Saturday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to shabbos for Jewish cats: Saturday, November 16, 2024, and National Fast Food Day.  Below is the fast-food buffet that Trump served the Clemson University football team. The commentators were horrified, because of course it’s Trump. I think it’s kind of cute and, of course this stuff is what Trump loves to eat (I’m amazed he hasn’t yet had an infarction):

It’s also Have a Party with Your Bear Day, National Fast Food Day, and International Day for Tolerance. 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 16 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*I can’t bear to summarize this tired but probably correct thesis over again, but David Brooks repeats it in his postmortem of the Democratic election loss, “Why we got it so wrong.” (see archived article here).  Answer: it’s identity politics, Jack: something that turned off voters.  His sagacious solution: Democrats should give up identity politics.

*According to the WSJ News, human smugglers are telling would-be migrants to get into the U.S. however they can before Trump takes power.

From the dense jungle connecting Panama and Colombia to the banks of the Rio Grande, human smugglers are spreading a message to U.S.-bound migrants: Hurry up and sneak in before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.

Trump’s second term is creating an incentive for migrants to try to reach U.S. soil before the Jan. 20 inauguration, because many anticipate the president-elect will dismantle legal pathways to entry. Those paths include a U.S. government app that allows people to apply for U.S. asylum while in Mexico and then cross legally when they have an appointment—a system created last year that some migrants think will be upended by Trump.

Beatriz Fuentes, who manages the Casa Fuente shelter for women and children in Mexico City, said her shelter began emptying out even before the election. “They were told to hurry up in case of a possible change,” she said.

While there is no evidence yet that a migration surge is materializing, people smugglers are using WhatsApp and social-media groups to tell immigrants it is now or never. Known as “coyotes” or “polleros,” the smugglers’ business model becomes more lucrative during migrant surges, and business slows down right after policy changes are implemented.

. . . In southern Mexico near the Guatemala border, some 4,000 migrants formed three caravans last week and set out for the U.S., volunteers and Mexican officials said. But many of them dispersed after being quickly “hooked,” or lured, by human smugglers, said Luis Villagrán, a Mexican migrant advocate who organizes caravans in the city of Tapachula. Caravans offer safety in numbers for migrants, but are easy targets for authorities, while smugglers offer faster routes to the U.S.

It’s sad to see the desperation with which these would-be immigrants are moving north. Some start in South America and cross Central America, including the Darien Gap, and then March all the way north through Mexico to the U.S. border. But of course there are legal procedures for immigrating, one of which is that economic motives don’t count nearly as much as persecution. What happens when this wave reaches the border—and it will take a long time—will say a lot about whether the Democrats have learned anything from the election. Of course, Biden and Harris now have little to lose by opening the border, but the Democratic Party sure does.

*The Jerusalem Post let slip that during Israel’s retaliation against Iran in late October, it actually hit one of Iran’s nuclear-weapons facilities, something I hoped Israel would do but which the U.S. “banned.” I guess the ban wasn’t serious.

The Israel Air Force allegedly struck one of Iran’s secret nuclear research facilities as part of an operation that took place at the end of October, according to a Friday Axios report that cited former and current US and Israeli officials.

According to the report, the attack caused significant damage to the site in the Parchin military complex, about 20 kilometers southeast of Tehran.

The strike dealt a severe blow to Iran’s nuclear development efforts, the officials cited in the report claimed.

The facility was allegedly part of the Iranian Amad nuclear weapons program until 2003. It was then used for testing explosives needed to set off a nuclear device, the report added, citing the Institute for Science and International Security.

Iran declines to comment

Axios also noted that a former Israeli official briefed on the strike said Israel destroyed sophisticated equipment that was required and necessary for the nuclear devices.

Additionally, the report said that Iran has allegedly denied using nuclear weapons. It also mentioned that the Iranian mission to the UN declined to comment on the Axios report.

*As always, I’ll steal three items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly summary of the news on the Free Press, called this week “TGIF: Department of eat my shorts“, referring of course to Trump’s cabinet picks. They will be longer than usual because of the cabinet picks:

→ Trump’s aloha admin takes shape: At first, things seemed normal. Republican, but normal. He brought on Marco Rubio as secretary of state. Okay, well. He’s a senator. Susie Wiles has been around Republican White Houses since the Reagan era, so that makes sense. Stephen Miller, okay, we know him. But then: Pete Hegseth. As the secretary of defense? Interesting. A veteran and Fox News personality who once threw an ax on TV, missed the target entirely, and almost killed a West Point drummer (there is, of course, a TMZ clip of it). Pete is a handsome bro with a tattoo sleeve and a few ex-wives, and he once proudly said that he “hasn’t washed his hands in ten years.” But okay. He’s a man in a suit, so I guess this is all tracking. But then: Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democrat who represented Hawaii, is to be the director of national intelligence? Here’s what Tulsi Gabbard once said about the war in Ukraine:

Dear Presidents Putin, Zelensky, and Biden. It’s time to put geopolitics aside and embrace the spirit of aloha, respect and love, for the Ukrainian people by coming to an agreement that Ukraine will be a neutral country—i.e., no military alliance with NATO or Russia—thus alleviate the legitimate security concerns of both U.S./NATO countries and Russia, because there would be no Russian or NATO troops on each other’s borders (non-Baltic). This would allow the Ukrainian people to live in peace. Aloha.

