Thursday: Hili dialogue

January 4, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, January 4, 2024, and National Spaghetti Day, which is in fact what I’m having tonight.

“Spaghetti-cat-1” by RikkisRefugeOther is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

It’s also Dimpled Chad Day, celebrating the January election tally in 2001 that was so problematic,  National Trivia Day, World Hypnotism Day, World Braille Day, the eleventh of the Twelve Days of Christmas, and, in Nigeria, Ogoni Day (Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People).

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the January 4 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Shoot me now! The NYT cannot stop its biased reporting about Israel, in which the news is almost imperceptibly infused with pious moralizing about what Israel should do. Now the Jewish-owned paper is beefing because Israel killed a senior Hamas leader—exactly what it is supposed to do—and did it “surgically”, the way the world prescribes. The NYT headline: “Killing of senior Hamas leader carries risks for Israel, analysts say.” As if Israel didn’t know this!  What does the paper want—for Israel to surrender to Hamas and withdraw back into its boundaries? Don’t answer that, because the answer is “yes”. From the odious rag:

“Of all the possible reactions Hamas may take, the most disconcerting is with regard to the hostages,” wrote the columnist, Nachum Barnea. “The argument that the assassination will soften Sinwar’s position is just a story we tell ourselves,” he wrote, referring to the Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, adding that the killing was likely to “delay, or even torpedo, the negotiations” for their release.

Mr. Netanyahu met with representatives of hostage families on Tuesday evening, around the very time that the strike took place, and told them efforts to free their loved ones were continuing. “The contacts are being held; they have not been cut off,” he said.

Israel, familiar with the seemingly endless cycle of attacks and counterattacks in the Middle East, is bracing for retribution.

Many residents who live along the northern border with Lebanon have already been displaced from their homes for months because of rocket fire by Hezbollah, with whom Mr. al-Arouri had worked closely.

After the killing, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military’s chief spokesman, said in a televised briefing that Israeli forces were “on very high alert on all fronts, for defensive and offensive actions.” He emphasized that Israel was “focused on fighting Hamas,” in what some Israeli analysts interpreted as a suggestion that it did not seek a wider war with Hezbollah.

Israeli public support for destroying Hamas is broad but not unqualified: After almost three months of war in Gaza, and amid growing international pressure to limit the rising number of Palestinian civilian deaths, many Israelis are beginning to voice out loud questions about whether the goal is realistic, and whether the country could bear the toll it would take to achieve it.

Most senior Hamas leaders within Gaza have eluded capture, and though Israel has begun pulling some troops out of the enclave in what appears to be the start of a shift toward a new stage of the war, few in the country were prepared for a conflict of this length and with such heavy casualties.

I’m starting to believe that not only does the NYT want Israel to lose the war, but they don’t even want Israel to exist.  That’s probably an exaggeration, but when I read an article like the above, which made the steam come out of my ears, I can almost see the editors frantically looking for some angle that’s bad for Israel. And when Israel screws up, as it did when killing the three hostages, I bet they pass out sweets in the newsroom.

*And along those lines, the Washington Post, a running dog sprinting for the pound, is tut-tutting about how a surgical strike on a Hamas leader could produce a “wider war” and that Hezbollah has vowed to take revenge. Seriously, we’re supposed to fret over Israel doing exactly what nearly all of America wants it to do? Oy!

Hezbollah chief Hasan Nasrallah said in an address Wednesday that Israel would meet with “a response and punishment” a day after the death of senior Hamas leader Saleh Arouri in a suspected Israeli drone strike in a Beirut suburb. Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militant group based in Lebanon, has traded fire with Israel in recent weeks amid fear that tensions could lead to a regional conflict. The Lebanese government said it was urging Hezbollah to show restraint. “If the enemy thinks of waging a war on Lebanon,” Nasrallah said, they “will regret it.” Before Nasrallah’s speech, the Israel Defense Forces said its troops were “prepared for any scenario.”

. . .Regional and global leaders warned against escalating violence after the killing of a top Hamas official, Saleh Arouri, in Beirut, amid fears that tensions could boil over on the Israeli-Lebanese border and across the region.

  • In France, President Emmanuel Macrontold Israeli Minister Benny Gantz that it was “essential to avoid any escalatory attitude, particularly in Lebanon,” according to a readout of a call Tuesday provided by French officials, Agence France-Presse reported. Macron also reportedly offered France as an intermediary to keep lines of communication open among all parties.

