then elect the preferred candidates of the Democrat powers-that-be.

The article mentions that, even if SCOTUS decides that Election Day is the final acceptable day for mail-ins, that rule would only apply to federal elections. State and local elections could still use the old method – which means the primary rules for governor and mayor would not change, as far as I can tell.

Once states go this way, it’s very hard to reverse the trend. And that is part of the design.

ADDENDUM:

A similar reversal has been starting to happen in the governor’s race; see this. Will Hilton make it into the general? I submit that it looks better for him than it did for Pratt. I think it’s more difficult to commit enough fraud to matter on the level of an entire state election unless the percentages are very close to begin with. On the state level, there are too many red areas which are not amenable to Democrat vote-counting control, plus the sheer number of faked votes needed is higher. So maybe Hilton will hang in there – although if he doesn’t, it would not surprise me either. It would be third-place Steyer who would have to outperform both Becarra and Hilton as time goes on.

The phenomenon of late fame

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an interesting piece on the phenomenon of late fame. Robert Graboyes concentrates on music:

Johann Sebastian Bach is one of history’s three greatest composers (along with Beethoven and Mozart), but his fame didn’t really blossom until the mid-19th century—75 or 80 years after his death. That fact contains both sadness (that he never enjoyed the fame he deserved) and joy (that his name rings out around the world and across the centuries). … I’ll share the stories of a handful of mid-20th century folk/pop musicians whose fame (in selected circles) was similarly deferred—along with some clips of their music.

That started me thinking about other arenas and other examples of late fame. I think the quintessential one is Van Gogh, who struggled tremendously in his life (from some unspecified and episodic mental illness, among other things like poverty) and sold very few paintings, although more than the one painting of legend:

We don’t know exactly how many paintings Van Gogh sold during this lifetime, but in any case, it was more than a couple. Vincent’s first commission was from his uncle Cor. He was an art dealer and wanted to help his nephew on his way, so he ordered 19 cityscapes of The Hague.

Vincent sold his first painting to the Parisian paint and art dealer Julien Tanguy, and his brother Theo successfully sold another work to a gallery in London. The Red Vineyard, which Vincent painted in 1888, was bought by Anna Boch, the sister of Vincent’s friend Eugène Boch.

Without the help of his brother Theo, Van Gogh would have been even worse off. But things were bad enough, and he killed himself at the age of thirty-seven in 1890. Now Van Gogh is one of the most popular artists ever, whose work fetches astronomical prices at auction.

But I think it’s somewhat of a myth that he was a complete failure in his lifetime. From his Wiki entry, I was surprised to see that he did have more recognition during his lifetime that I’d previously known, plus he was acknowledged with at least some praise and acknowledgement shortly after his death:

After Van Gogh’s first exhibitions in the late 1880s, his reputation grew steadily among artists, art critics, dealers and collectors. In 1887, André Antoine hung Van Gogh’s alongside works of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, at the Théâtre Libre in Paris; some were acquired by Julien Tanguy. In 1889, his work was described in the journal Le Moderniste Illustré by Albert Aurier as characterised by “fire, intensity, sunshine”. Ten paintings were shown at the Société des Artistes Indépendants, in Brussels in January 1890. French president Marie François Sadi Carnot was said to have been impressed by Van Gogh’s work.

After Van Gogh’s death, memorial exhibitions were held in Brussels, Paris, The Hague and Antwerp. His work was shown in several high-profile exhibitions, including six works at Les XX; in 1891, there was a retrospective exhibition in Brussels. In 1892, Octave Mirbeau wrote that Van Gogh’s suicide was an “infinitely sadder loss for art … even though the populace has not crowded to a magnificent funeral, and poor Vincent van Gogh, whose demise means the extinction of a beautiful flame of genius, has gone to his death as obscure and neglected as he lived.”

Van Gogh’s fame and reputation started to build in the early years of the 20th century and he became quite famous in mid-century. So it did take a while for him to reach his present mega-fame.

Another example of a very different kind that comes to mind is Ignaz Semmelweis, who’s not really what you’d call a household name even now. But he was disgraced in his lifetime and rehabilitated only after death:

In 1847, he proposed hand washing with chlorinated lime solutions at Vienna General Hospital’s First Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors’ wards had thrice the mortality of midwives’ wards. The maternal mortality rate dropped from 18% to less than 2%, and he published a book of his findings, Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever, in 1861.

