Thursday: Hili dialogue

March 7, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday,  March 7, 2024, and National Cereal Day.  I don’t regularly eat the stuff, but wouldn’t turn down a bowl of Raisin Bran or hot oatmeal if it was put before me. Here’s a fancy bowl of oatmeal I got at the inn where I was staying in August, 2018 for the wonderful Kent Presents meeting.  That was a lovely occasion and a nice breakfast. And, eating right across the aisle as I downed my oatmeal, was newswoman Lesley Stahl, who was interviewing Henry Kissinger onstage later that day. Look: fresh fruit, dried fruit, nuts, and heavy cream!

Below: the discussion a couple of hours later. (Kissinger was 95 at the time, but of course has since crossed the Rainbow Bridge).  Although Lesley asked good questions, Kissinger rambled on in a barely audible voice, and it wasn’t enlightening.

And this morning I voted by mail.  It’s such a convenience to get the ballot, fill it out at home, and drop it in a mailbox a block away:

It’s also National Flapjack Day, National Crown Roast of Pork Day, and, in the UK and Ireland, World Book Day. (Why “World Book Day” in those two countries alone? Are they referring to the World Book encyclopedia, or touting the inhabitants of Ireland and the UK to read books from throughout the world?)

Finally, there’s a Google Doodle today (click to open) celebrating the 92nd birthday of renowned Mexican singer and actress Lola Beltrán (1932-1996):

Here she is singing “Siempre”:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the March 7 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*One of the worries that Israelis and Israel supporters have is the possibility of a second front opening up against Lebanon, for Hezbollah, which controls the country, keeps firing rockets into Israel, and it has more and better rockets than does Hamas. The Times of Israel reports on the latest barrage.  (Remember, these are war crimes, and the UN has forces in Lebanon tasked with preventing Hezbollah from doing this, or even approaching the border. No resolutions have been passed against Hezbollah. The UN is worthless.)

The Lebanese Hezbollah terror group fired a large barrage of rockets at the northern Israeli city of Kiryat Shmona on Tuesday evening, in what it said was a response to a deadly Israel Defense Forces airstrike in southern Lebanon earlier in the day.

According to the IDF, some 30 rockets were fired at Kiryat Shmona, with at least 10 of the projectiles being successfully intercepted by the Iron Dome air defense system.

One rocket struck the yard of a home in the nearby community of Kfar Blum, causing minor damage, local authorities said.

To see what a “large barrage” means, see the video below. The missiles are of course not targeted at the military or at military installations, but are fired willy-nilly at civilian areas, a war crime.

The remainder of the rockets hit open areas, and there were no reports of injuries.

Sirens sounded in Kiryat Shmona and several nearby communities.

Hezbollah claimed responsibility for the barrage, saying it was in response to an IDF strike in the southern Lebanon village of Houla, which killed three civilians according to the terror group and media reports.

Of course the IDF strike was in response to Hezbollah rockets! Israel doesn’t initiate hostilities. A bit more:

In response, the IDF said fighter jets struck a Hezbollah rocket launching position in southern Lebanon’s Taybeh, from which the terror group fired a barrage at Kiryat Shmona this evening.

Additionally, an anti-tank missile launch position in Aarab El Louaizeh, also used in attacks on Kiryat Shmona, was struck by an aircraft, the IDF says. Earlier, the IDF says it struck a building used by Hezbollah in Dibbine, and additional infrastructure in Ayta ash-Shab.

Earlier, the IDF said it had carried out strikes in Houla on Tuesday afternoon, targeting a building used by Hezbollah.

Strikes were also carried out against a Hezbollah compound in Ayta ash-Shab that the IDF said was used to fire two anti-tank missiles at the Biranit army base, a Hezbollah command center in Jabal al-Batam, rocket launching positions in Matmoura, and additional buildings used by the terror group in Majdal Zoun and Kafra, according to the IDF.

