Saturday: Hili dialogue

April 20, 2024 • 6:45 am

Good morning on CaturSaturday, April 20, 2024, Jewish cat shabbos and National Pineapple Upside Down Cake Day. My mom used to make these, and oy, do I love them. But I haven’t had one in years. Look at this beauty from Wikipedia!:

Kimberly Vardeman from Lubbock, TX, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Posting will be light today and I’m still working on my talk for Amsterdam (I spend a lot of time preparing). Bear with me; I do my best.

Today’s Google Doodle (click to read) celebrates the NBA playoffs:

It’s also National Cheddar Fries Day, National Cold Brew Day, Lima Bean Respect Day (I have no respect for these odious legumes), UN Chinese Language Day, and, of course, it being April 20, it’s 420 (cannabis culture).  Where did 420 come from? Wikipedia tells you:

In 1971, five high school students in San Rafael, California, used the term “4:20” in connection with a plan to search for an abandoned cannabis crop, based on a treasure map made by the grower. Calling themselves the Waldos,  because their typical hang-out spot “was a wall outside the school”,  the five students—Steve Capper, Dave Reddix, Jeffrey Noel, Larry Schwartz, and Mark Gravich—designated the Louis Pasteur statue on the grounds of San Rafael High School as their meeting place, and 4:20 pm as their meeting time. The Waldos referred to this plan with the phrase “4:20 Louis”. After several failed attempts to find the crop, the group eventually shortened their phrase to “4:20”, which ultimately evolved into a code-word the teens used to refer to consuming cannabis.

And here’s the Pasteur Statue that served as the meeting place:

Photograph: Sapphic, (Sculptor – Beniamino Benvenuto Bufano (1898–1970)), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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

Da Nooz:

*I just checked the news from Columbia, and the protestors, previously removed, have moved back into the quads, illegally again. But the administration is doing nothing about it. They are calling for the killing of Israeli soldiers and similar acts of butchery. 

Dozens of activists denouncing Israel’s war in Gaza remain camped out on the West Lawn of Columbia University on Friday, a day after New York City police arrested more than 100 people on suspicion of criminal trespass during a pro-Palestinian demonstration on the campus.

Now, students at several other universities are planning rallies in solidarity with the Columbia University demonstrators.

The University of North Carolina Students for Justice in Palestine is holding a solidarity rally Friday. The Boston University Students for Justice in Palestine announced an “emergency rally.” The Students for Justice in Palestine at The Ohio State University announced an “emergency protest supporting Gaza solidarity encampment.” And the Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee announced a student walkout “in solidarity with steadfast Columbia students.”

Good old SJP; you can always count on them to support terrorism. Colleges are turning into ideological raves rather than places of learning.

*Well, Israel retaliated for the drone and missile attack from Iran, but it appears to have been a pretty tepid retaliation, which is fine with me. I’d prefer Israel to defeat Hamas than start a war with Iran.

Israel and Iran backed away from the brink Friday.

After a small-scale Israeli overnight strike on Iran—a response to Iran’s far broader missile and drone assault on Israel last week—leaders in Tehran signaled it was time to de-escalate.

But while the foes appear intent for now on returning to the shadow war of covert strikes and counterstrikes that has characterized the conflict for years, the past week’s pair of direct attacks on each other’s territory have raised the stakes and increased the risks of miscalculation.

Israel’s limited strike near the city of Isfahan appeared to provide an off-ramp from the recent cycle of direct conflict. No serious damage was reported, and it was played down by both sides, neither of which are seen as having an interest in going to war.

Israel, which is still deeply entangled in its war against Hamas in Gaza, is also under pressure from the Biden administration to tamp down tensions. Iran, because its less capable air force and air defenses would leave it at a disadvantage in a full-scale conventional war with Israel or the U.S., also has an incentive to defuse the current crisis and return to its previous strategy that centered on asymmetrical warfare.

The stand-down has stopped for now the back-and-forth strikes that the U.S., Europe and Gulf nations feared could send the region spiraling into war.

