From Jerry: Hili dialogue

December 1, 2023 • 6:45 am

I’m BAAACK, but with a truncated Hili dialogue, and am allowing Dr Cobb to go back to his book writing. (Thanks to him for yesterdayt’s Hili.

Greetings from sunny (but crisp) Cambridge on Friday, December 1, 2023.  Yep, it’s December now, and today is National Fried Pie Day, a speciality of the American South. It’s also these food months:

It’s also National Pear Month, National Egg Nog Month and National Fruit Cake Month.  There is, of course, only one fruitcake in existence, which is endlessly passed from hand to hand.

It’s also Bartender Appreciation Day, Eat a Red Apple Day (I dislike all of these mush bombs; give me a tart Granny Smith), National Christmas Lights Day, National Pie Day, Rosa Parks Day  in Ohio and Oregon (she wasn’t born or died on this day), World AIDS Day, and Military Abolition Day in Costa Rica, one of the few countries in the world that doesn’t have an army; it was abolished on this day in 1948.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the December 1 Wikipedia page.

War news from various sources:

*I’m writing this on Friday morning, and just discovered, as I predicted three tweets down, that Israel has resumed fighting in Gaza after the latest truce expired. However, talks are continuing over reviving the “pause.”  But lordy, why did Hamas fire rockets on Israel, which apparently started the war again?. Also, yesterday Hamas released eight hostages instead of the promised ten, though Israel released the usual 30 terrorists. And don’t forget the Hamas bus shooting in Israel (see below), which killed three. It’s almost as if Hamas wants the conflict to restart, or perhaps thought Israel would swallow this stuff and keep the pause simply to get the hostages back:

A weeklong cease-fire in the Gaza Strip collapsed on Friday morning after Israel said Hamas had fired rockets toward Israel in the hours before the truce was set to expire, and Israel responded with strikes on the territory.

[JAC: “Israel said:. . . “Israel said”. Does the NYT have any way of checking whether this is true, or are they doing lazy journalism?

International mediators said talks were continuing in the hopes of quickly reviving the truce, which saw the two adversaries exchange hostages and prisoners and brought a respite from Israeli bombardment for Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Despite increasing international pressure to reach a more comprehensive cease-fire, Israeli officials have emphasized in recent days that they intend to destroy Hamas, the armed group that controls most of Gaza.

Hamas blamed Israel for the collapse of the cease-fire and said in a statement that it had offered to release more hostages, including older people, but that Israel had made “a prior decision to resume the criminal aggression.”

Israel, for its part, said that Hamas had violated the cease-fire agreement by firing on Israel and failing to release as many hostages as it had promised. Hamas released eight hostages on Thursday, two fewer than expected, after releasing at least 94 since the truce began.

. . . On both sides, the trade focused on women and children. Officials from both Israel and Hamas said the armed group had few hostages remaining in those categories, while Hamas has said that it would demand a higher price for releasing Israeli men or soldiers of either sex.

How can those who support Hamas’s side justify a three-to-one trade of hostages versus terrorists, which of course is “disproportionate”. And now it may bet even more lopsided.

However, talks over a new truce are still going on:

International mediators said talks were continuing in the hopes of quickly reviving the truce, which saw the two adversaries exchange hostages and prisoners and brought a respite from Israeli bombardment for Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Despite increasing international pressure to reach a more comprehensive cease-fire, Israeli officials have emphasized in recent days that they intend to destroy Hamas, the armed group that controls most of Gaza.

*I don’t know if this counts as a Hamas violation of the “pause,” but three Israelis were killed at a bus-stop shooting in Jerusalem; the NYT appends, “. . . Israeli officials say” to the headline. Doesn’t the Gray Lady have reporters in Israel who can verify this?

Hamas seems to be responsible, as they admitted it:

At least three people were killed and six others wounded when two Palestinian gunmen affiliated with Hamas opened fire near a bus stop on the outskirts of Jerusalem on Thursday morning, according to the Israeli authorities.

