Welcome to Friday, September 26, 2025, and National Dumpling Day. I’m told by One Who Knows that the place in Taipei shown in the video blow is the best dumpling place in the world. (Taipei is widely acknowledged to be the world’s Dumpling Epicenter). I love them, but when I went to a highly reputed dim sum place in Chicago with a person from Taipei, and I loved the dumplings, I was told that they were nothing compared to the ones in Taipei! So now I have to go to Taiwan.
It’s also National Bakery Day, National Better Breakfast Day (pie is a better breakfast), Native American Day, German Butterbrot Day (arrant cultural appropriation), National Key Lime Pie Day (when you buy or order one, make sure it’s made with real Key limes rather than the less tasty Persian limes), and Lumberjack Day. Which reminds me. . .
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 26 Wikipedia page (note that the page needs more citations).
Da Nooz:
*Trump is going after his enemies one by one: he must have had a “Little List” of targets for his second term. Yesterday he went after a big one: James Comey, the former FBI director under whose aegis the agency investigated the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia in the 2016 election. After Trump fired Comey in 2017, the director released memos of private conversations he’d had with Trump, showing the Orange man pressuring hm to drop investigations against others. This is the background ffor yesterday’s indictment of Comey, since Trump perceives Comey as an enemy and in fact has called the ex-director a “sick man”:
A federal grand jury on Thursday indicted James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, a culmination of President Trump’s relentless demand for retribution after the bureau investigated his 2016 presidential campaign over possible ties to Russia.
Mr. Comey was indicted on one count of making a false statement and one count of obstruction of a congressional proceeding in connection with his testimony before a Senate committee in September 2020.
The indictment, filed in Alexandria, Va., came over the objection of career prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia who found insufficient evidence to support charges but were overruled by Lindsey Halligan, a Trump loyalist handpicked by the president to run the office a few days ago.
It represents the most significant legal step yet by the Trump administration to harry, punish and humiliate a former official the president identified as an enemy, at the expense of procedural safeguards intended to shield the Justice Department from political interference and personal vendettas.
The bare-bones, two-page indictment was signed only by Ms. Halligan, a former defense lawyer for Mr. Trump who personally presented the case to the jury, despite her lack of any previous prosecutorial experience. Typically such filings are also endorsed by career prosecutors who have gathered the evidence in the case.
Court records indicate that Ms. Halligan also tried to get the grand jury to indict Mr. Comey on a second false statement charge, and that it was rejected.
Here are the charges ag, which hinge on whether or not Comey had authorized someone to be an “anonymous news source” for the FBI:
This is trivial, though if it’s illegal Comey should be punished. But going after something like this clearly shows that a.) Trump is behind it, and b.) such charges would not normally be brought. They reflect Trump’s strong retributive streak.
Halligan is a neophyte, and no doubt picked simply because she agreed to prosecute Comey. I predict this will come to nothing, despite the indictment by grand jury.
*Trump has announced that he’ll block any plans Israel has to annex the West Bank, presumably through blocking U.S. sale of weapons to Israel if Netanyahu allows the settlements to expand. The WSJ also reveals Trump’s plans for a postwar Gaza.
President Trump said he would block Israel from annexing the West Bank, issuing a new ultimatum to head off a move that other Western and Middle Eastern powers warned could further inflame regional tensions and jeopardize Israel’s normalized ties with some Arab nations.
“I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank. I will not allow it. It’s not going to happen,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday, publicly reiterating a pledge he made to Arab leaders privately earlier this week.
Trump’s comments mark a rare escalation of public pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he expands Israel’s war in Gaza against Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group, and while Western countries such as France have said they would recognize a Palestinian state. Netanyahu’s government has approved controversial projects in recent months to expand Israeli settlements in the West Bank on tracts of land that Palestinians seek for statehood.
A spokesman for the Israeli prime minister’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
And here are Trump’s plans for The Day After:
The White House has proposed a postwar plan that would include former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair serving as interim administrator of Gaza and a potential Arab-led security force, according to Arab officials and a senior U.S. official familiar with the plans. Blair, the officials added, would oversee a body known as the Gaza International Transitional Authority, or GITA, which could temporarily control the enclave after the conflict ends.
