Saturday: Hili dialogue

June 14, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to CaturSaturday, June 14, 2024, and National Cucumber Day, a vegetable best instantiated in the half-sour pickle.  Here’s where you get the best one: The Pickle Guys in NYC (my fave used to be Gus’s Pickles, but that place has gone downhill). I like the garlic half-sours. This is one of several stop on Coyne’s  Famous Lower East Side Tour, which also includes a visit to Yonah Schimmel’s for knishes and, of course, Katz’s Deli for pastrami.  Oh, and Russ and Daughters for a bagel with lox and a schmear.

It’s also National Bath Day, National Bourbon Day (I favor Maker’s Mark for the inexpensive stuff), International Drink Chenin Blanc Day (good advice: it’s an underrated wine), International Feta Day, International Rosé Day, National Strawberry Shortcake Day, and World Blood Donor Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 14 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*A federal judge has ruled that Trump’s calling out the California National Guard to tame the anti-immigration protests in Los Angeles was illegal (article archived here).

A federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked the federal government’s mobilization of the California National Guard to protect immigration agents from protesters in Los Angeles. He ruled that the Trump administration had illegally taken control of the state’s troops and ordered them to return to taking orders from Gov. Gavin Newsom.

In an extraordinary 36-page ruling, Judge Charles Breyer of the Federal District Court in San Francisco severed Mr. Trump’s control of up to 4,000 National Guard troops, hundreds of whom are already deployed in the streets of Los Angeles on his orders. The judge said the administration’s seizure of them violated required procedures in a federal statute.

President Trump’s “actions were illegal — both exceeding the scope of his statutory authority and violating the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution,” Judge Breyer wrote. “He must therefore return control of the California National Guard to the governor of the state of California forthwith.”

The directive would have taken effect at noon Pacific time on Friday. But the Trump administration immediately filed a notice that it was appealing Judge Breyer’s decision. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit agreed to stay the ruling while it reviews the case, temporarily blocking it from taking effect.

The ruling, which accused Mr. Trump of setting a “dangerous precedent for future domestic military activity,” was the latest in a series of judicial rebukes to Mr. Trump’s expansive claims of wartime or emergency powers over matters ranging from deporting people without due process to unilaterally imposing widespread tariffs. Court rulings blocking his actions as likely illegal have enraged the White House.

Judge Breyer’s ruling on the National Guard went beyond what California had asked for. While the state’s lawsuit had contended that Mr. Trump’s mobilization of the National Guard was illegal, its specific motion was for a temporary restraining order limiting military forces under federal control to guarding federal buildings in the city and no other law enforcement tasks.

Judge Breyer blocked Mr. Trump from using California’s National Guard at all. But he also rejected a request by the state and Governor Newsom to restrain a separate group of active-duty Marines, which the administration has also mobilized to counter the protesters.

I guess this means that the National Guard will keep its presence in L.A. until a court lifts the stay. But the Marines aren’t banned, though they don’t seem to be doing anything:

Judge Breyer blocked Mr. Trump from using California’s National Guard at all. But he also rejected a request by the state and Governor Newsom to restrain a separate group of active-duty Marines, which the administration has also mobilized to counter the protesters.

*Over at the Liberal Patriot site, Ruy Teixiera argues, in a piece called “Riot On!: Democrats still don’t get it”, that the demonstrations and rioting in L.A. might have been designed to make the Democrats looks bad (h/t Enrico).

The chaos in Southern California could have been designed in a lab to exploit Democratic weak spots, combining the issues of illegal immigration, crime, and public disorder. Yet their most visible response to the anti-deportation riots in Los Angeles has been to denounce President Trump for sending National Guard troops to quell the riots. The situation, they insist, is under control—or at least it was, until Trump intervened.

