Welcome to a Hump Day (“ಹಂಪ್ ಡೇ” in Kannada, a language used in SW India with 44 million speakers): Wednesday, September 10, 2025 and National TV Dinner Day. Do you remember them? Do they still have them? When I was a kid we had a whole set of fold-up metal tables on which to place these aluminum-foil dinners while we ate and watched the tube. Here’s an ad for a Swanson’s TV. dinner from 1963. They were always dreadful. And note the absence of dessert!
It’s also National Port Wine Day (I favor Taylor’s or Graham’s, rounded and sweet), National Suicide Prevention Day, National Quiet Day (in the UK), and a big day in Chicago: National Hot Dog Day. Here’s are two folks, one heavily pierced, searching for Chicago’s best dog (I’d vote for the Vienna Beef Store or Portillo’s). They single out the top five places, but, really, you can get a good dog with all the fixings in many places. But they must use Vienna beef dogs, and remember: NO KETCHUP! I’ve been to several of these, and Superdawg is the best, but it’s pretty far north of here. I like your New York dogs, especially at Papaya King, but there’s nothing in the world like a good Chicago dog dragged through the garden!
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 10 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The WSJ reports that Israel actually attacked a senior Hamas official via an airstrike in Qatar, a country that should have expelled these Hamas bosses a long time ago. Still, this represents a widening of the war against the terrorists:
Israel’s air force carried out a strike on Hamas’s senior political leadership in Doha, Qatar, Israeli officials said, expanding its fight against the militant group as it ramps up the war in the Gaza Strip.
The attack represents a sharp escalation of tactics against the group, whose military leadership has been wiped out in Gaza by Israel, and a potentially risky operation on the soil of a key U.S. partner in the region.
Qatar, which condemned the attack, hosts America’s most important air base in the region as well as much of Hamas’s political leadership. It has been a key mediator in two years of talks to resolve the war in Gaza.
Israel informed the U.S. that the attack was coming, and the U.S. in turn notified Qatar, people familiar with the matter said.
The strike was the latest in a year of brazen attacks that have highlighted Israel’s military and intelligence prowess, along with its appetite for using them. In a relatively short period, Israel has wiped out the leadership of Hamas, Lebanese militia Hezbollah and Iran’s nuclear program; destroyed much of Syria’s military equipment; killed militant leaders and other enemies in Gaza, Tehran, Damascus and Beirut; and simultaneously exploded pagers and walkie-talkies carried by thousands of Hezbollah rank and file.
. . . . Tuesday’s attack targeted Hamas leaders Khalil Al-Hayya and Zaher Jabarin, one of the Israelis and a Qatari official said. Many of Hamas’s top political leaders were gathered in a meeting at the time of the attack, Arab officials said. It wasn’t immediately clear whether anyone was killed in the attack or how it was carried out.
Defense Minister Israel Katz earlier warned Hamas leaders abroad that they would be “annihilated” if the group didn’t lay down its arms.
It’s ironic that at the same time Qatar is protected from potential enemies like Saudi Arabia by a U.S. air base in the country (the UK is also there), they knowingly allow Hamas leaders to live lives of luxury in their country, and even funnel money to Hamas in Gaza. The solution is for the U.S. to tell Qatar to boot the Hamas leaders out (or arrest them) lest the air base be closed or moved. I suspect Qatar might act, as that base is an existential necessity for Qatar but Hamas is not. And Trump wouldn’t do it, as he’d be accused of loving Israel more than the Department of Defense War.
*The AP reports that the U.S. had warning that the strike in Qatar would occur, but it’s not clear whether we participated in any way. Congress was taken off guard, and the Pope is concerned.
Israel alerted the U.S. ahead of time, according to an Israeli official, a White House official and another person familiar with the matter. The White House official would not say if Washington provided Israel with approval for carrying out the strike, but another U.S. official said the American military did not participate.
All four officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.
Pentagon officials referred questions about coordination to the White House. And the White House officials did not respond to request for comment.
It was not clear how much warning was provided or whether the U.S. expressed approval for the strike.
Congressional leaders appeared caught off guard by Israel’s strike.
“I’m not sure about that development,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said when asked about the situation at his weekly press conference Tuesday. “We’ll have to reserve judgement.”
Senate leaders Democrat Chuck Schumer and Republican John Thune made no mention of the strikes in their opening remarks as the chamber convened.
It was unclear if they had been briefed ahead of the action.