Still, the attacks have raised the risk that one side or the other could miscalculate as they feel their way to the new rules of their conflict. The animosity that has driven the two countries to fight a long-running shadow war hasn’t diminished. But it will now play out in a context in which both sides have demonstrated a willingness to come out of the shadows and escalate to direct bombardment, security analysts said.

“We’re in a new stage that is much more dangerous and precarious than we used to be in,” said Brig. Gen. Assaf Orion, who is a senior researcher with Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, referring to Friday’s attack. “It’s a long game with a lot of moving parts with several frontiers.”

Indeed, and Iran will, sooner or later, get nuclear weapons. Things aren’t back to where they were before.

*The bills in Congress to give military help to Ukraine and Israel appear, mirabile dictu, to be on their way to being passed, and believe me, Ukraine needs the help very badly. And it was the Democrats who provided the momentum.

The House took a critical step on Friday toward approving a long-stalled package of aid to Ukraine, Israel and other American allies, as Democrats supplied the crucial votes to push the legislation past Republican opposition so that it could be considered on the floor.

The 316-94 vote cleared the way for the House to bring up the aid package, teeing up separate votes on Saturday on each of its parts. But passage of those measures, each attracting bipartisan support from different coalitions, was not in doubt, making Friday’s action the key indicator that the legislation is all but certain to prevail.

Should that happen in votes set for Saturday afternoon, the Senate was expected to quickly pass the measure, and President Biden has said he would sign it into law.

On Friday, the rule for considering the bill — historically a straight party-line vote — passed with more Democratic than Republican support, but it also won a majority of G.O.P. votes, making it clear that despite a pocket of deep resistance from the far right, there is broad bipartisan backing for the $95.3 billion package.

The vote was an enormous victory in the long effort to fund to Ukraine as it battles Russian aggression, a major priority of President Biden. It was a triumph against the forces of isolationism within the G.O.P. and a major moment of consensus in a Congress that for the past year has been mostly defined by its dysfunction.

But it came only after Speaker Mike Johnson put his job on the line by turning to Democrats in a significant breach of custom in the House, further imperiling his position even as he paved the way for the legislation to be voted on and approved.

Zelensky will be exuberant, I expect, as he’s been begging for help for several months. And of course Israel, too, now apparently back in good graces with Biden, will also consider it a mitzvah.

*Meanwhile, the fracas continues at Columbia University, despite the fact that Hamas Tent City was removed and three busloads of protestors arrested, with some students suspended (including the daughter of Ilhan Omar).

The new tents popped up — one, two, three — on Columbia’s campus. It was a defiant gesture on Thursday afternoon by student activists, who were furious about the university’s decision to call in the police to clear an encampment used to protest the Israel-Hamas war.

If university officials thought that getting rid of the encampment, or arresting more than 100 protesters, would persuade students to give up, they may have been very wrong.

By Thursday night, the tents had disappeared. But scores of students took over a campus lawn. Planning to stay all night, they were in a rather upbeat mood, noshing on donated pizza and snacks. An impromptu dance party had even broken out.

“The police presence and the arrests do not deter us in any way,” said Layla Saliba, 24, a Palestinian-American student at the School of Social Work, at a news conference organized by Apartheid Divest, a coalition of student groups.

. . .Other schools have also turned to tougher measures. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University and Brown University have recently acted against student protesters, including making arrests.

And the leaders of schools like Vanderbilt and Pomona have defended suspending or expelling student protesters, saying that they are not interested in dialogue, but disruption.

Alex Morey, director of campus rights advocacy for the free speech and legal defense group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression said “there can be good reasons” for removing students if they are violating neutrally applied policies.

But, she added, Columbia compromised itself when Ms. Shafik suggested to Congress, among other things, that the university may have investigated students and faculty for protected speech. “That’s very troubling,” Ms. Morey said, adding that consistently applied and viewpoint-neutral policies were the way out of this mess for Columbia and other universities.

