Saturday: Hili dialogue

October 5, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to CaturSaturday, October 5, 2024, and National Apple Betty Day, celebrating the dessert. It used to be called “brown betty”, but times being what they are, the color has been deep-sixed.

It’s also World Teachers’ Day, Do Something Nice Day, Rocky Mountain Oyster Day (them’s testicles!), and Global James Bond Day, celebrating the day in 1962 when the first Bond film, “Dr. No,” opened in London. 

Here’s the scene from the movie in which Bond meets Honey, played by Ursula Andress:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 5 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Everybody’s dispensing advice about what the Presidential candidates should be doing to win in November, and Peggy Noonan at the WSJ is no exception. Though she’s a conservative, she’s no Trump-osculator, and has advice for both candidates:

If I were a Trump supporter I would be worried about what Trump supporters have worried about since he came down the escalator, that he is squandering it away every day. Voters and observers have spent a decade saying “he’s getting crazier,” “he’s going too far,” and they’re always right and are right now. He’s selling $100,000 watches and having Truth Social meltdowns, free-associating about movies and dribbling away arguments. Ms. Harris insists almost to the point of credibility that the Biden-Harris administration didn’t let the border be overwhelmed, the Biden-Harris administration tried to control the border and put forward the toughest bill and Donald Trump stopped it. And she’s getting away with it! With the Jan. 6 filings released this week, his focus is sure to return to the endless murk and mire of personal grievance.

What should both sides be watching now? John Ellis, in his Political News Items Substack, notes an intriguing sidebar from a recent Gallup survey. “Nearly identical percentages of US adults rate Donald Trump (46%) and Kamala Harris (44%) favorably in Gallup’s latest Sept 3-15 poll.” But both candidates have higher unfavorable ratings than favorable. Mr. Trump’s unfavorable rating is 7 points higher than his favorable—and Ms. Harris’s is 10 points higher. Her favorable numbers have “moderated” since her rise to the nomination, while Mr. Trump’s are up 5 points since last month.

Look at the numbers involving independent voters, Mr. Ellis continues. Majorities of independents view Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris unfavorably, but he holds a favorability edge over her with independents, at 44% vs. 35%. More: “Assuming the poll is accurate”—he does—“the fact that 60 percent of independents have an ‘unfavorable’ opinion of Harris is surprising.” In 2020, Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump among independents, 52% to 43%.

Back to the Harris campaign. It’s odd that some political professionals think nobody cares if she does an interview with some newspaper. When all the public sees is scripted stuff, punctuated infrequently by an interview with a highly respectful and sympathetic interviewer, they pick it up. They get a sense that something is being hidden from them. Well-produced rallies with good enough speeches and softball interviews won’t really cut it. In Hollywood they used to try to soften the picture of a star losing her luster by putting a coat of Vaseline on the camera lens, to soften the focus. The Harris campaign is using too much metaphoric Vaseline, and it feels not like an attempt to soften but to obscure.

It would be better if she’d done interview after interview from day one of her candidacy, and better if her campaign had accepted the wobbles, accepted the imperfections, gotten people rooting for her, and helped her get more at ease, more confident, and let her build. That they didn’t implies they didn’t think she could build.

Hiding in plain sight works for a while but not forever.

*Bret Stephens, though somewhat of a conservative, is one of the few NYT columnists who has gotten the import of the Gazan war correct. In his latest op-ed, “The year American Jews woke up” (archived here), he first notes that all American Jews were aware of the rise in antisemitism, but it wasn’t driven home until Oct. 7, 2023—and driven home by American behavior:

After Oct. 7, it became personal. It was in the neighborhoods in which we lived, the professions and institutions in which we worked, the colleagues we worked alongside, the peers with whom we socialized, the group chats to which we belonged, the causes to which we donated, the high schools and universities our kids attended. The call was coming from inside the house.

It happened in innumerable ways, large and small.

