Welcome to Friday, January 3, 2025, and National Chocolate Covered Cherry Day. These aren’t my favorite chocolates, but can be good IF they use good cherries. Wikipedia even has a page on this confection, with this photo labeled, “Home-made chocolate-covered cherry ‘mice'”:
It’s also Festival of Sleep Day and J. R. R. Tolkien Day, honoring the writer born on this day in 1892–in South Africa. Here is his grave, and that of his wife, in Oxford:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the January 3 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*All over the NBC news last night was the suggestion that the attacker in New Orleans who killed 15 might have been part of a cabal, which was scary. Now it appears that the perp, an American of Arabic descent who waved an ISIS flag on his truck, apparently acted alone. That brings some relief to those expecting to attend the Sugar Bowl football game today and the Superbowl next month.
Investigators on Thursday said they now believe the U.S. Army veteran who plowed a pickup into New Year’s revelers acted alone, after previously saying they were looking into whether other people might have helped him plant explosives in coolers in the French Quarter.
Based on hundreds of interviews and reviews of the attacker’s calls, social media accounts and electronic devices, “We’re confident, at this point, that there are no accomplices,” Christopher Raia of the F.B.I.’s counterterrorism division said in a news conference.
With no further apparent threat, New Orleans officials said they were moving to reopen Bourbon Street and were confident in the security precautions they had taken for the Sugar Bowl, which was originally set for Wednesday night but rescheduled for Thursday afternoon.
At least 14 people were killed and dozens injured by the attack in the early hours of New Year’s Day. Investigators identified the pickup driver, who was killed in a shootout with the police, as Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, 42, of Beaumont, Texas.
Here’s what we’re covering:
ISIS inspired: The attacker, who served eight years in the military and deployed to Afghanistan, said in a video posted online that he had joined the Islamic State terrorist group, Mr. Raia said. He had originally planned to hurt his relatives and friends, but worried about how that would be interpreted by the news media, Mr. Raia said, adding that the authorities had recovered three phones linked to the attacker, as well as two computers. “He was 100 percent inspired by ISIS,” Mr. Raia said. Here’s what we know about him.
Las Vegas: Investigators have found no definitive link between the New Orleans attack and the explosion of a Tesla truck that killed one person outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Mr. Raia said, but he cautioned that investigators have not ruled anything out.
It’s sad that, in a spate of mass killings all over the West, it comes as a relief that a big one was committed by a person acting alone. Well, it is a relief, but I hope somebody is working on a way to stop this stuff. When they’re committed by native-born Americans rather than immigants, it might be harder to prevent this kind of stuff.
*Speaking of attempted slaughters, the Cybertruck that exploded outside the Trump Hotel, killing just the driver but injuring 7 others, has been identified. And he apparently committed suicide before he blew up the truck:
On Thursday, military officials identified the driver as an Army master sergeant who had been on leave from active duty.
The authorities are still working to determine exactly what happened, and why. Here is what we know so far.
At about 8:40 a.m. local time on Wednesday, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department received a report of an explosion at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, a 64-story tower on Fashion Show Drive, which is just off the Las Vegas Strip.
A rented 2024 Tesla Cybertruck had “pulled up to the glass entrance doors of the hotel,” according to Sheriff Kevin McMahill, before it exploded. Witnesses saw the vehicle engulfed in flames as it sat in front of the hotel.
After firefighters extinguished the blaze, the authorities said that they found gasoline canisters, camp fuel canisters and large firework mortars in the back of the truck; they said they did not know how the explosion had been ignited.
Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, said in a statement on X that “the explosion was caused by very large fireworks and/or a bomb carried in the bed of the rented Cybertruck,” and said the vehicle had been functioning properly.
The AP adds that the cybertruck driver, a “highly decorated soldier”, shot himself in the head before the cybertruck exploded.
There seems to be no connection between the slaughter in New Orleans and this mess, whose motivation isn’t clear, save that both were at one time military men. Apparently the Tesla truck is the worst thing to use for an attack of this type, since the explosion will be largely contained within the vehicle.
