Welcome to the first day of the “work” week: Monday, Februay 3, 2025 and National Carrot Cake Day, the only dessert made with vegetables that is tolerable. In fact, when made well (with cream-cheese frosting), it can be excellent. Here’s a large piece I had at a restaurant in Chicago on June 10 of last year (note the candied carrot curls on top):
It’s also American Painters Day, International Golden Retriever Day, Four Chaplains Memorial Day (read about them here), and The Day the Music Died, honoring the day in day in 1959 when Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Richie Valens died in a plane crash. Here’s a newspaper clipping of the tragedy:
. . .and the four chaplains, who went down with their torpedoed ship on this day in 1943 (they were all of different faiths, but stayed together, having given up their life jackets). Goode was a rabbi, Fox a Methodist minister, Poling from the Reformed Church of America, and Washington a Catholic priest.
From Wikipedia:
During the early morning hours of February 3, the vessel [the S. S. Dorchster] was torpedoed by the German submarine U-223 off Newfoundland in the North Atlantic. The chaplains helped the other soldiers board lifeboats and gave up their own life jackets when the supply ran out. The chaplains joined arms, said prayers, and sang hymns as they went down with the ship.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 1 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The NYT has a transcript of an Ezra Klein podcast called “Don’t believe him,” and the “him” is Trump. He says Trump is instantiating a policy articulated earlier by Steve Bannon:
If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, you should listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS’s “Frontline” in 2019:
Steve Bannon: The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. …
All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity. So it’s got to start, and it’s got to hammer, and it’s got to —
Michael Kirk: What was the word?
Bannon: Muzzle velocity.
And what Klein says:
Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV; he remade himself as a winner by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. He has always wanted to be king. His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.
Don’t believe him. Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency. The pardon power is vast and unrestricted, and so he could pardon the Jan. 6 rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch, and so he could remove it from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook, a largely unknown former State Department official under threat from Iran who donated time to Trump’s transition team. It was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness from a man who nearly died by an assassin’s bullet — as much as anything ever has been, this, to me, was an X-ray of the smallness of Trump’s soul — but it was an act that was within his power.
But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge — a Reagan appointee — who told Trump’s lawyers, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.
What Bannon wanted — what the Trump administration wants — is to keep everything moving fast. Muzzle velocity, remember. If you’re always consumed by the next outrage, you can’t look closely at the last one. The impression of Trump’s power remains; the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed. The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness. Don’t believe him.
. . . There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders rather than submitting these same directives as legislation to pass through Congress. A more powerful executive could persuade Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or reform the civil service to give himself the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. To write these changes into legislation would make them more durable and allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way. Even if Trump’s aim is to bring the civil service to heel — to rid it of his opponents and turn it to his own ends — he would be better off arguing that he is simply trying to bring the high-performance management culture of Silicon Valley to the federal government. You never want a power grab to look like a power grab.
But Republicans have a three-seat edge in the House and a 53-seat majority in the Senate. Trump has done nothing to reach out to Democrats. If Trump tried to pass this agenda as legislation, it would most likely fail in the House, and it would certainly die before the filibuster in the Senate. And that would make Trump look weak. Trump does not want to look weak. He remembers John McCain humiliating him in his first term by casting the deciding vote against Obamacare repeal.
That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.
. . . . This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and Trump is following. It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself. And there’s only so much you can do through executive orders. Soon enough, you have to go beyond what you can actually do. And when you do that, you either trigger a constitutional crisis or you reveal your own weakness.
We’ll just have to see how this all shakes out when the lawsuits are settled, and that will take a long time. Right now I’m suspending judgment on many of the EOs, but am glad that we can at least discuss their substance without being silenced.
*A survey by the Torygraph reveals that nearly half the world’s people are anti-Semitic. Surprise! (h/t Ginger K.)
Nearly half of people worldwide hold anti-Semitic views, with hatred of Jews doubling in a decade, a major survey has revealed.
Research by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) found that 46 per cent of adults globally – and 12 per cent in the UK – have entrenched anti-Semitic beliefs.