This view is not shared by some in charge of actually doing the quelling. As Los Angeles police chief Jim McDonnell admitted at a Sunday evening press conference:

We are overwhelmed…Tonight, we had individuals out there shooting commercial-grade fireworks at our officers…that can kill you…They’ll take backpacks filled with cinder blocks and hammers, break the blocks, and pass the pieces around to throw at officers and cars, and even at other people.

Meanwhile, California governor Gavin Newsom waved the bloody shirt of January 6, arguing that that was when the National Guard was needed and that therefore Trump is a hypocrite to call them in now. The state is now suing to stop the deployment while Newsom exchanges insults with Trump and White House “border czar” Tom Homan.

. . .In lonely contrast to these voices, John Fetterman, the maverick Democrat Senator from Pennsylvania channeled the normie voter reaction to violent street demonstrations:

My party loses the moral high ground when we refuse to condemn setting cars on fire, destroying buildings, and assaulting law enforcement…I unapologetically stand for free speech, peaceful demonstrations, and immigration—but this is not that…This is anarchy and true chaos.

The Democrats’ own goals on the L.A. disorder are the mirror image of the mistakes made by the president himself in recent months. Just as Trump has overread his electoral mandate—going further and faster than many of his voters wanted and pursuing many unpopular policies—now the Democrats have assumed they have an “anti-mandate” to oppose more or less everything the president does.

Democrats do not have to cheer on every ICE raid, but they have to be seen to prioritize law and order and not deny the reality on the ground of violent protests.

Missing from their calculus is how popular many of the president’s policies remain. And that’s especially true on the two issues in question on the streets of L.A.: law and order, and illegal immigration.

I have to admit that if the L.A. cops can’t stop demonstrators from burning cars, shooting dangerous fireworks at The Law, looting, and vandalizing, then some other solution needs to be found. The L.A. police chief himself admits they needed help, and I can’t find myself blaming the crowd’s violence on Trump. (Granted, most demonstrators in LA. and elsewhere seem to be peaceful.) But the National Guard isn’t trained to control demonstrating crowds, and neither are the Marines. I hope they are given some emergency crowd-control advice if they’re used again.

A quote from renegade Democrat John Fetterman:

“My party loses the moral high ground when we refuse to condemn setting cars on fire, destroying buildings, and assaulting law enforcement. … I unapologetically stand for free speech, peaceful demonstrations, and immigration — but this is not that. … This is anarchy and true chaos,”

*We have more details from the Times of Israel about the Jewish state’s attack on Iran yesterday. ]

Decades of Israeli warnings against Iran’s nuclear program and preparations for military action to thwart it culminated early Friday morning with the Jewish state launching a major offensive against the Islamic Republic, striking nuclear sites, military facilities, missile bases and senior leadership.

Jerusalem said it had engaged in a “precise, preemptive strike” against Iran, declaring an imminent threat from its nuclear program and announcing a domestic state of emergency as citizens braced for retaliation. Top officials warned of a potential prolonged conflict, noting that Tehran had the power to inflict significant pain upon Israel.

Multiple waves of Israeli strikes were reported throughout Iran for several hours, starting at around 3 a.m. and into the morning. Over 200 Israeli Air Force aircraft were involved in the opening strikes, and fighter jets dropped over 330 munitions on some 100 targets, the IDF said.

The operation, dubbed “Rising Lion,” was directed at Iran’s nuclear program — the military assessed Iran currently has enough enriched uranium to build 15 nuclear bombs — as well as its ballistic missile factories and its military capabilities, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the military said.

Israel said it had no choice but to attack Iran, adding that it had gathered intelligence that Tehran was approaching “the point of no return” in its pursuit of a nuclear weapon.

“The Iranian regime has been working for decades to obtain a nuclear weapon. The world has attempted every possible diplomatic path to stop it, but the regime has refused to stop,” the military said in a statement.

Confirmed killed in the strikes was Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Commander Hossein Salami. Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency reported that the chief of Iran’s military, Mohammad Bagheri, was also dead. Jerusalem assessed that other top brass and senior nuclear scientists were killed as well.