“If anything,” she added, “all of their repression towards us — it’s galvanized us. It’s moved us.”

Tear down those tents, President Shafik. But I am bothered by her apparent willingness to ditch the First Amendment by prohibiting certain forms of hate speech.

*As always, I’ll steal three items from Nellie Bowles’s incomparable weekly news summary at The Free Press, called this week, “WWIII may come tomorrow. But.”

→ Biden continues paying off successful young voters: Sorry, I mean “forgiving student debt.” Biden this week paid off another $7.4 billion in student loans, making his total student loan cancellation something like $153 billion. And by cancellation, I mean tax dollars were used to make the ledger go to zero. How much exactly? From Penn Wharton’s analysis: “We estimate that President Biden’s recently announced ‘New Plans’ to provide relief to student borrowers will cost $84 billion, in addition to the $475 billion that we previously estimated for President Biden’s SAVE plan.” But that goes to really needy people, right? Well, actually, at least 750,000 of those households are “making over $312,000 in average household income.” Meanwhile, to anyone who questions this allocation of resources, the White House answer is to shame them from official White House accounts by listing how much in pandemic loans were forgiven for House Republicans who own individual small business, which is weird because the reason businesses needed pandemic relief was because the White House banned them from operating. It’s a trap! And the only answer is to pay off every Media Studies PhD student’s loan. Colleges, for their part, are now charging up to $100,000 a year. Yes, literally. And since that’s ultimately going to be paid for by the taxpayers, why work to make it less expensive? Why cut corners when you need to remodel the cafeteria?

→ “Alleged threats”: An activist in Bakersfield, CA, named Riddhi Patel, 28, threatened the city council when it installed metal detectors at City Hall and refused to back a cease-fire resolution. She said: “I hope one day somebody brings the guillotine and kills all of you motherfuckers. . . . You guys want to criminalize us with metal detectors? We’ll see you at your house. We’ll murder you.” Thoughtful stuff. Real reaching across the aisle rhetoric here. She worked at the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment. Perfect.

But it turns out you can’t actually tell someone you’re going to murder them, specifically. As soon as she was done speaking, she was arrested, in one of the more dramatic videos of the week. She now faces 18 felony counts for what the LA Times refers to as “alleged threats.”

→ Men, if you want that job, simply re-identify as gender-fluid: At the University of Waterloo in Canada, there are certain professorships you can apply for only if you meet a very unique set of requirements. Mostly sexual. From the job posting for a position in the mathematics department: “eligible candidates for this search are required to identify as a woman or gender minority, which is defined to include individuals who self-identify as women, transgender, gender-fluid, nonbinary, and Two-Spirit people.” One computer science professor position must be filled by another sexually open-minded candidate; another must be filled by “a member of a racialized minority.” Is this ridiculous? Of course it is. Is it the end of civilization? Probably. But until then, men, put on some nail polish and call yourself gender-fluid. Have a single night of transgressive sex you’re not at all interested in, but do it, because then you can get back to computational theory. Okay? Is that so hard? Pierce one ear. Now you can teach physics.

*A while back Texas banned all DEI initiatives in higher education, and it’s having an effect, at least jobwise.

A ban on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in higher education has led to more than 100 job cuts across university campuses in Texas, a hit echoed or anticipated in numerous other states where lawmakers are rolling out similar policies during an important election year.

Universities throughout Texas rushed to make changes after Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed the law last year. On April 2, the president of the 52,000-student University of Texas at Austin — one of the largest college campuses in the U.S. — sent an email saying the school was shuttering the Division of Campus and Community Engagement and eliminating jobs in order to comply with the ban, which went into effect on Jan. 1.

More than 60 University of Texas at Austin staff members were terminated as a result of the law, according to the Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors. The group said it compiled the list based on affected employees who had reached out and that the number could be greater. University officials declined to confirm the number of positions eliminated.