Macron can aller en randonnée. An official of Hamas happened to be in Beirut, and he expects Israel to stay its hand. Pfft!

  • In Lebanon, Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habbib told the BBC that government officials are urging Hezbollah not to respond to Arouri’s killing, and he called on Israel’s allies to also restrain it from taking action in Lebanon. “We are very concerned,” he said, referring to the risk of a regional war. Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, condemned the attack as an “Israeli crime” aimed at drawing Lebanon into the conflict.

If Hamas officials go to Lebanon, so will Israelis or their weapons. Pfft!

  • An adviser to Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, former ambassador Mark Regev, said the strike did not represent an attack against the Lebanese state or Hezbollah. “Whoever did this did a surgical strike against the Hamas leadership,” he said in an interview with MSNBC. Israel has not taken responsibility for the attack, he said.
  • In Iran, which is a key backer of Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said the attack was “another spark in the veins of resistance and motivation to fight against” Israel.

No, it’s an attempt of Israel to stop terrorism against it, terrorism which is largely financed and promoted by Iran.

  • The United Nations peacekeeping force inside Lebanon, UNIFIL, has urged all parties to cease fire. “We are deeply concerned at any potential for escalation that could have devastating consequences,” a spokesman said in a statement emailed Wednesday. The U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon was established in 1978 to monitor the border after Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon that year.

The UN, which is clearly an arm of Palestine now, can also take a hike. Surely they know what a “cease fire” means. But when have they ever cared a hoot about Israel? Further, the UN force in Lebanon has done almost nothing to curb Hezbollah, something that’s clearly obvious now.

*Here’s a Times of Israel headline that should scare the bejeezus out of Hamas. Click to read:

It’s a short article:

After the killing of Hamas deputy chief Saleh al-Arouri in Beirut yesterday, allegedly by Israel, Mossad chief David Barnea says today: “Let every Arab mother know that if her son took part in the [October 7] massacre — he signed his own death warrant.”

Barnea makes the comment at the funeral of former Mossad head Zvi Zamir, who died yesterday.

The quote is a paraphrase of a famous one by Israel’s first prime minister David Ben Gurion, who said in a 1963 speech: “Let every Hebrew mother know she has entrusted the fate of her [soldier] sons to commanders worthy of it.”

But maybe the butchers don’t care, for when Mossad takes them down they’ll become shaheed (martyrs) and get all the goodies in Heaven. Mossad has a long memory, though, as witnessed by the seven years it took for them to finish off the terrorists who killed Israeli athletes in the 1972 Munich Olympics.

*More trouble, but this time in Iran. As the WSJ reports, the funeral of Qassem Soleimani, a top Iranian terrorist boss, who was assassinated by the U.S. four years ago, was interrupted by a series of explosions that killed at least 95 people.  And Israel apparently had nothing to do with it. Soleimani was the man who gave orders to Hezbollah, to Hamas, to the Houthis, and who was in charge of exporting the Iranian revolution to the whole world. He was killed at the direction of, yes, Donald Trump with the approval of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, without the Congress knowing anything.

At least 95 people were killed in explosions in Iran near a public ceremony commemorating the death of a senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officer killed in 2020 by an American airstrike, the country’s state media reported. Iranian officials said the blasts were the work of terrorists.

Some 211 others were wounded by the blasts, which took place as crowds gathered near the tomb of Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, according to Iran’s government-run Islamic Republic News Agency. Iran said it was investigating the cause of the explosions. Officials revised the death toll down after reporting earlier in the day that 103 people had been killed in the blasts.

The blasts come at a moment of heightened tensions across the Middle East, with war raging between Israel and Hamas, an Islamist militant group that has moved closer to Iran in recent years. A senior Hamas leader, Saleh al-Arouri, was killed on Tuesday in Beirut in what Lebanese officials described as a suspected Israeli attack. The Israeli military declined to comment on whether it was responsible for the attack in Beirut.