. . .“We have to pray a lot and continue to work and try to insist” on an end to the hostilities, Pope Leo XIV told Italy’s RAI television.
“The whole situation is really serious,” Leo said.
Leo and the Vatican’s top diplomats met Israeli President Isaac Herzog last week, when he called for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, the release of all hostages and entry of humanitarian aid to famine-stricken Palestinians there.
The Vatican told Herzog a two-state solution was the “only way out of the war,” according to a Vatican statement at the time.
Il Papa may be good at the rituals of his church, but his call for a two-state solution, and apparent willingness to allow Hamas to continue ruling Gaza (that’s what a ceasefire would do), all show that he’s in over his head in international politics. Is he okay with two states when the Palestinian one will continue firing rockets at Israel and committing terrorist attacks on civilians, like the one in Jerusalem that killed six Israelis on Monday.
*House Democrats released a “birthday book” of greeting to Jeffrey Epstein on his 50th birthday, and in it was this “card”, supposedly drawn, composed, and designed by Donald Trump (see also here).
The book contains a number of other images and messages that recount Epstein’s life and accomplishments over 238 pages. The notes include a graphic description of his conception, photos of Epstein with a partially nude woman and a partially redacted image of Epstein holding an oversize novelty check signed by “DJTRUMP.” A handwritten message below that image reads “Jeffrey showing early talents with money + women! Sells ‘fully depreciated’ [redacted] to Donald Trump for $22,500.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the check.
The drawing is below, which includes the text, “we have certain things in common, Jeffrey”.
From the NYT:
Compiled by his then-girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, the book contained everything from a handwritten letter from Mr. Epstein’s mother, to photos of scantily clad young women, to a cartoon drawing of Mr. Epstein lying in a beach chair getting what appears to be a nude massage from four topless women.
After an introduction by Ms. Maxwell, the book opens innocently with Mr. Epstein’s birth certificate and a letter from his mother, who wrote about his bar mitzvah and his being named one of Cosmopolitan magazine’s most eligible bachelors at the age of 27. There are report cards from his grade school and photos from his childhood.
But as the book continues, the submissions become crude and dark, containing numerous references to Mr. Epstein’s sexual conquests and female genitalia.
Most notably, the book contains the now well-publicized poem to Mr. Epstein that bears Donald J. Trump’s name. It is framed by a silhouette drawing of naked women and includes what appears to be Mr. Trump’s signature. Elsewhere there is an oversized check that purports to be Mr. Epstein jokingly selling a “fully depreciated” woman to Mr. Trump for $22,500.
White House officials denied that Mr. Trump created the image of the naked woman.
But in keeping with the overall salacious tenor of the birthday book, that image and letter blend in.
Well, Epstein was a horndog, no doubt of that. And the articles both recount stuff that is not only salacious, but suggests sex trafficking. But there is nothing criminal that I see in these notes, just stuff that concentrates on sex as the focus of Epstein’s life. As for Trump’s drawing and signature, I think that he at least signed it, even if someone else produced it. I don’t believe his denials. But again, after Trump’s “grab the by the [REDACTED]” comment, this is unlikely to drive away his followers.
*The Harvard Crimson reports that FlyBase, a repository of extremely valuable genetic and other data on the world’s most-used model organism, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, has lost funding in the Trumpian cuts, and has had to lay off employees (h/t Bat).
When Harvard Medical School professor Dragana Rogulja wanted to learn how sleep deprivation affects the human body, she began by studying specimens from another species entirely: Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly.
Rogulja, who studies what happens to the brain during sleep, found that sleep deprivation leads to damage in fly intestines, a phenomenon she also discovered in mice. She eventually hopes to extend her research to understand why humans and other animals need to sleep.
But Rogulja’s lab — and thousands of others worldwide — could soon find themselves without access to the database that underpins their research. Called FlyBase, the free online repository includes a complete map of the Drosophila melanogaster genome, updated continuously, and lets researchers instantly access more than 87,000 papers on Drosophila, stretching back to the 17th century. If it’s an academic cliche that science stands on the shoulders of giants, there is perhaps no clearer embodiment of the adage than FlyBase.
Throughout its more than 30-year existence, FlyBase has relied on federal grants worth millions of dollars annually, the latest of which was cut in May by the Trump administration. The grant, awarded by the National Institutes of Health and worth $2 million a year, was a casualty of the White House’s multibillion dollar freeze on Harvard’s federal funding.
