Thursday: Hili dialogue

March 27, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, March 27, 2025, and National Spanish Paella Day (is there any other kind?) When I gave a talk in Valencia in 2011, they took me to what was supposed to be the best paella place in the city—the Spanish city most famed for its paella. The small restaurant was way out in the country, and in the back were two old men cooking paella over a wood fire. It was fantastic. Here’s a photo of the cooking and one of the final product.

Posting will be light for the next two days as today I have to take my car in for maintenance (oil change, tire rotation, etc.) and tomorrow I have a number of tasks. Bear with me; I do my best.

It’s also International Whisky Day and World Theatre Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 27 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, whom no rational person wanted to take that position, is starting to look like the biggest bumbler in the Signal fiasco in which US plans to attack Yemen were leaked by accident to the editor of the Atlantic–and before the attacks took place. I wish Trump would replace that guy. From the WSJ:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted plans for the timing and weapons to be used in a military strike against Houthi militants on a nongovernmental group chat at least two hours before the first bombs were scheduled to drop, according to texts published Wednesday by the Atlantic magazine.

The release of the texts comes after days of contentious dispute between the magazine and the White House over whether classified information about the military operation had been shared in the unclassified chat group in violation of longstanding security procedures and possibly legal requirements.

The new messages that were made public by the magazine showed the texts included details about the specific times that F-18s, MQ-9 drones and Tomahawk cruise missiles would be used in the attack and mentions intelligence that an unnamed target of the attacks was at a “known location.”

Such information is normally guarded carefully by the Pentagon before imminent strikes to avoid disclosures that could help adversaries.

In a statement Wednesday, Hegseth said, “The Atlantic released the so-called ‘war plans’ and those ‘plans’ include: No names. No targets. No locations. No units. No routes. No sources. No methods. And no classified information.”

His texts before the strikes in Yemen, though, included multiple specific details of the looming attack.

In a text entitled “Team Update” on the Signal service, Hegseth wrote that the weather was favorable for the military operation and that “we are a GO for mission launch.”

The text was posted at 11:44 a.m. E.T. on March 15, about 30 minutes before the first U.S. F-18s warplanes that carried out the strikes took off from a U.S. aircraft carrier.

All the participants, especially Tulsi Gabbard, said that no classified information was shared, nor any methods, locations, or war plans. This, given what has been reported elsewhere, sounds like flat-out lying. See Tulsi Gabbard’s video testimony at the WSJ piece, and she simply says she simply does not recall the details of the conversation when denying that it contained any sensititive information.

*And The Atlantic has finally released the transcript of the Signal chat, and yes, it gives sensitive information including methods and locations. As they say:

As we wrote on Monday, much of the conversation in the “Houthi PC small group” concerned the timing and rationale of attacks on the Houthis, and contained remarks by Trump-administration officials about the alleged shortcomings of America’s European allies. But on the day of the attack—Saturday, March 15—the discussion veered toward the operational.

Hegseth’s text:

  • “1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package)”
  • “1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME – also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s)”

Let us pause here for a moment to underscore a point. This Signal message shows that the U.S. secretary of defense texted a group that included a phone number unknown to him—Goldberg’s cellphone—at 11:44 a.m. This was 31 minutes before the first U.S. warplanes launched, and two hours and one minute before the beginning of a period in which a primary target, the Houthi “Target Terrorist,” was expected to be killed by these American aircraft. If this text had been received by someone hostile to American interests—or someone merely indiscreet, and with access to social media—the Houthis would have had time to prepare for what was meant to be a surprise attack on their strongholds. The consequences for American pilots could have been catastrophic.

The Hegseth text then continued:

  • “1410: More F-18s LAUNCH (2nd strike package)”
  • “1415: Strike Drones on Target (THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP, pending earlier ‘Trigger Based’ targets)”
  • “1536 F-18 2nd Strike Starts – also, first sea-based Tomahawks launched.”
  • “MORE TO FOLLOW (per timeline)”
  • “We are currently clean on OPSEC”—that is, operational security.
  • “Godspeed to our Warriors.”

Shortly after, Vice President J. D. Vance texted the group, “I will say a prayer for victory.”