Those strikes came following an earlier Hezbollah barrage on Kiryat Shmona, which caused damage to a home and a store, and numerous missile and rocket attacks on IDF positions along the Lebanon border. There were no reports of injuries in the attacks.

And of course these rockets cannot be blamed as a response to Israel colonizing Lebanon! The video below, from the Torygraph, shows a big group of Hezbollah-fired rockets aimed at Israel.  The Iron Dome interceptor system isn’t as good up north as it is near Gaza, but it worked well against these rockets. The description of the event from another video, that one posted by the Hindustan Times:

Israel’s Iron Dome air defence system lit up the skies to stop Hezbollah’s large rocket barrage on the city of Kiryat Shmona. Hezbollah fired nearly 30 rockets into Israel from Lebanon after IDF’s air strikes killed three Lebanese civilians on March 5. The Iron Dome was successful in shooting down 10 rockets and averting any casualties. Social media was abuzz with the footage of the interception of rockets. Watch for more details.

 

*This is now a trend. Joining an increasing number of schools, Brown University has decided to reinstate the SAT (a standardized test) as a mandatory requirement for admission, when previously it was optional. (h/t Enrico)

Brown University will reinstate standardized testing requirements for admission, joining Yale, Dartmouth and M.I.T. in backtracking on “test optional” policies adopted during the Covid pandemic.

Brown’s decision, announced on Tuesday, will require either SAT or ACT scores and will be in effect in the upcoming admissions cycle.

In its announcement, Brown said that test results were a clear indicator of future success.

“Our analysis made clear that SAT and ACT scores are among the key indicators that help predict a student’s ability to succeed and thrive in Brown’s demanding academic environment,” the Providence, R.I., university said in a statement.

Brown also echoed concerns expressed by both Dartmouth and Yale that suspending test requirements had the unintended effect of harming prospective students from low-income families.

The committee at Brown that was charged with reviewing admissions policies was concerned that some students from less-advantaged backgrounds with lower scores had chosen not to submit scores under the test-optional policy, even when submitting them could have actually increased their chances of being admitted.

For more details, see my post from February on why Dartmouth reinstated mandatory SAT or ACT scores as a requirement for application.  This is good for everybody, for it not only puts the emphasis on merit, but also increases the number of minority students who wouldn’t get in because they didn’t think that submitting test scores would help them.

*Over at the NYT, Bret Stephens has an op-ed on “The new rape denialism.”

Yet Hamas denies that its men sexually assaulted Israelis, calling the charges “lies and slanders against the Palestinians and their resistance.” And Hamas’s fellow travelers and useful idiots in the West, most of them self-described progressives, parrot that denialism in the face of powerful and deeply investigated evidence of widespread rapes, documented most recently in a United Nations report released on Monday.

The interesting question is, why? Why the refusal to believe that Hamas, which butchered children in their beds, took elderly women as hostages and incinerated families in their homes, would be capable of that?

I’ll get to that in a moment, but first it’s worth looking at the forms this denialism takes. One method is to acknowledge, as one recent article put it, that “sexual assault may have occurred on Oct. 7,” but nobody has really proved that it was part of an organized pattern. Another is to raise questions about various details in stories to suggest that if there’s even a single error, or a witness whose testimony is at all inconsistent, the entire account must also be false and dishonest. A third is to treat anything an Israeli says as inherently suspect.

Another he mentions is the persistent but stupid question, “Where are the women who were raped on October 7? Why aren’t they testifying?” Because they’re dead, as many witnesses have averred.

How quickly the far left pivots from “believe women” to “believe Hamas” when the identity of the victim changes. If, God forbid, a gang of Proud Boys were to descend on Los Angeles to carry out the kinds of atrocities Hamas carried out in Israeli communities, I’m pretty sure no one on the left would devote any energy trying to poke holes in who got raped, much less how or when.

