Friday: Hili dialogue

August 2, 2024 • 6:45 am

This may be the last full Hili dialogue for a month, as I’m not sure how much Internet time (or free time) I’ll have in South Africa. As always, I’ll do my best. Matthew will be posting daily photos of the cats and their dialogues while I’m gone. Pictures of animals I see will be posted as I have time.

Welcome to Friday, August 2, 2024, and both International Beer Day and National Ice Cream Sandwich Day. Here’s a specimen of the latter from some unknown place; it looks like a hamburger but is ice cream between sweet buns (photo from Wikipedia):

Urville86, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also Dinosaurs Day, World Four-Leaf Clover Day, and “Romani genocide-related observances, including: Roma Holocaust Memorial Day.  Matthew sent a tweet memorializing this day (there are more in the thread):

There’s a Google Doodle today honoring an Olympic sport. This one is easy: click on the screenshot to find out:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 2 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*A huge prisoner swap just took place, freeing, among others the convicted Wall St. Journal writer and another American. It’s the biggest swap I remember. The WSJ reports with elation:

Russia freed wrongly convicted Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich as part of the largest and most complex East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War, in which he and more than a dozen others jailed by the Kremlin were exchanged for Russians held in the U.S. and Europe, including a convicted murderer.

Gershkovich and other Americans left Russian aircraft at roughly 11:20 a.m. ET at an airport in Turkey’s capital, Ankara. Gershkovich was then transported to an aircraft lounge on a Turkish bus. Russia had kept the 32-year-old behind bars for more than a year on a false allegation of espionage. It sentenced him in a hurried and secret three-day trial to 16 years in a high-security penal colony.

Moscow also released former Marine Paul Whelan, journalist Alsu Kurmasheva and Vladimir Kara-Murza, a British-Russian dissident and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, sentenced to 25 years in prison on treason-related charges. Russia also released a number of political dissidents.

The sweeping deal involved 24 prisoners and at least six countries, and came together after months of negotiations at the highest levels of governments in the U.S., Russia and Germany, whose prisoner, Russian hit man Vadim Krasikov, emerged as the linchpin to the arrangement.

“The deal that secured their freedom was a feat of diplomacy,” President Biden said moments after their release. “Some of these women and men have been unjustly held for years. All have endured unimaginable suffering and uncertainty. Today, their agony is over.”

Speaking from the White House later with the families of Gershkovich and the others who were freed Thursday, Biden said they were able to connect with the recently released prisoners on the telephone.

“Multiple countries helped get this done,” Biden said. “They joined a difficult complex negotiation at my request. I personally thank them all again.”

This is a spot of good news in a spate of bad news, so lift your heart a bit, even if a convicted murderer did go free. Remember that it’s better to free one innocent man than let ten guilty persons go free.

*Three people who have been held at Guantanamo Bay prison for years have finally agreed to plead guilty to planning the 9/11 attack so they could avoid the death penalty.

The man accused of plotting the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and two of his accomplices have agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy and murder charges in exchange for a life sentence rather than a death-penalty trial at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, prosecutors said Wednesday.

Prosecutors said the deal was meant to bring some “finality and justice” to the case, particularly for the families of nearly 3,000 people who were killed in the attacks in New York City, at the Pentagon and in a Pennsylvania field.

The defendants Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi reached the deal in talks with prosecutors across 27 months at Guantánamo and approved on Wednesday by a senior Pentagon official overseeing the war court.

The men have been in U.S. custody since 2003. But the case had become mired in more than a decade of pretrial proceedings that focused on the question of whether their torture in secret C.I.A. prisons had contaminated the evidence against them.

Word of the deal emerged in a letter from war court prosecutors to Sept. 11 family members.

“In exchange for the removal of the death penalty as a possible punishment, these three accused have agreed to plead guilty to all of the charged offenses, including the murder of the 2,976 people listed in the charge sheet,” said the letter, which was signed by Rear Adm. Aaron C. Rugh, the chief prosecutor for military commissions, and three lawyers on his team.