Every day, if you want to avoid the watchful eye of the national intelligence community, I need you to ask yourself: Are you aloha today? Was that email sent with the proper aloha? Are you tracking that terrorist with an aloha mindset? Otherwise it’s Abu Ghraib but you’re hogtied with leis and you hear pahu drums all night.

Later in the week, Trump gave the base some real red meat: Matt Gaetz for attorney general. Yes, Gaetz as the nation’s top cop. His potential future employees were just recently investigating him for allegedly paying underage escorts, so if you’re one of those guys, I recommend scrubbing your computer and getting your family into hiding. Gaetz also apparently was just a gross colleague. Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin has said this about Matt Gaetz: “We had all seen the videos he was showing on the House floor. . . of the girls that he had slept with. He’d brag about how he would crush ED medicine and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night.” Now Senator Mullin is getting in line with: “I completely trust President Trump’s decision-making on this one.” If you heard Gaetz talking about his sexual rituals before a roll call, no you didn’t.

Here’s a nice primer on Gaetz’s various scandals, but I guess my favorite is when Gaetz brought Chuck Johnson—a real internet freak, a guy who said the Holocaust gas chambers were fake, that sort—to the 2018 State of the Union.

→ He really did it: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been nominated to be the head of the Department of Health and Human Services. We have crossed the Rubicon. We are in the new era. We went from the most extreme control freaks ruling us to a doing-my-own-research free-for-all. Bras are banned and RFK is burning them in the streets. If food requires a label, now it’ll just say POISON. It will soon be illegal to eat gummy bears, so folks, stock up now. In preparation for this appointment, I’m getting every measles vaccine I can find. Any needle I see is jabbing me, and fast. I’m gonna need a full-body X-ray while I can still get it. You know you’re just a little bit of a contrarian when last month you were winking at the pediatrician like “Is all this really necessary” and now you’re all “I think you’re missing the rubella booster, Doc, let’s do another just in case.”

As Trump had said in his victory speech: “He’s going to help make America healthy again. . . . He wants to do some things, and we’re going to let him go to it. Go have a good time, Bobby.”

Do you have Teflon pans, little Madison? Do you want to go to jail? Every single woman in America just got 15 minutes of steel wool scrubbing added to her day. A man just knocked on my door wanting to know if I have a black plastic spatula, but I’ve hidden it here in my desk. There’s about to be a new Red Scare, but it’s going to be a list of people who keep their laptop on their groin too long. So many bros are going to get into ball tanning, there will be a ball sunscreen boom (my next company, but this has been so fun while it’s lasted). Heroin will be legal, but anyone caught with movie theater butter popcorn is to be executed on the spot.

This freaks me out: Harris, a Presidential candidate, paid celebrities (without either party disclosing it) to endorse her on live appearances:

→ You spent how much, Kamala? Kamala Harris’s campaign is $20 million in debt. Those are washed-up Hollywood actress numbers. How is that even possible? How could the campaign have possibly blown through a billion dollars? To be sexist for a moment, this is what I call girl math. It’s my sweet wife thinking that when she doesn’t open the bill, it goes away. Do you think they were just like “Okay, the shoes were on sale, so really it’s like we’re saving money,” but times a hundred? “The truth is this is just an epic disaster, this is a $1 billion disaster,” said Lindy Li, a DNC National Finance Committee member. But literally, how? Well, rumors are coming in hot. How much did Beyoncé cost? Megan Thee Stallion? Lizzo? Eminem? Geez, I guess smoke machine operators are unionized. And we know it was $1 million for the Oprah appearance (mind you, this cash doesn’t go directly to the celeb, but to their production companies). Then $500,000 for Al Sharpton, which is crazy because these days, he’s really only a third by volume of the original. I’m not saying any of these celebs took inappropriate payments: I’m saying that producing a Megan Thee Stallion concert and paying for that was a strange way to spend campaign dollars.

The campaign paid six figures to build a new set to appear on the sex and relationship podcast Call Her Daddy. A flight to Austin from South Florida is like 400 bucks. It was, as The Spectator put it, the Fyre Festival of campaigns.