And they discuss matters of foreign policy about Europe. And they even use EMOTICONS. Oy!

*This is a surprise; there was an anti-Hamas protest in Gaza, and it was even reported by the BBC (h/t Neil). You can see two minutes of video and read an article about this at MEMRI, too.

Hundreds of people have taken part in the largest anti-Hamas protest in Gaza since the war with Israel began, taking to the streets to demand the group step down from power.

Masked Hamas militants, some armed with guns and others carrying batons, intervened and forcibly dispersed the protesters, assaulting several of them.

Videos shared widely on social media by activists typically critical of Hamas showed young men marching in the streets of Beit Lahia, northern Gaza on Tuesday, chanting “out, out, out, Hamas out”.

Hamas has not commented directly on the protest, but in a statement on Wednesday it blamed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for resuming the war.

Pro-Hamas supporters downplayed the significance of the protests and accused the participants of being traitors.

The protests in northern Gaza came a day after Islamic Jihad gunmen launched rockets at Israel, prompting an Israeli decision to evacuate large parts of Beit Lahia, which sparked public anger in the area.

Israel has resumed its military campaign in Gaza following nearly two months of ceasefire, blaming Hamas for rejecting a new US proposal to extend the truce. Hamas, in turn, has accused Israel of abandoning the original deal agreed in January.

. . . . Open criticism of Hamas has grown in Gaza since war began, both on the streets and online, though there are still those that are fiercely loyal and it is hard to accurately gauge how far support for the group has shifted.

There was opposition to Hamas long before the war, though much of it remained hidden for fear of reprisals.

Mohammed Al-Najjar, from Gaza, posted on his Facebook: “Excuse me, but what exactly is Hamas betting on? They’re betting on our blood, blood that the whole world sees as just numbers.

“Even Hamas counts us as numbers. Step down and let us tend to our wounds.”

Here’s an ABC News video of the protests:

All I can say is that I’m mystified why Hamas didn’t shoot these protestors, for they used to do that. And bravo for the Gazans brave enough to know that they won’t begin to prosper until the get rid of Hamas and its culture of death. It’s possible that they are trying to court world opinion by showing that they tolerate dissent, or maybe they’re saving their ammo for Israelis.

*Neil Gross, a sociology professor at Colby College, asks in a NYT op-ed, “Have young people really turned MAGA?” Betteridge’s Law of Headlines suggests that the answer is “no,” and sure enough, that’s the case.

Democrats were alarmed last spring and summer when polling suggested that voters ages 18 to 29 were softening in their longtime commitment to the Democratic Party. After the November election, when exit polls indicated that Kamala Harris had won the young adult vote by only a slim margin (if that), it seemed that the ground had shifted. A post-inauguration cover story in New York magazine on young Trump supporters partying it up in Washington captured a widespread impression that this was a generational realignment: the rise of a cadre of MAGA youth.

After examining new survey data and interviewing more than 100 young adults for a book I’m writing on how politics is reshaping the college experience, I’m doubtful. Young MAGA types may feel newly energized and empowered, but empowerment is different from numerical growth. The data suggest that the swing in young adults voting for Donald Trump did not reflect a major shift in ideology. Rather, the swing seems to have resulted from moderate-to-somewhat-liberal young voters deciding to bet on Mr. Trump out of concern about the state of the economy — and from young moderates and progressives who chose to stay home because they thought Ms. Harris was either too progressive or not progressive enough. This is a point with implications for Democrats and Republicans alike.

The most striking feature of the young adult Trump swing is that it occurred even though there has been no significant recent increase in the proportion of young adults who identify as conservative. Data from the Cooperative Election Study, a national survey with more than 50,000 respondents during election years, show that between 2006 and 2023, about 23 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 identified as either “conservative” or “very conservative” on average, a number that fluctuated only modestly year to year. The 2024 numbers, which the study’s researchers have shared with me, show no meaningful departure from this pattern. (Despite fears of the influence of a misogynistic online “manosphere,” the ratio of young men to young women who identify as conservative did not change appreciably, either.)

Likewise, the survey registered only modest changes in the political party affiliations of young adults over the past two decades. Young people have been softening in their commitment to the Democrats, but they’ve been softening in their commitment to the Republicans as well. In place of these loyalties a growing number say they are independents.

