Category: Hili Dialogue

Sunday: Hili dialogue

November 10, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the Sabbath for goyische cats: it’s Sunday, November 10, 2024, and National Vanilla Cupcake Day about as bland a dessert as you can imagine. Who would prefer such a thing over, say, a chocolate cupcake.

It’s also Area Code Day, National Pupusa Day (it’s a stuffed griddle cake, the national dish of El Salvador), World Science Day for Peace and Development, and International Tongue Twister Day. 

Here’s a Polish tongue twister (I got Malgorzata to pronounce it; she had no trouble):

Czy rak trzyma w szczypcach strzęp szczawiu czy trzy części trzciny

It means “Does the crab hold in its claws a piece of sorrel or three pieces of reeds?”

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 10 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*This report comes from the Wall Streeet Journal, but the same information appears in The Jerusalem Post.  It’s surprising, really, because Qatar, long the refuge for the bodies and money of Hams leaders, has decided to expel those leaders and stop acting as a mediator in the Gaza war. It’s hard to believe, and I can’t figure out why. Here’s the report from the WSJ:

Qatar has asked Hamas’s political leaders to leave the Gulf country, after more than a year of trying to leverage their presence to broker a cease-fire with Israel that would halt the war in Gaza and free the hostages held by the group.

In a move coordinated with the U.S., Qatar told the Hamas leadership to leave about 10 days ago, according to officials familiar with the matter.

The decision is a dark sign for the Biden administration’s long effort to broker a cease-fire in Gaza, in which it has worked closely with both Egypt and Qatar to communicate with Hamas. Qatar’s government has grown increasingly frustrated with both Hamas and Israel in recent months. Its move reflects a conclusion that there isn’t enough willingness on either side to cut a deal, one of the people said.

The U.S. regards Hamas as a terrorist organization and therefore has no direct relations with the group, relying instead on intermediaries during months of painstaking diplomacy over Gaza. The effort to impose a cease-fire in Gaza fell apart in recent months largely due to intransigence by both Hamas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who says he opposes any deal that leaves the group intact.

“After rejecting repeated proposals to release hostages, its leaders should no longer be welcome in the capitals of any American partner,” a senior Biden administration official said. “We made that clear to Qatar following Hamas’s rejection weeks ago of another hostage release proposal.”

Senior Hamas officials denied that they had been asked to leave the country. Qatari officials have previously threatened the group with expulsion, including as recently as August, in an attempt to force progress in negotiations without following through.

It’s curious that Hamas officials say they have no word of this given the many reports.  But of course questions remain. Why now? Well, Republican congresspeople have pressured the administration to put the screws on Qatar for some time, but I can’t see that the election of Trump (who would have really pressured Qatar) may have speeded up the process.  But I don’t see any sign of this, and the news says that Qatar made this decision ten days ago—before the election. But it’s good news, for Hamas leaders won’t be able to live in luxury in Qatar, or keep their money there. Where will they go? I’m betting Iran, which, after all, supports Hamas.  People may beef because Qatar put itself in the role of broker of the Gaza war, but the likelihood of any deal between Israel and Hamas is about zero.  This is a further decline in Hamas and, in my view, will help bring an end to the war.

*The race for the House of Representatives is still up in the air, and it may be a while until we know. However, the latest stats show the GOP creeping closer to winning. The Republicans are now seven UPDATED: six seats away from getting a majority, while the Democrats need 19 seats:

From the NYT:

The House remains up for grabs, though Republicans need only seven [now six] more seats for a majority. Twenty-five seats have not been decided for either party. Of those, 10 are in California and four are in Arizona, where counting will continue into next week.

Information from two states:

  • California, where 10 races remain uncalled, will count all ballots postmarked by Election Day as long as they arrive by Tuesday, so the count won’t be complete until then at the earliest. And some counties won’t post updated results at all until Tuesday, because of the Veterans Day holiday.

  • Election officials in Maricopa County, Arizona’s largest county, said before the election that they expected counting to take at least a week. And Pima County officials said this year’s two-page ballot has slowed down tabulation and made it harder to estimate when they might finish. That leaves several competitive congressional races hanging in the balance, as well as the state’s Senate race and presidential contest.

According to NPR, Democrats lead in 11 races and Republicans in 10.

*Fareed Zakaria, a op-ed writer for the Washington Post and a self-identified centrist, has an op-ed whose title inexorably lured me to click (laws of physics): “Democrats’ three big mistakes.” I’ll bite; here they are:

Global inflation is something that was hard to shut down, but there were other issues Democrats flubbed, which inflamed the opposition and depressed their base. I write about them here because it is the right time to do a postmortem, but to avoid appearing to have 20/20 hindsight, I should say that I noted each of these mistakes at the time, often provoking angry responses from the left.

I will add that every time I criticized Kamala Harris in these pages, I’d get some negative feedback saying that I was throwing the election to Trump, or that I should keep my mouth shut until the election was over! People who said that were misguided, for what is the point of being a supporter of the Democrats if you don’t note the failings of their most prominent members. But I digress in self defense. More from Fareed:

The first big error was the Biden administration’s blindness to the collapse of the immigration system and the chaos at the border. An asylum system that was meant for a small number of persecuted individuals was being used by millions to gain legal entry. Instead of shutting it down, liberals branded anyone protesting as heartless and racist. They missed a massive shift in American public opinion in just a few years. In 2020, the percentage of Americans who wanted to decrease immigration was 28 percent; by this year, it was 55 percent. When Harris went on “The View” and was asked how she would have differed from Biden, instead of basically saying she wouldn’t have done anything differently, she should have said, “I would have shut down the border early and hard.”

Do note that many people who are protecting immigrants who came here illegally don’t seem to realize that there are two major reasons to leave home for America: persecution at home and a search for economic or life improvement. Only the former is a legal reason for immigration. Being poor doesn’t equate to persecution. On to #2:

The second error was the overzealous misuse of law to punish Trump. The most egregious of the prosecutions pursued was District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s hush money case in New York, one that even he was once skeptical of but was reportedly pressured by some on the left into pursuing. Some, including the Georgia election interference case, were legitimate. But the host of them piled on in rapid succession gave the impression that the legal system was being weaponized to get Trump. The indictments confirmed to his base what it had always believed — that overeducated urban liberals were hypocrites, happy to bend rules and norms when it suited their purposes. (It’s worth noting that in this week’s election, a CNN exit poll found that among those who believed that U.S. democracy is threatened, a majority supported Trump.) Lawfare turned Trump from a loser into a victim, and as his list of indictments grew, his campaign contributions increased and his poll numbers solidified.

Well, these are all of course speculations, and depend on what voters tell exist pollsters. I’m not sure if there’s really a way to empirically determine why Harris lost with any degree of assurance. Is there?  On to #3:

The final error is a more diffuse one: the dominance of identity politics on the left, which made Democrats push for all kinds of diversity, equity and inclusion policies that largely came out of the urban, academic bubble but alienated many mainstream voters. There is an irony in claiming to be pro-Latino by insisting that people use the term “Latinx,” only to discover that Latinos themselves think the word is weird. This kind of obsession made Democrats view people too much through their ethnic or racial or gender identity, and it made them miss, for example, that working-class Latinos were moving toward Trump perhaps because they were socially conservative or liked his macho rhetoric or even agreed with his hard-line stance on immigration. One of Trump’s most effective ads, on trans issues, ended with the tagline: “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.”

The problem is much deeper than nouns and pronouns. The entire focus on identity has morphed into something deeply illiberal: judging people by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character. Similarly, university speech codes and cancel culture have become ways that the left has censored or restricted that most cherished of liberal ideas, freedom of speech.

One simple way to think about the lessons of this election is that liberals cannot achieve liberal goals — however virtuous — by illiberal means.

Again, I’d like to think that Zakaria is right here, because he’s blaming the wokeness of Democrats, and their obsession with identity politics, as the last reason—a trend I’ve decried for a long time. But of course there were other big mistakes. Two of them include Biden not withdrawing early enough from the race to allow a proper vetting of Democratsand Harris’s inability to answer straight questions about immigration, distinguishing herself from Biden, or giving her plans, substituting instead a farrago of tropes. But the hunt for “reasons” will go on, and I doubt we’ll all settle on one. The best thing to do is ask nonvoters and Republicans why they voted for Trump and not Harris, but that is just massive hearsay.

*Let’s collect some more reasons:

From Mo Dowd at the NYT:

Democratic candidates have often been avatars of elitism — Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and second-term Barack Obama. The party embraced a worldview of hyper-political correctness, condescension and cancellation, and it supported diversity statements for job applicants and faculty lounge terminology like “Latinx,” and “BIPOC” (Black, Indigenous, People of Color).

This alienated half the country, or more. And the chaos and antisemitism at many college campuses certainly didn’t help.

“When the woke police come at you,” Rahm Emanuel told me, “you don’t even get your Miranda rights read to you.”

From Josh Barro at the NYT, in an op-ed called “This is all Biden’s fault“:

In his own campaign rhetoric, Mr. Biden focused on the idea that democracy itself was on the ballot this year. But if democracy was on the ballot, his actions should have matched his rhetoric at every turn to ensure Democrats would win the election. Instead, he prioritized his own ego and profile.

. . . . After winning the nomination, Mr. Biden made his first big mistake that would set Democrats on a path with no route to win the 2024 election: He selected Ms. Harris as his running mate.

Perversely, Ms. Harris’s apparent weakness as a potential presidential candidate was an asset to Mr. Biden. It helped insulate him from calls to step aside. The case for him running again was simple, and I even made it myself, before June’s disastrous debate: Ms. Harris had run a terrible campaign in 2019, and at the time she regularly polled worse than he did; if Mr. Biden did not seek re-election, it was highly likely that she would end up as the nominee; therefore, he had better run again.

If Amy Klobuchar or Gretchen Whitmer were vice president, the calculus would have been very different, and I think that the calls for Mr. Biden to step aside would have come much earlier and much louder — and if he had stepped aside in favor of one of them, we would have had a much stronger nominee who could not so easily be attacked as extreme and out of touch. That woman might well be the president-elect right now.

Whitmer! She was the one I wanted to run, but of course she bowed out after Biden anointed Harris as his successor.

Finally, Nicholas Kristof from the NYT in his piece, “Maybe now Democrats will address working-class pain.”

My neighbors, struggling to pay the rent and buying gas five dollars at a time, often perceive national Democrats as remote elites more eager to find them pronouns than housing. Election postmortems have been dissecting Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, but the challenge for Democrats goes far beyond any of that.

For several decades, voters have identified more with the Democratic Party than with the Republican Party. But in some polls this year, more people have affiliated with the Republican Party than with the Democratic Party. Looking ahead at the specific Senate seats that will be in contention in 2026 and 2028, it’s not easy to see when the Democrats will have a chance to recover the chamber.

. . .Here’s an astonishing statistic from Bureau of Labor Statistics data: Blue-collar private-sector workers were actually earning more on average in 1972, after adjusting for inflation, than they are now in 2024. So today’s blue-collar workers are on average earning less in real dollars than their grandparents were 52 years ago.

So of course people are angry at the establishment — which in this election was represented by a vice president who wouldn’t distance herself from the president.

. . .It’s not enough for liberals to proclaim that they have better policies, because Democrats increasingly are the party of university-educated elites, and they have an unfortunate knack for coming across as remote and patronizing scolds. This is compounded by the tendency of some on the educated left to scorn religion, which to many voters is a pillar of reassurance in difficult times.

Given that 74 percent of Americans believe in God, according to Gallup, while only 38 percent of those over the age of 25 have a B.A., condescension is a disastrous strategy.