. . . and lagniappe:

→ Wow, that’s so beautiful:

Oh, did you guys pivot too hard into insanity? Did that not work out for you?

*Bernard-Henri Lévy is a famous philosopher in France (and Jewish), but I know him primarily as the husband of the gorgeous French actress and singer Arielle Dombasle. To be sure, he’s both handsome and rich as well, so perhaps a real “catch”. But he’s also a pro-Israeli activist, and this is the first time I’ve seen an article in the MSM by him in English, a WSJ op-ed  called “Antisemitism in America: My Campus Tour.” (It was translated by someone else from the French, and you can find it archived here.) What he’s describing (and read the archived version if you don’t subscribe) is a 10-day campus tour of America, and the diverse things he saw pertaining to the war in Gaza.

The University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles. Two prestigious institutions where the spirit of antisemitic hatred has been raging in the U.S. since Oct. 7, 2023. These students claim to follow French theory and Michel Foucault. Well, I am here to talk to them about the Foucault I knew: the one who had just returned from California and who, in 1975, was among the first, alongside Jean-Paul Sartre, to protest the United Nations General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism.

Los Angeles is the first stop on my 10-day campus tour of North America, which I announced on these pages last month. Next is the Claremont Colleges, where a group of woke activists are outraged that the author of “Israel Alone” is invited. It’s a double occasion: A Holocaust studies professor has invited me to guest-teach her seminar, and there’s a meeting where I urge students not to succumb to intimidation: “Israel, this multiethnic and multireligious democracy that has endured 75 years of war without falling into the abyss of the state of emergency, can and should be defended—not in spite of but because of your progressive beliefs.”

. . . . A stop in Vancouver, then Toronto, where Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur who relentlessly accuses Israel of “genocide,” is scheduled to speak. I don’t want her to have the last word, but her supporters seem equally determined not to let me have a word at all. That is why my address takes place in a heavily secured basement auditorium, guarded by student leaders worried about an incident. I say that I know from experience what a genocidal project is—Bangladesh, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, Ukraine. An army that, just this morning, coordinated the transfer of 231 Gazan children with rare diseases to Emirati hospitals obviously has nothing to do with genocide.

The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor is among those where the anti-Zionism that disgusted Sartre and Foucault is most entrenched academically. Law classes, film, art history, economics, geography, literary disciplines—all are breeding grounds for rants against Israel and “genocide,” Israel and “apartheid,” Israel and “colonialism.” To members of the Board of Regents visibly overwhelmed by the scale of the upheaval: “Why not take these people at their word, invite the best experts in the world, and schedule true, comprehensive colonial, apartheid, or genocide studies courses?”

My theory of the day, developed at Columbia University in front of a hundred young people gathered at the campus’s Chabad House: The Jews of Europe and the U.S., until today, enjoyed, with the Enlightenment’s triumph, unconditional protection. What happens now when they are told, “You have the right to be protected, but only if you aren’t openly or excessively Zionist”? Or when, on the other side, Donald Trump warns in his September speech before the Israeli American Council that Jewish voters will be to blame, and the Jewish state can’t survive, if he loses? In both cases, the protection granted to the Jews is subject to conditions set by the would-be protector. Therein lies, in the new Jerusalem envisioned by the Founding Fathers, a terrifying moral regression.

The University of Pennsylvania is where this madness has done the most damage—up to the resignation of President Liz Magill, unable to answer the question posed during her congressional hearing: Is calling for the murder of Jewish students a violation of your institution’s rules? I listen to the assembly of professors who have come to share their distress as eminent scholars humiliated by “public ruffians” (Nietzsche) interrupting their lectures with chants of “Free Palestine” and “Globalize the intifada!” Didn’t my generation also have its share of aspiring Red Guards? Certainly. But Benny Lévy, their leader, stopped short when anti-Semitism reared its head.

Levy is a bit wrong here: Magill and others answered the question with the proper First Amendment answer: “It depends.” But Harvard, MIT and Penn are private universities and need not adhere to the Constitution, and their hypocrisy in dealing differently with different kinds of Constitutionally-permitted speech is what brought down Magill and Claudine Gay. In the end, Levy is for some reason heartened, and he ends this way:

How should we respond, a brilliant and distressed student of Ohio University asks me, to professors who tell us that Israel is a “colonial creation”? You need to interrupt them. Impeach them. You need to treat them the way the students of May 1968 treated the most reactionary teachers. Explain to these ignoramuses that half of the Jewish founders of Israel were indigenous and that, if the others did indeed often come from Europe, they weren’t conquerors but refugees—escapees whom Europe regarded as garbage.

