Welcome to a Hump Day (“Jum il-Ħotob” in Maltese): Wednesday, April 29, 2026 and National Zipper Day. It’s time to think about the marvelous zipper: an invention that many of us use daily. Here’s a short introduction to the zipper. It didn’t really become practical until 1916:
Here’s a gif of how it works:
It’s also Denim Day (read the link to see why it’s today), International Rugelach Day, and National Shrimp Scampi Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 29 Wikipedia page.
I have not yet gotten over the loss of my duck brood, and posting may be desultory, splenetic, or lame for a while. Is anybody reading this any more?
Da Nooz:
*It’s Noon in Israel reports that “Iran is Drowning in Oil“. (See this similar article in the WSJ.)
It’s Tuesday, April 28, and Iran is beginning to crack. Vindicating Donald Trump’s Saturday claim that Iranian officials could “come to us, or they can call us,” Iran has reportedly presented a new proposal, offering to “reopen” the Strait of Hormuz and end the current hostilities, provided that U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations are postponed to a later date.
Iran’s inability to export its oil is strangling the regime financially, and keeping that oil onshore is posing a growing existential threat. According to a recent report by The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. blockade has pushed Tehran to the brink of desperation, forcing officials to stockpile crude in makeshift “containers” and disused oil tanks in poor condition. This reporting aligns with an April 12 estimate indicating that Iran had only about 13 days of onshore storage capacity remaining. Once that critical threshold is crossed, Tehran will have no choice but to initiate the drastic step of shutting down domestic oil production entirely.
Shutting down an oil well is far worse than merely pausing operations or stranding valuable resources; it is a death sentence for the industry. When a well is “shut in,” the delicate pressure required to push crude to the surface permanently dissipates. Worse, stagnant oil cools and solidifies, permanently clogging the porous rock, rendering it inaccessible. Oil production is strictly a game of “use it or lose it.”
Loss of future production isn’t the only risk. Around one to two percent of the Iranian workforce is directly engaged in oil extraction, with an even larger number employed in downstream petroleum products and related industries. Lose the wells, and you immediately have that many more angry, desperate and unemployed Iranians on the streets.
All this is to say: time remains on Trump’s side.
From the WSJ:
The blockade has sharply reduced the amount of oil that Iran, a net energy exporter, has been able to load on tankers, commodity analytics firm Kpler said. Iranian crude oil and condensate loadings averaged 2.1 million barrels a day between April 1 and April 13. Only five cargoes have been observed since the blockade, bringing the average down to 567,000 barrels a day between April 14 and April 23.
In February, before the war, Iran exported on average 2 million barrels a day.
We have a game of global economic chicken: will the U.S. and the West demand economic relief before Iran makes major concessions so it can restart oil exports? Don’t ask me—I’m not a pundit.
*Tired of the restrictions imposed on their oil production, the United Arab Emirates are going to quit OPEC.
The United Arab Emirates said it would leave OPEC, dealing a heavy blow to the oil cartel as the war in Iran scrambles alliances and investment priorities among the world’s top oil producers.
The sudden departure of OPEC’s third-biggest producer further weakens a bloc that despite producing up to four out of every 10 barrels of oil pumped worldwide has been hobbled by internal disunity and the rise of American oil output.
The war in Iran has piled on more pressure by exacerbating rifts among the Arab countries at the core of the group and by closing the Strait of Hormuz, through which the group’s biggest producers export most of their oil, making it impossible for the group to influence the market during its biggest supply shock.
The U.A.E. is in a relatively privileged position with the ability to circumvent the blockade in the strait by routing more than half of its oil exports across the country. Withdrawing from OPEC will give it more freedom to make investments to expand its output and adjust to the uncertain future of the waterway.
. . . “Its departure therefore removes one of the core pillars underpinning OPEC’s ability to manage the market,” said Jorge Leon, head of geopolitical analysis at consulting firm Rystad Energy and a former energy demand analyst at OPEC. “Losing a member with 4.8 million barrels a day of capacity, and the ambition to produce more, takes a real tool out of the group’s hands.”
Of course we’re all asking, “What does this mean about how we pay at the pump?” Don’t ask me—I’m not an oil pundit (or any other species of pundit). If you know economics, weigh in below.