So people blame Biden, Harris, and the Democrats for Harris’s loss, not to mention irate Democrats blaming those who voted for Trump (viz., Laura Helmuth). One common thread to many of these article is blaming the elitism and wokeness of the Democrats for their loss, a point that James Carville just made in a Newsweek article.  Well, Carville said it, I believe it, and that settles it. (On the other hand, on October 23 he wrote a NYT op-ed called “Three reasons I’m certain that Kamala Harris will win.”) Here:

*I was proud of my state because on January 1 of this year, Illinois banned assault rifles (semiautomatic weapons).  But then, just two days ago, that ban was overturned by a fricking Federal Appeals Court. Now we can blast away happily at each other:

A federal judge on Friday overturned Illinois’ ban on semiautomatic weapons, leaning on recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings that strictly interpret the Second Amendment right to keep and bear firearms.

U.S. District Judge Stephen P. McGlynn, of the Southern District of Illinois, issued a permanent injunction he said applies universally, not just to the lawsuit’s plaintiffs. He decided, however, that the injunction would not take effect for 30 days.

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul responded speedily, filing a notice of appeal Friday evening.

The Protect Illinois Communities Act, signed into law in January 2023 by Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker, took effect Jan. 1. It bans AR-15 rifles and similar guns, large-capacity magazines and an assortment of attachments largely in response to the 2022 Independence Day shooting at a parade in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park.

The opinion drew heavily from recent landmark Supreme Court rulings expanding on the definition of the Second Amendment’s guarantees.

“Sadly, there are those who seek to usher in a sort of post-Constitution era where the citizens’ individual rights are only as important as they are convenient to a ruling class,” McGlynn wrote in his opinion. “The oft-quoted phrase that ‘no right is absolute’ does not mean that fundamental rights precariously subsist subject to the whims, caprice, or appetite of government officials or judges.”

Sadly, there are judges who think that the possession of an assault weapon, something that didn’t exist when the Constitution guaranteed the right to bear arms for the formation of a militia, is a “fundamental right.”  There will be more decisions like this, and they’ll go way into the future as Trump will be appointing several hundred Federal judges, and he ain’t going for any stinking liberals.  What’s next, the “right” to teach views opposed to evolution, like creationism?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili inspected the contents of the refrigerator and saw her favorite thing: BEEF!

Hili: I have a feeling that we should return home.
A: Why?
Hili: There is still a bit of tenderloin in the fridge.

In Polish:
Hili: Mam wrażenie, że powinniśmy wrócić do domu.
Ja: Dlaczego?
Hii: W lodówce jest jeszcze kawałek surowej  polędwicy.
Love

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

From Cat Memes:

A useful pie chart from Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:

And a working cat from somewhere on Facebook:

From Masih, who retweeted two X’s from PEN America, which is getting alarmingly woke. Note whose assassination plot they decry:

From Malgorzata: the good old BBC goes after the Jews again:

Irish textbooks seemingly being anti-Semitic, found on my own feed:

Two from my feed.  Sound up; puppy is squealing and the man is grunting as he succeeds in freeding the squeaking dog. Good thing it wasn’t a larger gator!

Yes, a good dad!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

Two old ones from Matthew, who refuses to supply us with tweets any more because he’s gone over to BlueSky because of Musk. Sadly, there don’t appear to be many post-able things on that platform. I may have posted this first one before, about the taming of an angry feral cat

This has got to take some skill:

Saturday: Hili dialogue

November 9, 2024 • 6:45 am

Good morning on Cat Sabbath: It’s CaturSaturday, November 9, 2024, and National Scrapple Day.  This Pennsylvania Dutch treat, made of “fried pork scraps and trimmings combined with cornmeal and wheat flour, often buckwheat flour, and spices,” is usually served fried for breakfast along with eggs. I quite like it so long as the “trimmings” don’t include organs. Here’s a photo of uncooked scrapple (left) and cooked (right):

Alyo, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also British Pudding Day (give me a sticky toffee pudding any day), National Fried chicken Sandwich Day (I’d rather have my chicken desnudo), Carl Sagan Day (he was born on this day in 1934), National Greek Yogurt Day, and World Freedom Day, commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Communist domination of Eastern Europe. 

xxx

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 9 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The Times of Israel reports on the pogrom in Amsterdam,

Israeli soccer fans on Friday recounted their terror when mobs of antisemitic rioters targeted and beat up Israelis Thursday, and said the police failed to protect them, in what was described as a twenty-first century “pogrom.”

Israeli officials said 10 Israelis were injured in the hours of overnight violence, which the victims said was perpetrated largely by local Muslims and Arabs, with hundreds more people reportedly besieged in their hotels and fearing they could be attacked again when trying to reach their flights home. The Israelis were mainly fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv, who came to watch their team play against Ajax in the city.

Amsterdam police said five people were hospitalized and 62 arrested after authorities said antisemitic rioters attacked Israeli supporters following the soccer match.

The police said that they had started a major investigation into multiple violent incidents. Amid rumors that some people had been taken hostage, officials said there was no sign of this, and Israeli authorities said all Israelis were accounted for.

Two Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, Aviv and Harel, told the Kan public broadcaster: “There was a police force standing on the side, not doing too much when there was some kind of protest. Everything was planned down to the last detail. Each of us had been to the Netherlands four times; we had never felt like this before.

“We saw people on the ground in the middle of the road. They arrived by car, by bike, they kicked. Some came in taxis, so we had trouble finding a taxi driver to get out of there. I suggested we hide any signs that could identify us and just pass through them, so they wouldn’t suspect us.”

. . . . “It was a pogrom. We were abandoned by the Amsterdam police. Until other Israelis arrived at Dam Square and drove away the rioters, an hour and a half from the start of the event, the Amsterdam police didn’t lift a finger,” Dan Kopleh, an eyewitness, told Kan.

Footage from the scene screened on Israeli television included a video clip in which an assailant asked an Israeli where he was from and attacked him while shouting “Free Palestine.”

There are a lot more stories like this, all horrifying. What steams me the most is the claim that the Amsterdam police “didn’t lift a finger”. It’s hard to believe that, and of course it’s hearsay here, but I’d like to hear from Dutch people. But this is not limited to the Netherlands. A reader reports that two Jewish students at Chicago’s DePaul University, demonstrating in favor of Israel, were attacked by masked men and slightly injured. The ToI adds:

Violence against Jewish Americans has surged to record levels across the country in the 13 months since the terror group Hamas attacked Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza. There have also been several attacks on Palestinian Americans.

*Timothy Shenk, a professor of history at George Washington University, tries to console us by penning a NYT op-ed called “This rout is an opportunity for Democrats“.

What do Democrats stand for? Over the last eight years, the answer has been simple: whatever Donald Trump is against. They have been the party of the so-called Resistance, defending institutions against a dangerous and fundamentally undemocratic movement. Two impeachments, four criminal investigations and 34 felony convictions, along with countless warnings that democracy was in peril: All of it flowed out of the conviction that Mr. Trump was a menace who couldn’t be addressed by politics as usual. It has defined what it means to be a Democrat. And it failed spectacularly this week, helping clear a path for Mr. Trump to return to the White House with a clean victory in the popular vote. This time, there’s no James Comey to scapegoat or Electoral College to blame. It’s a painful defeat — but it could also be a moment of rebirth for the party as it sets out to find a lasting Democratic majority.

. . . No matter how progressive the rhetoric, Resistance politics inevitably feels conservative. It’s reactionary in a literal sense: The other side decides the terms of debate, and it usually ends with finding yet another norm under assault, a new outrage to be tutted over or another institution that needs protecting.

Okay, so what should we do? What is the opportunity? You’re not going to believe this, but Shenk offers NO SOLUTION. Or rather, this:

Awkward coalitions across left and right have their place during emergencies, and there’s no politics without some fearmongering. But the methods Democrats counted on to keep Mr. Trump out of the White House came up short, and the excuses have lost touch with electoral reality. He was impeached, indicted and convicted, and then he won more votes in a fair fight with what could well be the most racially diverse Republican coalition in decades. Trumpism doesn’t have a generational lock on American politics, but it has broad and deep support, with the potential to grow in the years to come.

Democrats brought this battle on themselves, and they lost it. The Resistance has run into a dead end. That doesn’t mean ignoring the ideological overreach, bureaucratic incompetence and flagrant corruption that is guaranteed to pile up in Mr. Trump’s Washington. But it does mean giving up on the hope that laws, norms or one last impeachment will deliver us from Trumpism. It’s going to take a sprawling, messy and sometimes brutal debate inside the Democratic coalition — a debate that ends with a party that can plausibly present itself as a champion of ordinary people trying to make a better life in a broken system.

So the solution is that we can’t play the Resistance games and, in the end, we have to represent “ordinary people” instead of the elites. Well isn’t THAT special?

*As usual, I’m going to steal three items from Nellie Bowles’s incomparable Friday news summary at the Free Press, called this week “TGIF: Our campaign was perfect.”

→ Trump won: Yep. Trumpo won the election thanks to White Supremacy (Latinos) and Disinformation (men). The whole country simply jolted to the right:

He moved every demographic rightward except rich white women (me, your narrator, your debutante, I’m the only one you people can’t blame). I’m also college educated, but you knew that (Columbia College Class of 2010, Comparative Literature and Society major, magna cum laude but it should have been summa, still looking into that).

It was decisive. It was across the board. Trump moved Hispanic voters right by 25 points. Young men have shifted nearly 30 points to the right since 2020. I didn’t even know they could shift that far, what with their gaming headsets plugged into their Xboxes.

Trump did it and he did it cheap: Kamala Harris raised three times as much money as Trump. Yes, all the people who tell us that money can buy elections are really quiet now because money didn’t buy this one. And folks tried! They brought the election to the register and they said, “Wrap it up real nice, please, it’s a gift.” The clerk said, “Ma’am this is a Wendy’s,” and “MAGA.”

You might take all of these shifts and think: Wow, American voters rejected Democrats in this cycle. Or you could have The New York Times’ take on it, which is that we have been conquered.

Never before seen in our 248-year history? He was president four years ago.

→ The Dearborn vote: Kamala passed over the favorite—Joshheads, I see you, I am you—and chose a lefty VP to appease her party’s anti-Israel wing. And yet she still lost the heavily Muslim city of Dearborn, Michigan, to Trump. Yes: 42 percent for Trump—36 percent for Harris. The rage candidate, Jill Stein, pulled a healthy 18 percent.

Instead of nice, moderate Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, who unfortunately is Jewish (okay, Harvard kids, stop screaming yahood), she chose Tim Walz—the jolly man who let Minneapolis burn in antifa riots and who set up a Covid snitch line. Call in to report on a neighbor seen hosting dinner, that sort of thing. Not enough! I genuinely want to know who would be good enough for the pro–October 7 crowd. Obviously that person would have to be on a no-fly list. Probably they would need to rank highly enough in Hezbollah to have a pager. Lack of pro-Hamas representation and rhetoric is, honest to god, the take that many progressives are going with as to why Kamala lost:

Right. White women in Philadelphia and young men who felt left behind really needed to see Kamala doing an UNRWA fundraiser in her Instagram bio. That would have flipped ’em.

→ Peanut’s revenge: As Election Day loomed, blue cities in blue states were getting a little too confident. They were starting to flex their muscles. And so the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation went to a social media influencer’s house to kill his rescued pet squirrel, Peanut. Crimes don’t need solving, but Peanut needed killing. (They also killed Fred, his pet racoon. It was a massacre.) Peanut briefly became a conservative rallying cry. The influencer had adopted Peanut after his mom was killed by a car–and hadn’t Peanut been through enough? That Peanut’s rescuer was an OnlyFans star didn’t matter. He was America, just trying to get by, often naked, with a tiny rodent on his shoulders, harming no one. The state didn’t need to get involved here; this was between OnlyFans, squirrels, and God. Apparently, when the authorities came to do a check on Peanut, he bit them, but I’m waiting for the full autopsy report to be released before I jump to any conclusions.

On the stage before Kamala conceded, as cameras rolled and the crowd waited, somber, apprehensive. . . a squirrel darted across. Peanut’s revenge.

I loved Peanut and his execution by the authorities was a horrible thing. Those are bad people!

