They seem to have Ilhan Omar’s DNA

The New Neo Posted on by

Anyone who reads Powerline regularly probably concluded a long time ago that Ilhan Omar likely married her brother in an attempt to commit immigration fraud.

But can it be proven? And is this report true?:

People familiar with the years-long criminal probe said the feds have made use of whistleblowers, government records and now obtained DNA in an effort to substantiate decade-old allegations that Omar — and possibly members of her family like her father — defrauded immigration authorities.

One source said the DNA evidence was critical to proving an allegation that Omar married her brother when she wed Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in 2009 because she was trying to help him get a green card — which never came to fruition.

It’s unclear whether the DNA was taken before or after Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) searched the congresswoman’s home in Washington, DC, last Monday, when federal agents were seen exiting the bungalow with boxes marked “Seized Property Evidence.”

Interesting.

Is France burning?

The New Neo Posted on by

Short answer: yes.

Is Paris Burning? is the name of a 1966 movie about France’s liberation from the Nazis. This is how it ended:

… [F]ighting breaks out in the streets and civilians join in the battle. Allied troops reach Rue de Rivoli and enter Choltitz’s office at the Hotel Meurice, asking him to have German officers accompany Free French troops throughout the city under white flags to convey the surrender order to his troops. French tanks reach Notre Dame Cathedral and reactivate the bells after years of silence. The crowd cheers and sings “La Marseillaise.” Free French forces parade down the streets of Paris led by General de Gaulle. Against a backdrop of cheering crowds, a phone receiver is shown dangling off the hook with a German voice repeatedly asking “Is Paris burning?” Aerial footage shows Paris intact, and the view switches from the black and white of 1944 to contemporary colour footage.

Contemporary in 1966, that is. France suffered widespread riots a bit later, in 1968. But they were somewhat different than today’s riots, and France was very different as well:

May 68 (French: Mai 68) was a period of widespread protests, riots, strikes, and general civil unrest in France that began in May 1968 and became one of the most significant social uprisings in modern European history. Sparked by student demonstrations against university conditions and government repression, the movement quickly escalated into a nationwide general strike involving millions of workers, bringing the country to the brink of revolution.

Note it started with students – or appeared to do so, much like today’s riots. The left took over pretty quickly, just as it’s doing now. Then again, there was no “green” back then in a red-green alliance. Most of the people involved were French rather than children of so-called “migrants” who are heavily involved today.

In 1968:

Inspired by countercultural, anti-imperialist, Marxist, and anarchist ideologies, students increasingly viewed themselves as part of a revolutionary struggle against capitalism and authoritarianism. At the same time, the French working class was dissatisfied with stagnant wages and poor working conditions, despite growth. The political order, dominated by President Charles de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic, was seen by many as outdated and repressive.

It was, after all, the 60s. As such, it was typical of the 60s, but French-style. France has a history of large leftist demonstrations/riots. You might say the original of the genre was the French Revolution.

What ultimately happened in 1968? De Gaulle made some economic concessions and the whole thing petered out. But France has been a welfare state for quite some time, and the French have gotten very very accustomed to being taken care of.

What will happen now? Darned if I know, but the consensus is that these riots will ultimately benefit Le Pen, and that the French economy is in bad enough shape that the Macron forces can’t satisfy the mob by upping the benefits:

Elections next year will see President Emmanuel Macron step down after a decade in power. The unrest is likely to boost far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, who is already the frontrunner in polls and has long talked tough on law and order.

“Le Pen no longer needs to spend any money to campaign,” Jean-Baptiste Moreau, a former lawmaker from Macron’s camp, told Reuters. “It’s not just a clear path ahead of her, it’s a six-lane highway.”

Time will tell.

Obama knows exactly what he’s doing

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “Mike Plaiss.”]

Obama: knave, not fool. Here’s an excellent opinion piece in the WSJ by Elie Wiesel’s daughter Elisha. An excerpt:

Mr. Obama said of the Jewish people that after millennia of persecution, “they took land off people, and they were excessive. And those people understandably said, ‘This is injustice and I want my land back.’ ” …

Consider the word “excessive.” Was it excessive for Jews to buy land, at fair or often inflated prices, from absentee landlords in Beirut and Damascus who were glad to sell malarial swamps? Was it excessive for the Jews of Hebron, a community that had prayed there for centuries, to be slaughtered by rioters in 1929, nearly 20 years before there was a Jewish state, an occupation or a West Bank settlement to blame? Was it excessive for Jews to accept the United Nations’ 1947 partition plan while facing an impending invasion by five armies in 1948? To offer peace at Camp David in 2000, and again in 2008? To pull every soldier and settler out of Gaza in 2005?

