We’ve reached the end of the “work” week, though many who say they’re “working from home” are , of course,, raiding the fridge or chilling with their cat. But I digress: it’s Friday, March 14, 2025, and National Potato Chip Day. Here’s how Lays makes them (the ruffled kind, which stands up better to dips, is my perennial favorite):
And of course it’s National Pi Day, since the date written in English is 3/14. But 15:09, or 3:09 p.m., it will be 3/14 15:9. Pi!
It’s also Learn About Butterflies Day (an important fact: many species are declining), Moth-er Day (honoring moths), National Reuben Sandwich Day, Science Education Day, National Save a Spider Day, and Purim, the Jewish holiday celebrating the saving of the Jews from massacre by the Persians. It’s celebrated with the consumption of latkes and Hamentashen, triangular pastries filled with fruit jam (said to resemble the hat of the villain Haman, who persuaded the Persian king to kill the Jews. The Jews were saved by the intercession of Queen Esther, and so we have the usual description of a Jewish holiday:
They tried to kill us;
They failed;
Let’s eat!
Here are some Hamentashen with poppy seed, raspberry, and apricot, though the traditional filling, and my favorite, is prune (good for the kishkes, too!):
Every year at this time the University of Chicago hosts a famous Latke-Hamantash debate (read the Wikipedia page), which has been going since 1946. Six Jewish scholars here defend either the latke or the hamentash, pointing out the advantages of one over the other (3 defenders each) and the problems with the other side’s food item. It is supposed to be funny and defended on the basis of the scholar’s own field, so I would have to give an evolutionary reason why, say, the hamentash is superior (I was invited once but was out of town). It is always a tie! Other schools have now started aping us, as they do with our Chicago Principles of Free Speech.
To see the debate 7 years ago on YouTube, go here (the proper debate starts at 18:16, preceded by remarks from Rabbi Anna (it’s run by Hillel) as well as some music by an a cappella chorus.
After the debate, fresh latkes and Hamentash are served. What’s a debate without a little nosh?
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 21 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Although the U.S. has proposed a cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine. Russia isn’t having it.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russia wouldn’t agree to an immediate end to the fighting in Ukraine, as Moscow’s army made rapid gains toward expelling Ukraine’s forces from its Kursk region.
Any pause in fighting at this point would be in Ukraine’s interests, he said, adding that Russia wanted a truce that led “to a lasting peace and the elimination of the root causes” of the war, which he described as a crisis.
Putin’s comments were the first official response from Moscow to a U.S.-backed proposal agreed by Ukraine this week to pause the war, now in its fourth year. They came as President Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, was headed to Moscow to discuss the cease-fire proposal, according to two U.S. officials.
“The idea itself is good, and we of course support it, but there are questions we have to discuss,” Putin said Thursday.
Putin said it wasn’t clear how such a cease-fire would be enforced and whether it would give Ukraine the chance to shore up its forces.
Russia in the past has repeatedly ruled out a temporary cease-fire and voiced skepticism about any peace talks, insisting that a lasting agreement would take time.
Many of the “root causes” cited by Putin were set out in a draft treaty drawn up by Russian and Ukrainian negotiators in April 2022, weeks after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began.
Russia justified its invasion that year as a defense against NATO expansion, and that document envisions a postwar Ukraine that is a disarmed and permanently neutral state unaligned with any military blocs.
. . . . Moscow insists on keeping at a minimum the 18% of Ukrainian territory it already controls, an area equivalent to the state of Virginia in size.
In short, as the article notes, Russia has no incentive to stop the fighting. It will get 18% of Ukraine and a neutral state on its boundary. Given that nobody from the West wants to tangle with Putin, this will merely embolden other autocratic states to expand their areas. Taiwan looks to be the next one to me. . . . And reader Merilee recommends this eloquent eight-minute video from the President of Finland, describing why people and countries should defend Ukraine.
*Trump’s Executive Orders to fire half the government is coming back to bite him, as a federal judge ordered the rehiring of many from several departments, saying that their firing had been a “sham”:
A federal judge on Thursday ordered six federal agencies to rehire thousands of workers with probationary status who had been fired as part of President Trump’s government-gutting initiative.