*An op-ed in the Harvard Crimson by the President of the University’s Institute of Politics (IOP) asserts that now that Trump is elected, it’s time to abandon institutional neutrality:

On Tuesday, America made a choice. But nearly 70 million Americans did not vote for election denialism, violence against their compatriots, or the elimination of basic human rights.

Today, Harvard’s Institute of Politics has a choice to make too. Nonpartisanship — a founding principle of the IOP — is no longer a tenable position in today’s political environment. Donald Trump’s imminent return to power underscores the importance of the IOP finally breaking from our long-standing commitment to it.

As this incoming administration charts its course, we must resist platforming anti-democratic voices in the guise of nonpartisanship. In fact, we must strive to defend principles of democracy, due process, and justice precisely to ensure that we can continue carrying out our age-old mission of nonpartisanship.

From the Jan. 6 insurrection to the wave of conservative voter suppression laws, anti-democratic action and rhetoric sits staunchly at the core of MAGA’s platform.

When democracy itself is under attack, nonpartisanship is not the hill to die on. And it certainly should not be used as an excuse to platform election deniers and those who seek to dismantle our democracy. People and rhetoric that enable violent, authoritarian, and oppressive governance have no place at an institute for civil political disagreement like the IOP.

On election night, with his unfounded claims of “massive cheating” in Pennsylvania, Trump once again signaled his interest in the erosion of American democracy. In stark contrast, the very next day Vice President Kamala Harris conceded electoral defeat, demonstrating a commitment to the peaceful transition of power.

The essence of democracy lies not just in constituents casting votes but also in candidates respecting the results of these votes. The IOP cannot ignore the reality that, as it stands, one party’s leadership actively betrays these democratic processes. True bipartisanship — and healthy nonpartisanship — is only possible when both sides of the aisle share a basic commitment to our country’s norms. Trump and his supporters have demonstrated that such a commitment can no longer be assumed.

Yes, it’s nonpartisanship so long as somebody you don’t like gets elected, and then you wave your colors and denounce the other side as antidemocratic. How about this: do what the University of Chicago does: remain institutionally neutral except on those issues that directly affect the workings and mission of the University.  If Trump tries to impede those things, then yes, speak out loudly. But until then, keep your gob shut and stop anticipating the worst.

*Finally, in his latest column, “The energizing clarity of democracy,” Andrew Sullivan, who voted for Harris, finds a silver lining in the results (I keep seeing these “silver lining” columns but have yet to see any metal):

But the good news is that we have become less tribal. The president whom Ta-Nehisi Coates derided as whiteness personified just won more non-white votes than any Republican since Nixon. The allegedly xenophobic campaigner against illegal immigration gained massively among various Spanish-speaking constituencies and many legal immigrants, especially men. The champion of rural whites somehow also made his biggest electoral gains in the big, non-white cities, and among Hispanic voters in Texas border counties. A Republican whom the left and the legacy media called a “white supremacist” won about 24 percent of the black male vote and 47 percent of the Latino male vote.

What about the huge impact of enraged women we were told about, especially in the wake of the Selzer poll in Iowa? Again: a nothingburger. Biden won women by 12 points; Harris —a woman candidate after the end of Roe — won by only 7 points. Ruy Teixeira runs through the other demos here. Gen Z? Biden won women under 30 by 32 points, and Harris by a mere 18. Meanwhile, men under 30 went from +15 for Biden to +14 for Trump — a truly staggering swing! Trump gained among Jews and Muslims! Harris was the candidate of the Upper West Side. The Bronx moved massively to Trump.

How could an entire left-liberal worldview be more comprehensibly dismantled by reality? And yet, the primary response among my own liberal friends was rage at the electorate. They texted me to insist that Harris lost because of white people — white women, in particular, their favorite bêtes blanches. The NYT’s resident race-baiter, Nikole Hannah-Jones, made her usual point:

Since this nation’s inception large swaths of white Americans — including white women — have claimed a belief in democracy while actually enforcing a white ethnocracy.

In fact, among the few demos where Harris did better than Biden were white people earning over $100,000 a year, white women, white men, and “LGBT” voters — most of whom are now young, bi, white women in straight relationships. Warming to her racism, NHJ went after “the anti-Blackness … in Latino cultures as well.” Here’s how Joan Walsh put it:

[Biden]’s got a couple things that my girl Kamala didn’t have. A penis, and that nice white skin.

But more whites went for Kamala than Biden! If you want proof that critical race, gender and queer theory is unfalsifiable, you just got it. The Dems and most of the legacy media have literally no frame of reference outside “white-bad/black-and-brown-good” and “men-bad/women-good.”

. . . .On Trump as a potential dictator, Americans keep telling us they don’t really buy it. They may be wrong … and maybe they are. But if you are going to respect democracy, you also need to respect their judgment, and honor their choice. I suspect they think he will throw his weight around, but will be constrained as he was last time around by the ability of the American system to stymie most radical moves. But they want him to end mass illegal immigration, and I suspect they will give him some leeway to get there. The Dems had their chance to enforce the border and instead chose to open the floodgates. What Trump now does is therefore their responsibility too.

The ending:

But Trump is now a world-historical figure, the most significant American politician of this century so far, with a real mandate. That requires, in my view, an attitude adjustment: not a doubling down of “resistance” but a strategy of engagement and discerning opposition. The way to get Trump to do what you want is to flatter and seduce him — the way Putin and Kim Jong Un do. I suspect that finally giving him the establishment respect he so desperately yearns for could be the most effective way of dealing with him. That requires a real shift in worldview among his opponents. And it will not come easy to many of us. But if this election doesn’t occasion that, what would?

Yes, this is democracy in action. It hasn’t died. It has, in fact, surprised us by revealing a much less tribal and less racially polarized country than we imagined, a vibrant electorate open to change and nuance, and two multiracial coalitions vying for power. Trump remains the unknown, of course. And we could be headed for disaster if both he and his opponents revert to form. But there is an opening here, if we want to take it. For the first time in eight years, I feel some small confidence in saying this once again, even as many around me seem sunk in despair.

Know hope.

The silver lining seems to be simply our ability to know that “democracy has worked” and hope that Trump isn’t as bad as people think. (Truth be told, I don’t think he will be because others will restrain him. In my view, although he’s a narcissistic and unhinged man, his bark has always been worse than his bite—unless you’re a woman he likes or it happens to be January 6.)

Oh, and Sullivan gives a good quote:

“I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that,” – Seth Moulton, Dem congressman.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili mourns the passing of summer, which she’s forced to do each year:

Hili:Do you see what’s going on?
A: Leaves are falling.
Hili: It doesn’t bode well.
In Polish:
Hili: Widzisz co się dzieje?
Ja: Liście spadają jak co roku.
Hili: To nie wróży dobrze.

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

From Strange, Stupid, and Silly Signs:

From Jesus of the Day:

From Cat Memes:

From Masih; there’s been another plot to kill her. Sound up. This is pretty shocking:

These are from my freed. I don’t know why I get them; I follow nobody but when I click on “home” I find stuff like this:

Is this a joke?

From JKR. Read the whole thing. Like me, she’s a liberal, but that doesn’t mean we have to approve of every form of gender activism. I could have written this—if I could write as well as Rowling:

From Shermer. I presume he realizes that that massive staff purge would include the editor-in-chief:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, re the troubles in the Netherlands, here’s one I retweeted:

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. The first he labels “Amazing!”

Did you know there was a real Snoopy?

Friday: Hili dialogue

November 8, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the tail end o’ the week: Friday, November 8, 2024, and National Cappuccino Day.  I’m having a latte, but that is a sister species to cappuccino, having just a little more milk. Here’s mine this morning (I put a bit of cinnamon on top). I’m sipping it as I write!

It’s also World Pianist Day, National Harvey Wallbanger Day (a drink made with vodka, Galliano liqueur, and orange juice), and X-ray Day (the anniversary of the day on which Wilhelm Roentgen discovered X-rays in 1895). Here is the first “radiograph”, an image of Roentgen’s wife’s hand (her name was Anna Bertha Ludwig):

Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 4.0 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 8 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Control of the House of Representatives, crucial in what will happen in the next two years, is still undetermined.  The Republicans have to win 7 more seats out of the 25 left; the Democrats must win 19.  But the Senate is in GOP hands. Here’s the latest count from the AP:

And Trump has named Susie Wiles as his chief of staff (her Wikipedia bio is here):

Susie Wiles, who was named Donald Trump’s new White House chief of staff, will be the first woman in US history to serve in the role as gatekeeper to the president, a position that typically wields great influence.

The chief of staff position is usually the first appointee that a president-elect names, and may oversee the transition from one administration. Once Trump is sworn in as president, Wiles will also be in charge of all White House policy, serving as a confidante and adviser and managing day-to-day affairs.

Wiles, 67, is a veteran of Florida politics. She began her career in the Washington office of New York congressman Jack Kemp in the 1970s. Following that she did stints on Ronald Reagan’s campaign and in his White House as a scheduler.

. . .  Wiles joined up with Trump’s third campaign and served as his “de facto chief of staff” over the last three years to lead his successful re-election bid and helped him work with lawyers on his various criminal and civil cases.

*Here is a clickbaity headline from the NYT. I couldn’t help but read it (click on screenshot to read):

Buyt the essential bet is a bit anodyne. I’ve put the “essential bet” in bold:

How he won in 2024 came down to one essential bet: that his grievances could meld with those of the MAGA movement, and then with the Republican Party, and then with more than half the country. His mug shot became a best-selling shirt. His criminal conviction inspired $100 million in donations in one day. The images of him bleeding after a failed assassination attempt became the symbol of what supporters saw as a campaign of destiny.

“God spared my life for a reason,” he said at his victory speech early Wednesday, adding, “We are going to fulfill that mission together.”

At times, Mr. Trump could be so crude and self-indulgent on the stump that aides wondered if he were engaged in an absurdist experiment to test how much aberrant behavior voters would tolerate.

But Mr. Trump successfully harnessed the anger and frustration millions of Americans felt about some of the very institutions and systems he will soon control as the country’s 47th president. Voters unhappy with the nation’s direction turned him into a vessel for their rage.

“The elites cannot come to grips with how alienated they are from the country,” said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, an informal adviser to the former and now future president.

But more than just broad societal forces were at play. His victory owed, in part, to strategic decisions by a campaign operation that was his most stable yet and was held together for nearly four years by a veteran operative, Susie Wiles — even if the candidate himself was, for much of 2024, as erratic as ever.

Is there any “there” there? All it seems they’re saying is that people who liked Trump would ignore stuff that would hurt any other candidate.  But we know that! After all, he was the one who said that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and wouldn’t lose any voters.” That was in 2016!

*I guess I’m just obsessed (as many Democrats are) with why the party lost. So here’s a WSJ headline that drew me in (click to read). I have an endless obsession with this kind of speculation because, of course, nobody knows for sure what changes would have led Harris to win:

Heading into Election Day, Donald Trump kept making controversial comments they thought would play right into their strategy of showing voters he was unfit for another term. They were optimistic the vice president was on the precipice of victory in a race they viewed as on a knife’s edge. Her final campaign appearance, on the iconic Philadelphia steps from Sylvester Stallone’s “Rocky,” would cap the arc of an underdog’s rise.

Instead, their optimism was a sign of how badly the Harris campaign misread an electorate that was more wound up about inflation and immigration than about Trump’s character. Trump punched his return ticket to the White House with a stunning electoral romp that batted away Harris’s attacks and lured voters who believed the country was on the wrong track and blamed President Biden, Harris’s deeply unpopular boss. Her inability to separate herself from him and offer her own specific solutions to Americans’ problems, despite a lavish campaign war chest, was a central reason for her loss.

Is this really news to anybody? That voters were concerned with immigration and the cost of living and Harris waffled about those things, offering only a promise to stop “price gouging”? And that when asked how she differed from Biden, she couldn’t give a substantive answer? But there’s more!