Blasts were reported in Natanz, the site of a key nuclear facility, as well as in and around the capital Tehran.

All Israeli Air Force pilots and aircrews who participated in the strikes returned to their bases unharmed, the military said late on Friday morning.

The Israeli operation was expected to last days, according to military officials, who added that the IDF was preparing for heavy fire from Iran, but asserted that “at the end of the operation, there will be no nuclear threat” from the Islamic Republic.

. . . Netanyahu and Iranian state TV confirmed that one target of the strikes was the Natanz enrichment facility, one of two underground nuclear sites in the country, the other being at Fordo.

The “Natanz enrichment facility has been hit several times,” state TV reported Friday morning, showing footage of heavy smoke billowing from the site.

Two tweets:

I’m stunned that Israel could build an entire secret drone base in Iran, 1000 km from Israel. They even moved vehicles to Iran, which means that there were a bunch of brave Mossad commandos, who would be instantly killed if they were caught.

I’m still amazed that the operation went off as well as it did, though I am unsure about whether Israel did take out Iran’s ability to make a deliverable nuclear warhead.  And I think Iran realizes its impotence to damage Israel using the weapons it has now. This is going to go on for a long time, and Israel, if it’s to do serious damage, must somehow get bombs to the underground facility at Natanz.

*As always, I’ll steal a few items from the incomparable Nellie Bowles’s weekly news and snark column at the Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: ICE raid on Aisle 4.” Sadly, because nobody can replace Nellie, this column (and next week’s) will be written by her vacation replacement, Will Rahn.  Actually, his column isn’t bad, but I do want Nellie back ASAP.

→ Don’t go to Home Depot like that: At the heart of the protests is a genuinely nasty little change in deportation practices. The Trump admin is doing big, high-profile snatches of immigrants as they’re trying to get work. Here’s a great Wall Street Journal story on the new strategy designed by Trump adviser and Bond villain Stephen Miller: “Agents didn’t need to develop target lists of immigrants suspected of being in the U.S. illegally, a longstanding practice, Miller said. Instead, he directed them to target Home Depot, where day laborers typically gather for hire, or 7-Eleven convenience stores. Miller bet that he and a handful of agents could go out on the streets of Washington, D.C., and arrest 30 people right away.” Super chill bet, Stephen. So ICE agents are going to Home Depots and just grabbing guys who are there trying to get some work that day, i.e., literally the most productive illegal immigrants you could find. It’s the shock and awe method. The panic is the point. The car burners are right on cue.

It’s important to note that a majority of Americans now disapprove of how Trump’s doing this. If the optics of burning cars and waving Mexican flags aren’t great, so too are the bad optics of masked, anonymous ICE guys tackling hardworking day laborers. They ought to do violence like how I do violence: quietly, at my computer, over Slack. With my eyes, when a driver rushes through a yellow light and I’m walking. With my grip on the stroller. Silent. But smoldering. Our current immigration policy feels wild, schizophrenic. On the one hand, we constantly read about illegal immigrants with long records of violent crime getting just one more chance in Berkeley (he killed the last wife, but let’s try one more before prison, okay? It takes two to do a murder), then you have Stephen Miller sending SEAL Team Six to grab a woman as she picks strawberries.

Even Trump is now saying that deportations have gotten out of control and his employees must be stopped.

→ David Hogg is out: It’s done. The Hoggster (Hoggmeister? Skinny-armed legend? Nevermind) is out as DNC vice chair, ousted because his election violated the gender-balance rules, and he pissed everyone off. He says he won’t run for it again. Well done, guys! And DNC chair Ken Martin has said privately that he doesn’t even want to keep doing his own job these days: “I’ll be very honest with you, for the first time in my 100 days on this job. . . the other night I said to myself for the first time, I don’t know if I wanna do this anymore.”