Ruling from the bench, Judge William J. Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California went further than he had previously, finding that the Trump administration’s firing of probationary workers had essentially been done unlawfully and by fiat through the Office of Personnel Management, the government’s human resources arm.
He directed the Treasury and the Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Defense, Energy and Interior Departments to comply with his order and offer to reinstate any employees who were improperly terminated. His order stemmed from a lawsuit brought by employee unions who challenged the legality of the mass firings.
Judge Alsup concluded that the government’s actions were a “gimmick” designed to expeditiously carry out mass firings.
He said it was clear that federal agencies had followed directives from the Office of Personnel Management to use a loophole allowing them to fire probationary workers en masse based on poor performance, regardless of their actual conduct on the job.
“It is a sad day when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that’s a lie,” he said.
“It was a sham in order to try to avoid statutory requirements,” he added.
Well, I don’t know the proper procedure for firing, but it looks as though Trump’s EOs are going to land him in numerous court battles in the next couple of years. And I’m beginning to hope that Vance won’t be a shoo-in in 2028; but the Democrats still have to confect a strategy.
*The Free Press has an article about Mahmoud Khalil, the ex-Columbia student detained for supposedly engaging with pro-terrorist organizations during protests at his school. The Free Press introduces a piece about it by noting the debate between free-speechers those who say the law allows for the deportation of Khalil, and saying that “Yale constitutional law professor Jed Rubenfeld says they’re both wrong. The law, he argues, isn’t obvious on either side. And anyone who says it is is not telling the truth.” The article is “Both Left and Right Are Wrong About Mahmoud Khalil.”
Political opinion, no matter how abhorrent, is protected speech in America. Expressing support for even the sickest terrorist butchers, like Hamas, is protected speech. In fact, even if Khalil had committed nonspeech, non-protected acts like blocking Jewish students from accessing parts of the Columbia campus, but the true reason for his arrest was because he’s pro-Hamas, he would still have a First Amendment retaliation claim—if he were a citizen.
But he’s not a citizen. His green card makes him a lawful permanent resident, but he’s still an alien. Thus the real question is whether, or when, or to what extent aliens have the same constitutional rights as citizens. Unfortunately for both left and right, the answer is complicated.
. . . . . And in many subsequent cases, the Court has not only endorsed Holmes’ great Abrams dissent, but expressly held, as in a 1945 case called Bridges v. Wixon, that “[f]reedom of speech and of the press is accorded aliens residing in this country.”
How can this make sense? How can Turner still be good law if aliens are protected by freedom of speech?
The answer is that Turner was not addressing lawfully admitted aliens. The case concerned aliens outside the United States and aliens who try to come here illegally. Foreigners outside America have never been held to enjoy constitutional rights, and as the Turner Court held, an alien “does not become one of the people to whom these [rights] are secured by our Constitution by an attempt to enter, forbidden by law.” By contrast, Abrams dealt with aliens who had entered the country lawfully and resided here for five to 10 years.
So do we have a clear answer now? Khalil appears to have entered the country legally, so that means he has full constitutional rights?
Not so fast. The Court has never held that an alien obtains the full panoply of constitutional rights the moment he is lawfully admitted here. Instead, the Court has created a kind of sliding scale in which legal aliens acquire constitutional rights as they “develop” more “substantial connections with this country.”
. . . .it’s pretty clear that Khalil has “substantial connections” to America.
So does that finally end the matter? Khalil enjoys constitutional rights as a lawful permanent resident, and the First Amendment does not allow people to be punished for expressing their political opinions, no matter how abhorrent. Case closed?
No, still not closed. Because Khalil’s case arises in a distinctive context: deportation.
If Khalil were being prosecuted in a criminal case, as Abrams was back in 1919—for example, under a statute prohibiting seditious dissent—his First Amendment rights would be violated and would protect him. But Khalil is not being prosecuted; he is in deportation proceedings. And those who support Khalil’s deportation will say this makes all the difference, because as the Supreme Court held in 1953, “Courts have long recognized the power to expel or exclude aliens as a fundamental sovereign attribute exercised by the Government’s political departments largely immune from judicial control.”