Since then, the scientists who maintain the database have not been able to replace the funding — and FlyBase is paying the price. Eight Harvard employees who help maintain the database were laid off in August, after the Faculty of Arts and Sciences denied a request from the researchers for more bridge funding to maintain the program.
When FlyBase lost its grant in the spring, the FAS provided Harvard Medical School professor Norbert Perrimon, the project’s principal investigator, funding to continue running the database.
But that bridge funding will run out in October. And after Perrimon asked this summer for more funding from an FAS initiative designed to fund research by FAS affiliates whose grants were canceled, the school denied his request on Aug. 8.
The denial means that four full-time and four part-time Harvard employees have been laid off. Two have already departed, one will leave sometime in the middle of this month, and another five will leave by mid-October.
The departures jeopardize the future of the critical database, which is used worldwide to study issues ranging from cancer to the science of gene expression, and show the limits of Harvard’s capacity to continue funding research once covered by federal grants.
I used FlyBase all the time. This is not a frivolous enterprise, but one that’s deeply important for pure science in all kinds of fields. This is just another example of science and scientists being made to suffer from Trump’s blackmail. This appeal is now on the FlyBase webpage, which you might want to peruse:
*earth.com reports on a recent and very cool innovation, a fabric that not only keeps your body cooler, but also is likely to do the same for buildings and cars (h/t Peggy).
Heat keeps pushing people indoors, raising electric bills and straining power grids. A new fabric created for cooling suggests there is another way to stay comfortable without flipping on the air conditioner.
Researchers at the University of Chicago report a fabric that stayed about 4.1 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than a sports cooling textile, and about 16 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than silk under full sun. It’s designed to work on both buildings and cars.
Po Chun Hsu of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago led the work.
. . . The team built a layered textile that balances these optical tricks.
A top layer scatters sunlight strongly, a middle layer with silver nanowires reflects unwanted infrared from hot pavement and walls, and an inner wool layer pulls body heat into the fabric for release.
The textile reflects 97 percent of sunlight and emits strongly in the mid infrared window, which is why it stays cooler even next to hot urban surfaces.
The group tested samples under clear skies in Arizona and around Chicago. They tracked temperature with sensors, minimized stray heat, and compared against common clothing materials.
The results line up with the physics. The textile beat a broadband emitter used in sports gear by about 4.1 degrees Fahrenheit and beat silk by about 16 degrees Fahrenheit at midday, with additional on-skin tests confirming cooler readings on a volunteer’s arm.
Clothing is an obvious first step, but the team is also developing thicker sheets for vehicles and buildings. That approach could cut air conditioner run time on hot afternoons by passively blocking heat gain.
Here’s the original paper from Science, which you can click on to read for free:
The editor’s summary:
Textiles can be designed to push thermal radiation into outer space through passive radiative cooling. However, these materials also absorb thermal radiation in places where heat islands exist, including the urban environment. Wu et al. developed a textile with a top layer that selectively emits through the atmospheric infrared radiation window, a silver nanowire layer to reject incoming thermal radiation, and a wool bottom layer to move heat from the skin to the middle layer. The result is a textile that passively cools even when heat islands are present while also having good durability, mechanical properties, and washability. —Brent Grocholski
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s on her back, and I think I know what the “outbreak” is.
Andrzej: What are you doing?
Hili: Watching the outbreak spread through the global village.
In Polish
Ja: Co ty robisz?
Hili: Oglądam zarazę w globalnej wiosce.
*******************
From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:
From Now That’s Wild:
From Things With Faces:
Masih is still AWOL. I am afraid I may have to stop looking at her “X” feed. But we have a substitute.
Here’s the post in which Malcolm Gladwell admits he lied about his feelings about trans-identified men participating in women’s sports. He was opposed to it, but lied so he could look “virtuous”. I put it up to give context for the tweet after it:
Malcolm Gladwell admits he lied about trans athletes because telling the truth destroyed careers. @nypost https://t.co/OMwrGnQvie
— Douglas Murray (@DouglasKMurray) September 5, 2025
At first I thought the sentiment of the article in this post (and of JKR in another tweet) was ungracious, but the article has a point:
🎯 by @glosswitch https://t.co/xrAOfrKYGY
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) September 9, 2025
From Barry, who says, “But why would they place the fake caterpillars right next to the lizard after pulling them out?” His email was headed “Poor little guy, but it looks like he’s going to be okay.” I hope so!