Of course it was, but they don’t comment on stuff like this (and we have confirmation from “anonymous sources”(. But I highly doubt that the explosions in Iran had anything to do with Israel. They have nothing to gain from causing pandemonium at the funeral of a dead terrorist and there are plenty of splinter groups in Iran that would gladly do so.  But when in doubt, blame the U.S. and Israel:

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in a short statement didn’t assign blame for Wednesday’s attacks, saying “the perpetrators and criminals who were involved in this terrorist crime will soon be identified and punished for their actions.”

Some Iranian officials broadly blamed the U.S. and Israel for the blasts, without offering specifics of how the two countries might have been involved.

U.S. officials said the U.S. had no involvement in the blast, and said they had no indication Israel was behind it. White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the U.S. had seen no intelligence anticipating violence surrounding the anniversary of Soleimani’s death.

As an example of how odious this guy was, he was personally sanctioned by the United Nations. You have to be a really bad actor to get that award!

*Bill Ackman, the hedge-fund gazillionaire whose tweets helped bring down Claudine Gay and who was the first donor to withhold money from Harvard for its antisemitism, has written an article for the Free Press called “How to fix Harvard.” I thought Steve Pinker had already done that by proposing his “Fivefold Way”, but Ackman has more to say:

A few weeks later, I went up to campus to see things with my own eyes, and listen and learn from students and faculty. I met with 15 or so members of the faculty and a few hundred students in small and large settings, and a clearer picture began to emerge.

I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem. It was simply a troubling warning sign—it was the “canary in the coal mine”—despite how destructive it was in impacting student life and learning on campus.

I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.

Then I did more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard but the educational system at large. I came to understand that diversity, equity, and inclusion was not what I had naively thought these words meant.

I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing, and more.

What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form. Rather, DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.

Apparently Ackman has not been paying attention to campuses, and seems pretty ignorant about the grasping tentacles of DEI and its narrative. Well, better to learn later than never. And so he pins most of the blame for Gay’s failure on her embrace of DEI. Pinker, too, says that DEI must be eliminated to “fix Harvard”, but his solution is more thorough.  Ackman on Gay:

The Harvard board should not have run a search process that had a predetermined objective of hiring only a DEI-approved candidate. In any case, there are many incredibly talented black men and women who could have been selected by Harvard to serve as its president, so why did the Harvard Corporation board choose Gay?

One can only speculate without knowing all of the facts, but it appears Gay’s leadership in the creation of Harvard’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging and the penetration of DEI ideology into the corporation board room perhaps made Gay the favored candidate. The search was also done at a time when many other top universities had similar DEI-favored candidate searches underway for their presidents, reducing the number of potential candidates available in light of the increased competition for talent.

He also suggests that universities should get their presidents from the world of business:

. . . . universities should broaden their searches to include capable businesspeople for the role of president, as a university president requires more business skills than can be gleaned from even the most successful academic career with its hundreds of peer-reviewed papers and many books.

Perhaps, but businesspeople don’t much understand what’s needed in academia. In fact, Harvard’s Board of Overseers is loaded with such people, and look what they did: they chose Gay and then defended her against the charges of plagiarism! He gives other recommendations, including the resignation of several Board members, and some of them are good:

Harvard must once again become a meritocratic institution that does not discriminate for or against faculty or students based on their skin color, and where diversity is understood in its broadest form so that students can learn in an environment that welcomes diverse viewpoints from faculty and students from truly diverse backgrounds and experiences.

I can sign on to that. In net, Ackman did Harvard a very good turn, but Pinker’s solution involves more salubrious changes than does Ackman, with more emphasis on free speech and the addition of institutional neutrality.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili looks proud and very intent today!:

Hili: I’m very busy.
A: What with?
Hili: Observing the world.
In Polish:
Hili: Jestem bardzo zajęta.
Ja: Czym?
Hili: Obserwowaniem świata.

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

From Kristen:

From Stash Krod, a New Yorker kitty cartoon by Kim Warp:

From the Really Funny Signs FB page:

From Masih, another Iranian women beaten to death because of her tonsure. She was just 17.

From Jez, who loves otters—just like Matthew and me:

From Simon; Oded likes to find scientific analogues to videos (“supplementary material” consists of the data that you don’t want to put in the paper but is necessary to buttress its conclusions)::

From Malcolm (second tweet). A cat makes a mistake by attacking a crow when its mates are around:

From Luana, the two types of d*gs:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a 21 year old woman killed with an injection of phenol directly into the heart, a horrible and painful way to die. Then they killed her parents and her sister.