What’s shocking is that it took him 100 days. Can you imagine wanting the job of DNC chair? How psychotic you must be to desire that? That’s like wanting to be the beverage director on the Titanic. To be DNC chair, you need to be on so many psychiatric medications that your mind is like a placid, gentle lake. Your phone rings and it’s James Carville calling you a dumb loser trash traitor creek scum and you need to say, “Okay, James, my love to your wife.” Your assistant position can only, by DNC bylaw, be filled by a blind, autistic, nonbinary Guatemalan. Those are the rules and you ratified them. And what if you can’t find that person? Maybe they don’t exist. So you need to be able to blind a Guatemalan with your own hands, using only your thumbs, and then make them stay on as your assistant. And they’re bad at getting back on email, but how can you blame them since they’re blind? That would be ableist, and would get you fired. Unless?

Here’s a Nate Silver quote given by Andrew Sullivan in his latest column:  “This is Olympic-level DNC’ing. You can’t DNC any harder than this,” – Nate Silver on the woke logic that ousted David Hogg.

→ A little dramatic, Christiane: British CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour recently relayed the fear she felt traveling to Massachusetts to deliver a speech:

When I went to Harvard to give this speech, and it was just a few days ago, last week, I must say I was afraid. I’m a foreigner. I don’t have a green card. I’m not an American citizen. I’m fairly prominent. And I literally prepared to go to America as if I was going to North Korea. I took a burner phone, imagine that. . . . and I had nothing on the burner phone except a few numbers. . . . I was really afraid.

It’s Massachusetts, not Mosul, Christiane! You’re traveling to Harvard and you’re not Jewish—you’ll be fine. What, are you going to run into a cappella kids who demand to see your Social Security card? I actually think what’s happening is that people are freaking themselves out on Bluesky. Just like how X/Twitter is convincing me that the entire world is full of guys who think Hitler is misunderstood, Bluesky is convincing Christiane Amanpour that she needs a burner phone to visit Harvard Yard.

→Elsewhere in Gaza: Four weeks ago, Imad al-Hout, the director of the European Gaza Hospital, told reporters at The New York Times that he believed there were no tunnels under his hospital. This past weekend, Israel announced it had recovered the body of Muhammad Sinwar, Hamas’s military chief, from a tunnel directly under the hospital. A Times article begrudgingly admitted that there does seem to be a Hamas tunnel under the hospital. It goes on to suggest that letting the Hamas chief die by possibly suffocating him in said tunnel might be a war crime, calling up a war crimes expert. But, you see, blowing up the whole tunnel would have blown up the hospital, which sits above it. It’s a catch-22, and the only answer is for Jews in the Middle East to let themselves be killed off (have they considered it, asks the NYT).

Some of the news media who reported the absence of tunnels have yet to correct themselves; they can’t bear to!

*The WSJ reports on how the Trump administration is now trying to control scientific journals as part of its plan to take “progressive” ideology out of journals (and presumably replace it with conservative ideology:

The Trump administration’s attack on scientific institutions has been characteristically audacious: Eliminating the U.S. Agency for International Development, which funded healthcare interventions and research worldwide. Removing all the members of the vaccine advisory panel of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Cutting healthcare research funding by $1.8 billion and overall funding for the National Institutes of Health by $3 billion.

It has also homed in on what might seem like a small-bore opponent: the highly specialized world of science and medical journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association.

In April, the Justice Department sent letters to 15 of the country’s top science and medical journals inquiring about “fraud,” “political bias” and “censorship.” “It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications like CHEST Journal are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates,” read a letter addressed to the journal published by the American College of Chest Physicians. The letters were signed by Ed Martin, then the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia and now President Trump’s pardon attorney.

Neil McCabe, a spokesperson for Martin, said the list of journals came directly from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the letters were a response to legitimate public grievances. “You have a bunch of leftists who are sitting on big pots of money from pharma, and they all entertain each other and publish their friends,” McCabe said. “They were basically publishing lies.”