Lizard eats a fake caterpillar, vet pulls it outpic.twitter.com/8Zv0m7fiPm
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) September 9, 2025
Happy #Caturdaypic.twitter.com/lgj9KNuIRJ
— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) August 23, 2025
Two from my feed. Is this first one for real?
— Cat is Amazing 🐈⬛ (@AMAZINGCATSS) September 8, 2025
A gorgeous landing:
Full flaps, gear down, flare. Butter landing. pic.twitter.com/sG1IgHyiVD
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) September 8, 2025
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Belgian Jewish boy was gassed immediately upon arriving at Auschwitz. He was only five; had he lived he woiuld be 88 today.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-09-10T10:48:10.069Z
Two posts from Doktor Cobb. Amazing photos and video:
Just woke up from a social media pause and the first thing I see is an incredible footage of a sperm whale casually cruising with a giant squid in its mouth ??🦑 🌊 🌿
— Jean-François Cudennec (@jfcudennec.bsky.social) 2025-09-08T08:03:44.584Z
Just wow 😵💫 #MolluscMonday
— Jean-François Cudennec (@jfcudennec.bsky.social) 2025-09-08T10:38:15.894Z
Perhaps an announcement of an amnesty for apostates of transgender ideology might encourage more to publicly acknowledge their change of heart or perhaps new found courage. While I completely agree with J K Rowling about Malcolm Gladwell, it might be more beneficial to deliver a light slap on the hand, then welcome him back into the fold.
Seems reasonable. Otherwise, they will decline to admit guilt for fear of an additional group indulging in name-calling.
I haven’t thought of it that way, but maybe so. There is likely a sizable number of closeted people who can swell the ranks if they feel they can come out.
Seems familiar, somehow….
Maybe. Many folks like Gladwell have a close friend or relative with a “trans” child. Admitting this error risks torching those relationships. I think it’s why so many folks just don’t say anything (at least out loud and in public) when confronted with the obvious: that these are mental illnesses, transmitted by social contagion, facilitated by anxiety, homophobia, abuse, and autism.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbjGnvzmXQs
Min 8:00: “Malcolm Gladwell . . . the little punk, the girl, the little girly girl.”
Ladies, by all means, at all costs, do not be (born) a “little punk, a girl, a little girly girl” if you wish to avoid being the object of name-calling. It is apparently better to be born a male. (Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “girly man” notwithstanding.) And don’t think you can get by with identifying as a man in order to avoid the name-calling.
A truth-and-reconciliation process requires at minimum some contrition from the offenders that they behaved badly at the time, not just excuses. The Devil made them do it?
From The Critic article:
“I had no idea how many self-styled “good” people will support bad things on the basis that other, less important people can take all the hits.”
I do agree that we should be welcoming to the likes of Gladwell. However, it seems to me he has lost all credibility and can never win it back. After all, how can we be certain that he is honest about his opinions now, rather than having performed a new analysis of the costs and benefits of publicly holding the view that transwomen belongs in women sports?
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos. -Stephen Jay Gould, paleontologist, biologist, author (10 Sep 1941-2002)
I will never be able to see Trump’s signature on an executive order without thinking Eeeew!
Merkin to the core, he is!
LOL! That’s the best double entendre I’ve seen in a long time. Brilliant!
βPer
Glad to see that Israel is bringing the fight to the terrorist bosses in Qatar. Good for Israel to dismantle Hamas as completely as possible. (And I agree that the pope ought to stick to sacraments and stop pontificating on topics about which he knows nothing.)
am yisrael chai
Sadly, pontificating is a key part of the job description.
It is now being reported that Trump directed Mideast Envoy Steve Witkoff to warn Qatar about the pending strike.
But a complaint from an official in Qatar was that the warning came pretty much when the explosions were going off.
So here’s the worlds’ smallest violin for my feelings about that. 🎻
By the time I was eating TV dinners, the Swanson ones had a desert. I used to love the fried chicken dinners, especially if the apple cobbler(?) bubbled over and got on the chicken.
Yes. I remember the tablespoon of apple cobbler style dessert in its corner pocket of the tray. Seem to recall it got treated separately in requiring uncovering at some point in the cooking/heating procedure. Rest of meal was turkey breast with a bit of stuffing, mashed potatoes, and green peas. Kinda sat between mom’s homecooking and going out to the local restaurant. Prepared me for 1960’s college cafeteria food.