. . . George Washington University is the final stop on the tour. Michael Feuer, the dean, introduces me to his 100 or so students. Fatigue. Melancholy. But when I see the determination of these brave Jewish students standing tall, there’s hope.

At least we have a French philosopher, and one who knew Foucault, saying that the postmodernist philosopher was not an antisemite.

*The NYT gives us a useful list of “The 25 most influential cookbooks fom the last 100 years.”  Here are the ones I own or have owned:

1. The Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer (1931; a later edition was a gift from my parents). This was for me the most useful general cookbook I ever had.
2. Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle and Julia Child (1961). I have both volumes and have cooked from it but oy! is it complicated. It took me two days to make their mushroom soup once for Thanksgiving when I was in grad school
3. A Book of Middle Eastern Food by Claudia Roden (1968). This was a very popular book in the seventies, as it was “hippie food,” but I haven’t used it in some time
4. An Invitation to Indian Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey (1973). For a short while I was on an Indian-cooking kick, and bought all the requisite spices, but discovered that I couldn’t do both that and my all-time speciality, Szechuan cooking, at the same time. The recipe I made most often (and I hope it’s in that book!) is oily toor dal.
5. The Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen (1974). This again was a huge success with hippies, as it was vegetarian. I even insisted on being taken to the Moosewood Restaurant when I gave a seminar at Cornell, though I found it somewhat disappointing.
6. The Silver Palate Cookbook by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins (1982). For some reason I never used this much
7. The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Katz (2012). I was given this book and read it avidly, but have never cooked from it.

Seven out of 25 isn’t bad, is it? Especially for a guy! I also have a ton of Chinese cookbooks, but not the one on the list. The best of them all is Mrs. Chiang’s Chinese Cookbook, which is out of print but still can be had. It’s the best Szechuan cookbook I can find, with useful introduction and lots of good detail. It’s out of print but you can find inexpensive copies on the internet.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Malgorzata explains today’s dialogue.

Hili is super sarcastic. The UN is a disaster even greater than the League of Nation was, and Hili knows that. The League of Nations was dissolved because it was such a disaster, but immediately “wise” people decided that they needed another one, just with a different name. 

Hili: The creation of the League of Nations was salutary.

A: Really?

Hili: Of course, that’s why immediately after WWII the UN was created to work equally well or even better.

Hili: Stworzenie Ligi Narodów było zbawienne.

Ja: Naprawdę?

Hili: Oczywiście, to dlatego po drugiej wojnie światowej natychmiast stworzono ONZ, żeby działała tak samo, albo nawet lepiej.

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

From Jesus of the Day. Oy!

From Cat Memes:

From The Dodo:

From Masih, who tells us that Iran is now regarding women who refuse to wear a hijab as mentally ill, as they did the woman who stripped down to her skivvies in protest.

In the 21st century, the Islamic Republic is opening a so-called “hijab clinic” in Tehran, where women who bravely defy the regime’s oppressive dress code are to be treated as mentally ill. This isn’t healthcare, it’s yet another tactic of gender apartheid. The regime wants to… https://t.co/9RCKOdpdWP pic.twitter.com/OnOYdJMGuv

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) November 13, 2024

From Susan, a Bluesky post of a porcupine making noises as it noms a banana. Sound up!

For anyone wondering what porcupines sound like, here’s a clip of a smol porcupine called Kemosabe chomping on a piece of banana

— Adam Sharp (@adamcsharp.bsky.social) 2024-10-04T17:06:21.548Z

From Keith: cats resting well:

car parking

— Punch Cat (@punchingcat.bsky.social) 2024-11-13T18:24:38.021Z

From Simon, who says he feels this way right now:

watching the shock and horror as trump’s cabinet roles are announced and thinking everyone needs to get familiar with this word

— shauna (@goldengateblond.bsky.social) 2024-11-13T00:39:12.386Z

From my feed, I learn that Krav Magna is complicit in genocide:

A woman finds out Krav Maga self defense method originated in Israel😂
pic.twitter.com/XZZP9wxBVy

— Michal (@itsmichalll) November 15, 2024

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I retweeted:

Murdered with cyanide gas upon arrival at Auschwitz, this Czech boy was fourteen. https://t.co/jQcflPPLH2

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) November 16, 2024

Two Bluesky tweets from Matthew. This first one is hilarious:

— Star Trek Shitposting (@startrekshitpost.bsky.social) 2024-11-15T07:24:11.514Z

I miss this quacking:

Sound on for crunchy leaves and happy duck quacks 🦆🍂✨

— Nicole aka Nimasprout (@nimasprout.bsky.social) 2024-11-12T02:26:12.030Z