And so this comes to an end, and I’m satisfied on two counts. First, I’m opposed to the death penalty, even for a horrific crime like this. Life without parole is better, if for no reason other than if someone’s been executed, they can’t be brought back to life by exculpatory evidence. Second, I’ve always been opposed to holding these people on Guantanamo, where they don’t have the same rights they’d have if held in the U.S. There is no good reason I can see for trying these people in a military court on the island of Cuba rather than bringing them back to the mainland U.S. and giving them over to the American judicial system. One thing is for sure: they’ll be held in the ADX Florence prison, a place that is almost worse than living. It’s a dehumanizing and soul-breaking place where you have to stay in your cell 23 hours a day.

*The NYT reports that pro-Palestinian groups in America are trying to ensure that Josh Shapiro—the Jewish and Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, and once a key contender for Kamela Harris’s VP slot—doesn’t get the nod.

Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania took the stage at Wissahickon High School in the Philadelphia suburbs on Monday to the roars of his fellow Democrats, a campaign appearance and an audition all in one.

As he enthusiastically shouted out his support for Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, the pro-Palestinian demonstrators who had dogged Democratic politicians last spring were nowhere in evidence. There was only the adoration of an audience from his native Montgomery County, which the Democratic ticket must carry by sizable margins in November to win Pennsylvania.

But as Ms. Harris prepares to name her running mate ahead of a rally on Tuesday in Philadelphia, those protests are very much part of the calculus surrounding Mr. Shapiro, who is believed to be on her shortlist of potential running mates.

An effort by a motley group of left-wing and pro-Palestinian activists to derail his nomination has presented the Harris campaign with a decision as the vice president prepares to make one of most significant choices of her career: Should she take the opportunity to stand up to her far-left flank in an appeal to the center of the party and to independents, or should she shy away from inflaming an issue that has divided and bedeviled the party — Israel’s war in Gaza?

“Harris needs to win Pennsylvania, signal moderation and reassure Haley voters that she’ll stand up to the left,” said Representative Jake Auchincloss, a Massachusetts Democrat, a Jewish military veteran and an admirer of Mr. Shapiro, referring to Republican supporters of Nikki Haley. “The more the Twitter left piles on him, the more helpful he is to Harris.”

Truedat.  But of course Harris needs to cater to her followers on the “Twitter left” (otherwise known as progressives). I’m not a fan of either of the candidates, but I think it would be judicious for Harris to pick Shapiro. If she doesn’t, she’ll have some ‘splaining to do.

*There are two articles in the Free Press bearing on the election. In the first, Abigail Shrier tells Trump what he should be doing to win the Presidency, and he appears to be doing it all rong. (I don’t think for a second that Shrier wants Trump to win.). First, they should stick to politics:

There is every reason to believe Vice President Harris is actually quite radical and would govern that way. Since the start of her failed 2020 presidential campaign, she has adopted virtually every tenet of progressive maximalism—yes, wokeness—from gender ideology (pronouns-in-her-bio) to seriously discussing defunding the police in a 2020 radio interview. [Shrier then details more of Harris’s progressive” Leftism.]

. . . . In 2019, she expressed remarkable hostility to American energy. On CNN, she said there was “no question” she would ban fracking and offshore drilling. She fully supported Biden’s disastrous, inhumane policy of encouraging not only hormones but also gender surgeries for vulnerable minors and of flinging open the doors of women’s jail cells to biologically male offenders.

. . . . Each of these positions is out of step with the moderates in her party and the vast majority of the American people; had they come out in a primary, they would have been quite damaging. For good reason, Harris was ranked the “most liberal” member of the senate by the government transparency organization GovTrack, which recently memory-holed the webpage bearing the accolade.

Republicans foolish enough to attack Harris as a DEI hire are likely to be startled by the stampede to defend her. For one thing, calling Harris a DEI hire mistakes attacking the system with attacking its beneficiaries. The system of DEI is unethical and must be dismantled. But the beneficiaries did nothing wrong. Were they not supposed to apply for these jobs? Why shame them now?