And a drawing of the executions, I believe by someone who witnessed them:

Two tweets from Professor Cobb. First, LOOK AT THIS YAK GO!

Six species of cat from one trailcam (identified in Spanish):

 

19 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. On this day:
    1642 – English Civil War: King Charles I, accompanied by 400 soldiers, attempts to arrest five members of Parliament for treason, only to discover the men had been tipped off and fled.

    1649 – English Civil War: The Rump Parliament votes to put Charles I on trial.

    1853 – After having been kidnapped and sold into slavery in the American South, Solomon Northup regains his freedom; his memoir Twelve Years a Slave later becomes a national bestseller.

    1903 – Topsy, an elephant, is electrocuted by the owners of Luna Park, Coney Island. The Edison film company records the film Electrocuting an Elephant of Topsy’s death. [Monsters!]

    1918 – The Finnish Declaration of Independence is recognized by Russia, Sweden, Germany and France.

    1944 – World War II: Operation Carpetbagger, involving the dropping of arms and supplies to resistance fighters in Europe, begins.

    1951 – Korean War: Chinese and North Korean forces capture Seoul for the second time.

    1958 – Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957, falls to Earth from orbit.

    1972 – Rose Heilbron becomes the first female judge to sit at the Old Bailey in London, UK.

    1987 – The Maryland train collision: An Amtrak train en route to Boston from Washington, D.C., collides with Conrail engines in Chase, Maryland, United States, killing 16 people.

    1990 – In Pakistan’s deadliest train accident an overloaded passenger train collides with an empty freight train, resulting in 307 deaths and 700 injuries.

    1998 – A massive ice storm hits eastern Canada and the northeastern United States, continuing through January 10 and causing widespread destruction.

    2000 – Catherine Hartley and Fiona Thornewill become the first British women to walk across Antarctica to the South Pole. [You can read about their feat, which started with a drunken New Year’s Eve resolution, and the difficulties women faced in setting foot in Antarctica at all here.]

    2004 – Spirit, a NASA Mars rover, lands successfully on Mars at 04:35 UTC.

    2007 – The 110th United States Congress convenes, electing Nancy Pelosi as the first female Speaker of the House in U.S. history.

    2010 – The Burj Khalifa, the current tallest building in the world, officially opens in Dubai.

    Births:
    1581 – James Ussher, Irish archbishop and historian (d. 1656). [His chronology sought to establish the time and date of the creation as “the entrance of the night preceding the 23rd day of October… the year before Christ 4004”; that is, around 6 pm on 22 October 4004 BC, per the proleptic Julian calendar. So he’s to blame for the Young Earth Creationists.]

    1643 (NS) – Isaac Newton, English mathematician and physicist (d. 1726/27).

    1785 – Jacob Grimm, German philologist and mythologist (d. 1863).

    1809 – Louis Braille, French educator, invented Braille (d. 1852).

    1813 – Isaac Pitman, English linguist and educator (d. 1897).

    [Two inventors of unconventional notation systems sharing a birthday.]

    1838 – General Tom Thumb, American circus performer (d. 1883).

    1864 – Clara Emilia Smitt, Swedish doctor and author (d. 1928). [She was also one of Sweden’s earliest women rights activists and wrote articles on the subject for the magazine Idun.]

    1878 – Augustus John, Welsh painter and illustrator (d. 1961).

    1900 – James Bond, American ornithologist and zoologist (d. 1989).

    1905 – Sterling Holloway, American actor (d. 1992).

    1940 – Gao Xingjian, Chinese novelist, playwright, and critic, Nobel Prize laureate.

    1943 – Doris Kearns Goodwin, American historian and author. [Won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for History for her book No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II.]

    1947 – Marie-Thérèse Letablier, French sociologist and academic.

    1956 – Bernard Sumner, English singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer.

    1957 – Patty Loveless, American singer-songwriter and guitarist.

    1960 – Michael Stipe, American singer-songwriter and producer.

    1965 – Craig Revel Horwood, Australian-English dancer, choreographer, and director.

    1966 – Deana Carter, American singer-songwriter and guitarist.

    The amount of death terror experienced is closely related to the amount of life unlived. (Irvin D. Yalom):
    871 – Æthelwulf, Saxon ealdorman.