. . . .Republicans, for their part, should heed the limits of their mandate from young Americans, such as it is. The G.O.P.’s core base remains older white people who say they no longer recognize the country that young people are ushering into being. The more the Trump administration caters to these voters by doubling down on prayer in public schools, for example, or pursuing a national abortion ban or imposing restrictions on L.G.B.T.Q.+ rights, the more it risks alienating younger, more socially accepting voters who swung toward Mr. Trump for bigger paychecks and less expensive housing — especially if the economy falters.

Perhaps today’s young voters will more fully embrace partisan identities as they grow older. But it is also possible that dissatisfaction with both parties is so great that we are witnessing the emergence of a cohort of swing voters who are open to persuasion each political cycle. If this has the effect of tempering our polarized and dysfunctional politics, we will owe today’s young people our gratitude.

Well, I’m not sure if this is good news for Democrats. If the economy tanks it is, but the young folks aren’t that keen on wokeness, either. I get the feeling that Gross is trying to squeeze as much good news out of his data as he can, but I couldn’t find much to hearten me.

*Republicans have called for the defunding of NPR and PBS because they’re biased, and of course they are. Have you listened lately? I can hardly turn it on without hearing something woke, but at least Krista Tippett is no more. Yesterday House Republicans lit into the chief executives of both organizations for this bias.

Congressional Republicans laced into PBS and NPR on Wednesday, accusing the country’s biggest public media networks of institutional bias in a fiery hearing that functioned as the latest salvo against the American press by close allies of the Trump administration.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican who organized the hearing — which she called “Anti-American Airwaves” — derided PBS and NPR as “radical left-wing echo chambers” that published skewed news reports and indoctrinated children with L.G.B.T.Q. programming.

Paula Kerger, the chief executive of PBS, and Katherine Maher, the chief executive of NPR, rejected those claims, arguing that their stations served as a crucial source of accurate information and educational programming for millions of Americans.

And Democratic committee members mocked the proceedings as a cynical exercise by Republicans to air a predictable list of grievances against the news media. Representative Stephen Lynch, Democrat of Massachusetts, tried to shift focus onto the Trump administration, including the revelation that top security officials inadvertently included the editor of The Atlantic on a group chat planning a military operation.

Mr. Lynch said that Republicans would rather go after Big Bird than President Trump. “If shame was still a thing, this hearing would be shameful,” he said.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a government-funded company, received $535 million from the government for this year. Most of that money is spent on public radio and TV stations across the United States, with some of it going directly to NPR and PBS.

According to the NYT, fans of the stations are relieved that neither executive made major flubs.  Christopher Rufo published ten questions for Katherine Maher on his Substack site, but I seriously doubt that any of them were asked. More tomorrow.

Over at The Free Press, Uri Berliner, notorious for having quit as an NPR editor and writing about how woke the station is, continues to say that it’s woke, losing listeners, and that its promise to become more objective has failed. Berliner argues that NPR should just stop taking public money, quit pretending, and come out as a “progressive” radio station.  That sounds okay to me, because the station sure is not evenhanded in how it covers news. I would like to be challenged sometimes when I listen to it, and it’s the only station I listen to on my car radio.

*Finally, the AP reports two river otters escaped from a zoo (North American river otters: Lontra canadensis). I expect they’ll be caught and returned.

Two river otters, Louie and Ophelia, weaseled their way out of their Wisconsin zoo enclosure last week during a winter storm, appearing on security camera footage cavorting across the snow, as the search continued Tuesday.

The NEW Zoo & Adventure Park said the two North American river otters escaped through a small hole that they enlarged in a buried fence, and their flight was quickly noticed by zookeepers on their morning rounds.

But Louie and Ophelia don’t appear to have gone far, their tracks showed them exploring nearby bodies of water and returning to the zoo’s perimeter now and again, the zoo said in a news release.

Footage released by the zoo shows an otter leaving the stoop of a building and launching itself into a belly slide on the snow, its forepaws snapping to its side, nose leading the way and back legs thrusting for an extra boost.

It’s the undeniable “bounce, bounce, sliiiiide” of the otter, the zoo said in a Facebook post, and creates one of the more recognizable mammal tracks.

Louie and Ophelia are expected to stay close because otters are territorial creatures, the zoo said, adding their species are native to the area and capable of surviving, with the local ponds and streams offering food and shelter.

Here’s a news report (click “Watch on YouTube”)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is tired and says that it’s time to put Listy to bed:

Hili: Switch off the computer and let’s go to sleep.
A: Just let me check the articles for tomorrow.
In Polish:
Hili: Zgaś ten komputer i idziemy spać.
Ja: Jeszcze tylko sprawdzę artykuły na jutro.

. . . and a photo of the loving Szaron:

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

From John Schuermann:

 

From Jesus of the Day (this is me):

From Things With Faces, a sad cookie:

From Masih’s site: a tweet with a video of Gazans protesting against Hamas:

From Luana; education or indoctrination?

From Malcolm, who adds, “Big ears, too.”

Two from my feed. First, a biker d*g:

Caracal mom is very watchful!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted.

A 43-year-old German engineer was gassed to death upon arrival at Auschwitz (I believe he's holding a slide rule).

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-03-27T10:06:52.750Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, an amphipod hitching a ride on a jellyfish:

This was a jelly sort of day. Featuring a handsome jelly-riding amphipod with a tail like antlers

— Keishu Asada (@cephwarden.bsky.social) 2025-03-25T23:11:36.349Z

An old tweet that chuffed Matthew’s daughter:

An old tweet.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-03-26T09:44:58.872Z

43 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
    If you view religion as necessary for ethics, you’ve reduced us to the ethical level of four-year-olds. “If you follow these commandments you’ll go to heaven, if you don’t you’ll burn in hell” is just a spectacular version of the carrots and sticks with which you raise your children. -Susan Neiman, philosopher and author (b. 27 Mar 1955)

  2. “Two river otters, Louie and Ophelia, weaseled their way out of their Wisconsin zoo enclosure last week during a winter storm”

    I quite enjoy this sentence.

    1. Yes as did I. And for the cherry on top, aren’t Louie and Ophelia the names of the lead characters in the movie “Trading Places”…Ophelia was Jamie Lee Curtis as prostitute….Louie was Dan Ackroyd.

      1. LOL that’s right – looks like a play also (feel free to search). Not sure I understand … maybe goes back further?…

  3. There’s a lot of loose reporting on this Signal affair. First of all, the app is encrypted (not app is “classified”). It was introduced into the government by the Biden Admin, and is held to meet Records requirements if substantive conversations are documented separately. Second, the information shared inadvertently with Goldberg was not critical. Yemen is the size of Wyoming, and saying there’s going to be an airstrike at a certain time–assuming there was, even if the Houthis knew, hardly helps them without a location. Third, Goldberg and The Atlantic have continually dialed back their assertion that “war plans” were shared. Goldberg is the same reporter who pushed the “fine people on both sides” and “losers and suckers” stories, now discredited. Lastly, the people who are up in arms about this and demanding heads should roll, we somehow silent over the botched Afghan Withdrawal, when thirteen soldiers died and unknown numbers of civilians were abandoned. This is nothing but partisan piling on, made more intense by the Dems inability to come up with a serious opposition policy. The only interesting question here is how Goldberg wound up in the chat.

    2. I don’t think the complaint is that the app is classified, more that the information posted on it is classified and that there was a journalist in the conversation. That’s two security fails, at least.

      And the Houthis presumably knew where they were and could move or take other precautions if they had forewarning of an air strike.

      Finally, bringing up the mistakes made by the Biden administration is an example of whataboutery. That Biden made mistakes is of no relevance here.

      1. Is it whataboutery if the point is to show how the media treats the two different examples?

        1. Yes. This is not about the media but about the content of the information that was shared. Stay focused!

    4. Well, if everything is not bad at all, why are Republicans also pressing for investigations?

      Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said if senior officials in the Biden administration had made a similar mistake, Republicans in Congress would be blowing their tops.

      Inadvertently looping a journalist into text chain discussing military planning was “really bad,” Murkowski added. “This is what happens when you don’t really have your act together.”

      Asked whether Republicans should hold hearings, Murkowski said: “Think about what we do if Biden were president and this came out. … We would raise the roof.”

      https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5213861-republican-senators-investigate-signal-disclosure/

    5. You’ve made some good points, but there’s no escaping the facts; Hegsleth (or someone) made a serious mistake; whether out of incompetency or unfamiliarity with the platform, it was a serious breach of security. Yes, heads should roll.

    6. Also in on the chat group was Joe Kent, Trump’s nominee to be director of the National Counterterrorism Center. However, he has not been confirmed by the Senate yet. The level of incompetence and sloppiness is not surprising. These guys are like teenagers who sneaked Dad’s car out and are joyriding.

    7. You’re wrong. The Signal app was previously used for things like scheduling meetings. It was never approved for war planning.

      The information shared WAS critical.

      The Atlantic has dialed nothing back. I’ve been following this story closely.

      Back up your assertions with links.

    8. Oh come on! The Republicans screamed for years about “her emails” then when a Republican uses an insecure platform and includes unauthorized persons in a discussion of pending military operations, you excuse it because you think the information leak might not have harmed our interests (wasn’t “critical”). Seriously?! 🤣

    9. +1 for taking the struggle session. Not me – don’t want have my sublated consciousness revoked.

    10. I might be wrong but I thought I read he confused Goldberg for another Goldberg in the Defense dpt.

      “This Signal message shows that the U.S. secretary of defense texted a group that included a phone number unknown to him—Goldberg’s cellphone..”

    12. The “fine people on both sides” quote was never discredited. Trump said it in front of cameras, ferchrissakes. We all heard it. What kind of fine people march with those openly carrying Nazi flags, again?

      1. Trump said that in response to a question about removing statues – that there were good people on both sides of that debate. He was right. The comment was not about the march, but it has be conflated with it. In most cases, deliberately so, for obvious reasons.

      2. Per https://www.factcheck.org/2020/02/trump-has-condemned-white-supremacists/
        1. Aug. 15, 2017 “Trump: Excuse me, they didn’t put themselves down as neo — and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group – excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down, of to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name. …
        It’s fine, you’re changing history, you’re changing culture, and you had people – and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally – but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats – you had a lot of bad people in the other group too.”
        2. Trump, Aug. 14, 2017: “Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”
        3. After nearly two dozen people were killed on Aug. 3, 2019, in a shooting at a Wal-Mart in El Paso, Trump said: “The shooter in El Paso posted a manifesto online consumed by racist hate. In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy. These sinister ideologies must be defeated. Hate has no place in America. Hatred warps the mind, ravages the heart, and devours the soul. We have asked the FBI to identify all further resources they need to investigate and disrupt hate crimes and domestic terrorism — whatever they need.”

        I’m all in favor of calling Trump whatever you want to call him as I’m a huge fan of exercising our Free Speech rights to rip on our elected officials of any stripe as often as possible, and I am no fan of either his personality or many of his policies, but we need to get the facts right. I bought into the fine people hoax as well based on video clips, so I get it. He actually said “fine people on both sides” but he also said more.
        Personally, I don’t think he’s a racist – I believe that he’s a narcissist who will use people of any race to his own personal advantage.

        1. Now, on the other side, Biden lied when he said Trump hasn’t, “yet once to condemn white supremacy, the neo-Nazis. He hasn’t condemned a darn thing.”

  4. I just read that Kennedy is going to cut 10000 jobs from HHS. This will probably be handled very carefully. We don’t need 10000 workers when vitamin A can pretty much solve the infectious disease problem.

  5. The Harvard course on Palestine has the jargon and verbiage down:

    “this course privileges the long history of Palestine in order to center the continuities and breaks in the region’s past”

    What does privilege history mean? And is center used instead of focus? This hours be signal enough to stay away from this course!!!!!!

    1. What “privileges the long history of Palestine” likely means is that the focus is on the geographic area of Palestine rather than the many empires that controlled that area, and particular cultural history of the geographic region. Which is a legitimate way of organizing a course. What the actual content will turn out to be I have no idea.

      1. I think they mean “Palestine” as the 1960s construct made by the KGB and Stasi, the idea of a “Palestinian State” – whipped up from nothing as an opposition to the west.

        The few Arab cits who lived there before then, mainly Egyptians and Jordanians btw, didn’t have a “State” idea – they were citizens of the Ottoman Empire’s Mediterranean Wilaya (Governate).

        Nation states like that didn’t exist “for eons” like we’re lead to believe: That “Palestine” is some primordial identity when it was MADE UP just before I was born in the early 70s.
        Even the idea of “Lebanon” dates back only a century or so, Syria same.

        Onwards Israeli heroes.

        D.A.
        NYC

    2. But at that same time, that kind of language is a signal to others to make them want to take the course.

      The way language is used as signaling is fascinating.

  6. The NYT already changed the title of the article about MAGA youth to avoid the Betteridege law. It now reads “This Is Why Young People Really Voted for Trump”

  7. Hegseth and the rest could have admitted they made a mistake and that they will put protocols into place so that this kind of breach never happens again. But Nooooo. The principals had to lie about it, goading the Atlantic to release the entire transcript, and creating a firestorm. (It also makes the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg appear a bit sleazy. He withheld some of the detail knowing that he might have a use for it at a later date. He did.) This story could have been put to bed in a day or two, but now it’s a giant food fight. They can’t seem to help themselves.

    As for NPR and PBS, I stopped listening and watching them a few years ago. I just couldn’t stand them any more. They have established donor bases. Cut them loose and let them fund themselves. If there’s a market, they’ll survive on their own without government largesse.

    1. Religion strikes again. One must never acknowledge alleged mistakes in the Sacred Revelations, in this case the words, deeds, and personnel selections of the Anointed One.

      (He’s a very naughty boy.)

  9. Bias isn’t the issue any more. There is simply no reason the taxpayer should fund NPR, PBS and the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) which runs The Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Asia, etc. If you’re pissed about the $500+ million (most of that goes to PBS) taxpayers shell out for NPR and PBS, Trump wants $950 million for USAGM.

  10. Those Hamas protesters everybody is going mental for…. kissy hearts all over the campus courtyard I’m sure… they’re not protesting Hamas. They’re protesting that HAMAS LOST and it immiserated them. Or rather, the evil joos did.

    At every other stage almost all of Gaza was uniformly, at all ages, one hundred percent with “the project”, one of annihilation. No secrets there.

    And they probably know the wider war begins soon (now they’ve lost track of or murdered the civilian hostages, their shield has slipped. Oh bugger!).

    Nobody likes a loser. These protesters aren’t peaceniks who want a compromise. No “new dawn of peace in Gaza” as I’m sure that retard HQ The Guardian or the repulsive New Woke Times will try to sell it to us.

    Let’s keep than in the damn frame shall we?

    Onwards Israeli heroes.

    D.A.
    NYC

    1. Sorry “my frame” is, that not all Palestinians, some 2 million in Gaza, are that dumb they don’t know how they ended up in this shit show of death and destruction.
      Hamas. It’s not hard, unless you think the indoctrination is so complete no whisker of intelligence can squeak out. There is also the enemy within, fear.
      Outcome of this change and I take it as a sign in the right direction remains to be seen.

  11. I’m seeing sad faces on both of the cookies shown in full in the photo. The bottom one looks particularly sad and disturbed.

  12. At first I didn’t understand the sliced bread photo and then I realized it was a sandwich made from the fewest number of slices one could get from a loaf of bread. That’s a fat sandwich, bread-wise. (And where to get a baggie it will fit into?)

  13. Wikipedia (post-Maher) is still very woke. For example, on Wikipedia, you can ‘learn’ that Imane Khelif is female and that no medical information contra wise has ever been published. Neither statement is remotely true. Does that trouble Wikipedia? Of course, not. Does his Wikipedia page mention 5-ARD? Of course, not.

  14. I know this might be an extreme comparison and simply a product of my imagination, but when I see texts with messages like “godspeed to our warriors”, prayers for victory, and god bless, before an imminent attack, I can’t help but associate it with a somewhat milder form of something analogous to Islamism and the jihad.

    1. Surely a lot of that hocus-pocus is performative, but based on past administrations I’m pretty sure there are indeed some raving nutbar Christians in there. Deus vult, anyone?

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