Is it excessive to want to live in peace?

And what does “understandably” demanding one’s land back look like? Understanding Palestinian grievances isn’t the same as excusing Hamas, and Mr. Obama knows the difference. But words have consequences. The partition of India in 1947 uprooted more than 10 million people, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs alike. No American president would tell a crowd that the grandchildren of those who were displaced “understandably” want those homes back, because everyone knows where that leads. We saw where it leads on Oct. 7, 2023. Hamas’s leaders have since vowed to do it again and again until Israel is gone. There can and should be no understanding of those ambitions.

The deeper problem is the story itself. In Mr. Obama’s telling, Jews were oppressed in Europe and then arrived somewhere else and took too much. Jewish history in the land disappears. My father drew a line when he wrote in the New York Times in 2001: “To compromise on territory might seem, under certain conditions, imperative. . . . But to compromise on history is impossible.” That is the line Mr. Obama crossed in Belfast.

The timing of his remarks matters. This week he will rally in Detroit for Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic U.S. Senate nominee, who has accused Israel of “genocide” and “apartheid,” called it “bloodthirsty” and a “rogue state,” and, when asked three times on CNN whether Israel has a right to exist, refused to say yes.

Wiesel goes on to add that her father respected Obama but differed with him on Iran, and attended Netanyahu’s speech to Congress taking a stand against Obama’s Iran Deal. After that, Obama never spoke to him again. This surprises me not at all. He used Wiesel when he was pretending to be friendlier to Israel than he ever was, and dropped him when it no longer served him.

That’s not unusual for politicians. But I wrote long ago (although I don’t know how to find the post; this one written during his first campaign comes closest but isn’t quite it) that Obama was unusual at the time in that he pretended to be far more moderate than he was. I say “was unusual at the time” because now it’s the standard among Democrats. As with so many other things, Obama paved the way.

Yes, many politicians hide things – sexual promiscuity, for example, or their academic records. And sometimes they change their minds on something or even several things. But I can’t offhand think of another president who ran for office in the first place on a lie about who he was and what he intended. Obama did exactly that.

When arguing with people on the topic of Israel, I’ve often brought up India and Pakistan. They all have looked at me blankly; they either have no idea what I’m talking about and/or they don’t care because to them analogies are dangerous because they threaten their entrenched views about Israel. Can’t have that.

Wiesel ends her piece this way:

I hope Mr. Obama reconsiders his words and takes them back. It would be an act worthy of his friendship with my father.

That’s where she shows that she doesn’t quite understand what Obama is about.

The far left is usually a minority, but relies on the inaction and cowardice of others

The New Neo Posted on by

This seems correct to me, both then and now:

Communists triumphed in Russia not because of a popular uprising, but because a small group of disciplined and armed intellectuals, ready to use maximal violence, staged a coup. They could do so because liberals, anarchists, populist socialist revolutionaries, and other Marxists resisted them, if at all, only when it was too late. “Condemn terror?” indignantly asked Kadet leader Ivan Petrunkevich. “That would be the moral death of our party!” “No enemies to the left!” was an article of faith that Lenin, who was unprincipled on principle, knew how to exploit.

In the 1960s and ’70s, I was surprised my liberal friends would rather side with Communists, who rejected their core beliefs, than with conservatives, who differed only on details of policy. Better those a mile to one’s left than an inch to one’s right! It was a matter of identity: If you grow up regarding yourself as the opponent of conservatives, it becomes psychologically impossible to join them. Is that why liberal Democrats back Hasan Piker, who praises Stalin’s USSR and Mao’s China? More terrifying than Abdul El-Sayed, Graham Platner, and Zohran Mamdani is the readiness of those who are neither totalitarians nor antisemites to support them. It is that support that may enable their eventual triumph.

I see this operating constantly. There is the reflexive reluctance and often absolute refusal to vote for a Republican, however bland or moderate, combined with a willingness to hold one’s nose and vote for the most extreme and vicious (and/or most stupid) of leftists – or to sit the election out, which has much the same effect.

Plus, once an extreme leftist wins a Democrat Party nomination, there is sometimes a fatalism if the state or city is very blue. This depresses turnout immensely. Why bother to go to the polls if the outcome appears to be a foregone conclusion?

But Yeats said it better, and he said it a long time ago:

”

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

In the life of this blog, there are certain poems and scenes I’ve quoted over and over. One is the Yeats poem I quoted above, “The Second Coming.” Another is the Kipling poem “The Gods of the Copybook Headings.” And still another is this scene from the movie A Man For All Seasons.

