Saturday: Hili dialogue

June 8, 2024 • 6:45 am

Note: I’ve been struck down by severe insomnia again, and now have gone two nights without sleep. Posting will be light today as I try to rest and recover, and may also be very light tomorrow.

Welcome to CatSaturday, June 8, 2024, shabbos for Jewish cats and National Jelly Doughnut Day. I prefer the Polish variant, Pączki, shown below. Don’t they look good? They are fat, yeasty, and filled with good jam. 

Rmhermen, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also International Young Eagles Day (why the ageism?), National Rosé Day (the wine), World Gin Day, Best Friends Day, Thomas Paine Day (he died on this day in 1809), International Drink Chenin Blanc Day (it can be good!), Bounty Day on Norfolk Island, “the day that the descendants of the mutineers arrived on the respective islands” in 1856, World Brain Tumor Day and World Oceans Day.

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

Da Nooz:

*Good nooz first. According to the Times of Israel, the IDF rescued four hostages, ALIVE, in Gaza.

Four Israeli hostages were rescued alive by troops from Hamas captivity in a daring operation in the central Gaza Strip earlier today, the military announces.

The rescued hostages are named as Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv. All four had been abducted by Hamas terrorists on October 7 from the Supernova music festival near the southern community of Re’im.

Special forces had simultaneously raided two Hamas sites in central Gaza’s Nuseirat. At one location, Argamani was rescued, while Meir Jan, Kozlov, and Ziv were at the second location.

The rescued hostages are all in good condition, according to initial medical assessments. They were taken to Tel Hashomer Hospital for further evaluation.

Their photos from the ToI:

(From ToI)Hostages rescued in an IDF operation in the Gaza Strip on June 8: Shlomi Ziv (top left), Andrey Kozlov (top right), Almog Meir (bottom left), and Noa Argamani.

Argamani was known because videos of her being abducted by Hamas on the back of a motorcycle were widely circulated. Here’s a still photo of the abduction (h/t: Tom Gross):

*Clarence Thomas finally came clean about the ritzy trips he got from rich friends, revising his financial forms. Isn’t falsification of those forms a crime?

Justice Clarence Thomas revised his financial disclosure forms Friday to include two trips he took in 2019 that were paid for by billionaire Harlan Crow.

The first trip, in July 2019, was to the Indonesian island of Bali. The other was in the same month in Monte Rio, Calif. Crow, who is a real-estate developer and Republican Party donor, paid for food and lodging on both trips, according to the forms.

Thomas’s pattern of accepting luxury travel paid for by Crow was the subject of a ProPublica investigation in 2023.

At the time, Thomas defended his decision not to disclose the vacations, saying the personal trips weren’t the type that federal judges in the past had been required to report.

The ProPublica story renewed scrutiny of the court on Capitol Hill, where some lawmakers have long pushed for the justices to revisit their ethics policies. Last year, the court adopted its first formal code of ethics, saying at the time that the move “largely represents a codification of principles that we have long regarded as governing our conduct.”

Thomas said in Friday’s forms that he had “sought and received guidance from his accountant and ethics counsel” as part of a “review of prior filings that began last year.” The gifts from Crow were “inadvertently omitted at the time of filing,” Thomas said on the form.

Other stuff that was reported by other justices, who are more honest (Alito got a delay submitting his form).

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson reported being paid almost $900,000 by Penguin Random House, which is publishing her memoir later this year.

Jackson also disclosed that the singer Beyoncé personally gifted her tickets to a concert, which were valued at around $3,700.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh similarly reported $340,000 in book royalty income. Axios reported on Thursday that the justice is working on a memoir.

And I don’t believe Thomas’s claims that he “inadvertently omitted the trips”.

*It doesn’t look as if Hunter Biden is doing very well vis-à-vis his gun trial. His daughter testified today and it didn’t help him:

Hunter Biden’s daughter Naomi testified on Friday that her father was sober and “hopeful” in mid-2018, right before he claimed to be drug-free on a gun application — but that claim was quickly undercut by her own anguished texts saying he had driven her to the breaking point.

Ms. Biden, 30, a lawyer in Washington, took the stand hoping to bolster Mr. Biden’s contention that he was working hard to kick his addiction to crack cocaine and alcohol. She said he was “the clearest” she had seen him in years when visiting him in Los Angeles in August 2018.