Despite his research, Semmelweis’s observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. He could offer no theoretical explanation for his findings of reduced mortality due to hand-washing, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it. In 1865, the increasingly outspoken Semmelweis allegedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his colleagues. In the asylum, he was beaten by the guards. He died 14 days later from a gangrenous wound on his right hand that may have been caused by the beating.

His findings earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory of disease, giving Semmelweis’s observations a theoretical and scientific explanation, and Joseph Lister, acting on Pasteur’s research, practised and operated using hygienic methods with great success.

Another extremely well-known example of the “late fame” genre is poet Emily Dickinson, reclusive and nearly unpublished in life but now considered one of the greatest American poets:

Although Dickinson was a prolific writer, only 10 of her nearly 1,800 poems were published during her lifetime.Today her poems are widely regarded as groundbreaking with their use of short acerbic lines, lean descriptions, and slant or off-rhyme. Her poetry primarily deals with nature and mortality.

One thing all three – Van Gogh, Semmelweis, and Dickinson – had in common was that their work was unconventional for the times, trailblazing even. It took the passage of time for them to be appreciated. I’ll let Dickinson have the last word:

Success is counted sweetest,
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purpose Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of Victory

As he defeated – dying –
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!

More about the terrible death of Henry Nowak

The New Neo Posted on by

Now we learn even more about the behavior of Henry Nowak’s murderer, as more news slowly is revealed:

It turns out that Vickrum Digwa is far more vicious and depraved than we were led to believe, and that Britons have not been allowed to see much of the evidence. Neither was the jury, because the judge deemed the evidence too disturbing to share with them. Think about that and let it sink in: Digwa was so depraved in his behavior that the judge withheld evidence of his crime from the people who needed to know because it would enrage them.

If that withholding of evidence from the jury is true – and I’m not 100% sure it is – I’m not sure on what legal grounds it would happen; “it would be too upsetting” hardly seems sufficient. I’ve been puzzled and frustrated from the start by all the gaps in the record and especially in the reporting of the trial itself.

There is some reference to it in the judge’s sentencing remarks, or at least a reference to something similar:

Your brother, Gurpreet, arrived on the scene very shortly after your attack had finished. You then filmed Henry desperately trying to get away from you, somehow scaling a fence, onto a communal bin, before landing on a car in front of the property next door. Bloodstains show that he had got one, more or all his injuries before then.

You then showed a callous disregard for his wellbeing, knowing you had stabbed him to the chest. You continued to make films of Henry suffering, ignoring much of his desperation at having been stabbed. You told him that had not happened, no doubt to convince others who were nearby. Your attitude did not change even though Henry was clearly going downhill very fast. Your brother did much the same, although he may just have been accepting that which you had told him, rather than lying himself. …

You kept Henry’s phone with the incriminating recording of you on it. You had no intention of handing it over. It was found on you after you had been arrested and taken into police custody.

There was a conversation between the two brothers in Punjabi as they were being driven to the station. At least the police had the presence of mind to record that conversation (or maybe the act of recording was automatic?). It was in that conversation that Vickrum Digwa confessed to his brother that he was guilty, and this confession was discovered when the conversation was translated.

The following allegedly involves video taken by a home security camera, but I can’t find the Daily Mail article referred to:

A home security camera then captured what may be the most chilling exchange in this entire case.

Henry: “I am dying.”

Digwa: “You’re not dying bro.”

Ten minutes later, Henry said: “You stabbed me.”

Digwa replied: “No, I didn’t.”

In the ten minutes that followed the stabbing, Vickrum Digwa did not call an ambulance. He filmed Henry for a full five minutes instead.

That clip was deemed too disturbing to be played in court.

Which clip was deemed too disturbing – the one Digwa filmed? The one from the home security camera? Or both? I don’t think either has been released to the public (although we’ve seen the police videocam with certain aspects blurred). I continue to find it surprising that the jury didn’t see the video made by Digwa on Nowak’s cellphone (perhaps it came under some self-incrimination exclusionary rule?) or in particular the home security video (some privacy rule?). The judge almost certainly saw all the videos, but I’ve been unable to find anything that clarifies further.