The U.S. official said that Netanyahu isn’t wholly sold on the plan, as questions remain about how to staff a potential Arab-led security force and whether GITA’s authorities could interfere with Israel’s Gaza policy.
A White House spokeswoman said regarding a Blair role in postwar Gaza: “A variety of proposals are being considered—but this will not be relevant unless Hamas releases every single hostage, living and deceased, and surrenders.”
I don’t have much of a dog in the West Bank, except that it seems unwise to increase settlements by Israelis, violating the Oslo Accords, but the peace plan is better. And Tony Blair has considerable diplomatic background. But an Arab-led security force? Will any Arab state be willing to take on this task? (I leave out the terrorist-supporting Qatar). What would be in it for them save fighting and heartache? But it’s reassuring that Trump still demands the release of all the hostages and the surrender of Hamas.
*I find Bret Stephens, though described as a “neoconservative” (he detests Trump), a much clearer thinker and writer than mushy NYT columnists like David Brooks or, Ceiling Cat forbid, Tom Friedman. Stephens’s columns on the Hamas/Gaza war are the best in the NYT op-ed section, and today’s is on the hypocrisy of the Left’s views on free speech, which until recently have evinced some tendency for suppression, but suddenly, with the murder of Charlie Kirk and the cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel (who’s back again), the Left is, says Stephens, all “we love free speech” again. Click to read, or find the piece archived here:
An excerpt:
Because there’s a silver lining for most things in life, maybe there’s also one for ABC’s craven (if brief) suspension, under thuggish government pressure, of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show. To wit: Now the left is once again all but unanimous in wanting to defend free speech.
That hasn’t always been the case in recent years.
It wasn’t the case when, a day before Kimmel’s suspension, Amy Klobuchar called on Congress to prevent violence like Charlie Kirk’s murder by cracking down on speech online. “I’m not for censorship, but I do think that more has to be done online,” said the Democratic senator from Minnesota. Sentences that begin “I’m not for censorship, but …” are usually calls for censorship.
It wasn’t the case this spring when Democrats in the Colorado legislature sought to criminalize some speech that “misgendered” or “deadnamed” transgender children, including custody threats to parents who refused to use their child’s preferred pronouns.
It wasn’t the case in 2023 when a RealClear Opinion Research poll found that three-fourths of Democrats believe government has a responsibility to limit “hateful” or inaccurate social media posts, as compared with roughly half of Republicans.
It wasn’t the case when, in the summer of 2021, MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski asked, with clear relish, whether social media companies shouldn’t be “open to lawsuits” for publishing what she and the government deemed to be “misinformation” on the Covid vaccines.
What particularly galls me is when writers, literary types, or publishers, who should know better, are in favor of censorship. Young adult fiction, for example, is a cesspool of boring and woke books, made anodyne of “sensitivity readers”:
It wasn’t the case among the stars of the liberal literary establishment, including Sally Rooney and Arundhati Roy, who demanded boycotts of Israeli publications, publishers and institutions on account of their presumptive complicity in oppressing Palestinians.
It wasn’t the case, either, when another batch of liberal writers, including the cartoonist Garry Trudeau and the novelist Peter Carey, rebuked the PEN American Center for its decision to give an award to Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical newspaper that lost 12 of its staff members in a 2015 terrorist attack.
The revolt by PEN America members was particularly heinous. More:
It wasn’t the case when the New York publishing industry began capitulating to social-media demands to cancel or torpedo books whose authors had run afoul of one left-wing orthodoxy or another: Jeanine Cummins and “American Dirt,” Richard North Patterson and “Trial,” Dr. Seuss and “If I Ran the Zoo” and several other titles.
And so he ends reminding the Left (and all of us) of a lesson we should have learned a long time ago, winding up wishing us a Happy New Year in Hebrew (it was Rosh Hashanah):
It’s a cliché, but can’t be said enough, that speech is genuinely free only when it’s speech we like the least from those we dislike the most. Rosa Luxemburg put it well: “Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.”