“I think it was an intimidation tactic,” said Eric Rubin, the editor of NEJM, which responded to the letter with a statement citing its “rigorous peer review” process, editorial independence and First Amendment rights. The Lancet, which did not receive a letter, posted an editorial denouncing the government’s letter as an “obvious ruse to strike fear into journals and impinge on their right to independent editorial oversight.”

Now I’m the first person to admit that quite a few scientific journals, including Nature, Science, and The Lancet, have become ideologically captured, pushing a “progressive” agenda in their op-eds and summary articles. Crikey, I’ve written about this quite a few times.  But we cannot allow the government to impose restrictions on this stuff. For one thing, journals only hurt themselves when they hew to a political line (Nature lost credibility when it endorsed Biden), and, importantly, the meat of journals—the scientific research itself—seems by and large to remain politically neutral. It is  scientists should police their journals, which is customary under academic freedom, but that freedom is violated when journals are bullied by the government to change their political leanings. Plus, of course, the journals are run as for-profit operations.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, a fog has settled on the land and Hili wants a change in the weather:

Andrzej: What are you waiting for?
Hili: For fog to lift.
In Polish:
Ja: Na co czekasz?
Hili: Aż mgła się podniesie.

 

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

From Stephen, and the Sayers quote is correct:

From Jesus of the Day:

From Things with Faces: a mean backpack

Masih reacts to the Israeli attack on Iran:

Not a tweet but a good video. Click below to hear a BBC tribute to Brian Wilson:

From Luana: Greta Thumberg has a sister who sings, and more or less how you’d expect Greta’s sister to sing:

From Malcolm. I can’t embed this tweet, but click on the screenshot to go to the video tweet, as it’s really nice:

One from my feed, and yes, it’s sad (explanation in following tweet):

One I posted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

A Hungarian Jewish girl was gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was seven.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-06-14T09:54:26.336Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. About this first one he asks, “How else can one interpret this statement?”:

Kristi Noem: "We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city."Sen. Alex Padilla is then forcibly removed!

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona.bsky.social) 2025-06-12T18:06:08.896Z

Look at this assortment of weird fish!  The eyes of the last one freak me out:

A lot of really fantastic fish images @mbarinews.bsky.social put in this video! It's on their IG & tiktok pages . #MarineLife

— Lisa (@tuexplorer1.bsky.social) 2025-06-13T04:48:36.425Z

21 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili dialogue”

  1. 100% agree on “… 15 of the country’s top science and medical journals ..”

    How would a limited government be able to pay attention to journals all the time? It won’t, until it doesn’t, and then the ideological subversion will resume.

    PCC(E) and Luana Maroja made transparent the ideological rot in the scientific literature in countless posts here ( and I’d mention Grievance Studies Affair and Alan Sokal were valuable as well in highlighting failures in the peer review of sociological literature ). The government had nothing to do with that.

    There’s a programming mantra[*] :

    “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”

    -Linus Torvalds
    (See The Cathedral and the Bazaar, E. S. Raymond, 1999)

    I think the exact same principle applies – either in its free software, or open source approaches. And yes, there’s a paper which says ideology should be like a virus.

    I think there’s also something to say for this old-fashioned philosophy :

    If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.

    [*] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_law

    2. Yes, I should have been more explicit in what I said. Still, whether a paper gets published or not, even if its arguments are questionable or ideologically slanted, is still up to the journal editors.

      1. It’s crystal clear to me – I’d like to highlight this concise statement :

        “It is scientists [ who ] should police their journals, which is customary under academic freedom, but that freedom is violated when journals are bullied by the government to change their political leanings.”

        🎯

    3. “…Grievance Studies Affair and Alan Sokal were valuable as well in highlighting failures in the peer review of sociological literature…”

      A quick, friendly correction. If you are referring to Sokal’s Social Text article, we might want to note that it was not peer reviewed, and was accepted by the editors without being otherwise refereed. And Social Text was/is a Lit Crit journal, not a sociological journal.