Officials at other schools, in response to inquiries from The Associated Press, indicated that a total of 36 positions were eliminated between Texas A&M University in College Station; Texas Tech University in Lubbock; Texas State University in San Marcos; The University of Houston; Sam Houston State University in Huntsville; and Sul Ross State University in Alpine. Officials said no one was let go; people were assigned to new jobs, some resigned and vacant positions were closed.

Earlier this week, University of Texas at Dallas officials announced that approximately 20 associate jobs would be eliminated in compliance with the law. University officials declined to comment on how many of those positions are currently filled.

Texas House of Representatives Speaker Dade Phelan, a Republican, applauded the University of Texas actions in a post on the social media platform X. “It is a victory for common sense and proof that the Legislature’s actions are working,” Phelan wrote.

Texas is among five states that have recently passed legislation targeting DEI programs. At least 20 others are considering it.

This is all to the good; DEI is divisive, stifles speech, makes people pledge fealty to preferred ideologies, and has led to an increase in antisemitsm by considering Jews to be “white adjacent” as well as colonialists.  Schools can have people who police bigotry and ensure all community members are treated equally, but that’s not what DEI does.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron need OUT!:

Szaron: The window seems to be open but I can’t go out.
Hili: Call the servants.
In Polish:
Szaron: Okno niby otwarte, a wyjść nie można.
Hili: Zawołaj służbę.

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

From Not Another Science Cat Page:

Trapped! From Science Humor via Sheri Hensley, photo by Charlie Mackinnon

From Jesus of the Day:

From Masih: another puritanical hijab cop gets confronted by Iranian women, who are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it any more:

I had no idea there was a vote. Who are these far left lawmakers? I can guess.  Ceiling Cat bless Senator Fetterman.

Yep, I guess right. Here’s the list from the article:

Democratic Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), Cori Bush (D-MO), Greg Casar (D-TX), Jonathan Jackson (D-IL), Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), Hank Johnson (D-GA), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Summer Lee (D-PA), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Delia Ramirez (D-IL) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) joined Massie in opposing the resolution.

From Simon: the oppressed clean up after the privileged Columbia students:

From Malcolm: a cat otherwise engaged brushes away a Roomba:

From my feed. Yes, it’s troublesome, but still the world’s best job!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a German Jewish woman, born on this day in 1921, died in the camp at age 21.

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, listen to the male woodcock on the prowl. PEENT!

. . . and a genuine Ceiling Cat!

18 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili dialogue”

  1. A one-time removal/arrest will not break the momentum that these Columbia groups have built up to define their normal. The administration must stay on it, suspend them for a full semester, taking their school ID which means they cannot come onto campus. Otherwise it will be business as usual with one hiccup on one day when the cops moved in.
    And of course some education about appropriate time and place if you want to be a Columbia student. It’s a contract Jake.

    1. Do you (well, anyone really) see the administrators standing strong and enforcing measures against the students? Or failing them if they don’t attend classes?
      Wonder what the percentage of students there are still quietly trying to attend classes, hoping the mob doesn’t turn on them.

      1. What is the downside to suspending or expelling students (or staff) whom the university deems in breach of its student enrollment contract? The lucrative foreign students would lose their visas (good thing for us, bad for them and the university) but that’s their problem. So we graduate a few hundred fewer sociologists and minors in genocide studies, maybe even lose a few engineering justice studies majors. Who cares?

        Speech should absolutely (literally) be protected. Don’t even go there. It undermines the cause to police it. Disrupting university activities to the detriment of scholars should be squashed. Tear down the tents and expel their occupants. (If occupants there be. In some occupations, no one actually sleeps in the tents at night. It’s a theatrical set.)

        What are the admins afraid of? Is it just because they couldn’t imagine this would be a component of the job of a university president, provost, or dean, to be disliked by the oppressed? It would be like someone joining the air force just to learn to fly, and then on being called to fly in Vietnam, saying, “No, wait…Not what I signed up for.” Yes it was, Jake.

        Anyway, this is a private affair of concern the university. Even though I hate to see great institutions crumble and fall, I’m washing my hands of it.