The home of an impeccably progressive Jewish director of a prominent art museum was vandalized with red spray paint and a sign accusing her of being a “white supremacist Zionist.” A storied literary magazine endured mass resignations from its staff members for the sin of publishing the work of a left-wing Israeli. A Jewish journalist scrolled through Instagram and recognized an old friend from Northwestern gleefully tearing down posters of Hamas’s hostages while saying “calba” — dog in Arabic — to the pictures of kidnapped infants and elderly people. A leading progressive congresswoman was asked during a TV interview about Hamas’s rapes of Israeli women and called them an unfortunate fact of war before quickly returning to the subject of Israel’s alleged perfidy. An 89-year-old Holocaust survivor petitioned the Berkeley City Council to pass a Holocaust Remembrance Day proclamation in light of the resurgence of antisemitism and was heckled by demonstrators. An on-campus caricature depicted an affable Jewish law school dean holding a knife and fork drenched in blood. A Columbia University undergraduate posted on Instagram: “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” Tucker Carlson platformed a Hitler apologist. Trump warned Jews that he is prepared to blame them should he lose the election.

All these stories became public, but what could be at least as upsetting were the stories you heard about only over meals with friends and acquaintances. A publishing executive who wanted to promote a novel set during the Holocaust but faced internal resistance from staff members who saw it as “Zionist propaganda.” A college freshman with a Jewish surname being the only person in her dorm to have anti-Israel leaflets pushed under her door. A student who suggested to me, during a give-and-take at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, that Israelis should heed the words of the Book of Matthew and turn the other cheek. It reminded me of Eric Hoffer’s quip that “everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world.”

At some point, an awakening of sorts occurred. Perhaps not for every American Jew, but for many. I’ve called them the Oct. 8 Jews — those who woke up a day after our greatest tragedy since the Holocaust to see how little empathy there was for us in many of the spaces and communities and institutions we thought we comfortably inhabited. It was an awakening that often came with a deeper set of realizations.

Stephens notes three realizations that many of us have had:

One realization: American Jews should not expect reciprocity.

Few minorities have been more conspicuously attached to progressive causes than American Jews: Samuel Gompers and labor unionism; Betty Friedan and feminism; Harvey Milk and gay rights; Abraham Joshua Heschel and civil rights; Robert Bernstein and human rights. A proud history, but whatever we poured of ourselves into the pain and struggle of others was not returned in our days of grief. Nor should we expect much understanding: In an era that stresses sensitivity to every microaggression against nearly any minority, macroaggressions against Jews who happen to believe that Israel has a right to exist are not only permitted but demanded.

. . . A second: “Zionist” has become just another word for Jew. Anti-Zionists deny this strenuously, because a vocal handful of Jews are also anti-Zionist and because outright antisemitism is still unfashionable and because they’d like to believe — or at least tell others — that their objection is to a political ideology rather than to a people or a religion.

But when the wished-for dire consequences of anti-Zionism fall directly on the heads of millions of Jews and when the people the anti-Zionists seek to silence, exclude and shame are almost all Jewish and when the charges they make against Zionists invariably echo the hoariest antisemitic stereotypes — greed, deceit, limitless bloodlust — then the distinctions between anti-Zionist and antisemite blur to the point of invisibility.

. . . . And a third: This isn’t going to end anytime soon.

It won’t end because anti-Zionism has a self-righteous fervor that will attract followers and inspire militancy. It won’t end because politics in America are moving toward forms of illiberalism — conspiracy thinking and nativism on the right, a Manichaean view on the left that the world is neatly divided between the oppressors and the oppressed — that are congenial to classic antisemitism. And it won’t end because most Jews will not forsake what it means to be Jewish so that we may be more acceptable to those who despise us.

I’d reproduce the whole column if I could, as it’s one of Stephens’s best (it’s archived here). Maybe that’s because I’m a secular Jew, but it does echo my own feelings, and at least tells non-Jews how many of us feel.

*This being Rosh Hashanah, and Nellie being somewhat of a pious Jew, the weekly news summary at the Free Press is written by Katie Herzog, and is called “TGIF: Justice for Bear 402“. I’ll steal three of Katie’s items:

→ Fat Bear Week postponed after fat bear murdered: Fat Bear Week, the annual celebration of animal obesity at Alaska’s Katmai National Park & Preserve (an event commonly confused with San Francisco’s Pride Parade), was delayed this week after a male bear, identified as 469, fatally attacked a female bear, known as 402, in a shocking display of toxic masculinity and male violence that was captured on the park’s widely viewed livestream. In response to the tragedy, park officials said that they have no plans to enact justice for 402, stating that this is simply part of what bears do. When reached for comment, Bear 469 stood on his hind legs and growled. Voting for the fattest bear resumed on Tuesday.