More broadly, the party erred in failing to plan a smooth transition from Biden’s presidency to the next generation of younger leaders despite his pledge to do so. Thrusting Harris atop the ticket in July left her campaign ill-prepared to compete against an opponent with a firm grip on the electorate.

In a 15-week campaign, Harris’s advisers knew from the start the fundamentals of the race were against her, but they eventually came to believe that bringing into focus Trump’s character was the only way to neutralize her headwinds.

Voters’ discontent with the direction of the country—including their frustrations with inflation and record illegal border crossings—meant they were looking for a change agent. Harris didn’t feel comfortable coming off as critical of Biden, despite a push from some allies, and her advisers also didn’t think it would work, given her role in the administration.

And who hasn’t said this? I said it, for one. Again, we have a postmortem analysis that is speculative and, more important, old news. Let’s move on (I’m getting the feeling that my writing about the election is drawing to a close).

*Can we find something interesting in the Washington Post? How about this?

An excerpt:

President-elect Donald Trump is poised to push swiftly for new tax cuts if Republicans win full control of Congress, further slashing corporate rates and extending trillions of dollars of other cuts even as the national debt soars.

Major portions of Trump’s 2017 tax law are set to expire next year, and Republicans are aiming to give Trump a major legislative accomplishment within his first 100 days in office.

The GOP won control of the Senate in Tuesday’s elections. While control of the House is still uncertain, Republicans are optimistic that results are trending toward maintaining their narrow majority.

As party leaders discuss their plans for the early days of a new Trump administration, the attitude that’s emerged on taxes is, “Just go,” according to a top conservative lobbyist familiar with the discussions, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks. “Rip the Band-Aid and run and just plow it through.”

Trump ran on a promise of extending individual tax cuts — which reduced what taxpayers in every income bracket paid — and a bevy of other expensive new changes. He pledged to exempt tipped wages and overtime pay from taxes, along with Social Security benefits, which could rapidly accelerate the insolvency date for social safety-net programs. His 2017 law cut the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 percent, but Trump on the campaign trail said he hoped to lower it to 15 percent.

The earlier Trump tax cuts overwhelmingly benefited the nation’s highest earners, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

. . . . Congressional Republicans could move to approve those policies through a process called reconciliation, which would allow a bill to pass the Senate with a simple 51-vote majority, dodging a potential filibuster. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) and other GOP leaders have been meeting for months to plot their moves at the start of a second Trump administration.

Note the sort-of editorial remark in the first sentence, implying already that Trump’s proposal, not yet enacted, will hurt the national debt. As for passing this thing, well, it has to pass both the Senate and the House, and passing the Senate means “reconciliation,” which, as I recall, is something the Democrats did—so they can’t object to it. And if the House goes Democratic, well, they’ll vote as a block on this and it won’t pass.  I just want to see what Trump really does on Day 1.  Mass deportations, as he promises? (I’m a bit worried about that!). And I’d be curious what readers think about exempting overtime pay from taxes (“tipped wages” are typically so low—except in rare cases where wages excluding tips are high—that they should be exempt from tax).

*Finally, how can I ignore this? (Click to read):

An excerpt:

Donald J. Trump’s election victory is plunging efforts to reach a cease-fire in Gaza into further uncertainty, after a year of failed attempts by the Biden administration floundered because of irreconcilable demands from Israel and Hamas.

For months, leaders across the region — in Israel, Lebanon, Gaza and Qatar — have taken a wait-and-see approach to the U.S. election. It is unclear what will come next, but any firm advancement on a cease-fire, if there is one at all, would most likely be delayed until after Mr. Trump’s inauguration in January, analysts said.

The sense was that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel “was waiting for the results of the U.S. presidential election to make a move,” said Michael Stephens, a Middle East expert at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based research group. “Why would he give Biden anything now?”

More than 43,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began, including thousands of women and children, according to health officials in the enclave, and Gazans had been skeptical about whether Mr. Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris would do much to improve their situation. The war was set off the Hamas-led attack last October in which the Israeli authorities said roughly 1,200 people in Israel were killed and about 250 were taken hostage.

There is, of course, no mention about whether that figure is accurate (I doubt it) or what percentage of those people were Hamas fighters rather than civilians (I suspect about 35-50%). But let’s proceed.

The Biden administration had urged both sides to bridge their remaining differences and agree to a three-stage truce. As part of the proposed accord, the phases would see Israel end the war against Hamas, withdraw from Gaza and release Palestinian prisoners; Hamas would free the 101 hostages still held there. (Proposals for a short-term truce were rejected by Hamas, which demanded an end to the war as a condition for agreeing to a deal.)

Mr. Netanyahu has welcomed the election of Mr. Trump, who was a staunch defender of Israel during his first term. He was one of the first to congratulate Mr. Trump on his victory, and spoke to him on Wednesday evening. The two agreed “to work together for the sake of Israel’s security,” according to a statement from the Israeli prime minister’s office.

But how Mr. Trump might rearrange the chessboard is still unclear. He has expressed broad support for Israel’s right to defend itself after the Oct. 7 attacks.

At the same time, he has called on Israel to “finish up” the campaign — a position that would clash with many in the hard-line Israeli government who support indefinite Israeli control in Gaza.

The Biden administration’s plan for a truce would involve freeing thousands of Palestinian terrorists in return for the hostages (there are probably only 30 alive, not 101),  Would a withdrawal from Gaza entail Hamas surrendering unconditionally? I doubt it. And of course Harris, at least, kept trumpeting the “two state solution,” which is a total nonstarter. I don’t know what Trump will do, of course, but I’m pretty sure he’ll do more of what Israel wants than would Harris, which of course is why Netanyahu was so eager to congratulate Trump.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, a hedgehog ate cat food. But Hili is okay with that!

Hili: A hedgehog was here yesterday.
A: Have you seen it?
Hili: No, Paulina said that it was here. She gave him cat food and he ate everything.
In Polish:
Hili: Tu wczoraj był jeż.
Ja: Widziałaś go?
Hili: Nie, Paulina mówiła, że był i dała mu kocią karmę, wszystko zjadł.

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

From Jesus of the Day. This must be a Halloween costume:

From Science Humor:

From Cat Memes:

 

From Masih. Another brave Iranian girl goes unveiled (with lipstick). If she has ulcers, she should be on antibiotics! Ceiling cat bless the brave women of Iran!

Titania tweeted, like a good liberal should (h/t Jez):

A tweet by #10 cat sent in by Simon two years ago. There’s no doubt where Larry’s politics lie!

Somebody sent this to me, but I can’t remember who.  No worries, Texas stayed red but the spelling stayed lousy!

From my feed.  Crikey, this lady has a fit because they don’t serve fries without salt!  She should just go elsewhere.

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I re-Xed:

Two tweets from Matthew. I don’t see why these people had “too” move, and I don’t really believe it. But I believe the stealing incident happened:

. . . and Cat Crazy Hour!

Thursday: Hili dialogue

November 7, 2024 • 7:00 am

Welcome to Thursday, November 7, 2024, and International Stout Day (no, it’s not celebrating fatness, but dark beer). I don’t know if this is a stout, but this bottle of Ola Dubh, which I first encountered in Davis, California, and then drank on my stay in Utah as well, is “stoutlike,” and certainly the best dark beer I’ve ever had. The name means “Black Oil” in Gaelic, and it does indeed look like what you drain from your crankcase during an oil change. It’s made in Scotland and very hard to find (kudos to my friend Phil Ward for tracking it down.  It’s complex and wonderful: here is a description from the Harviestoun website:

Ola Dubh, meaning ‘Black Oil’ in Gaelic, is craftily created by taking our Old Engine Oil and maturing it in 12 year old Highland Park whisky casks. The process is far from simple, but the result is a beautiful brew with complimentary whisky notes and a chocolate, roasty and bittersweet aftertaste. All thanks to the labour of love of our master brewers.

Ola Dubh is a labour of love. Everything about it is extreme. The brew team fill the mash tuns to the brim with roast barley, pinhead oats and malted barley. It ferments more slowly as the the yeast struggles to move around in such a viscous beer! The base beer is Old Engine Oil which they then put into Highland Park Whisky casks and it stays there for at least 6 months. During this time the flavours from the wood enter the beer to produce Ola Dubh. It is ready only when our Master Brewer, Stuart, deems it ready!

It’s also Hug a Bear Day, Little League Girls Day, International Merlot Day, National Bittersweet Chocolate with Almonds Day, and Men Make Dinner Day (I’m having a consolation rib-eye steak). 

Here’s me hugging a bear: my teddy bear Toasty, who is as old as I am (the picture is from 2002:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 7 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*As of this writing, Trump’s accrued 295 electoral votes to Harris’s 226, the Senate is firmly in the hands of the GOP (52-44), and the House is still up for grabs (205 Republicans and 190 Democrats). Kamala Harris gave a concession speech at Howard University, vowing to continue her fight for America:

“While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign,” Ms. Harris said.

“Hear me when I say, the light of America’s promise will always burn bright,” she added. “As long as we never give up. And as long as we keep fighting.”

Ms. Harris, her voice cracking with emotion at times, made the final speech of her presidential campaign at Howard University, her alma mater, in Washington. The results, still trickling in as Ms. Harris spoke, showed her on track to lose both the national popular vote and the top seven battleground states.

But of course the analyses of why she lost to Trump are already everywhere; in fact, this Nooz discusses several (see below). One explanation which is ubiquitous is that she lost because she is not only a woman, but a black woman (you can see articles about this in the NYT here, and here, and one in the WaPo here),

From the Free Press’s morning newsletter (I’ll save Helmuth for later):

But if the media meltdown that followed Trump’s extraordinary comeback is anything to go by, there is no end to that fever dream. Just take a look at what has transpired over the last 36 hours:

  • On MSNBC, Joy Ann Reid said, “anyone who has experienced this country’s history. . . and knows it, cannot have believed that it would be easy to elect a woman president, let alone a woman of color.” Of Harris’s election effort, she added: “I mean, this really was a historic, flawlessly run campaign.”
  • On The View, Sunny Hostin said: “I was so hopeful that a mixed-race woman married to a Jewish guy could be elected president of this country. And I think that it had nothing to do with policy. I think this was a referendum of cultural resentment in this country.”
  • On Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough said to a nodding Al Sharpton that “It’s not just misogyny from white men; it’s misogyny from Hispanic men, it’s misogyny from black men—things we’ve all been talking about—who do not want a woman leading them.” He added that it “might be race issues with Hispanics. They don’t want a black woman as president.” (He left out the fact that Trump performed nine points better with Hispanic women this year compared to 2020.)

Here’s a tweet with that clip from Morning Joe:

  • Laura Helmuth, the editor in chief of Scientific American, chimed in with a now-deleted tweet: “I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of fucking fascists.” (Fifty-four percent of Gen X voted Trump.)
  • The pastor and activist John Pavlovitz, who has 400,000 followers on X, declared: “Kamala Harris was the perfect candidate and she ran a beautiful campaign of joy, empathy, and unity. She just happened to run in a nation that is addicted to nihilism, cruelty, and division.”
  • Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The 1619 Project at The New York Times, warned that: “We must not delude ourselves in this moment.” Among “shifting demographics where white Americans will lose their numeric majority,” she added, there is “a growing embrace of autocracy to keep the ‘legitimate’ rulers of this country in power.”

I think the gender and race issue, while they may have played a role, were not the main factors in the Democatic loss; after all, Obama won twice, and, although I have no proof, I haven’t detected a note of misogyny from Republicans or Trump-supporters (of course, people were say that it was kept hidden). But you can also read Kat Rosenfeld’s Free Press article, “It’s not because she’s a woman” (archived here).  Four paragraphs:

It’s not hard to see the appeal of this [sexism] narrative. It displaces blame for Harris’s failure onto everyone but the candidate herself and allows her supporters to claim the moral high ground, in the face of abject defeat. The idea that voters dismissed Harris on the basis of sex rather than the substance, or lack thereof, of her policies means there is no need to consider the campaign’s missteps or how it could do better next time. In this paradigm, Harris was perfect; it’s America that is wrong. And so she lost, yes, but only because the country itself is so full of losers.