. . .Israel’s Shin Bet security service said that the gunmen were Palestinian brothers from East Jerusalem who were affiliated with Hamas, the armed group that controls most of Gaza, and that both had been jailed for what it called “terrorist activity.” In a statement, it identified them as Murad Nimr, 38, and Ibrahim Nimr, 30.

Hamas said the men were members of its armed wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades. In a statement on the Telegram messaging app, Hamas — which the United States and many other nations classify as a terrorist group — called the attack “a natural response” to Israel’s “brutal massacres” in Gaza.

. . . Benny Gantz, an Israeli politician and member of the country’s wartime emergency government, said the deadly shooting only strengthened Israel’s resolve “to continue the fighting with might and determination against the murderous terrorism which threatens our citizens.”

From Reuters:

The slain victims were identified by Israeli media as a woman in her 20s, a woman in her 60s and a 74-year-old rabbi.

If this isn’t breaking the “pause”, I don’t know what is.  And this is one reason why a “one state solution” proposed by a reader yesterday is futile. Even a two-state solution won’t work until we have honest negotiators on both sides, which we don’t, and even then I wouldn’t bet on it.

*From The Jerusalem Post and other sources, we hear of some pretty shocking news involving an employee of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East; the infamous UN branch called UNRWA, known to employ members of Hamas:

One of the hostages, recently released from Gaza, revealed on Wednesday that he was held for nearly 50 days in an attic by a teacher from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

The story was publicized on X by Channel 13 journalist Almog Boker.

The hostage also said that the teacher who held him captive was a father of 10 children. He had barely been provided food or medical attention, and was locked away by the teacher, he said.

. . . A report from the beginning of the month saw a UNRWA-run school in Nablus in the West Bank posting a video to its official Facebook page in which a young student called for the victory of Hamas’s “jihad warriors” in Gaza.

The UNRWA has long been known to be complicit in formenting Jew hatred in Gaza; it even uses textbooks in its schools that push anti-Semitism and martyrdom. But this is worse: an employee is complicit in Hamas’s terrorism and kidnapping. Can we expect to see the UN fire this employee and condemn his action?

*[Written yesterday evening] The WaPo reports that Biden has prompted Secretary of State Blinken to pressure Israel into producing a more concrete plan to protect civilians if the war resumes:

The Israeli government agreed to put in place a “clear plan” to protect civilians prior to resuming hostilities in southern Gaza, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Thursday after a day of meetings with Israeli leadership, a sign of intense U.S. pressure for Israel to minimize the grave humanitarian toll that defined the war’s first severalweeks.

The conversations were the toughest to date from Blinken, and, by his account, they resulted in concrete assurances from the Israelis that they would change the way they are fighting their war on Hamas, the group that attacked Israel on Oct. 7. But other comments from Israeli officials made it clear that they intended to abandon the week-long pause in their military campaign as soon as Hamas stops releasing hostages.

“We made clear the imperative that before any operations go forward in southern Gaza that there be a clear plan in place that puts a premium on protecting civilians as well as sustaining and building on the humanitarian assistance that’s getting into Gaza,” Blinken told reporters in Tel Aviv. “And the Israeli government agreed with that approach.”

Well, if the new plan saves more civilian lives than the old one, that’s good; I do wonder what concrete steps the plan will involve. But it’s this, more than anything else, that convinces me that the war will resume eventually, and that the U.S. will continue to support Israel if it does.

*Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, Russia’s Supreme Court has apparently (and shamefully) cracked down on LGBTQ activism.

 Russia’s Supreme Court effectively outlawed LGBTQ+ activism on Thursday, the most drastic step against advocates of gay, lesbian and transgender rights in the increasingly conservative country.

Ruling in response to a lawsuit filed by the Justice Ministry, the court labeled what the suit called the LGBTQ+ “movement” operating in Russia as an extremist organization and banned it.