Yes! The apple cobbler is missing from Jerry’s dinner. Yum.
I had a TVD a few years ago, where the instructions included “pierce overwrap to allow steam to escape”, and thought Pierce Overwrap would be a great film character name (maybe partly because the overwrap was clingfilm).
Thanks for posting that article liked by JKR. It’s spot on. I don’t necessarily think we should pile on to everyone who (finally) acknowledges the truth about trans insanity, but they sure don’t deserve praise. (By the way, lots of economists out there, including my husband, are quite enjoying seeing Gladwell raked over the coals now. That’s because they’ve known for years that he stole the idea of the tipping point from another economist and didn’t acknowledge it.)
I don’t know anything about Malcolm Gladwell, but I guess he is important? Anyway, I liked the comment from JKR the other day that he was a weathervane, pointing in the direction of current winds.
I thoroughly enjoyed watching Douglas Murray completely eviscerate Gladwell in a Munk Debate some years ago. Apparently Gladwell had some sort of breakdown afterward.
Re: National Hot Dog Day, reminded me that when I was a student at the University of Chicago, there was always a hot dog/Polish sausage food truck parked outside of Regenstein on 57th St. that was a regular lunch stop for all of us grad students. I don’t know if it is functioning 50 years later, but I still remember it fondly.
I was also reminded (can you tell I am now an elder?) of a conference I attended in Zagreb in the former Yugoslavia, when all us conference participants came down to breakfast at the conference hotel to find a lavish buffet that included a large tray of hot dogs. I asked a friendly server about the hot dogs and he said that they had heard that Americans liked sausage with breakfast, so they cooked up and set out these sausages! I guess the main difference is that “sausage” usually has sage in it — thus the name — but otherwise I suppose there isn’t much difference….
Big incursion of Russian drones over Polish airspace yesterday after press time, some of which may have come from Belarus.
Don’t want to start a fight here… but Chicago people boasting about “all the food we own”… to a NYer, as I munch on my bagel, Hebrew National hotdog, popularization of sushi, and all the other stuff we actually invented or started here in the Big Apple… is adorable.
Yes… that’s a lovely Deep Dish Pizza, my Chicago friends, we’ll take a picture of it and put it right here on the fridge….
with love,
D.A.
NYC
…a weathervane to know which way the wind blows…I’ve been following this M.G. thing on a couple of substacks. JKR and Victoria Smith are right. I recall her JKR’s post within the last year, predicting that people would be acting like/proclaming they never believed this madness. So this all seems spot-on. But it’s also good to flip people, muster as much support as quickly as possible to limit the trans-damage to children, science, politics.
I enjoyed the videos, especially the Butter Landing. Do birds fly just for the fun of it?
I’m always charmed by cats. The Auschwitz Memorial and related posts stay with me — wrenching.
“The Auschwitz Memorial…stay with me…”
Same, Tom, same.
Swanson TV dinners? Of course I remember them! They were a huge treat, especially the delicious desserts. One was a small, sweet, cakey thing that tasted like apple. The one in your picture is missing the dessert! We had them on what we called “TV trays,” those folding trays you mention. TV dinners were way better than ordinary, mother-made dinners. And the gravy! OMG! Just a minute. I need to run to the store… .
I’m back. It’s hard to be sure if the U.S. administration was aware of the IDF attack in Doha. My guess is yes. Since the U.S. has a base in Qatar, attacking Doha without prior U.S. knowledge would have led to the U.S. scrambling jets when they detected the attack. So, the need for deconfliction was critical. That said, the Trump administration and the Israeli official stance is that the attack was Israel’s decision and Israel’s alone. That doesn’t mean that the U.S. was unaware, however. They were at least aware just before the attack took place, simply to ensure that the U.S didn’t attack the IDF jets— which would have been a disaster.
I’m sure we informed the Qataris ahead of time, Norman. This is a continual problem. We didn’t whack Bin Laden in 1998-ish b/c he was falcon-ing with an Emirati prince in Afghanistan. Israelis are less diplomatic, thank goodness.
Still… we need our allies and Qatar is one, so best tread gingerly. Qatar has a lot of places by the short and curlies: Turkey has a base there, making GCC’s intention for an invasion a decade ago a no-go, along with our Al Obeid Base.
Time to rid the world of all of Hamas, regardless of which nook or cranny it scuttles into.
D.A.