. . . . To suggest that Americans balk at the notion of putting women in power is absurd. Hillary Clinton won the nation’s popular vote by a margin of three million just eight short years ago; an elderly Biden easily won the presidency in 2020 despite the very real possibility of his female VP ascending to the Oval Office in the event of his death.

But even more importantly, fitness for office isn’t just about being charismatic and competent enough to win; it’s also about accepting defeat gracefully, without claiming that the system was rigged against you. And much like Donald Trump’s insistence that he would have won the 2020 election if not for widespread cheating by Democrats, the idea that Kamala would have been victorious if not for the moral failings of a misogynist electorate is a lie, and a cope, that has no place in presidential politics.

If you want to become president of the United States of America, then you have to convince Americans to vote for you, full stop.

*I don’t like Bret Stephens insulting my party in the title of his new op-ed—”How a Part of Prigs and Pontificators Suffers a Humiliating Defeat“—but I always read what Stephens has to say. And note that he voted for Kamala Harris. (The article is archived here.)

Why did Harris lose? There were many tactical missteps: her choice of a progressive running mate who would not help deliver a must-win state like Pennsylvania or Michigan; her inability to separate herself from President Biden; her foolish designation of Trump as a fascist, which, by implication, suggested his supporters were themselves quasi-fascist; her overreliance on celebrity surrogates as she struggled to articulate a compelling rationale for her candidacy; her failure to forthrightly repudiate some of the more radical positions she took as a candidate in 2019, other than by relying on stock expressions like “My values haven’t changed.”

There was also the larger error of anointing Harris without political competition — an insult to the democratic process that handed the nomination to a candidate who, as some of us warned at the time, was exceptionally weak. That, in turn, came about because Democrats failed to take Biden’s obvious mental decline seriously until June’s debate debacle (and then allowed him to cling to the nomination for a few weeks more), making it difficult to hold even a truncated mini-primary.

But these mistakes of calculation lived within three larger mistakes of worldview. First, the conviction among many liberals that things were pretty much fine, if not downright great, in Biden’s America — and that anyone who didn’t think that way was either a right-wing misinformer or a dupe. Second, the refusal to see how profoundly distasteful so much of modern liberalism has become to so much of America. Third, the insistence that the only appropriate form of politics when it comes to Trump is the politics of Resistance — capital R.

. . .Regarding the first, I’ve lost track of the number of times liberal pundits have attempted to steer readers to arcane data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve to explain why Americans should stop freaking out over sharply higher prices of consumer goods or the rising financing costs on their homes and cars. Or insisted there was no migration crisis at the southern border. Or averred that Biden was sharp as a tack and that anyone who suggested otherwise was a jerk.

Yet when Americans saw and experienced things otherwise (as extensive survey data showed they did) the characteristic liberal response was to treat the complaints not only as baseless but also as immoral. The effect was to insult voters while leaving Democrats blind to the legitimacy of the issues.

The second “mistake of worldview”:

The dismissiveness with which liberals treated these concerns was part of something else: dismissiveness toward the moral objections many Americans have to various progressive causes. Concerned about gender transitions for children or about biological males playing on girls’ sports teams? You’re a transphobe. Dismayed by tedious, mandatory and frequently counterproductive D.E.I. seminars that treat white skin as almost inherently problematic? You’re racist. Irritated by new terminology that is supposed to be more inclusive but feels as if it’s borrowing a page from “1984”? That’s doubleplusungood.

The Democratic Party at its best stands for fairness and freedom. But the politics of today’s left is heavy on social engineering according to group identity. It also, increasingly, stands for the forcible imposition of bizarre cultural norms on hundreds of millions of Americans who want to live and let live but don’t like being told how to speak or what to think. Too many liberals forgot this, which explains how a figure like Trump, with his boisterous and transgressive disdain for liberal pieties, could be re-elected to the presidency.

The more I hear from both sides about Harris’s loss, the more I think that her “wokeness” was a factor; but also important was the rather unfair way she became a candidate: without competition. Stephens deals with the last point in the article (read for free), which he says made Dems look “hyperbolic” and “hysterical.” He finishes by chastising us this way, and he’s right:

I voted reluctantly for Harris because of my fears for what a second Trump term might bring — in Ukraine, our trade policy, civic life, the moral health of the conservative movement writ large. Right now, my larger fear is that liberals lack the introspection to see where they went wrong, the discipline to do better next time and the humility to change.

*Jesse Singal wails on Substack that “We are losers.”

I hope, but am not holding my breath, that the thoroughness of the thumping will drive home a point that has been clear to many of us for a while: The anti-Trump movement is a broken, ineffectual, frequently self-sabotaging mess that cannot be salvaged. It needs to be burnt down (NOT LITERALLY) and rebuilt into something more effective and less delusional. This movement consists of far too many individuals who, having gotten way too high on their own supply, have spent the last few years wandering around like zombies, chanting strange mantras and scaring the normie neighbors. They need to be taken by the arm and guided gently to the nearest comfy chair for a long, restorative rest while people whose eyes are less bloodshot take over.

But the point is simply that the anti-Trump movement’s decade-long attempts to define Trump as beyond the pale, as racist, as evil, as a threat to America, and on and on and on, has failed utterly and completely and spectacularly. By nearly every available metric, at the level of averages, American voters have marched away from these claims: Trump has gained significant ground among just about every group supposedly threatened and/or offended by him, including black and Latino voters (that’s an interesting NPR interview from this morning that is worth listening to).

Singal’s argument is that a lot of the anti-Trump movement’s leaders (he is of course an anti-Trumper) are failures and should get out of the way? Okay, what then?  He says that we can’t use this mantra (bolding is Singal’s:

There are a few reasonable-sounding objections to my indictment of the anti-Trump movement. I don’t have it in me to respond to all of them, so I’ll just choose one: Trump won because of a combination of economic concerns (perceived or real) and widespread dissatisfaction with the Biden campaign’s handling of the border, and other issues, and no anti-Trump movement (or Democratic candidate) could have really done anything about these difficult on-the-ground facts.

But then gives three arguments against it. In the end, he doesn’t offer much of a solution save that Democrats should be less self-congratulatory, which jibes with Stephens’s view that we are prigs and pontificators:

I’m not offering a lot of solutions here, and the fact is I’m hoping to really turn away from politics for a while and back to this newsletter’s red meat (let’s see how successful I am). In terms of the rough contours of a possible way forward, I leave you with Matt Yglesias:

There has been a lot of strategic investment in a deliberate project of narrowing the progressive tent both by purging a few and by intimidating others out of speaking their minds and it’s basically worked.

The problem is you just lose!

And with Rachel Cohen:

[I] am doubtful that most groups will do serious reflection and reconsideration of their strategy and demands because their organizational incentives are primarily not about actually winning, one of the saddest dynamics to me about contemporary politics

At the end of the day, much of this really will come down to a choice: How important is winning to you versus feeling good about yourself and being congratulated by your peers at your ever-shrinking coalition’s annual conferences and galas? I strongly suspect that in the case of many anti-Trump stalwarts, I know the answer — and it’s depressing as hell.

*And one paragraph from Matt Yglesias’s column “A tale of two machines: Democrats need to stop shrinking the tent.”

The electoral tent is too narrow. Setting aside the question of toxically unpopular progressive positions, Democrats just have too many stances that are considered non-negotiable. Democrats’ formal campaigns emphasized abortion rights, health care, and a light smattering of left-populism (federal price gouging law, anyone?) on top of an upbeat, inclusive cultural positioning. But if you want to be seen as a party that’s obsessed with abortion rights and health care, then you have to welcome people who agree with you about that stuff as allies, even if they disagree about other stuff, not do purges over student loan reform.

But have we done that? Who, exactly, are we supposed to welcome into the Democratic party?

*Comedian and podcaster Konstantin Kisen gives us his analysis of why Trump won and Harris lost in a Substack piece called “10 reasons you didn’t see this coming“. (h/t Anna). Here are the first five:

1. Americans love their country and want it to be the best in the world. America is a nation of people who conquered a continent. They love strength. They love winning. Any leader who appeals to that has an automatic advantage.

I call this the “Patton argument”.

2. Unlike Europeans, Americans have not accepted managed decline. They don’t have Net Zero here, they believe in producing their own energy and making it as cheap as possible because they know that their prosperity depends on it.

3. Prices for most basic goods in the US have increased rapidly and are sky high. What the official statistics say about inflation and the reality of people’s lives are not the same.

4. Unlike you, Americans do not believe in socialism. They believe in meritocracy. They don’t care about the super rich being super rich because they know that they live in a country where being super rich is available to anyone with the talent and drive to make it. They don’t resent success, they celebrate it.

5. Americans are the most pro-immigration people in the world. Read that again. Seriously, read it again. Americans love an immigrant success story. They want more talented immigrants to come to America. But they refuse to accept people coming illegally. They believe in having a border.

As you see, the reasons vary in quality.  Here’s one more, which makes more sense than some of the others, but go look at the last four.

6. Americans are sensitive about racial issues and their country’s imperfect history. They believe that those who are disadvantaged by the circumstances of their birth should be given the opportunity to succeed. What they reject, however, is the idea that in order to address the errors of the past new errors must be made. DEI is racist. They know it and they reject it precisely because they are not racist.

*Or, if you want to be a really petulant Democrat, just have a big fat tantrum and stop supporting Musk, Amazon, and Twitter, unsubscribe from all national news papers, never vote for a Republican, ever, and stop giving your money to companies that could enrich already-rich owners because, as we know, all very rich people are “assholes.” Now that is a recipe for a Democratic comeback, no?

*Finally, across the pond and then the Mediterranean, Israel is in turmoil.  First, Hezbollah fired 150 rockets at Israel yesterday, with one hitting near the Ben-Gurion airport. One person was killed, and of course Israel will retaliate. Second, Netanuyahu and other Israeli leaders rushed to congratulate Trump on his victory:

As the results of the 2024 United States presidential election indicated on Wednesday morning that former president Donald Trump had defeated Vice President Kamala Harris, Israeli leaders and politicians began congratulating the Republican on a decisive victory.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the first world leader to congratulate Trump, even before news outlets began to call the election in his favor.

“Congratulations on history’s greatest comeback!” he said in an English-language statement written in Trump’s trademark over-the-top style.

That’s another reason to dislike Bibi, but realize that he, like other Israelis, realized that the candidate who would be the best for Israel’s welfare was Trump, not Harris. But surprisingly, Arab-American voters in the Midwest alsoo exulted in Trump’s victory, for they felt that the Biden-Haris administration was to blame for America’s support of Israel:

 Optimism and hookahs were bubbling in concert on Tuesday night at the Arab Americans for Trump election watch party in Dearborn, Michigan, as the major TV networks called one state after another for the former and soon-to-be future US president.

It was a scene that was virtually unimaginable just four years ago, when Joe Biden won nearly 90 percent of the vote in the southern part of Dearborn, where a similarly overwhelming percentage of residents are Arab and Muslim.

But riding the community’s utter fury over the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of Israel’s war against the Hamas terror group in Gaza, Donald Trump managed to win a plurality of the vote in Dearborn — 47 percent to 28% for Vice President Kamala Harris, who only beat Green Party candidate Jill Stein by six percentage points, according to an NBC News projection.