*John Roberts, though still a conservative, hasn’t turned out to be the rabid pro-Republican Chief Justice that, I think, W. expected when he put him on the bench and then elevated him. Now Roberts is going after VP-elect J. D. Vance. This starts with a quote from Roberts:
“The courage of federal judges to uphold the law in the face of massive local opposition — and the willingness of the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations to stand behind those judges — are strong testaments to the relationship between judicial independence and the rule of law in our Nation’s history,” Roberts observed.
And in case you missed the pointed reference to the role of both Republican and Democratic administrations in enforcing court orders, Roberts went on, and he’s worth quoting in full.
“Every Administration suffers defeats in the court system — sometimes in cases with major ramifications for executive or legislative power or other consequential topics,” Roberts wrote. “Nevertheless, for the past several decades, the decisions of the courts, popular or not, have been followed, and the Nation has avoided the standoffs that plagued the 1950s and 1960s. Within the past few years, however, elected officials from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings. These dangerous suggestions, however sporadic, must be soundly rejected.”
These words cannot be read in a vacuum — nor, I suspect, were they written in one. Because of all the “elected officials from across the political spectrum” who have toyed with defying court orders, the most prominent by far — and the one who ought to know better — is JD Vance, Yale Law School Class of 2013, whose wife, Usha, clerked for Roberts from 2017 to 2018.
And yet defying the courts is something Vance has repeatedly suggested. “If I was giving him [Trump] one piece of advice, fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,” Vance said on a 2021 podcast. “Replace them with our people. And when the courts — because you will get taken to court — and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
This was no casual, one-off comment.
Nor was it a wise comment. Vance is already calling for vigilante justice, and he’s not even in office yet. I haven’t agreed with most of Roberts’s votes, but he is trying to keep both the authority and reputation of the coursts (and not just the Supreme Court) intact.
*You are aware, aren’t you, that the Palestinian Authority is fighting against Hamas on the West Bank? (You surely know that Hamas hates the PA and killed many of its members after Hamas won a plurality of votes in the 2007 election and then enacted a coup with a lot of bloodshed.) Well, the fight continues, or rather has restarted (Hamas should have also had control of the West Bank back then, too.):
Palestinian Authority security forces are battling militants from Hamas and its allies in the occupied West Bank, in a fight that has the potential to shape the long-running struggle for the leadership of the Palestinian cause.
The struggle between Palestinian factions gained new urgency as the Israeli military battered Hamas in Gaza over the past 15 months, leaving a leadership vacuum in the territory. The PA has support in the West, while the militant groups are backed by Iran and deeply rooted in Palestinian society.
The Biden administration and others see the PA as the best alternative for running Gaza after the war. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has resisted the idea, saying the PA is anti-Israel at its core.
The Biden administration is badly misled. It is, after all, the PA which runs the “pay for slay” program, rewarding terrorists who kill Jews in Israel. The PA is not even a viable alternative for running Gaza after the war–not until a reasonable leader surfaces, and one is not in sight.
The PA has governed major Palestinian population centers in the West Bank since the 1990s under agreements with Israel. Showing it can take on militants there could bolster its case to run Gaza.
The clashes pit PA security forces against militants from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an allied group. The fighting, which erupted in December, is the most fierce since Fatah, the Palestinian faction that largely controls the PA, engaged in a 2007 battle with Hamas in Gaza, analysts said. Fatah ultimately lost that fight, leading to Hamas’s control of the enclave.
The current fighting has taken place in the Jenin Refugee Camp, which has long been seen by Palestinians as a center of resistance against Israel and by Israel as a stronghold for militants conducting terrorist attacks. The fighting has led to at least 11 deaths and dozens of arrests, according to Palestinian and Israeli officials.
It is tempting to say “let the terrorists kill each other off,” but this still causes misery and brings us no closer to a resolution to the war between Israel and Hamas. That war, I am sure, will continue after Biden steps down, much as he and Blinken tried to end it. But they never offered a solution that was remotely credible.
