Thursday: Hili dialogue

June 13, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, June 13, 2024, and National Cupcake Lovers Day.  Here are some very fancy s’mores cupcakes with marshmallow frosting and the requisite graham crackers and two squares of a Hershey Bar™.  This would be a great breakfast treat!

Stephanie Clifford from Arlington, VA, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also Sewing Machine Day (Thomas Saint of England took out a patent on an early sewing machine on this day in 1790), Weed Your Garden Day, World Softball Day, and International Albinism Awareness Day. Let’s not forget albinos other than humans; here’s an albino wallaby and its joey; mom must have mated with either another albino or a carrier for this recessive gene:

By Apdency – own work, CC0.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 13 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*A war between Israel and Hezbollah seems imminent since Hezbollah keeps upping the number of sophisticated rockets fired at Israel daily. As I write this at 1 pm yesterday, Hezbollah has fired over 215 rockets at Israel. Note that the Iron Dome takes down most of these rockets, plus many Israelis in danger areas are sequestered in bomb shelters.  Note too that Israel responds only to rocket fire from Lebanon and only responds to attacks, never initiating. Finally, note that the UN has a binding resolution (#1701) on Hezbollah not to do that. Hezbollah is committing an arrant war crime, targeting civilians, but nobody cares since their targets are Jews.

Hezbollah launched some 215 rockets and several more missiles and drones at northern Israel on Wednesday, in what it said was a response to the killing of a senior commander in the terror group by an Israeli airstrike a night earlier.

The barrages marked the largest attack carried out by Hezbollah during ongoing fighting on the Lebanon border amid the war in the Gaza Strip.

And the terror group vowed to ramp up its attacks in retaliation for Israel’s elimination of top commander Taleb Abdullah. At a funeral procession in Beirut, senior Hezbollah official Hashem Safieddine said the group would increase the intensity, force and quantity of its operations against Israel.

Hezbollah launched some 215 rockets and several more missiles and drones at northern Israel on Wednesday, in what it said was a response to the killing of a senior commander in the terror group by an Israeli airstrike a night earlier.

The barrages marked the largest attack carried out by Hezbollah during ongoing fighting on the Lebanon border amid the war in the Gaza Strip.

And the terror group vowed to ramp up its attacks in retaliation for Israel’s elimination of top commander Taleb Abdullah. At a funeral procession in Beirut, senior Hezbollah official Hashem Safieddine said the group would increase the intensity, force and quantity of its operations against Israel.

“If the enemy is screaming and moaning about what happened to it in northern Palestine, let him prepare himself to cry and wail,” Safieddine said.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a security assessment Wednesday evening “in light of the developments in the north,” his office said.

The successive Hezbollah attacks began on Wednesday morning with a barrage of at least 90 rockets fired at several areas in northern Israel, including Tiberias — for the first time amid the war — Safed and Rosh Pina, sending tens of thousands of people to shelters, as Jewish Israelis celebrated the Shavuot holiday.

The Israel Defense Forces said another 70 rockets were then launched at the Mount Meron area, home to a sensitive air traffic control base. Ten more rockets were fired at Kibbutz Zar’it, and an anti-tank guided missile struck a factory of the Plasan armored vehicle manufacturer in Kibbutz Sasa, causing damage.

Fortunately, only a handful of Israelis have been killed or wounded by these rockets, but Hezbollah sure looks as if it’s spoiling for a fight, and it may get one. Israel is already prepared for a war with Hezbollah, and the U.S. has warned them, indirectly, not to take advantage of the Gaza war by themselves attacking Israel. But that’s exactly what they’re doing, though I expect the U.S. won’t help Israel in a war with Hezbollah.  The UN has many soldiers stationed in Lebanon, but they dare not interfere with the terrorists.  Oh, and 60,000 Israelis have become refugees in their country, having fled south from their northern border to avoid the rockets.

*There’s not a lot of news today, but there is useful practical news. Here’s some for people who want to renew their passports, and now can do so ONLINE:

Travelers who want to renew their passports online can do so starting Wednesday.