The other counterproductive strategy—which some Republicans seem keen to pursue—is “slut shaming” Harris for her affair, early in her career, with the powerful older politician Willie Brown, the married mayor of San Francisco. The charge seems ridiculous when leveled against a happily married woman turning sixty, who looks like a kindly auntie and whose stepchildren call her “Momala.” In four years as the first female veep, she presented a personal side that was warm and conventional, and that’s what voters remember. Shaming her for earlier romantic affairs will only inspire her base to vote early.

Ergo:

The question Republicans ought to confront before leveling any attack is: “Will this energize my supporters more or hers?” For nearly every ad hominem salvo currently flung at Harris, the answer is: hers.

. . . Harris has never stopped being a San Francisco politician. Republicans should remind the public of that and ask Wisconsin residents: Are you ready to become California? Liberals and conservatives are fleeing Harris’s home state, where she was U.S. senator and attorney general. Would Pennsylvanians like to know why?

Ten million migrants have entered our country since Harris was put in charge of the border. Are they ready for millions more? Would they like to find their own schools and hospitals so overrun that American citizens are sent away, as happened in New York and Texas?

The vast majority of American families prefer Republican policies. It’s the messengers who are so often the problem. And perhaps that’s especially the case this year.

Shrier seems on the mark to me.  Trump and Vance are doing exactly the opposite of what they should do to win. When Trump says that Kamala Harris changed her public identity from Asian to black, he might be true (I have no idea), but it’s not going to fly with black voters or anybody else. It doesn’t have anything to do with ISSUES. Likewise when Vance compares Democrats to “childless cat ladies”. That’s ad hominem and just plain mean, and which voters would be won over by that? If anything, I think this election is going to turn on issues and accomplishments, not name-calling. Or so I hope.

*Right underneath Shrier’s piece is one by Freddie de Boer, “Step away from the memes, Madame Vice President,” that gives Harris advice about how to beat the Republicans.  (The subtitle is “Kamala Harris is acting like she’s running to be President of Online. That’s a huge mistake.”)

The liberal media is really, really feeling themselves, seemingly convinced that Kamala Harris’s near-tie performance in recent polls reflects permanent strength on her part. I don’t know; it seems like this closing of the gap could largely be the result of an unprecedented one-time boost, given the strange situation we’re in. It would certainly be an exaggeration to say that most Democrats appear certain of victory in November, but many are displaying a level of exuberance that’s very hard for me to justify with evidence. This is especially true given two facts: one, we’ve seen successive presidential elections in which Donald Trump has meaningfully outperformed both pundit prognostication and polling, and two, our horrible electoral system unduly empowers a lot of voters who are not at all Harris’s core constituencies. A vote in California is not worth as much as a vote in Pennsylvania. That’s absurd, but it’s the reality, exactly the kind of reality left-leaning people ignored in 2016. They ignore it again at their own peril.

And many seem intent on remaking a core 2016 mistake—acting as though the Democratic candidate’s job is to become the President of Online rather than the President of the United States, begging Harris to devote her campaign to memes and social media, playing to people like them instead of the middle-class white retirees in Wisconsin and Arizona who will actually determine this election. New York magazinehas been particularly uninspiring in this regard, producing a lot of takes predicated on the idea that the median undecided swing state voter is, well, a New York magazine subscriber. Here Jason P. Frank says that the key to victory for Harris is mobilizing “stans.” Jason, what Kamala Harris needs is white independents without college degrees in swing states. Are a lot of those in very-online fan armies? I have my doubts.

In fact, I suspect most of the people Harris needs the most don’t know what the fuck a stan is and don’t spend any time in the spaces where stans congregate! Here Angelina Chapin credulously covers a pro-Harris Zoom call for white women, which I’m sure is a great way to reach women married to laid-off-ironworkers-turned-Uber-Eats-drivers in the Rust Belt. Here Camille Squires talks about all the enthusiasm for Harris that’s bubbling up in Harris’s old sorority. Squires writes that “there’s little doubt that she can count on the support of the more than 360,000 women of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.”Well, yes, that’s true. As would Biden. I don’t think the Democrats were going to struggle to reach the black sorority sister demographic. The weird way that a given party’s most loyal voters are often rendered the least important is another dumb element of democracy, and another fact of life.