The ruling is the latest step in a decade-long crackdown on LGBTQ+ rights in Russia under President Vladimir Putin, who has emphasized “traditional family values” during his 24 years in power.

Thursday’s closed-door hearing lasted four hours. No one besides Justice Ministry representatives were allowed in, and there was no defendant. Journalists were taken into the courtroom only for the reading of the verdict by Judge Oleg Nefedov, who wore a face mask, apparently for health reasons.

I was curious about why Russia needs to take a step like this—until I got to the part about Putin.  Even so, I’m not sure how LGBTQ activism is going to erode traditional family values. It just expands them a bit.

*Finally, the horror we’ve all ignored for a few months, described in Robert Kagan’s WaPo column, “A Trump.  dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.”

et’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day. In 13 weeks, Donald Trump will have locked up the Republican nomination. In the RealClearPolitics poll average (for the period from Nov. 9 to 20), Trump leads his nearest competitor by 47 points and leads the rest of the field combined by 27 points. The idea that he is unelectable in the general election is nonsense — he is tied or ahead of President Biden in all the latest polls — stripping other Republican challengers of their own stated reasons for existence. The fact that many Americans might prefer other candidates, much ballyhooed by such political sages as Karl Rove, will soon become irrelevant when millions of Republican voters turn out to choose the person whom no one allegedly wants.

For many months now, we have been living in a world of self-delusion, rich with imagined possibilities. Maybe it will be Ron DeSantis, or maybe Nikki Haley. Maybe the myriad indictments of Trump will doom him with Republican suburbanites. Such hopeful speculation has allowed us to drift along passively, conducting business as usual, taking no dramatic action to change course, in the hope and expectation that something will happen. Like people on a riverboat, we have long known there is a waterfall ahead but assume we will somehow find our way to shore before we go over the edge. But now the actions required to get us to shore are looking harder and harder, if not downright impossible.

This is not only possible, but probable. And horrible. How can a mentally ill dictatorial narcissist be the person Americans want to lead their country?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej is cynical in a chinwag with Hili:

Hili: Falling leaves broaden the horizon.
A: Sometimes they rerveal the ugliness

In Polish:

Hili: Spadające liście poszerzają horyzonty.Ja: Czasem odsłaniają brzydotę.

***************

From Thomas; NO FREE WILL IN DOGS! (A Dave Coverly Speedbump cartoon.)

After I mentioned that Biden and Netanyahu were dancing to the tune of Hamas’s violin, reader Rosemary used AI to make this meme (she calls Hamas “gerbils”):

From The Absurd Sign Project 2.0:

From Masih, who walked out of a meeting with the German government because they wanted to keep it secret (as an anti-regime Iranian activist, they argued that they can’t be seen meeting with a woman who’s constantly hectoring Iran for its policy towards women). See her explanation in her tweet.

Translation of the German by Google: the “empty promises” must refer to Germany’s promises to help oppressed Iranians.

Is this feminist foreign policy? The people in #iran have long been disappointed by the empty promises of the Federal Republic. I suspect a lot more now! @ABaerbock @AuswaertigesAmt @AlinejadMasih @simamoradb51053 @DEonHumanRights

From Jez. What a beautiful litter!

Another from Jez, who says, correctly, “A great tweet.” Absolutely!

From Luana: Princeton shames itself again. “Jewish supremacy? And in the land of Palestine/Israel? What land is that?

You can read the whole letter at The Daily Princetonian, which also has the list of signers.  As one reply tweet notes, “Not a single STEM professor in the signatories, and that probably tells you something.”  One excerpt:

We oppose all forms of colonialism, racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and apartheid. We stand against white supremacy in the United States and against Jewish supremacy in the land of Palestine/Israel.