→ Trump pens boring op-ed in Newsweek: Okay, there’s no way that Trump himself wrote this thing because RANDOM WORDS were not PRINTED in ALL CAPS. But either a human being or mildly sophisticated AI did publish an op-ed under his name in Newsweek, and it was mostly a repetition of the economically illiterate tripe he’s been pushing for years about how tariffs on foreign goods will somehow benefit American citizens. Trump is a moron (sorry, comments section, it’s just true), but you’d think even he would be able to understand that taxes on goods get passed on to the consumer. But don’t take my word for it (again, libtard). Take Grover Norquist’s. Or Chuck Grassley’s. Or the Tax Foundation’s. Or the Cato Institute’s. Or Goldman Sachs’. These are not poor people or Marxists or socialists in disguise. These are free-market capitalists who love money, want the economy to grow, and who realize what Trump somehow does not: Tariffs are not taxes on foreign countries. They are taxes on the American public. That’s you, commenters. Actually, when you put it like that, tariffs don’t sound so bad.

→ Helene could spell disaster for the world: You’ve probably never heard of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, but you almost certainly depend on it. The two-street town is home to around 2,200 people and the most important quartz deposits not just in the U.S. but in the world. The mines in Spruce Pine produce up to 70 percent of the high-purity quartz used to manufacture semiconductors globally. And what the hell is a semiconductor? Honestly, no clue, but I hear they’re extremely important to the manufacture of solar panels, cell phones, AI, and more. And now those mines are, to use a technical term, royally fucked by Hurricane Helene. Manufacturers will also have a much harder time moving this resource out of Spruce Pine. What’s this mean for the rest of us? Our global semiconductor shortage will get even worse. If this means a slowdown of AI development, may I gently suggest we press pause on those portraits that look real until you start counting fingers? Let’s start there. Thanks.

*If you’ve eaten Breyers Natural Vanilla ice cream in the last eight years, you’re probably in for some money:

If you’ve enjoyed vanilla-flavored Breyers ice cream over the last eight years, you may be in line for a sweet treat—a cash refund.

Breyers is paying out a nearly $9 million settlement as part of a class-action lawsuit filed against Conopco, Inc., and Unilever United States, Inc. The lawsuit claimed Breyers’ labeling of Natural Vanilla ice cream gave consumers the impression the dessert contained vanilla flavor derived only from the vanilla plant and not from non-vanilla plant sources.

The lawsuit also alleges that the ice cream contained non-vanilla plant vanilla flavors.

The $8.85M settlement fund notes eligibility for anyone who purchased Breyers Natural Vanilla ice cream in any size between April 21, 2016 and Aug. 14, 2024.

Per the agreement, settlement class members who submit a valid and timely claim form by Feb. 19, 2025, will be eligible for cash payments.

Settlement class members may also submit claims with or without proof of purchase.

The deadline to exclude yourself or object to the settlement is Oct. 31, 2024.

You can claim up to eight purchases of this flavor without receipts (unlimited with receipts, but who keeps grocery receipts for eight years), and I’ve certainly made at least that many in the last eight years.  If you want your rebate, which won’t be munificent, just fill out the forms at this site.

*The theocratic head of Iran (disliked by many of his people) is taking the hard line with respect to Israel, though I don’t think he’s going to strike again unilaterally.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivered a rare Friday sermon defending this week’s missile attack on Israel that deepened fears of a regional war, while praising the “logical and legal” Hamas-led October 7 invasion and massacre in southern Israel that sparked the war in Gaza and fueled violence throughout the Middle East.

Speaking in front of tens of thousands at a mosque in the capital Tehran, Khamenei said Iran-backed armed groups in the Middle East “will not back down” even after Israel recently killed a spate of terrorist leaders.