It’s in this ideological climate that we get the U.N. report. In some ways it’s a landmark, if only because the U.N. is never sympathetic to the Jewish state and was outrageously slow even to notice the early evidence of sexual assaults. For anyone who maintains a reasonably open mind but is still in doubt, the report notes, among other details, “at least two incidents of rape of corpses of women,” “bodies found naked and/or tied, and in one case gagged,” and “clear and convincing information that sexual violence, including rape, sexualized torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment occurred against some women and children” during their time as hostages.

That should be more than enough. It won’t be. A large and expanding corner of the West refuses to accept that Israel’s war in Gaza is a response to evil, or that Israelis might be victims in any way. It disturbs the narrative of the war in Gaza as a case of strong against weak, the settler-colonialist Israelis against righteous and indigenous victims.

In the end, Stephens (the only NYT columnist who goes after the Israel haters with regularity) compares this kind of nitpicky denialism to the denialism used to argue against the occurrence of the Holocaust. In both cases we have overwhelming evidence for evil, but I guess evidence is not good enough when it opposes The Narrative

*Are we at the beginning of a DEI backlash? The WaPo reports on a Texas federal judge’s ruling that an agency that helped minority-owned businesses violated the Constitution.

A federal judge in Texas has ruled that a 55-year-old federal agency created to help minority-owned businesses must now open its doors to every race, siding with a group of White plaintiffs who argued that the agency discriminated against them.

In a 93-page opinion rendered Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Mark T. Pittman ruled that the Minority Business Development Agency’s presumption that businesses owned by Blacks, Latinos and other minorities are inherently disadvantaged violated the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. He permanently enjoined the agency’s business centers, which have assisted minority-owned businesses in accessing capital and government contracts, from extending services based on an applicant’s race.

“If courts mean what they say when they ascribe supreme importance to constitutional rights, the federal government may not flagrantly violate such rights with impunity,” Pittman wrote. “The MBDA has done so for years. Time’s up.”

The ruling is the latest blow to government affirmative action programs after the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in June against Harvard and the University of North Carolina that upended race-conscious college admissions. The decision sparked a broad legal offensive against affirmative action and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs in the private and public sectors. In July, a Tennessee judge ruled that the Small Business Administration 8(a) Business Development program’s use of the racial presumption of disadvantage was unconstitutional, forcing the agency to overhaul its program.

“This is a historic victory for equality in America,” said Dan Lennington, an attorney with Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, the conservative public interest law firm representing the plaintiffs in the MBDA case. “No longer can a federal agency cater only to certain races. MBDA is now open to all.”

Lennington has previously noted that the case is likely to be appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which leans conservative.

Yes, and the 5th Circuit will uphold Pittman’s opinion, in which case it will be appealed to the Supreme Court. And of course the court will uphold the lower courts’ opinion, with the usual 6-3 vote.

*I found this article by accident in the Military Times (it came up next to another piece), but thought it was worth noting. Do you remember this photo taken on V-J Day (for you youngsters, that’s the day that the Japanese surrendered, ending WWII: August 14, 1945)? It was called V-J Day in Times Square, was taken by famed photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, was published in Life magazine, and is probably the most famous photo he ever took.  A sailor, overcome with joy, at the war’s ending, kisses a dental assistant whom he probably doesn’t know. (By the way, the subjects have never been identified, and many have claimed to be the man or the woman).

Have a look, and figure out what kind of reception it would get from the Purity Patrol:

Yep, members of the PP decided it should be banned from all Veteran’s Affairs facilities.  But it’s not sexual assault, just a moment of pure and understandable joy.  I probably wouldn’t have done it, but ban this wonderful photo? I don’t think so. And, thank Ceiling Cat, the VA changed its mind:

Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough is overruling plans to ban the famous Times Square kiss photo marking the end of World War II from all department health care facilities, a move criticized as political correctness run amok.

The ban was announced internally at VA medical facilities late last month in a memo from RimaAnn Nelson, the Veterans Health Administration’s top operations official. Employees were instructed to “promptly” remove any depictions of the famous photo and replace it with imagery deemed more appropriate.

“The photograph, which depicts a non-consensual act, is inconsistent with the VA’s no-tolerance policy towards sexual harassment and assault,” the memo stated.