Eligible travelers can process their applications without sending everything in the mail and can expect to receive their passport back in six to eight weeks. The State Department tested online passport renewals in 2022, but took the program offline in 2023.

The relaunched renewal program is open to the public, but is in beta, or trial mode, senior State Department officials said. This will allow the department to make changes to the process as it evaluates the process and user feedback.

Under the program, a limited number of people can renew their passports. Each day around 1 p.m. Eastern time, the department will open up a small number of spots for renewal, the officials said.

. . .The online renewal is meant to save time and effort and provide a more convenient option for travelers, the officials said.

An online renewal doesn’t yet guarantee you’ll get your passport any faster. These renewals aren’t eligible for expedited processing. Processing times are the same as those submitted by mail, the officials said.

Yes, but you don’t have to MAIL it, and I presume an online photo will do. As the kids say, here are the deets:

Applicants must be 25 or older and already have a valid passport. That passport should have been valid for 10 years and must have been issued between 2009 and 2015.

Travelers who use the online option can’t update biographical information such as their name, gender or date of birth, the senior State Department officials said. The department has posted complete requirements on its website.

Applications will open each afternoon at 1 p.m. Eastern time, seven days a week. The window of availability will extend over time, officials said.

The officials declined to say how many people can apply for online renewals each day, but said the number will increase over time. Once the daily quota is reached, the portal will close, the officials said. That means not every person who attempts to renew online each day will be able to.

I would have done this earlier this year had it been available when I renewed my passport.  The link above tells you what you need to know, and you can upload a digital photo.

*The NYT reports that a Missouri restaurant has banned anyone under 30. Yep, not just kids, but even young adults. They think it gives older customers a better vibe, but legal issues loom. . . .

When Tina and Marvin Pate travel to Cancún or the Dominican Republic, they enjoy the bliss created by the good music, delicious food and the absence of children.

So in May, when they opened Bliss Caribbean Restaurant in St. Louis County, Mo., the couple decided to give their customers the same joy — by requiring that all female customers be at least 30 years old, and all men 35.

“We decided to come up with a whole restaurant where adults could pretty much go on vacation for a fraction of the cost,” Mr. Pate said.

This rule has drawn widespread attention to Bliss through social media, resulting in packed dance parties and what the restaurant calls a “grown and sexy” vibe.

But the requirement has also raised some legal questions, as experts point out that the restaurant is treating men and women differently.

“My knee-jerk reaction is that it is technically illegal,” Sarah Jane Hunt, the owner and managing partner of the St. Louis-based law firm Kennedy Hunt, P.C., said in an interview. Ms. Hunt specializes in discrimination lawsuits.

Since Bliss Caribbean Restaurant opened in May, news media have covered the restaurant and its rule, and residents have turned to social media, mostly to praise the policy.

“It stops all of the riffraff that goes on in St. Louis,” said Sean McLemore, a 50-year-old St. Louis resident who has dined at Bliss Caribbean Restaurant. “The atmosphere is real chill. It’s a great environment.”

What laws might it be breaking? Here’s one answer:

But legal experts say that despite the owner’s best intentions, the restaurant’s age rules may not be legal. Travis Crum, an associate law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said that even though federal law does not generally prohibit age restrictions in public spaces, the restaurant may be violating the Missouri Human Rights Act.

The act “prohibits discrimination by public accommodations on the basis of sex” in addition to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, ancestry, or disability, Mr. Crum explained.

But Crum doesn’t say anything about age. If they can’t ban those under 30, they can’t ban children, either, and yet don’t some restaurants ban kids? I am neutral on this restaurant’s policy, but I do think that banning children in some places is salubrious because sometimes you want a quiet meal without worries of children screaming or running about.

*One of my friends asked me why I thought Republicans had a worse policy on the environment than do Democrats, something that would seem to me bloody obvious.  But the WaPo reports some new Republican perfidy on this issue, and how scientists are trying to prevent it:

When the union representing nearly half of Environmental Protection Agency employees approved a new contract with the federal government this month, it included an unusual provisionthat had nothing to do with pay, benefits or workplace flexibility: protections from political meddling into their work.