. . . If Harris is going to win, the absolute last thing she should do is to run a meme candidacy like that presided over by Robby Mook in 2016, where Hillary’s agenda took a back seat to a never-ending procession of glamorous celebrity photo ops and a wince-inducing attempt to make the candidate into America’s cool grandma. In many ways, during the 2016 general election it felt like the primary never ended for the Democrats, the party seemingly certain (as I was) that Trump could not win and Hillary determined to match Barack Obama in inspiring the base, which was simply not what she needed to focus on. These strategic mistakes were not the reason that Hillary lost, but they played directly into her biggest weakness, which was how her underlying unpopularity fit squarely into the perception that Democrats came from a different strata of life than swing voters.

This piece is so well written, and so funny, that you should read it all. I’ll give one or two more quotes, but you get the message of what Harris needs to do. I love this one:

Over at The New York Times, the constitutionally even-tempered Lydia Polgreen has been huffing the hopium as well. Her piece includes some important qualifications but falls into the same trap as so many others, allowing her hope to overwhelm her analysis. She writes, “By building her campaign around freedom, she has found what she lacked in the 2020 race: a clear, simple message that stands in stark contrast to the strange and unpopular plans laid out in Project 2025.” For one thing, the abstract concept of freedom doesn’t strike me as particularly novel or unceded territory in an American election. For another, isn’t that precisely what Harris has demonstrated she’s incapable of consistently doing—delivering clear, simple messages? On the campaign trail in 2019 and as VP, she’s demonstrated a profound tendency to fall into gaffes, sometimes legitimately earning the title “word salad.” Her infamous “I’ve been to the border” comments are indicative of many more stumbles. And yet even this weakness can be spun into a strength, if you want to badly enough. In one of the most absurd of these pieces, Amanda Hess writes that Harris’s recurring failure to articulate herself well is good, actually, because we’re in a “post-coherence” political moment. When Donald Trump rants incoherently about Hannibal Lecter, that’s a vulnerability; when Kamala Harris once again mumbles about “being unburdened by what has been,” somehow, that’s an opportunity. Because of memes, or something. Memes that the voters Democrats need won’t ever see because they don’t have bullshit email jobs where they can watch Instagram reels for six and a half hours a day.

. . . and then a funny ending:

Coconut tree! Brat! Pokémon go to the polls! We’re all having a good time! I very much hope these people are still having a good time in November. Right now, they seem incapable of contemplating the fact that they very well might not be. I am just absolutely bamboozled at how few people in the media are currently telling their readers to rein it in a little and not get too optimistic. Harris still faces massive challenges related to the electoral map. In hindsight, the failure to recognize Trump’s chances in 2016—my own failure—was a matter of putting hope above sense. And we can’t afford any more of that.

Since I’m not happy with either candidate (especially Trump), I won’t dispense political advice. But it does seem like both Shrier and de Boer are offering sensible advice to the candidates. Right now the runup to the election in 3 months really does seem like Silly Season.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron got lucky!

Szaron: I found a four-leaf clover.
Hili: Count again.
In Polish:
Szaron: Znalazłem czterolistną koniczynę.
Hili: Policz raz jeszcze.

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

From Cat Memes:

From Science Humor sent by Anita Raj Pandy. A board that looks like an ostrich:

From Strange, Silly, or Stupid Signs via Nisar Khokhar:

 

From Masih.  Iran’s Supreme Leader does look like he’s scanning the sky, doesn’t he?

Simon says “the laws of physics compelled him” to post this:

From Malgorzata: a 13-point thread on why you shouldn’t trust Hamas’s casualty counts. (There are also two addenda.) I didn’t know that the “unidentified people” didn’t represent bodies at all.

Two marine posts from my feed:

From the Auschwitz Memorial:

x

Two tweets from Herr Doktor Professor Cobb. First, the Missing Lynx appears:

A lot of lovely photos of sky phenomena, including clouds, auroras, and so on. Go see them all; you won’t be disappointed.

38 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

  1. The question Republicans ought to confront before leveling any attack is: “Will this energize my supporters more or hers?”