      2. How do they expect to miss classes to protest and still pass? I didn’t have that much spare time as a student.

  2. It was a tepid response by Israel but I think there was a clear, intentional, message; “We can hit your nuclear facilities”.

    1. Agreed, particularly if they damaged any of Iran’s most advanced air defense systems.

  3. On this day:
    1657 – Freedom of religion is granted to the Jews of New Amsterdam (later New York City).

    1828 – René Caillié becomes the second non-Muslim to enter Timbuktu, following Major Gordon Laing. He would also be the first to return alive.

    1859 – Daniel E. Sickles, a New York Congressman, is acquitted of the murder of Philip Barton Key on grounds of temporary insanity. The case marked the first successful use of the “temporary insanity” legal defense.

    1861 – Thaddeus S. C. Lowe, attempting to display the value of balloons, makes record journey, flying 900 miles from Cincinnati to South Carolina.

    1862 – Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard complete the experiment disproving the theory of spontaneous generation.

    1902 – Pierre and Marie Curie refine radium chloride. [Yesterday was the anniversary of Pierre’s death in 1906.]

    1918 – Manfred von Richthofen, a.k.a. The Red Baron, shoots down his 79th and 80th victims, his final victories before his death the following day.

    1945 – World War II: Führerbunker: On his 56th birthday Adolf Hitler makes his last trip to the surface to award Iron Crosses to boy soldiers of the Hitler Youth. [It was Hitler’s birthday, he was born on this day in 1889.]

    1945 – Twenty Jewish children used in medical experiments at Neuengamme are killed in the basement of the Bullenhuser Damm school.

    1946 – The League of Nations officially dissolves, giving most of its power to the United Nations.

    1961 – Cold War: Failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion of US-backed Cuban exiles against Cuba.

    1968 – English politician Enoch Powell makes his controversial “Rivers of Blood” speech. [Eric Clapton later says “Enoch was right” during a racist rant, inspiring the launch of the Rock Against Racism campaign.]

    1999 – Columbine High School massacre: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold kill 13 people and injure 24 others before committing suicide at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado.I

    2008 – Danica Patrick wins the Indy Japan 300 becoming the first female driver in history to win an Indy car race.

    2010 – The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explodes in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven workers and beginning an oil spill that would last six months.

    2015 – Ten people are killed in a bomb attack on a convoy carrying food supplies to a United Nations compound in Garowe in the Somali region of Puntland. [The Al-Shabaab militant group claimed responsibility for the blast.]

    2020 – For the first time in history, oil prices drop below zero, an effect of the 2020 Russia-Saudi Arabia oil price war.

    2021 – State of Minnesota v. Derek Michael Chauvin: Derek Chauvin is found guilty of all charges in the murder of George Floyd by the Fourth Judicial District Court of Minnesota.

    2023 – SpaceX’s Starship rocket, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, launches for the first time. It explodes 4 minutes into flight. [SpaceX call it a “rapid, unscheduled disassembly”.]

    Births:
    1646 – Charles Plumier, French botanist and author (d. 1704). [Considered one of the most important of the botanical explorers of his time. He made three botanizing expeditions to the West Indies, which resulted in a massive work Nova Plantarum Americanarum Genera (1703–1704) and was appointed botanist to King Louis XIV of France.]

    1826 – Dinah Craik, English author and poet (d. 1887). [Best remembered for her novel, John Halifax, Gentleman, which presents the mid-Victorian ideals of English middle-class life.]

    1850 – Daniel Chester French, American sculptor, designed the Lincoln statue (d. 1931).

    1893 – Harold Lloyd, American actor, comedian, and producer (d. 1971).

    1893 – Joan Miró, Spanish painter and sculptor (d. 1983).

    1908 – Lionel Hampton, American vibraphone player, pianist, bandleader, and actor (d. 2002).