The memo garnered public scrutiny after it was posted online by the X account EndWokeness on Tuesday.

Here’s the tweet, which got 10,000 retweets:

More:

Just hours later, McDonough took to social media to reverse the memo.

“This image is not banned from VA facilities — and we will keep it in VA facilities,” said a post from his official X account. Department officials echoed in a separate statement that “VA will NOT be banning this photo from VA facilities.”

Officials said the memo should not have been sent out and was formally rescinded on Tuesday. They did not provide details of whether senior leaders were consulted on the matter ahead of Nelson’s memo.

In her memo, Nelson noted that use of the photo in VA facilities “was initially intended to celebrate and commemorate the end of World War II and the triumphant return of American soldiers. However, perspectives on historical events and their representations evolve.”

Nelson wrote that the non-consensual nature of the kiss and “debates on consent and the appropriateness of celebrating such images” led to the decision. Senior leaders did not provide an explanation for the reversal.

The reversal was, I bet, because people realized that banning an image of a spontaneous and joyful kiss planted at the end of a long and brutal war, an act that doesn’t look as if it was unwanted (who knows?), seemed puritanical and Pecksniffish. It takes a special kind of person to look at that photo and feel not joy but deep anger.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili appears to have heard the lyrics of “Take the Money and Run”:  “Billy Mack is a detective down in Texas/You know he knows just exactly what the facts is.”

A: What are you doing?
Hili: I’m checking the facts.
In Polish:

Ja: Co robisz?
Hili: Sprawdzam fakty.

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

From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:

From The Dodo Pet, sad but sweet:

From The Darwin Awards 2024:

From Garry Kasparov (retweeted by Masih), responding to his demonization by Putin (and quoting Goldwater!)

 

A deconstruction of Ilhan Omar’s initiative. I wonder how she’d reply.

This is why cats are smarter than d*gs: a cat would get there right away, jumping onto the table or figuring out the roundabout route to the food:

From Jez: I have no respect for this woman, yet she’s a hero to many, especially feminists. Listen to her weasel words on the October 7 attacks.

From Malcolm: the wrong kind of Adventure Cat:

 

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a 12-year old boy killed with Zyklon-B upon arrival at the camp:

Two tweets from Doctor Cobb. The comment on this one, “Indeed it is!”

This one got a “!” from Professor Cobb. This is what we’re in for next January 20:

30 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. On this day:
    161 – Marcus Aurelius and L. Commodus (who changes his name to Lucius Verus) become joint emperors of Rome on the death of Antoninus Pius.

    1799 – Napoleon Bonaparte captures Jaffa in Palestine and his troops proceed to kill more than 2,000 Albanian captives.

    1876 – Alexander Graham Bell is granted a patent for an invention he calls the “telephone”.

    1900 – The German liner SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse becomes the first ship to send wireless signals to shore.

    1951 – Iranian prime minister Ali Razmara is assassinated by Khalil Tahmasebi, a member of the Islamic fundamentalist Fada’iyan-e Islam, inside a mosque in Tehran.

    1965 – Bloody Sunday: A group of 600 civil rights marchers is brutally attacked by state and local police in Selma, Alabama.

    1986 – Challenger Disaster: Divers from the USS Preserver locate the crew cabin of Challenger on the ocean floor.

    1989 – Iran and the United Kingdom break diplomatic relations after a fight over Salman Rushdie and his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses.

    2007 – Reform of the House of Lords: The British House of Commons votes to make the upper chamber, the House of Lords, 100% elected. [One week later, the House of Lords retorted by voting for an all-appointed House by a larger majority.]

    2009 – The Real Irish Republican Army kills two British soldiers and injures two other soldiers and two civilians at Massereene Barracks, the first British military deaths in Northern Ireland since the end of The Troubles. [Last year was the first in more than fifty years in which no deaths related to The Troubles were recorded.]

