Wednesday: Hili dialogue

May 29, 2024 • 6:45 am

Good morning on a Hump Day (“Կուզի օր” in Armenian): May 29, 2024. Graduation at the University of Chicago is in three days: June 1 (will it be disrupted?). It’s National Coq au Vin Day, an arrant form of cultural appropriation. But it’s good!

Ewan Munro from London, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also National Biscuit Day, celebrating a wonderful comestible from the American South, Paper Clip Day, Learn about Composting Day, World Digestive Health Day, International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers (LOL; are they keeping the peace in Lebanon?), and, in England, Oak Apple Day in which people wear “oak apples” (galls on oak trees) “to commemorate the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in May 1660.

And there’s a Google Doodle today, celebrating the emergence of two different broods of cicadas right now. Click on the Doodle for an explanation, or go here:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 29 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*As I write this on early Tuesday evening, it looks as if the closing arguments for Trump’s “hush money” case will be over within the hour.  Further, perhaps anticipating a guilty verdict, Trump is starting to paint himself as an “outlaw”, one with two rappers, Sheff G and Sleepy Hallow, accused of murder. Read that last bit for yourself.

The defense closed first; here’s the NYT’s summary:

Mr. Blanche called for jurors to reach a “very quick and easy” verdict. He argued that there was nothing false about the documents because Mr. Cohen had in fact performed legal work — and suggested that Mr. Trump had little reason to pay attention to them in any case, because he was the “leader of the free world” at the time.

But Mr. Blanche’s closing, which took a little under three hours, was at times perplexing. He sometimes called extra attention to elements of the prosecution’s case and repeatedly emphasized Mr. Cohen’s position as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer even as he was impugning his character. He also played down prosecutors’ contention that Mr. Trump, Mr. Cohen and Mr. Pecker had engaged in a criminal conspiracy.

“Every campaign in this country is a conspiracy,” he said.

And the prosecution’s summation, which closed the arguments:

Mr. Steinglass told jurors that suppressing Ms. Daniels’s account “could very well be what got President Trump elected” in 2016. But he framed it as just one part of a broader effort to influence the election, recounting testimony by Mr. Cohen and David Pecker, the longtime publisher of The National Enquirer, about a pact with Mr. Trump to buy and bury negative stories.

The tabloid, which Mr. Steinglass said served as “a covert arm” of the Trump campaign, quashed an apparently false story about Mr. Trump fathering a child out of wedlock and struck a deal that suppressed the account of Karen McDougal, a Playboy model who said she’d had an affair with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Steinglass then described how a tape from “Access Hollywood” on which Mr. Trump bragged about groping women set off a panic inside the Trump campaign, and sent Mr. Cohen scurrying to keep Ms. Daniels under wraps after Mr. Pecker declined to buy another story. She signed a nondisclosure agreement 11 days before the election.

He presented what he described as the “smoking guns” of the scheme: notes from Mr. Trump’s then-chief financial officer laying out the plans to reimburse Mr. Cohen.

My prediction: Trump will be found not guilty on all counts because Cohen’s testimony was wonky, and he may even have committed perjury. This is a beyond-reasonable-doubt felony case, so the jury has to be unanimous and the prosecution’s case strong. I’m not confident about either of those. To add to the fun, the Biden campaign, in a weird move, decided to send acolytes, including Robert De Niro, to palaver and speechify outside the courthouse:

President Joe Biden’s campaign on Tuesday showed up outside former President Donald Trump’s New York City criminal hush money trial with actor Robert De Niro and a pair of former police officers in an effort to refocus the presidential race on the former president’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol insurrection.

It was a sharp about-face for Biden’s team, which had largely ignored the trial since it began six weeks ago and is now looking to capitalize on its drama-filled closing moments, sending the “Goodfellas” actor and the first responders who were at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Biden’s campaign had been wary about feeding into Trump’s argument that his criminal trials were the result of politically motivated prosecutions, but ultimately it decided to engage because its message about the stakes of the election was struggling to break through the intense focus on the trial.

Here’s De Niro “clashing” with Trump supporters in NYC. “You are gangsters!”, he yells, and I believe he uses the “F. U.” phrase.