We support those in Palestine who have called for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) and listen to their call for international solidarity in their struggle to:

– end Israel’s occupation and colonization of Palestine and all Arab lands occupied in June 1967, including the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights;

Their demands also include a Palestinian “right of return”. Dream on, comrades! And I’m SO glad I’m not at Princeton. (As a high-school student, I wanted to go—I was enamored with Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise—but my parents said we couldn’t afford it.)

From Malcom: Cat + Xmas trees = fun:

From the Auschwitz Memorial: An eight-year-old girl, gassed upon arrival:

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb: First, an awesome cup. I want one! (The video seems a bit wonky on “X”):

Matthew also loves Victor Borge (who was funny), and sent me this video to make me laugh:

37 thoughts on “From Jerry: Hili dialogue”

  1. “Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, and the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers, it is an identity without an essence.”

    -David M. Halpern

    “Queer theory has its roots in disruption of, rather than assimilation to, norms of identity. Politically, queer emerged as part of a political movement of gender and sexual minorities in the 1960s. Distinct from mainstream lesbian and gay movements, groups like Queer Nation resisted assimilationist strategies that sought rights on the basis of stable and unchanging identities.”

    -Emily Drabinski
    Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction
    Library Quarterly
    Volume 83, Number 2, 2013

    As for the “+”, a guess might be in this paper :

    Zoophilia Is Morally Permissible
    Fira Bensto (pseudonym)
    Controversial Ideas 2023, 3(2), 5; doi: 10.35995/jci03020005

    … so I’m not sure when the Ls, the Gs, and the Bs declared their Unity over those ideas – but it seems Putin doesn’t care because it is so easy for Putin to declare Unity On A New Basis on their behalf.

    In other news, remember to :

    “Support Black-owned shops this holiday season” in “100% Black Owned Friday” – “100% love”.

    “Showcase your Black-Owned Badge”

    “Stand out to customers on Google Maps and Search by adding the Black-owned business attribute to your free Business Profile.”

    Businesses can get “certified black-owned”.

    See Google’s homepage for that material (as of this writing) which the dialectic assures us has nothing to do with racism.

  2. I read the WaPo editorial about what life might look like after a Trump coronation, and I agree that it’s pretty grim.

    Here’s my question: Trump is 78 years old, obese, and doesn’t eat well. He is not going to live forever. Six months? Ten years?

    And then what? What are the MAGAs’ plans for succession?

    L

    1. Good question. Arguably, the biggest question for both parties, assuming a Trump/Biden re-match, is who will their VPs be? I can’t read the WP piece. Did Kagan give his reasons for saying Trump would become a dictator?

      1. He’s already said he’d invoke the Insurrection Act and suspend the Constitution.

        Who he chooses as VP would probably want to succeed him, but there are Trump’s children, plus any number of supporters who think they should be next in line.

        Peaceful problem solving isn’t their deal, so it could get pretty messy. Even if they have an election of some kind, one or more of the losers will be screaming about voter fraud, so an election wouldn’t solve anything, even if only MAGAs were allowed to vote.

        And since they will have given themselves permission to henceforth solve every dispute with violence, there’s always that in the mix, too.

        L

        1. Linda, as I’ve written before on this site and others, and riffing on Kagan’s point, we must prepare for the worst, namely, another Trump presidency. We who are opposed to Trump have been too Pollyannish about next year’s election. It is right and necessary to be alarmed and to lay in fortifications for the violence that will start before, during, and after the presidential election next year. Mark my words!

      2. Good comment! I really think there is a silent majority of Americans who don’t want either Biden or Trump. Most of us know Trump is an immoral person and a bigot. But in many important ways, the country is worse off since Biden took the presidency–open borders, worse crime, and a surge of inflation.

        People want a decent person in office, not a bum like Trump. But as they hold their noses and go to the polls, they’re also asking, “Who will do better on the border, crime, etc?” It’s a tough position for many Americans, though we all know there are many who refuse to feel shame and openly support Trump.