*Both Donald and Melania Trump have asked ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel for a tasteless remark he made while pretending to be a speaker at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Remember that Kimmel was suspended previously for remarks about Charlie Kirk’s assassination.)
She was seemingly referring to Thursday’s episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” in which Kimmel parodied the upcoming White House correspondents’ dinner and noted that Donald Trump would be attending for the first time as president.
“And of course, our first lady, Melania, is here,” Kimmel said, pretending to be the host of an “alternative” correspondents’ dinner. “Look at — so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.”
President Trump called for the comedian to be axed in a post on Truth Social on Monday.
“I appreciate that so many people are incensed by Kimmel’s despicable call to violence, and normally would not be responsive to anything that he said but, this is something far beyond the pale,” the president wrote. “Jimmy Kimmel should be immediately fired by Disney and ABC.”
Here’s the joke, for which Kimmel has an explanation not involving assassination, but death due to poor health and/or old age. Regardless, it’s pretty tasteless, though many anti-Trumpers will like it. It’s sort of funny, but I still wouldn’t have said it myself:
Kimmel has said that this reference didn’t have anything to do with assassination, but only with the age difference between the President and First Lady. And that rings true; after all, nobody guessed that there would be an assassination attempt at the dinner. At any rate, this is free speech—mockery of our leadership—and in my view there should be no punishment of Kimmel. But of course ABC doesn’t want to alienate some of its viewership, so, as a profit-making corporation, it’s ultimately their call.
*The Free Press has a profile of Dartmouth College’s President Sian Beilock, a hard-hitting, plain-speaking administrator whose college was the only Ivy League institution not to be investigated by the Trump Administration for antisemitism. The title: “Can Dartmouth Save the Ivy League?”
Beilock, now 50, didn’t choke this time. Two hours after Dartmouth students pitched an encampment on the Green in May 2024, she called in the police. Eighty-nine people were arrested.
In an interview earlier this month in her office overlooking the same spot, Beilock told me without even a hint of equivocation, “Setting up an encampment on a shared space and declaring it for one ideology, where certain people can’t be or walk through—that’s disrupting someone else’s free speech.”
While other university presidents were preoccupied with campus agitators and either fending off or capitulating to investigations by the Trump administration, Beilock used her power to keep the peace at Dartmouth. That has given her the credibility to articulate a vision of reform for American colleges and universities that she hopes will restore the public’s trust in them.
As other university leaders are sounding the alarm about what they see as a federal assault on higher education, Beilock is focused on what colleges can do to fix themselves.
She has railed against “groupthink” and a lack of “ideological diversity,” complained that university presidents “lost our mission,” and accused Wesleyan University’s president of “name-calling” the Trump administration. In a January op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Beilock wrote that colleges “must demonstrate to students and families—and to the broader public—that we’ve heard their criticisms and will address them.” She proposed five major changes, from ending “political posturing” to emphasizing “equal opportunity, not equal outcomes.” The essay went viral.
“I really believe in American higher ed,” Beilock told me. “If we as leaders can’t take responsibility for what we’re doing and be held accountable for outcomes, I worry someone else will try and do it for us.”
For the most part, the Dartmouth campus seems to reflect Beilock’s vision. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression ranked Dartmouth highest in the Ivy League for free speech—and up from one of the 10 worst colleges in the entire U.S. in 2023, when Beilock started as president. Students in the government and Middle Eastern studies departments told me that their professors do a good job teaching multiple viewpoints and staying neutral. A program called Dartmouth Dialogues, launched by Beilock, has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars bringing in high-profile speakers with a wide variety of political views.
It also helps that Dartmouth has an atmosphere that is less progressive and less confrontational than, say, Columbia’s Barnard College, where Beilock was president for six years. “I’m sure you’ve noticed the difference,” she said. At Dartmouth, “you can’t yell at someone and disappear into the city. You have to see them at the dining hall.”
Bravo for Dr. Beilock! Her WSJ essay is very good (archived here) and includes this:
Third, re-center higher education on learning rather than political posturing. Too often, colleges and universities have participated in the culture wars. The result is an environment in which students and faculty feel they must toe an ideological line rather than explore ideas that fall outside prevailing norms.