*The world continues to excoriate Israel for supposedly targeting civilians in a humanitarian area, killing 21-50 Gazans and wounding dozens more.  From the outset you have to be skeptical of such claims given that they’re reported by Hamas and because Israel avoids targeting civilians.  Now we learn that skepticism is warranted: there were no deliberate attacks on civilians and nobody was killed in a humanitarian zone.  The IDF spokesman below, using videos and intercepted phone calls, explains what we know: two Hamas officials were targeted in a Jeep using very low-power bombs to minimize other casualties.

Those bombs set off secondary explosions. We’re not sure why, but the spokesman below suggests that weapons stored in the area (there were Hamas rocket launchers, too) were exploded by the bomb. Other sources indicate that shrapnel from these secondary explosions ignited a fuel tank in the area, and that is what caused the fires that led to civilian deaths. Note that none of the civilians killed were in a humanitarian zone, so the world’s accusations are misplaced. That said, it’s still a tragedy–noncombatant Gazans were killed in a series of unexpected and concatenated disasters.  I wish the Gazans would stay in the humanitarian zones, but, according to Malgorzata, IDF attacks are often called off when they see civilians or children near Hamas targets, and some civilians are counting on that form of “protection” (it’s a risky calculation). Further, some Gazans prefer to stay near Hamas because they want to “support the resistance.” Whatever the reasons, in general it’s safer to stay in humanitarian zones, as the IDF scrupulously avoids targeting those.

Here’s the IDF’s explanation from its spokesperson. Watch the video below from 4:00 (when it starts) to 10:26. (The phone call at 8:34 is telling.) There are questions afterwards, but some are in Hebrew.

*Speaking of excoriating Israel, the WSJ reports that, as expected, the IDF continues its assault on Rafah. (Did anybody think they were going to stop? As Douglas Murray says, “You don’t try to put out just half of a fire.”)

Israeli tanks advanced further into Rafah on Tuesday, according to witnesses, as the Israeli military said it was expanding operations in the southern Gaza city amid growing international condemnation.

The tanks passed near the Al-Awda mosque, a central Rafah landmark, Palestinians in the city told The Wall Street Journal. The Israeli military didn’t comment on the specifics of its push into Rafah, but Israel’s Army Radio said the military had added a brigade to the five already operating in the city and troops were engaging in close-quarters combat with Hamas.

Israel is trying to thread a needle by pursuing a fight with Hamas in Rafah without further damaging its relationship with the U.S., its closest ally, or derailing fragile relations with the Arab world.

An airstrike on Sunday in Rafah that Palestinian officials said killed dozens of civilians has demonstrated the inherent challenge that Israel faces.

Israel for months has said it wants to destroy the last of Hamas’s military structure in Rafah and disrupt the U.S.-designated terrorist group’s smuggling network from Egypt into Gaza. But the U.S. has repeatedly warned Israel that it needs to do more to protect civilians.

Sunday’s airstrike raises further questions about whether the Israeli military can achieve its goals without crossing American red lines. The incident is heaping fresh political tension on President Biden, coming after weeks of pro-Palestinian protests that roiled college campuses across the U.S.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the deaths of civilians in the airstrike a “tragic mistake.” It came just days after the United Nations’ top court demanded that Israel halt some operations in Rafah, with the outcry over the civilian deaths echoing the one that followed an Israeli strike in April that killed seven aid workers in Gaza from World Central Kitchen.

Note that there is not a word here that the strike was likely not in the humanitarian zone (that appears way further down in the article along with Hamas’s counterclaim),. But if “Israel must do more to protect civilians, it would help if the U.S. told them what to do and where the vaunted “red line” is. It would be immensely more informative for the MSM to note that there’s substantial evidence that, as noted above, the IDF was trying to protect civilians, and didn’t drop bombs in the humanitarian zone. Yes the event was “tragic,” as Netanyahu said, but that word does not imply that Israel was responsible for it.

*The Associated Press reports that the Pope used an extremely offensive word to refer to “being gay”, and then said he didn’t really mean to say it. P

Pope Francis apologized Tuesday after he was quoted using a vulgar and derogatory term about gay men to reaffirm the Catholic Church’s ban on gay priests.

The ruckus that ensued underscored how the church’s official teaching about homosexuality often bumps up against the unacknowledged reality that there are plenty of gay men in the priesthood, and plenty of LGBTQ+ Catholics who want to be fully part of the life and sacraments of the church.

Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni issued a statement acknowledging the media storm that erupted about Francis’ comments, which were delivered behind closed doors to Italian bishops on May 20.

Italian media on Monday had quoted unnamed Italian bishops in reporting that Francis jokingly used the term “faggotness” while speaking in Italian during the encounter. He had used the term in reaffirming the Vatican’s ban on allowing gay men to enter seminaries and be ordained priests.

Bruni said Francis was aware of the reports and recalled that the Argentine pope, who has made outreach to LGBTQ+ Catholics a hallmark of his papacy, has long insisted there was “room for everyone” in the Catholic Church.

“The pope never intended to offend or express himself in homophobic terms, and he extends his apologies to those who were offended by the use of a term that was reported by others,” Bruni said.

With the statement, Bruni carefully avoided an outright confirmation that the pope had indeed used the term, in keeping with the Vatican’s tradition of not revealing what the pope says behind closed doors. But Bruni also didn’t deny that Francis had said it.

And for those who have long advocated for greater inclusion and acceptance of LGBTQ+ Catholics, the issue was bigger than the word itself.

“More than the offensive slur uttered by the pope, what is damaging is the institutional church’s insistence on ‘banning’ gay men from the priesthood as if we all do not know (and minister alongside) many, many gifted, celibate, gay priests,” noted Natalia Imperatori-Lee, chair of the religious studies department at Manhattan College.

Now if the Pope didn’t really mean to say anything offensive or homophobic, why did he say it? He is, after all, chosen by God, so perhaps God put that word in his mouth.

*And from the BBC, the world’s most expensive record album is going on view. Unfortunately, it’s by the Wu-Tang Clan (bolding is the BBC’s):

An album so rare and valuable that only a few ears have ever listened to it is set to go on display at an Australian gallery, giving the public a taste of the uber-exclusive tracks.

Housed in an ornate silver box, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin – recorded in secret by the Wu-Tang Clan over six years – was designed to be a piece of fine art. Only a single CD copy exists.

The record by the pioneering hip-hop group is the most expensive ever sold. Currently, it is on loan to Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art (Mona).

Over 10 days in June, Mona will host small listening parties where members of the public can hear a curated, 30-minute sample of the album.

Recorded in New York City and produced in Marrakesh between 2006 and 2013, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin includes the nine surviving members of the group – and features pop artist Cher and Game of Thrones actress Carice Van Houten.

The group felt the value of music had been cheapened by online streaming and piracy, and wanted to take “a 400-year-old Renaissance-style approach to music, offering it as a commissioned commodity”.

It includes a hand-carved nickel box and a leather-bound manuscript containing lyrics and a certificate of authenticity – and a legal condition that the owner cannot release the 31 tracks for 88 years.

Producer RZA likened it to a Picasso artwork, or an ancient Egyptian artefact.

Well. . . . . .

“It’s a unique original rather than a master copy of an album,” he said when the album went on sale in 2015.

As a result, only a handful of people on the planet have heard snippets of the 31 tracks.

A group of potential buyers and media heard a 13-minute section in 2015, and disgraced drug firm executive Martin Shkreli – who bought the album for $2m (£1.6m, A$3m) – streamed clips of the music on YouTube to celebrate Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory.

Shkreli was later forced to hand it over to US prosecutors in 2018 after being convicted of defrauding investors, and it was then sold to digital art collective Pleasr.

Here’s a video I found that purports to show and give a snippet of the sole CD, bought by “Pleasr” with cryptocurrency:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Kulka has finally taken an interest in Paulina’s newborn daughter:

Szaron: Have you seen Kulka?
Hili: No, she is sitting by the baby now.

In Polish:

Szaron: Widziałaś gdzieś Kulkę?
Hili: Nie, ona teraz siedzi przy dziecku.

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

From Science Humor:

From Jesus of the Day:

From The Dodo Pet:

Masih calls upon the UN to not honor the “Butcher of Tehran”:

Rashida Tlab speaks at a Detroit conference also hosting some rather unsavory fellow speakers.  She covers it all, much of it lies, including Israeli genocide, mass graves of children buried by Jews in Gazas, Israeli snipers killing Jews, and so on. She threatens Biden for suppporting Israel, and , threatens Biden, and decries universities’ repression of “protected speech” of encampments. Her full 15-minute speech is in the second tweet.

