Tuesday: Hili dialogue

February 20, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to The Cruelest Day, Tuesday February 20, 2024, and National Cherry Pie Day. This reminds me, of course, of the delicious cherry pies that Malgorzata baked when I visit Dobrzyn. Here’s one of them along with some freshly-picked pie cherries:

It’s also National Muffin Day, Shrove Monday, Cream Bun Day in Iceland (didn’t we just have that?), Love Your Pet Day, Presidents’ Day (again?) Day of Heavenly Hundred Heroes  in Ukraine (108 civilian protestors killed in 2014), and World Day of Social Justice.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the February 20 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*How many Hamas fighters have been killed by the IDF? According to the Times of Israel (and of course caveat emptor, as these figures are from Hamas), 6,000—less than half the estimate of the IDF.

A Hamas official based in Qatar tells the Reuters news agency that the group estimated it had lost 6,000 fighters during the four-month-old conflict, about half the 12,000 Israel says it has killed.

Hamas can keep fighting and is prepared for a long war in Rafah and Gaza, says the official, who requested anonymity.

“Netanyahu’s options are difficult and ours are too. He can occupy Gaza but Hamas is still standing and fighting. He hasn’t achieved his goals to kill the Hamas leadership or annihilate Hamas,” he adds.

The comments are a rare acknowledgment from the terror group that it has suffered significant losses in the Gaza fighting and appears to mark the first time that they have differentiated between combatants and civilians in a death toll from the fighting.

According to official figures from the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry 28,985 Palestinians have been killed in the war.

However, these figures cannot be independently verified, and are believed to include both civilians and Hamas members killed in Gaza, including as a consequence of terror groups’ own rocket misfires. The IDF says it has killed nearly 12,000 operatives in Gaza, in addition to some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.

The IDF says 235 Israeli soldiers have been killed in the Gaza ground offensive.

If you take the IDF figure of 13,000, then the ratio of terrorists to Gazan civilians killed is about 1:1, a low number for combat, particularly urban combat when human shields are being used.  You can do the math for the Hamas numbers, but I don’t believe them; and, even with them, the ratio is still much lower than the 9:1 estimated by the UN itself for wars in general.  The ratio is lower for the U.S. and UK in recent wars against Al-Qaeda and ISIS: about 3 civilians to every combatant, and the Israeli ratio is less than half that. So why are people saying that there are “too many” civilian deaths.

*Apropos, at the same venue’s blog, Michael Oren argues that “The US charge of indiscriminate bombing is over the top.” (h/t: Norman)

Even when the enemy is using its own population as a human shield, Israel must do its utmost to reduce the damage to civilians. This is not only a strategic interest for Israel – civilian casualties help substantiate the charges of war crimes and genocide that could result in boycotts and sanctions – but also a moral imperative.

For that reason, the IDF takes unprecedented measures to warn civilians of impending actions and to evacuate them from combat zones. It’s why, despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles, Israel has maintained the lowest combatant-to-civilian casualty rate in modern warfare – as Hamas’s own statistics show.

How, then, can the Biden administration accuse Israel of ״indiscriminately bombing” Gaza, of reacting “over the top” to the events of October 7th, and of dehumanizing the Palestinians? The oft-leveled charge that “too many Palestinians have been killed” implies that a smaller number would have been acceptable to the White House. The history of our previous rounds of fighting with Hamas, each of which produced similar claims of “too many Palestinians killed,” suggests that no such number exists.

President Biden and his staff continue to uphold Israel’s right to self-defense, to supply us with vital forms of ammunition, and to resist mounting calls for a permanent ceasefire. Yet, the accusations they level at Israel do far more than insult our soldiers. They fundamentally endanger our security.

Though Hamas is well-known to grossly inflate its casualty figures, even that of the 28,000 civilian deaths cited by the “Gaza Health Ministry” actually proves Israel’s case. The 28,000 includes the nearly 12,000 terrorists killed by the IDF. Deducting that number as well as the civilian casualties caused by the thirty percent of Hamas rockets that fall short within the Gaza Strip, and the total will be roughly 13,000 civilian fatalities. That is a ratio of nearly one combatant death for every civilian.

According to The New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Watson Institute of Brown University, in America’s wars in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the ratio was four civilians killed for every combatant. The record for NATO’s 1999 intervention in Serbia was similarly four-to-one.

Apart from the unprecedented challenges confronting Israeli forces in Gaza, their success in reducing civilian casualties is also unmatched.

That success, however, is nothing to be celebrated. On the contrary. Israel’s goal for its terrorist-to-civilian fatality ratio should always be one-to-zero. Outrage at the civilian casualties, meanwhile, must be directed at those who cynically and barbarously engineer them. Hamas’s goal is to delegitimize Israel and brand us as war criminals. That is precisely the objective served by accusations of “over the top” reactions, indiscriminate bombing, and dehumanization.

*This proposal by the U.S., reported by Reuters, would be a major disaster for Israel, and if adopted it would certainly guarantee that Israel would lose the war, for Hamas would remain as a going concern. It’s crazy!

The United States has proposed an alternative draft United Nations Security Council resolution calling for a temporary ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war and opposing a major Israeli ground offensive in Rafah in southern Gaza, according to the text seen by Reuters on Monday.

Washington has been averse to the word ceasefire in any U.N. action on the Israel-Hamas war, but the U.S. draft text echoes language that President Joe Biden said he used last week in conversations with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The U.S. draft text “determines that under current circumstances a major ground offensive into Rafah would result in further harm to civilians and their further displacement including potentially into neighboring countries.”

Israel plans to storm Rafah, where more than 1 million of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza have sought shelter, prompting international concern that such a move would sharply worsen the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

The draft U.S. resolution says such a move “would have serious implications for regional peace and security, and therefore underscores that such a major ground offensive should not proceed under current circumstances.”

It was not immediately clear when or if the draft resolution would be put to a vote in the 15-member council. A resolution needs at least nine votes in favor and no vetoes by the United States, France, Britain, Russia or China to be adopted.

The U.S. put forward the text after Algeria on Saturday requested the council vote on Tuesday on its draft resolution, which would demand an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield quickly signaled that it would be vetoed.

I can’t believe that the U.S. would actually propose such a resolution, for capturing Rafah is essential to eliminate Hamas, and to prevent that it and mandate a ceasefire would guarantee that Hamas would resurrect itself with all its attendant terrorism. And what about the hostages? It’s things like this that make me wonder if Biden really doesn’t want Israel to win the war, but prefers the status quo or some ludicrous and unworkable “two-state solution.” I’m hoping that the “text seen by Reuters” is just a draft, and one that will be rejected by Hamas unless Israel frees 9,000 jailed Palestinian terrorists. It won’t do that, and I hope that Israel can defy this addlepated resolution should it pass.

*You probably know that hyper-conservative Republican congresswoman Lauren “Snogging at the Movies” Boebert has decided to run for reelection in a different Colorado district. She nearly lost her seat in 2022, and isn’t well regarded anywhere, so she’s trying a nearby district where the incumbent GOP representative is retiring. But her reelection isn’t a done deal:

Now, as the congresswoman runs for election in a new district on the opposite side of the state, voters are scrutinizing whether she belongs in their country.

“So many things get spread about you,” a voter told Lauren Boebert on a recent snowy morning in Elbert County, which has a population of 27,000 and is southeast of Denver. At a fairgrounds building, she circulated among a dozen tables of voters under 4-H banners and state-fair marksmanship rankings, fielding questions about immigration policy, election security and her personal life after a rocky divorce.

Voters there were divided, reflecting what political analysts are forecasting: It will be a hard-fought and unpredictable primary race.

Mark Peters, a promoter who came to the event to sell T-shirts declaring, “Stop Democrapping on America,” said he wants the congresswoman in office. “Love Lauren Boebert…. She’s stood up to Democrats on everything,” Peters said.

Chris Ware, a retired medical contractor, left the event impressed with a few of the candidates, but not Boebert. “I will not vote for her. Period. She’s not one of us,” Ware said.

Boebert brings a $1.3 million war chest and almost-universal name recognition to the 11-person race in a district that covers agricultural plains stretching from Wyoming to New Mexico, and some of the wealthiest suburbs of Denver and Fort Collins.

Her fame could help in a crowded race, but it has become as much of a curse as a blessing, as she deals with fallout from scandals including her removal from a Denver theater back in September. The reception from grass-roots Republican groups has been chilly. The field includes strong local candidates, several with long statewide political experience and regional backing.

The congresswoman gained national recognition for her vocal support of gun rights when she was first elected in 2020. Her district switch came after she nearly lost her seat in 2022, prevailing over the Democratic challenger, Adam Frisch, by just 546 votes in an area where many said they had grown tired of Trump-style politics.

Fingers crossed! There are simply too many loons in Congress already.

*Is the Washington Post circling the drain. Have a look at the headlines and try to find something interesting. The best I could do is this one (click to read):

Okay, I’ll bite. For what?

On the evening of March 21, 1864, the quiet of a small corner of the Army of the Potomac’s sprawling winter camp along the Rappahannock River near Beverly Ford, Va., was disturbed when a fight broke out in one of the mess tents between Union Army civilian employees Moses J. Robinette and John J. Alexander.

The scuffle left Alexander bleeding from knife wounds, and Robinette was charged with attempted murder and incarcerated on a remote island near modern-day Florida. It would also cause an unexpected intersection in the histories of two American presidents, Lincoln and Biden — a story that has waited 160 years to be told.

Robinette, who received a pardon from Lincoln, was Biden’s great-great-grandfather.

Joseph Robinette Biden’s ancestral line has long been established and lists Moses J. Robinette among his paternal ancestors hailing from western Maryland, but very little has ever been chronicled about the man. Robinette’s court-martial records, discovered at the National Archives in Washington, show how the current president’s story is intertwined with that of the man who was president at the most perilous junction in U.S. history.

The military judges were not convinced. The next day, they rendered a unanimous verdict: guilty on all counts with the exception of “attempt to kill.” The punishment was two years’ incarceration at hard labor.

After his conviction, Robinette again had to wait nearly three months for his case to churn through the army’s bureaucratic channels. Occupied by active military operations, the commander of the Army of the Potomac, Gen. George G. Meade, did not confirm Robinette’s sentence until early July, when he was sent to the Dry Tortugas islands near Key West, Fla.

. . . Around the time Robinette arrived on Dry Tortugas, three army officers who knew him petitioned Lincoln to overturn his conviction. John S. Burdett, David L. Smith and Samuel R. Steel wrote that Robinette’s sentence was unduly harsh for “defending himself and cutting with a Penknife a Teamster much his superior in strength and Size, all under the impulse of the excitement of the moment.”

And so Lincoln pardoned him on Sept. 1, 1864. And this is about as interesting as watching golf on television.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Editor Hili has corrected Andrzej:

Hili: You made a mistake.
A: What mistake?
Hili: North Korea has more than 40 atomic bombs.
A: So claims Wikipedia.
Hili: I trust Wikipedia only when it is about ornithology.
In Polish:
Hili: Pomyliłeś się.
Ja: W czym?
Hili: Korea Północna ma więcej niż 40 bomb atomowych.
Ja: Tak twierdzi Wikipedia.
Hili: Ja jej ufam tylko w sprawach dotyczących ornitologii.

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

From Barry:

From Kristin:

From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:

Masih, at the Munich Security Conference, meets Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of Aleksei Navalny, who of course just died mysteriously in a Soviet Arctic gulag.

From Luana; the “indigenization” proceeds:

From Gravelinspector, who points out that we don’t really know if the Emperor whacked the Adelie. (Look at the size difference, though!) And it should be “discreetly”.

From Jez, a sneaky tree, though a dead one, too:

From Malcolm: leopard belly rubs:

The island at hand is Kiritimati (part of the many atolls that make up this republic), and yes, the names are real:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, an eight-year old Hungarian girl, gassed to death right upon arrival at Auschwitz:

A tweet from Professor Cobb, who asks, “Is it pretending to be a bird or a very big insect?” This is actually a mantid and I’ve put a video at the bottom. Why the markings, though?

25 thoughts on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue”

  2. Per your “didn’t we just do that” comment. Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras) was last week, so I assume Shrove monday (which I didn’t know was a thing) was also last week – anyhow that’s when we heard about Icelandic buns. It’s the beginning of Lent a movable feast – in some way linked to Passover – which set the original crucification weekend (the festival is always either early or late, never on time). Calendar dates don’t work. If your calendar tells you it’s pancake day tomorrow, it’s lying, it was last week! Happy fasting (or not)

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  3. WAPO circling the drain? In fairness, in this morning’s hard copy paper, that article was on page B3 of the Metro (regional/local) section, not the front page of the A section which covered Ukraine, Israel, NATO and the like this morning. The Biden story was today’s “Retropolis” column, a regular public interest feature that deals with historical local to DC happenings of interest. WAPO may be circling the drain, but I would not use this article and its placement to support such a call.

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  4. It’s a bit of a stretch to call those places in Kiribati “cities”. Looking at Google Earth, Poland, for example, appears to consist of about five houses.

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    1. In the US, every “poor little one-horse town” (© Mark Twain) has signs marking its “city limits”, I believe, so they use the word loosely.

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    2. According to Wikipedia, Poland has a population of 400. Maybe they enjoy communal living?

      But it also appears that Paris is defunct, as reportedly all of the people living there gave up and moved to London. I imagine this opens the door for the English to have a bit more fun at the expense of the French…

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  5. On this day:
    1472 – Orkney and Shetland are pawned by Norway to Scotland in lieu of a dowry for Margaret of Denmark.

    1792 – The Postal Service Act, establishing the United States Post Office Department, is signed by United States President George Washington.

    1816 – Rossini’s opera The Barber of Seville premieres at the Teatro Argentina in Rome.

    1824 – William Buckland formally announces the name Megalosaurus, the first scientifically validly named non-avian dinosaur species.

    1846 – Polish insurgents lead an uprising in Kraków to incite a fight for national independence.

    1872 – The Metropolitan Museum of Art opens in New York City.

    1877 – Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake receives its premiere at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow.

    1905 – The U.S. Supreme Court upholds the constitutionality of Massachusetts’s mandatory smallpox vaccination program in Jacobson v. Massachusetts.

    1933 – The U.S. Congress approves the Blaine Act to repeal federal Prohibition in the United States, sending the Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution to state ratifying conventions for approval.

    1935 – Caroline Mikkelsen becomes the first woman to set foot in Antarctica.

    1939 – Madison Square Garden Nazi rally: The largest ever pro-Nazi rally in United States history is convened in Madison Square Garden, New York City, with 20,000 members and sympathizers of the German American Bund present.

    1942 – World War II: Lieutenant Edward O’Hare becomes America’s first World War II flying ace.

    1943 – World War II: American movie studio executives agree to allow the Office of War Information to censor movies.

    1943 – The Saturday Evening Post publishes the first of Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms in support of United States President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address theme of Four Freedoms.

    1952 – Emmett Ashford becomes the first African-American umpire in organized baseball by being authorized to be a substitute umpire in the Southwestern International League.

    1962 – Mercury program: While aboard Friendship 7, John Glenn becomes the first American to orbit the Earth, making three orbits in four hours, 55 minutes.

    1971 – The United States Emergency Broadcast System is accidentally activated in an erroneous national alert.

    1986 – The Soviet Union launches its Mir spacecraft. Remaining in orbit for 15 years, it is occupied for ten of those years.

    1998 – American figure skater Tara Lipinski, at the age of 15, becomes the youngest Olympic figure skating gold-medalist at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan.

    2014 – Dozens of Euromaidan anti-government protesters died in Ukraine’s capital Kyiv, many reportedly killed by snipers.

    Births:
    1784 – Judith Montefiore, British linguist, travel writer, philanthropist (d. 1862). [Authored the first Jewish cook book written in English.]

    1839 – Benjamin Waugh, English activist, founded the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) (d. 1908).

    1893 – Elizabeth Holloway Marston, American psychologist and author (d. 1993). [Credited, with her husband William Moulton Marston, with the development of the systolic blood pressure measurement used to detect deception; the predecessor to the polygraph. She is also credited as the inspiration for her husband’s comic book creation Wonder Woman, a character fashioned on their polyamorous life partner, Olive Byrne.]

    1898 – Enzo Ferrari, Italian motor racing driver and entrepreneur, founder of Scuderia Ferrari and Ferrari (d. 1988).

    1902 – Ansel Adams, American photographer and environmentalist (d. 1984).

    1912 – Johnny Checketts, New Zealand flying ace of the Second World War (d. 2006).

    1920 – Karl Albrecht, German businessman, co-founded Aldi (d. 2014).

    1925 – Robert Altman, American director and screenwriter (d. 2006).

    1927 – Roy Cohn, American lawyer and political activist (d. 1986).

    1927 – Sidney Poitier, Bahamian-American actor, director, and diplomat (d. 2022).

    1935 – Ellen Gilchrist, American novelist, short story writer, and poet (d. 2024).

    1937 – Nancy Wilson, American singer and actress (d. 2018).

    1941 – Buffy Sainte-Marie, Canadian singer-songwriter and producer. [In October 2023, an investigation by the CBC’s The Fifth Estate television program disproved Sainte-Marie’s career-long claims of Indigenous ancestry. It included interviews with some of her relatives and located her birth certificate which listed her as white and her supposed adopted parents as her birth parents.]

    1942 – Mitch McConnell, American lawyer and politician.

    1943 – Mike Leigh, English director and screenwriter.

    1946 – J. Geils, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2017).

    1950 – Walter Becker, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (d. 2017).

    1951 – Randy California, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1997).

    1963 – Ian Brown, English singer-songwriter and musician.

    1967 – Kurt Cobain, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1994).

    1984 – Trevor Noah, South African comedian, actor, and television host.

    1988 – Rihanna, Barbadian singer, songwriter and actress.

    2003 – Olivia Rodrigo, American actress and singer.

    If Shaw and Einstein couldn’t beat death, what chance have I got? Practically none. (Mel Brooks):
    922 – Theodora, Byzantine empress. [Nothing is known of her background except for the fact that she was born into a family of Greek peasants.]

    1626 – John Dowland, English lute player and composer (b. 1563).

    1778 – Laura Bassi, Italian physicist and scholar (b. 1711).

    1895 – Frederick Douglass, American author and activist (b. c. 1818).

    1900 – Washakie, American tribal leader (b. 1798).

    1961 – Percy Grainger, Australian-American pianist and composer (b. 1882).

    1968 – Anthony Asquith, English director and screenwriter (b. 1902).

    1972 – Maria Goeppert-Mayer, German-American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1906). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]

    1992 – Dick York, American actor (b. 1928).

    1993 – Ferruccio Lamborghini, Italian businessman, founded Lamborghini (b. 1916).

    1996 – Toru Takemitsu, Japanese pianist, guitarist, and composer (b. 1930).

    1999 – Sarah Kane, English playwright (b. 1971).

    2001 – Donella Meadows, American environmentalist, author, and academic (b. 1941).

    2005 – Hunter S. Thompson, American journalist and author (b. 1937).

    2008 – Emily Perry, English actress and dancer (b. 1907).

    2017 – Mildred Dresselhaus, American physicist (b. 1930).