In his first public Friday sermon in nearly five years, Khamenei spoke in Arabic to discuss fighting against Israel by the Iran-aligned “axis of resistance,” including Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Palestinian terror group Hamas.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivered a rare Friday sermon defending this week’s missile attack on Israel that deepened fears of a regional war, while praising the “logical and legal” Hamas-led October 7 invasion and massacre in southern Israel that sparked the war in Gaza and fueled violence throughout the Middle East.

Speaking in front of tens of thousands at a mosque in the capital Tehran, Khamenei said Iran-backed armed groups in the Middle East “will not back down” even after Israel recently killed a spate of terrorist leaders.

In his first public Friday sermon in nearly five years, Khamenei spoke in Arabic to discuss fighting against Israel by the Iran-aligned “axis of resistance,” including Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Palestinian terror group Hamas.

“The resistance in the region will not back down with these martyrdoms, and will win,” Khamenei told the crowd at the Imam Khomeini Grand Mosalla mosque, where supporters carried portraits of slain Hezbollah and Hamas leaders.

“Israel will never defeat Hamas and Hezbollah,” he declared.

He hailed the terror groups’ “fierce defense” against Israeli forces over the past year, referring to Hamas’s brutal October 7 onslaught against Israel and the subsequent solidarity attacks by Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthi rebels and militia groups in Iraq and Syria.

The Tehran-backed terrorists were engaged in “logical and legitimate” action against Israel, Khamenei claimed, and “no one has the right to criticize them.”

This is an evil, terrorism-financing dude who needs to be deposed or destroyed. Israel now has two real choices: go after Iran’s oil and gas fields, which will cripple the country economically (but leave its nukes program) or go after its facilities for enriching uranium and making bomgs.  The former will have a greater temporary effect, but if Iran gets the bomb it’s bye-bye Israel.  I don’t know which it will choose, but it really has to do something about the nukes. I predict that reprisal from Israel will come within ten days—the time it will take them to work out the logistics. And no, Israel should not listen to Biden, who for some unaccountable reason wants Israel to keep its hands off Iran’s nuclear program.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is looking for peace:

Hili: I’m worried about this quiet.
A: Why?
Hili: Something may disrupt it.
In Polish:
Hili: Niepokoi mnie ten spokój.
Ja: Dlaczego?
Hili: Coś go może zakłócić.

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

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy:

From The Dodo:

From somewhere on the internet, found by a reader. It’s hilarious!

From Masih, a woman without a hijab watches a pro-terrorist parade in Iran.  Sound up: you’ll hear whom they’re praising.

From Malgorzata. No, you won’t see it in the MSM:

From Simon, a bit of Carter humor (he was born in 1924):

From my feed. Sound up, of course. Both of these do a good job.

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I posted:

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, great video of wolves taken by a trailcam:

Matthew says of this one, “Better them than me!” My feeling exactly. Sound up.

15 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili dialogue”

  2. Love the joy on the faces of the marimba band kids and their body language as they play.

    And Katie mentioned that it is in the Torah that Nellie can’t blog on yom tov. Nice to start off with a smile.

    And aligned with Bret Stephens’ comments, the past year has certainly focussed me on trying to really understand the history of the Middle East, from BCE days to present. Malgorzata’s comments on this site are always helpful, as has been, Michael Oren’s history of Middle East- US relations and Antonius’ The Arab Awakening, and of course Herzl’s writings. I am sure that some of those histories were provided in my hebrew and sunday school classes decades ago, but I was not a very good student and remember almost nothing other than the dates of destruction of the first and second temples.

  3. Delightful items today

    The shredding bayanist (not an accordion.. the difference appears to be in the details…) is Alexander Hrustevich, born in Ukraine.

    hrustevich.com/en/bio

    He has a number of Grammys.

    [ checks music subscription ]

    Awesome – two recordings with lots of classical repertoire, available, and loaded! Thanks!

    And Hili nails it yet again!

    … I don’t get it : Hedge…

    OH OH I GET IT I LOVE IT!!! 111!! THAT IS…

    Say, is that fake?

  4. Since I’ve bought lots of Breyers ‘natural’ vanilla in the last 8 years, I’m a member of the class of aggrieved consumers in the lawsuit. In theory, anyway. In practice, I’m not nearly aggrieved enough to go to the trouble of filing a claim since the most I’d get is 8 dollars.