      I think that made a big difference in the Sokal case — you will remember that he announced the hoax just before the article actually appeared, so it was impossible to say how many people would have fooled by the hoax if they had not known beforehand that it was bogus. In my own network, everyone who read the article without knowing that it was a hoax expressed a kind of WTF response to it, leading me to believe that, had it actually been peer-reviewed (and what was a ‘peer’ in that mash-up of physics and Lit Crit?), it might well have been flagged as nonsense and never published.

      1. Very good correction!

        Yeah, someone taped it on a local door, and everyone could congregate for a good laugh – nothing else really mattered!

        … UNTIL NOW.

        [ orchestral stab ]
        /MovieTrailer

  2. Hili at a foggy and misty Vistula; 43 seconds (sound on) of nature meeting art: a lovely start to a Saturday morning. Thanks!

  3. It’s also Flag Day here in the U.S.

    It now seems that President Trump engaged in phony diplomacy as a cover for the Israeli attack. While I don’t object to the attack itself, I think that this cheapens U.S. on the world stage. Is Putin now supposed to believe any denials we make that we were involved in the Ukrainian drone attacks on their airbases? Frankly, it reminds me of the Japanese continuing to negotiate as their fleet steamed towards Hawaii. Shameful.

    Also, the Appeals court has stayed the lower court’s ruling on the National Guard.

  4. In the past, I’ve hired a number of day laborers from Home Depot. I came to have a lot of respect for them because they were invariably honest and incredibly hard working. While they are indeed in the country illegally, and, under the law, should be deported, to characterize illegal immigrants, as a group, as criminals and undesirables bent on destroying the country is just slander.

    If I had a choice, I’d far rather see Trump and his appointees deported. Yes, yes, it would be unconstitutional since they’re all native-born citizens, but so what? The administration itself has made it clear that people only have citizenship rights – or any rights at all – if they like them. And I detest them all.

    Speaking of which, is this an Orwellian administration or what? You have Noem claiming that Trump sent the Army to LA in order to ‘liberate’ the citizens from the people they freely elected. And you have RFK replacing legit scientists with anti-vaxxers and claiming he did it to ‘restore trust’ in vaccines.

    1. No one doubts that illegal aliens are a good deal for employers. That’s why illegal immigration exists: because employers are incentivized to break the law hiring them, and so they come. Does this matter? Are there negative externalities from having illegal workers? At the low end of income, it’s unlikely in a steeply progressive income-tax system that much taxable income is going untaxed off the books. They do pay sales taxes, and property taxes through their landlords. Schooling and social services consumed by illegal workers and their children they would likely not pay for even if they were were legal. The tax system does benefit from income tax on business profits they help to generate. They won’t ever be able to claim Social Security. They miss out on cash benefits that low-income people have to file a tax return in order to get. Would they be eligible for Medicaid? (But then Medicaid is welfare for doctors, not poor people, because the beneficiaries don’t see any cash.)

      The main rationale historically for restricting immigration is to protect jobs for citizen workers, and protect the rents the labour unions extract for representing them. Illegal immigration thwarts those goals, supposedly, although more people means more demand for all work, including union work. It is a commonplace, though, that illegals will do jobs that even legal immigrants won’t do, much less the native-born. Why is this? Would a native rather starve than do day labour? My son did day labour while he was following up his cold calls to get a start in business, any business.

      Of course the answer is that the native-born don’t have to do day labour or farm work because they have grown up with a welfare system that says they don’t need to work unless they feel like it, and don’t need to be motivated if they do work. As long as this perverse disincentive against working exists, I am sympathetic to employers who hire illegal aliens to get the work done, at a price their customers are willing to pay, instead of what it would cost to draw the sloths off the welfare couch.

      I’m sure there must be some downsides to illegal immigration of people who want to work (even for untaxed wages), stay out of trouble, and not collect welfare but I’m having trouble seeing any. The main trouble in Canada is that governments won’t let investors build enough houses for all the people we let in legally, which makes houses unaffordable. That and the medical system can’t produce enough family doctors to provide one to everyone who wants one. But those are hardly the immigrants’ fault.

      1. I think an additional problem in Canada is that the proportion of legal immigrants who come in as students is very high. We issued >500,000 new study permits in 2024, and there were almost 1 million study permit holders in Canada that year, compared to about 500,000 permanent immigrants of all kinds. Those students contribute much less to economic activity, but have legal access to social and medical services, and they need (and deserve) housing. Agree that’s not the fault of those students, they’re just doing what Canada encourages them to do.

      2. Undocumented workers contribute nearly $100 billion dollars in federal, state and local taxes: https://itep.org/undocumented-immigrants-taxes-2024/

        In Colorado, they contribute $436.5 million in taxes. https://coloradofiscal.org/national-study-undocumented-immigrants-contribute-436-5-million-in-colorado-taxes-a-year/

        Undocumented workers pay a higher tax rate than the wealthiest Americans and many corporations. https://americansfortaxfairness.org/undocumented-immigrants-contribute-economy/

        The Trump administration claims that illegal immigrants are a net drain on the government, but it has no data to support that; indeed it’s the opposite. https://taxpolicycenter.org/fiscal-facts/yes-undocumented-immigrants-pay-taxes-and-receive-few-tax-benefits

        1. Thanks.
          The title of the third link is misleading. Illegal aliens pay an effective tax rate of 5% on their income. To the extent that this can be verified, it is more than legal workers of similar income pay and reflects substantial evasion of income tax on unreported income, which the author acknowledges is true. It is irrelevant that the author thinks the corporate tax rate is too low or that he managed to find five wealthy Americans whose tax situation in any one year resulted in a tax rate of 5%. His invocation of the politics of envy and resentment undermines his otherwise respectable arguments.

  6. Many of the Israeli agents working in Iran are usually not Israeli citizens but rather locals who hate the regime and are willing to help wreck it. That said, the emptying out of the Islamosphere of Jews over the past 70 years provides Israel with a wealth of talent – pissed off talent at that – of Jews about their Arab homelands. They provide valuable intel, language skills and essential local knowledge.

    Israeli intelligence is doubly blessed though – by conscription. With nearly all Israeli adults passing through the system – Mossad, Shin Bet et al get a deep talent pool to select from. It is the opposite of DEI.
    (Only Israeli born citizens can officially serve in Mossad directly but if you’re born abroad there are still jobs for you).

    In non-conscription countries the intel services have to wait for people to come to them to select the best. And in Israel working in intelligence is even more prestigious than, say, the CIA or MI5 etc in their countries.

    D.A.
    NYC

    1. I wondered about that, too. Are these people on these dangerous missions Jews originally from the area or are they locals?

      I figure that Jews from those areas would be getting on in years so they were likely using locals.

      1. I get the impression Jews who fled don’t go back for any reason (and as Israelis they’d be under suspicion, lots of problems with that) but rather provide the intel of what goes on there, translations, the last they heard about gossip or the way local gvts operate.

        Hard to know the boots on the ground of hostile nations ratio to local hires and I imagine it depends on the country.
        For operation Opera (Israel’s bombing of Iraq’s Osirak reactor in the 80s) they used Iraqis know how about Saddam’s gvt (though in that one there was very little on the ground work. Ditto Syria’s NK reactor in 2007).

        In some cases there almost has to be at least some real Israelis on hostile soil though – and damn, my hat off to them.

        D.A.
        NYC

  7. Beata Mona Lisa could duet with Yoko Ono. As long as they were in Sweden and I stayed away from Sweden.

  8. The only reason I can think of for posting something about the otherwise entirely uninteresting Beata Mona Lisa would be to discredit her sister Greta. And is this not rather akin to the guilt by association which is occasionally disavowed on this site in other contexts? (By which I mean to express no opinion whatsoever concerning Greta.)

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