    2017 – Steve Hewlett, British journalist (b. 1958).

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    1. Woman of the Day:
      [Text from Wikipedia]

      Maria Goeppert Mayer (German pronunciation: [maˈʁiːa ˈɡœpɛʁt ˈmaɪ̯ɐ], née Göppert; born June 28 1906, died on this day in 1972) was a German-born American theoretical physicist, and Nobel laureate in Physics for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus. She was the second woman to win a Nobel Prize in physics, the first being Marie Curie. In 1986, the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award for early-career women physicists was established in her honor.

      A graduate of the University of Göttingen, Goeppert Mayer wrote her doctoral thesis on the theory of possible two-photon absorption by atoms. At the time, the chances of experimentally verifying her thesis seemed remote, but the development of the laser in the 1960s later permitted this. Today, the unit for the two-photon absorption cross section is named the Goeppert Mayer (GM) unit.

      Maria Goeppert married chemist Joseph Edward Mayer and moved to the United States, where he was an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University. Strict rules against nepotism prevented Johns Hopkins University from taking her on as a faculty member, but she was given a job as an assistant and published a landmark paper on double beta decay in 1935. In 1937, she moved to Columbia University, where she took an unpaid position. During World War II, she worked for the Manhattan Project at Columbia on isotope separation, and with Edward Teller at the Los Alamos Laboratory on the development of thermonuclear weapons.

      After the war, Goeppert Mayer became a voluntary associate professor of physics at the University of Chicago (where her husband and Teller worked) and a senior physicist at the university-run Argonne National Laboratory. She developed a mathematical model for the structure of nuclear shells, for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963, which she shared with J. Hans D. Jensen and Eugene Wigner.

      In 1960, she was appointed full professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. [Infamously, The San Diego Tribune announced her Nobel award on Nov. 5 1963 under the headline “S.D. Mother Wins Nobel Physics Prize.”] Although she suffered from a stroke shortly after arriving there, she continued to teach and conduct research for a number of years. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1965.

      Goeppert Mayer died in San Diego, California, on February 20, 1972, after a heart attack that had struck her the previous year left her comatose.

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Goeppert_Mayer

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    3. RE: 1962 John Glenn becomes first American to orbit the Earth. And what a day it was! Certainly in the heady, positive, can-do zeitgeist of my middle class neighborhood, school, and town. Thanks for the memory Jez.

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  6. Anybody know why Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Aleksei Navalny, has had her Xitter account suspended? Doesn’t seem consistent with the principles of free speech.

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    1. Don’t know why it was suspended, but it has been restored. My guess would be someone, or some number of someones, reported one or more of her Xitts. I don’t know about Xitter, I’ve never had an account, but on many platforms a complaint is enough to get you suspended by the moderation software before a human moderator even looks at the issue.

      If something like that is the case, she’s lucky. A regular schlub like me would likely be in for a much longer battle to get myself cleared of spurious complaints.

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  7. I recently had someone throw at me that Gaza is all about Israel wanting their natural gas. This was news to me that there even was any there, or in Israel for that matter, but in going off to dig into this it first seems that this is something that has been going around, so it was somewhat of a surprise that I don’t remember it coming up here.

    But going further, it seems that it’s quite the opposite. Big natural gas reserves were discovered in Israel in the early 2000’s and a much smaller amount offshore of Gaza – something on the order of 2%. Numbers are not that easy to come by from non-paywalled objective sources, and they’re complicated by being reported either in cubic feet or cubic meters. The multiplier is about 35. Israel has some fields that are as-yet undeveloped but that exceed the Gazan deposits.

    Additionally, development of Gaza’s reserves had been held up by Israel, but in June 2023 or so, the Israeli gov’t had given a green light to proceeding with plans to start the process.

    So as usual, the indignant allegations are backwards, but if anyone has a good reference where all of this is laid out in the same units, pls post.

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    1. The gas *is* being shared with Egypt and Lebanon and your friend seems to know less about economics than s/he even does about the Middle East. (That’s OK, I have low-understanding friends also.) 🙂

      National wealth isn’t built by a few puffs of gas, in fact the resource curse means there are more Angolas, Congos and Russias than Norways or Australias. In all but the most liberal democracies, or when the petrocarbon lottery pays insane money (the Gulf), resources are USUALLY a curse.

      The truest analysis is that things like rule of law, contract freedom, individual and market freedom, educated populations, etc actually build wealth. Also true is that if they’d have played it right, Gaza from 2005 COULD have been a new Dubai or Singapore. Now it is shit and they made that themselves 100%.

      Palestinian …let’s say.. “dynamics” have always been their ruin and always will be. The rabid antisemitism is literally religious there, in the koran and all. Before they REALLY “got” Islam in the 1990s, socialism was their north star.
      I wrote about this recently:
      https://democracychronicles.org/no-two-sides-in-gaza/

      D.A.
      NYC

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  9. It’s hard to interpret the numbers and statements coming out of Gaza and Israel, as some statements may be purposely distorted to have a particular effect. For example, as Jerry writes above, Hamas claims that it has lost only 6000 fighters and that it can continue to prosecute the war for a very long time. True or not, this statement benefits Hamas in the propaganda war since it potentially demoralizes the Israeli public and military, and it encourages the rest of the world to continue to demand an immediate cease-fire as the only way to get the killing to stop.

    On the Israeli side, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Sunday asserted that communications between Hamas fighters and their leader, Yahya Sinwar, have broken down, that “Hamas has no trust in its commanders,” and that “Hamas is losing its fighting spirit.”* True or not (I hope it’s true), Gallant’s statement was clearly directed at Hamas fighters in an effort to break their will to fight.

    In other words, the fog of war is amplified by pronouncements that are themselves meant to influence the outcome. Even with the huge amount of reporting going on—or perhaps *because* of it—our ability to discern the truth has its limits.

    * https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-787615

    And regarding the resolution reported in Reuters, I don’t at all like the fact that the U.S. has proposed an alternative to Algeria’s proposal. The U.S. should have allowed the Algeria proposal to proceed and then killed it with a U.S. veto. The fact that the U.S. is proposing a resolution to deescalate that can actually pass is very worrisome indeed.

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  10. ”I can’t believe that the U.S. would actually propose such a resolution . . .”

    We’ll see, but I never underestimate the propensity of those in DC to sell out allies or friends if they can foresee a domestic political advantage in doing so. Do “progressives” outnumber left-wing Jews? Would left-wing Jews, in any case, abandon their party even if this resolution were submitted?

    And a slight quibble, even though the above usage is standard: It wouldn’t be the US making the proposal; it would be the Biden administration. I’m confident that a majority in the US would oppose it.

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  11. The Japanese on the weird-assed mantis says: singing dancing mantis. If that’s any help….

    “Centre for Indigegogy”
    – Parody is dead. Reality is so much more ridiculous than fiction.

    D.A.
    NYCC

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    1. I think the Japanese name is best understood as “kabuki mantis,” as in kabuki theatre. There is a costume style that the mantis resembles.

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  13. Lauren Bobert is a notorious fool, but she can vape her head off, “go down on me in a theatre” (Alanis Morrisette) as she does – well not me – but y’know.
    But… HOW IS SHE ON ISRAEL?
    That’s my primary metric for voting now. (I live in NYC, not Colorado).

    I’ve never really been a political donor before but as of Oct. 7th I’m working on cutting some checks to anybody who can primary, beat or dislodge the Squad and other “Palestine allies.”
    That said, I’m unsure of whether Ms. Bobert has even heard of Israel or the Middle East.
    D.A.
    NYC

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  14. Lauren Bobert most likely will lose in her present district, but a Republican will win.
    Lauren Bobert likely would have lost in her former district, but it is possible a Democrat could have won. Now it is probable a Republican will win.
    So her changing districts benefits the Republicans.

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