Welcome to Sunday, November 19, 2023, and National Macchiato Day (it’s a little bit of steamed milk in an espresso). Here’s one I had in Jerusalem on Sept. 21, not knowing that all hell would break loose a bit more than two weeks later:
It’s also National Blow Bagpipes Day (blow ’em if you got ’em), Play Monopoly Day, Equal Opportunity Day (the Gettysburg Address was delivered on this day in 1863 noting that “all men are created equal”), International Men’s Day, Women’s Entrepreneurship Day and World Toilet Day, a UN day to help those who don’t have proper “facilities”. Here’s its symbol from Wikipedia, showing a man in the act:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the November 19 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*War news from the NYT: Things at al-Shifa Hospital are reported to be dire, and there’s no sign of the hostage (I believe a hostage swap is in the works, but don’t quote me)
Nearly four days after the Israeli military stormed the biggest hospital in the Gaza Strip, the World Health Organization described the complex as a “death zone” where several patients had died because medical services had been shut down.
There were 291 patients, including 32 babies in extremely critical condition, remaining at Al-Shifa Hospital, the U.N. agency said in a statement late Saturday, after Israeli forces allowed a U.N. team to tour the facility for an hour. Earlier in the day, hundreds of patients and civilians sheltering at the hospital had fled south.
The W.H.O. said that that movement came after an evacuation order from the Israeli military. But Israeli officials said that they had agreed to a request from the hospital authorities to allow safe passage for people who wanted to leave Al-Shifa, and that they had brought food and water into the complex.
. . .Israel has yet to provide conclusive proof of a subterranean military base at the hospital. The United States has backed the assertion about the tunnels but has also said that Israel must do more to protect civilians as the death toll rises after six weeks of war.
The NYT should have some patience here; they’re almost gleeful that no “conclusive proof” has been found, despite the discovery of weapons in the hospital and a tunnel entrance that has yet to be explored. As for the “common knowledge” among reporters of various nationalities that Al-Shifa has long been a Hamas headquarters, see this article nine years ago from YNet.
The NYT continues:
Israeli forces are continuing operations at Al-Shifa, Adm. Daniel Hagari, a military spokesman, said in a statement. Their top priority, he said, was uncovering information about the hostages taken by Hamas on Oct. 7.
Six weeks after that assault, the fate of the more than 200 people identified by Israel as abducted by Hamas and other groups remains uncertain. The United States has been trying to broker an agreement to free some hostages, but a deal remains elusive.
Israel is beginning to strike southern Gaza, though allowing a safe corridor for refugees from the north (who aver that it isn’t really “safe”):
As the fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas engulfs northern Gaza, about 10,000 more people evacuated from the territory’s north to its south on Saturday using a route designated by the Israeli military, according to United Nations estimates.
The Israeli military has been opening the route for several hours each day, promising safe passage for civilians to escape the fighting. But evacuees have described the route as a risky journey with an uncertain outcome. Along the way, they brave what they have said is incoming fire and the physical strain of a long trek. Once they reach the south, they have found overcrowded shelters and scarcities of food and water. Israeli airstrikes have pounded southern Gaza, too.
*In a separate news analysis, the NYT concludes that Israel’s miliary strategy to eradicate Hamas isn’t working. I have to say that I’m quite worried about that too. How far has Hamas been eradicated? What’s the endgame: who is going to rule Gaza after the guns fall silent? And how will displaced civilians return home when they have no homes left? From the piece:
The Israeli military’s seizure of Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex, is central to the military strategy at the heart of the ground invasion: Eradicate Hamas and free roughly 240 hostages taken during the Oct. 7 surprise attack.
That strategy has unfolded over the past three weeks as more than 40,000 Israeli soldiers encircled Gaza City, where Israeli officials say Hamas commanders were concentrated. The soldiers then attacked fighters and bunkers, all while targeting a vast tunnel network that Israeli officials say enables Hamas forces to hide and carry out operations. Israeli officials also assessed that striking so deeply in the heart of Gaza City would pressure Hamas to reach a deal on hostage releases.
So far it is not clear that the Israeli strategy is working.
U.S. military officials said their Israeli counterparts tell them to expect more weeks of clearing operations in the north before Israel prepares a separate initiative in southern Gaza, widening the offensive.
The Israeli military’s chief spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said late Friday that its troops would continue their offensive “in every place that Hamas is, and it is in the south of the strip.”