    Births:
    1481 – Baldassare Peruzzi, Italian architect and painter (d. 1537).

    1765 – Nicéphore Niépce, French inventor, invented photography (d. 1833). [He developed heliography, a technique he used to create the world’s oldest surviving product of a photographic process: a print made from a photoengraved printing plate in 1825. In 1826 or 1827, he used a primitive camera to produce the oldest surviving photograph of a real-world scene. Among Niépce’s other inventions was the Pyréolophore, one of the world’s first internal combustion engines, which he conceived, created, and developed with his older brother Claude Niépce.]

    1788 – Antoine César Becquerel, French physicist and biochemist (d. 1878).

    1792 – John Herschel, English mathematician and astronomer (d. 1871).

    1839 – Ludwig Mond, German-born chemist and British industrialist who discovered the metal carbonyls (d. 1909).

    1872 – Piet Mondrian, Dutch-American painter (d. 1944).

    1875 – Maurice Ravel, French pianist, composer, and conductor (d. 1937).

    1894 – Ana María O’Neill, Puerto Rican scholar and activist (d. 1981).

    1895 – Dorothy de Rothschild, English philanthropist and activist (d. 1988).

    1912 – Adile Ayda, Turkish engineer and diplomat (d. 1992). [The first woman career diplomat of Turkey, but is today better remembered as an Etruscologist.]

    1917 – Betty Holberton, American engineer and programmer (d. 2001).

    1922 – Olga Ladyzhenskaya, Russian mathematician and academic (d. 2004). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]

    1936 – Georges Perec, French author and screenwriter (d. 1982).

    1938 – David Baltimore, American biologist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate.

    1938 – Janet Guthrie, American race car driver.

    1942 – Michael Eisner, American businessman.

    1944 – Ranulph Fiennes, English soldier and explorer.

    1944 – Townes Van Zandt, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1997).

    1945 – Arthur Lee, American singer-songwriter and musician (d. 2006).

    1946 – John Heard, American actor and producer (d. 2017).

    1952 – William Boyd, Ghanaian-English author and screenwriter.

    1952 – Ernie Isley, American guitarist and songwriter.

    1952 – Viv Richards, Antiguan cricketer and footballer.

    1957 – Robert Harris, English journalist and author.

    1958 – Rik Mayall, English comedian, actor, and screenwriter (d. 2014).

    1964 – Bret Easton Ellis, American author and screenwriter.

    1970 – Rachel Weisz, English actress.

    Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations. (Michel de Montaigne):
    1274 – Saint Thomas Aquinas, Italian priest and philosopher (b. 1225).

    1778 – Charles De Geer, Swedish entomologist and archaeologist (b. 1720).

    1809 – Jean-Pierre Blanchard, French inventor, best known as a pioneer in balloon flight (b. 1753).

    1897 – Harriet Ann Jacobs, African American Abolitionist and author (b. 1813).

    1913 – Pauline Johnson, Canadian poet and author (b. 1861).

    1947 – Lucy Parsons, American communist anarchist labor organizer (b. c 1853).

    1957 – Wyndham Lewis, English painter and critic (b. 1882). [Co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art and edited its literary magazine BLAST.]

    1967 – Alice B. Toklas, American writer (b. 1877).

    1982 – Ida Barney, American astronomer, mathematician, and academic (b. 1886).

    1999 – Stanley Kubrick, American director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1928).

    2006 – Ali Farka Touré, Malian singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1939).

    2012 – Ravi, Indian director and composer (b. 1926).

    2016 – Leonard Berney, Bergen-Belsen concentration camp liberator (b. 1920).

    2017 – Lynne Stewart, American attorney and activist (b. 1939). [She herself was convicted on charges of conspiracy and providing material support to terrorists in 2005, and sentenced to 28 months in prison. Her felony conviction led to her being automatically disbarred. She was convicted of helping pass messages from her client Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, an Egyptian cleric convicted of planning terror attacks, to his followers in al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, an organization designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the United States Secretary of State.]