This means an estimated 2.2 billion people worldwide, including 6.7 million adults in Britain, hold anti-Semitic views – twice the 1.09 billion identified in 2014.
The record level of anti-Semitism uncovered by the ADL’s second Global 100 Index Score survey has led its directors to warn of a “global emergency” and call on governments to act.
Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the ADL, said: “Anti-Semitism is nothing short of a global emergency, especially in a post-October 7 world.
“We are seeing these trends play out from the Middle East to Asia, from Europe to North and South America”.
The ADL, founded in 1913, is the world’s leading anti-hate organisation. Its latest poll of 58,000 adults across 103 countries measured belief in anti-Semitic tropes, identifying those who agreed with six or more of 11 negative stereotypes about Jews.
An average of 76 per cent in the Middle East and North Africa endorsed most tropes, including “Jews have too much power in business,” “Jews’ loyalty is only to Israel,” and “Jews have a lot of irritating faults”.
This dropped to around half in Asia, Eastern Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa, while in Western Europe one in five adults still held significant anti-Semitic views.
“Jews have a lot of irritating faults”? Where did that come from? The only explanation for a doubling of anti-Semitism in a decade is Israel defending itself by going after Hamas in Gaza. Had Israel done nothing and just let Hamas kill Jews, anti-Semitism would not have increased. The lesson is that Jews are not allowed to defend themselves when attacked: Israel is the only nation on Earth that is not allowed to win a war—or even fight back when attacked. But of course what we’re seeing is underground anti-Semitism just coming to the surface.
*Over at the Free Press, you can see the bad bargain that Israel made with Hamas in an essay by Gideo Black: “The terrorist who murdered my cousin now walks free.”
Ashraf Zughayer, the Hamas leader who arranged for the killing of my cousin and attempted to have me killed, got out of prison January 25 as part of the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas. He had served 22 years of what were supposed to be six life sentences—one for each person whose murder he orchestrated.
Yoni Jesner, my cousin and closest friend, was 19 years old when a Hamas suicide bomber whom Zughayer dispatched murdered him and five others on a bus in Tel Aviv in 2002. More than two decades later, emotional scarring from that bombing—which I survived by the slightest margin—is still etched into my soul. So are physical scars on my torso.
Time, it turns out, does not heal all wounds. Perhaps it might when those wounds are given an uninterrupted chance to heal. But that is impossible in Israel, where the war against us never ends and where the freeing of the man responsible for that attack cuts at the scar tissue and forces me and every other Israeli into an impossible corner. We are being asked to weigh our profound grief and our concerns about terrorists reoffending against our bond with the hostages whom we want back home with every fiber of our being. This is an unsolvable conundrum, especially for those who have lost loved ones to terror.
Zughayer masterminded the attack that killed Yoni, but he is now home, having been welcomed back to his East Jerusalem neighborhood as a hero, draped in Hamas flags atop a white Toyota pickup truck just like the ones his Hamas comrades rode as they stormed southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
It isn’t simply releasing our enemies that vexes us. Israeli society—and Jews around the world—find ourselves in an impossible ethical quagmire. We cannot leave our hostages in Gaza. We are morally and mystically connected to their well-being and dare not return to normal daily existence until they are free. We need to use every lever at our disposal—financial, diplomatic, military, and spiritual—to bring them home.
At the same time, releasing terrorists has been proven to lead to more terror. Radicalized Palestinian youth have been reared on a curriculum of Jew-hatred. Their time in Israeli jail does not heal them of it. They know they are lionized in the streets of Nablus, Jenin, and Khan Yunis, and they are only too eager to burnish their legacies further. A deal Israel struck in 2011 saw a single captured soldier, Gilad Shalit, freed in return for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, of whom a staggering 280 were serving life sentences for terrorism. Many have reoffended—most prominently, Yahya Sinwar, who immediately upon his release took charge of the Gaza Strip’s terror network and subsequently masterminded the October 7 attack.
Strategically, releasing terrorists is a reckless, shortsighted move. It is likely to lead to the death of more Jews in the future than if those same terrorists were kept imprisoned. And yet the trade for the definite safety of Jews who are currently in captivity and whose lives are presently in mortal danger takes precedence. We must move mountains to bring them home, even as we fear that those very mountains may bury our loved ones in the future. The moral dilemma is excruciating.