And although the Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant, said in a video statement on Monday that Israel had “accelerated our activities against the tunnels” and that Hamas militants had lost control in the north and were fleeing south, military analysts said Mr. Gallant’s statements raised many questions.
How will Hamas be eliminated if its fighters blend into the rest of the population as they head south? How long can Israel, which lost about 1,200 people in the Oct. 7 atrocities, sustain growing international pressure for a cease-fire as civilian casualties in Gaza mount? Most immediately, was Al-Shifa an important enough military target to raid?
. . .Israel blames the civilian deaths — 11,000, according to the Gaza health ministry — in part on Hamas’s decision to hide its military fortifications and command centers in residential neighborhoods and hospitals like Al-Shifa.
But U.S. officials said Israel’s rapid decision to launch ground operations in the enclave left Israeli commanders little time for extensive planning to mitigate risks to civilians and all but guaranteed a high civilian death toll.
Of course this is Monday-morning quarterbacking, and what other conclusion would you expect the NYT to come to? But then again, what else was Israel to do? Not respond to Hamas? Sit there quietly and allow its civilians to be butchered. Or, to placate the world’s call for “proportionality”, kill about 1200 Gazans?
I asked Malgorzata’s opinion about this article, and this is what she said (quoted with permission, of course):
There is something very jarring and unpleasant in this article. I know nothing about how to conduct the war but I know that already in the beginning, before Israel started with the land invasion, the leaders said that it would be a very long operation, maybe lasting a year. Hamas had 16 years to build their fortress and these journalists want Israel to dismantle it in weeks! Information about Hamas’ headquarters under Al-Shifa hospital has been confirmed by Gazans and Western journalists—at least since 2014. Information about the 11,000 civilians killed has been repeated for at least two weeks and somehow it doesn’t grow in spite of constant bombardment by Israel. And how do these three authors know how many of the killed are terrorists, how many were killed by terrorists’ rockets that “fell short”, and how many were killed by Hamas when they wanted to escape? Are those “500” killed in a hospital (parking lot) bombed by the PIJ [Palestine Islamic Jihad] malfunctioning rocket included?
*As you saw yesterday morning, the SpaceX Starship test had mixed results. Yes, both the booster and capsule experienced “rapid disassembly” (SpaceX’s euphemism for “blew up”), but they at least got the capsule up and separated at the right time. But then what happened? We won’t know for a while but the WaPo has some information (see also a longer story at the Wall Street Journal).
SpaceX’s Starship rocket successfully lifted off. All 33 of its Raptor engines ignited and continued to fire. That was a significant improvement over the first test flight when three engines failed at liftoff and three more went out during the ascent.
The Super Heavy booster and Starship spacecraft made it through what’s known as Max Q, the moment when the aerodynamic forces are greatest, and reached space.
The booster and the ship separated successfully, which did not happen during the previous test. But after SpaceX performed a tricky separation event called “hot-staging” where the second stage ignites its engines while still attached to the booster, the booster was lost.
The six engines on the ship’ second stage ignited successfully, SpaceX said. But something caused the vehicle’s onboard flight termination system to destroy the craft.
“What we do believe right now is that the automated flight termination system on second stage appears to have triggered very late in the burn as we were headed downrange out over the Gulf of Mexico,” SpaceX’s John Insprucker said during SpaceX’s broadcast.
The launch site, which was destroyed during the first test, appears to be in much better shape this time, according to preliminary reports.
Speaking on the broadcast, SpaceX commentators said that the company will have learned a lot from the flight and will incorporate the necessary changes ahead of the next attempt.
Remember, these are test flights for a reason, but they’re becoming very expensive tests! Good thing Musk has a lot of dosh!
Reader Jon pointed out that SpaceX posted, during the countdown, several size comparisons of the Starship with various objects, including the Statue of Liberty (much smaller than the rocket) as well as an animated Godzilla walking across the screen! Here’s a screenshot (Godzilla was 345 feet tall).
*Speaking of Musk, I don’t much follow his doings, though some people seem obsessed with him. But it’s hard to miss the latest accusations that he’s an antisemite. (I have no dog in this fight and haven’t seen the inflammatory tweets.) Here’s how the WSJ reported on them:
Elon Musk insists he isn’t an antisemite.
But this past week, the billionaire entrepreneur left many wondering. At the very least, a string of inflammatory tweets he sent Wednesday showed how gratuitous Musk can be and how easily tweets on his own social-media platform can be misleading and trigger him.