    1913 – Willi Hennig, German biologist and entomologist (d. 1976). [Founder of phylogenetic systematics, otherwise known as cladistics. In 1945 as a prisoner of war, Hennig began work on his theory of cladistics, which he published in German in 1950, with a substantially revised English translation published in 1966. With his works on evolution and systematics he revolutionised the view of the natural order of beings. As a taxonomist, he specialised in dipterans (true flies).]

    1914 – Betty Lou Gerson, American actress (d. 1999). [Best known as the original voice of Cruella de Vil from the Disney animated film One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) for which she was named a Disney Legend in 1996.]

    1920 – Frances Ames, South African neurologist, psychiatrist, and human rights activist (d. 2002). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]

    1924 – Leslie Phillips, English actor and producer (d. 2022). [“Herl–air–oh!”]

    1936 – Pat Roberts, American captain, journalist, and politician.

    1937 – George Takei, American actor.

    1939 – Gro Harlem Brundtland, Norwegian physician and politician, 22nd Prime Minister of Norway.

    1941 – Ryan O’Neal, American actor.

    1945 – Mike, American Wyandotte chicken, lived 18 months following decapitation (d. 1947).

    1949 – Jessica Lange, American actress.

    1951 – Luther Vandross, American singer-songwriter and producer (d. 2005).

    1953 – Sebastian Faulks, English journalist and author.

    1964 – Andy Serkis, English actor and director.

    1969 – Felix Baumgartner, Austrian daredevil. [Known for jumping to Earth from a helium balloon from the stratosphere on 14 October 2012. Doing so, he set world records for skydiving an estimated 39 km (24 mi), reaching an estimated top speed of 1,357.64 km/h (843.6 mph), or Mach 1.25. He became the first person to break the sound barrier relative to the surface without vehicular power on his descent.]

    If you live each day as it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right (Steve Jobs):
    1769 – Chief Pontiac, American tribal leader (b. 1720).

    1831 – John Abernethy, English surgeon and anatomist (b. 1764).

    1873 – William Tite, English architect, designed the Royal Exchange (b. 1798).

    1899 – Joseph Wolf, German ornithologist and illustrator (b. 1820). [Became the preferred illustrator for explorers and naturalists including David Livingstone, Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter Bates. Wolf depicted animals accurately in lifelike postures and is considered one of the great pioneers of wildlife art. Sir Edwin Landseer thought him “…without exception, the best all-round animal artist who ever lived”.]

    1912 – Bram Stoker, Anglo-Irish novelist and critic, created Count Dracula (b. 1847).

    1918 – Karl Ferdinand Braun, German-American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1850). [Contributed significantly to the development of radio and television technology and built the first semiconductor. He shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Guglielmo Marconi “for their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy” and was a founder of Telefunken, one of the pioneering communications and television companies.]

    1991 – Steve Marriott, English singer-songwriter and producer (b. 1947). [ “Laaaiiizy Sunday afternoon…”]

    1991 – Don Siegel, American director and producer (b. 1912).

    1992 – Benny Hill, English comedian, actor, and screenwriter (b. 1924).

    2003 – Bernard Katz, German-English biophysicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1911).

    2012 – Bert Weedon, English guitarist and songwriter (b. 1920).

    2016 – Victoria Wood, British comedian, actress and writer (b. 1953).

    2021 – Les McKeown, Scottish pop singer (b. 1955).

    2022 – Gavin Millar, Scottish film director (b. 1938).

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

      Frances Rix Ames (/ˈfrɑːnsɪz eɪmz/; born on this day in 1920, died 11 November 2002) was a South African neurologist, psychiatrist, and human rights activist, best known for leading the medical ethics inquiry into the death of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, who died from medical neglect after being tortured in police custody. When the South African Medical and Dental Council (SAMDC) declined to discipline the chief district surgeon and his assistant who treated Biko, Ames and a group of five academics and physicians raised funds and fought an eight-year legal battle against the medical establishment. Ames risked her personal safety and academic career in her pursuit of justice, taking the dispute to the South African Supreme Court, where she eventually won the case in 1985.

      Born in Pretoria and raised in poverty in Cape Town, Ames became the first woman to receive a Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Cape Town in 1964. Ames studied the effects of cannabis on the brain and published several articles on the subject. Seeing the therapeutic benefits of cannabis on patients in her own hospital, she became an early proponent of legalization for medicinal use. She headed the neurology department at Groote Schuur Hospital before retiring in 1985, but continued to lecture at Valkenberg and Alexandra Hospital. After apartheid was dismantled in 1994, Ames testified at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission about her work on the “Biko doctors” medical ethics inquiry. In 1999, Nelson Mandela awarded Ames the Star of South Africa, the country’s highest civilian award, in recognition of her work on behalf of human rights.

      Ames struggled with leukemia for some time. Before her death, she told an interviewer, “I shall go on until I drop.” She continued to work for UCT as a part-time lecturer at Valkenberg Hospital until six weeks before she died at home in Rondebosch on 11 November 2002. Ames was cremated, and according to her wishes, her ashes were combined with hemp seed and dispersed outside of Valkenberg Hospital where her memorial service was held.

      South African neurosurgeon Colin Froman referred to Ames as the “great and unorthodox protagonist for the medical use of marijuana many years before the current interest in its use as a therapeutic drug”. J. P. van Niekerk of the South African Medical Journal notes that “Frances Ames led by conviction and example” and history eventually justified her action in the Biko affair.

      Ames’s work on the Biko affair led to major medical reforms in South Africa, including the disbanding and replacement of the old apartheid-era medical organisations which failed to uphold the medical standards of the profession. According to van Niekerk, “the most enduring lesson for South African medicine was the clarification of the roles of medical practitioners when there is a question of dual responsibilities. This is now embodied inter alia in the SAMA Code of Conduct and in legal interpretations of doctors’ responsibilities”.

      Ames testified during the medical hearings at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1997. Archbishop Desmond Tutu honored Ames as “one of the handful of doctors who stood up to the apartheid regime and brought to book those doctors who had colluded with human rights abuse.” In acknowledgement of her work on behalf of human rights in South Africa, Nelson Mandela awarded Ames the Order of the Star of South Africa in 1999, the highest civilian award in the country.

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

  4. Here’s a piece from The Free Press about plans on the Left to disrupt the DNC this summer. Not to protest, but to disrupt. “We’ve got to give them a 1968 kind of welcome.”

    1. Was there in Chicago in ’68 to protest against the DNC, and just by sheer luck managed not to be in the group that the police tear gassed. But it was a education in how easy it is for a very small committed minority to use a predominantly peaceful group as cover to provoke the police. (Not that they needed too much provoking back then.)

      There is a women’s organization also planning to protest the DNC, over the Biden admin’s gutting of Title X, and supporting men who feel like women over the biological kind. They plan to be entirely peaceful and non-violent, and I suspect will be seen as the enemy, by the pro-Palestine group who consider themselves more urgently righteous than anyone else.

  5. “We’re in a new stage that is much more dangerous and precarious than we used to be in,” said Brig. Gen. Assaf Orion, with Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, referring to Friday’s attack…”

    Small observation: This Israeli general thinks that Israel’s [mild] attack on Friday was the onset of dangerous escalation? What about Iran’s massive attack the previous Saturday. That didn’t represent a “new stage”?

    1. Closer to home (well, closer if home is England or northern United States), we had a discussion about that on another Discord group. University of Waterloo has designated several “research chairs” in engineering (really just federal diversity slush fund money — the candidates don’t have to do any research and don’t chair anything) as open only to candidates who self-identify as trans, non-binary, or two-spirit (the trans appropriation of an obscure indigenous cultural tradition), or who self-identify as black. You can legally do this in Canada. What you can’t do is make a position open only to straight white settler men who know they were born in the right body.

      This, I said, should be pretty easy to game. Who on a hiring committee is going to dare question me if I say I’m black? I suppose eventually my estranged sister (different last name) would rat me out that neither of our parents and none of our grandparents were the slightest bit black. Oh well. But surely non-binary or gender-fluid is pretty easy. What does that even mean? Would a hiring committee ask me to prove it? How could I? How could they disprove it? Would a hiring committee have enough non-binary people on it even to know what they were trying to vet? Every wise young man coming out of school now ought to be getting his social media profile in order to show his non-binary bona fides, I said.

      But I was gently rebuked by a Mum of a trans kid. The purpose of these hiring strictures, she reminded me, is not to actually hire non-binary people. It’s to compel genuflection to the idea that non-binariness (or blackness) is a legitimate criterion for hiring (and for excluding those who lack it from consideration of hiring.) Even if no non-binary people actually get hired — no skin off the university’s nose: these are make-work non-jobs paid for with other people’s money — the message goes out that people comply with this and therefore it’s OK, normal, acceptable. Fight it we must, and she’s right.

      However, a Human Rights Tribunal would be unlikely to find in favour of a candidate whose application was rejected because he didn’t self-identify into one of the correct pigeonholes. The Human Rights Commissions actually vet these exclusion schemes and give advance approval in writing to employers wanting to use them, to prevent guesswork. Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms* explicitly allows reverse discrimination for a noble social purpose like validating grievances and settling scores. And decisions by HRTs are, unlike court rulings, beyond reach of judicial review for all intents and purposes. So I reiterate: Canadians with boys in high school must encourage their sons to pose as non-binary if they want doors not to be closed in their faces.
      ——————
      * This modern-sounding language reflects the Charter’s being thrown together in a hotel room in the 1980s by politicians considerably less wise than James Madison.

      1. To be fair, that ad does say Waterloo is doing this “[t]o address legal requirements for supporting underrepresented groups in the CRC program.” Totally not a make-work program for nonbinary indigenous people.
        https://uwaterloo.ca/research/sites/default/files/uploads/documents/eng-crc2024-t2-women-final.pdf

        I’m afraid it will take a generation to undo this system of legally sanctioned bigotry now that it’s supported by our human rights commissions and the Supreme Court of Canada.

  8. Love the guillotine lady, especially her arrest. I wonder what will happen to her.

    I’m concerned that the action taken at Columbia to remove the protestor will lead to worse before it leads to better. Yes, the protestors needed to be removed, and new protests must also be stopped if they violate the law. But this protest movement will spread beyond Columbia, and there’s no telling how far. How will the other institutions respond?

    I’m glad that both Iran and Israel have signaled that they want to call it even for now. The problem is that they have crossed the rubicon into attacking each other’s sovereign territory. So, we’re not back to the status quo. A new ratchet has been engaged.

    In limiting its response, Israel has retained the support of the U.S. and other players. Let’s see if that group is really serious about solving the Iran problem. Will it act now or will it kick the can down the road until Iran actually tests a nuclear weapon? And then what? Will they throw up their hands and say that a nuclear Iran was inevitable?

  9. About the campers at Columbia, hearing them described as “furious” only reinserts into my head the image I’ve long had of them as babies throwing tantrums. The bit about them eating pizza and playing music makes me sad when they’re supposedly protesting in support of terrorists who slaughtered kids their own age doing the very same thing in Israel October 7. Obviously different, but if only they could see themselves from afar. They would never be able to do what they’re doing if Hamas or the Houthis were in charge of their campus. They’re so very unaware of the important details in this battle.

    1. Little self awareness is a trait of many narcissists. Psychological categories can OFTEN be applied to groups b/c those groups (or activism as a calling) attract those personality types.
      There’s fairly new data on narcissistic personality disorder being overrepresented within left wing activists. (more data on “bitcoin bros” and narcissism, also)

      My personal pet theory (and there are no studies I know of) is that many trans activists have borderline personality disorder. Again, just my theory.
      With Palestine activists we have narcissism and psychopathy all the way through.

      D.A.
      NYC
      (B.A. Middle East pol and psychology – they’re a good match of majors) 🙂

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