Dartmouth was also one of the first schools that reinstated SAT tests for applicants after many schools, worried about equity, made them option or prohibited scores from being submitted. It’s even better than the University of Chicago, which waited a week before dismantling the encampment, didn’t punish students or faculty who violated university regulations, and since 2018 has been “test optional,” with the stipulation that they will use SAT/ACT scores only if they help your admission. So it goes.
*It is ironic that the NYT hired Peter Beinart, a Jewish writer, as a columnist specializing in Israel, for the man is an anti-Zionist who wants the Jewish state to disappear. “What Tucker Carlson means when he talks about Israel.”
Wikipedia says this about him:
As of 2012, Beinart lives in New York City with his wife and two children. He keeps kosher, regularly attends an Orthodox synagogue, and has sent his children to a Jewish day school.
And when I asked Grok about his views on Israel, I got what I already knew:
He has been explicit and public about this for years. In a widely discussed 2020 New York Times op-ed (and a longer piece in Jewish Currents), he declared: “I no longer believe in a Jewish state” and advocated a one-state solution in which Israel as a Jewish-majority state with special obligations to Jews would end in favor of a single binational state granting full equality to Jews and Palestinians.
He has reiterated this view repeatedly, including in his 2025 book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, arguing that Jewish ethics and safety require rejecting Zionism as currently practiced. He is editor-at-large of the left-wing, anti-Zionist magazine Jewish Currents and frames his position as coming from within Jewish tradition and concern for both Palestinians and Israelis.
Bret Stephens, it’s turned out, is the only pro-Israel columnist at the NYT, whole Beinart regularly disses Israel, it’s “genocide, and its right to exist, as he does in the new column about Tucker Carlson. Beinart’s take:
Now, as many Americans sour on Israel, [Tucker Carlson] in the vanguard once again. Over the last year or so, he’s become a leading champion on the right for abandoning America’s long-held support for the Jewish state. “Hopefully the first thing we do when and if this war is resolved is detach from Israel,” he told his audience in early April.
Mr. Carlson’s worldview hasn’t fundamentally changed. Like other prominent figures on the anti-Israel right, he still sees the West as menaced by alien civilizations bent on its destruction. He has just turned his attention towhat he sees as the alien civilization that populates the Jewish state. And he’s done so with the same penchant for conspiracy theories that has long marked his public commentary. Now he is using a destructive, ill-defined and unpopular war to give those theories even greater reach.
While some of Carlson’s conspiracy theories are deemed ridiculous, Beinart seems to agree with this one:
[Carlson] is at the forefront of a cohort of right-wing commentators who don’t merely condemn Israel’s manifold crimes against the Palestinians and others in the Middle East. They also suggest something far more troubling: that Israel’s crimes stem from its Jewishness, which they claim threatens the Christian West.
And s0, while Beinart says that we can’t attribute Israel’s perfidies to Jewishness, we can still attribute them to—Israel.
Combating the anti-Israel right’s conflation of Israel and Jewishness is made harder by pro-Israel American Jewish organizations that have conflated those two things as well.
But progressives must not blur the distinction between viewing Israel as a state, which practices forms of oppression and aggression that can occur in states of every ethnic and religious type, and viewing Israel as the product of a peculiarly Jewish pathology. It is understandable that some progressives, who are rightly eager to end America’s support for Israel’s human rights abuses, might be tempted to see figures like Mr. Carlson as allies. But the struggle for Palestinian freedom should not indulge bigotry of any kind. That includes the bigotry of figures like Tucker Carlson, who blame Israel’s crimes on its Jewishness so they so they can pretend that America and Christianity are morally pure.
Here we have a man who emphasizes Israel’s crimes (e.g., opposing the “struggle for Palestinian freedom”) and says that we should not indulge in bigotry while at the same time favoring a “one state solution” that would result in war and the death of gazillions of Jews. I remember Malgorzata used to dismiss Beinart as a “self-hating Jew.” I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s palpably clear that he’s an “Israel-hating Jew.” But is there a difference?
*The WaPo reports that former war correspondent Jonathan Ledgard is setting up bank accounts for wild gorillas to help pay for their conservation (both species are critically endangered).
Fixing this has become the mission of former war correspondent and novelist Jonathan Ledgard. He now works as a financier opening bank accounts in the name of nonhumans.