His tweets called an antisemitic post “the actual truth” and renewed his pointed criticisms against the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish advocacy group that he has described as pushing a “woke mind virus” hurting free speech and, in turn, his business, Twitter-turned-X.
It was an unexpected provocation six weeks after Musk and the ADL appeared to reach a detente after an earlier escalation. And once again his self-generated drama is hindering his pursuits.
This is about the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which fights defamation of Jews:
“Fake corporate new media is making up stuff again,” began a post by an account called Wall Street Silver, run by Jim Lewis and Ivan Bayoukhi and followed by more than one million users, including Musk.
Wall Street Silver, which has its roots in a Reddit forum dealing with metals, included a screenshot of an MSNBC broadcast about the rise of hate speech at Twitter under Musk that cited data from the ADL. “Not exactly legitimate objective sources,” it concluded.
Musk responded. “They really should just drop the ‘A’ and go with Defamation League,” he wrote. “Way more accurate.”In the roughly two hours that followed, the billionaire’s rhetoric grew hotter as he continued to name check the ADL. One could almost see anger building in real time as what Musk’s biographer has dubbed his Demon Mode exploded online for all to see.
At one point, Musk tweeted support for a random X user’s post espousing the same sort of vile conspiracy theory about Jews replacing whites that was spewed by a killer who shot up a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018. That reply by Musk—“You have said the actual truth”—ignited the firestorm against him.
He kept going.
“The ADL unjustly attacks the majority of the West, despite the majority of the West supporting the Jewish people and Israel,” Musk tweeted. “This is because they cannot, by their own tenets, criticize the minority groups who are their primary threat. It is not right and needs to stop.”
When a user pushed back that it wasn’t fair to generalize against the Jewish community at large, Musk mostly agreed: “You right that this does not extend to all Jewish communities, but it is also not just limited to ADL.”
Well, from what I’ve seen of the the guy, he seems a bit “off” to me, perhaps a bit autistic, and maybe that, or a fit of rage, explains his behavior. Certainly he should take more care with what he tweets, and he doesn’t look like a good friend of the Jews, but I can’t yet call him an antisemite.
*A group of 120 Harvard faculty have signed a pro-Palestinian letter to President Gay, “Harvard faculty statement in support of academic freedom.” It is, I suppose, not just a response to the President’s several denunciations of antisemitism and Hamas’s attack, but also to the “Open letter to the Harvard Community” of October 8, signed by 350 faculty, which I also posted and discussed. That statement decried the attacks by Hamas of the previous day, and also attacked the off-the-rails student organizations that held Israel responsible for Hamas’s attacks. (You’ll remember that when some of the signers of the student letter were doxxed, they quickly withdrew their endorsements. From the first “open letter”, in which Steve Pinker played a large role:
The leaders of the major democratic countries united in saying that “the terrorist actions of Hamas have no justification, no legitimacy, and must be universally condemned” and that Israel should be supported “in its efforts to defend itself and its people against such atrocities.“ In contrast, while terrorists were still killing Israelis in their homes, 35 Harvard student organizations wrote that they hold “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” with not a single word denouncing the horrific acts by Hamas. In the context of the unfolding events, this statement can be seen as nothing less than condoning the mass murder of civilians based only on their nationality. We’ve heard reports of even worse instances, with Harvard students celebrating the “victory” or “resistance” on social media.
And the new one, which is pro-Palestinian, shows the signers to be really ticked off that President Gay created an initiative to combat antisemitism in light of statements like the one by the student organizations. I’ll give excerpts. First, the Professors pull a Tlaib about the “river to the sea” chant. This shows how totally clueless—or disingenuous—a bunch of faculty at America’s most elite university can be.
. . . . the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine must be free” has a long and complicated history. Its interpretation deserves, and is receiving, sustained and ongoing inquiry and debate. Singling it out as necessarily implying removalism or even eliminationism – when over a million Palestinians have been forced from their homes and over ten thousand civilians, including four thousand children, have been slain in Gaza, actions which the Holocaust historian Omer Bartov suggests in the New York Times may amount to a “crime against humanity” being executed with “genocidal intent” – is imprudent as a matter of university policy and badly misjudged as an act of moral leadership.