Shana tova.
At least the NYT let him use the last two words!
*The Guardian, of all places, reports substantial participation of biological men in women’s track and field competitions since 2020 (h/t Ginger K.)
Between 50 and 60 athletes who went through male puberty have been finalists in the female category in global and continental track and field championships since 2000, according to a senior World Athletics official.
World Athletics has introduced SRY screening, a gene test that uses a cheek swab to assess if someone is biologically male or female, for the world championships in Tokyo.
In a presentation to a scientific panel in the Japanese capital on Friday, Dr Stéphane Bermon, head of health and science at World Athletics, outlined why the sport’s governing body believes such screens are necessary as he presented data collected over the past 25 years. He said it showed that athletes with differences of sex development (DSD), who have a 46 XY karyotype with male testes but were reported female at birth, were significantly “over-represented” in major finals and that it “compromises the integrity of the female competitions”.
It’s easy to detect an XY karyotype, which is highly but not perfectly correlated with male “sex”, as is by the presence of an active Y-linked SRY gene, which turns on male function. Using both chromosomes and DNA analysis is a pretty good way to to detect biological males, though presence of testes (internal or external) would make this airtight (I’m not sure how they detect them if they’re internal). More:
“Everyone is watching World Athletics and we are leading in this area,” Bermon said before telling his audience that there were “approximately 50-60 cases of DSD in athletics”.
In total between 2000 and 2023, Bermon said there had been 135 DSD finalists in elite international events, given some of the 50 to 60 athletes competed in more than one final. He also showed a slide that said that DSD cases are 151.9 times more likely than would be expected given the number of DSD individuals in the general population.
The numbers, which were derived by anti-doping tests that revealed high testosterone levels – and arguably therefore may not capture every case – are significantly higher than many in the sport had expected.
There have been several high-profile cases of athletes with a DSD athlete winning global medals, most prominently the South African Caster Semenya, who won women’s 800m Olympic gold at the 2012 and 2016 Games. Christine Mboma also made significant headlines four years ago when the Namibian claimed a silver medal in the women’s 200m at the Tokyo 2020 Games.
Neither athlete has competed at elite level since World Athletics introduced rules requiring DSD individuals to suppress their testosterone levels.
Semenya and Mboma were males, both having elevated levels of testosterone (which Semenya refused to reduce) and thus had DSDs. I doubt they’ll take back their medals, but the new rules are a vast improvement over what went before.
*We’re into the quarter finals of Fat Bear Week, in which Alaskan brown bears (“grizzlies”) compete to see who can pack on the most weight before winter hibernation. And there are two matchups today in which you can vote (go here to see all the bears and the results so far). Here are today’s two contests. The winner of the first gets the bear into the final competition, while the winner of the second goes into the semifinals against a yet-to-be determined bear.
The page describing the bear competitors is here. Below is bear 909 (left) versus 128, the famous Grazer (right), who won the championship in the last two years. (She’s the first mother bear ever to win.)
The site shows the wrong photos for today’s competition, between bears 856 and 910, so I’ll put their real photos below (the before-and-after shots show the weight gain). Bear 856 looks like a ringer:
Be sure to vote twice today and also on Tuesday for the finals. The winner gets no prize save a long, safe hibernation.
The finals are on September 30, and you can see the bears below live (so long as it’s daylight in Alaska; at other times they show reruns):
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is engaged in the Remembrance of Times Past.
Me: Are you asleep?
Hili: I’m thinking about the past.
In Polish:
Ja: Śpisz?
Hili: Nie, jestem w czasie przeszłym.
*******************
From Give Me a Sign:
From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy (be sure to look at the bottom):
From Cats That Have Had Enough of Your Shit:
From Masih: hijabis at age 7. Oy!
Heartbreaking to watch. Western media can watch Pezeshkian at the UN and call him “reformist.” But this is what reform looks like in Iran: little girls forced into hijab at age 7 just to go to school.