Evergreens, I’m afraid.

Elections are coming up in Israel

The New Neo Posted on by

Can Netanyahu pull it off again?

Trump has endorsed him, and Israel is one of the few countries where that would seem to be a plus. The elections are on October 27, and as usual, they promise to be complicated because of the challenges of forming a coalition government no matter who wins:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed concern over the possibility of failing to win the upcoming election during an interview with Radio North on Sunday.

“We need to make sure we win. I am not certain of my victory, and I am very worried,” he said.

Netanyahu also addressed the possibility that he might fail to form the next government. Asked whether he would retire from politics if he lost, Netanyahu replied, “No, I will not retire from politics.”

Netanyahu alPso criticized his political rivals, including Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, and Avigdor Liberman, claiming that a government led by them would depend on the support of Arab parties.

Polls – for what they’re worth – generally say that Eisenkot leads. But in the sort of parliamentary system Israel has, that’s not necessarily all that important:

With just nine days left until the election, Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party has maintained a consistent lead over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud in four recent election polls, but neither political bloc comes close to securing the 61 seats needed for a Knesset majority, according to surveys published by Maariv, Channel 13, Kan News, and Channel 12.

The four surveys paint an almost identical picture: the Zionist opposition averages 51.25 seats, compared with 51 for Netanyahu’s bloc, a virtual tie that leaves the Arab parties and smaller factions hovering around the electoral threshold in key positions ahead of election day.

Netanyahu has held the position of prime minister longer than anyone in Israel’s history: from 1996 to 1999, from 2009 to 2021, and from 2022 till now. So I would never count him out. He’s seventy-six years old at present, but that doesn’t seem such an advanced age these days for a head of state.

Elissa Slotkin isn’t hiding her intent

The New Neo Posted on by

Slotkin admits wants to frighten young conservatives out of working for the current administration:

During an Oct. 13 University of Chicago event focused on her political path and the future of the Democratic Party, Slotkin said she wants to pursue “signature cases” against people who “enabled” President Donald Trump.

“I want to look at these signature cases and not just focus on the president, but on the people who enabled him,” the Michigan Democrat said. Slotkin went on to describe how she wants prospective administration employees to weigh the risks.

“I want young people coming out of school to say, should I go work for the Trump administration? Like, that sounds fun, I might get an opportunity. I want them to be like, Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want, and so let me avoid participating in that,” she said. “I want that deterrence message.”

This has been Democrats’ policy for a long time, either through lawfare or financial pressure or social or career ostracization or through actual violence and public harassment. What’s new is admitting it so blatantly.

I think the “admitting it” part comes from Slotkin’s belief that the left has successfully implanted the idea in the minds of half the country (or more?) that this administration is not just one with which the left disagrees, but is in fact evil and must be stopped by any means. The survival of “our democracy” depends on it.

Katie Zacharia, we hardly knew ye: on being a lawyer

The New Neo Posted on by

Katie Zacharia seems to have set a record for shortness of stay in the press secretary role. It’s probably one of the most pressured and stressful jobs in government, and she simply was not up to the task:

Zacharia held her first brief press briefing on Tuesday, just one day after she started the job, and came under scrutiny after she had represented herself as a lawyer but acknowledged this week that she did not pass her bar exam following law school.

Zacharia’s first White House press briefing lasted less than 15 minutes, during which she took only a few questions from reporters and couldn’t answer one about whether the U.S. had stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine.

It’s that part about being a lawyer that interests me – for personal reasons. I, too, am a law school graduate but not a lawyer. The Zacharia flap brought back a ton of memories, few of them good.

Why did I even go to law school? The main reasons were threefold: I was aimless and undirected even in my senior year of college, my father was a lawyer (a real one), and I took the LSAT test and did very very well indeed. That last bit told me I could pretty much write my ticket to any law school in the land, and so I did and was admitted to an elite law school. I had mild dreams of Clarence Darrow-like defense and eloquence in my head, dreams of which I was disabused rather quickly – in fact, my very first day of class.

I was forced to confront the fact that I was very shy and hated being put on the spot in front of a crowd. Yes, I should have thought of that to begin with, but somehow I hadn’t. During my second year, I spoke to a professor who had been assigned to me as an advisor, and said I wanted to quit. It was the first and last time I ever spoke to any advisor there; although nowadays they have plenty of them, back then you were pretty much on your own. He talked me into staying by pointing out that I still didn’t know what else I should do, and that at the time I was in the middle of my second year. Only one and a half years to go and I’d have a law degree. So why not stay?