But under an intense cross-examination, her claim seemed to crumble. Prosecutors read aloud her texts from mid-October, when Mr. Biden visited New York City, where Ms. Biden was living with her boyfriend and entering her second year of law school.

The exchanges painted a starkly different picture of his behavior. Mr. Biden ignored Ms. Biden’s desperate texts for hours and made a bizarre request when he did resurface, at one point asking her boyfriend to drop off keys to a borrowed truck at 2 a.m. in Midtown Manhattan before disappearing again.

“I’m sorry daddy, I can’t take this, I don’t know what to say,” she wrote to him on Oct. 18 — at a moment when he was buying crack and partying with a girlfriend, according to previous evidence introduced by the government.

His lawyers have offered a spirited, if narrow, defense centered on questioning whether Mr. Biden was actually using drugs at the moment he filled out the form. It remains to be seen whether Ms. Biden’s emotional testimony, intended to help her father’s case, had a positive impact on the jury.

. . . .Mr. Biden is charged with three felonies: lying to a federally licensed gun dealer, making a false claim on the federal firearms application and possessing an illegally obtained gun. If convicted, he could face up to 25 years in prison and $750,000 in fines. But nonviolent first-time offenders who have not been accused of using the weapon in another crime rarely receive serious prison time for the charges.

The defense has indicated it will seek to show that Mr. Biden was not using drugs at the time he applied to buy a gun, emphasizing the lack of evidence in witness accounts, text exchanges and Mr. Biden’s memoir. Already in some of his cross-examinations, one of Mr. Biden’s lawyers, Abbe Lowell, has tried to punch holes in the prosecution’s stated timeline of Mr. Biden’s pattern of drug use in the months before and after the gun purchase.

The defense argues that the question is worded in the present tense, and that the government cannot prove that Mr. Biden was using crack cocaine on the day he acquired the gun, Oct. 12, 2018.

Seriously? On the day he acquired the gun? I don’t think that’s what the question was meant to ascertain. Below is the relevant question from ATF form 4473, the one Biden checked “no” to. Note that the question says “are you an unlawful user of. . “. It implies, at least to me “during the period you got the gun”, not “on the very day you got the gun”. (And he was probably on crack then anyway, but it can’t be proven.)  His ex-wife and girlfriend testified that, at the time he bought the gun, Biden was using crack, as evidenced from crack-smoking paraprenalia found in his car and direct observation (he was using crack “every 20 minutes or so“).

*As aways, I submit for your consideration three items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news summary at the Free Press, this week called “TGIF: Mystical old man era.”  The first point is something that I think we really have to worry about:

→ Good days and bad days: Brave whistleblowers are coming out recently to say, “Guys. . . Biden. . . he’s so old, have you noticed?” And Democrats have no good response, even though there is a whole bench of nice, normal-aged options to swap in. This week there’s a mega Wall Street Journal investigation, including this detail from a major war funding meeting about Ukraine: “He read from notes to make obvious points, paused for extended periods, and sometimes closed his eyes for so long that some in the room wondered whether he had tuned out.” He sounds like me trying to break up with someone. He sounds like me as a stoned teenager running into my mom. You get it. “The White House and top aides said he remains a sharp and vigorous leader.” But over and over the investigation emphasizes: there are good days, and there are bad days. Like when you’re recovering from hip surgery. But just watch him at this wreath-laying ceremony with 46-year-old Emmanuel Macron: the look of confusion on Biden’s face; the moment he sort of starts to sit down but pauses; how Jill Biden leads him offstage as Macron springs around agile, alive, shaking hands, using his brain to tell his body where to go. At this point my theory is that Biden and his team know he cannot govern anymore and cannot even be an effective figurehead for staff machinations. So the theory: if Biden wins, he resigns, citing new health information, and Kamala Harris becomes president. In fact, I’d bet money on that. Please bet among yourselves in the comments. Other publications may have cooking apps. I have no problem becoming a betting app.

→ Briahna Joy Gray is letting it all hang out: Bernie Sanders’ former press secretary gives us a window every day into the mind of the American left. She’s been employed by The Hill, an otherwise normal, sane publication, where she gives her take from the progressive side of things. Her latest take: Hamas wants to build a beautiful multifaith, multiethnic country of freedom, just like the United States.