It’s The Handmaid’s Tale in real life. It’s gender apartheid. A regime that… pic.twitter.com/drb8DjYbOS— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) September 25, 2025
From Luana, a culture clash in New Zealand. But I’m surprised that Māori declare their country a “Christian nation”:
In New Zealand, native Māori are protesting against Islamic immigration, tearing down a jihadist flag while performing the traditional Haka.
“New Zealand is a Christian nation!
The jihadists are not welcome here!” pic.twitter.com/aPLz0wY7Nx— Imtiaz Mahmood (@ImtiazMadmood) September 23, 2025
From Bryan, a clever siphon, though I’m not sure when you would use this:
Physics trick to remove water pic.twitter.com/0XLZnF8Oh4
— Earn Knowledge (@earnknowledgee) September 24, 2025
From Barry: the classic battle of the titans. Whale wins!
I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)
— Rebecca R Helm (@rebeccarhelm.bsky.social) 2025-09-24T20:30:21.505Z
From Malcolm: a man who is doing good:
Francisco Oliveira is a hair prosthesis specialist. He creates and styles hair additions that go much beyond a simple wig, especially for kids who experienced accidents or serious illness.
[📹 franciscoprotesecapilar]pic.twitter.com/FGVnPysAoY
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) September 2, 2025
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Italian Jewish girl was gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was six years old, and would be 88 today had she lived.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-09-26T11:08:48.582Z
Three from Dr. Cobb. Of this first one (click embedded post for link), he says “Sacré bleu!”:
I don’t get this “illusion”. All the discs look purple to me!
A nice shift in perceived colour between central and peripheral vision. The fixated disc looks purple while the others look blue. The effect presumably comes from the absence of S-cones in the fovea.From Hinnerk Schulz-Hildebrandt:arxiv.org/pdf/2509.115…
— Pascal Mamassian (@mamassian.bsky.social) 2025-09-24T10:16:30.695Z
Finally, Matthew humbly tenders his new Crick bio, which is THE definitive bio of a very smart man. It will soon be out and is ripe for ordering:
And here we are. Another damn’d thick, square book. A real wrist-sprainer. UK edition (pictured) has endpapers showing Crick and Brenner’s blackboard and colour plates. Both U.K. and US editions have sections heralded by a double page photo as here. Loads of illustrations. Out in November!
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-09-26T09:36:02.013Z
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm but the harm does not interest them. -T.S. Eliot, poet (26 Sep 1888-1965)
Excellent quote. This should have a name. Harry Frankfurt defined a bullshitter as someone who tells a falsehood but doesn’t care whether the statement is true because the statement has some other use (e.g., to signal virtue). What should we call someone who says something harmful but doesn’t care whether the statement causes harm because it has some other use (e.g., to seem important)?
A Trumpism…that one was too easy! lol
A sociopath.
[Edit: Oh bother, another kick into moderation. Hey, this isn’t offensive to the Sociopath community; that would be like a person feeling insulted by a refrigerator.]
Yes maybe “sociopath”. A kind of social arsonist.
Perhaps it’s called being human. See the full passage below.
While Eliot wrote this, it is not Eliot’s prose. These are the words of Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly from Eliot’s play “The Cocktail Party.” The entire passage is more interesting than the excerpt:
Half of the harm that is done in this world
Is due to people who want to feel important.
They don’t mean to do harm—But the harm does not
interest them.
Or they do not see it, or they justify it
Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle
To think well of themselves.
Thanks for posting it.
Re perhaps it’s called being human — yes perhaps, but at the extreme left-hand tail of the humanity distribution. In my limited but hard-won experience there are qualitative differences between sociopaths and garden-variety self-serving a-holes (Vulgaris vulgari); see The Sociopath Song below.
Another way to look at it is that sociopathy is orthogonal to humanity (h/t Jim B).
“All the discs look purple to me”
It’s a matter of degree, they all look purple to me, but whichever one I focus on turns into a darker purple with all the others being paler. It even happens if I cover them all up except one row.
Same. I can stare at the central one, and the peripheral ones soon fade into the background.
That’s the case with most such optical illusions: they work as described for some, work but somewhat differently for others, don’t work at all for still others.