A question that remains for me is how much time passed in its entirety, from the stabbing itself to Henry’s death. This would seem important in determining if he could have been saved. More time seems to have passed than we originally were led to believe. There’s also this:

It is apparently true that if the stab wound had pierced an artery, [Nowak’s] chances of survival were low, especially by the time they arrived. But it did not. It pierced a vein, and the resulting leak would have been far slower, because such wounds clot far more quickly, slowing the bleeding. It is likely that the act of dragging Nowak and then handcuffing as they did reopened and stretched the puncture, and that led to his quickly dying.

A doctor testified that Nowak could not have been saved no matter what, but I won’t believe that until I hear more corroborating details. There will be an inquest to look into it further:

The full inquest into the death of Henry Nowak will open with a jury at Winchester Coroner’s Court on 20 September 2027.

More than a year away? What on earth?

From Ace, who thinks an hour passed between the stabbing and the death, although I’m not sure on what that is based:

People point out there was a trauma center five minutes away — but they allowed the “racist” to bleed out on the ground for an hour while chatting with the racist foreign family of killers.

This is a case of a murder that grows in meaning and force rather than fading. I suppose it will fade – no doubt authorities are hoping for that. But it taps into so many themes of recent years: “anti-racism” resulting in racism against the non-favored groups, the focus on hate speech as an actionable offense (especially in Europe and Canada) if the hate speech is against those favored groups, the phenomenon of violent crime by immigrants from foreign countries (although Sikhs are generally quite law-abiding), and DEI prejudice on the part of police. It also highlights the ubiquity of recording devices, without which I doubt Digwa would have been convicted at all.

Pratt falling in Los Angeles tallies

The New Neo Posted on by

I couldn’t resist a pun for the title of this post. But the content is no joke. We all knew that the vote counting in California is very very slow, and that there’s a history of it turning towards the left as it goes on and if there’s a hint of someone on the right doing relatively well.

Does that mean there’s cheating? Maybe. There’s certainly a strong desire to win coupled with a less-than-convincing devotion to assuring that the will of the voters will be carried out no matter what the outcome. The mail-in ballots that can come in late, the drop-boxes, the rabid leftist partisanship, all combine to create at the very least a lack of trust in the system on the part of anyone on the right.

And so it was almost a foregone conclusion that this would be happening, and that it would seem suspicious whether it is or not:

… [T]he race for second place in the mayor’s contest is moving in a direction that should concern Spencer Pratt supporters, and anyone who thinks Los Angeles needs to move toward a more centrist, common-sense course.

Friday afternoon’s update added roughly 140,000 ballots countywide, with about 42.7% from within the city of Los Angeles.

Mayor Karen Bass remains firmly in first place with 34.98% of the vote. The real drama is the battle for the second runoff spot between Pratt and City Councilwoman Nithya Raman. …

Raman gained 23,115 votes in Friday’s update, compared to 10,711 for Pratt and 20,419 for Bass. In a single ballot drop, Raman netted 12,404 votes on Pratt. …

Put another way, she received more than twice as many votes as Pratt in this batch.

The upshot is that Pratt may fall to third place as more votes come in. And if he’s in third, he won’t be on the ballot. California’s voting system is designed to give voters a November choice of leftist and more leftist, rather than Democrat and Republican. But realistically, even if Pratt holds onto second place, at present he is only getting about a quarter or third of the vote compared to a combined Democrat/leftist vote that constitutes a definite majority.

Why anyone would vote for Bass or Raman is beyond me. I understand that Democrats will vote for Democrats. But these two have had their chances and have failed to help the city. If I lived in LA, I think that even if I were a Democrat I’d give Pratt a chance.

D-Day: 82 years after

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: The following is a slightly-edited version of a previous D-Day post.]

Today is the eighty-second anniversary of D-Day, the Normandy landings in WWII that led to Western Europe’s liberation.

I wonder how many people under forty, either here or in Europe, now know or care what happened there. The dog barks and the caravan moves on.

The world we now live in seems so vastly different, including the relationship between the US and western Europe. But make no mistake about it; if threatened in a way that finally gets their attention, Europeans would be counting on us again. And although until a while ago I still thought that we would probably be up to the task, I now have my doubts. It would depend on the administration in charge. And we pretty much know our press would fail us.