. . . . . There is no simple answer. We dare not leave the hostages in Gaza. We dare not free the terrorists, and endanger our people for years to come; truly, a deal with the devil. We should not be having to make this decision in the first place: given the sea of enemies that surrounds Israel, its security apparatus simply cannot afford to have any blind spots.
This unspoken national pact—that we will not leave anyone behind despite the extraordinary risks—raises the threshold of physical danger in the name of collective healing. There is a sacred irony to this, but it’s the price of a homeland in a hostile world, and our commitment to this ideal gives our nation its spine. It is precisely the intimate kinship we feel with all Jews no matter their background or ideology—and our willingness to act on it—that will allow Israel to emerge from this terror and stand strong once again.
Well, maybe the answer is not as hard as Black thinks. If releasing a gazillion terrorists will, in the end, result in killing more Jews than not trying to swap prisoners for hostages (meaning of course that the hostages will either die or might be released in an unconditional surrender), then what is the point of trading one hostage for fifty terrorists? After all, it was Yahya Sinwar who, serving a life sentence for terrorism in an Israeli prison, was part of the thousand-plus terrorists exchanges for a single Israeli soldier. One IDF life was saved. Sinwar then masterminded the October 7 massacre, which killed more than a thousand people, mostly Israeli Jews.
*The WSJ enumerates some items that, in view of the upcoming trade wars, you might want to buy now. I’ll concentrate on food and drink:
Yes, prices of automobiles or Canadian lumber are likely to go up. But you also might pay more for these more-surprising things:
Cherry tomatoes: Canada is a big supplier of these to the U.S. Canadian producers grow them in giant greenhouses near the U.S. border. Mexico supplies them, too. The U.S. grows a huge volume of produce and may be able to step up tomato production, but economists warn that domestic producers will be tempted to increase their prices to match prices on imports.
Maple syrup: Canada and the U.S. are the only two countries that produce this at commercial scale, according to Canada’s agriculture department. More than 60% of Canada’s production is exported to the U.S.
Tequila: The U.S. is the largest market for Mexican tequila, which has soared in popularity with American drinkers over the past decade. Shots and sugary margaritas have given way more recently to higher-end tequilas intended to be sipped or imbibed with soda. Celebrities from George Clooney to Kendall Jenner have piled into the category with their own made-in-Mexico brands.
Avocados: That guacamole you are looking to make for the Super Bowl could cost a bit more this year, thanks to tariffs. More than 80% of U.S. avocados come from Mexico, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department. Mexico provides about half of U.S. fresh produce imports and is a particularly important supplier in the winter, according to Ed Gresser, a former assistant U.S. trade representative now working at the Progressive Policy Institute.
Smartphones: The U.S. imposed import tariffs on a slew of industrial goods from China during President Trump’s first term—and again during the Biden administration—to protest what it has long called China’s unfair trade practices. But most consumer goods, including smartphones, were spared to avoid the wrath of American consumers. An across-the-board 10% tariff on goods made in China will hit smartphones for the first time and possibly cause price increases.
There are also sledgehammers, but we’ll ignore those. But yes, we’ll be hit in the pocketbook by these tariffs, and Americans may lose their jobs when other countries retaliate. Tariffs are a bad idea, even if the threat of them did make Colombia accept 110 immigrants who had entered the U.S. illegally.
*I had thought that there was good reason to believe that the D.C. airplane/helicopter crash that killed 67 was caused by the Army Black Hawk flying higher than its mandated limit of 200 feet. But now the AP says it’s not at all clear.
Preliminary data from the deadliest U.S. aviation accident in nearly 25 years showed conflicting readings about the altitudes of an airliner and Army helicopter when they collided near Reagan National Airport in Washington, killing everyone aboard both aircraft, investigators said Saturday.
Investigators also said that about a second before impact, the jet’s flight recorder showed a change in its pitch. But they did not say whether that change in angle meant that pilots were trying to perform an evasive maneuver to avoid the crash.