Yes, what we need is context! The quote about “genocidal intent” is just as clueless, for it is Hamas, not Israel, that has a genocidal intent. Trying to wipe out Hamas, a terrorist group, is not “genocide”. Trying to wipe out the Jews is. And then the clueless faculty tender their inevitable demands:
We call on you to present a balanced commitment to the support of intellectual freedom at Harvard by taking the following steps:
- Resisting calls to suspend and/or decertify the Palestine Solidarity Committee in retaliation for its public statements and advocacy, and resisting calls to set aside the University’s normal disciplinary procedures to prematurely sanction students and employees because of concerns raised about their political activity absent specific allegations of wrongdoing (and those already thusly sanctioned must be reinstated pending a procedurally sound investigation);
- Directing the President’s Advisory Group on Antisemitism to explain its definition of antisemitism to the University community, as requested at the FAS faculty meeting of November 7, before recommending any policies touching upon the freedom of thought and expression on our campus;
- Explicitly and specifically affirming the University’s commitment to the freedom of thought, inquiry, and expression in light of the extraordinary pressure being brought to bear upon critics of the State of Israel and advocates of the Palestinian people, and indicating that there can be no tolerance for a “Palestine exception” to free speech;
- Creating an advisory group on Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism (as suggested at the FAS faculty meeting of November 7).
Remember that last week a group of Harvard students violated university regulations by holding a sit-in at University Hall, the most famous of the buildings in Harvard Yard. That’s what #1 is about. I presume the students got of scot-free. They, too had demands, but their demands were rejected by Harvard. At any rate, I haven’t heard of any incidents of “Islamophobia” at Harvard since the Hamas attack, but the professors above can’t stand all the attention given to antisemitism, of which there were several instances including that odious student letter.
*Horses loose on a plane! According to the AP, a horse in a stall got loose in the hold of a plane crossing the Atlantic. All hell broke loose:
A cargo jet headed to Belgium from New York had to turn around mid-flight after a horse escaped its stall and got loose in the hold, according to air traffic control audio.
The Boeing 747 operated by Air Atlanta Icelandic had just started its flight across the Atlantic Ocean on Nov. 9 when the pilot radioed air traffic control in Boston and said that a horse on board had escaped its stall.
“We don’t have a problem as of flying-wise but we need to return, return back to New York. We cannot get the horse back secured,” the pilot said on air traffic control recordings made by the site LiveATC.net and compiled by the site You Can See ATC.
The controller cleared the aircraft to return to John F. Kennedy International Airport.
The pilot said that due to the plane’s weight, he had to dump 20 tons of fuel before going back to New York.
The controller gave the OK and alerted nearby pilots about a “fuel dumping in progress approximately 10 miles west of Martha’s Vineyard.”
The 747 pilot had one more request. “I do believe we need a vet — veterinarian, I guess you call it, for the horse upon landing,” he said. “Is that something you can speak to New York about?”
The controller said he would pass it on.
Can you imagine being a passenger on that plane and having to go back to New York because of a loose horse? Did they even tell the passengers why they were returning? Fortunately, the horse got loose soon after takeoff so the return to Boston was short. Imagine if this had happened halfway across the Atlantic.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s hopes extend only so far:
Hili: I’m praying for peace.A: For mice as well?Hili: Don’t go to extremes.
Hili: Modlę się o pokój.Ja: Dla myszy też?Hili: Bez przesady.
*******************
From Ron:
From Phun.org. I used to have a similar list in the lab, where we’d all push flies while listening to the radio. #1 on my list was NO REM, since my student Allen Orr used to like their music but I didn’t:
I can’t remember where I got this one:
From Masih; more Iranian students rebel against their oppressive regime.
Fearlessly defying threats and arrests, Sharif University students celebrated their graduation without hijabs, standing up against compulsory hijab. As the Minister of Education issues threats and faculty leaders resign, our resolve strengthens. Iranian women won’t step back.… pic.twitter.com/4IkwXjlMU8
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) November 18, 2023
From Jez; if you have a tablet, get this app for your cats! It’s a game!
Tablet app for cats. This is Catch the Mouse
[📹 ZL8CbPjXWoddz8w]pic.twitter.com/zFSjfmWcUe
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) November 18, 2023
From Barry. Flaco the escaped Eurasian Eagle-Owl, after slumming around the Lower East Side of Manhattan, has returned to Central Park and his favorite tree. As Barry said:
I suspected he eventually would. I guess it took him a while to realize that hanging around cement buildings and alighting on air conditioners was no way to live. Look at this proud and dignified creature:
Joy in Central Park today as Flaco the Eurasian Eagle-Owl has returned to reclaim his favorite oak tree, standing his ground despite visits from a hawk and some crows. 🦉 ♥️ 🌳 pic.twitter.com/nEgQkP1XSS
— Manhattan Bird Alert (@BirdCentralPark) November 17, 2023
I do worry about Flaco when the winter comes in force, though.