“When Hamas is talking about eliminating Israel, it’s talking about not killing all of the Jews. It’s about eliminating the idea,” she said onstage this week. (One of the panelists, Free Press columnist Eli Lake, erupts in laughter.) “Sir, can I just finish this sentence? It’s about eliminating the idea of a Jewish state, ending a Jewish state, ending an ethno-national state, and having a state more like what we have in the United States.” The Bernie brigade genuinely believes that Hamas wants to make a country just like the United States. I think they genuinely think this is what will happen. I think they’ve been foie gras–ducked with so much Iranian propaganda, they think this is what Tehran is too. Freedom has gotten so normal to this group they have no concept of what life under fundamentalist Islam even would look like.

And when the sister of a Hamas hostage implored Briahna to think about the suffering of the female hostages, Briahna literally rolled her eyes and ended the call. I’m grateful to Briahna Joy Gray for making the leftist stance here so clear. Which is why it’s a bummer that it looks like The Hill ended her contract on Thursday.

→ Oh, I love the NYT union: The very well-paid leaders of the New York Times’ union are doing what they do best: posting their hatred of Jews and Israelis, insulting reporters, saying the paper is trash and they hate it.

Here’s a beloved New York Times union leader, Nastaran Mohit, referring to “Zionists”—“All these Zionist butchers know how to kill. Children. Families. The next generation. Depraved monsters who will meet their fate one day.” Interesting read there. Reminder that if you believe in a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, then you are a Zionist to Ms. Mohit and the rest of the movement. She called the newspaper a “decrepit institution” and said it was “utterly reprehensible” that the paper received an award for its coverage of the war. Go to her with all your HR issues, y’all. I’m sure she’ll be great at reviewing a Jewish NYT employee’s harassment allegation. Good luck!

*And we can’t miss Sully. Over at The Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan’s main column is “How elites have empowered the far right,” with the subtitle “The US, UK, EU and Canada went far left on immigration—and are paying the price.”

Not so long ago, as many of us reeled from the political earthquakes of Brexit and Trump, it seemed sensible for responsible mainstream political parties to adopt tighter immigration control to keep the populist right at bay. Mass migration in Europe had led to a far-right resurgence; in the US and UK, Trump and the Johnson-era Tories seemed to grasp this and moved to co-opt the anti-immigrant fervor. Democracy was working to accommodate a shift in the public mood.

Or so it seemed. Nearly a decade later, something else has happened: an immigration explosion. In response to a volatile public mood, Western elites actually intensified their policy of importing millions of people from the developing world to replace their insufficiently diverse and declining domestic populations.

The same thing is happening in the UK and Canada.

The recent figures from the US, UK and Canada are mind-blowing. The graphs all look like a hockey stick, with a massive spike in the last three years alone. Under Trump, the average number of illegal crossings a year was around 500,000; under Biden, that has quadrupled to two million a year — from a much more diverse group, from Africa, China and India. To add insult to injury, Biden has also all but shut down immigration enforcement in the interior; and abused his parole power to usher in nearly 1.3 million illegal migrants in 2023 alone. The number of undetained illegal migrants living in the US has thereby ballooned under Biden: from 3.7 million in 2021 to 6.2 million in 2023, according to ICE. If a fraction of those millions turns up for asylum hearings, I’ll be gob-smacked.

. .  If you want to understand why Biden keeps trailing in the swing states, why the Tories are about to be wiped out in a historic collapse, and why Trudeau is at all-time low in approval at 28 percent, this seems to me to be key. As the public tried to express a desire to slow down the pace of demographic change, elites in London, Ottawa, and Washington chose to massively accelerate it. It’s as if they saw the rise in the popularity of the far right and said to themselves: well now, how can we really get it to take off?

. . . Even under Biden’s “crackdown”, he is still prepared to admit at least 1.75 million illegal immigrants a year! Last week, Chuck Schumer declared that the ultimate goal was to legalize every single illegal immigrant — because Americans are not having enough children. Without open borders, of course, our economy wouldn’t look so good: in the last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, foreign-born workers gained 600,000 new jobs, while native-born Americans lost 300,000. But don’t you dare mention the “Great Replacement Theory”!

I’ll skip the UK/EU stuff and just give the conclusions about the U.S.  First, Sullivan avers that hes not against immigration per se, but wants  ”legal, orderly, and controlled immigration”, which jibes with the wishes of most Americans, and explains why (read it). And the results:

One person was responsible for Trump’s first term: Hillary Clinton. And one will be responsible for his second: Joe Biden.