Data from the jet’s flight recorder showed its altitude as 325 feet (99 meters), plus or minus 25 feet (7.6 meters), when the crash happened Wednesday night, National Transportation Safety Board officials told reporters. Data in the control tower, though, showed the Black Hawk helicopter at 200 feet (61 meters) at the time.
Investigators hope to reconcile the altitude differences with data from the helicopter’s black box, which is taking more time to retrieve because it became waterlogged after it plunged into the Potomac River. They also said they plan to refine the tower data, which can be less reliable. [They have the black boxes; what they mean is that the DATA are hard to retrieve.]
“That’s what our job is, to figure that out,” said NTSB member Todd Inman, who grew increasingly agitated with reporters’ questions seeking more information and clarity about the readings during a Saturday evening news conference.
He acknowledged that there was dissension within the investigative team about whether to release the information or wait until they had more data.
Officials say the helicopter’s maximum allowed altitude at the time was 200 feet (61 meters).
We will know pretty soon, as families are demanding early answers. And The Black Box will tell all.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is sick to death of winter:
Hili: Let’s start negotiations.
Andrzej: What about?
Hili: I demand the immediate return of Summer.
In Polish:
Hili: Zaczynamy negocjacje.
Ja: W jakiej sprawie?
Hili: Żądam natychmiastowego przywrócenia lata.
And going west to Berlin, Stupsi the Cat is enjoying the weather, saying ““Ich liebe die Sonne.” [“I love the sun.”]
*******************
From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:
From Things with Faces:
From Cat Memes:
From Masih; this time the woman protester has stripped completely as an objection to Iranian modesty laws. And she climbed on a cop car! I hope they don’t kill her. Brave woman!
Iranian woman’s naked protest shakes the Police!
This woman in Iran has completely stripped naked in front of security forces, climbing onto a police vehicle in protest.The footage shows armed security forces trying to prevent bystanders and cars from gathering at the scene.… pic.twitter.com/8iySoklxKE
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) February 2, 2025
From Luana. The Newsweek piece is here; you decide whether it’s a puff piece. An excerpt:
The vast majority of inmates in Oregon State Penitentiary are men, but Lee said she is able to wear makeup, eye shadow, foundation, eyeliner and even lipstick on occasion. She also cherishes her jewelry, including rings and necklaces, as well as bras, panties and what she called a “slightly feminized” uniform. That had eliminated her thoughts of suicide. She’s now seeking breast augmentation and hair replacement therapy since male pattern baldness drastically enhances her gender dysphoria.
Lee said that she had initially been diagnosed at the age of 16 with the condition – a feeling of distress that can happen when a person’s gender identity differs from the sex they are born with. But Lee said she wasn’t told of the diagnosis at the time and that “intolerance” simmered inside her for decades.
“I hurt, so I hurt others,” she said.
SHE said. . .
This man held a family of four hostage in their home for hours, beating them, raping the 11 year old daughter and the mother, then strangling the mother, and finally setting the house on fire, killing both children from smoke inhalation.
Newsweek now publishes a puff piece on… https://t.co/7mFpWzBwZ9 pic.twitter.com/key69b4iSn
— Laura Powell (@LauraPowellEsq) February 1, 2025
From Jez: More funny school tweets:
17. Math Teacher Finishes His Student’s Doodle pic.twitter.com/wO8zMmIa5s
— Wolf of X (@tradingMaxiSL) January 31, 2025
From Malcolm, a Darth Vader cat:
Darth Cat.. 😅 pic.twitter.com/nnl4Yq9ZM4
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) December 28, 2024
From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:
This little sailor boy was gassed to death upon arrival at Auschwitz. He was eight years old.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-02-03T11:24:36.694Z
Two posts from Herr Doktor Professor Cobb. First, flatulence apparently made illegal!
it's the 14 year anniversary to the time Malawi tried to ban farting
— depths of wikipedia (@depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social) 2025-01-29T20:33:21.654Z
Bats! Be sure to enlarge the left photo.