About forty-eight years ago I visited Omaha Beach, site of the worst of the carnage. A quieter place than that beach and those huge cemeteries, with their lines of crosses set down as though with a ruler, you never did see.

But the scene was quite different back in 1944. The D-day invasion marked the beginning of the end for the Germans.

The weather was a huge factor, and the Allied commanders had to make the decision knowing that the forecast for the day was iffy and the window of opportunity small. For reasons of visibility and navigation (maximum amount of moonlight and deepest water), the invasion needed to occur during a time of full moon and spring tides, and all the invasion forces had already been assembled and were at the ready. To postpone would have been hugely expensive and frustrating, but to go ahead in bad weather would have been suicidal.

This is how bad the weather looked, how difficult the decision was, and how much we owe to the meteorologists, who:

…were challenged to accurately predict a highly unstable and severe weather pattern. As [Eisenhower] indicated in the message to Marshall, “The weather yesterday which was [the] original date selected was impossible all along the target coast.” Eisenhower therefore was forced to make his decision to proceed with a June 6 invasion in the predawn blackness of June 5, while horizontal sheets of rain and gale force winds shuddered through the tent camp.

The initially bad weather ended up being an advantage in other ways, because the Germans were not expecting the invasion to occur yet for that reason:

Some [German] troops stood down, and many senior officers were away for the weekend. General Erwin Rommel, for example, took a few days’ leave to celebrate his wife’s birthday, while dozens of division, regimental, and battalion commanders were away from their posts at war games.

In addition, there was Hitler’s personality and his reluctance to give autonomy to his military commanders:

Hitler reserved to himself the authority to move the divisions in OKW Reserve, or commit them to action. On 6 June, many Panzer division commanders were unable to move because Hitler had not given the necessary authorization, and his staff refused to wake him upon news of the invasion.

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This didn’t mean that the beaches were not heavily fortified and manned, especially Omaha:

[The Germans] had large bunkers, sometimes intricate concrete ones containing machine guns and high caliber weapons. Their defense also integrated the cliffs and hills overlooking the beach. The defenses were all built and honed over a four year period.

The number of Allied casualties was enormous. Reading about it today makes one appreciate anew what these men faced, and how courageously they pressed on despite enormous difficulties. This is just a small sampler of what occurred on Omaha Beach at the outset; there was much more to come:

Despite these preparations, very little went according to plan. Ten landing craft were lost before they even reached the beach, swamped by the rough seas. Several other craft stayed afloat only because their passengers quickly bailed water with their helmets. Seasickness was also prevalent among the troops waiting offshore. On the 16th RCT front, the landing boats found themselves passing struggling men in life preservers, and on rafts, survivors of the DD tanks which had sunk. Navigation of the assault craft was made more difficult by the smoke and mist obscuring the landmarks they were to use in guiding themselves in, while a heavy current pushed them continually eastward.

As the boats approached within a few hundred yards of the shore, they came under increasingly heavy fire from automatic weapons and artillery. The force discovered only then the ineffectiveness of the pre-landing bombardment. Delayed by the weather, and attempting to avoid the landing craft as they ran in, the bombers had laid their ordnance too far inland, having no real effect on the coastal defenses.

These obstacles and unforeseen circumstances were extraordinarily costly in terms of the human sacrifice that occurred that day. Note that I use the word “obstacles and unforeseen circumstances” rather than “mistakes.” Today, if the same things had occurred (at least, while under the aegis of a Republican administration), they would be labeled unforgivable errors rather than the inevitable difficulties inherent in waging war, in which no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

Another historical footnote is the following passage from Eisenhower’s message to the Allied Expeditionary Forces: You are about to embark upon the great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. It’s another sign of how times have changed; the word “crusade” has become verboten.

In his pocket, Eisenhower also kept another statement, one to activate in case the invasion failed. It read:

Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.

The note was written in pencil on a simple piece of paper, and is housed in a special vault at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library & Museum in Abilene, Kansas, a bit of thought-provoking fodder for an alternate history that never occurred.

[NOTE: I’ve read that there’s a new movie out about Eisenhower and D-Day, entitled Pressure. Has anyone seen it?]