    1804 – Charlotte Lennox, English author and poet (b. 1730).

    1877 – Cornelius Vanderbilt, American businessman and philanthropist (b. 1794).

    1882 – John William Draper, English-American physician, chemist, and photographer (b. 1811).

    1904 – Anna Winlock, American astronomer and academic (b. 1857).

    1925 – Nellie Cashman, American nurse, restaurateur, entrepreneur, and gold prospector (b. 1845).

    1943 – Marina Raskova, Russian pilot and navigator (b. 1912). [The first woman in the Soviet Union to achieve the diploma of professional air navigator. She founded three female air regiments, one of which eventually flew over 30,000 sorties in World War II and produced at least 30 Heroes of the Soviet Union.]

    1960 – Albert Camus, French novelist, philosopher, and journalist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1913).

    1961 – Erwin Schrödinger, Austrian physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1887).

    1965 – T. S. Eliot, American-English poet, playwright, and critic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1888).

    1975 – Carlo Levi, Italian painter, author, and activist (b. 1902).

    1986 – Christopher Isherwood, English-American author and academic (b. 1904).

    1986 – Phil Lynott, Irish singer-songwriter, bass player, and producer (b. 1949).

    1999 – Iron Eyes Cody, American actor and stuntman (b. 1904). [After his death, it was revealed that he was of Sicilian parentage, and not Native American at all.]

    2004 – John Toland, American historian and author (b. 1912).

    2007 – Helen Hill, American director and producer (b. 1970).

    2011 – Gerry Rafferty, Scottish singer-songwriter (b. 1947).

    2012 – Eve Arnold, American photographer and journalist (b. 1912).

    2012 – Rod Robbie, English-Canadian architect, designed the Canadian Pavilion and Rogers Centre (b. 1928).

    2021 – Tanya Roberts, American actress (b. 1949).

    2023 – Rosi Mittermaier, German alpine skier and Olympic champion (b. 1950). [She was the overall World Cup champion in 1976 and a double gold medalist at the 1976 Winter Olympics.]

  2. The lead story in last Sunday’s NYTimes was about the sexual abuse of Israeli hostages.

    1. Yes, that went some way towards making up for their other coverage. But probably too little, too late for many.

    1. It was an hour late because I overslept. You should have it now. But I cannot fix the issue of people not getting posts if they should have. Try resubscribing or whatever.

  4. I certainly agree that DEI should go, and that Harvard’s next President shouldn’t be a member of the DEI mafia. It’s going to take more than that, though. A president alone can’t stifle DEI without destroying institutional amity. Ultimately, it will require a revolt of the consumers. Until many schools see declining enrollment like Evergreen college, DEI will remain part of the institutional zeitgeist.

  6. Israel needs to continue its pursuit of Hamas leaders and dispatch them permanently. The NYT and UN can pound salt.

    Regarding Bill Ackman and his apparent lack of understanding of DEI. I think that this kind of naïveté is commonplace, as the phrase “diversity, equity, and inclusion” seems so benign. A rabbi I know recently wrote a piece in her temple’s monthly bulletin talking about the need to embrace DEI to protect members of the LGBTQ+ community from discrimination. I responded with a private e-mail to her pointing out that by allying herself with the DEI movement she is aligning herself with antisemites and that she needs to rethink the company she keeps. She had no idea what she was tying herself to.

    My point is that lots of otherwise well-informed people do no know what an evil movement the DEI ideology is and what a danger the DEI bureaucracies pose to our institutions. The entire vile enterprise must be exposed, discredited, and dismantled. We who read and participate regularly in the conversations on this web site are WAY more informed than the general public.

    1. I suspect brainwashing (see Robert J. Lifton’s writing) : emotional warfare to admit a “crime” or sin by adopting the people’s standpoint.

      I wish I knew how to undo brainwashing – it is astonishing in its power.

      Also check out entryism. There’s a progression to the takeover. The end stage will destroy the institution because Marxism doesn’t know how to do anything but get power and run the engine ’til the tank is empty at the expense of humanity – then continue the long march.