*Over at the Spectator, Jordan Peterson blathers on, calling himself a “new kind of Christian” (archived here). Just a few bites of word salad:
MG [Michael Gove]: or Victor Hugo, or with George Eliot or Jane Austen, that these authors tell compelling stories about unity and about how a moral life should be led. What is it that is unique about the Bible that means it contains within it stories that are more compelling and more powerful than even the richest voices in the western canon?JP: One very straightforward answer is primacy of position. The deeper an idea is in a given culture, the more other ideas are predicated on it. All the people you described were intimately familiar with the biblical writings, and their worldview was shaped in the finest details by them. If you read all the great texts in the western canon except the Bible you’d pretty much be able to fill in all the gaps, so to speak, but that’s because the biblical stories would be reflected second-hand in the texts.
First of all, the Bible presents a series of hypotheses. One is that there’s an underlying unity that brings together all structures of value. The second claim is that there’s a relationship between the human psyche and that unity. And the third claim is that the unity can be characterised. The Bible is a sequence of characterisations of unity and each of the main biblical stories casts that unity in a different light, accompanied by the insistence that, despite those differences, what is being pointed to is one animating principle. As far as I can tell, that’s correct.
In the story of Noah, God is characterised as the voice of intuition that comes to the wise when they see trouble coming. Then in the story of Abraham, God comes to him as the voice of adventure that comes even to the unprepared. The juxtaposition of those two stories implies that the spirit of adventure and the spirit of wisdom are the same thing. They’re manifestations of the unity that lies at the bottom of everything, or at the pinnacle of aspiration. Those are parallel metaphors. A lot of the atheist argument in the modern world misses the mark because the God that’s being disbelieved is never defined. Or if it is, it’s brushed off as foolish – the equivalent of Santa Claus the Great, the old man with a beard in the sky.
I would take issue with those hypothesis, since all of them seem to have been disproven. God is sometimes kind and sometimes nasty as hell. The second hypothesis is so nebulous as to be untestable. Ditto for the third hypothesis. I will, as an atheist, characterize the Christian God as a supernatural being who is to be propitiated (that was Dan Dennett’s take). But do we need our brains muddled by the amorphous lucubrations of Peterson. Here is one more for your delectation:
MG: Richard Dawkins’s intellectual evolution (no pun intended) is fascinating because he’s become more and more a defender of a morality that Christians would understand, while at the same time vehemently denying that there can be any supernatural element to it. For Christians, at the heart of Christian belief and morality is the fact that the supernatural and the natural coincided in the birth of Jesus – not just a symbol, but the reality of love and compassion. What about that belief do you think is useful? Or what about that would you contest?
JP: I would say that the supernatural and the natural are constantly operative in our lives. If we’re diligent materialists and we delve into the bottom of the world, we find at the end of our striving an impenetrable mystery – the mystery of the quantum world, where things behave in a manner that’s so unlike the way they behave at our natural level that we can’t even understand the phenomena. The biblical claim is that the value structure we necessarily inhabit ascends to a point that’s equally mysterious. Then that’s characterised in various ways. It’s characterised in the person of Christ. It’s characterised in the representations of Yahweh in the Old Testament. What that means is the finite – that would be us – is in a relationship with the infinite. There are elements of that relationship that are supernatural, in that they supersede our understanding of the deterministic processes that make up the natural world.
If I read that right, he’s equating Jesus with quantum mechanics—an old trope. And is he saying that quantum mechanics is deterministic (it’s probabilistic) or just that it’s “finite”, whatever that means. It seems as if Peterson is the Deepak Chopra of Christian theology.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, if you ask a stupid question. . . .
Andrzej: Why are you lying here?Hili: Because I’m not lying somewhere else.
Ja: Dlaczego tu leżysz?Hili: Bo nie leżę gdzie indziej.
*******************
From Cat Memes:
From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:
From Jesus of the Day:
Masih is on hols, but this was posted on her site. It’s true, too: Just Google Image “Women Iran 1965” and then “Women Iran 2000“. (I’ve kindly provided the links.)