  3. On this day (Part 1):
    1640 – End of the Iberian Union: Portugal acclaims as King João IV of Portugal, ending 59 years of personal union of the crowns of Portugal and Spain and the end of the rule of the Philippine Dynasty.

    1662 – Diarist John Evelyn records skating on the frozen lake in St James’s Park, London, watched by Charles II and Queen Catherine.

    1824 – United States presidential election: Since no candidate received a majority of the total electoral college votes in the election, the United States House of Representatives is given the task of deciding the winner in accordance with the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

    1834 – Slavery is abolished in the Cape Colony in accordance with the Slavery Abolition Act 1833.

    1862 – In his State of the Union Address President Abraham Lincoln reaffirms the necessity of ending slavery as ordered ten weeks earlier in the Emancipation Proclamation.

    1865 – Shaw University, the first historically black university in the southern United States, is founded in Raleigh, North Carolina.

    1878 – President Rutherford B. Hayes gets the first telephone installed in the White House.

    1913 – The Buenos Aires Metro, the first underground railway system in the Southern Hemisphere and in Latin America, begins operation.

    1918 – Iceland becomes a sovereign state, yet remains a part of the Danish kingdom. [I’m not sure I understand how that works…]

    1919 – Lady Astor becomes the first female Member of Parliament (MP) to take her seat in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom. (She had been elected to that position on November 28.)

    1934 – Sergei Kirov is assassinated, paving way for the repressive Great Purge, and Vinnytsia massacre by General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin.

    1941 – World War II: Emperor Hirohito of Japan gives his tacit approval to the decision of the imperial council to initiate war against the United States.

    1952 – The New York Daily News reports the news of Christine Jorgensen, the first notable case of sex reassignment surgery. [Rudolph / Dora Richter) and Einar Wegener / Lili Elbe both underwent surgery earlier, but their cases weren’t known about contemporaneously unlike George William / Christine Jorgensen’s. Indeed, Jorgensen wasn’t even the first American to undergo the procedure, but was the first to go public.]

    1955 – American Civil Rights Movement: In Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress Rosa Parks refuses to give up her bus seat to a white man and is arrested for violating the city’s racial segregation laws, an incident which leads to that city’s bus boycott.

    1958 – The Our Lady of the Angels School fire in Chicago kills 92 children and three nuns.

    1959 – Cold War: Opening date for signature of the Antarctic Treaty, which sets aside Antarctica as a scientific preserve and bans military activity on the continent.

    1964 – Vietnam War: U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson and his top-ranking advisers meet to discuss plans to bomb North Vietnam.

    1969 – Vietnam War: The first draft lottery in the United States is held since World War II.

    1973 – Papua New Guinea gains self-government from Australia.

    1984 – NASA conducts the Controlled Impact Demonstration, wherein an airliner is deliberately crashed in order to test technologies and gather data to help improve survivability of crashes. [Today is also the anniversary of several airline crashes.]

    1988 – World AIDS Day is proclaimed worldwide by the UN member states.

    1988 – Benazir Bhutto, is named as the Prime Minister of Pakistan, becoming the first female leader to lead a muslim nation.

    1989 – Cold War: East Germany’s parliament abolishes the constitutional provision granting the Communist Party the leading role in the state.

    1990 – Channel Tunnel sections started from the United Kingdom and France meet beneath the seabed.

    1991 – Cold War: Ukrainian voters overwhelmingly approve a referendum for independence from the Soviet Union.

    2000 – Vicente Fox Quesada is inaugurated as the president of Mexico, marking the first peaceful transfer of executive federal power to an opposing political party following a free and democratic election in Mexico’s history.

    2001 – The United Russia political party was founded.

    2006 – The law on same-sex marriage came into force in South Africa for the first time on the African continent.

    2018 – The Oulu Police informed the public about the first offence of the much larger child sexual exploitation in Oulu, Finland.

    2019 – The outbreak of coronavirus infection began in Wuhan.

    2020 – The Arecibo Telescope collapsed.