His nonprofit Tehanu recently gave bank accounts to gorillas to spend on their own survival. Ledgard ultimately wants to give far more plants and animals financial safety nets of their own to safeguard their future and the ecosystems that sustain all of us.
“It’s truly insane that we’ve built these economic systems without … understanding that we also have to reward nature for its services,” Ledgard told me in a video interview from his home
In August 2024, Tehanu logged its first interspecies transaction, a payment of 5,000 Rwandan francs ($3.42) to a local ranger for removing a snare from Gisubizo, one of the roughly 350 mountain gorillas in Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda, according to the digital receipt. Other micropayments followed, including for tree planting, path clearance, anti-poaching patrols and veterinary observation. The gorillas’ spending was funded by the Rwandan government and private donors
For the first time, the primates weren’t a charity case, but paying clients.
Wild gorillas and other nonhuman species can’t tell us exactly what they need. But wildlife biologists, combined with artificial intelligence trained on hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers on mountain gorilla biology and behavior, identified the animals’ priorities.
Whenever someone took action to advance the gorillas’ interests, they were eligible to receive micropayments in Rwandan francs via their mobile phone. (All actions were verified by human experts, but Tehanu plans to automate this with AI and cameras in the future.)
Each gorilla in the project received a digital identity based on their unique set of nose wrinkles, known as “nose-prints,” and was tracked through the park using motion-activated camera traps.
This is a great idea–if it works. It’s working for gorillas, but Ledgard wants to extend it to other endangered species, including plants. Who would fund that? Well, there’s an interview with Ledgard where he explains where the dosh will come from, and it’s something to be considered!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili offers a corrective to Szaron’s optimism:
Szaron: The world is beautiful.
Hili: Yet it can be dangerous.
In Polish:
Szaron: Świat jest piękny.
Hili: Ale bywa groźny.
*******************
From Stacy:
From Things With Faces; a happy loo:
From The Dodo Pet:
From Masih; a protestor wiping his eyes with cuffed hands. He’s already been executed.
With his hands cuffed, he wipes his own tears…Because he was forced to confess to a crime he never committed. And then, they hanged him in Iran for protesting against Islamic Republic.
His name was Erfan Kiani.
But we only heard his name after his execution.His family stayed… pic.twitter.com/oqFZG1AXp8
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 27, 2026
Part of a conversation between Bill Maher and comedian David Cross. Cross, a liberal, has been captured by gender activism. There’s a video at the bottom.
Bill Maher: “You need to hear that other side. You need to be checked. People need to be checked. Including your little girl.”
David Cross: “F*ck that b*tch. F*ck that little b*tch with her black friends and tr*ns friends and not even understanding.”
Bill Maher: “Tr*ns? Wait,… pic.twitter.com/vBd4nzdSoo
— RedWave Press (@RedWavePress) April 27, 2026
From Larry, the #10 Cat. Do Brits steal wine from gatherings?
Not a single British person would bat an eyelid at this. Just hope they thought to take a corkscrew too. https://t.co/wkBoniarJR
— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) April 26, 2026
Two from my feed. First, some Tanzanians say their names, which are long and have those hard-to-make clicks:
The children from the Hadza tribe in Tanzania probably have the most difficult names to pronounce in the world.
In addition to vowels and consonants, their unique language contains clicking and guttural sounds, which also have specific meanings. pic.twitter.com/txfYqQuxRD
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) April 28, 2026
Orange cat wins!
So your game is more important than me huh? pic.twitter.com/ZQ1Pur0yOR
— Cat 🐈 (@CuteCatsMagic) April 27, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was ten years old. She’d be 92 today if she’d lived. https://t.co/DYRiQhlWhT
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 29, 2026
Two from Dr. Cobb, still in Chile. The first includes his photos from the Atacama Desert:
Went to the salt lagoons near San Pedro de Atacama (an hour on a v bumpy and dusty desert road). The first lagoon you are allowed to float in (I didn’t). Amazing lunar landscape. Traces of life – dried plants that emerged last time it rained, a fly we probably brought with us, and a lost dragonfly!
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-04-28T12:36:46.590Z
And this gets an “Awww!”:
Of course we’re reading you; WEIT is part of the morning routine. Please don’t doubt it.
Every denim day!