The bizarre thing is that this is all true. From Seth Andrews’s feed:
#Christianity #Bible #Adam #Eve #Genesis pic.twitter.com/Ehy6kUWtKb
— The Thinking Atheist (@ThinkingAtheist) December 18, 2024
From Malcolm; a cat finds a cozy berth:
🐶: “Just ignore him guys” pic.twitter.com/DLdYaMY5OU
— Posts Of Cats (@PostsOfCats) December 16, 2024
I love posts like this. Don’t trust people who don’t like animals!
Real Heroes 🙏👏 pic.twitter.com/a0d3MQ8cUp
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) January 2, 2025
I had to look up “nominative determinism,” but by god if Rowling isn’t right!
I don’t think I’ve ever come across such a clear cut case of nominative determinism. pic.twitter.com/y2PYyZJp53
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) January 1, 2025
From the Auschwitz Memorial, one I reposted:
31-year-old Dutch mother and her son gassed to death immediately upon arriving at Auschwitz.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-01-03T11:18:03.711Z
Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. Matthew loves swallows and swifts, and you will too after you watch this one-minute video:
This animation shows the incredible migration of the Beijing Swift (Apus apus pekinensis). Each coloured dot is an individual bird tracked from the Summer Palace. See https:wildbeijing.org/the-beijing-swift-project/
— Wild Beijing (@wild-beijing.bsky.social) 2025-01-02T06:43:20.032Z
Matthews Senior Cat Ollie is going downhill. I’m sad even though he once laid open my nose with a swift stroke of his paw:
Ollie, a bag of bones who turns 18 today, is fast asleep under his blanket.
“It seems as if Peterson is the Deepak Chopra of Christian theology”. Nice!
And in the spirit of the aforementioned quantum mechanics, Hili is lying both here and somewhere else until Andrzej sees her here.
The F.B.I. has been awfully quick to make statements about the NOLA and Las Vegas attacks: That the NOLA attack wasn’t terrorism; that the NOLA attacker worked alone; that the two attacked weren’t related. I am skeptical, since, starting with the first comment on terrorism, it seems like the F.B.I. People are pointing that the F.B.I. has spent the last four years (or more) investigating a series of non-terrorist threats. A list on The Federalist includes Catholics, Trump supporters, parents at school meetings, pro-lifers.
Evidently the FBI considers some Catholics, MAGAs, upset parents, and anti-abortion types to be domestic terrorism threats. You know them to be wrong on this?
Absolutely anti-abortionists are domestic terrorists! They bomb clinics, harass, threaten, stalk, and murder staff and physicians, and in general are extremely violent.
I worked at an independent abortion clinic for three years. I’ve been physically attacked and followed multiple times. One of my former coworkers was murdered and another seriously injured by an anti-abortion terrorist shot up the clinic. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, where another inmate killed him. These terrorists film women and threaten and/or blackmail them.
We had the FBI train us on how to live with bomb threats. Our security system was incredible and incredibly expensive. It had to be.
So yes, anti-abortionists are domestic terrorists.
Richard Dawkins has written a new piece on The myth of the God-shaped hole.
Thanks for the heads up and link, Coel. Excellent.
I wrote a piece about it above. Richard’s argument is very good.
The thought of the cyber truck containing the blast reminds me of this hilarious, supposed commercial for a Volkswagen Polo. https://youtu.be/WUtE3QlTpKI
I’ve noticed—but am willing to learn otherwise—that many of the Holocaust victims that you memorialize in this site are Dutch. Is this true? Is there a reason? Is it because such a huge percentage of Dutch Jews were killed in the Holocaust (~75%)? Or did the Dutch simply keep diligent records that still haunt us?
Peterson’s overworked analysis of the deep meaning found in the Bible reminded me of a challenge:
Here is a million dollars. It goes to whoever can come up with the most convincing description of how the stories in the Bible are interconnected and filled with deep meaning. Go.