All the discs look blue to me, including the fixated one, so I must have those S-cones in my fovea! (I assume S stands for Short wavelengths we see as blue)
I feel sorry for Jim Comey. His reward for public service is as now citizen Comey, he must pay big bucks to an attorney to defend himself against the unlimited resources of the United States and, along with his family, suffer from the public nastiness of so many trolls. I really wish him the best.
Regarding languages spoken in US: a friend who was a hostess for Colonial Williamsburg, an interpreter dressed in 18th century colonial garb telling tourists stories of colonial days, laughed as she told a group of friends about the tourist lady who admonished her with something to the affect “the way you people go on about the British, you would think that they discovered America and not the Americans”.
If not for Comey and his own interference in the 2016 election, we might have avoided the national nightmare that is President Trump. He’s reaping what he sowed.
Wow. That is really mean.
I do find it ironic that without Comey reopening the HC email investigation at the eleventh hour, Trump most likely wouldn’t have been elected POTUS in 2016. (I can’t prove it, I just know it’s true.) And looking back, the HC “controversy” is so quaint by the standards of the convicted felon’s mishigas since then.
Trump should have thanked Comey then and now. Another lesson to be learned- malignant narcissists never get help from anyone.
True about the interference but the law is the law.
https://saltypolitics.substack.com/p/comey-was-russias-useful-idiot
Christianity spread really fast amongst the Maori (pretty fast amongst Polynesians in general, really). Maori considering themselves a ‘Christian Nation’ is entirely expected.
Some syncreticism happened, as is usually the case (same thing happening in Peru and Mexico, for example; for that matter, the conversion of the Saxons in the 9th century took some, uh, considerable liberties. Jesus the warrior king and his entourage of twelve manly swordsmen kinda liberties), but the identification as ‘Christian’ is pretty strong.
Canada’s aboriginals converted rapidly to Christianity, too. The French Catholic clerics were sometimes caught in the cross-fire as the English-backed Iroquois set about exterminating the Huron in what is now Ontario in the mid 17th century, but on the whole, the Christian message resonated with aboriginal victor and vanquished alike, and took. The mumbo jumbo about animistic paganism is a throwback, a recent political affectation used to delay and extract rents from resource projects.
Many of the 3-4 dozen churches of the several denominations that were burned down or vandalized after the 2021 Kamloops mass graves hoax were located on Status Indian Reserves or in small off-Reserve communities with substantial aboriginal congregations, who experienced the loss painfully.
Pun intended?
“The Nations of Canada” podcast is a good source on this history. The interactions between Europeans and indigenous groups were first commercial, then became military and religious. Samuel de Champlain and his French colonists were at first just explorers and traders. Only after regime change in France did Jesuit clerics replace some of the commercial clerks, and they added religious conversion to the fur-trading mission.
https://nationsofcanadapodcast.wordpress.com/2021/02/10/episode-24-birth-of-an-empire/
But Mr./s Denial – there is also a strain of Third World Indigenous black power bs (see Tiriti, Waitangi Day, etc.) so it seems to me (and I haven’t lived there in 30+ years, just as a kid)… it is a mixed bag.
Third World Socialism/ indigeneity has “Pawethtine” and Islamic madness as pretty central to its particular brand of evil.
I was happy to see the Christian Maoris take the civilized position above. Also anti-trans motivated them last (?) year I think. Hamilton or Rotorua from memory.
best,
D.A.
NYC
Did you noticed the guy towards the end of the clip dressed in a black suit holding a microphone. His name is Brian Tamaki. This is from a TV1website TVNZ peice.
“What exactly is the message of Brian Tamaki’s Destiny Church? John Campbell highlights some consistent themes: far-right prejudices, manifest anger and hatred. Meanwhile, for some former members, the church leaves a lasting taste of sadness and fear.”
He is a very controversial evangelical type leader of Destiny Church.
Destiny Church are not proponents of free speech or expression… unless it agrees with them.
I’ve been following the doings of “Apostle Bishop” Brian Tamaki and his Destiny Church for a while. He’s the dude in a suit holding a mic at 1:14. This is not a mass protest by “the Maaori” of NZ; it is just the most recent of the Apostle’s many Parteitag-style rallies in support of his ongoing grift and ludicrous political ambitions.
Yes, the indigenous Polynesian polytheism was relentlessly suppressed by missionaries and the colonial government, and the Maaori did enthusiastically take up Christianity (obviously the more powerful god), but they do not in any way deserve to be lumped in with this thug.
Literally a thug — his men’s anger management group gang recently attacked a suburban library (!!) to stop a gay pride event. I am not making any of this up or overdramatising it.
Now ask me what I really think about him. But I won’t answer; inviting a defamation suit is not my idea of a good life choice.
On a totally unrelated matter, I repost this ditty:
[Edit: This time I think the AI™ or whatever made a reasonable call to kick this into moderation. Please feel free to ****-out any bits which seem OTT.]
On the Guardian report of athletes who have gone through male puberty, and have been track and field finalists in female
events, and have DSDs and 46 XY karotypes. Isn’t there a question whether the report involves people who should be described as “trans-identified”? The focus of the report does not appear to be people identified at birth as male who later identify as women (trans-identified males), but people like Caster Semenya, identified at birth as female who are found later to have a DSD showing that they are biological males?
Yes, good point. But it depends on who is doing the identification (if it’s us, we can say “trans-idenfied”). But I will clarify that.
Semenya has always been male. The error on his birth certificate doesn’t change that.
I can understand that with the misidentification on his birth certificate he may have unwittingly taken part in children’s sports with girls, but at puberty Semenya’s sex became obvious and he should immediately have stopped competing against females.
He claims to be a woman, but he has fathered children, so he is no different to any other man who claims to be a literal female. He may not call himself trans identified, but he is a man who calls himself a woman and that’s what being a trans identified man is.
I don’t feel sorry for Comey at all (sorry, Jim). He clearly abused his role for partisan purposes, in effect seeking to aid the effort to undermine a Constitutionally-elected Executive and thwart the choice of the voters. That the charge is narrow, I have no problem with. Senior Executive-branch officials lying to Congress undermines Congress’s oversight responsibilities and the separation of powers. We will hopefully see many more indictments like this. During the Biden Administration it seemed like every hearing featuring a Cabinet member or senior official included as passel of lies. Mayorkas, Garland, and Wray comes to mind immediately. We are lucky as a nation to have survived their public service (if it’s not premature to say that we have). The violence we are experiencing now is a direct result of their activities in flooding the countries with illegals.
Yeah DrB, we are just going to disagree on this one. I will admit that my sympathy/empathy derives a bit from my experience as a govy exec (of course at a much lower level than Jim Comey) having to make difficult decisions that sometimes went against policy and a bit from having an undergrad education with similar liberal arts courses as he did at the same college…just a few years earlier. My theory of justice moral philosophy is showing.
Let’s remember that the FBI was behind the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, thus directly interfering in a U.S. election.
I am curious what role Comey played in these actions.
This is interesting! The comments above suggest that Comey’s interference favoured the Republicans in one instance and the Democrats in the other. Fair man. Very nonpartisan. Maybe he has a problem with elections.
Amazing, isn’t it? One thing is for sure, the spectacle is only just beginning; there is enough hatred, suspicion, innuendo, and idiocy to keep us entertained for some time.
Focusing on the central circle, the other circles look somewhat bluish, but not a very strong, or impressive effect. Not the greatest of illusions.
I find it interesting that some feel sorry for James Comey and others don’t, while neither group knows whether he is guilty or not. Shouldn’t that play some role?
Below is a link from reporter Catherine Herridge. If what she reports is accurate, then it appears that either Comey lied to Congress or his former deputy Andrew McCabe lied to everyone. Since they gave opposite answers to the same question, it isn’t possible that both were correct. Perhaps one was simply mistaken. I can accept that, even though the answers were quite vigorously made and later defended. But if only one was lying, should we feel sorry for both men? If not, which one shouldn’t we feel sorry for given that it isn’t possible for any of us to know which, if either, was lying?
Any curiosity among half the public about the subject matter of the purported lies? None? Some lies are more consequential than others—and some seek to hide bigger issues than do others. Oh, never mind. I need a Tylenol. (I hope I’m not pregnant.)