      1. I wish I knew how to undo brainwashing – it is astonishing in its power.

        As the free speech mantra goes : “the solution to the problems of free speech is more free speech”. So, the solution to brainwashing is more brainwashing – same magnitude, different direction. Brainwashing is a vector, not a scalar.
        Being brainwashable is probably part of the human state. Juveniles who didn’t accept brainwashing from authority figures (parents, elders, loud voices) tended to have fewer surviving offspring than those who did. After that – see blog^H^H^H^H website title. So, you’ll either have to provide a counteracting vector of brainwashing (“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”, as IIRC Juvenal wrote about infidelity.) or make people more resistant to all brainwashing. The latter would be (correctly) recognised by all politicians and advertisers as a profound existential threat, and resisted to the limit of their almost unlimited powers.
        Yep. There are reasons people are susceptible to brainwashing. Profound reasons. You might be able to remove those reasons, but the resultant organisms might not be recognisable as humans. Mentally, if not genetically.
        Oh, BTW, Marxism is one of the innumerable political systems dependant on human susceptibility to brainwashing. If you attack brainwashing, you’ll find yourself under fire from every political dimension, including the ones you thought were your “fellow travellers”.

        1. Well reasoned.

          TL; DR : free speech is not the doctrine of any cult.

          TL;DR 2: The antidote to brainwashing would then be free speech (I’d say, following along your honestly interesting argument).

          Free speech is not totalizing – we are free to reject, disapprove, make incorrect conclusions, and resolve disputes according to classical liberal thought / empiricism.

          Every brainwashing project depends on gnostic wizards with secret knowledge to control thought along social / emotional dimensions.

          1. When you are being brainwashed, you are, by definition, not in a position to freely choose the magnitude and direction of the brainwashing you are being exposed to.
            Unless your brainwasher is being particularly incompetent.

    2. I agree that many, many people have no idea what DEI is. I usually have to tell anyone outside academia what the acronym stands for.

      1. Is there an acronym that doesn’t require explanation?

        Some decades ago – before I had internet access – I started trying to compile a dictionary of acronyms used in a particular part of my industry – petrophysical investigation of wellbore materials. The list hit the several hundred mark in a couple of jobs, and since I wasn’t receiving any working time allocation to maintain it, I had to let it go. Some years later, when I got a phone line and 36kbps modem at home, I resumed the subject and fairly rapidly found that an industry body would sell me access to their database of exactly these acronyms for a few thousand dollars a year (with an NDA). The database claimed to be over 80,000 entries long. For 36 characters (English letters, plus digits), that’s enough for every 3-character acronym, and a similar number of 4-character acronyms (footnote). (Being operated from Houston, it is unlikely that they covered Cyrillic, Hangul or Chinese character sets, though both scripts definitely have their own acronyms covering similar parameters.)
        Yes, All Acronyms (AA) need explanation at First Use (FU). Not that people do. But that’s what the “review” phase of the Publishing Cycle (PC) is for.
        .
        footnote (added in review phase, before Spell Check (SC) phase) : 36^2 = 1296 ; 36^3=46656.

      2. Be sure to note:

        DEI is fraud.

        It is in fact a brainwashing/struggle session strategy to produce more of the same.

  7. You mentioned that NYT is a “Jewish-owned paper.” I don’t think the Sulzberger who now runs the paper is Jewish.

    https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-sulzberger-family-a-complicated-jewish-legacy-at-the-new-york-times/

    “Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. was raised in his mother’s Episcopalian faith and later stopped practicing religion. He and his wife, Gail Gregg, were married by a Presbyterian minister. However, he has said that people still tend to regard him as Jewish due to his last name.”

    But yes — given that earlier generations identified as reform Jews, it is one of life’s great mysteries why they have always been anti-zionist, anti-Israel, and not supportive of issues affecting Jews.

    1. A “reform Jew” – that would be, in Orthodox terms, an utter heretic, worse that an open enemy? And to leave the faith – even worse!
      “If,” to quote an American President who (possibly genuinely) didn’t understand the implications of what he was saying, “you’re not with us, you’re against us.”

      What would you call a Jew who isn’t also a Zionist? Or even worse – one who dislikes and distrusts the political actions of the state of Israel while being a Zionist? A traitor? Worse?

      he has said that people still tend to regard him as Jewish due to his last name

      Why does someone with a Germanic-sounding name get tagged as “Jewish” in America? Surely the number of non-Jewish German immigrants exceeds the number of Jewish ones? Probably by a considerable margin.

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