We saw these adorable Long-nosed bats in the rainforest in Ecuador. Because there are no caves for them to sleep in these have adapted to hanging on tree trunks. You had to look hard to notice them. #wildlifephotography
— Carol Pope Gordon (@carolpopegordon.bsky.social) 2025-01-24T14:44:09.049Z
If people think Jews have a lot of irritating faults, wait til they get to know the Muslims! … Oh wait. They already have.
Well, f*ck people. What Jews really have is a sense of humor (they need it!). Here’s a good documentary I recently watched: “When Jews Were Funny.” It has a lot of interviews with old and new Jewish comedians.
Thank you Brooke. I just watched the first ten minutes of the video which were great (shpilkes?). Really looking forward to watching the rest this evening…get the little mice bar mitzvah and you will never see them in the shul again…good to see these old guys who are left.
Stoppit fer chrisake! There are numerous sources of data regarding the helicopter and airplane altitudes and speed. These include but are not limited to adsb telemetry, tower radar, gps, and onboard data systems on both vehicles. Also, in what is called compatibility calculations, engineers can take other flight data measurements such as velocities, accelerations, locations, air data and combine them in various ways to reconstruct some best or most probable time histories of altitudes for both vehicles. But it takes time to access these data, sometimes adjust the raw measured data, and then combine them in an agreed upon way to get an adequate result. Remember, these are all measured quantities which means they are in error or at least a certain amount of uncertainty. That is one reason that the teams are often reluctant to release preliminary findings…now, damnit, please trust these guys and gals to do their jobs.
‘“That’s what our job is, to figure that out,” said NTSB member Todd Inman, who grew increasingly agitated with reporters’ questions seeking more information and clarity about the readings during a Saturday evening news conference.’
Apparently no one should ever get agitated in response to media behavior. A few days earlier at another press conference reporters badgered a spokesperson for the investigation with questions pressing the spokesperson to speculate. It doesn’t cost the media anything – like it does the spokesperson and investigators – to (try to) extract speculation which later is erroneous. I speculate spokespersons occasionally succumb to the pressure to get the ululating media hyenas off their backs.
I look forward to similar media scrutiny of members of Congress pressing for and imposing additional flights on an apparently already overburdened airport.
I looked at the carrot cake photo and I thought, “Hmm, crumbled bacon on carrot cake, what a good idea.” Then I read the candied carrot text. And I still think bacon on carrot cake is a good idea. Change my mind!
I can only add that pancakes with Maple syrup and a side of bacon is a great meal. And one must never prevent the bacon from wandering into the spillover syrup.
I used to put pieces of pretzels in ice cream
I’m afraid this is a non sequitur. The mere fact of people demanding early answers will not make the process of finding the correct answers any faster.
To echo Jim at #2, we need to give the investigators the space and time to find out what really happened.
Stop with the incivility. It is not a non sequitur. I heard on the evening news last night that they were working very fast on this because the families want to know what happens. Yes, of course we need to give the investigators time and space to find out what happened. But according to the news, the process is going especially fast because of people’s demands.
You need to reread the Roolz.
But you cannot speed up the analysis more than making it the priority of your best engineers. Not that I was one of the best, but I know that it just takes time to do an analysis, have it peer reviewed by other subject matter experts and make corrections if required.
One reason it takes time is that often the data are recorded in different formats which the analysts need to understand in order to just read them. The time synching of the data (critically important in this case) must be understood so that measurements can be aligned in time. Also, The calibration of the measurement sensors on each vehicle must be understood which sometimes means actually physically engaging with technicians who carry out the process on the airplane – they may be at a contractor facility so this analysis must be their highest priority also and they cannot be covering their tucheses. The accuracy and precision of each sensor must be known so that data reconstruction using techniques known as filtering and smoothing can be done.
As my chief engineer used to say: “In god we trust; all others must bring data”.
Sorry. I used some jargon: readers should think of “filtering and smoothing” as a kind of intelligent averaging of data points – something that works nicely in textbook examples but seems to require a bit of art with the science when applied to real world recorded flight data.
The new (R) Sen from PA, Dave McCormick, who supposedly has a PhD from Princeton, posted on FB last night pushing Bitcoin. Anyone else see anything like that from their Congresspeople?