    1. On this day (Part 2)
      Births:
      1083 – Anna Komnene, Byzantine physician and scholar (d. 1153).

      1761 – Marie Tussaud, French-English sculptor, founded Madame Tussauds Wax Museum (d. 1850).

      1792 – Nikolai Lobachevsky, Russian mathematician and geometer (d. 1856).

      1847 – Julia A. Moore, American poet (d. 1920).

      1912 – Minoru Yamasaki, American architect, designed the World Trade Center (d. 1986).

      1913 – Mary Martin, American actress and singer (d. 1990).

      1925 – Martin Rodbell, American biochemist and endocrinologist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1998). [Shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Alfred G. Gilman for “their discovery of G-proteins and the role of these proteins in signal transduction in cells”.]

      1931 – Jimmy Lyons, American saxophonist (d. 1986).

      1931 – Jim Nesbitt, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2007).

      1940 – Richard Pryor, American comedian, actor, producer, and screenwriter (d. 2005).

      1944 – Eric Bloom, American singer-songwriter and guitarist.

      1944 – John Densmore, American drummer and songwriter.

      1945 – Bette Midler, American singer-songwriter, actress and producer.

      1946 – Gilbert O’Sullivan, Irish singer-songwriter and pianist.

      1949 – Pablo Escobar, Colombian drug lord and narcoterrorist (d. 1993).

      1951 – Treat Williams, American actor (d. 2023).

      1952 – Stephen Poliakoff, English director, producer, and playwright.

      1954 – Judith Hackitt, English chemist and engineer.

      1957 – Vesta Williams, American singer-songwriter and actress (d. 2011).

      1958 – Candace Bushnell, American journalist and author.

      1959 – Billy Childish, English singer-songwriter, guitarist, and painter. [Co-founded the Stuckism art movement.]

      1970 – Sarah Silverman, American comedian, actress, and singer.

      1976 – Matthew Shepard, American hate crime victim (d. 1998).

      1982 – Riz Ahmed, English actor and rapper.

      One can survive everything nowadays except death:
      217 – Yehudah HaNasi, ‘Nasi’, Rabbi and editor of the Mishnah (b. 135).

      1866 – George Everest, Welsh geographer and surveyor (b. 1790). [He initially objected to having the world’s highest mountain named after him, as he had had nothing to do with its discovery and believed his name was not easily written or pronounced in Hindi.]

      1933 – Pekka Halonen, Finnish painter (b. 1865).

      1935 – Bernhard Schmidt, Estonian-German optician, invented the Schmidt camera (b. 1879).

      1947 – Aleister Crowley, English magician, poet, and mountaineer (b. 1875).

      1958 – Elizabeth Peratrovich, Alaskan-American civil rights activist (b. 1911).

      1964 – J. B. S. Haldane, English-Indian geneticist and biologist (b. 1892).

      1973 – David Ben-Gurion, Israeli politician, 1st Prime Minister of Israel (b. 1886).

      1975 – Anna Roosevelt Halsted, American journalist (b. 1906).

      1987 – James Baldwin, American novelist, poet, and critic (b. 1924).

      1997 – Stéphane Grappelli, French violinist (b. 1908).

      2007 – Anton Rodgers, British actor (b. 1933).

      1. The main objective of the Controlled Impact Demonstration, in which an obsolete (full scale) B-720 four engine jet airliner was flown remotely to a controlled crash scenario at NASA’s high desert Dryden Flight Research Center, was to test the proposed fire-prevention and retardation properties of a specific fuel additive. Because one should not waste an opportunity for full scale testing of newly proposed technologies in general, a number of structural and instrumentation experiments were piggy-backed including seat attachments and crash dummies. Several years of preparation were required along with several preparation flights with pilots onboard. The aircraft was provided by the FAA and remotely piloted for the controlled crash at the high desert NASA facility by very senior NASA research pilot the (now) late Fitz Fulton. (In the early 80’s, not every 5th grader could fly a drone!). A significant result of the demo was that the fuel additive did not work as it had in theoretical simulations and earlier bench experiments and thus that particular additive project was cancelled based on the flight test data.
        Pretty good Wikipedia write-up at url https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_Impact_Demonstration