Now how can this be? How can Bibi celebrate Trump’s victory on one hand and Arab-Americans on the other? The answer, I think, is twofold. First, many Arab-Americans have no idea of how much friendlier Trump will be to Israel than was the Biden/Harris administration was, or that Kamala “Cease Fire/Two-State” Harris would have been. (Yes, the Biden administration said they would stand by Israel, but they withheld weapons at time, tried to run Israel’s war strategy with blackmail and threats, and kept touting an impossible cease-fire and “two state solution”.) Second, throughout the Middle East, and perhaps in America, Arabs not friendly to terrorism or the Palestinians are hoping that Trump can help purge the area of terrorism, particularly or the species generated by Iran and its proxies.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is gnawing on a sticl:

Hili: This tastes awful.
A: But what did you expect?
Hili: I don’t know but something less awful.
In Polish:
Hili: To ma okropny smak.
Ja: A czego się spodziewałaś?
Hili: Nie wiem. ale mniej okropnego.

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

From Strange, Stupid, and Silly Signs:

From Jesus of the Day:

From Scott: a meme about Ahou Daryaei, the Iranian woman who stripped (including her hijab) to protest the covering of women mandated by the theocracy.  A tweet showing her transgression is below.  She has been arrested, of course, and put in a mental hospital, for Tehran University says she has a “mental disorder”

A tweet:

And from Masih, who publicized Darvaei’s gesture of defiance, a lot of details about the woman, including the worrying one that the doctors found her mentally healthy but she’s still under guard:

And a relevant cartoon:

From Andrew Doyle, the alter ego of Titania McGrath. Sound up.

Two from my feed. First, from the mysterious Elder of Ziyon:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I re-Xed:

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, a leopard cat (Prionailurus bengalensis) from Asia:

From Bluesky, where Matthew is registered. He gook a screenshot of this gynandromorph ant: male on one side (haploid) and female on the other (diploid):

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

November 6, 2024 • 8:45 am

*Yes, the Republicans took the whole hog last night: the Presidency, the Senate, and likely the House.  See the post just below for that Nooz. This post was written yesterday afternoon, before the polls closed.

Welcome to a Hump Day (“Çarşamba günü” in Turkish): Wednesday, November 6, 2024. It’s National Nachos Day, and wouldn’t you like some right now?

Simranjeet Sidhu, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also Basketball Day, Eat Smart Day, and National Saxophone Day.  In honor of the last day, I give you one of Coleman Hawkins‘s greatest solos, “Body and Soul”. First, a few words from Wikipedia:

On October 11, 1939, [Hawkins] recorded a two-chorus performance of the standard “Body and Soul“, which he had been performing at Bert Kelly’s New York venue, Kelly’s Stables. In a landmark recording of the swing era, captured as an afterthought at the session, Hawkins ignores almost all of the melody, with only the first four bars stated in a recognizable fashion. Hawkins’ departure from the melodic themes of the tune, use of upper chord intervals, and implied passing chords in that recording have been described as “one of the early tremors of bebop”.

The other guy in the photo below is surely Charlie Parker, but Parker didn’t play on this cut. It must be a stock photo.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 6 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*THIS IS OUTDATED NOW: SEE THE PREVIOUS POST. If you want to follow the election results in real time, a good way to do it is to look from time to time at the “election needle” of the NYT, where the needle swings to one side or another depending on who’s winning. I remember following it during the day in Hong Kong when Hillary Clinton moved the needle on the blue side, and then it moved toward the red side bit by bit, until the eection was called (I had voted by mail in the U.S.).  I was dumbfounded and depressed, but I’ve told that story before. If you subscribe to the NYT, you can find the needle here, or by clicking below:

An excerpt:

How does the needle work?

The Needle considers two fundamental questions: Where are the votes that remain to be counted in a particular race, and which candidate is faring better than expected in the results so far?

As results begin coming in, the Needle compares what is being reported with pre-election expectations, county by county and precinct by precinct. It then estimates who will win the remaining vote based on patterns it has seen in the results so far.

But making these calculations is far from easy.

Pre-election expectations are created by combining data from New York Times/Siena College polls, other public polls, voter registration files, the U.S. census and past election results. At the start of the night, this is all the model knows.

Once it receives results, the Needle uses a statistical model to spot demographic patterns that help it understand how votes vary in different types of counties or precincts. If a candidate performs better than expected in highly educated areas, for example, our model will adjust other highly educated areas toward that candidate. It then blends its pre-election expectations, the output of the statistical model and the results that have been tabulated thus far into a single estimate.

Like any statistical model, the Needle improves as it sees more and better data. It performs best when an election includes predictable partisan and demographic divides, which allow it to judge quickly whether a candidate is on track for a victory. It is helped when election officials break out returns based on different methods of voting, like voting in person, or by mail.

*The EurAsia Daily, and many other sources, report that Imane Khelif, whom we’ve met before, and who won a gold medal in women’s welterweight boxing in the Olympics, is really an XY male with a DSD (“disorder of sex development”) that caused changes in the genitals that led him to be raised as a woman. And, in fact, he had no idea that he was a biological male, so one can’t pin this unfair medal on him. Rather, pin it on the Olympic Committee that didn’t check very closely. An excerpt (bolding is as in the original):

French journalist Jaffar Ait Audia claims to have received a copy of the medical examination of Olympic boxing champion Iman Khelif, the Reduxx Internet portal reports.

The report of June 2023 indicated that the Algerian woman has a deficiency of type II 5α-reductase is a violation of sexual development, which occurs only in biological men.

A genetic abnormality affects the normal development of the child’s genitals. At birth, male children with such an anomaly are often mistakenly attributed to the female sex due to the presence of deformed genitals.

MRI results showed that Helif does not have a uterus, but testicles and a “micropenis” resembling an enlarged clitoris are present. A chromosomal test confirmed that the athlete has the XY karyotype, and a hormonal test showed that she has a typical testosterone level for men.

In 2023, the International Boxing Association (IBA) suspended Khelif from participating in the World Championship due to a DNA test that revealed she had a male Y chromosome and elevated testosterone levels.

Despite the test results, the International Olympic Committee allowed Khelif to participate in the 2024 Olympics. Officials cited unclear standards for biochemical testing and opaque management of the IBA. The IOC is convinced that “the athlete is not transgender, and her testing was illegitimate and not trustworthy.”

In Paris, 25-year-old Khelif became the winner of the women’s tournament in the weight category up to 66 kg.

In turn, the famous British journalist Morgan Pierce reacted to the published information.:

“Confirmation of what some of us were saying at the time: Khelif is a biological man. The gold medal should now be selected and awarded to the best real woman.”

The testosterone is crucial here, for it’s what gave Khelif the athletic advantage to win the gold.  If he really does have normal testosterone for males (the male and female ranges don’t overlap), then his participation in the women’s league would normally violate Olympic rules, but the Olympics has stopped checking that. It will be a tough decision for the IOC about whether to take back the gold medal.

*This just in: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired one of the three members of his war cabinet: Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Israelis are going nuts; they don’t like it at all!

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, on Tuesday over differences on the prosecution of the war in Gaza — a risky step at a moment when Israel is fighting on two fronts.

Mr. Gallant was pushing for a cease-fire deal in Gaza that would secure the release of hostages, and his dismissal removes the main proponent in the government for such an agreement. Mr. Gallant and Mr. Netanyahu also clashed over domestic political issues, particularly the conscription of ultra-Orthodox Israelis.

Mr. Gallant had increasingly been viewed as an internal opponent to the prime minister, and he has been a more moderate voice within the government on security issues.

Mr. Netanyahu, who announced the decision in a video statement issued by his office, said, “significant gaps on handling the war” emerged between him and Mr. Gallant.

He named Israel Katz, the foreign minister, as the new defense minister, and said he offered Gideon Saar, a hard-liner, to replace Mr. Katz as foreign minister and formally bring his party into the coalition.

The prime minister’s decision comes at an extraordinary moment for Israel. Its military is fighting against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, two groups backed by Iran, and bracing for possible Iranian attack in a cycle of retaliatory strikes. It is also conducting raids in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Israel’s closest ally, the United States, is voting in a presidential election that could have major implications for the American approach to the war in the Middle East. Mr. Gallant maintained close contact with senior U.S. officials, who often chose to communicate with him instead of Mr. Netanyahu, a dynamic that frustrated the Israeli prime minister. On Monday, Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, called Mr. Gallant to discuss the situation in Gaza and Lebanon.

A friend of mine in Israel wrote me this: “Half the country is out on the streets. It’s considered almost taboo to fire a defense minister in the middle of a war. I’m actually in Israel now and it’s quite loud.” And, according to the Times of Israel, anti-Netanyahu demonstrators are out in the street in both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

*The Free Press reports that Georgetown University’s School of Public Policy, treating its students like toddlers (which they may well be), is giving them every bit of child self-care save blankies:

On Wednesday, the day after the election, most of us are going to roll out of bed, have our breakfast, and get on with our day—no matter which presidential candidate wins. But students at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy—where diplomats and policymakers are molded—have another option: They can play with Legos. Seriousl
In an email to McCourt students, Jaclyn Clevenger, the school’s director of student engagement, introduced the school’s post-election “Self-Care Suite.”
“In recognition of these stressful times,” she wrote, “all McCourt community members are welcome to gather. . . in the 3rd floor Commons to take a much needed break, joining us for mindfulness activities and snacks throughout the day.”
Here’s the agenda (and no, you can’t make this up):
10:00 a.m.-11:00 a.m.: Tea, Cocoa, and Self-Care
11:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.: Legos Station
12:00 p.m.-1:00 p.m.: Healthy Treats and Healthy Habits
1:00 p.m.-2:00 p.m.: Coloring and Mindfulness Exercises
2:00 p.m.-3:00 p.m.: Milk and Cookies
4:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m.: Legos and Coloring
5:00 p.m.-6:00 p.m.: Snacks and Self-Guided Meditation
 
I wanted to ask Clevenger why college and graduate students needed milk and cookies to recover from their stress—and how being coddled in college might someday affect American diplomacy—but she didn’t respond to my calls or emails.
Of course, Georgetown is hardly the only school fearful that their students will be traumatized after the election. At Missouri State University, the counseling center has set up a post-election “self-care no phone zone space” with calm jars, coloring pages, and sensory fidgets.
And just last week, The New York Times reported that Fieldston, the elite New York City private school, was making attendance the day after Election Day optional for “students who feel too emotionally distressed.” Fieldston has also eliminated all homework requirements that day, and is even providing psychologists for “Election Day Support.”
Jerry Seinfeld told the Times that his family found such decisions so aggravating that it caused his youngest son to withdraw from Fieldston and switch to a different school in the eighth grade. “What kind of lives have these people led that makes them think that this is the right way to handle young people?” he said. “To encourage them to buckle. This is the lesson they are providing, for ungodly sums of money.”

And from Harvard Divinity School, a whole list of “self care” activities. The tweet below disappeared suddenly after I got it from Luana, but I saved a screenshot. Basketry, puppets, mending, and sonic meditation!

And if you’re an adult and can’t cope, well, there’s alcohol or, if you want, the NYT article by Gary Greenberg, “Advice from a psychotherapist on how to cope today.” Here’s the gist of his advice, and consider yourself lucky that you don’t have to pay for it!

In the unraveling, I find myself offering counsel that I offered before only in the face of hopeless circumstance — a terminal illness, say, or the death of a loved one: that many of the most important parts of our lives are beyond our control, and equanimity cannot be had without surrender to circumstance. This is one thing of which we can be certain: History’s wheel is indifferent, not unlike cancer or a cheating spouse, and can crush us willy-nilly. Which means, I hear myself saying to my own surprise and dismay, that it falls upon us to cultivate helplessness.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili may be talking about the election:

Hili: I feel the hint of change.
A: For the better?
Hili: I don’t know. Time will tell.
In Polish:
Hili: Czuję powiew zmian.
Ja: Na lepsze?
Hili: Nie wiem, czas pokaże.

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

From Cat Memes:

From The Dodo (remember Yahtzee?)

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy, a true idiot with a “polite” reminder:

From Masih, a suicide: a girl who was harassed repeatedly for noncompliance with Iran’s draconian dress code:

And I’ll add this: a photo of Khavari:

From Luana:

Okay, now we’ll have calming tweets since everyone is anxious:

From my feed. I want a pet bear! Sound up.