. . .All that means, it seems to me, is that if you care about the issue at all, as more and more Americans do, then Trump is the obvious choice this fall. Which is one reason I fear the election result will not be as close as most people think. Our elites have had almost a decade to respond to the public mood and a new global reality. And they still don’t get it.

This was, of course, supposed to be the job of Kamala Harris, but she didn’t do squat: one reason I wouldn’t trust her as President. Biden didn’t do squat, either, and don’t really understand why. It’s not exactly that he would lose by following the wishes of most Americans. Could he have bent to the whim of the open-border Democratic progressives? Whatever the cause, he failed to address until the last minute what the American people have been calling for loudly. I am no longer a big fan of Biden, and will vote for him only very reluctantly. I also think hell be close to non-sentient at the end of his second term.

*Finally, since it’s the weekend, here’s a story from the AP’s “oddities” section about a small kid getting nommed (well, picked up) by a giraffe:

A Texas family got a brief scare when a nibble from a giraffe turned a 2-year-old’s safari visit into an airborne adventure.

Paisley Toten was in the bed of a pickup truck on June 1 when her family drove through the Fossil Rim Wildlife Center, where visitors can see exotic animals such as zebras, giraffes and sable antelope, and feed some of them from their car.

The family had stopped to feed a giraffe when it grabbed Paisley’s shirt with its mouth and lifted her several feet. Paisley’s mother was in the pickup bed with her and shouted, prompting the giraffe to drop the toddler into her arms unhurt. Video of the encounter taken from the car behind went viral. The girl’s family also shot their own video.

“Paisley was holding the bag and the giraffe went to go get the bag, not get her, but ended up getting her shirt too and picking her up,” Jason Toten, the girl’s father, told television station KWTX.

“My heart stopped, my stomach dropped … it scared me,” Toten said.

The family then took the girl to the shop and bought her a toy giraffe.

Park rules when the family visited allowed riding in an open truck bed as long as an adult was riding with any children. The park on Thursday changed its safety rules to require everyone to stay inside their vehicles with doors closed.

Yeah, but you’re allowed to feed the giraffes by hand? That doesn’t sound too good to me. I’m informed that giraffes can bite people very hard, and also kill them with a hard kick. People should stay in the cars with the windows rolled up, and the giraffes should be fed only by the wildlife center.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej and Hili have some badinage:

A: Here you are!
Hili: Only because I’m not somewhere else.

In Polish:
Ja: Tu jesteś!
Hili: Tylko dlatego, że nie ma mnie gdzie indziej.

Baby Kulka is enjoying the fine weather:

And the flowers are blooming in Hili’s (and the staff’s) yard:

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

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy:

From Alison; father and daughter, killed October 7, 2023:

From The Dodo Pet:

Retweeted by Masih; two dissidents hated by Russia (see about Bill Browder here):

From the news: the draft Security Council resolution about Israel. Looks like Hamas pretty much wins. And since the U.S. proposes this, it will pass the Council.

I love this one, and the cat found a loving home (read the full second tweet; h/t Keith):

From Bryan; a rescued duckling! It reminds me of the good old days for me!

Here I am with Sammi the duckling, who also slept on my chest, but under my hand (I got no sleep). He/she also slept in my armpit:

From Barry. Get a load of those peepers!

From the Auschwitz Memorial; one I reposted:

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, a duck on a cricket field. Matthew adds, “Also: a duck is the word for getting out for zero in cricket. A golden duck is getting out first ball.”

. . . . and American sports. A fantastic throw from right field, getting the runner out at home plate:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali claims that sinister forces are out to destroy Western society

June 7, 2024 • 11:35 am

Many of us feel that the world is going mad.  What used to be called “political correctness” is sweeping the country from the Left, and authoritarianism sweeping in from the right. On one hand we have the encampments and Ilhan Omar, on the other, Donald Trump.  Names like Audubon, Fisher, and Jefferson are being policed, as I pointed out in the last post, people are self-silencing on and off campus, students are celebrating the Houthis and even Hamas, DEI initiatives are promoting racial divisiveness and the instillation of guilt, people are calling for the defunding and even the elimination of the police, young people are cheering for the intifada all over the world, and so on.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has a theory (or rather, borrows a theory) to explain all this, one that she lays out in a provocative article in the Free Press. No, it doesn’t mention religion, though she has suggested that Christianity is a way to fight what she sees as the dissolution of the West. Rather, here he describes what is happening in the West, suggests that it’s part of a deliberate four-stage plan (we’re at the end of stage 1), what those stages involve, and how we can stop it.