It goes back and forth until author Rubenfeld concludes:
Given these crosscutting precedents, it is sadly probable that judges’ reactions to cases like Khalil’s will tend to divide along partisan lines. A good bet is that the Southern District of New York judge currently hearing Khalil’s case will (if the case isn’t transferred to Louisiana) likely enjoin the administration from deporting him. Another fair bet is that the more conservative judges of the Fifth Circuit (if the case is transferred) will likely uphold the deportation.
But anyone who says the law is settled or obvious here is wrong, as is anyone who thinks they know how the Supreme Court will rule.
I don’t know! I don’t! But I’m pretty sure this case, which looks to be repeated as Trump tries to deport people, will go to the Supreme Court. And, if the divide there is along partisan lines, Khalil will be out of here.
*The WaPo has a fascinating and long story (archived here) about the problem of curing rare diseases, disease for which companies have little financial incentives to develop useful drugs. The case discussed is that of Alaina Smith, a girl from Texarkana who came down at five with what seems to be about the most horrible disease you can have: free-living amoebas that can infect humans and eat their brains!
. . . . For the next week, Walter and Amanda [Smith] remained with Alaina in the hospital. No news was good news, and Alaina, by some miracle, seemed not only undamaged by brain surgery but nearly back to her old self. Then, as they packed up to return home for Christmas, several doctors appeared outside her door and beckoned the parents. “They just pointed at the word on their phone and said, ‘This is what she’s got,’” recalled Walter. “They couldn’t even pronounce it. They just said, ‘It’s not good. Don’t even google it.’”
Walter and Amanda took in the word: “Balamuthia.” They’d grown used to being treated, as Walter put it, “as just hicks from the country.” Amanda thought it was more the indifference of a system overwhelmed by demands. “We’re just ants on the anthill,” she said. For the most part they didn’t protest, or expect special treatment, or do anything but allow the doctors to think whatever they thought of them. Their first instinct was to respect their doctors, but they were coming to doubt their infallibility. They googled “Balamuthia” and learned that it was an amoeba that on very rare occasions entered the human brain and consumed it, possibly through the ingestion or inhalation of soil or compost. Walter immediately thought of the raised beds and the swirl of dust.
Even at that point there was still hope in the air — the possibility that the surgery might have completely removed the brain-eating amoebas. That sentiment was tested by yet another MRI, after which a nurse pulled Walter and Amanda into a room. Waiting for them were doctors in white coats. Six doctors sat on one side of the table. Walter and Amanda sat on the other. Someone had arranged for each parent to have a box of tissues — Walter instantly noticed this detail. The doctors showed them the second MRI. “It looked like a bomb had gone off in the back of her head,” said Walter. They listened to the doctors explain what they themselves obviously had only just learned about Balamuthia. How fewer than 200 cases had been reported worldwide and that it had killed 95 percent of the people it had infected. How there was still no known effective treatment for it, just a cocktail of drugs whose only certain effect was to sicken the patient. “They told us again not to look it up,” said Walter, “’cause they’d looked it up. And they’re like, ‘Holy shit, this kid is going to die.’”
Nothing worked until Mom did some Googling:
And there was zero chance that some pharmaceutical company was going to ride to the rescue with some new cure. “The only hope,” said DeRisi, “is drugs that have already been in people. And okay, if that’s true, let’s try every drug ever approved in Europe or by the FDA.” He set his graduate students loose on the problem. They grew Balamuthia in the lab and bombarded it with the 2,177 drugs approved in either the United States or Europe. All but one were ineffective. And the one, very oddly, stopped Balamuthia in its tracks. It was called nitroxoline. An antibiotic long used for urinary tract infections outside the United States, it was neither used nor approved for use in the United States. Its ability to kill Balamuthia inside a lab was no guarantee that it would do the same inside a human. But for the first time in the brief recorded history of this free-living amoeba, there was hope.
. . . . . Late one night that August, Amanda’s mother, Kathryn Keithley, just started googling “Balamuthia.” Amanda thought Walter had googled the story of each and every one of the small handful of Balamuthia survivors, but apparently not. For her mother now discovered the preprint of a new paper co-authored by, among other people, Joe DeRisi. It described a case study of the use of nitroxoline on a middle-aged white man who lived off the grid and had wandered into the University of California at San Francisco six months before Alaina had been diagnosed. The man had survived. Kathryn handed the paper to Amanda. Amanda read it and called their doctor at Children’s Medical Center Dallas, who said, “Where did you find this? Our people haven’t even found this.”
The upshot: the family got some leftover nitroxoline pills from a guy who had the amoeba and had been cured (it was too slow to get them right away from China, where they’re made), Alaina began taking them, and lo! she was cured. The lesson? Well, it’s hard to find cures for rare diseases, not only because companies lack the will and money to invest in those cures, but also because there are not enough cases to even do a controlled study of a drug. All you can do is test various drugs against the putative agent, and see if anything stops it, which is how it worked this time. As for the very many diseases that remain rare, there isn’t any good answer.
*The AP’s reliable “oddities” section describes the TSA catching a man at the airport smuggling a turtle (and not a small one) in his pants. And it was a red-eared slider, a common pet turtle and one of the denizens of Botany Pond.
A Pennsylvania man who was going through security at a New Jersey airport was found to have a live turtle concealed in his pants, according to the federal Transportation Security Administration.
The turtle was detected Friday after a body scanner alarm went off at Newark Liberty International Airport. A TSA officer then conducted a pat-down on the East Stroudsburg man and determined there was something concealed in the groin area of his pants.
When questioned further, the man reached into his pants and pulled out the turtle, which was about 5 inches (12 centimeters) long and wrapped in a small blue towel. He said it was a red-ear slider turtle, a species that is popular as a pet.
The man — whose name was not released — was escorted from the checkpoint area by Port Authority police and ended up missing his flight. The turtle was confiscated, and it’s not clear if the turtle was the man’s pet or why he had it in his pants.
“We have seen travelers try to conceal knives and other weapons on their person, in their shoes and in their luggage, however I believe this is the first time we have come across someone who was concealing a live animal down the front of his pants,” said Thomas Carter, TSA’s Federal Security Director for New Jersey. “As best as we could tell, the turtle was not harmed by the man’s actions.”
He said the incident remains under investigation, and it wasn’t clear if the man would face any charges or penalties.
We’ll take that turtle for Botany Pond, please. It will be happy here!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili encounters baby Julia, offspring of the upstairs neighbors. As Malgorzata explains, “Andrzej wanted a picture of Hili with the baby but Hili didn’t want to come close. So he took some cat food and put it on the floor by the baby. Hili came to get the food and he could take the picture.”
Hili: Dry cat food on the floor by the baby must be a trick.Andrzej: You guessed it.
Hili: Sucha karma na podłodze koło dziecka to jakiś podstęp.Ja: Zgadłaś.
*******************
From Cats Without Gods:
From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:
From Stacy via Colin, another one of those papers:
Masih has a thread on Twitter responding to Ilhan Omar, who dissed the brave Iranian. Here’s the first and last two tweets of ten. Omar never seems to sympathize with Masih’s campaign against Islamist misogyny, but apppears to side with Iran against Masih’s activism:
MPORTANT THREAD ⬇️⬇️⬇️
1-Earlier this week, Rep Ilhan Omar shared a defamatory article about me on social media by a Koch-Brothers funded “think tank” co-founded by a known sympathizer of the Iranian regime.
Here’s my response to @IlhanMN pic.twitter.com/t7iiEgJvAx
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) January 10, 2020
The last two tweets:
10-Yet, when I divulge the repression of the Islamic Republic, attacks against me proliferate by the regime & their supporters in the West. I’d have never imagined that one day a member of Congress, a fellow woman of colour, would join with my oppressors in trying to defame me
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) January 10, 2020
From Luana, a very funny tweet.
Dog moves camera so he can secretly eat food on the table..
Wait for the cat’s reaction.. 😂 pic.twitter.com/Cs65lIRa6P
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) March 11, 2025
From Malgorzata. Am Yisrael chai!
Incredible: This 130-year-old violin survived the Holocaust.
Now, it is being played by freed hostage Agam Berger.
They will never break us.
Am Yisrael Chai 💙🇮🇱
— Israel ישראל (@Israel) March 9, 2025
From my feed, a great coincidence:
This only happens to you once.😃 pic.twitter.com/Mm2dSziCGn
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) March 12, 2025
From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:
This Polish lawyer lived just eleven days after arriving in Auschwitz.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-03-14T10:06:44.371Z
And one post from Dr. Cobb. First, a phylogeography of knots, which date back at least ten thousand years:
Perfect collection of a wide range of items – I’d love to see the Latke-Hamantash debate!
The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it. -Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (14 Mar 1879-1955)
And now we have the Trump administration who commit both in tandem. How ’bout that Einstein!
He, like most Americans at the time could never conceive of the possibility. Except for some novelists, I suppose.
Here’s a fun pi search page:
http://www.angio.net/pi/
E.g. You can look for your phone number or “999999” … does anyone know the name that point has been given?
I tried our phone number and got the message, “Sorry, we couldn’t find your string in Pi! But keep searching — Pi contains lots of other interesting strings”. But surely if Pi is infinite my number must occur somewhere?
Edited to add: It couldn’t find my mobile number either.
I know, right? It’s interesting! But I think also they only go so far with the calculation – that is also very interesting. Bear in mind there are other sites to use.
It’d be really funny if it reports
“Your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and dial again.”
I got a 7-digit number (less the area code). It found 9225501.
Lots of 5318008 in pi.
This string is known as the Feynman Point, even though his association with this number is tenuous. Hofstadter was apparently the first person to note this location, which begins at the 762nd number. Here’s the Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_nines_in_pi
Hi Bryan, This program is messed up (incorrect). Try 8 nines: Program says it occurs once at 66780105. Try 7 before 8 nines (799999999) this is OK occurs once at 66780104. Try 6 before 8 nines program says it occurs once at 36356641. So program gives result that 8 nines occurs once and twice. QED program does not work correctly. It gets worse, try 8 nines followed by a 3 and it says occurs once at 66780105.
Hmmm – good call, I’ll think about that.
March 14 is a very special day. Everyone knows 3/14 is pi day, but it should be better known as Albert Einstein’s birthday. We should make merry today.
Yes it is a very special day. That’s why my quote today is by Einstein.
I’m wearing an Einstein t-shirt today!
I’m wearing a T shirt with the Einstein-Hilbert equation of general relativity.
Obama’s EOs put 80,000 coal miners out of work. Biden’s EO put 50,000 Keystone pipeline workers out of work.
These people got no sympathy. They were told to “learn to code.”
Nice spin. Are you aware of how misleading what you wrote is, or do you truly not know?
Are Lysander’s numbers incorrect?
Hili has her price! Nice to see baby Julia.
When I mentioned how Butch (59 y.o.) and Suni’s (61) replacements on Station looked like kids in comparison, I had forgotten that Don Pettit (70 in April) is aboard for another month or so. Don, a chemical engineer, who has been an astronaut since 1996 and has regularly hosted a number of his fellow astronauts in his “Don Pettit’s garage” home workshop for independent problem solving, includes among his inventions, the zero-g coffee cup he created onboard Station some years ago. Interview with him on the process should be at url
https://www.deathwishcoffee.com/pages/fbdc-ep-106-donald-pettit?srsltid=AfmBOooyjV6ZvD9MOWuxGnHl6RW5M-Y1zkcIeifc6BZE0VwG10SAzxGd
Thank you! I greatly enjoyed learning about the Latke vs. Hamentash debate. I read the entire Wikipedia page and even watched parts of various debate videos (btw, the link to the 2019 debate was accidentally omitted). But mostly I got very hungry. And the video about Lays potato chips just made things worse!
On a completely unrelated note, I am growing to seriously hate Donald J. Trump.
That’s American! In English the date is 14/3. 🙂
I am frustrated by all the media’s inability to report comprehensively on any topic these days. It all seems very tactical and tweet-ish.
Here, though, are two handy pieces on the various legal challenges to Trump Admin actions:
“Here’s Your Guide To The Lawsuits Challenging Trump’s Funding Freezes And Terminations”
“Here are the 119 legal challenges brought against Trump in just 51 days”.
You can’t tell the players without a scorecard.
Government is only allowed to grow. It must never be allowed to shrink.
The one on that list that particularly irks me is the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops v. the United States Department of State. I’m not skilled enough with this phone to cite the references so I’ll not go into detail, but the Catholic Church profited madly from government contracts with Pima County (wherein lies the city of Tucson) for the business of housing and later transporting people who had crossed the border illegally. It was quite the racket. Pima County purchased huge buildings specifically for this purpose. They didn’t wait for the shit to hit the fan. Within days of Trump winning the election the entire enterprise was shut down. The buildings now sit fallow. They are boarding them up in an attempt to keep our growing homeless population out. It’s interesting that the feds were happy to fund the migrant cause, but the homeless are a local problem. We are a county that’s had its priorities backwards for years. Yes, the county received grants from the feds. What bothered me the most about the ordeal was the money that was exchanged between church and state.
The dog, cat, camera video is funny, but I don’t believe for a minute it was spontaneous.
It’s hard to believe that the dog knows it is being watched on the camera.
“[A]nother one of those papers”
It makes the crazy Grievance Studies Hoax one about canine rape culture in Oregon’s public parks seem normal!
I can’t tell if the paper is for real or is a hoax, which tells you a lot
My wife made a spectacular batch of poppy seed Hamentashen for Purim—my favorite. I’m so lucky! They are especially delicious with Lay’s potato chips on the side (just kidding).
And speaking of Purim (bad transition, I know), regarding the case against Khalil, Jed Rubenfeld seems to be a Talmudic scholar! On the one hand, but on the other hand…. Talmudic argumentation doesn’t run out of hands, so the case will go on.
An amoeba that eats the brain! OMG!
When I was a child, I used to collect red-eared sliders that lived in the pond by my house. I kept them in big flat containers, filled with pond water, sometimes for weeks at a time. It wasn’t good for them, but I loved the turtles and, well, I was just a boy being a boy. The man’s embarrassment at being caught with a turtle in his pants should be punishment enough.
Finally it was heartwarming to hear Agam Berger play (scrape) the violin!
Great story about the little girl and the amoeba. I’ll recall it next time I see someone smirk and hear him snidely say “Do your own research.”
I was wrong. I doubted you. It’s real. I thought I was out there for my research on how trees cause pollution and how ozone helps some species. But this goes way beyond:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10894160.2025.2473971?casa_token=2xrqR_cvKGUAAAAA%3A9uiYb-Wp-0Gi4J8lvNlTFwypC4s-VOufl0JCzCtIahcSk4WXzAFKg4rDDpnco4hARdRbZyihWuHD
The program to locate digit strings in Pi is messed up (incorrect). Try 8 nines: Program says it occurs once at 66780105. Try 7 before 8 nines (799999999) this is OK occurs once at 66780104. Try 6 before 8 nines program says it occurs once at 36356641. It gets worse, try 8 nines followed by a 3 and it says occurs once at 66780105. So program gives result that 8 nines occurs once and three times. QED program does not work correctly.
Regarding Khalil, this isn’t fundamentally a question of free speech—it’s a question of allegiance. As a Green Card holder, Khalil is still in what is effectively a probationary period. Fealty to the United States—its values, its security, and its alliances—is not only expected, it’s a prerequisite for full citizenship. Yes, this necessarily includes a refusal to support terrorist organizations. Without such standards, we are left with few meaningful criteria for determining who should be entrusted with the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. (Yes, while I admire our Ceiling Cat’s caution, I think our Host is wrong. Green Card holders don’t deserve all the protections of full citizens.)
I share Larry Summers’ caution, as well, about taking the severe step of deportation lightly. Due process matters, and so does public understanding of the rationale behind such actions. But I also believe there must be baseline expectations for those seeking the protection of our Constitution—expectations that include a genuine commitment to the United States and its interests, and a clear renunciation of foreign entities that wish harm on our allies and on the principles of Western civilization itself.
Emotionally and rationally, I find myself thinking: deport him.
But I temper that instinct with Summers’ wisdom—recognizing the need for clarity, due process, and a public conversation grounded in fact, not sentiment. Unless something surfaces to change my mind, I believe I’ve done my due diligence in thinking through this matter. Khalil doesn’t deserve to be here.
I keep seeing articles making this about free speech, such as this one in the New Yorker by Jay Caspain Kang: “The Detention of Mahmoud Khalil Is a Flagrant Assault on Free Speech: Whatever legal rationale the Trump Administration cooks up, deporting protesters for things they say is wildly un-American—and possibly unpopular, too.”
But this misses the boat! Foreigners who want to be here don’t deserve the Constitutional protections of citizenship UNLESS THEY HAVE DEMONSTRATED THAT THEY ARE LOYAL TO THE US.
I find myself torn in pieces on this matter because I know that just deporting him could increase antisemitism. But it’s going to do that no matter what, isn’t it???
Hamas murdered AMERICANS on 10/7!
Khalil and all like him on visas on green cards who publicly endorse terrorist groups that kill OUR CITIZENS and allies should be deported.
Fealty to the United States trumps free speech. Free speech is a right that is earned and granted freely to those who want to pledge allegiance to the United States. It’s not a god-given right for foreign squatters.
Can we disentangle deportation from criminal punishment? I don’t think fealty to the United States does trump freedom of speech. How would you measure the former, to weigh it? I believe due process applies to everyone on U.S. soil and wherever U.S. law reaches. No one should be (or would be) imprisoned for speech that is 1A protected. No law that provided for imprisoning non-citizens for controversial speech (but exempted citizens) would be upheld in U.S. courts, except maybe in war on your own soil. And then you would just suspend habeas corpus as the Constitution allows, and not bother charging the aliens with explicitly dangerous speech. (Because then you would have to get around to prosecuting them and risking their acquittal. Then what do you do with them?)
But the government doesn’t want to imprison Mr. Khalil, or even fine him, for “illegal” speech. If only wants to deport him as an undesirable. Anything he actually said (“speech”) might be irrelevant. It’s the other no-good things he’s been up to that makes him an undesirable. So the legal question is whether the government is giving him due process in the deportation proceedings given that he is closer to being a citizen than, say, a foreign student or an illegal fence-jumper.
Gotta say, the country is bending over backward to give him a fair shake. Or is he just a pawn in The Resistance (TM)?
That said, I do hope he is deported. It would be an object lesson pour encourager les autres. But it should be done lawfully, of course.
Exactly.
Having a green card does not imply that the holder is in a probationary status for citizenship. Having a green card means the holder has permanent legal residency but may have no interest in becoming a citizen, and is not in a kind of probationary state. Material provided by the INS says that a person with this status is expected to support the democratic form of government and not to try to change the government by illegal means. As is clear in the material from Rubenfeld, cited by WEIT, the status may be taken away, and certainly support for terrorism would count against keeping your legal residency. But as far as I know Khalil has not been shown to be a supporter of terrorism.
Seriously? Public support of Hamas isn’t actively showing support for terrorism? Come on. With all due respect, if you think showing up at protests in favor of Hamas isn’t support for Hamas, then we have en epistemic rift so big between us that I’m not sure I should bother typing.
While I sympathize with the fact that there are no doubt thousands of hapless students at universities who are Hamas sympathizers, people that if they had a decent education would know better, Khalil isn’t your run-of-the-mill university student, is he? He’s a foreigner who endorsed the slaughter of Israelis and Americans and more, right? Someone who is influencing our university students!
This is different than a letter going out on behalf of its members, members which may not agree with said letter. This is about someone showing up in full regalia in support of Hamas. That means in support of Americans being slaughtered by Hamas.
So, I don’t know what kind of proof is needed in this case beyond the public demonstration.
But you and I may have some meeting of minds. There is one exception. Maybe he’s been falsely accused. Maybe he wasn’t at the protests. Or maybe he was there but as a hapless kid who deserves some grace; maybe he wasn’t there endorsing Hamas; maybe he was just a confused dolt who thought it was cool to do so. Then yes, he deserves the benefit of the doubt. And I’m for that.
But there is so much harm in continuing to allow foreign influencers on our soil. Yes, provide as wide a rope as can be given. But if he honestly supports Hamas, deport his scummy ass.
I don’t know of any occasion on which Khalil has shown support for Hamas. There were people at protests who supported Hamas, but I have seen no evidence that Khalil supports Hamas. When Troy Edgar, the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, was asked on NPR what Khalil had done that aligned with terrorist activity, he hemmed and hawed. Merely having participated in protests at Columbia did not show that Khalil had done anything aligned with terrorism, and that’s why Michael Martin on NPR repeated his question to Edgar about what Khalil was supposed to have done that aligned with terrorist activity.
I’m struggling to follow the reasoning, Cransdale. Let’s be honest: American-born students often say foolish things and are given the benefit of the doubt. It’s understandable; cerebral cortices aren’t fully developed until long after most people collect their university diplomas.
But we should not pretend, even for a moment, that Iran hasn’t been actively involved in fueling some of the protests we’re seeing on American campuses. Ali Khamenei has openly praised and encouraged these demonstrations. His fingerprints are unmistakable.
Which brings me to Khalil. What’s his excuse? Are we truly expected to believe he was at these protests as a neutral observer? That he just happened to be there, coincidentally aligned with demonstrators supporting Hamas, but had no sympathy for their cause? That stretches credulity. He was there protesting in support of Hamas but didn’t himself support Hamas? OK, what?
This defense—that he was present and actively participating but somehow uninvolved—echoes the rationale too often used to excuse combatants hiding behind human shields.
Yes, I understand due process. And…
I need to step back from this discussion, both because the Da Roolz demand that I stop engaging and because the apologetics for this kind of behavior make me physically ill. That said, if Khalil is not actively doing the work of Iran on American soil, I do believe we should extend as much grace as the situation allows. Find out if he’s an innocent kid or a foreign influencer causing chaos on our campuses. But we have to be honest about the reality: the United States has foreign enemies. Iran is among them. Hamas is among them. We cannot continue to allow those interests to infiltrate and manipulate our youth. And we certainly cannot permit such influence to operate freely on our university campuses—especially by those who are here as guests, not citizens. Should we really allow ourselves to be so manipulated?
Respectfully, I’m bowing out of this exchange as my blood is boiling. Mahmoud Khalil is about 30 years old. This isn’t a kid. He’s long-passed the period where teens do stupid shit.
Thank you for the thoughtful interaction.
Ukraine. Russian invasion.
No the Kursk region by all accounts is a withdrawal.
From Tatarigami_UA X
“Our team has a good understanding of the situation in Kursk. There are no encircled troops. The retreat was generally organized but occasionally chaotic. There is no threat of encirclement, and no evidence suggests otherwise. It’s wise to rely on intelligence, not Putin’s word.”
Trump as per usual… “thousands of Ukrainian troops are trapped and about to be slaughtered” stuff but I have a peace plan and a noble prize waiting. Putin on the other hand has other ideas.
American media portrays “Hamas’ demands” of “hostage exchange” like it is some kind of swapping of prisoners of war. See PBS, NYTimes, WaPo etc. Most of them.
It is not. Israeli prisoners given back to Hamas are criminals, mainly murders of civilians, in Israeli (a democratic country) jails.
VERSES …. Israeli civilians held as actual hostages in Gaza tunnels.
Consider that here: Consider your most loved ones in a bank hostage situation (like that 1970s movie Dog Day Afternoon – excellent flick btw).
With your beloved held by psychopaths at gunpoint wouldn’t you beg the swat team to blow the criminals’ heads off? Would you adjust your view if the bank robber jabbered about historical lies about their great grandparents’ “sacred land?”
I know my reaction….
It demeans us – it degrades us – to take the moral claims of the Palestinian movement seriously.
Onwards Israeli heroes.
D.A.
NYC