From my own “home” feed. What a way to sleep! But notice the baby sloth on her belly.
Sloths live almost exclusively in trees, leading to amazing situations like this. pic.twitter.com/E77hYWUldh
— Fascinating (@fasc1nate) November 17, 2023
Sweeping up (and lining up) kittens:
The way they line up at the end 😭 pic.twitter.com/lq6GpRsres
— Why you should have a cat (@ShouldHaveCat) November 17, 2023
From the Auschwitz Memorial, a 12 year old French boy gassed to death upon arriving at the camp:
19 November 1929 | A French Jewish boy, Charles Kaplon, was born in Montreuil.
On 14 August 1942 he was deported to #Auschwitz from Drancy. He was murdered in a gas chamber after the selection. pic.twitter.com/EQgDGtnLpY
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) November 19, 2023
Two—count them, two—tweets from Professor Cobb. First, a story in alphabetical order, though “xtreme” isn’t a word!
ADAM AND CHARLES’S ALPHABETICAL FOOD HYGENE STORY
Adam
Brought
Charles
Damsons
Every
Friday.
Grapes,
Ham,
Interesting
Jam.
Klaxon:
Leaving
Mess
Naughty.
Ordure
Pervades.
Quietly
Remove
Shards.
Take
Unsavoury
Vessels.
Wash
Xtreme
Yogurt.
Zzzzzzzz.— Ian McMillan (@IMcMillan) November 18, 2023
Happy birthday to a 39 year old macaroni penguin!
Help us wish Mickey, a macaroni penguin, a very happy hatchday. 🎉She is 39 and the oldest penguin in our Aquarium. We celebrated with a special ice cake! pic.twitter.com/mF0OSBFnik
— Pittsburgh Zoo & Aquarium (@PghZoo) November 17, 2023
Don’t worry, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is currently providing about 90% of the world’s commercial launch capacity, with a long queue of commerical clients (and the DoD and NASA and others), so they have a strong cash flow.
No he didn’t, this is just not true, on any fair-minded reading of the Tweet and surrounding Tweets. That poster was simply pointing out that while many Jewish organisations (ADL; Soros’s Open Society Foundation, for example) have been pro-immigration into the West, seeing blacks and Muslims as fellow beleaguered minorities, that sentiment is not always reciprocated, as is clear post Oct 7. The Tweets were not anti-Semitic, they were anti-woke.
That seems an incredible leap of bad reporting to go from those Tweets to the reportage of those Tweets. Perhaps the reporting was not derived from the Tweets (you know, where a reporter actually checks the source), but on the invariably inaccurate reactions to them.
But do they make any money? Nobody outside SpaceX knows if Falcon 9 is profitable.
And is it a good idea to rely so much on a company run by a petulant man-child?
Yeah. We could continue to rely on Putin like we did when Shuttle was retired.
1) Why wouldn’t the Falcon 9 be profitable, given that they can pretty much charge what they like, being a near monopoly and having a long queue of clients (their only real competitor being the Russians, but since Ukraine that’s been a no-go for Western companies and institutions)?
2) Yes, the reading of Musk’s Tweets by the ADL and others is bad faith. They want a return to the biased moderation of the old Twitter. But Musk is a maverick and anti-woke and they can’t control him. So they’re trying to bring Musk’s Twitter down, and their primary weapon is trying to scare advertisers away from the platform. They do that by malignly trying to associate Musk/Twitter with bogeyman phrases such as “far right”, “antisemitic” and “conspiracy theory”.
For example, “Media Matters” created Twitter accounts, deliberately followed a few fringe, far-right, few-follower posters, then repeatedly refreshed their timeline to try to generate match-ups between those posters and major advertisers, then trumpeted the screen shots saying “See!, See!”, even though what they had generated was utterly unrepresentative of the typical user experience on Twitter (they were pointing to juxtapositions that occurred only about 50 times out of 5 billion ad-views that day). This was a deliberate hit job. If we care about free speech, and want a “public square” where all can speak, then we should side with Twitter on this.
“The Tweets were not anti-Semitic, they were anti-woke.”