The article is surely worth reading, as her “stages” do fit nearly into a plan suggested by the journalist Yuri Bezmenov (1939-1993), who spied for Russia, defected to the West, and then described how the Soviet system took over Russia. It is the stages of that takeover (Bezmenov’s “Soviet subversion model”) into which Hirsi shoehorns the West’s own transformation.

You can read her take below, which is also archived archived here.  It sounds plausible enough, but I can’t quite buy it. Surely there are people who do seem to be calling for the dissolution of the West, but I can’t quite see the plotting she envisions, nor can I believe that the West is malleable enough to fall for it. Hirsi Ali seems to have been quite taken by Bezmenov and eager to apply his model to the West. You be the judge. Click to read

Hirsi Ali first limns the Western values that are endangered (quotes from hjer article are indented):

The West’s inheritance springs from a peculiar confluence of habits and customs that had been practiced for centuries before anyone branded them as “ideas.” But they are principles—radical ones—that have given us the most tolerant, free, and flourishing societies in all of human history.

Among these principles are the rule of law, a tradition of liberty, personal responsibility, a system of representative government, a toleration of difference, and a commitment to pluralism. Each of these ideas might have been extinguished in their infancy but for the grace of God and the force of their appeal.

. . . Right now, so many Western nations are under grave threat from the twin forces of cultural Marxism and an expansionist political Islam familiar to me from my youth.

Of course Hirsi Ali grew up in Somalia, which became authoritarian and didn’t adhere to these values, so she’s particularly sensitive to their erosion.

Here are the four stages of Western dissolution as outlined by Bezmenov; indented quotes are from Hirsi Ali:

Bezmenov described the subversion process as a complex model with four successive stages, a diagram of which I have provided. These are, in order: demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and finally, normalization.

Hirsi Ali provides a handy chart (made by Bezmenov) of what will be affected by this process, but to me it looks a little like a Unabomber letter, and I’ll reproduce it below. Here are the stages and their expected duration, as well as the signs of the first stage that we’re in now (and nearing its end).

Demoralization

Demoralization is the first stage and requires the subverters’ greatest investment of time and resources. Bezmenov claims the process of demoralization can take between 10 to 30 years, because that is the amount of time it takes to educate a new generation.

The demoralization process targets three areas of society: its ideas, its structures, and its social institutions. The targeted institutions include religion, education, media, and culture. In each realm the old ways of thinking, the old heroes, are discredited. Those who believed in them come to doubt themselves and their ability to discern reality itself.

Think of the cynicism and selective truth-telling young Americans encounter in most classrooms. You know Jefferson owned slaves, right? You know Columbus killed millions? Again, never mind that Jefferson set us on the path to emancipation, or that Columbus knew nothing about epidemiology. A little learning, as the saying goes, is a dangerous thing.

. . .What else can explain the daily displays of moral panic attacks masquerading as righteous activism, from the destruction of artwork to self-immolation? As human life ceases to look inviolable, we might also expect measures like euthanasia to gain steam, not just to help end terminal anguish but to end all manner of non-debilitating hardship. It’s no surprise, then, that we are seeing movements speeding ahead for “assisted dying” in the U.S., UK, the Netherlands, Canada, France, Ireland, and the rest of the West.

Next, the fundamental structures of society—like the rule of law and social relations—are targeted. For example, demoralization in the rule of law would entail undermining our trust in legal institutions and eroding the basis for legal authority. This could be accomplished by presenting the justice system as corrupt or illegitimate and by sowing distrust in the mechanisms of law enforcement. Think of the movements to “defund the police” because of “systemic racism.” Or the conviction last week of the front-runner presidential candidate on 34 counts of obvious political charges.

This stage also includes, says Hirsi Ali, both euthanasia (assisted dying) the breakup of the traditional nuclear family, something she sees as a bulwark of Western values, and “the retrograde practice of polygamy” (now “polyamory”). DEI statements begin to curb academic freedom, and college students begin to feel that “resistance is justified”. This is usually couched as resistance to Israel, but Hirsi Ali says it’s also resistance to Western values. She’s not far wrong here, given that student protestors, in their authoritarian sureness, say that they’re out to “globalize the intifada”. This can be seen as the Islamist takeover of the West (“Turtle Island” as they call it.)