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

      Olga Aleksandrovna Ladyzhenskaya (Russian: Ольга Александровна Ладыженская; born on this day in 1922, died 12 January 2004) was a Russian mathematician who worked on partial differential equations, fluid dynamics, and the finite difference method for the Navier–Stokes equations. She received the Lomonosov Gold Medal in 2002. She is the author of more than two hundred scientific works, among which are six monographs.

      Ladyzhenskaya was born and grew up in the small town of Kologriv, the daughter of a mathematics teacher who is credited with her early inspiration and love of mathematics. In 1937 her father, Aleksandr Ivanovich Ladýzhenski, was arrested by the NKVD and executed as an “enemy of the people”.

      Ladyzhenskaya completed high school in 1939, unlike her older sisters who weren’t permitted to do the same. She was not admitted to the Leningrad State University due to her father’s status and attended a pedagogical institute. After the German invasion of June 1941, she taught at a school in Kologriv. She was eventually admitted to Moscow State University in 1943 and graduated in 1947.

      She began teaching in the Physics department of the university in 1950 and defended her PhD there, in 1951, under Sergei Sobolev and Vladimir Smirnov. She received a second doctorate from the Moscow State University in 1953. In 1954, she joined the mathematical physics laboratory of the Steklov Institute and became its head in 1961. Ladyzhenskaya was on the shortlist for the 1958 Fields Medal, ultimately awarded to Klaus Roth and René Thom.

      Ladyzhenskaya is known for her work on partial differential equations (especially Hilbert’s nineteenth problem) and fluid dynamics. She provided the first rigorous proofs of the convergence of a finite difference method for the Navier–Stokes equations. She analyzed the regularity of parabolic equations, with Vsevolod A. Solonnikov and her student Nina Ural’tseva, and the regularity of quasilinear elliptic equations.

      Ladyzhenskaya had a love of arts and storytelling, counting writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and poet Anna Akhmatova among her friends.

      She was once a member of the city council, and engaged in philanthropic activities, repeatedly risking her personal safety and career to aid people opposed to the Soviet regime. Ladyzhenskaya suffered from various eye problems in her later years and relied on special pencils to do her work.

      Two days before a trip to Florida, she died in her sleep aged 81 in Russia on 12 January 2004.

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

      1. The strength of Olga Ladyzhenkaya against so many difficult opposers is amazing. Thank you, Jez, for highlighting her life and accomplishments today.

  2. I saw PCC(E) post that “gem” of a Butler excerpt on eXtwitter.

    A masterful command of dialectic (a casual listener will not recognize anything unusual – that’s the exoteric angle). Butler here is showing she is a literally a wizard, as in literally a religious leader, manipulating thought towards demoralization.

    I’d have to listen carefully again (will not happen) to find some examples of application of esoteric meaning to the exoteric words.

    BTW I think Butler is a nth-wave feminist or something quite distinct from the older feminisms – that undoubtedly had its internal contradictions dialectically negated away.

    1. Butler’s (*) comment has caused quite a stir in Germany. Many left-liberal and left-wing media, who have so far admired Butler rather uncritically and placed her her on a pedestal, criticize her for her statement, sometimes harshly, and back away from her. Butler’s star is sinking more and more and it does not look as if this descent will be halted any time soon.

      (*) Judith Butler endorses “Strike Germany”, an organization that calls on cultural workers to boycott Germany as the government and a very large majority of the population support Israel and its people in the fight against Hamas.

      https://strikegermany.org/

      1. Not sure about the German population. Survey data that have just now come online say that 50 % of German voters think that Israel’s reaction goes too far, with only 28/5 thinking Israels reaction it is just right/not aggressive enough. As this is a poll of people registered as voters, a lot of immigrants from the Muslim world aren’t even included.
        You are right about elite opinion, though, or at least professed elite opinion. Lots of these people would change their tune in an instant if it became acceptable to do so.