The protections, which ensure workers can report any meddling without fear of “retribution, reprisal, or retaliation,” are“a way for us to get in front of a second Trump administration and protect our workers,” said Marie Owens Powell, an EPA gas station storage tank inspector and president of American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Council 238.

The agreement signals the extent to which career employees and Biden administration officials are racing to foil any efforts to interfere with climate science or weaken environmental agencies should former president Donald Trump win a second term. Trump and his allies, in contrast, argue that bloated federal agencies have hurt economic development nationwide and that the Biden administration has prioritized climate science at the expense of other priorities.

“One of the things that is so bad for us is the environmental agencies. They make it impossible to do anything,” the former president said in an interview with “Fox & Friends” that aired June 2, claiming that “they’ve stopped you from doing business in this country.”

The Trump administration sidelined, muted or forced out hundreds of scientists and misrepresented research on the coronavirus, reproduction and hurricane forecasting, environmentaladvocates said. Now as an example of what’s to come, they point to a blueprint called “Project 2025,” a plan for the next conservative administration drafted by right-wing think tanks in Washington.

The plan calls for a sweeping reorganization of the executive branch, one that would concentrate more power in Trump’s hands. At the EPA, it recommends eliminating the office of environmental justice, which was created in 2022 to address the pollution that disproportionately harms poor and minority communities.

I’ve never heard of this office, so I have no opinion about its elimination, but I know how anti-science Trump and his running dogs are.  A bit more:

Soon after President Biden took office, his administration began imposing scientific integrity policies across the federal government, setting rules that protect research from political interference or manipulation. Many such policies are in place — though research advocates say they aren’t durable because they aren’t enshrined in federal law, and could be undone with new executive actions.

At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, where a 2020 investigation found that agency leaders violated its scientific integrity policy after Trump showed a doctored hurricane forecast map, stricter standards took effect in March. A similar policy will soon be extended to the Commerce Department, including to the political appointees whose violations were detailed in the 2020 probe.

At the EPA, the new scientific integrity provision is part of a four-year contract with the agency. The provisionensures that workers’complaints will be assessed by an independent investigator, rather than a political appointee.

I can’t imagine someone thinking that it’s good for the government to interfere with the duties of environmental organizations on political grounds, but that’s what has happened. What we need is for new federal laws that prevent this interference. Good luck with this Congress, though!

*This was in the AP’s “oddities” section, but it’s really science, not an “oddity”. I’ve seen this result reported widely, deriving from a paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution suggesting that elephants call each other with “names”: unique sounds that are not mimicry of the sounds that the “named” individuals make themselves. They thus seem to correspond to true names instead of what some animals like dolphins and parrots do: address an individual by mimicking (“parroting”) its sound.

African elephants call each other and respond to individual names — something that few wild animals do, according to new research published Monday.

The names are one part of elephants’ low rumbles that they can hear over long distances across the savanna. Scientists believe that animals with complex social structures and family groups that separate and then reunite often may be more likely to use individual names.

“If you’re looking after a large family, you’ve got to be able to say, ‘Hey, Virginia, get over here!’” said Duke University ecologist Stuart Pimm, who was not involved in the study.

It’s extremely rare for wild animals to call each other by unique names. Humans have names, of course, and our dogs come when their names are called. Baby dolphins invent their own names, called signature whistles, and parrots may also use names.

Each of these naming species also possesses the ability to learn to pronounce unique new sounds throughout their lives — a rare talent that elephants also possess.

For the study in Nature Ecology & Evolution, biologists used machine learning to detect the use of names in a sound library of savanna elephant vocalizations recorded at Kenya’s Samburu National Reserve and Amboseli National Park.

The researchers followed the elephants in jeeps to observe who called out and who appeared to respond — for example, if a mother called to a calf, or a matriarch called to a straggler who later rejoined the family group.