Destabilization

Destabilization is the next phase. This process is considerably shorter, taking anywhere between five months to two years. With demoralization now reaching its full maturity, society is increasingly paralyzed by harsh domestic turmoil across all sectors. Democratic politics take on the character of a vicious struggle for power. Factionalism takes hold. Economic relations degrade and collapse, obliterating the basis for bargaining. The social fabric frays, leading to mob rule. Society turns inward, leading to fear, isolationism, and the decline of the nation-state itself, leading to crisis.

It is important to understand that, at this stage, the process of subversion is largely self-propelled. What once required active involvement on the part of a subverter has now taken root and grows organically. Then, society ruptures all at once in a rolling series of crises as the full extent of the cancer manifests.

I’m not sure that we’re not at the beginning of this, but of course one could couch Trump’s campaign as part of the struggle for power. I’m not sure, however, if you can see this happening, or beginning to happen, in the rest of the West.

Finally, we have the two final stages:

Crisis and normalization

Bezemov says the “crisis” phase is supposed to last 2-6 months, and Hirsi Ali doesn’t mention it. That leads to “normalization”—presumably the Western acceptance of a new authoritarian set of values, as in Nineteen Eighty-Four. This stage is supposed to be indefinite:

Finally, says Bezmenov, a subverted society enters the normalization stage, which is when the subversive regime takes over, installing its ideology as the law of the land. By then, the enemy has totally conquered the target society—without ever firing a shot.

WHO IS DOING THIS?

Hirsi Ali says she can “discern at least three forces” producing this dissolution.

The first: American Marxists. This category includes old card-carrying communists, red-diaper baby socialists, antifa anarchists, and many of whom we now call woke. Though the Soviet Union collapsed decades ago, the Soviet worldview has found familiar proponents: young Americans and their professors. They are no longer advancing their cause merely through class struggle, but through the fusion of racial, class, and anticolonial struggles. Theirs is now a cultural communism; they lead subversion through the institutions with the ultimate aim of overthrowing the West.

The thundering socialists of the past (think of poor Bernie) seemed to earnestly care about the working class. Perhaps they did so naively, but at least they loved the poor. Does AOC? Rashida Tlaib? My former countrywoman, Ilhan Omar?

So this is largely the extreme Western Left.  And they will be allied with members of the next group, as indeed they have, at least on campus:

The second force is the radical Islamists, who are riding the coattails of the communists to power. A good example is the Muslim Brotherhood and its many tentacles. Of these tentacles, some are openly religious, like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Students Association, each with chapters in nearly every American university. Other organizations don a secular mask, like the so-called Students for Justice in Palestine. These groups have become increasingly confident over the past months. Anti-Israel Muslim candidates recently won elected seats in countries like England, where imams talk openly about reestablishing the caliphate in Europe.

The question at hand is whether Marxists and Islamists can produce some kind of coherent society, for Islamism aims to convert the entire West to tenets of Islam, tenets that are very different from those of Marxists. If both groups are trying to destroy the West, they may succeed, but ultimately they’re working at cross purposes.

 Things become even weirder when you add in the third “subversive” force:

The third force is the Chinese Communist Party. The most obvious avenues through which the CCP has spread subversion in America is through its numerous Confucius Institutes. These organizations have been vehicles for Chinese espionage within major American academic institutions. Then there is TikTok, an addictive social media app controlled by the CCP, which presents Chinese children wholesome, educational content while wreaking havoc on American kids—polarizing them and feeding them anti-American propaganda.

In the end, then, and not necessarily consciously, the phases are being propelled by a mixture of American Marxists/Socialists, radical Islamists, and Chinese Communists.  In Hirsi Ali’s view, this combination will destroy Western values, but what kind of society will it produce? Does each group envision the same kind of endpoint?  Maybe that doesn’t matter; perhaps the groups just hate Western values and will fight it out for power after they’re gone.  Here’s the chart Hirsi Ali produces to show the process. She doesn’t mention it, nor that it was created not by her but by “Tomas Schuman”, a pseudonym for Bezemov himself.


How do we stop this? First, says Hirsi Ali, we need to “recognize the good activism from the bad”, and she says that “there is no easy way” to do this ave “pay attention to your gut and avoid being recruited by people for subversive causes. Even if we’re undergoing this dissolution, that doesn’t seem as hard as Hirsi Ali makes out.  Don’t support Hamas, Rashida Tlaib or DEI, don’t become an encamper, and, I guess, avoid all the pejorative forms of wokeness. I would add that you should speak up if you see Western (or “liberal”) values attacked.