Because it’s already a dolorous day, I’ll omit the Auschwitz Memorial today and put in three tweets from Matthew. The first is of a Japanese rocket test viewed from a nearby airplane: “Launch of X-band defense communications satellite “Kirameki 3″ by H3 rocket No. 4”

A crab protecting (and disguising) itself by putting a coral on its back:

. . . and the Tweet of God!

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

November 5, 2024 • 6:45 am

IT IS ELECTION DAY in America, and already at this hour people are casting ballots on the East Coast. (Many of us have already voted by mail.) I needn’t remind you to fulfill your duties as a citizen of a democracy. And remember, whatever happens, the Republic will stand!

Sadly, Andrzej and Malgorzata are ill, struck down with a debilitating virus or bacterium.  Please send them your well wishes in the comments.

And it’s National Donut Day.  Here is reader Michelle, who made my cat cookies for CSICon, about to scarf a S’mores donut from Blinkie’s Donut Emporium in Woodland Hills, California, reputedly the best donut shop in the state. Look at that thing, complete with marshmallows, graham crackers, and chocolate!

Welcome to Tuesday, November 5, 2024, and Google Doodle reminds us that it’s Election Time. Click below to find out where to vote.

It’s also American Football Day, National Chinese Take-Out Day, Skeptics Day International, National Love Your Red Hair Day, and, of course, Election Day. 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 5 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Obituaries first: Quincy Jones died at 91 on Sunday.

Quincy Jones, who died at 91 on Sunday, was a colossus of American music, leaving a profound influence on nearly every genre he touched, from the 1950s on — jazz, funk, soundtracks, syrupy R&B and chart-topping pop.

The scope of his career is so vast, it seems almost impossible that it’s the work of a single person. He cut his teeth as a trumpeter in Lionel Hampton’s touring band in the early ’50s, then studied in Paris under the great classical pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. He produced jazz albums for Mercury Records, made fast friends with Frank Sinatra — who called him “Q,” a nickname that stuck — and recorded “It’s My Party,” a No. 1 hit by a teenage Lesley Gore.

Then came gorgeously textured movie scores, slithery funk and a fantastically successful partnership with Michael Jackson, whose 1982 LP “Thriller,” produced by Jones, is the biggest seller of all time. And it didn’t end there. In a 2018 documentary, “Quincy,” Kendrick Lamar, the reigning rap laureate, is seen bumping fists with Jones and crediting him as the inspiration for “combining hip-hop and jazz.”

Here is a sampling of some of Jones’s essential work, as a producer, arranger, composer, bandleader and recording artist in his own right. (Listen on Spotify and Apple Music.)

The NYT lists 14 of his “essential” songs as a producer, and I’ll just give five with links to YouTube videos:

Lesley Gore, “It’s My Party” (1963)

Frank Sinatra, “Fly Me to the Moon (1964)

Michael Jackson, “Billie Jean” (1982)

USA for Africa, “We Are the World” (1985).  “For the ultimate charity single, Jones was the ideal captain — conducting an ensemble of dozens of stars, and managing a complex session as producer (with Michael Omartian). Video of the sessions shows Jones leading the chorus sections, directing soloists to their microphone positions and working with Stevie Wonder to guide Bob Dylan through his lines.”

Don’t bother looking for the linked video; they’ve taken it down.

But here’s the recording of “We Are the World”, which I quite like. Best “charity ensemble” ever! How many singers can you recognize? (I recognized 22 of the 30 singers shown in closeup.) Quincy is directing.

*Here are the results of yesterday’s readers’ polls on which candidate got readers’ votes and who people thought would win. As expected, the readers were overwhelmingly in favor of Harris, and also were pretty sure that she’ll win today—more sure than the real polls.  We have 72% voting for Harris, 11% for Trump, but also 11% for “I’m not going to vote”.

Readers are far more optimistic about Harris winning (62% think she will), even though the best polls show that the race is neck and neck. This was a considerably larger vote than we’ve had here before.

*In a NYT op-ed clearly aimed at voters (and probably the basis of the Bill Maher video I posted the other day), Steve Pinker argues that, contra Trump, America really is getting better (article archived here).

Narratives of national decline have intensified in recent years. Most prominent, of course, is Donald Trump’s vow to “make America great again,” in response to what he has called “a nation that is dying.” But there is also doomsaying on the far left, which sees a “late-stage capitalist hellscape” (to quote the journalist Taylor Lorenz) and is often resigned to voting in protest for a long-shot candidate or sitting out the election altogether.

The doomers can always find ammunition in the news. News, by its very nature, consists of things that happen, and it’s easier for things to go wrong suddenly — a war, a terrorist attack, a hurricane — than to go right suddenly. When things do go right, it usually means either that nothing happens (a country remains at peace, for example) or that improvements creep up a few percentage points every year and compound over time, transforming the world by stealth.

As a result, one can get the impression that the state of the world keeps getting worse when, in fact, it keeps getting better.

An antidote is to look at trends. Actual data seldom tells a simple tale of disaster or triumph, but in this case, indicators of national well-being over recent decades suggest that the reports of our nation’s demise are greatly exaggerated, if not downright delusional.

Here are two indices and Pinker’s writing:

People often identify the state of the nation with the state of the economy. Since inflation and unemployment are both bad things but at any given time a government’s policies can trade one off against the other, it’s helpful to look at a measure called the Misery Index, which is simply the sum of these two measures of badness.

The line since 2020 shows a spike in unemployment from the Covid pandemic, which was brought down by government stimulus payments and loans, which then jacked up inflation, which is now getting back under control. The most recent Misery Index (from August) has not returned to pre-Covid levels but is lower than it has been in 88 percent of the quarters since 1970. And the post-Covid U.S. economy is the envy of our peer democracies.

And poverty:

The left is often pessimistic about the efficacy of antipoverty policies, and the right can be downright cynical, as in Ronald Reagan’s quip that “the federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won.”

Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter  Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. 

In fact, poverty is losing. Between 1967 and 2021, the poverty rate fell from 26 percent to 7 percent, before a small bounce to 10.5 percent in 2023.

To be sure, not all is peaches and cream. To be sure, happiness is where it was in 1970, and Pinker notes that a cleaner environment seems to be incompatible with a rising standard of living. But overall, considering crime, life expectancy, and women’s political empowerment, we’re doing better. Most of the dips we see were pandemic-induced and are recovering. This is part of his message, which isn’t inevitable, of course, but the data speak for themselves.

*I’m sick of election news: all we know is that it’s a squeaker: about dead even. Instead, let’s hop over to the Wall Street Journal, which has an exclusive story, “Russia suspected of sending incendiary devices on U.S.-bound planes.”

Western security officials say they believe that two incendiary devices, shipped via DHL, were part of a covert Russian operation that ultimately aimed to start fires aboard cargo or passenger aircraft flying to the U.S. and Canada, as Moscow steps up a sabotage campaign against Washington and its allies.

The devices ignited at DHL logistics hubs in July, one in Leipzig, Germany, and another in Birmingham, England. The explosions set off a multinational race to find the culprits.

Now investigators and spy agencies in Europe have figured out how the devices—electric massagers implanted with a magnesium-based flammable substance—were made and concluded that they were part of a wider Russian plot, according to security officials and people familiar with the probe.

Security officials say the electric massagers, sent to the U.K. from Lithuania, appear to have been a test run to figure out how to get such incendiary devices aboard planes bound for North America.

Poland’s National Prosecutor’s Office said authorities there have arrested four people in connection with the fires and charged them with participating in sabotage or terrorist operations on behalf of a foreign intelligence agency. Poland is working with other countries to find at least two more suspects.

“The group’s goal was also to test the transfer channel for such parcels, which were ultimately to be sent to the United States of America and Canada,” the prosecutor’s office said, without saying who was orchestrating the group’s efforts.

But the head of Poland’s foreign-intelligence agency, Pawel Szota, said Russian spies were to blame and such an attack, if carried out, would have represented a major escalation in Moscow’s campaign against the West. “I’m not sure the political leaders of Russia are aware of the consequences if one of these packages exploded, causing a mass casualty event,” Szota said.

Great!  It doesn’t seem that hard to create such devices and send them as cargo, so now we have to worry about Putin and his thugs downing flights to America or Canada. It’s like 9/11, but with the Russians behind it.

*Reader Patricia informs me of a reprehensible event: Animal “influencers” Peanuts the Squirrel and his friend Fred the Raccoon were needlessly euthanized!

A man who took in an orphaned squirrel and made it a social media star vowed Saturday that New York state’s decision to seize and euthanize the animal “won’t go unheard.”

“We will make a stance on how this government and New York state utilizes their resources,” Mark Longo said in a phone interview.

He declined to specify his possible next steps but said officials would hear from him soon about what happened to Peanut the squirrel and Fred, a rescued raccoon that was also confiscated and put down.

AP correspondent Julie Walker reports the owner of a pet squirrel euthanized by New York officials after being seized wants justice.

The state Department of Environmental Conservation took the animals Wednesday from Longo’s home and animal sanctuary in rural Pine City, near the Pennsylvania border. The agency said it had gotten complaints that wildlife was being kept illegally and potentially unsafely.

State law requires people to get a license if they wish to own a wild animal. Longo has said he was working to get Peanut — also known as P’Nut or PNUT — certified as an educational animal.

The DEC and the Chemung County Health Department said Friday that the squirrel and raccoon were euthanized so they could be tested for rabies after Peanut bit someone involved in the investigation.

. . . . .Longo said he started caring for Peanut after the animal’s mother was hit by a car in New York City seven years ago. Tens of thousands of users of Instagram, TikTok and other social media platforms glimpsed the animal sporting tiny hats, doing tricks and nibbling on waffles clutched in his little paws.

Longo said Fred the raccoon was dropped off on his doorstep a few months ago. After helping the animal recover from injuries, Longo said, he and his wife were planning to release the creature into the woods.

I have been bitten twice by squirrels, and the doctors didn’t even recommend a rabies shot. In fact, no person in America has ever contracted rabies from a squirrel. They killed a beloved and beautiful squirrel for no reason!  Here is a sad report on the demise of Peanuts, who was NOT rabid:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is philosophizing again, but about what?

Hili: Individualism doesn’t have a future.
A: Why do you think so?
Hili: The herd instinct in humans always prevails.
In Polish:
Hili: Indywidualizm nie ma przyszłości.
Ja: Dlaczego tak sądzisz?
Hili: U ludzi stadne odruchy zawsze biorą górę.

 

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

From Cat Memes:

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:

From They Walk Among Us:

From Masih, who was falsely accused of stripping in a subway and then getting raped. This woman was incarcerated in a mental hospital despite no evidence that she was mentally ill. The tweet includes this: “One student who witnessed the entire incident says: “On Saturday, November 2, we saw the university’s security and Basij forces trying to forcibly drag a female student into the security room, under the pretext of her not wearing a proper hijab. She resisted, and in the struggle, her hoodie was pulled off, leaving her with only her undergarments underneath. Shocked, the security officers let her go, after which, in a moment of rage, she removed her pants and threw them at the officers.” This eyewitness account directly contradicts the regime’s narrative and shows the extent of brutality Iranian women face for the most basic acts of defiance.”

Two from Simon. First, a tough DA in Philadelphia warns those who would “play militia” with the voting system:

. . . .and a hopeful cartoon:

From J. K. Rowling.  They’ll never put her in jail–but they could!

From my feed, and a tweet relevant to Peanuts the Squirrel, who in a horrible and malicious act, was euthanized to be checked for rabies (squirrels have never infected a human with rabies):

From the Auschwitz Memorial. something I retweeted:

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. The first, he says, are domesticated horses, but let out to run on the North York Moors. Lovely!

. . . and listen to these ravens. Freaky!