  4. Is a Trump dictatorship inevitable? Maybe yes, maybe no.

    But you could argue that US politics has been edging towards a dictatorship for some time. You could argue the slide towards dictatorship has been going on since Dwight D Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex. Subsequent Presidents have not rolled the prospect of dictatorship back…

    And then you could argue that Obama, Trump and Biden were and are so close to running a dictatorship that everybody should be alarmed.

    YMMV.

  5. “Israel says” does, indeed, seem like lazy journalism, both with regard to confirming the information reported and as to who provided it. “Ministry of Defense Spokesman”? “Cabinet Member”? “Haaretz”?

    I don’t know why Hamas might break the ceasefire, other than to provide the opportunity to try and make Israel look bad. On the other hand, it’s possible that neither attack was sanctioned by Hamas leadership. Still it’s Hamas’s responsibility to prevent such things during a ceasefire.

  6. Quote:

    “One of the hostages, recently released from Gaza, revealed on Wednesday that he was held for nearly 50 days in an attic by a teacher from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).”
    https://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/news-releases/united-states-contributes-us-1537-million-unrwa-support-palestine-refugees

    This is *INSANE*. Of course, I state the obvious. The UN (via a representative of UNRWA) held hostage a victim of the Oct 7th massacre, entertaining with impunity the -unfathomable- grief of a family and a nation. Mind boggling.

    Note** The largest contributor to UNRWA is the USA.

    “In 2022, the United States was the largest donor to UNRWA, with an overall contribution of US$ 344 million in support of Palestine Refugees. In 2023, the U.S. supported the Agency’s US$16 million 2023 Syria-Lebanon Flash Appeal with a contribution of US$ 3.4 million”

    https://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/news-releases/united-states-contributes-us-1537-million-unrwa-support-palestine-refugees

    344 million? How about reallocating these funds elsewhere until and unless an assurance is established that our tax $$$ are not funding the work of Hamas sympathizers and “teachers” who teach Palestinian children to hate and/or hold victims of terror hostage. This is not to say that Palestinians don’t deserve our aid, they do, but that aid must be strictly conditional.

    I work in Africa among some of the poorest people in the world, we work together to protect and raise awareness about earth’s last iconic animals. I continue to be aghast when I realize just how much good a mere 10K (or less!) could achieve here in the lowveld, next to Krguer. It breaks my heart. It does.

    The UN is broken. I’m beginning to understand (though I don’t share the sentiment) of the isolationists on the “other side” of the aisle.

  7. … And – perhaps to get based after the depressing politics – I bring mathematics/physics :

    “The SAT Question Everyone Got Wrong”
    Veritasium (new today):
    https://youtu.be/FUHkTs-Ipfg?si=Pe1FF51kld1zYWLF

    My comment:

    Get two coins! Then watch. This is similar to this older Presh Talwalkar (Mind Your Decisions) video : https://youtu.be/kN3AOMrnEUs?si=h5cdmFfHnCLQBZSt

    Derek Mueller (Veritasium) interviews one of the three test takers who actually proved the solution to the SAT, and made news at the time!

    There is excellent use of the video medium to explain this highly intuitive but deeply interesting phenomenon. I highly recommend both videos!

    I actually shared here the Talwalkar video a year or so ago. Perhaps the link is somewhere.

    1. Thanks for releasing this comment PCC(E)!

      An edit : the kids who wrote to the College Board proved the choices on the test were incorrect – maybe they proved a solution, I’m not sure.

      1. Yes, they did and the now established math prof explains it.
        Great video, with relevance to time-keeping on earth and in space (solar vs. sidereal day, etc.)
        I posted a comment that even though I am interested in this aspect of time-keeping, I did not suss out the correct answer to the question and was suitably humbled but enlightened.