You might answer: “money.” Didn’t law school, especially an elite one, cost an absolute ton of money? These days it certainly does; according to Google AI:

According to recent data compiled via U.S. News Best Law School Rankings and Above the Law, annual tuition and fee rates for top-tier private programs include:

– Columbia University: $88,390 per year
– New York University (NYU): $87,214 per year
– University of Chicago: $84,906 per year
– University of Pennsylvania (Carey): $84,492 per year
– Duke University: $81,829 per year
– Northwestern University (Pritzker): $80,583 per year
– Stanford University: $79,707 per year
– Yale University: $78,961 per year
– Harvard University: $78,692 per year

Total 3-Year J.D. Cost Estimates

– Tuition and Fees (3 Years): A standard three-year Juris Doctor (J.D.) program totals roughly $230,000 to $265,000 in tuition alone.
– Full Cost of Attendance (3 Years): When adding rent, meals, health insurance, and books, the complete 3-year price tag often scales between $330,000 and $390,000+.

That’s sobering. But it’s nothing like when I went to law school. My tuition was $2K a year, which in present-day dollars would be about $18K. Not the least bit comparable to today’s tuition. What’s more, my rent was $65 a month. So it was not that much of a hardship for me or my family, unlike today.

Back then, also, I was told – although I don’t know where this statistic came from or whether it was correct – that about half of the graduates from elite law schools never practiced law. Nowadays, the percentage is smaller, but nevertheless sizeable percentages leave.

To be blunt, I found law to be very very very boring, except for certain pockets that were interesting. Might I have found work within those pockets? The main one was jurisprudence, or philosophy of law, and the only job that might lead to was to be a law professor. I had neither the grades, nor the inclination – nor, to be frank, the sex chromosomes (law professors were male in those days) – for that job. Now, strangely enough, jurisprudence is a topic I do explore with some regularity on the blog.

So does it all work out in the end?

More on the Ilhan Omar investigation

The New Neo Posted on by

It gallops apace. What will come of it, nobody knows.

But here’s the latest:

We’ve reported that at least two investigations are ongoing: one involving immigration questions and another involving financial disclosures. Now there are new reports that what’s being looked into may be even broader than people generally believe. NewsNation’s Leland Vittert claimed that the raid on Omar’s home was just the most conspicuous of more than a dozen raids. He also reported that federal agents allegedly went dumpster diving in Omar’s trash for DNA and that “likely coming indictments will be stunning in nature,” according to his sources.

I’ll believe it when I see it.

Her sister is being investigated as well:

Meanwhile, Omar’s older sister, Sahra Noor, who is supposed to be on a tour promoting her book about her life as a Somali immigrant, was scheduled to be at a book tour stop at the University of Minnesota Rochester on Thursday night.

Except, according to reports, she skipped the event due to a “family emergency,” amid all the action going on. Noor has allegedly been subpoenaed in the investigation.

Now there is a report from the New York Times that the sister’s phone was seized before the raid on Omar’s home.

I have little doubt there’s something – or probably many things – crooked in Ilhan Omar’s presentation. Whether she will be prosecuted for it (or them) is another question entirely. Omar has been immune from serious consequences for a long time, mostly because she can play the race card and the discrimination card any time she wants, and has done so very successfully for many years.

SSRIs and violence

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: In yesterday’s thread on the school shooting in Bend, I noticed that the topic of SSRIs and violence came up. So I think it makes sense to repeat the following post, which I wrote in 2023.]

Every time there’s a school shooting or any sort of mass violence, the subject of SSRIs comes up from one commenter or another.

Sometimes people also bring up the subject of fatherlessness and mass shooters, which I wrote about at length in this post, the gist of which is that there is no connection although it’s popularly thought that there is.

Now, on to SSRIs. It is notoriously difficult to do research on whether SSRIs trigger more violence, have no effect, or help prevent violence, and if so in what populations. It’s a popular internet meme that they trigger violence, but the evidence is not at all clear that that is so, and as I said it’s very difficult to design a good study. One obvious reason is that such people are often at higher risk for violence in the first place, and drugs are not given randomly. There is almost certainly something already different about the people who get them and those who don’t.