Really? There is absolutely nothing antisemitic about this statement?:
“Okay. Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”
The term “dialectical hatred” itself is a loaded one. From the Business Insider article linked below, it is explained:
“As with much hate speech online, the layers of hate in this exchange are hidden in “coding and euphemism,” said Ben Gidley, an academic at Birkbeck, University of London with expertise in antisemitism.
Gidley pointed to @breakingbaht’s phrase “dialectical hatred.”
“It’s this idea of antiwhite racism as a kind of Jewish conspiracy,” he said.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/musk-faces-consequences-for-calling-antisemitic-tweet-actual-truth-2023-11?op=1
But arguing that the Tweet’s meaning is “hidden in coding and euphemism” amounts to admitting that one is reading into it what isn’t there.
The poster himself (@breakingbaht) clarified further down the thread exactly what he meant:
“I support Jewish people’s right to self defense literally and ideologically. But I also, as a white person, have to acknowledge that it’s been depressing to see Jewish communities not take a stronger stance against anti white dialecticism that is basically just repurposed antisemitism.”
Then, in reply to someone asking: “How is it antisemitism?”
“Anti white bigotry? Because it uses a dialectical view. If you take most any antisemitic trope and remove “Jews” and “Jewishness” and insert “whites” and “whiteness” you have basically an interchangeable set of ideas to attack either group.”
Then in reply to someone mentioning “conspiracy theories”:
“Look, I’ve been clear. I’m not here for this shit. I’m here to defend white people from unfair propaganda. Not to hate Jews.”
None of that is “antisemitic” It is blatantly a rejection of both antisemitism and anti-white rhetoric. Thus it is a rejection of left-wing Critical Race Theory and DEI policies.
Jews have been pushing anti-white hatred, but that is not antisemitism ?!?
Sure.
Because the statement so clearly is code against CRT and DEI. Because the poster, after all, said he is not here to hate Jews. (Just accuse them of anti-white hatred.)
Got it.
Yes, many Jewish groups have gone along with the anti-white rhetoric (“hatred”) of the CRT/DEI-supporting left. So have many non-Jewish groups. So have many white groups. So has much of the West. Pointing this out is not anti-Semitic.
Not sorry–I really like Rick Astley–and it’s a great song with a great story behind it! Rick is still going strong, too–a really nice guy.
I seem to recall that Rick was hired by Stock, Aitken, and Waterman under the UK government’s Youth Opportunities Programme, which paid employers to take on teenagers.
Not sure how Rick Astley got here. (Where have I heard that before?) But here is something rather similar, but also quite different: https://ultimateclassicrock.com/rolling-stones-2024-tour-aarp/
Yes, the American Association of Retired Persons is sponsoring the Stones’ tour.
“Can you imagine being a passenger on that plane and having to go back to New York because of a loose horse? Did they even tell the passengers why they were returning?” Well, the AP story specifies that this was a “cargo jet,” so presumably no passengers.
And unfortunately, the poor frightened horse got hung up on a gate or partition somehow, and had to be euthanized after landing.
I continue to be astounded by how calm, professional, and solution-oriented pilots and air traffic controllers are in these situations. I hope that all WEIT readers will click on the hotlink to “liveATC” and just listen to the calm and professional back and forth….and follow the flight path graphics. It really is a worthwhile 10-20 minutes. Nobody screams hey there’s an f***ing horse loose!!…just calm, cool professionals at both ends as we have witnessed so many times in past air emergencies…amazing.
IIRC, early on in The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe claimed the calm, solution-oriented pilot persona could be traced back to sound-barrier breaking test pilot Chuck Yeager.
Not always.
For contrast listen ( or read) the CVR / FDR transcript from Air France 447. Airbus 330 lost in the inter tropical convergence zone between SA and Africa.
It took two years approximately to find and recover the recorders, CVR/FDR deep in the Atlantic.
Note, The pilots “inadvertently stalled” the Airbus, this happened at close to the aircraft max altitude and was not even recognised until far too late.
It is a worrying statistic still, that the majority of aircraft catastrophic incidents are still caused by the flight crew, not poor design, not maintenance errors, not the cabin crew, not the weather, the flight crew.
Notwithstanding, statistically still the safest travel method.