What is happening? Speaking for myself, it’s not absolutely clear what Hirsi Ali is saying. Is she just describing only how Russia became communistic, or describing what’s really going on in the West? Are we going through these four stages in order?  I’m not sure. Is there collusion among the groups to destroy Western values? No, surely not, even if they have the same aim, for the society that each group aims for is very different.

In the end, all I can say is that Hirsi Ali correctly points out that many groups and many protesters are, in the end, bent on the destruction of Western values. But this has been said by many others; to name two, Hirsi Ali herself in her earlier works and Douglas Murray. And you’ll have encountered this idea before. To me the serious point of the article is nothing new (though recognizing the aims is important), and the new point—that we may be going through a Soviet-style transition to dictatorship and authoritarianism—is not very convincing.  The more I think about her article (it’s also on audio, but I haven’t listened to it, and the audio may be a bit different from the Free Press article.

“Nobody knows what Audubon did but we’re going to cancel him anyway”

June 7, 2024 • 9:30 am

My two criteria for whether someone’s name should be removed from a society or building, or whether a statue should be taken down are, first, that the naming was done to honor the positive achievements of what the person did, and second, that the person’s life, as a whole, created a positive rather than a negative net effect on the world. If you can answer “yes” to the first one and “positive” to the second, the name should stay. It’s when these answers conflict that you have a problem and have to make a judgment call. And so it is with artist and naturalist John Jams Audubon.

There’s no doubt that the National Audubon Society, named after John James Audubon, the “father of American birding”, has been a positive force in conservation and getting people interested in our feathered friends. On the other hand, Audubon owned at least nine slaves and was a white supremacist.  This affects the second part of my judgment, and it’s hard to weigh the negative effects of owning slaves, which are substantial, against the net good of someone’s life, which in Audubon’s case includes the Society named after him.

The same conundrum applies to people like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who owned many more slaves than did Audubon. Do we rename Washington, D.C. and the Jefferson memorial, and always qualify both of them when writing about them?  In general, my view is that the institutions and legacies of all of these men, recognizing their role as slave-holders, should remain, but of course any account of their accomplishments should be qualified, as slavery cannot be excused as “a practice of the times.” (There were abolitionists, who recognized its immorality from the get-go.)

The National Audubon Society has decided to keep its name, though some branches have renamed themselves. To me the renaming is more a performative than social-justice-improving action, since I doubt that the name Audubon has kept minorities out of birding. Yes, they are relatively few, but I attribute that to cultural differences or lack of access to the environment, not to Audubon’s name.  And I haven’t heard anyone assert that they’d gladly go into birding or join the Society if only it were renamed.

In the announcement from The Tucson Audubon Society sent in by reader Debi (below), it says that they are changing their name to become a “more inclusive and welcoming organization” and that the new name (not yet chosen) will “carry immense weight and signal our larger commitment to diversity, equity and access.”   They also think that the old name turned off minorities interested in birding: “We now recognize that this is a clear barrier for people who might otherwise become involved in or support or work.”  Really? How many such people do they know of?

Finally, though, they admit that few people outside the society really know about Audubon’s bad aspects; that outside their bubble the name Audubon has “little or no recognition.”

These two claims are mutually exclusive. You can’t say the name is keeping people out of birding because of Audubon’s legacy, while at the same time assert that few people outside the birding/conservation bubble know about Audubon’s life. (I’ve underline the claims in red below.)

At any rate, readers can weigh in here, but I think I agree with Debi when she added that this announcement, which she was sent, was “basically just more of the SOS (same old shit) that is driving us all batty.”  Yes, Audubon was a slaveholder, as were many people, some of them “fathers of our country,” but he left behind a legacy that was positive. I’d vote to keep the name on those grounds and on the grounds of historical continuity, and, like Debi, I’m tired of the constant drive to rename things under the misapprehension that this will substantially improve society. Yes, you can take the name “Hitler” off of stuff, but it’s no longer there anyway, and it seems time to stop trolling the lives of famous people, finding bits sufficiently bad to demonize them.  (The geneticist Ronald Fisher is one example of someone who has been unfairly canceled.)

Anyway, judge for yourself. Here’s the announcement that Debi sent.