I KID I KID
😁
Over breakfast
Same here. I anticipate WEIT more than I anticipate my coffee and whatever else I’m having.
I’d say I read it religiously, but that’s probably not the best way of putting it.
“Ritualistically”, then? (That’s me!)
Read WEIT every morning, with my BRU chicory coffee
Yup, every morning with shots of espresso! Genuinely appreciate your work to make it happen.
Hear! Hear! I always try to read the posts before I comment!
While I enjoy the reading, I will also greatly miss watching the little ducks grow.
your site is my main source of news and humor.
+1
I read you and look forward to your post every morning. I learn from you and always find something thought provoking. I don’t comment because nobody reads you to see what I think.
This pretty well sums it up for me, too.
ditto
Ditto ditto.
I start every day with WEIT, I need that assurance of sanity and rational thinking before I look at the “mainstream” headlines and start rolling my eyes. Yours is a much-loved and respected voice.
I dare say that I read WEIT religulously.
Bank accounts for gorillas is wonderful. A new twist to get people to (literally) pay attention. And the concerned orange cat trying staging an intervention to break staff’s gaming addiction is priceless.
And everything else in this column, too. Pro animal, pro science, pro humanity. This is the news source that I trust.
Of course I still read your posts, including those about the lost ducks. Still hoping for good news.
It is in fact the left in the US, Canada, and elsewhere who prevent the implication of a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. Such a solution depends on respect for borders. If one state is attacked across its border, they have the right to defend themselves.
Now take Gaza as a test case. When Israel withdrew and Hamas was elected, we were subjected to years of rocket fire. Over a generation of children’s in towns near Gaza grew up under rocket fire. And we practiced a policy of restraint. It took us several years to respond with ground attacks. And when we did, the left around the world condemned us for doing so—and by “the left” I include governments that made nary a peep
when Hamas was firing rockets.
Now look at the border of pre-1967 Israel and the West Bank. If that were to become the border of a new Palestinian state, there is little doubt in the minds of Israelis, including those of us who oppose Netanyahu, that the area east of that border would become a source of rocket fire. And those on the left would condemn us for fighting back, just as they did, and still do, in Gaza.
For this generation, at least, the left in Europe and North America etc. killed the two-state solution. Someday, it might happen. But not now.
Long time WEIT addict here. Can’t get my day going without it.
Peter Beinart is not a SELF hating Jew, he is an OTHER JEWS hating Jew. He sits in judgement from the safety of his New York City life where doubtless he is a darling of the Mamdani crowd while half the world’s Jews live under rocket fire and threat annihilation in Israel. Twenty percent of Israel’s population is Muslim and these citizens receive the same rights as any other citizen–for gays and women this may be more rights than they might have in many other Muslim-majority countries. There are Muslims that serve alongside Jews in the IDF (sometimes as commanders over Jewish soldiers) and in the Knesset. Meanwhile, does anyone really believe that if there was a single Palestinian-Jewish State that equal rights would be maintained for all? Does Beinart give any practical steps for how this miracle would be achieved or is his entire rhetoric reserved for bashing Israel for not conforming to his diasporic Progressive ideal of Judaism?
Peter Beinart – along with Olympic level phony Ezra Klein – are indeed self hating Jews who hate other Jews, Mice. These fellow NYers are the Vilest People Alive in my book – for reasons you put well.
I’ve no time for comfortable fellow diaspora fainting couch libtards who virtue signal, at the expense of the very survival of Israel and Jews.
D.A.
NYC🗽
All true. In fact, much of the IDF’s tactical infantry doctrine was established by an Arab commander, a man still revered here in Israel.
Each morning I begin my day with WEIT and a nice hot coffee. It’s my retirement routine now and I would miss it terribly if it disappeared. I rely on the sound and sensible look at the news, the check-in with Hili and cats & ducks.
I don’t find Kimmel funny at all. He’s also a massive hypocrite and opportunist…he became famous 20 years ago doing the tasteless and misogynistic “Man Show” on Comedy Central. People have been cancelled for doing 1/182nd of the antics that he got away with there.
So he went from Frat humor to woke and progressive because he was able to see how the winds were blowing. I doubt he believes half of what he blubbers over.