Analyzing only the audio data, the computer model predicted which elephant was being addressed 28% of the time, likely due to the inclusion of its name. When fed meaningless data, the model only accurately labeled 8% of calls.

“Just like humans, elephants use names, but probably don’t use names in the majority of utterances, so we wouldn’t expect 100%,” said study author and Cornell University biologist Mickey Pardo.

There may be other explanations, but I want to read the paper first to see what’s going on. And I presume they used all the audio data, as elephants can make rumbles below the frequency of human hearing. If the phenomenon turns out to be real, then the next thing to do would be to replicate the study in Indian elephants, in different genera that split from a common ancestor about 8.5 million years ago. If the phenomenon exists in both, then perhaps name recognition was present in that ancestor.  But I’ll read the paper and try to report on it.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is showing off:

Hili: I admire everything possible.
A: And what do you admire just now?
Hili: The vastness of my ignorance.
In Polish:
Hili: Podziwiam co się da.
Ja: A w tej chwili co podziwiasz?
Hili: Bezmiar własnej ignorancji.

And Kulka has finally made friends with the new baby upstairs:

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

From Cat Memes:

 

From Now That’s Wild:

From Jesus of the Day:

From Masih; another Iranian woman injured for not covering her hair.  When is this madness going to stop?

From Emma Hilton, responding to a tautology-infected gender activist. She’s getting as snarky and funny as J. K. Rowling:

From Qanta Ahmed, a Muslim physician who happens to not hate Israel and Jews.

A tweet and a followup answering Larry the Cat’s question:

From Malcolm. I haven’t seen this movie, but I love the animations from Studio Ghibli (my favorites are “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Spirited Away.”

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a Dutch girl gassed upon arrival. She was 11.

Two tweets from Doctor Cobb; the first showing a fun-loving DUCK:

We haven’t seen my beloved Philomena lately. Here she is dilating on Christianity:

28 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. ” s’mores cupcakes with marshmallow frosting and the requisite graham crackers and two squares of a Hershey Bar™. This would be a great breakfast treat!”

    And so the endrinkination of s’mores cupcakes begins.

    The encerealination has already taken place… somewhere…

  2. If it looks like a jet and sounds like a jet, then….. The M-02-J is what is called a motor glider, designed to be primarily flown as a glider, but with a motor to take off and climb to initial altitude, avoiding the need for a tow plane or elastic catapult launch equipment. The “J” designates that this M-02 glider has been fitted with a jet engine. It is surprising that the pilot seems to be running the engine during landing approach.

    1. Thank you for answering the question I asked upon watching that video: Why is that glider so noisy?

      1. In a landing configuration, with spoilers extended, gliders ARE a bit noisy, but not THAT noisy and that was clearly a jet engine sound.

  3. ‘If trans women weren’t women they wouldn’t be trans women.”

    If seahorses weren’t horses, they wouldn’t be seahorses.

  4. An FYI for readers: the two astronauts who launched to the Space Station last week have had their return to Earth delayed until at least next Tuesday, June 18. They are continuing to evaluate the condition of their capsule which is docked at Station. They have located some additional very small helium leaks which mission ops says will not impact their return and are, upon undocking, expected to exercise and gather further data from their full 28-jet reaction control system which exhibited five balky jets as they rendezvoused with Station last week. They are also continuing to evaluate the capsule as a “safe haven” in case an emergency would require immediate evacuation of Station.

  5. The administration of George W. Bush, besides walking away from the Kyoto Protocol, thanked Exxon for that company’s involvement in climate change policy. That administration also pressured scientists to alter their publications and information to conform with its policy of climate change skepticism. The administration also sought to actively suppress scientific findings regarding climate change.

    If Trump is elected, he and his minions will go after the Deep State, including anyone in any government agency that deals with climate change. In his first administration he tried to implement “Schedule F”, which would have created a new job category for federal employees in policy-related positions. That would have exempted them from civil service protections and made them easier to remove.