At least, when I trawled the comments I didn’t see a single one that wasn’t derogatory in one way or another.
Idiots Ezra Klein and Zone-Flooder Bannon are comic relief parodies of the insufficiencies of their respective ideologies. Woke everything-is-waacst shape shifting scoundrel Klein* opposes …. well Bannon. I’m a writer and I can’t describe him properly!
But each are so typical of the mentally ill left wing and the mentally retarded right wing. They are both insufferable.
D.A.
NYC
*Again with Klein – hear him on Sam Harris’ podcast or just read any of the woke crap he’s scrawled over the past decade.
I can only imagine a lot of the terrorist-hostage exchange is Israel playing 4D chess when the Pals are sticking checkers pieces in their mouths. (hehehe)
If you know where these murderers are being released to, if you know literally where they live…. they can be visited later on when the heat dies down.
Just the low hum of drones over “Free Gaza” in a few months: watching, hunting. “Look up shaheeds!” No, wait, the free beepers the IDF gave you are going off.. hold on…..
Onwards Israeli heroes. This fight is not a real estate squabble and its relevance in the Middle East is merely local. This fight is ACTUALLY civilization over barbarism.
Plenty of further reading in my column, lo these many years:
https://democracychronicles.org/author/david-anderson/ (free to WEIT readers!)
D.A.
NYC
That “puff piece” (i.e. propaganda piece) on Newsweek about murderer Stephen Joseph Hayes is infuriating for more than one reason. First of course is the way the focus on his identifying as a woman overshadows and minimizes the severe nature of the crime. Look at how he himself puts it —
“I think about them every day and regret my part in what happened…”
His part in “what happened??” No. “I regret my part in
what happened” is what you say when there’s a multi-car pileup in an ice storm and you hit the brakes too hard and end up spinning out and knocking a couple more cars into the ditch. It is NOT applicable when you break into a house, drive the woman to the bank and back, then rape her, rape her 11 year old, kill her, and set the children on fire. Wtf.
But the really infuriating aspect of the article is the implied threat: this is a predictable consequence of a society that “forces” Transwomen to hide their true nature. Wouldn’t have happened if he’d only been accepted as a woman early on. Little powder kegs of suppressed rage just want to access women’s spaces to put on their makeup and then they’ll be happy and fine. Wtsf.
To my baleful gaze this story tells me that men who call themselves transwomen are mentally unstable criminals and my refusal to hire them is fully and rationally justified for the safety and productivity of my workforce. Now sure, she seems to have begun her gender journey many years after the crimes she committed, and perhaps the trauma of her arrest precipitated her epiphany where she finally knew her true self.
But hold on. The activists tell us that women like her must always have been women — those little powder kegs planted there at conception. That’s why we trans kids, right? Every trans adult was once a trans baby, right? So we should try to find these occult trans people, closeted even from themselves, at an early age and send them for the counseling and affirmation they will surely need and deserve. But not hire them into Accounts Receivable.
YES to everything Sastra said.
Someone slipped him a note and he learned to game the system by discovering his inner trans-ness and can now play dress up and have makeup and be special. Not only that, but media acclaim, support, and endless sympathy for what he’s had to endure— the denial of treatment “for male pattern baldness and face/body hair removal.”
Given me a @#$%!* break
Agree. His crime was so bad that I am not remotely interested in hearing about his problems trying to pretend he’s a woman.
Bad article. Find a more sympathetic example or don’t write anything.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. Imagine being a relative to the victims of this vile man and reading the Newsweek piece. Really gets my blood boiling. If increasing tolerance for trans identified individuals is the intention, I can’t think of anything more counterproductive to that goal.
Last night, The Beatles won the Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance (“Now and Then”). Sixty years ago, they won the Grammy for Best New Artist. Has any other artist won Grammys sixty years apart?
(Paul McCartney is also on Beyonce’s “Cowboy Carter” album, which won Album of the Year. Macca’s doing all right. Remember how ancient George Burns seemed when he starred in “Oh God?” Paul is now older than Burns was then.)