    The even better question is: “How will this go down with the 5% of wavering and uncommitted voters?”.

  3. I’ll be interested to see if Harris runs a basement campaign like Biden did or whether she has rallies and answer questions from the press. She hasn’t answered one question from the press since the announcement that she was Maria Theresa. I wonder if the Dems looked at Biden and said, Hey, we don’t even need to do that, the press will cover us just as well. The clips circulating of her may be cherry-picked or she may be terrible in front of a camera. Time will tell.

  5. Having experienced a similar bolide once in my life, the singer’s jaw-dropping disbelief seems very real. The bright original daylight-like flash in the darkness of night followed by the resolved meteor streaking across the sky is how I saw it. The only thing missing in the video is the chill down her spine and the hair on the back of her neck standing up. Oh and my experience included the even more frightening breakup of the meteor into several pieces that shined red, orange, green, and yellow. It was forty years ago and only now do I not get chills when I recall it.

    1. I got chills just “hearing” (in my mind’s ear) you describe it, Jim.

  6. I find the discussion of the Kamala Harris as a DEI choice so ironic, given that Donald Trump is the epitome of what I would call our society’s traditional DEI practice, that is, awarding wealth and status based solely on who your parents are. If Donald Trump did not have a multi millionaire father, do you think he would have avoided the draft and gotten into Wharton business school? Not a chance.

    1. I like this question out there, if DEI is so great, why is it offensive to call someone a “DEI hire”?

  7. Finally, and I will, with a nod to da roolz, try to cease and desist for the day, Boeing has appointed a new boss. This guy actually has a BS in engineering (mechanical) as opposed to the most recent guy who, with his BS (maybe BA?) in accounting oversaw the inattention or incompetence to design and manufacturing that led to airplane parts and whole airplanes falling from the sky as well as leaving two astronauts on an unintended, extended staycation on the space station. According to reports, the new guy is even setting up his office in the Seattle area where airplanes are designed and built as opposed to Chicago or Arlington, VA where the old guy oversaw the books. My memory of work with the Boeing engineers, technicians, first-line and middle managers is that they were extremely good. Let’s hope their expertise is again allowed to carry the day.

    1. In some fairness and recognition of the long lead time in aircraft design and manufacture, I must acknowledge that the guy who preceded the accounting major and was CEO when the first 737MAX crashes happened, WAS an engineer, but that the guy who preceded him, likely during the design decisions on the MAX, was a Yale American Studies major – the first non-engineer to lead the company. In any case I am glad to have someone with an engineering state of mind back at the top of Boeing’s C-suite.

  8. Remember that it’s better to free one innocent man than let ten guilty persons go free?

    Isn’t it better that ten guilty go free than one innocent suffer?

    The Auschwitz Memorial tweet is missing for me at least.

    1. “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”
      — Wm Blackstone, 1760’s

  9. Safe travels Jerry. I loved SA the one time I visited, I reckon you will too!

  10. The argument that all Presidents have given, after they were inaugurated and became privy to America’s deepest secrets, is that they can’t send the Guantanamo prisoners to the civilian justice system on the mainland for two reasons:

    1) a civilian trial would require disclosure to the defence and the jury of secrets that would compromise American intelligence assets operating in foreign countries, and,
    2) the defendants might be acquitted if the prosecution had to withhold conclusive but sensitive information under reason 1) or evidence that would be ruled inadmissible because illegally obtained. The acquitted defendants would be then free to disappear into American or international society. The Administrations have always said these men are too dangerous for this to be allowed to happen.

    I don’t know if these are good reasons. Without knowing secret information I don’t know how one could judge. But they are reasons.

    I am glad they are not going to be executed. But you have to admit the threat of it got them to plead guilty.

    1. “Giving them a fair trial might result in acquittal so we’re not going to do that.”

      The high security prison a guilty plea puts them in probably doesn’t waterboard them, so maybe they just want to end the torture.

      1. I don’t think anybody was waterboarded there, ever, and not anywhere in a long time in any case. It was done at CIA black sites abroad and the prisoners sent to Guantanamo after interrogation. It was done to get information, not as punishment. President Obama made it illegal. So the idea that they pled guilty to avoid further waterboarding doesn’t hold water.

        Many if not most criminal defendants are probably guilty as hell. The suppression of illegally obtained, but true and condemnatory, evidence is to deter the police from using illegal methods to get it which would undermine the freedom of us all, not because we doubt its veracity. We accept that the guilty go free sometimes in ordinary life because we know most defendants are not all that dangerous to the rest of us. Most murderers don’t kill you and me. Families of victims can suck it up and move on, hoping the murderer doesn’t kill more of them. The 9/11 defendants still held there were, are, and will be dangerous to everyone who gets on a plane and who knows what else. Acquitting them was simply never going to happen. You aren’t fools.

        A piece of American extra-sovereign territory that is beyond the reach of the Constitution to deal with non-citizens who commit original sin — killing Americans — is a handy thing to have for “special cases.” I know it’s ugly, probably illegal under international law in the treatment of enemy combatants but who’s going to enforce it? No one did, but not for want of trying.

  12. In the Trump hush money trial, the prosecution argued that the voters had a right to know about Trump’s affair with Stormy Daniels and that it was “election fraud, pure and simple” that he tried to hide it.

    Does this mean that voters have a right to know about Kamala Harris’s past affairs with married men?

    If not, why the double standard?

    2. Oh, I just noticed your use of the plural there: “affairs” with “men”.
      If you’ve got info on affairs other than Brown, let’s hear it.
      If not, it’s a dishonest piece of rhetoric.

  13. Vadim Krasikov, the most well-known of the Russians released in the prisoner swap, was reportedly an officer of the Russian Federal Security Service. He is widely described as a murderer and a hit man, guilty of the “brazen” assassination of a Chechen exile living in Germany. Reuters describes the victim as “Georgian citizen Zelimkhan Khangoshvili . . . Khangoshvili had long forsworn any violent struggle for Chechen independence.” This makes this man almost seem a pacifist. The Associated Press moves a bit closer to the truth, stating that Khangoshvili was “a 40-year-old Georgian citizen who had fought Russian troops in Chechnya.” The NYT and BBC expand appropriately, noting, respectively, that he “commanded a militia during the separatist wars in Chechnya” and was “a former Chechen rebel commander.” Russia’s take is that the man participated in the Narzan Raid of 2004 that saw the deaths of nearly 100, over a quarter of them civilians, with another 100+ people injured. Russia also charged him with other terrorist acts. At the time of Krasikov’s conviction, CBS reported of the victim that “‘There is no doubt that Khangoshvili bears responsibility for people’s deaths,’ Arnoldi [the German judge] said, citing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s description of the victim in December 2019 as a ‘terrorist and murderer’.”

    I want to accept for sake of argument that both Krasikov and Khangoshvili were killers, the one guilty of state-sanctioned killings, the other guilty of terrorist crimes. My question, to whomever would like to answer, is this: What distinguishes the Russian officer from any number of American and Israeli military and intelligence personnel who have conducted targeted killings of terrorist suspects abroad? I am not saying this to condemn, tacitly or otherwise, the Americans and Israelis. I am asking why we condemn Russia for taking what appears to be similar retaliation against terrorists (not to be confused with their killing of journalists or political dissidents). Is the objection one of time, place, and manner?

    1. You mean the “one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter” argument maybe?
      It is one worthy of discussion but I think the deciding factor has to be the governing state or organization. Is the “terrorist” one from a terrorist org, as a starting point.

      Then the big binary is “Is the state responsible a democracy or a dictatorship?”
      That seems essential to me here. And also… in trusting ANYTHING any non-democracy says – be it Iran’s numbers on anything, Saudi Arabia’s economic numbers, China’s unemployment figures, etc. Without free speech and democracy pretty much everything is a lie – whatever “the big guy” says is true.

      I’m no expert in these kinds of ethics. Being a former criminal defense attorney has made me extremely humble in my moral pronouncements.