Yes, lying under oath to Congress when you head the premier law enforcement agency of the country, if that is indeed what happened, is a trivial matter. See, some people get to choose which laws they will obey and which they will flaunt. “Nobody is above the law” is a mantra made to chant at other people. And prosecutions against one’s political adversaries? Those are just when going in one direction and authoritarian retribution when in the other. Again, doesn’t that presume guilt in one case and innocence in the other? Oh, I forgot. We are supposed to feel sorry for some but cheer for the imprisonment of others. Without having seen all the evidence. I might get the hang of this yet.
https://x.com/C__Herridge/status/1971363615338033187
Beautiful work by Francisco Oliveira! Very compassionate.
I didn’t see the problem with illustrating bone homologies between horses and humans that way until I read “How not to illustrate… .” I must be getting old.
Finally, the new plan for Gaza is very similar to the plan that I recommended on September 14. You read it here:
“A better solution might be a consortium of Arab states that forms a corporation to serve as the governing entity in Gaza (and perhaps the West Bank, but the two areas aren’t really in synch). This entity would manage reconstruction, dramatically overhaul the education system, ensure that the territory does not rearm, start to create the structures that would eventually constitute a state, and establish criteria (in concert with the international community) that would need to be met before creating an actual state. After a period of fifty (50) years, if the criteria for statehood are met, the consortium would transition leadership to the new state.”
I recommend a 50-year time horizon for establishing a Stage of Palestine. It will take that long to unlearn the hatred of Israel and Jews that Hamas and UNRWA has so effectively nurtured.
And, Israel should not move to annex the West Bank! Let’s end the war, finish off Hamas, and get the hostages back before unleashing yet another firestorm. I am hoping that the talk of annexation is largely for domestic Israeli consumption, where a vocal minority is recommending annexation. Keep this fight to yourselves!
We already have a long-running Stage of Palestine. Also a Stooge. Probably also a Stodge.
Netanyahu addressing the UN now.
Note idiots, cowards, third world losers and Islamists – who can’t face truth… walking out like little children.
As they stomp out of the General Ass Room, Bibi should say: “Yeah.. walk out. But I won’t be talking long. We’ll notify you all when I’m done via those beepers we gave you earlier. … or maybe…… on your own cellphones.” 😉
remember last year Bibi blowing up Nasrallah as he was addressing the UN Gen Ass? One of the most boss moves I’ve ever seen.
THIS year he’s broadcasting a message in Hebrew into Gaza hoping the hostage people can hear – during his speech. (Hebrew is not one of the 5 UN languages).
Onwards Israeli heroes! 🇺🇸❤️🇮🇱
D.A.
NYC
Netanyahu delivered a strong and well-crafted speech. People who didn’t attend weren’t doing their jobs as diplomats.
I’m not impressed by this self-righteous practice of refusing to listen. When my senator, Patty Murray, refused to attend Netanyahu’s speech to the United States Congress on July 24, 2024—her position as president pro tempore of the Senate meant that she was supposed to preside over the event—I wrote her a letter telling her that she wouldn’t be doing her job if she didn’t attend. I also told her that I would remember her failure when it came time to vote.
Love the pic of the guy with his dog picture on the t-shirt, and dog, mainly because I HAVE THAT EXACT SAME THING with my guy “Aussie”. (Childless people infantilize their pets…. haven’t you noticed?).
I don’t wear it out much, it is a bit… I don’t know… not cool Manhattan. Cheesy? Cringe? Rather, I take the actual dog with me (in his stroller).
D.A.
NYC
“I don’t have much of a dog in the West Bank, except that it seems unwise to increase settlements by Israelis, violating the Oslo Accords, but the peace plan is better. ”
There is no provision – none – in the Oslo Accords restricting the creation of new Israeli settlements in Area C.
There are a LOT of provisions in the Oslo Accords regarding the cessation of terrorism by the Palestinians, obligations that the PLO and PA have brazenly broken, which would constitute abrogation of the Accords by any reasonable standard.