But having said all of that…I still don’t want any comedian kicked off a show for telling a joke, especially those that mock the chief executive. The fact that we live in a country where the President can be mocked openly is a great sign a free society.
“Isn’t it past your jail time?”
Not funny, eh?
I continue to follow you and Sam Harris as atheist scientists that have similar political stances for your critical thoughts towards the progressive side that I feel I can trust more than criticisms from the right.
Yep. I read your articles every day. I don’t always respond in print, but I always respond inside my head. Molecules already in motion are diverted by your daily insights, causing new thoughts and behaviors, which sometimes includes a follow-up comment (or longer).
If we patiently keep the embargo in place, Iran’s oil industry will be permanently destroyed, as much of the country’s oil will no longer be recoverable even after the embargo ends. The Iran that emerges will have to make a living some other way.
Jimmy Kimmel’s “joke” was in poor taste to begin with, but he was surely not talking about assassination. True. He has the right to speak freely, and he exercised that right. But his right to free speech doesn’t translate into a right to continued employment. Disney/ABC will have to decide if his Kimmel’s latest will be his last.
“Earth Boring” ? I thought it was Mostly Harmless.
👍🚀
OPEC and UAE.
OPEC is a “thing” only in Boomer and GenX minds. In reality it is kind of a dead letter office now, prices being established on markets (like NYMEX where I worked once, in the World Trade Center). Cartel shenanigans like in like our youth aren’t possible in the same way. So “UAE LEAVES OPEC!” is a nothing.
Qatar left a few years ago and various nations, African and Asian, wander in and out of OPEC.
Plus, UAE has diversified so that petrochemicals are much less important to them now.
D.A.
NYC🗽
Hen Mazzig thinks there’s a back story to it that looks good for Israel, not so good for UAE vs Saudi:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-195759391
Goodness – don’t flag boss! WEIT is my favorite site online period. I’ve read it (heheh religiously!) every day for over a decade. In part b/c it is pitched, and read, at a pretty high IQ (science and popular culture) level which is very rare today.
I’m positive I represent MANY people who don’t comment (I didn’t for awhile).
Like with my own column, readership numbers rise and fall, often randomly. And would that I had so many admiring commenters/readers. (I mainly get hate mail. hehehe)
Keep up the good work – it is very appreciated.
D.A.
NYC🗽
I read WEIT posts daily and enjoy them for intelligence, news, nature and humour..
I might not get to WEIT until later in the day, but I look forward to every post. I enjoy them all – Jesus ‘n Mo, Bill Maher, odds and ends. I often read comments and feel like I have nothing new to add so I don’t. But you asked, “Is anyone reading this any more?” It looks like a resounding YES!! Thank you and please don’t stop.
I also have been reading WEIT for at least 10 years – and I love it, and have learned a lot from Jerry and those who comment here.
I’d like the WaPo or someone down there to run a story on what happened to all the food at the Correspondents Dinner.
Otherwise, with Denim, altho not related to Denim Day, it’s worth noting that (enzymologist, biochemist, Nat’l Academy member, 10yr-editor of Science) Daniel Koshland Jr (PhD, 1949, U Chicago) was the son of the onetime CEO of Levi Strauss in the ’50s, and who was apparently credited with rescuing the company in the ’30s. As a result, at one time DKJr was ranked 64th wealthiest individual in the US. Pretty stellar accomplishments for someone in that category.
I was wondering the same thing. Apparently, it was donated: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2026/04/28/was-the-food-from-the-white-house-correspondents-dinner-donated/89833097007/
I agree with the host that “the glow of an expectant widow” is a really funny line. It would be perfect in a Best Man’s speech at the reception celebrating a December-May marriage. But also like the host, I don’t think I could bring myself to utter it. (Unlike for Mr. Kimmel, there really would be consequences for me! The King’s men doing their worst in the Tower of London would be as nothing.)
I agree also with Jeff Vader that a society where the Head of State can be mocked without fear is a healthy one, although after several decades I have doubts that freedom of speech for clowns accomplishes much except providing more laughs than otherwise.
Just one small point. Profit-making corporations are not alone in being beyond the reach of the First Amendment. Everyone in the private sector can fire an employee who disparages the firm or conducts himself in a manner that brings it into disrepute with customers or donors, or is otherwise a pain in the ass to work with because of his bloviated opinions. The ACLU or FIRE would certainly fire an official who tweeted that he had had a change of heart and no longer believed in freedom of speech, and called on the public to stop donating to the organization until it started supporting censorship. University professors are used to being free to denounce thunderously their employers under the important protection of academic freedom without fear of reprisal but that’s not how it works anywhere else. If Mr. Kimmel is bad for business, he’s gone. So would Chase Strangio.
“The ACLU or FIRE would certainly fire an official who tweeted that he had had a change of heart and no longer believed in freedom of speech, and called on the public to stop donating to the organization until it started supporting censorship.”
I was about to mention Chase Strangio as a counter-example; I confess I’m not sure what your point is by mentioning him, though. Can you clarify?
Regarding: “Is anybody reading this any more?”
Yes! But my server unaccountably started putting things into junk and otherwise. some strange interruption where I had to go to the website directly to write this. So I signed up with my email again, in case something had slipped a cog.
As others have commented, I’ve learned a lot, encountered opinions I don’t agree, (might learn something there, hey) and also, all those people who said it first or better than I might have done.
I really like the news roundup and cats and ducks and all the intelligent comments. I comment rarely, because I’m rarely qualified to comment on the same rarefied level of other commenters. So, please, keep up the good work.
Coffee and WEIT every morning (and beyond)…and I’m away on vacation as I type this.
Keep going Jerry, the best thing on the net. I never miss a day, though I rarely say anything. I can’t be alone.
Kimmel noted on the Tuesday night show that earlier in the day Mr. Trump uttered a very similar joke about himself. Read all about it here
https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/donald-trump-jokes-about-the-expiration-date-on-his-marriage-after-slamming-jimmy-kimmel-for-calling-melania-an-expectant-widow/ar-AA21VFLu
Kimmel is just another pathetic man-child with an adolescent sense of self-restraint; I’m sure the irony escapes him as he ridicules Donald Trump. The “widow” joke went beyond tasteless. He wasn’t mocking Trump; he was publicly playing with the emotions and fears of a woman whose husband had two recent attempts made against his life. And he’s doing so for cash, laughs, and self-congratulations.
Free speech? Sure, and I would defend it. Many men and women have died doing so. Is it too much to ask that responsible exercise of the right be commensurate with the price? In our partisan times, probably so.
Bloody hell, context matters, Trump has said some disgusting things about people, i.e. “I’m glad he’s dead” about some Trump critic.
He (Trump) plays it but doesn’t like it when it comes back to bite him… there’s nothing to defend or refute, it’s snarky politics mixed with mockery, feigned offence, and not at all surprising.
Yes, context matters—which is why Kimmel’s “expectant widow” line was deeply inappropriate. Melania is not Donald, though that seems to be a tough lesson in an era of imputed guilt and smear by association. Ridicule and criticize the man all you would like. That’s fair game. Mocking her quite realistic fears for one’s own gain is not. We used to call this simple human decency.
“But Trump is indecent!” Please note that the first sentence of my original comment twice points a critical finger at Donald Trump. That we so easily slide into “Donny does it too!” as a juvenile excuse for bad behavior is an unfortunate sign of the times. Is it so hard to grasp that both men are immature, insensitive, and occasionally loathsome?
Is anybody reading this any more?
Every single day! I just don’t think the world needs my comments as often.
I watched the entire Bill Maher interview with David Cross. There was some disagreement on the trans issue, but they were friendly and that quote is taken out of context to make it sound much more contentious. David was joking at that point and Bill was laughing.
As a South African, your sane, rational writing is a much valued source for me of the US’s (and wider world’s) news. It helps me to understand the US-enigma a little better. The large range of other topics makes for great reading. And of course, the Caturday posts are just the best cat reads!
Thank you!
Bloody hell, context matters, Trump has said some disgusting things about people, i.e. “I’m glad he’s dead” about some Trump critic. This from Google AI, “referred to McCain and fallen U.S. service members as “losers” and “suckers”.
He (Trump) plays it but doesn’t like it when it comes back to bite him… there’s nothing to defend or refute, it’s snarky politics mixed with mockery, feigned offence, and not at all surprising.
Both sides of the US political divide just love winding each other up. Meanwhile in the real world…