    1. While Trump is indeed likely to sick his minions on folks who don’t agree with their views, let’s not pretend that this phenomena is just a right-wing thing. There are many highly respected scientists who’ve expressed skepticism over the “accepted” climate discussion, and feel the current hysteria is very misguided, not to mention absurdly costly with few real lasting benefits. And as a result they’ve been vilified and in many cases hounded out of their positions. (See Curry, Nordhaus, Shellenberger, Lomborg, etc.) I have friends in academia who’ve questioned some of the received wisdom and been given official warnings about not toeing the line. My own husband criticized Michael Mann over his ClimateGate actions and the way he fiddled the numbers, and as a result Mann threatened to sue him, and also tried to have him fired. (The editor, to his credit, told Mann to take a hike.) As is the case in so many issues these days, both sides have lost their minds.

      1. Curry, Nordhaus, Shellenberger, Lomborg are not highly respected scientists. They are contrarians. Shellenburger and Lomborg are not even scientists. Nordhaus is not a climate scientist. Curry admits to receiving money from the fossil fuel industry.

        They oppose the rock-solid consensus by tens of thousands of actual climate scientists with regard to global warming.

        Michael Mann did not “fiddle” numbers. This has been verified by seven independent investigations.

        I don’t think your bothsides-ism is warranted.

        1. I was going to write the exact same thing. In fact “climate-gate” was a tragedy not of consensus scientists faking things but the opposite-nothing burger emails spun into a conspiracy by climate deniers which, if anything, just put us in a worse place to deal with a problem that more and more looks *worse* then these evil consensus climate scientists even thought.

      2. “I have friends in academia who’ve questioned some of the received wisdom and been given official warnings about not toeing the line.”

        I don’t believe you. “Official” from what office?

        1. Wow, lots of kool-aid drinkers here, I see. I expect that of MSM commenters, but am genuinely surprised to find it here. I will concede that I shouldn’t have referred to Shellenberger and Lomborg as scientists, but I stand by everything I’ve said. There have been many folks who’ve questioned some of the so-called consensus, the Michael Mann investigations were hardly independent, and he is indeed known in the field for being an absolute bully who threatens to ruin the careers of anyone who dares question him. A 2-minute google search will elicit many articles on this topic. As for Curry “receiving money from the fossil fuel industry,” she admitted that her consulting firm did some hurricane forecasting for an oil company (she is a climatologist, after all). If you really believe that this is evidence of some sort of conspiracy, there’s not much else I can say. And on the implication that I’m lying about a friend who was threatened to toe the line, the institution was LSE, and I’ll leave it at that.

          1. Sorry. This is just not correct. There is data and there are personalities. You don’t like Mann, think he’s a bully, acts like he not objective? Fine. The data stands and you are wrong and seem to know little about the science. It indeed has been objectively and properly vetted.

            As a practicing theoretical physicist it has always surprised me just how willing some smart people in my field will take the contrarian view here. Dyson, Happer and others are smart guys. But listen to their critiques of climate science. They are not rational critiques. They amount to the following: “the climate is hard to model. I don’t believe the models.” This is a valid critique for a separate issue! Let’s set the default knowledge:
            1.the baseline issue is simply the greenhouse effect. Arrhenius already more than a century ago wrote about this wrt to global warming. No one debates this. If this were the only effect we’d already be cooked. There are mitigating factors which actually lead to slower warming, but clearly those mitigating factors don’t erase the baseline effect.
            2. The mitigating factors concern clouds and moisture. Wannabe (who won the physics Nobel in 2021) made the first simple model for feedback related to some of these effects. That was in IIRC 1968. The predictions of that model have been quantitatively confirmed over the last 50 plus years. In science you should take actual prediction seriously.
            3. The same types of models explain why the temperature of Venus is actually as COOL as it is.
            4. The one current fudge in the models is adjusting for clouds. Every time the models are recalibrated the effect is one where the models are actually too conservative! Things are probably worse than consensus climate science thought.

            Those are just the facts. You can doubt them all you want but these points stand regardless.