    But this did inspire me to finally look for the answer to a question that I’m always torn about when I’m shopping for vanilla: is natural vanilla worth the extra money? This is a good article, if you’re curious like me:
    https://www.americastestkitchen.com/articles/6229-vanilla-extract-vs-imitation-vanilla

    My takeaway is that if you only use vanilla in baked goods (like most people), natural vanilla bean extract is a total waste of money. Actually, it’s worse than that. Since there is less vanillin in natural vanilla extract than in artificial vanilla, the former is arguably an inferior product.

  5. Edward Galiński, today’s remembered Holocaust victim, is probably a relative of mine.

    Bret Stephens’s piece is excellent and poignant. I always knew that antisemitism lay just below the surface but, being below the surface, didn’t know how extensive it was. Now I know. Israel and the Jews are on their own. We thought we had allies on the liberal left, and for decades we worked (and spent) in diligent and tireless support of liberal causes. But we were only being used. Now I know better. And whenever I can, I tell my liberal—and still deluded—friends and family members that they ought to know better by now as well.

    1. The top ranked comment (2960 upvotes) on Bret Stephens’ piece is discouraging:

      “as american jew, i literally haven’t experienced anything you mention in the article. that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening necessarily but it is dangerous painting everyone with one brush. as an american jew i am disgusted with netanyahu and israel and while i absolutely thing october 7 was absolutely awful – i think the response over the long term has been just as bad. i don’t see how israel is any better off today than they were before the terrible attacks.”

  6. “Carter 2028 Hang in there buddy!”

    Laugh? Watch Trump lose this election and his scrum of crazies will put him on the ballot, at 84, again in 2028.
    Gonna be awesome.

    D.A.
    NYC

  9. Trump is a moron and his belief that taxes on goods don’t get passed onto the consumer is evidence of that fact.

    Given her husband’s job, Harris surely knows that the higher corporate taxes she’s pushing will be passed onto consumers. So, she’s not moronic she’s just deceitful.

  10. I doubt that Donald Trump actually believes, moronically, that tariffs aren’t ultimately paid by retail customers. Claiming that the exporting country pays the tariff to Uncle Sam out of its own treasury, and that this isn’t reflected in the selling price, is just his deception to take advantage of anti-China sentiment among low-information voters.

    Kamala Harris is similarly deceitfully taking advantage of anti-corporate sentiment among her low-info voters with her proposal to raise corporate taxes. This is a bad idea, too, but not for its effect on prices. (There is no strong connection between what after-tax profit a firm earned this quarter and what price it will be able charge next quarter. We can only wish that a price increase was the cure for anemic profits!). Rather, corporate taxes discourage investment and encourage capital flight, which makes us all worse off. A more “progressive” approach would be to tax dividends as received by the individual human taxpayer at each person’s marginal tax rate and leave the corporate tax rate on undistributed profits very low. (Capital is mobile. Humans tend to stay put and can’t easily flee to avoid taxes. Capital can, and does. If you are worried that the dividends going to foreigners will evade tax in America, tax that dividend stream as it leaves the country.)

    America is a benchmark. If your corporate tax rate is low, it acts as a brake on the avarice of governments like Canada’s who would otherwise try to take every dollar of profit earned domestically. Low corporate taxes and low tariffs are therefore both American foreign policy good deeds.

    1. After thinking about it, I’d have to agree that both politicians are simply pandering to their base. And yes, higher taxes do encourage capital flight while discouraging investment. But there is a long-term relationship of higher taxes leading to higher consumer prices.

      This article summarizes some of the research done in this area.

      https://taxfoundation.org/blog/who-bears-burden-corporate-tax/

      The “authors calculated that 31 percent of the corporate tax incidence falls on consumers, 38 percent on workers, and 31 percent on shareholders.” So it would seem under Harris’ plan the big bad owners of capital would absorb only 31% of her tax increases while the little people pay for the rest.

      Moreover, her plan is regressive, “the effects on prices were strongest for products that were more likely to be purchased by low-income households, indicating that corporate tax is likely less progressive than commonly asserted.”

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