Peterson has a lot of competition. They start teaching this skill in Sunday School, the average believer is comfortable with the practice, and there are even whole colleges and academic departments where Christians who are particularly good at this go to hone their craft.
Notice above that one of the quotes from Jordan Peterson includes “predicated on.” It’s characteristic of his lexicon. He’s used it in many lectures and interviews, in writing and speech. Without seeing any other context, if someone just told me that phrase was used, I’d guess with a good deal of accuracy that it was Peterson that uttered it.
It is popular in the humanities.
Thanks, mayamarkov.
(While I want to respond to you, I’m also testing whether I can add html highlighting and links by doing this.)
Yes, I bet that’s the case. I first heard “predicated on” in linguistics circles, though before you mentioned it, I had not linked it to the humanities.
That said, here is a short (far from comprehensive) list of a few times Peterson uttered “predicated on / predicated upon”:
Say What You Think
“It is **_predicated on_** the idea of the logos. That the logos is the sacred element of Western culture.”
Source
A Conservative Manifesto
“This is all **_predicated upon_** conceptualizing and articulating the need for a shift in the Western individual’s moral outlook…”
Source
Neuropsychology of Motivation for Group Aggression and Mythology
“Constructivism—a form of philosophy **_predicated upon_** the assumption that the human personality and human models of reality are constructed from information…”
Source
I know it is a weird thing to obsess about. But I’m a geek of all sorts, including of language. I have also noticed a characteristic thing about our host’s writing. In particular, he uses “, for” more than I see others do:
Is there “a meaning to life” for nonbelievers?
“We may, for instance, have evolved in small groups to behave altruistically, **_for_** reciprocity might have been the result of genetic evolution in our ancestors.”
Source
Is there “a meaning to life” for nonbelievers? (continued)
“If this life is all we have, we’d damn well make the best of it, **_for_** we get no sequel in Heaven.”
Source
“Because of all the ‘elected officials from across the political spectrum’ who have toyed with defying court orders, the most prominent by far — and the one who ought to know better — is JD Vance”
Yes, surely Roberts was not also referring to the current occupant of the Oval Office, who having had his pet political pander of student loan debt rejected by the Court, boasted that “. . . the Supreme Court blocked it and blocked it. But that didn’t stop me.” Nor could Roberts be alluding to “progressives” who scream about the illegitimacy of the Court and of packing it whenever important rulings don’t go their way. (Should the Republicans help them with that priority this year?) No. He must be talking about JD Vance. JD very bad. Friendly reminder: most journalists are not reporters any longer. They are activists and “influencers.”
Legal scholars have been laying the groundwork for open defiance of the court for several years. (Do we need to guess why?) The main thrust is from the Left, but if I search long enough, then I’m sure I’ll find their right-wing twins. The below is excerpted from “We Are Already Defying the Supreme Court” (Dissent, Winter 2024):
“The risks of calling on politicians to push back against the court must be weighed against the present reality of a malign judicial dictatorship. . . . Opposition to the Supreme Court has occurred in myriad forms. Feigning horror at the idea is a con, and a pernicious one at that. To pretend like there aren’t multiple styles of noncompliance gives the impression that resistance is beyond the pale. . . . Presidents have not openly defied a federal court order since the turn of the twentieth century, but the record of open presidential defiance goes back to the beginning of U.S. history. And it is morally complicated.”
Perhaps JD Vance retained a bit of what he was taught at Yale.
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/we-are-already-defying-the-supreme-court/
Regarding Peterson’s remarks, a big factor in my rejection of religion was my realization that the stories of Austen, Eliot, and Hugo, as well as Shakespeare, Dickens, and Hardy, and Tolstoy, taught me so much more than the Bible and its theological spinoffs.
No, he’s saying it’s not, and comparing it to religion’s supernatural claims:
I find this an odd claim:
On the contrary, I would say that most “sophisticated” theological definitions of “God” are so vague and non-falsifiable as to be useless, while the more precise definitions are easily refuted.