Monday: Hili dialogue

November 4, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to to the first Monday in November: to be exact, Monday, November 4, 2024, and National Candy Day. Here’s the way they make one of my favorite candy bars—Milky Ways:

It’s also National Chicken Lady Day (honoring Dr. Marthenia “Tina” Dupree), King Tut Day (his tomb was discovered on this day in 1922), and National Skeptics Day. 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 4 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The WSJ pinpoints a key group, they say, that may swing the upcoming election–only two days away! It’s young men.

Donald Trump is pinning his political future on winning the votes of disaffected young men. But persuading them to get off the couch to cast ballots is no easy feat.

Young men vote at far lower rates than many other demographic groups. They are more likely than older generations and their female peers to be disconnected from politics, and they are increasingly disillusioned with the country’s institutions, according to researchers and election analysts.

Youth voting increased in the 2020 presidential election, but it paled compared with the share of older voters who showed up at the polls. In 2020, 18- to 24-year-olds were the least likely age group to vote, with just over half of that cohort voting that year, according to U.S. Census Bureau surveys. In that age group, fewer men than women said they voted in 2020. In contrast, about three-quarters of Americans ages 65 to 74 reported voting in 2020.

“I’ve had to ask a couple of my friends to come out and vote,” said Joompit Nakhapakorn, 23, a consultant in Milwaukee who attended Trump’s rally there on Friday evening. “They’re like, ‘Do I have to vote? Is it a good use of my time?’ ”

Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump has taken pains to appeal to young men, from showing up at a sneaker convention in Philadelphia and an Ultimate Fighting Championship event in New Jersey, to appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast. On Thursday, he received the endorsement of the social-media influencer and boxer Jake Paul, who has 20 million subscribers on YouTube. The strategy could help offset Kamala Harris’s big advantage with female voters—but risks widening that gap should Trump’s macho rhetoric and crude comments alienate women.

. . .In interviews with dozens of young men around the country in recent months, some said they don’t see a place for themselves in today’s Democratic Party. Others said they are drawn to Trump’s politically incorrect approach. Many said they were focused foremost on their finances—with several arguing that Trump would do more to benefit their stock portfolios. Others said they appreciated the former president’s pledge to crack down on illegal immigration.

Luke Meihack, 25, a high school physical education teacher in the Milwaukee suburbs, said he didn’t used to be a Trump supporter, but changed his mind during Joe Biden’s presidency, and said many men his age are moving in the same direction.

“It’s mostly guys. Guys are more big into Trump,” he said. “He’s a guy that speaks in a way that demands respect, and that appeals to a lot of guys.”

Well, I agree with one or two of the young men’s concerns, especially immigration and the cost of living, but by and large this doesn’t speak well for those of us having small, mobile gametes.  And if young men don’t vote as often as other groups, then their approbation of Trump shouldn’t worry Kamala Harris.

*If you wonder whether Harvard President Claudine Gay should have been fired, read this report from the NYT about Harvard’s response to the Hamas attack.  Apparently Harvard didn’t know what to do! (Article is archived here.)

Two days after Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel last year, senior administrators at Harvard University wrestled with how to respond. Drafting a public statement, they edited out the word “violent” to describe the attack, when a dean complained that it “sounded like assigning blame.”

They debated whether to explicitly disown a declaration by some Harvard student groups that Israel was responsible for the violence, but ultimately decided not to.

The internal debate among Harvard leaders including Claudine Gay, then the school’s president, played out furiously in emails and text messages that were released in a report on Thursday by the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

The report, part of a nearly yearlong inquiry by House Republicans investigating antisemitism on university campuses, offers a rare window into the discussions at multiple universities and how difficult judgment calls made by a small handful of people were scrutinized around the world.

The committee report accuses the schools’ leadership of permitting rampant antisemitism as pro-Palestinian students organized demonstrations at campuses across the country.

What is clear is that administrators struggled to find consensus on delicate moral judgments — like whether certain behavior constituted antisemitism — and how to take a stand on portentous affairs dividing the world.

Often, they seemed lost.

. . .The Republican staff report releases 400,000 pages of documents from Harvard, Penn, M.I.T., Yale, Columbia, Barnard, Rutgers, Northwestern, George Washington, Berkeley and UCLA (the documents from Harvard and Columbia were obtained in part through subpoenas). It argues that the schools may have violated civil rights law that requires universities receiving federal funds to address a hostile environment against Jews.

“How could you be somebody with a job at a university and not recognize antisemitism and move to do something about it?” Representative Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina and the chairwoman of the House committee, said in an interview on Thursday. “It is not complicated, and it wasn’t complicated on these campuses.”

It would have been easy if Harvard and other schools were institutionally neutral, in which case they didn’t have to say anything (the University of Chicago didn’t). As for allowing an anti-Semitic atmosphere to impede learning on campus, that’s a different issue entirely, and one admittedly hard to handle, even though cases of individual harassment and discrimination are not that hard to adjudicate. But right after October 7 this was not a problem. If Harvard abided by the Kalven Principle, they could simply be quiet. Instead, Claudine Gay had to issue three separate statements, each one clarifying her previous statement.

*As if the BBC weren’t biased enough against Israel in its reportage, now, according to The Independent, over 100 of its staffers have petitioned the BBC demanding that it is biased against Palestinians and will have to become more slanted towards Palestine.

More than 100 BBC employees are accusing the corporation of providing favourable coverage toward Israel and are calling on the broadcaster to “recommit to fairness, accuracy, and impartiality” over its reporting on Gaza.

In a letter sent to Tim Davie, signed by more than 230 members of the media industry, including 101 anonymous BBC staff, the corporation is criticised for failing its own editorial standards by lacking “consistently fair and accurate evidence-based journalism in its coverage of Gaza”.

Seen exclusively by The Independent, the letter, which has also been signed by Sayeeda Warsi and the actor Juliet Stevenson, calls on the BBC to report “without fear or favour” and to “recommit to the highest editorial standards – with emphasis on fairness, accuracy, and due impartiality”.

The letter also calls on the broadcaster to implement a series of editorial commitments including “reiterating that Israel does not give external journalists access to Gaza; making it clear when there is insufficient evidence to back up Israeli claims; making clear where Israel is the perpetrator in article headlines; including regular historical context predating October 2023; and robustly challenging Israeli government and military representatives in all interviews”.

The BBC has denied these claims, insisting it “strives to live up to our responsibility to deliver the most trusted and impartial news”.

. . . Other signatories on the list include the historian William Dalrymple, Dr Catherine Happer, a senior lecturer in sociology and director of media at the University of Glasgow, Rizwana Hamid, the director at the Centre for Media Monitoring, and the broadcaster John Nicolson.

I’m surprised at this given the number of times that both I and others have accused the BBC of palpably slanting the news against Israel (see here, as well as the report on the Torygraph analysis here), But, as we found out from The Nation‘s interns damning the magazine for endorsing Harris (she was too pro-Israel, they said), you can’t be sufficiently anti-Israel to satisfy some people.  Below is a 3.5-minute video featuring Tom Gross, who’s pro-Israel, discussing this latest BBC kerfuffle (thius bit starts at 1:15):

*Again from the WSJ, we have a piece on why grocery prices seem so high. In fact, they don’t just seem high: they ARE high. How did that happen? It is, you know, one of the things voters are concerned about (along with the cost of housing). Their article, “The mysterious fees inflating your grocery bill,” suggests some answers:

The price of a bag of coconut-cashew granola at Whole Foods jumped last year from $5.99 to $6.69. Why that happened defies simple explanation.

The granola maker, Wildway Foods, said the cost of making the cereal hasn’t gone up that much, and that it isn’t pocketing more profit. It jacked up the price, it said, in large part to offset fees that piled up from a little-known link in the supply chain: grocery distributors. There were charges for processing grocery promotions, others for potential spoilage and still more related to alleged shipping glitches.

Rising prices, especially in the supermarket, have vexed consumers, drawn scrutiny from regulators and emerged as a central issue in the presidential race. Donald Trump has blamed Kamala Harris and the Biden administration, and Harris has pointed a finger at grocery chains and food companies. 

George Milton, who runs a hot sauce business in Austin, Texas, said consumers are frustrated because it isn’t clear to them why many food prices are so high. “Is that price gouging or costs going up for distributors or retailers or farmers? I have no idea,” he said. “Nobody does.”

That can’t be true. What manufacturers and middlemen charged is a matter of record! But let’s proceed:

Big food companies have increased prices in recent years for everything from cereal to ketchup to potato chips, citing higher costs for ingredients and labor, among other things. Many small manufacturers that have raised their prices have another explanation. They say they also are being squeezed by the distributors who act as gatekeepers to many supermarkets.

Distributors are the middlemen of the grocery business. They buy products from food makers—many of them too small to run their own distribution networks—then store, sell and ship them to supermarkets. A small number of them, including KeHE Distributors, C&S and United Natural Foods, or UNFI, sell to grocery stores nationwide.

. . . . Distributors operate on razor-thin profit margins, with limited ability to offset rising operating costs. Food executives said grocers have enormous power to dictate terms with distributors, and that small food companies can be naive about the costs involved in building a brand and getting it to store shelves.

The situation reflects a struggle for profit throughout the grocery sector. Big food manufacturers that account for the bulk of sales have pushed through hefty price increases and notched some of their biggest profits in years. That is adding pressure on grocery chains to find other ways to keep consumers’ grocery bills from rising too much.

Well, this doesn’t bring us much closer to the truth, except that it’s either the manufacturers or the distributors. Who to blame?

*Finally, from the AP, we have the candidates making their final appeal on Sunday. Did you know that, according to Harris, America has a “divine plan”?  (I think Trump is an atheist, even if he says otherwise):

 Kamala Harris told a Michigan church on Sunday that God offers America a “divine plan strong enough to heal division,” while Donald Trump gave a profane and conspiracy-laden speech in which he mused about reporters being shot and labeled Democrats as “demonic.”

The two major candidates took starkly different tones on the final Sunday of the campaign. Less than 48 hours before Election Day, Harris, the Democratic vice president, argued that Tuesday’s election offers voters the chance to reject “chaos, fear and hate,” while Trump, the Republican former president, repeated lies about voter fraud to try to cast doubt on the integrity of the vote and suggested that the country was falling apart without him in office.

Harris was concentrating her Sunday in Michigan, beginning the day with a few hundred parishioners at Detroit’s Greater Emmanuel Institutional Church of God in Christ. It marked the fourth consecutive Sunday that Harris, who is Baptist, has spoken to a Black congregation, a reflection of how critical Black voters are across multiple battleground states.

“I see faith in action in remarkable ways,” she said in remarks that quoted the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah. “I see a nation determined to turn the page on hate and division and chart a new way forward. As I travel, I see Americans from so-called red states and so-called blue states who are ready to bend the arc of history toward justice.”

I favor Harris over Trump, of course, but seriously, I cannot abide this God talk. At least I don’t think that Harris will promote a theocracy in America, which is a real worry with Trump.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is once again pessimistic:

A: What do you see?
Hili: Lame luck.
In Polish:
Ja: Co tam widzisz?
Hili: Kulawe szczęście.

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

From Cat Memes:

From Jesus of the Day:

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy (this is clearly a sign for visitors):

From Masih, an impossibly brave Iranian woman, not only sans hijab but stripped to her undies.  Ceiling Cat bless these Iranian women! As the tweet says, she’s since been arrested.

From Simon. I may have posted this before but you can’t see it too many times.

The odious Francesca Albanese, mouthpiece for Hamas who works for the UN, says that Yayha Sinwar was killed “in a way that was quite inhumane.”  For crying out loud, he was with a group of Hamas militants who were firing at the IDF!

Three from my feed from a thread of great photos:

2. Racism is taught , not innate pic.twitter.com/9Ze4M9opTp

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

 

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, one he calls “a good Nazi,” and it’s true!

. . . and this is the reason why Matthew forgot to post Hili the other day: