Friday: Hili dialogue

50 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

1. On this day:
   1562 – Sixty-three Huguenots are massacred in Wassy, France, marking the start of the French Wars of Religion.

   1692 – Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne and Tituba are brought before local magistrates in Salem Village, Massachusetts, beginning what would become known as the Salem witch trials.

   1781 – The Articles of Confederation goes into effect in the United States.

   1805 – Justice Samuel Chase is acquitted at the end of his impeachment trial by the U.S. Senate.

   1815 – Napoleon returns to France from his banishment on Elba.

   1871 – The victorious Prussian Army parades through Paris, France, after the end of the Siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War.

   1872 – Yellowstone National Park is established as the world’s first national park.

   1893 – Electrical engineer Nikola Tesla gives the first public demonstration of radio in St. Louis, Missouri.

   1896 – Battle of Adwa: An Ethiopian army defeats an outnumbered Italian force, ending the First Italo-Ethiopian War.

   1896 – Henri Becquerel discovers radioactive decay.

   1910 – The deadliest avalanche in United States history buries a Great Northern Railway train in northeastern King County, Washington, killing 96 people.

   1917 – The Zimmermann Telegram is reprinted in newspapers across the United States after the U.S. government releases its unencrypted text.

   1921 – The Australian cricket team captained by Warwick Armstrong becomes the first team to complete a whitewash of The Ashes, something that would not be repeated for 86 years.

   1921 – Following mass protests in Petrograd demanding greater freedom in the RSFSR, the Kronstadt rebellion begins, with sailors and citizens taking up arms against the Bolsheviks.

   1932 – Aviator Charles Lindbergh’s 20-month-old son Charles Jr is kidnapped from his home in East Amwell, New Jersey. His body would not be found until May 12.

   1946 – The Bank of England is nationalised.

   1947 – The International Monetary Fund begins financial operations.

   1950 – Cold War: Klaus Fuchs is convicted of spying for the Soviet Union by disclosing top secret atomic bomb data.

   1953 – Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin suffers a stroke and collapses; he dies four days later.

   1954 – Nuclear weapons testing: The Castle Bravo, a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb, is detonated on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, resulting in the worst radioactive contamination ever caused by the United States.

   1954 – Armed Puerto Rican nationalists attack the United States Capitol building, injuring five Representatives.

   1966 – Venera 3 Soviet space probe crashes on Venus becoming the first spacecraft to land on another planet’s surface.

   1974 – Watergate scandal: Seven are indicted for their role in the Watergate break-in and charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice.

   1991 – Uprisings against Saddam Hussein begin in Iraq, leading to the deaths of more than 25,000 people, mostly civilians.

   1998 – Titanic became the first film to gross over $1 billion worldwide.

   2002 – The Envisat environmental satellite successfully launches aboard an Ariane 5 rocket to reach an orbit of 800 km (500 mi) above the Earth, which was the then-largest payload at 10.5 m long and with a diameter of 4.57 m.

   2005 – In Roper v. Simmons, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that the execution of juveniles found guilty of any crime is unconstitutional.

   2006 – English-language Wikipedia reaches its one millionth article, Jordanhill railway station.

   Births:
   1810 – Frédéric Chopin, Polish pianist and composer (d. 1849).

   1812 – Augustus Pugin, English architect, co-designed the Palace of Westminster (d. 1852).

   1880 – Lytton Strachey, British writer and critic (d. 1932).

   1890 – Theresa Bernstein, Polish-American painter and author (d. 2002).

   1893 – Mercedes de Acosta, American author, poet, and playwright (d. 1968). [Known for her many lesbian affairs with celebrated Broadway and Hollywood personalities including Isadora Duncan and Marlene Dietrich. Her best-known involvement was with Greta Garbo with whom, in 1931, she began a sporadic and volatile romance. Her 1960 memoir, Here Lies the Heart, is considered part of gay history insofar that it hints at the lesbian element in some of her relationships.]

   1904 – Glenn Miller, American trombonist, composer, and bandleader (d. 1944).

   1910 – David Niven, English soldier and actor (d. 1983).

   1917 – Robert Lowell, American poet (d. 1977).

   1917 – Dinah Shore, American singer and actress (d. 1994).

   1922 – Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli general and politician, 5th Prime Minister of Israel, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1995).

   1927 – George O. Abell, American astronomer, academic, and skeptic (d. 1983). [An originating member of the Committee on Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal now known as the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.]

   1927 – Harry Belafonte, American singer-songwriter and actor (d. 2023).

   1944 – Mike d’Abo, English singer.

   1944 – Roger Daltrey, English singer-songwriter, producer, and actor.

   1946 – Jim Crace, English author and academic.

   1954 – Ron Howard, American actor, director, and producer.

   1958 – Nik Kershaw, English singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer.

   1966 – Zack Snyder, American director, producer, and screenwriter.

   1969 – Javier Bardem, Spanish actor and producer.

   1978 – Jensen Ackles, American actor and musician.

   1994 – Justin Bieber, Canadian singer-songwriter.

   I know nothing new except that Herr Gellert, the Leipzig poet, is dead, and has written no more poetry since his death. (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart):
   1911 – Jacobus Henricus van ‘t Hoff, Dutch-German chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1852).

   1925 – Homer Plessy, American political activist (b. 1862 or 1863). [Plaintiff in the United States Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson. He staged an act of civil disobedience to challenge one of Louisiana’s racial segregation laws and bring a test case to force the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on the constitutionality of segregation laws. The Court decided against him and the resulting “separate but equal” legal doctrine determined that state-mandated segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution as long as the facilities provided for both black and white people were putatively “equal”. The legal precedent set by Plessy v. Ferguson lasted into the mid-20th century, until a series of landmark Supreme Court decisions concerning segregation, beginning with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.]

   1934 – Lillias Campbell Davidson, American-born British writer (b. 1853). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]

   1943 – Alexandre Yersin, Swiss-French physician and bacteriologist (b. 1863). [Co-discoverer of the bacillus responsible for the bubonic plague or pest, which was later named in his honour: Yersinia pestis. Another bacteriologist, the Japanese physician Kitasato Shibasaburō, is often credited with independently identifying the bacterium a few days earlier. Yersin also demonstrated for the first time that the same bacillus was present in the rodent as well as in the human disease, thus underlining the possible means of transmission.]

   1978 – Paul Scott, English author, poet, and playwright (b. 1920).

   1983 – Arthur Koestler, Hungarian-English journalist and author (b. 1905).

   1984 – Jackie Coogan, American actor (b. 1914).

   1991 – Edwin H. Land, American scientist and businessman, co-founded the Polaroid Corporation (b. 1909).

   1995 – Georges J. F. Köhler, German biologist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1946).

   2006 – Jack Wild, English actor (b.1952).

   1. Woman of the Day:
      [Text from the excellent The Attagirls X/Twitter account]

      Woman of the Day author Lillias Campbell Davidson of Hampshire died OTD 1934 aged 80, founder of the Lady Cyclists’ Association – possibly the world’s first cycling organisation specifically for women. She was dedicated to encouraging women to experience freedom by taking long walks, climbing mountains, travelling in carriages and trains without the need for a chaperone and to defy disapproval by taking up cycling.

      Lillias considered cycling “the greatest boon that has come to women for many a long day” because “the lives of women have been unnaturally cramped and contracted within doors”. It was a view shared by suffragist Susan B. Anthony who told journalist Nellie Bly in 1896: Cycling “has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.”

      Lillias took up cycling in the early 1880s when she was in her twenties. You have no idea how radical this was. As late as 1893, Cycling magazine discouraged any woman from cycling because “she is by nature physically unfit, and bound morally, if she respects her sex, to avoid anything in the nature of deleterious excess of exertion.”

      Women cyclists were then considered so improper that Lillias cycled in the early mornings when the streets were empty. On one occasion, she nipped sharply down a side street to avoid being spotted by the local vicar. Nothing stopped her though. “A new world of enjoyment is unlocked to the woman who finds herself a-wheel…the feeling of active movement, of the power of free locomotion, the thrill of healthful exertion, and the bounding of the pulses.”

      Cycling also radicalised female clothing. The Rational Dress Movement advocated ditching your constrictive whalebone corsets and heavy, impractical petticoats and adopting practical clothing. In an 1894 issue of the Cyclists’ Touring Club Gazette, Lillias dismissed the “war against rational dress” as not “very convincing or very full of logic” and quoted one woman’s retort to anyone who tried to shame her for wearing bloomers: “I can ride faster than people can talk.”

      In 1899, Lillias published a travel guide called Hints to Lady Travellers – to assist “my sisters in their wanderings” – that gave advice on how to buy train tickets, pack for a trip and embark on long-distance hikes. In 1896, she published the Handbook for Lady Cyclists.

      She was not immune to the intolerable pressure placed on women to conform to narrow stereotypes. She cautioned against racing, writing that “a woman’s nervous system suffers a hundred times more than a man’s from this excitement”, and while she considered it necessary for every woman to understand how every nut and spoke worked on their bicycles, she warned that “there is no necessity for her to be constantly airing her knowledge in conversation.” She also cautioned against travelling in some women-only carriages which she said attracted “aggressive-looking females.”

      Lillias settled in Southsea, “that ideal place for cyclists”, and shared a fiat with two other women – another outrage against convention. She published 14 novels with a recurring theme: women who struck out on their own in their youth, only later coming round to the traditional role of marriage.

      Not a path she took herself. When Lillias died in 1934, a probate listing of her estate described her simply as “spinster.”

      https://twitter.com/TheAttagirls/status/1763467086137844162

2. The problem about the colonialism discourse applied to Israel is not that it is factually wrong. Zionist settlers were settler colonialists as much as the Germans who settled east of the Elbe in the Middle Ages (called “Kolonisation” even then), the Pilgrim Fathers or the Boers who came to the Cape. What’s wrong about these students’ ideology is that while embracing “migration” as something desirable, they see settler colonialism as evil, when in fact it is just another form of migration, and the most frequent one for most of human history when states were nonexistent, weak or no ethno-nation states. The first farmers who came to Europe were settler colonialists, and so were the Bantu speakers who settled all over Africa, marginalizing the Mbuti-related hunter gatherers in the process. Resentment of newcomers, especially when they come in great numbers, use a sizable chunk of collective assets (land and game in premodern times, apartments and social welfare in modern Germany, France or Sweden), and may over time become dominant over the previous population because of mass influx or high fertility, is as much a universal of human history as are migrations themselves.
   Students who have no problem living in the settler-colonialist founded USA and studying at universities founded by settlers and their progeny have no business denouncing Israel’s existence as illegitimate.

   1. Thank you ruth. Always new ways of thinking from weit readers.

   2. Yes indeed. My thinking is that the students are antisemitic a priori and that the “white, settler-colonialist” claims are trumped up to justify it.

   3. Need a like button for this!

      1. Indeed! Very well said, Ruth.

3. “National Flour Day”

   But which flour?

4. The Berkeley mob was simultaneously calling for a “cease-fire” and for “intifada.” That seems to mean that they want an Israeli cease-fire and a Palestinian intifada. That is, they want Israel to stop fighting, while Hamas continues fighting. I can’t see any other way of making sense of the juxtaposition of those two demands.

   1. I notice that they are all wearing masks presumably to avoid recognition, not that convinced of the rights of their case then?
      What happened to “stand up and be recognized” ? Cowards one and all.

      1. But, … but…. Covid, Robert! Killer virus!

         And look at any presser where an administration official speaks. The flunkies and staffers in the background are usually wearing masks. Surely they aren’t afraid of being identified.

         1. Leslie, Surely they are not afraid of Covid? I am someone who has not had a cold or influenza from the age of six (influenza) or had an influenza vaccine and now well into in my seventh decade and forced into a Covid vaccination for “reasons”, my wife contracted it twice and likened it to a cold, I of course did not take any precautions at home but joined in the mask and distance melee etc and remain somewhat skeptical but maybe like “typhoid Mary” I spread it around with abandon? No doctor was or is interested in my “ immunity “.

            1. Masks are like gang colours for what in America are called liberals.
               At the Toronto Symphony, whose audience skews somewhat older than, say, a Raptors game, the cranky old people who speak with Eastern European accents don’t wear masks even if quite frail-looking. It’s the earnest healthy young people who mask up, but really not very many of them do. (Audience members of apparently Chinese origin do often wear masks during flu season but that is a cultural thing that long pre-dates Covid.)

5. Na cześć Chopina:
   https://youtu.be/LOuO7VM-56Y?si=LCIRnkW5hIncWjcD

   1. 😻😻😻

6. Let’s take a real life example of a situation where a president might be prosecuted.

   President Obama deliberately killed several American citizens in countries at which we were not at war. The constitutionality of these killing is questionable.

   People who believe Trump’s claim of immunity is ridiculous should explain why Obama should not be prosecuted.

   The ACLU and CCR have filed a lawsuit challenging the government’s targeted killing of three U.S. citizens in drone strikes far from any armed conflict zone.

   In Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta (Al-Awlaki v. Panetta) the groups charge that the U.S. government’s killings of U.S. citizens Anwar Al-Aulaqi, Samir Khan, and 16-year-old Abdulrahman Al-Aulaqi in Yemen last year violated the Constitution’s fundamental guarantee against the deprivation of life without due process of law.

   The killings were part of a broader program of “targeted killing” by the United States outside the context of armed conflict and based on vague legal standards, a closed executive process, and evidence never presented to the courts.

   https://www.aclu.org/video/aclu-ccr-lawsuit-american-boy-killed-us-drone-strike

   1. Well, this is an easy one.

      Trump’s claim of immunity is ridiculous. Since no other president has made that claim, that I am aware of, I don’t feel I have anything to explain. But to be clear, I don’t think the Constitution or any other laws or precedents support the position that POTUS is immune. Not any POTUS, not even ones that were inarguably far better at the job and inarguably for better human beings, than Trump.

      To clarify further, if it were found that the question of immunity of POTUS were not sufficiently clear given current law and that the question must now be decided for the first time in our history, setting a precedent for the future, then it is my strong opinion that the answer should be F%$@! no. Forever and always, in every case.

      1. +mucho

      2. If it is true that there is in fact no immunity, even during office, then the question is why so many possibly criminal acts of previous administrations did not lead to prosecution of members of said administrations.

         1. Did any of the other presidents you have in mind engage in a conspiracy to subvert the results of a presidential election they had participated in? Also known as a coup in some places. And if you don’t think that accusation is justified, have you read the indictment? If not I highly recommend it.

            Where did the “even during office” come from? Trump’s legal team claims he has immunity for anything he did as president, forever.

            Honest question. What instrument (Constitution, other law) do you know of that provides immunity for POTUS?

            Both sides types of arguments aside, there are virtually no legal and or Constitutional experts that think there is any support anywhere for Trump’s presidential immunity claim. The arguments mustered by Trump’s legal team are nearly uniformly considered to be ridiculous by experts.

            1. Presidents who conspired to subvert the results of a presidential election:

               Not sure:
               Nixon?
               Obama? (Just who did conspire to wiretap Trump on behalf of Clinton?)

               Certain:
               Biden

               Don’t make me dig out video of Biden boasting of building the most extensive voter fraud organisation.

               Oft claimed but no evidence:
               Trump

               The indictment is irrelevant, it’s the evidence that counts. All the evidence I’ve seen was around attempts to validate that the election was not fraudulent. Maybe if that political prosecution ever reaches trial we might be presented with evidence.

            2. I think that the insurrection charge is a special case that merits prosecution in any case, even if there were immunity.
               But the sheer number of partly trivial charges Trump has to contend with, when people like Donald Rumsfeld were never even investigated properly, just makes his base more convinced that he is being persecuted for political reasons.
               When corrupt Yulia Timoshenko or the criminal Khodorkovsky were prosecuted and jailed under Yanukovich in Ukraine and Putin in Russia respectively, this was rightly denounced as selective, politically motivated prosecution by Western observers and Western financed NGOs, not because these people were innocent of the crimes they were accused of (Khodorkovsky certainly wasn’t), but because other oligarchs with similarly dirty business practices but who were not politically active as opposition to the current regime/administration were left alone.
               Western democracies face a very difficult dilemma: How to protect democracy from its enemies without becoming authoritarian in the process.

   2. I respectfully submit that y’all should let the Courts decide that one. It is a legal question, which none of you have any say in. He either is immune or he isn’t. It’s not a political question to be settled in the public square. That’s why we have judges and laws, so that political partisanship and “Whaddabout . . .” play no role in whether someone is found guilty of a crime.

      1. It’s plausible to me that this particular legal question is too technical to be decided by a layman, but I think the claim that “judges and laws” are separate from “political partisanship” is incorrect. I do not think there has been a point in American history where Courts have been free from some form of shenanigans, and I can think of Court decisions from the past that were rightly criticized by laymen. I will therefore call the Courts to the court of reason, like everything else, and decide whether I agree or disagree (or suspend judgment) on that basis alone.

         1. Well, sure, anyone can disagree with what the Supreme Court says. But you can’t do anything about it, either before or after the decision. Your opinion literally doesn’t count. So why weigh in on Presidential immunity? If you are going to counter-buy off a Justice, best not to advertise it here. (Kidding!)

            The Supreme Court might follow the election returns, as Finley Peter Dunne said, but no Court anywhere is ever going to admit it tries to influence them based on public opinion.

      2. Yes, because the US Supreme Court is definitely not politicized. And some of us do have a say in it. Unfortunately it is relatively few and it requires the money and connections to buy judges like Clarence Thomas.

         This is not a question of whether someone is found guilty of a crime. It is a question of whether or not someone can be granted immunity from any crime. Some might call that a subtle difference, but it really isn’t.

      3. We need to be realistic: all presidents commit crimes, and all can be charged with one felony or another. Do we really want to go down this rabbit hole?

         Heck, even ordinary people commit three felonies a day:

         https://youtu.be/JwsLAqjqnxo?si=Xd5JzRWYsgz4g7Y5

         1. Not all presidents acted like Trump did after he lost the election and did his best to counter-act the will of the voters. In fact, no other presidents acted like Trump.

            If it’s true that all Presidents commit crimes, how is it that the Republicans who tried to pin all sorts of crimes on Clinton and Obama were never able to put either in prison? The answer is either incompetence or the lack of actual felonies.

      4. It appears to me the Supremes were working to save Trump in this decision. He wanted substantial delay, and they gave it to him. But, I’d like to know whether the decision came only from the conservatives and Trump appointees or if there was some ambiguity. Unfortunately, they did not enumerate who voted how. We may never know.

         1. Well, I’ll answer the easy question first: OF COURSE the decision came only from the conservatives and every Trump appointee put their thumb on the scale to extend and derail the trial. Does gravity work? Also, it takes five justices to take up a case, so I’m sure the “Fuck-you-America-Five” voted to hear the case in the first place. By all sane standards, SCOTUS should have allowed the 3-0 lower court’s (well reasoned) decision stand. This is obviously not science. There is no wonder why or who enumerated how. It’s all extreme partisan politics at this point and it’s pointless surmising the what-if’s. 5 conservative radicals (the fact they’re driven by religion should never be ignored) take their orders from “higher up”, one Chief Justice has no control of these idealogues, seems to understand the important integrity of the Court, but again, has no means to correct it, and 3 liberals who have no real power at this point. Pugilists, to be sure, but they’re just punching bags at this point.

            America is skidding backwards fast, thanks to Trump and SCOTUS (and McConnell for that matter). Funny how MAGA says the same…yet they own SCOTUS and they’re still unsatisfied…we’re not slipping back fast enough for them, it seems.

   3. Presumably Lysander would also like to prosecute Obama for the death of Osama bin Laden, who was also killed in a country the US was not at war with. Even so, Trump would still go to jail longer than Obama, since he engaged in far more drone killings:

      https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/2019/5/8/18619206/under-donald-trump-drone-strikes-far-exceed-obama-s-numbers

      1. No, I actually think it is a bad idea to start prosecuting presidents for actions they take in their official capacity. That’s the rabbit hole I want to avoid.

         1. What about prosecuting the actions he was involved in before becoming POTUS, like tampering with the election by paying off models/porn-stars to shut them up about his adultery? What about his many henchmen that went to prison that he pardoned: Stone, Manafort, Flynn, Banon…the list is endless. And that’s just a minute smidgeon of where Trump exists in this world and for whatever reason, you ignore and play both-sides-bullshit. So tired of that obfuscation. And your decades+ old link by the Cato institute is bullocks. What is that supposed to prove? Piffle.

            Rabbit Hole you want to avoid??? Open you’re eyes! Trump is already down in that hole, beckoning you to follow. The world needs to back away from that black void. Putin, Orban, Jung Un and others are down there with him. Orban’s supposedly going down to Maralardo to meet with Trump this week. How sweet.

            1. See, the thing about being a nation of laws is that even people you hate are supposed to be treated equally before the law. You can’t create a special law for Trump and a different law for everyone else. Dems are so consumed by hatred they are missing this point.

               Just as the reaction to 9/11 was worse than 9/11, the reaction to Trump was (and is) worse than Trump.

7. At first, I thought ‘Bears for Palestine’ somehow referred to the gay reference, where a bear is a big male lover.

   1. You weren’t the only one. And here I am, straight as an arrow.

      I chalk it up to about 25 years of reading Andrew Sullivan.

      1. The first big outbreak of Covid Delta variant occurred amongst a large group of highly vaccinated men attending a “bear” festival in Provincetown, Massachusetts in summer 2021. Large crowds of hairy shirtless men jostling together in several bars along the main street.

         No one died or got critically ill but they weren’t old enough on average to have much likelihood of getting really sick anyway, other than being, on the whole, large. This told us that vaccination was not going to get us out of trouble all by itself.

         I had never heard the term “bear” before….although the two innkeepers at the place we used to stay in Vermont years before would have fit the description to a T.

8. I’m not sure where March 1st as “National Hot Cross Bun Day (Good Friday)” comes from, as (a) today is not Good Friday and (b) Good Friday can never fall earlier than March 20th.

   It is, however, St David’s Day, the national day of Wales. As a David who is neither Welsh nor a saint, let me nonetheless wish PCC(E) and all who read this “Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus”.

9. The Chancellor on the 27th expressed “great sadness, concern, and dismay”. In other words “thoughts and prayers”. It appears that even this spineless, do-nothing response by the university was given the finger in the response on the 28th by the remorseless, and, I expect, even emboldened Palestinian students’ organization.

   1. We can no doubt look forward to an official Berkeley apology to the Bears for Palestine. The apology, issued by the DEI Office, will tearfully confess that the presence of a glass door at the Zellerbach building “poses a significant threat to the safety and well-being of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students on campus.”

10. Interesting claim from an enlightenment philosopher: David Hume famously stated that “reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions”

    1. This ‘interesting claim’ expresses an (IMO) inescapable moral reality related to Hume’s difficulty in deriving an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ – however much we try to elaborate and rationalise our moral views, at their base lie value preferences which cannot be fully justified by reason alone.

11. The loss of civilian life during yesterday’s incident is awful, most of the news coverage describing the IDF as “opening fire” and conducting a “massacre.” For its part, CBS* reported that, in response, Israel released “a heavily edited clip of grainy drone video,” a phrase carefully crafted to imply that, not only did the IDF conduct a massacre but that Israel was trying to cover it up. This is the reporting to which we are subjected every day, a transparent effort to blame and defame Israel. Blame and defame. That’s what they do.

    Fortunately, a small number of news outlets, and most of the Israeli ones I frequent, are more circumspect, and are willing to wait until the fog clears before assigning blame. The difference in the ways different press outlets treat this tragedy has to do with values. Much of the press is willing to blame (or hint at blame) Israel because they hate Israel. The decision to blame is a priori, and the coverage follows. Other outlets value truth first, and withhold blame until the facts are in. Those who are quick to blame before the facts are in cannot be trusted and should not claim to be reporting news.

    And in other news, the EU voted to clear $54 million in aid to Hamas through its UNRWA affiliate in the wake of yesterday’s incident. Nice work.

    The world seems not to understand that the war can end instantly if Hamas leadership would surrender, release the hostages, and go into exile. The absence of calls for Hamas to surrender is deafening.

    * https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-gaza-war-palestinians-deaths-food-aid-convoy-mounting-condemnation-netanyahu/

    1. America’s news outlets are consumed by the knee-jerk reaction of “if it bleeds it leads.” It’s a horrible way to practice “journalism” and has only gotten worse in the information age as online clicks are now more valuable than truth. The truth is hard, it takes time, it takes a lot of analysis from multiple perspectives; that’s not how the news business model works anymore, especially when all the outlets are competing for the same clicks and eyeballs. It’s much easier to manipulate the masses with instant, arm-chair reporting and regurgitation, esp. when there’s an ideological agenda. Easier to get the clicks, and easier to do the work- win, win! A sorry state of affairs, to be sure.

       1. Yep. Another thing I’d add to the list of why the truth is hard, it takes patience. As in waiting to gather and analyze enough information about a thing before running with the story. Can’t do that when you’ve got to be the first to get a Xit out.

       2. I completely agree that “if it bleeds it leads,” as you say. However, one would think that an incident in which 107 people were killed and 700 were wounded by being crushed by a caravan of trucks would also bleed sufficiently for the press. But it doesn’t. It’s the consistent way in which Israel is deemed responsible for the bleeding that’s the bias here. This is why I assert above that the decision to demonize Israel is a priori.

          As you so rightly say, it’s “a sorry state of affairs.”

    2. I noticed right away that Hamas made a bunch of claims, while the IDF released aerial night vision footage of the event.

       Hamas always either exaggerates or outright falsifies their version of the events. That the media generally takes their claims as truthful just illustrates how thoroughly politicized they are.

12. > A new Harvard Harris poll reveals that 82 per cent of Americans support Israel in its war against Hamas, with 68 per cent saying they believe Israel is doing what it can to avoid civilian casualties.

    This is even better news than it looks. 82% indicate overall support for Israel against Hamas, even though “only” 68% can vouch for Israel’s efforts to avoid civilian casualties. This could mean that 14% are willing to forgive Israel for doing less than humanly possible to avoid civilian deaths, meaning they have a realistic understanding of war, that “doing everything humanly possible” would mean not going to war at all, or recklessly exposing one’s own soldiers to casualties which much be limited also in a long war. (And if the civilians are being used illegally as human shields, why bother trying to spare them?) Wars get grim as they wear on because the marginal cost in family misery gets higher as each new soldier is killed or wounded. Each family feels the nation’s cumulative grief as well as its own.

    The poll also shows how (more) out of touch (even by their usual standards) with the mainstream American population is the jihadist Left.

13. Seeing that today is Yap Day, I’ll try to remember to post/submit a picture next year of some Yap money my dad brought back from the island. It’s about 18″ around and heavy as you-know-what.

14. “The new rules of journalism appear to be these: “Don’t report the truth; report what buttresses the tenets of Critical Social Justice.””
    Yes, that’s the way I read it. The problem, it seems to me, is that the baby boomers who reported the news for the last 30 or 40 years have been replaces by the next generation, influenced by the Woke Wave.

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