. . . and the conference introduction with a snarky remark:

This is one college President who means business; no idle threats here! (There are other tweets in the thread.) Note the cowardly covering of faces, which in this case is not going to help them.

From Malcolm. What is this creature (answer in the thread)?

From the Auschwitz Memorial; no comment needed:

Two tweets from Doctor Cobb. First a d*g that wants the television bacon really bad!

. . . and the two types of cat:

38 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

  2. Well, it’s a shame in a democracy but most people only see the superficial and few understand the background. It’s like those psych question that ask what sweeping the floor is:

    1) Cleaning and removing dirt and debris to create a healthy living space
    2) Moving a broom back and forth over the floor

    One more thought for today: Interesting secularization 0.1a was already tried and failed – French revolution brought us a Cult of Reason / Church of Reason, but it was disbanded by Napoleon who had to compromise with the Church to restore order in society.

    So that’s kind of like Lennin (who called atheism ‘militant materialism’) original attempt to found Marxism in Russia without money – that turned into such a disaster for farmers the militant materialist ended up as documented writing “For God’s sake we need food for Petersburg now!”

  3. Jerry, you had expressed an interest in seeing some of the cicada emergence. From reports I have, it is going on now and it will last some weeks. The emergence presumably is farther along toward the south, but I don’t know what is going on in the Chicago area. I suppose you will get specific information about where and when from your local news. The last round had a good emergence at Raccoon Grove Nature Preserve which is just south of Chicago. And here is a web site that includes a detailed zoomable map of the previous emergences of the two species: https://cicadas.uconn.edu

  5. Mistake to send De Niro (who sounded cuckoo) to “get the message across”. He was booed, harassed and heckled and sounded tired, old and -predictably- out of touch.

    Dogs lick us because they “like” us or are “pandering” to us (pack animals – with hierarchy). I doubt they want to eat our bones. 😁 🐾 🐾 🐾 🐾

    In other news, the pier we (USA) built in Gaza was damaged by weather and is being repaired.

    *US suspends aid deliveries via Gaza pier after it suffers serious weather damage*
    https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-suspends-aid-deliveries-via-gaza-pier-after-it-suffers-serious-weather-damage/

    So we can’t even build a pier now? Please Elon, get us to Mars quickly — the US needs something to brag about.

    1. Rosemary, I fully agree.
      Definitely a mistake to send De Niro who cannot manage his temper or language at the best of times, hardly a good ambassador for the current President, who arranged that fiasco? D Trump must have been pleased.

    2. *US suspends aid deliveries via Gaza pier after it suffers serious weather damage*
      https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-suspends-aid-deliveries-via-gaza-pier-after-it-suffers-serious-weather-damage/

      So we can’t even build a pier now?

      I don’t know how this was advertised in the US, but the very strong impression I got here was that this was an adapted amphibious-assault construction, modified for civilian use (and probably with a lot of procedures review because “not going into a war zone”), and so inherently a temporary structure.
      Do many traces exist of the multiple “Mulberry” piers, mooring pontoons and roadways constructed on the Normandy beaches? Of course not – they were temporary structures.
      While the weather (and more importantly, sea state) in the Eastern Med isn’t on a par with mid-winter North Sea or “Iceberg Alley”, it can definitely get lumpy enough to cause damage. When I was working on the Tamar gas discovery (which changed Israel’s energy prospects), we lost best part of a day to weather during a well-kill operation. Definitely a less-than millpond sea state.
      Any competent amphibious assault engineer would have researched the sea-state history of the area and specced their anchor spreads to provide whatever was required in availability – 80%, 90%, whatever. Since operations started, what has been the (non-military) availability of the structure?

      1. Interesting. Thanks for the explanation. I’m still somewhat bewildered. If I understand you corretly, we are to expect the structure to be “out of commission” at a certain frequency?

        1. Of course.
          I’m having a headache thinking into your head. You don’t have any marine experience, do you?

          Consider a harbour, with a bridge over the entry (Baltimore, for an example I’ve literally never seen); with a distance between the (height above/ below tide level) and maximum expected wave height (“sea state”). You can calculate (and will have published) the probability of a particular vessel being able to enter (leave) the harbour, for each vessel’s height above (also, below ; people die if you forget this) water level. I remember a month at home, while a vessel I was assigned-to went into a harbour on one side of the Bosporus to have 20m of (designed for quick-change) structural machinery removed, then go to a shipyard on the other side of the passage and have the equipment craned off the deck and put back in place. The second shipyard had to rent a crane across 7 national (and one customs) border for the job. It was cheaper than always having a 20-ton by 150m boom crane in the yard. Oh, in between, obviously, they went under the Bosporus Bridge, in mid-city Istanbul (16, 18 million commuters? I haven’t been keeping track).
          You may have heard of “Suez-max” and “Pana-max” vessel classes ; there is also “Bosporus-max”. For reasons that should now be fairly obvious. It was a design factor when the ship went to the drawing board, about 5 years before they started recruiting crew (me included).
          Harbours publish their probability (per tide, weather, month) of vessels of certain sizes getting in/ out. And as part of that, they publish their dredging plans for years to come.
          Every structure has a likelihood of availability. “Coastal” structures, doubly so. It varies with (likely) weather, need of dredging, and planned maintenance. Did you think it was ever any different?
          Most harbours have wreck buoys deployed around their entrances (and exit route) where ships got it wrong and sank/ floundered/ were sunk (it’s a routine part of warfare). They’re part of the hazard-avoidance problem for pretty much every harbour. Ship insurance covers the Master getting this wrong (it is expensive insurance).
          Sorry, but … how could you think that harbours were (1) always available or (2) operated by rolling dice? Isn’t the current Baltimore blockage sufficient example that “We don’t do it randomly”?
          Sub-text : I’ve left planned maintenance out of this. That’s a thing too. Note the word “planned”.
          All structures are only available most of the time. Never been up $SKYSCRAPER TOURIST SPOT$ and found the entrance shut off “because weather conditions”? Tried to drive across a bridge to see all the lorries bearing left (for an 80-mile/ 3 hour detour) before the “Bridge closed to high-sided vehicles” flashing sign? I get that every 4th or 5th time I go “down south” to visit the family.

          1. First, good luck with the headache – Tylenol can help. 😊

            To question why parts of a newly constructed (less than 1 months old) structure intended to deliver (“urgent”) aid broke off and floated away to the city of Ashdod almost 30 miles away is not an unreasonable question, it’s also not unreasonable to question or ponder how frequently we can expect similar occurrences (after it’s “fixed”). To respond by suggesting that “All structures are only available most of the time”, is an inadequate and unsatisfactory response. The pier has been operational for *just* a week+.

            From AP:
            https://apnews.com/article/gaza-israel-humanitarian-aid-us-pier-77d0cf1c1bd420042dc4cb6f4ad76ccb
            “Broken apart by strong winds and heavy seas just over a week after it became operational, the project faces criticism that it hasn’t lived up to its initial billing or its $320 million price tag.”

            Also:
            Quote:
            “The temporary pier, called the Joint Logistics Over the Shore (JLOTS), requires very good sea conditions to operate. CNN reported previously that JLOTS can only be operated safely in a maximum of 3-foot waves and winds less than approximately 15 miles per hour.”

            3 foot waves are not that high, and 15 miles per hour winds are not unexpected in coastal regions. If the pier is to be repaired once every 2-3 weeks, it’s suboptimal and doesn’t serve the purpose. If the average surf in the winter along the Gazan coastline is ~3 feet or more, the pier is going to face frequent/ongoing challenges.

            I want the aid to get to the people of Gaza *and* I want my tax $$$ to count.

          2. From FDD:

            Quote:
            “On the coast of Israel and Gaza it is common for the waves to get up to 1 meter or 1.5 meters and for winds to gust sometimes at 20 knots.

            It seems that any time there was even a hint of a storm the planners didn’t want the pier at sea, so it had to be towed back to an area off Ashdod on May 24. This means it was only operational for a short time.”

            ….
            “You have people who oppose Israel and the US administration’s support of Israel and think of the pier as symbolic of how the US cobbled together a bad operation to fix a humanitarian crisis that Israel caused. They have been cheering what they think is its demise. On the other hand there are also pro-Israel voices who think the Biden administration has made a wreck of its policy in the region, and that the pier is an example of this kind of incompetence.”

            https://www.fdd.org/analysis/op_eds/2024/05/28/the-us-built-pier-for-humanitarian-aid-delivery-was-always-a-long-shot/

    3. I respectfully disagree with your assessment of De Niros’ statement. Unlike the MAGA cult/congress people and Trump’s family members who have been openly spreading lies, he told no lies. He spoke truth about Trump. I’m surprised that it appears you’re attacking his statements based only on the fact he seemed elderly. He’s nearly 80. Are only young people allowed to speak?

      Sure, there were boos and noise, but I could hear his statement. The jeering was nothing like the cacophony that surrounded the MAGA cult members from Congress and Trump’s family members as they tried to tell their lies to New Yorkers the other day. They were completely drowned out by boos, car horns and cowbells, of all things. Nobody could hear anything they said, even though they had a microphone and amplifier.

      1. I did go after his age. Hmm. Maybe that was unfair. I’ll give it a think.

        His previous statements about Trump have been angry and wild, and though I understand his approach, my point is that they ( the statements) don’t help Biden. They appease Biden’s supporters and it ends there.

        I wish both sides would stop prophesying the “end of the world” if the other side wins. We know the latter is a highly unlikely scenario. If Trump wins, he’s going to be president forever? I don’t believe this, neither do most Americans. And now the far right has started responding to this “prediction” by saying “great, we want him to stay forever”, turning the words into mockery.

        Biden’s surrogates should stick to talking about the positive and productive things Biden has accomplished, attacking Trump incessantly is backfiring.

        The plan to address the verdict of the current NY trial from the WH is quite mad. The more the left doubles down on Trump, the more popular he becomes. Americans don’t like the constant vilification, whether it’s deserved or not. The data bears this out. The polls are going the wrong way for Biden.

        1. I agree – DeNiro’s appearance, at least for me, did not help Biden a bit. If the MAGA crowd was also shouting and carrying on, then it made both sides look like fools rather than showing the Democrats as taking the adult path. DeNiro being surrounded by body guards and getting into the limo / SUV also made the thing look very non-organic. Team Biden seems to be grasping at anything to try to gain some ground in the polling, and it’s not effective at all on me.

          1. Again, I respectfully disagree. Taking the “adult” path doesn’t appear to be working very well for the Democrats. As Rosemary noted, Biden is down in national polls. I don’t happen to think De Niro’s appearance made Biden look bad. I think the purpose was to get media’s eyes on him and for De Niro to tell the truth about Trump. Our celebrity obsessed culture might actually listen. And De Niro was surrounded by former Capitol police –not bodyguards. These were some of the men who were attacked and injured by Trump’s mob on January 6. They were there to tell their stories, also. It’s about time surrogates of Biden got out into the public and made a stink. Democrats are letting Trump and his surrogates set the narrative. And the media fawns all over Trump’s cult members as they tell endless, obscene lies for their dear leader. As Goebbels said, you tell a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. This is Trump’s modus operandi, learned at the knee of Roy Cohn. IMO, Biden’s surrogates should get some of the attention also and tell the *truth* about Trump– what he’s been doing and what he’s planning on doing. And shout it from the rooftops. I think Biden should definitely do it at every opportunity. Being aggressive and assertive is the only language these MAGAts understand. Just my $.02.

          2. +1. Yes, it presented as “out of touch” (tone deaf) to me. Surely, let’s hope the world does not end if Trump wins. And we know that the world will not end if Biden wins.

          3. Here’s NBC news reporting the aftermath of the event:

            De Niro calling New Yorkers “gangsters” does not go down well, at least not for me, and the comments bear this out.

            Somehow we need to “end” the “hate’. We can’t walk around hating 50% of America.

  6. The President of Pomona certainly handled that “illegal invasion” situation promptly and with determination, outstanding leadership.
    The masked rabble outside were hardly peaceful protesters and the police were calm and well prepared, and fully armed!

    2. the police were calm and well prepared, and fully armed!

      That, particularly the “well-armed” bit is .. some sort of recommendation? For the college, country, or society?
      Wow. Definitely different planets here.
      It might be different in your society, but here we’re quite proud that most (90%+) police officers do not have any weapons training, and far fewer actually have access to weapons on duty. (Generally those weapons are in a locked safe, the combination for which they have to request by radio if they think it is necessary.)

      “Calm and well prepared” is part of the job of the police.
      So … does “the police were ready to do their job” need an exclamation mark? OK, maybe it does, but it’s a sore reflection on your expectations of your police if it does.

  7. If the U.S. wants to protect civilians in Rafah, Biden should call for Hamas to surrender.

    2. At the very least release all of the hostages who are still alive (and return the remains of those who were murdered).

      1. No…this is not about hostages. This is about dismantling Hamas’ military capabilities…which kills Israeli civilians. Half-measures, such as hostage-centric demands, only prolong the killing. There can not be peace until there is first victory.

    3. Which is more important – destroying today’s Hamas, or removing the circumstances that led to the existence of Hamas (and it’s couple of previously “destroyed” predecessors)?
      The question bears on the casualties that will occur in the fighting in the 2030s, 2040s, 2050s …
      Oh, sorry, did I say an “unthink” think?

      1. First destroy Hamas (which wants to destroy Jews in the most horrendous ways) and then as you put it, remove the circumstances that led to Hamas. That is a tough question considering Arab countries, such as Egypt, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Morocco…would rather deal with the Jews in Israel than the Palestinians in Gaza.

        I would appreciate to learn why you think this is the case…sans any smart-ass remarks.

  8. Excellent outcome at Pomona College. Arrests and suspensions send a firm message.

    Regarding the fire and tragedy in Rafah. I haven’t read the news yet this morning, but I will be watching to see if the media updates its reporting to indicate that the IDF action was taken outside the evacuation area and that the fire within was accidental. Journalistic integrity demand that they update their reporting, so we’ll see.

      1. I didn’t see anything in today’s news altering the original claim. Tomorrow the press will be on to a new atrocity to pin on Israel.

    1. I do, as well. Cohen’s testimony was corroborated by documentary evidence as well as the testimony of Hope Hicks, David Pecker, Keith Davidson, Madeline Westerhout and others. All of those witnesses mentioned are still Trump supporters. So if Cohen lied, all those Trump supporters lied, too. Even Trump’s lawyer Blanche did not assert that. Every lawyer I’ve listened to who watched and reported on the trial–except those who were sent by Faux Noise–pretty much agree that Cohen was credible and his testimony backed up the testimony of the other witnesses and the documentation. Trump’s witness, Robert Costello, was openly contemptuous of the proceedings and the court. He testified about being Cohen’s lawyer when the prosecution had concrete evidence that Cohen had never hired him. He hurt the defense instead of helping. So chances are that Trump will be found guilty of some, if not all, the charges. Whether he’s sentenced to jail remains to be seen.

  10. Actually, I think what Deconstructionist philosopher Judith Butler has done by equating gender with the undefinable is essentially make sex God. Gender is the infinite (unbounded, limitless). The generative, as opposed to the grim reaper of natural selection 🙂

    So that completes the analogy for me – for the expression – What are people today like? Two groups in the marketplace, one shouts to the other “We sang wedding songs but you didn’t dance” and the other “We sang funeral dirges and you didn’t cry”. Something like that.

  11. It’s like those psych question that ask what sweeping the floor is:

    … while also saying “the question-setter has never pushed a broom for a living, and probably not at home either”.

    1) Cleaning and removing dirt and debris to create a healthy living space
    2) Moving a broom back and forth over the floor

    My second paid job was looking after an animal house at the local hospital. (This was before genetic testing – a suspected TB sample went into several Cavia porcellus ; if, after a week, any of them developed internal lesions of TB; then TB was diagnosed in the patient. Later in my career, I submitted two sets of TB test samples to this exact lab, while the animal house was still working. Working on the rigs, you regularly work with people with pre-diagnosis TB. So we have an SOP.) The job description could have been “shovel shit, and sweep up what is ejected from the cages. Daily.”
    The “psych question setter” probably has never lifted a broom in their own house, but under-paid someone else to do it for them.

  12. The Argentine Pope addressed a bunch of Italian bishops, and the article says “Italian is not Francis’ mother tongue language, and the Argentine pope has made linguistic gaffes in the past that raised eyebrows.” Did he say the word in English, or the Italian equivalent? If in Italian, and he has trouble with Italian, did he realize how the word could be misconstrued (same question for English)? And if it was in Italian, then why is the article quoting the word directly as English? Something seems a bit off in the reporting. Also, why would a bishop alert the press to something like this that occurred in a closed meeting?

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