          2. I’m convinced that climate change is real because I’m old enough to remember what it used to be like. We used to get some snow every winter in Vancouver, BC. Not always a lot but some. (60s-70s)

            Now snow is much rarer. Summers are warmer and dryer too.

            Drought was unheard of then.

      3. I wonder if we could have a truce on this question. I propose:

        1) The political Right should concede that the basic theory of anthropogenic global warming from burning fossil fuels (and other processes such as cement making and some forms of agriculture) is well-supported and is probably as close to true as one can obtain without being able to do randomized controlled trials with only one earth. Signing off on Ted Gold’s four facts below would be a good place to start. I would just add that another correct prediction the theory makes is that even as the earth’s surface has warmed, the upper atmosphere should have got colder because of heat trapping by carbon dioxide (with a positive feedback from water vapour) further down.
        Which it did.

        For the record, some contrarians accept this fully and cringe when people trot out long-debunked arguments. Their contrarian-ness is elsewhere, viz…

        2) In return for this perfectly reasonable but politically dismaying concession by the Right, the political Left should explain precisely how it is going to convince the 7 billion people who live in countries whose governments don’t care about climate change to act against their economic interests and join us in making aggressive deep reductions in their fossil fuel use to mitigate further global warming. Emissions are flat or decreasing in the countries of Anglo North America and the European Union but much of that “progress” (inadequate as it is) is an artefact of offshoring manufacturing and steel-making to developing countries who book the very large emissions inside their borders and then sell the products back to us as emission-free consumption.

        While it is at it, the Left should be clearer about what further economic sacrifices (beyond Canada’s carbon tax which will reach 37 cents per litre on gasoline by 2030 and equivalent levels on natural gas and coal — $170 per tonnne of CO2) it expects the 900 million people in rich counties to make and how it will deal with recalcitrant contrarians if those contrarians mobilize a voting majority against the governments’ plans. What if windmills and solar panels can’t (not by theory but by actual experience) power an industrial economy (here or in foreign countries who make things for us) with reliable electricity? What if nuclear remains both prohibitively expensive and unacceptable to fearful low-information voters? What if people won’t buy electric cars in the numbers said to be necessary, and/or if the electric benefit in terms of life-cycle emissions is small, although real? What if personal motor transportation at all is deemed to be too carbon-intensive to be permitted? (The Cambridge Study of 2019 describes these very tough impacts on ordinary middle-class life.)

        I think this is a reasonable set of concessions. The Right is imagined to be giving in on a false but deeply held belief. The Left is merely being asked to be clearer about how it will get the world to Gross Zero (–there is no Net Zero, that was just a catch phrase that sounded good–) by 2050 as the UN demands, if every country is keen on every other country playing by the rules but wants to cheat for itself. How do you solve the collective action problem when there is no absolute world sovereign who can enforce the rules on all players?

        Global warming is going to produce some winners and some losers, probably a lot of losers. Some losers may lose very badly if the tropical places they live in become uninhabitable. But there is no self-interested reason why people who live in countries where the domestic benefits of achieving Gross Zero are less than the cost of getting there should care about what happens to people in hot countries. As long as they can’t get here.

        Leftists: We on the Right will shut up about climate fraud and other nonsense if you will tell us how you intend to address the contrarian position that the only rational strategy in a collective action game with no umpire is not to play. This is not a scientific question — the basic science is settled, really — but a question of competing values and how we deal with foreigners who are making a big ask of us but who all hate us anyhow. (as Randy Newman sang in “Political Science.”)

        1. Well-of course. For a long time now I have argued with my non-scientist friends that the cosmetic things people get all up in arms about are useless in the face of global warming. First of all things we *think* help the problem often do nothing or make the problem worse. Secondly, we can’t and never will be able to force China or India to do anything they don’t want to do. The issue is that this is the way people live now and we are not going back to 1800. As it is the population of the world is 2x what it was when I was growing up. If we really wanted to do something that would have an effect in the short-term geoengineering is the only possibility. And while that is NOT hard to do in a way that will cool the earth, it comes with a whole lot of potential downsides.