Air France Flight 447 (AF447 or AFR447[a]) was a scheduled international passenger flight from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Paris, France. On 1 June 2009, inconsistent airspeed indications led to the pilots inadvertently stalling the Airbus A330 serving the flight. They failed to recover the plane from the stall, and the plane ended up crashing into the Atlantic Ocean at 02:14 UTC, killing all 228 passengers and crew on board.[2
“From the river to the sea” is clear to most people, and we may see more of it. At a Let Women Speak event in Leeds (a public event where women talk about the need for sex-based rights and spaces) some trans rights activists were chanting “From the river to the sea, Yorkshire will be fascist free” and “From the river to the sea, Yorkshire will be transphobe free.”
Yes, I saw that. And yet KJK/Posie and the women speaking are apparently the Nazis, and not the masked thugs trying to silence free speech and calling for the eradication of Israel. You couldn’t make it up. At least West Yorkshire Police seem to have done a good job at keeping the LWS attendees safe – I guess “Lesbian Nana” wasn’t on duty…
Trying again, as my first attempt didn’t appear…
On this day:
1493 – Christopher Columbus goes ashore on an island called Borinquen he first saw the day before. He names it San Juan Bautista (later renamed again Puerto Rico).
1816 – Warsaw University is established.
1863 – American Civil War: U.S. President Abraham Lincoln delivers the Gettysburg Address at the dedication ceremony for the military cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
1911 – The Doom Bar in Cornwall claims two ships, Island Maid and Angele, the latter killing the entire crew except the captain.
1916 – Samuel Goldwyn and Edgar Selwyn establish Goldwyn Pictures.
1941 – World War II: Battle between HMAS Sydney and HSK Kormoran. The two ships sink each other off the coast of Western Australia, with the loss of 645 Australians and about 77 German seamen. [I had no idea that the German navy was fighting off the Australian coast.]
1942 – World War II: Battle of Stalingrad: Soviet Union forces under General Georgy Zhukov launch the Operation Uranus counterattacks at Stalingrad, turning the tide of the battle in the USSR’s favor.
1943 – Holocaust: Nazis liquidate Janowska concentration camp in Lemberg (Lviv), western Ukraine, murdering at least 6,000 Jews after a failed uprising and mass escape attempt.
1944 – World War II: U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt announces the sixth War Loan Drive, aimed at selling US$14 billion in war bonds to help pay for the war effort.
1952 – Greek Field Marshal Alexander Papagos becomes the 152nd Prime Minister of Greece. [The 152nd prime minister, a post that only goes back to around 1843. Some Greek PMs make Liz Truss and the lettuce that outlasted her look like seasoned veterans.]
1954 – Télé Monte Carlo, Europe’s oldest private television channel, is launched by Prince Rainier III.
1955 – National Review publishes its first issue.
1969 – Apollo program: Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean land at Oceanus Procellarum (the “Ocean of Storms”) and become the third and fourth humans to walk on the Moon.
1969 – Association football player Pelé scores his 1,000th goal.
1979 – Iran hostage crisis: Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini orders the release of 13 female and black American hostages being held at the US Embassy in Tehran.
1984 – San Juanico disaster: A series of explosions at the Pemex petroleum storage facility at San Juan Ixhuatepec in Mexico City starts a major fire and kills about 500 people.
1985 – Pennzoil wins a US$10.53 billion judgment against Texaco, in the largest civil verdict in the history of the United States, stemming from Texaco executing a contract to buy Getty Oil after Pennzoil had entered into an unsigned, yet still binding, buyout contract with Getty.
1994 – In the United Kingdom, the first National Lottery draw is held. A £1 ticket gave a one-in-14-million chance of correctly guessing the winning six out of 49 numbers.
1998 – Clinton–Lewinsky scandal: The United States House of Representatives Judiciary Committee begins impeachment hearings against U.S. President Bill Clinton.
1999 – Shenzhou 1: The People’s Republic of China launches its first Shenzhou spacecraft.
1999 – John Carpenter becomes the first person to win the top prize in the TV game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
2002 – The Greek oil tanker Prestige splits in half and sinks off the coast of Galicia, releasing over 76,000 m3 (20 million US gal) of oil in the largest environmental disaster in Spanish and Portuguese history.
2004 – The worst brawl in NBA history results in several players being suspended. Several players and fans are charged with assault and battery.
2010 – The first of four explosions takes place at the Pike River Mine in New Zealand. Twenty-nine people are killed in the nation’s worst mining disaster since 1914.
2022 – A gunman kills five and injures 17 at Club Q, a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado. [Aldrich’s attorneys have said in court documents that their client identifies as non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, preferring to be addressed as Mx. Aldrich. Experts in online extremism have voiced the possibility that Aldrich’s proclaimed self-identification could be disingenuous. This is the problem with self-identifying “gender identities” – an increasing number of male sex offenders are experiencing “prison onset gender dysphoria” and requesting transfers to women’s prisons.]
Births:
1711 – Mikhail Lomonosov, Russian physicist, chemist, astronomer, and geographer (d. 1765).
1845 – Agnes Giberne, Indian-English astronomer and author (d. 1939). [Best remembered for her books popularising science. An amateur astronomer, she worked on the committee setting up the British Astronomical Association and became a founder-member in 1890. She sent proofs of her first science book, Sun, Moon and Stars: Astronomy for Beginners to Charles Pritchard, the Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford University, and he was so impressed by it that he wrote, without being asked, a very positive introduction. The Graphic stated that “As an introduction to a science, it could scarcely be more attractive, and it is the best book of the kind we have seen.”]
1873 – Elizabeth McCombs, the first woman elected to the Parliament of New Zealand (d. 1935).
1888 – José Raúl Capablanca, Cuban-American chess player and theologian (d. 1942).
1895 – Louise Dahl-Wolfe, American photographer (d. 1989).
1901 – Nina Bari, Russian mathematician (d. 1961).
1904 – Nathan Freudenthal Leopold, Jr., American murderer (d. 1971).
1905 – Tommy Dorsey, American trombonist, composer and bandleader (d. 1956).
1909 – Peter Drucker, Austrian-American theorist, educator, and author (d. 2005).
1917 – Indira Gandhi, Indian politician, 3rd Prime Minister of India (d. 1984).
1920 – Gene Tierney, American actress and singer (d. 1991).
1924 – Margaret Turner-Warwick, English physician and academic (d. 2017).
1932 – Eleanor F. Helin, American astronomer (d. 2009).
1933 – Larry King, American journalist and talk show host (d. 2021).
1936 – Dick Cavett, American actor and talk show host.
1938 – Ted Turner, American businessman and philanthropist, founded Turner Broadcasting System.
1949 – Raymond Blanc, French chef and author.
1956 – Eileen Collins, American colonel, pilot, and astronaut.
1958 – Charlie Kaufman, American director, producer, and screenwriter.
1961 – Meg Ryan, American actress and producer.
1962 – Jodie Foster, American actress, director, and producer.
1976 – Jack Dorsey, American businessman, co-founded Twitter.
I’m not afraid of death. It’s the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.
930 – Yan Keqiu, Chinese chief strategist.
1665 – Nicolas Poussin, French-Italian painter (b. 1594).
1692 – Thomas Shadwell, English poet and playwright (b. 1642).
1703 – Man in the Iron Mask, French prisoner.
1828 – Franz Schubert, Austrian pianist and composer (b. 1797).
1887 – Emma Lazarus, American poet (b. 1849).
1976 – Basil Spence, Indian-Scottish architect and academic, designed the Coventry Cathedral (b. 1907).
1998 – Alan J. Pakula, American director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1928).
2013 – Dora Dougherty Strother, American pilot and academic (b. 1921).
2013 – Ray Gosling, English journalist, author, and activist (b. 1939).
2013 – Frederick Sanger, English biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1918).
2014 – Mike Nichols, German-American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1931).
2017 – Charles Manson, American cult leader and mass murderer (b. 1934).
2017 – Warren “Pete” Moore, American singer-songwriter and record producer (b. 1938). [He was also born on this day. A founding member of Motown group the Miracles, he was the bass singer. He was the vocal arranger on all of the group’s hits.]
2017 – Jana Novotná, Czech tennis player (b. 1968).
Sixty-eight years of standing athwart history, yelling “Stop!”
Today, Rosalynn Carter died at age 96. What wonderful role models she and Jimmy Carter were, as to how to live and love.
https://people.com/jimmy-carter-speaks-out-wife-rosalynn-carter-death-8404565
If not for Elon taking over X, few of us would know the full extent of the Black Sabbath Massacre. Twitter would have heavily censored the videos that were taken and live-streamed by Hamas terrorists. One has to see the gore and guts in those videos to fully appreciate the depravity and barbarism of October 7th and *what Israel is up against.*
Least anyone have any doubt of the frenzied bloodlust and soullessness of these killers, the latest finding was a knife found impaled in a Jewish woman’s vagina.
Israel has no peace partners!
Yeah, he seems “off” to me, too — like a “corked” bottle of overpriced wine.