Here’s another view on the popular perception that Trump got Colombia to accept the 110 deportees by threatening the country with tariffs:
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-27-2025?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=20533&post_id=155898469&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=4ciwk&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Note that the first two flights of deportees were unannounced military airplanes, and thus were refused clearance to land. Also, in 2024, during the Biden Administration, Colombia accepted 124 flights of deportees from the U.S., so this is hardly an example of Trump playing tough to get his way.
Interestingly, I tried one of the free book web sites (from my work computer), and it BLOCKED me, with a university web page. The Univ. must be watching …
As a German, I have spent some time pondering, why anti-semitism has flared up again and again over the centuries. Especially in the last decade, it has been fascinating to watch how the attitude towards Jews and Muslims in Germany has developed.
Now, I have to preface, that I don’t want to be disrespectful and if our host doesn’t want a non-Jew (even worse – a German) to speculate why Jews seem to be the equivalent of the nerdy, underweight overachiever with the acne and the glasses during recess, please just moderate this comment out of existence.
I think Jews are such an “easy target” for demagoguery and hate mongering, because they combine a few factors. As a base, Judaism is a religion and few things get people riled up like religious differences. This is exacerbated by the fact, that in most societies Jews are more successful economically than the average which fuels the hate with envy. So far, so difficult. If you can’t beat the Jews in terms of success, you might want to join them – but you can’t become a Jew just by joining due to the Jewish identity being part religious, part cultural and part ethnic. So outsiders can be more easily persuaded of a view that Jews are excluding you. This is then compounded by the tendency of Jews – culturally or from painful experience – to keep to themselves and not proselytize. The greater the unknown, the more easily it is to demonize. Finally, the tendency to emphasize victim status has – at least in Germany – further alienated them from the general public.
Now, I really don’t want to make it seem like the Jews had it coming. They don’t. Hating people because of which group they belong to is wrong. That said, I cannot help but wonder if opening a path to integrating people not born a Jew into Jewish culture and faith might alleviate the problem of rising anti-semitism. If you could theoretically join them, maybe it would make them less of an easy target for group hatred. They’d be just another society with their own views just like the many other groups.
Maybe, but I’m highly dubious. It brings to mind the Weimar Jews who felt so well-integrated into the wider society that they couldn’t imagine anything like the horror that would soon befall them. IMO the religion aspect is crucial (so to speak); They were chosen over Us, deicide is pretty much an unforgivable sin, the guilt falls upon all their descendants, etc. Vicious nonsense, but widely-believed vicious nonsense.
Oh it would be so easy to join „the Jews“. When we had a vicious attack on a man wearing a kippa just walking the streets of Berlin several years ago, I thought to my insignificant self „why don‘t I just get a kippa and start walking around with it. Ok, I am a woman, I don‘t know if I would be religiously allowed to do that – I guess I should get myself informed – but as I am an atheist and don’t really worry about hurting religious feelings per se, what do I care, why not just do it.“ After all, if everyone with a sense of decency did this, the aggressors would be outnumbered – there would just not be enough of them to target everybody. Turned out I wasn’t the only one with this idea – and so the „wear a Kippa day“ was born. https://www.timesofisrael.com/anti-semitism-czar-asks-germans-to-wear-kippa-publicly-in-solidarity-with-jews/amp/
Of course now the situation is much more serious – to match the groups of hideous Hamas supporters in Neukölln and the like, we would have to get EVERYONE with a sense of decency to join such a campaign. But people are very reasonably afraid for their safety, and if not for their own skins, then for their children and those dependant of them.
But hey, it can be done. We are all weak and looking for excuses. IMHO. Don’t know where you are situated in our country and how things present themselves there…
But really, the only ultimate evil to eradicate is the hold of religion on young minds, at least where we live, I believe. To get rid of that, it must be a long long long journey, but making the religious per se mundane, and thus showing we are all just human, no matter what we wear on our heads, would be a first step, to make Jewish people feel they are not alone, and to make everyone understand it is not socially acceptable for the majority of people in our country to be anti-Jewish.
Sorry this is long. And just one Bosh‘s point of view.