        1. Not sure what you mean by “As this is a poll of people registered as voters.” Germany has no voter registration. I’m pretty sure that if you register at your place of residence as a resident (Wohnermeldeamt, residential registration office) and if you are a German citizen, then you are automatically put on the voter rolls.

          1. Yes. “Wahlberechtigte” was the term used, which equals registered residents with German citizenship, which is why a lot of immigrants aren’t included in the poll.

      2. “And so the dialectic progresses.”

        -Delgado and Stefancic
        Critical Race Theory – An Introduction
        2017

  4. NPR had an article out about the same time as Brett Stephens. They say that some NYT staff disagreed about the findings in a December NYT article about sexual violence by Hamas on October 7, “that the anecdotes weren’t fully nailed down” and it seems these staffers leaked their doubts to The Intercept. And then accused the Times of “interrogating” staff of middle eastern descent about the leaks. If there is news critical of Israel like the hospital bombing that wasn’t, you can be sure they won’t worry about nailing down the story. I used to love NPR and now I cannot stand them.

    1. Many negative comments on the Bret Stephens article, accusing Israel of “genocide.”

      1. Their are always a ton of negative comments no matter how reasonable he sounds because he is a Conservative. It took a while but I have to thank the woke for helping me get my head out of my ass and open my ears to different opinions.

        1. It’s an important acknowledgement. Ten years ago, even five, it was almost impossible to get many self-professed liberals to pay attention to the rapidly-growing illiberalism on the left side of the aisle. Why? Well, aside from people being busy with their own concerns, aside from being easily roused by right-wing excesses, it is, in part, because their favored institutions and sources of news were promulgating that illiberalism. The favored sources rarely drew attention to the excesses; the favored institutions couched it all as being simply about “fairness.” And, more importantly, because it was largely sources disfavored by the left that were sounding the alarm. So much for free thinking: “Who said it? Oh, never mind, it must be wrong. No need to assess.” (And to those who equate the WSJ editorial board and the vanishingly rare moderates and conservatives in elite academia with Fox News and random online wackos, I have nothing further to say.)

          It can’t be said often enough–but probably shouldn’t be said too often!—that people like Jerry have helped pull the blinders off many eyes and unstopped many ears.

    2. National Pyongyang Radio or National Palestine Radio?

      OK. Years (decades?) ago they were … pretty good. Like a lot of things, the BBC, NYTimes, etc. they’ve gone downhill, sucking on every swelling moral panic, become garbage. Unwatchable, unlistenable, de-subscribable.
      D.A.
      NYC

  5. To ban Eisenstaedt’s famous photograph is to ban joy. That tells you a lot about what the DEI apparatus is doing to our country. Words: scrutinized. Images: problematic. Pleasure: fraught.

    And in other news, media outlets continue to report that the rapes of Israelis cannot be independently confirmed while Hamas-reported tallies of Gazans dead need not be.

  6. Judith F-ing Butler:

    “…let us just call it “armed resistance” and then we can have a debate…”

    Yes, let’s just use language that concedes the entire argument to you and then and only then can there be an honest debate about who’s right or wrong. Sort of like insisting both sides call trans-identified males “women” and refer to them as “she” in advance of all the discussions on the topic. What a clever strategy, nobody will even notice.

  8. Further, in Lebanon, those rockets and their origination.

    Hezb usually takes over Christian houses and land to lob rockets south to Israel. When the inevitable blowback blasting destroys the house or land, Hezb “reclaims” it. This moves land and structures from the Christian side of the leger to the Shia side. So there’s further motivation.

    No doubt like in “Fataland” in the 80s and then in 2006 the larger goal is to invite an Israeli invasion. The Pals started this in the early 80s.

    Hezb owes its existence to Palestinians (earlier kicked out of Jordan for nearly starting a civil war there) goading Israel into invading Sth Lebanon. Lebanon continues to be destroyed by this, it is pretty much a failed state.

    It’ll probably happen again this year. Hezb/Iran have been and continue to be the death of Lebanon, a formerly Christian, largely peaceful state until the Pals arrived in the 1970. World’s worst neighbors.

    D.A.
    NYC

  9. Rep. Omar’s crusade against the murder and disappearance of black women is a straight rip-off of our fantastically expensive Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls that concluded what everyone already knew. Most indigenous women and children die at the hands of indigenous men they know or trust, often in domestic relationships with them. The police closure rate for murdered indigenous women is about the same as for non-indigenous women — high, because few murders of any women go unsolved. Young women do go missing during the long, sad, drifting hitch-hike from their home Reserves to the urban alcohol and fentanyl jungles of our larger southern cities where some of the survivors do die, completely unremarked by their families unless, anomalously, a white guy kills one.

    These sad findings about indigenous culture did not stop MMIWG from concluding that Canada had committed sex-based genocide against them. If Rep. Omar keeps at it, I’m sure she can accomplish the same in her crusade.

  10. Worse than the rape denialism was the reception trucks carrying beaten hostages got back in Gaza.

    Did you see the scenes of wild jubilation and celebration by ordinary people in the streets, randomly out doing weekend shopping, confronted by beaten and bloody young women tied up in the back of a truck? Rape meat back in Gaza, an excellent day!

    THAT is the vox populi of the Palestinian street.
    If you don’t get that, and what it says, you don’t understand the core of Palestinian culture.

    D.A.
    NYC

  11. ACT / SAT. I wondered how many American high school graduates of middling ability would have to end up in Ivy League classrooms before the faculty revolted.

    Does anyone have any behind-the-scenes insight that can be shared about who is driving the “test optional” reversal at these schools?

  13. My hypothesis—let’s not elevate it to a theory—is that the radical post-modern Left, deep down, does not believe that rape actually exists. Oh sure, they want unwanted touching that the survivor perceived as being of a sexual nature to be prosecuted as the more inclusive crime of sexual assault. And if there is any later dispute about FRIES consent between two horny young people, one of them a man, then it was rape pure and simple. But this doesn’t mean they believe that the crime of violent penetrative injuring rape actually occurs. (I had a patient who died of exactly that so I know it does.). If your only exposure to sexual “violence” consists of micro-aggressions you could be forgiven for thinking no one would actually do that to another human being.

    If this hypothesis is true, it would explain why leftists, who skew heavily female who you would think would know better, are sceptical that Hamas fighters and opportunistic Gazan civilians along for the ride raped strangers on 7 Oct. You see, alleging or even believing rape hurts their political purpose in that setting, so it must not have happened. The troubling part is that for female leftists to argue this suggests they themselves accept casually that accusations of rape made by their sisters could be mostly fabricated. They want society to “believe all women” but, wisely, they know not to believe their own propaganda.

    Rape of course is all too real, but rape as a political construct I believe has currency in a parallel universe. If it had been useful to boast about revenge rape of Zionist women, they would have. But they knew the world wasn’t quite ready for that. So next best is denial.

    1. Perhaps many of those who have uncritically swallowed the dogma that “rape is about power, not sex” have a difficult time seeing the “powerless” commit rape.

  14. Yes, vote by mail is the best. Convenient, fast, and biometrics is pretty much fraud proof. No travelling (except to your mailbox), no lines, no harassment (if you happen to live in one of those benighted places). It also increases voter turnout/participation. Why Trump et al are terrified of mail-in-voting is beyond me…perhaps because high voter turnout means Republicans lose…at least in swing states.

    And it’s no wonder the GOP wants to get rid of American Democracy as was stated at CPAC. Just look at their myriad efforts to suppress the vote. Any political party who makes it a priority to impede voting obviously doesn’t care for democracy.

    And Hungarian’s autocratic leader Victor Orban is speaking today to the Heritage Foundation (authors of the anti-democratic “Project 2025” that Trump is planning to use as a blueprint if he gets in the white house again) and then going to Florida tomorrow to visit Herr Trump. Two peas in a pod. If that doesn’t scare the shit out of the average American, I don’t know what will.

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