  8. But lordy, why did Hamas fire rockets on Israel, which apparently started the war again?.
    Simple! They can see they’re winning the public relations war. Be nice for a while, then provoke Israel and turn more nations against them when they respond. It’s a mostly, successful attempt to cut Israel off from the international support they need in the long run.

  9. My second comment above is awaiting moderation. It’s because there are two YouTube links. They are not superfluous – they are closely related.

    Appreciate any help. Thanks.

    1. For that, I just do two posts, but I vaguely seem to recall that you can edit-in a second one. Not sure if that’s a correct memory, tho, but might be worth a try.

      1. Cannot reply to moderated comments.

        It’s the latest Veritasium – it’s awesome!!

  11. It’s the oddest thing: Whenever I follow the links to Twitter from WEIT, each time instead of getting a new tweet it goes back to the one I’ve just seen, even though I close the tab in between. This only happens from Jerry’s site, not when I’m following multiple links to twitter from other sites, or Twitter’s own newsletter. Then the second time I try, it goes to the correct one. And so on. It’s been going on for weeks–has anyone else experienced this?

  12. I watched Secretary Blinken’s speech yesterday live. He has strong words for Israel regarding the need to protect civilians and, particularly, the need to provide safe harbor for civilians in the south of Gaza before Israel starts its campaign there. The net of it is that the U.S. commitment to Israel’s defense remains strong. The U.S. still supports Israel’s goal of getting rid of Hamas.

    My thinking is that the U.S. is both (1) genuinely concerned about civilian casualties and (2) believes that Israel’s approach to protecting civilians is a critical factor in maintaining international support for the operation—which is already severely limited and will end if civilian casualties become intolerable. Even U.S. support is at risk, as public condemnation of Israel in the media takes its toll.

    Israel needs to destroy Hamas and do everything it can to protect civilians at the same time. By breaking the truce, Hamas itself is helping.

    1. The catch, Norman, is that no matter how low those civilian casualties actually are — and how does anyone devote the resources to counting civilian bodies accurately in an urban war zone under fire? — Hamas will supply whatever “intolerable” number that it thinks will cause President Biden to pull the rug out from under Israel.

      I’m hoping that Israel can get a hearing in the Administration that these numbers are simply unbelievable, and have been ever since the Al-Ahli parking lot bombing by a Muslim rocket. But President Biden still has to grit his dentures and tell his antisemite wing that No, 20,000, or 100,000 casualties is OK. They don’t want to believe that their ally is lying or that it is using human shields in order to goose the body count.

  13. Even if we believe the figures from Hamas re deaths at 14,000, that still represents less than one percent of the population. How does that even come close to too many civilian deaths in wartime?

    1. And we don’t know how many were militants, including underage combatants. Hamas have confirmed the deaths of some senior commanders, so it’s likely that Israel has good intelligence and that many Hamas terrorists have been targeted and killed.

  15. “We oppose all forms of colonialism”. Except the form of colonialism where they map American antiracism onto the ME conflict. That form of colonialism they really like.

    1. Yup. And not so dedicated to opposing colonialism that they’ll actually leave the colonised land they’re living on themselves. Still, a mealy mouthed land acknowledgement will put everything right…

  16. ‘[JAC: “Israel said:. . . “Israel said”. Does the NYT have any way of checking whether this is true, or are they doing lazy journalism?’

    This morning in its opening audio headlines, NPR’s “Morning Edition” employed the same “Israel said” trope, adding for good measure that, in contrast, it was “a fact” that Israel was bombing Gaza, the corroberation of that being the statement of its Gaza producer.

    Was it that much more difficult for the producer to note Hamas rocket trails against the sky?

    1. Wouldn’t help. Those rocket smoke trails have been cited as “proof” that Israel is using white phosphorus against Gazans.

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