          I have always found it interesting why people on different sides of the political spectrum have their blind spots about what to disbelieve. For the left, things like biological sex are not true because somehow the notion “erases” a marginalized group if one believes that there is biological determinism. For the right, global warming would appear to require globalist solutions. Further it would interfere with a highly profitable industry. So… it can’t be true.

  6. Presumably the illegal sex discrimination is this bit:

    … female customers be at least 30 years old, and all men 35.

    If the rule was 30 for both sexes, it might pass muster?

    Also:

    The answer is contained in the question, if trans women weren’t women they wouldn’t be trans women.

    I have a fake Picasso that I’m willing to sell cheap. Being a Picasso, it must be worth loads, right?

    1. The restaurant has nothing to fear from the Human Rights Commission. The group the owner is discriminating against — men — is an oppressor group and will not get anywhere challenging a discriminatory program that gives advantage to a historically oppressed group. (This is explicitly the law in Ontario and some other provinces whose Human Rights Tribunals have adjudicated similar cases against male complainants, and against straight white ones, for that matter.)

      Now, if all the men under 35 identify as women at the door, the hostess will have to seat them, else be guilty of transphobia, and that will be a federal case.

  7. Yes. Hezbollah is the next menace in Iran’s campaign. I expected Hezbollah and Hamas to attack in unison, but they didn’t. Perhaps Hamas attacked prematurely, damaging an original plan to destroy Israel through coordinated attack, which would have been even more damaging. In any case, there is little question that Israel will need to take a more aggressive posture toward Hezbollah in pretty short order. I am concerned that Israel may not have enough weaponry to sustain a war on a second front, and am not sure that the United States can be counted on to provide adequate help.

    It would be nice if the United Nations would do its job and keep Hezbollah away from the border. Funny how the U.N. is perfectly capable of defaming Israel with youthful vigor, but is impotent at protecting it.

    I, too, saw the elephant “Odd News” story and found it interesting. It would be good to learn more about the elephant names study.

    1. The U.N. doesn’t have any troops in Lebanon, Norman. All troops anywhere under U.N. auspices are the national troops of various members states who lend (or rent, these days) their soldiers to U.N. missions under an agreed mandate. The soldiers remain under the sovereign control of the member state. In Lebanon, the mandate is to try to keep the various factions in the anarchy from each others’ throats, and to confirm that Israel has withdrawn its troops from Lebanon and doesn’t try to return. The mandate is not to protect Israel, rather to defend against it, and indeed a successful coordinated attack on Israel from Lebanon would be interpreted as cooperative nation-building emerging out of factionalism.

      So the “U.N.” soldiers who have only light weapons for self-defence sit back out of the way while the rockets fly. Their presence makes IDF retaliation dangerous because if any are killed as human shields the photos of blue-beret-clad bodies and burnt-out white U.N. Landrovers will blow back on Israel.

      1. There is a bit more to the UN resolution 1701 and the mandate for the UN force (UNIFIL):
        “This resolution calls for the full cessation of hostilities, the deployment of Lebanese forces to Southern Lebanon, parallel withdrawal of Israeli forces behind the Blue Line, strengthening the UN force (UNIFIL) to facilitate the entry of Lebanese Forces in the region and the establishment of a demilitarised zone between the Blue Line and the Litani River.”

    2. . . .his legal case . . . He is disappointed (naturally) . . .

      If he was a she, there would be no basis for World Aquatics to be saying it is a major step to protect women’s sport.

  9. Just a heads up on a Jordan Peterson YouTube video ep. 454 3 days ago. It is titled
    “Urban Warfare, Civilian Casualty and Human Shields” with John Spencer who is a combat vet (both as soldier and officer), a scholar and expert on urban warfare.
    John Spencer is very good, answers questions most hadn’t thought about to ask.
    One thing on the video is Peterson keeps interrupting Spencer, I think because what he is hearing really gets him pissed off at Palestinian protestors, the media bias, the UN, etc.

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