This is one of the better-designed studies, and as you can see if you read it it’s very hard to tell what it all means, if anything. For example:

As is often the case, the authors of the study themselves are rather cautious. While obviously concerned that it is possible that SSRIs may actually cause violent behavior in a small minority of people, they fully recognize that other explanations are possible. These include the possibility that what is driving the violent behavior is medication undertreatment, based on the finding that the risk with violence was only found among individuals who were likely taking subtherapeutic doses. As reported by MedScape, one of the study authors, Seena Fazel, states: “Our own view is that some evidence suggests that it’s a bit more complicated than that, because we found a link with subtherapeutic doses of SSRIs, and that would suggest to us that it may be that it’s actually a lack of treatment [and] it could be residual symptoms that are driving this link.” At the same time, if antidepressants really worked wonders for young people, we should see that therapeutic SSRI usage was associated with a reduced risk of violent behavior, which it wasn’t.

A couple other factors also deserve mention. The idea of comparing periods on and off medication within the same individual is a clever design, because many individual factors that might be related to risk of violence, like one’s socioeconomic status or DNA, are held constant. However, because the period of medication use was not randomized (and couldn’t be), it introduces the very likely complicating issue that individuals were taking medications during times when they were feeling more depressed, anxious, and angry to start with, and thus at higher risk of acting violently. Finally, it is important to note that a statistically significant association certainly does not mean that most people taking antidepressants are out there hurting others. When taking SSRI medications, the conviction rate of violent crimes was at a 1.0% rate compared to 0.6% without medications.

There’s also this:

Our study encompassed nationwide data over a 15-year period. In this period, the homicide rate per 100,000 remained fairly constant, with a moderate decline in recent years, leading to an average of 160 homicide victims per year. The suicide rate decreased steadily from 10.26 (approximately 1,500 victims) in 1994 to 8.77 (approximately 1,400 victims) per 100,000 in 2008. The homicide–suicide rate remained relatively stable, averaging at 0.05 per 100,000 (varying from 4 to 14 victims per year, see Fig. 1). In the same period, the rate of total antidepressant use increased considerably, from 3,038.81 in 1994 to 5,650.58 per 100,000 in 2008. A similar increase was observed for the rate of SSRI use alone, which more than doubled from 1,482.25 in 1994 to 3,161.15 per 100,000 in 2008 as well as the rate of SSRI use including venlafaxine, with an increase of 1,486.81 in 1994 to 3,904.20 per 100,000 in 2008. Over the same period, the number of defined daily doses used rose from 59.6 million in 1994 to 245.3 million in 2008: a fourfold increase. This indicates that not only more people used antidepressants, but also that the mean duration or intensity of the treatment grew…

Rates of the use of SSRIs including venlafaxine were also found to be negatively associated with both homicide rates and suicide rates. No significant independent association was found between rates of SSRIs including venlafaxine and homicide–suicide.

Here’s an article about suicide and SSRIs for young people:

The 2004 study examined the clinical trial data that had been collected on two types of medications, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) and selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRI). The results of the study prompted the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to issue a black box warning, the most serious level of warning in prescription drug labeling, for the risk of suicides in children and adolescents being treated with antidepressants in 2004. The warning was extended to young adults ages 18 to 25 years in 2006.

The researchers in the current study performed a meta-analysis of 41 studies, reviewing the data on a total of 9,185 youths, adults, and geriatric patients who were treated with fluoxetine (Prozac is one common brand) and venlafaxine (Effexor) immediate (IR) and extended release (ER) preparations…

In all three age groups, treatment with fluoxetine and with venlafaxine IR and ER resulted in a statistically significant improvement in depressive symptoms when compared to treatment with placebo. The decline in depressive symptoms was also faster for patients treated with medication than control group patients. In the adult and geriatric patients who were treated with fluoxetine or venlafaxine, suicidal thoughts and behaviors decreased over time.

As the patients became less depressed, they had fewer suicidal thoughts and attempts. Although the youths who were treated with medication showed the same statistically significant decrease in depressive symptoms as the older populations, they did not show a decrease in suicidal ideation and actions.

“In kids, we don’t see a harmful effect, but we do see a disassociation between the beneficial effects on depression and the potential beneficial effect on suicide,” said the study’s lead author…

The newest analysis did not support the idea that there was an increased risk of suicide in children and adolescents taking fluoxetine, an SSRI. In explaining the difference in their findings, the researchers note that these original meta-analyses included fewer studies and the studies were of shorter term than the longitudinal data they analyzed.

There probably will be a number of readers here who say something like this: “It’s all lies promulgated to cover up the damage drug companies do and to preserve their profits.” You’re welcome to that point of view, and certainly during the COVID years the CDC and many other official entities have earned our distrust. But if you throw out all research, including older studies such as these, you are left with internet memes and paranoia. That’s not science, either. I believe that most of these studies are attempts at valid research on a subject that is inherently difficult to study, and that the bulk of the evidence indicates that SSRIs do not increase violent behavior.