      D.A.
      NYC

      1. Extralegally assassinating terrorists or people one deems as terrorists in third countries with whom one is not at war is not normally legal according to most Western people’s international legal standards. Being a democracy, not a dictatorship, should make one more, not less respectful of such standards. US drone strikes against presumed terrorists abroad were not generally considered legal in Germany or the EU, and are among the violations of rule based, decent international conduct that the US committed post 1990 that helped destroy acceptance of the rule based order in countries that might have been won for it had the US played fair. I am not judging Israel here, which is fighting for its existence, although I personally think killing Haniye at the Pezeshkian inauguration was a strategic mistake. The US, though, was never really threatened by the countries it bombed or droned or meddled in in ways it would protest were others the actors.

  14. Ad to the suspicious/insane Hamas “fatality numbers” a mathematical argument between Hamas’ steady upward climb numbers (in a linear manner) verses actual combat deaths – in the real world – which are more jerky, clumped and non-linear.

    Sigh. Like we need deep analytics to seriously doubt anything these murderous terrorists say. Anything at all.

    For more on urban fighting see Mr. Spencer’s talk on Sam Harris’ podcast a few months ago. To wit: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/366-urban-warfare-2-0

    Onwards Israeli heroes.
    D.A.
    NYC
    column: https://themoderatevoice.com/author/david-anderson/

    ps Have a great trip to SA, PCC(E). Do not, under any circumstances, get murdered or eaten by the wildlife!

  15. Response to Lysander #12:
    This sort of Hannity-level discourse really gets tiresome.
    The issue in the Trump case was not that he ‘allegedly’ had an affair with a porn actress while he was married-with-child, nor that he (certainly) paid her off to keep it quiet during the 2016 campaign, but rather that he illegally falsified business records in an attempt to hide the payoff, presumably from voters.
    For Harris, she was unmarried, Brown was married but separated, and it was not a secret even at the time. And I am unaware of anybody trying to “hide” these well-known facts vis-a-vis her election campaign, let alone doling out hush money or fraudulently disguising such.
    You and Sean are going to have to work a lot harder to make any sort of plausible double standard out of these very different affairs.
    As a comparative indicator of personal character, though, the comparison seems illustrative.

    1. I thought the point about the Willie Brown affair was not the affair per se, but the supposed nepotism, i.e. it is assumed he promoted her politically because she was his girlfriend, or she used sex with the older man to get a leg up. (Have no idea whether there is truth to it.)

      1. I agree with you about the troubling possible tit-for-tat aspects of the Harris/Brown thing.
        But I was responding directly to a different comment that didn’t mention that part.

      1. Being in a particularly pedantic mood today, here is Wikipedia on “fraus”:

        In Roman mythology, Fraus was the goddess of personification of treachery and fraud.

        She was daughter of Orcus and Night (Nyx). She was depicted with a woman’s face, the body of a snake, and on her tail the sting of a scorpion.

        Fraus is an alternative name for Mercury, the god of theft (among other things). She is alternatively described as Mercury’s helper.. Her Greek equivalent was Apate.

  16. I’m at the edge of my Roolz loud mouth allotment here I’m aware – but just in passing I listened to this today and I think WEITers interested in geopolitics might enjoy the following.
    Anne Applebaum’s interview about her latest book Autocracy, Inc. (which I’ve bought and am awaiting delivery).
    Anne is a canny analyst of the global system:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYaRgplnZ_k&t=1307s
    35 min.

    D.A.
    NYC

  17. I think it’s pretty clear Ms. Harris will not be selecting the VP running mate. The power brokers that chose her to be the primary-less nominee will select it for her. Expect them to write her words for her, a la Biden, and see her using the teleprompter. This is a grim election.

  18. I’ve been concerned about Ms. Harris since Mr. Biden began his campaign for re-election, as I believed that shortly after his 2nd inauguration he would be deemed unfit to continue, & that she would serve the majority of his 2nd term. I wasn’t too thrilled with, in effect, electing her under the guise of voting for him. With Mr. Biden stepping aside early, at least we are honestly electing Ms. Harris, rather than doing so by duplicity. Nonetheless, she would not have been my preference for the Democratic Party candidate.

Comments are closed.