NYC
I grew up in a family of eight children. Each birthday, the birthday kid was allowed to have a TV dinner as a special treat. The rest of us would look on enviously, as the b-day boy or girl ate his Swanson dinner, and we had to eat our home cooked meal. How funny that seems to me now, that a store-bought, tasteless, tray of food was preferable to Mom’s home cooking.
Along that same line, almost every Sunday my maternal grandparents came for dinner. Grandma always brought store-bought cookies or a pie. We kids would have that for dessert and the adults would have Mom’s home made pie. We thought we were getting the better deal. Lol.
The Victoria Smith article was very good, thanks. The viciousness of gender ideologists has caused a lot of people to stay quiet, there are thousands more like Gladwell.
Smith makes a lot of very good points. If Gladwell et al had spoken up for common sense right away then we wouldn’t be destroying women’s rights and mutilating children, but their silence, and refusal to stand up for basic science, has ruined a lot of lives. I’m glad some are finally speaking up, but I resent that they expect praise now, when some people have been on the barricades for a long time.
Graham has named many well known people who have publicly attacked him for standing for women and children. That includes the team at Hat Trick Productions that is sitting on the Father Ted musical and refusing to allow it to go ahead while Graham is involved in it. It had already had some rehearsals, and is certain to be a huge success. It was to be Graham’s retirement fund. I hope Jimmy Mulville et al are high on the list for repercussions when the tide turns.
Mulville is a multimillionaire and owns Hat Trick, which produces many famous UK & US TV shows. He could well afford to stand up to the mob.
Re the Douglas Murray piece, a lot of comments have been made about Graham being met by police officers with guns. These are airport police and carrying a gun is part of their normal duty, so the weapons aren’t particularly significant.
But surely having 5 such officers arrest him was overkill intended to convey a message.
Definitely.
My point is that many articles refer to ‘armed police’ as if police felt he was dangerous and they needed to point guns at him to control him. That wasn’t the case as the airport police carry guns all the time, so they didn’t specifically decide to carry guns for the arrest.
But they did decide to intimidate him by sending 5 people. They are supposed to assess the risk when arresting someone and, as Graham has no history of violence, 2 cops would have been sufficient.
Retweeted to my followers:
“Go about half way down to learn about the fruit fly funding cut. Don’t mock if you don’t understand. It is a Big Deal for medical funding. These assholes in Trumpland shouldn’t be defunding stuff they evidently don’t understand.” – link to today’s WEIT.
The irony is fruit fly misunderstaners – the Trump admin and … famously… Sarah Palin some years ago… don’t realize how important it actually is.
“Clowns to the left, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with [WEIT].”
D.A.
NYC
What is also important is that Harvard enforce the civil rights of its Jewish students, eliminate identity-based preferences for admissions and hiring, and end the influence of the DEI bureaucracy through the university, as the federal government has rightly demanded.
Federal funding, which unfortunately disproportionately affects the science departments, is the only leverage the federal government has to bring these changes about. Columbia, Brown, and Penn have all entered into agreements with the federal government and have had their grants restored. In contrast, Harvard sued the government, a largely performative act that they are unlikely to win (at least according to Alan Dershowitz).
If Harvard owns up to its history of flagrantly violating US civil rights laws and agrees to make concrete changes, they’ll get their funding back too.
Unless Netanyahu is dissembling in an extraordinarily subtle way, I think we can conclude that Israel acted alone in Qatar.
https://x.com/netanyahu/status/1965417269837602943
Acted alone but the Emir of Qatar, the Saudis and Trump all knew of and approved this operation. Qatar itself had no diplomatic way of ridding itself of these lowlifes without drawing the ire of Muslims everywhere. Nothing happens in the region without a nod from the Saudis either. And, with a US base in Qatar, there’s no way Israel could have flown 15 planes so close without Trump’s permission.
Yet, after the fact, everyone is denying that they knew anything about it. This is plausible deniability. And it’s all totally fine. Except for one thing: if the airstrike didn’t kill the intended targets and they were somehow tipped off, only the Qataris will be to blame.
Retweeted to my followers:
“Go about half way down to learn about the fruit fly funding cut. Don’t mock if you don’t understand. It is a Big Deal for medical funding. These assholes in Trumpland shouldn’t be defunding stuff they evidently don’t understand.” – link to today’s WEIT.
The irony is fruit fly misunderstaners – the Trump admin and … famously… Sarah Palin some years ago… don’t realize how important it actually is.
“Clowns to the left, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with [WEIT].”
D.A.
NYC