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 7, 2024 • 8:15 am

Today we have some UK bird photos by reader Mal Morrison. His IDs and narrative are indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.

A few bird photos for a rainy day. I can’t match the exotic tropical birds that some of your readers have sent in so I thought I would see what I could photograph, commonplace or less so, while walking around a couple of sites in Plymouth in Devon over the last 3 weeks. I went to ‘Jennycliff’, a clifftop overlooking Plymouth Sound and in sight of the Hoe and to ‘Roborough Down,’ a stretch of moorland just outside Plymouth and which is part of Dartmoor.

To start with a couple of very common birds:

This is male Eurasian chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs). The female is a more subdued brown-green colour with a light breast:

A common blackbird (Turdus merula) in a field of buttercups. This is a male again and again the female is not as distinct. Incidentally, this is the type of blackbird in Paul McCartney’s song, or at least this species’ song is on the record:

A European Goldfinch (Carduelis carduelis). In this case I don’t know what sex, as the species is monomorphic. This one was so intent on feeding from the ground that it let me approach much closer than I normally could:

This is a Dunnock (Prunella modularis). Wikipedia says that the name comes from the English ‘Dun’ meaning ‘dingy brown, dark coloured’. Both sexes are equally dingy however, despite the bird’s drab appearance, its sex life seems quite exciting. Again according to WP, Dunnock females ‘are often polyandrous’ and ‘DNA fingerprinting has shown that chicks within a brood often have different fathers’ and that ‘Males provide parental care in proportion to their mating success, so two males and a female can commonly be seen provisioning nestlings at one nest.’ I wonder how a male can recognise its own progeny. Wikipedia does provide references for all these facts including that ‘Dunnocks take less than 1/10 of a second to copulate and can mate more than 100 times a day.’:

This is a European Stonechat (Saxicola rubicola) This is a male; the female is less brightly coloured. Readers will be pleased to hear that it is perching on 1 leg by choice rather than necessity:

A Greater Whitethroat (Curruca communis). This was perched on the bushes close to the cliff edge and there were several birds singing vigorously, presumably proclaiming their territory, along this stretch of coast:

The rest of the birds below were photoed at Roborough.

A European Robin (Erithacus rubecula), a very common bird which is quite famous in Britain, having become one of the symbols of Christmas, along with holly and snowmen. It seems to have a shorter disturbance distance than many birds but I can’t find any literature that backs this up, however, my brother swears that one follows him around the garden when he’s digging:

A Willow Warbler (Phylloscopus trochilus):

And I think this is a Common Chiffchaff (Phylloscopus collybita). This was how the bird looked, but its yellowness was exaggerated by the early light (it was 06:30). The problem with this identification is the bird’s similarity to the Willow Warbler. The Willow Warbler is slightly longer in body and wing and has lighter legs (Wikipedia says that it has a more elegant shape, whatever that means) but the primary means of identifying the birds is their calls. I did identify the Willow Warbler from its song but unfortunately the other bird has what appears to be a dragonfly in its mouth! I do have some other photos which I think show this bird to be slightly shorter in body and with darker legs, but I’m open to being corrected:

A Long-tailed Tit (Aegithalos caudatus). A strange looking bird with a tiny beak (and a tiny body it’s only 5-6 inches long including its tail:

This is a Common Linnet (Linaria cannabina), a type of finch. This is a male which, in Summer, has a red breast—bright red in some cases. The females lack the red and have white underparts:

JAC: I’d never seen a linnet before though one is mentioned in one of my favorite poems, Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree“, to wit:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

And finally this was a snapshot of a Common Buzzard (Buteo buteo). There were a pair flying very low and both were only in sight for seconds. I had been told there was a nest around where I was but this was the first time I saw them. It’s a very common bird throughout Europe:

Friday: Hili dialogue

June 7, 2024 • 6:45 am

Good morning at the tail o’ the week: Friday, June 7, 2024, and National Chocolate Ice Cream Day.  The best brand I’ve found, including premium varieties like Haagen-Dazs (I refuse to use the umlauts), happens to be Trader Joe’s Super Premium Ultra Chocolate Ice Cream, available in quarts for four bucks and change (their coffee ice cream is also good, but this one is spectacular). Here’s a review of that variety, along with vanilla and mint chocolate chip (I’d avoid those; they’re okay but not up to the par of the chocolate). Eat it slightly softened.  I’m not generally a fan of chocolate ice cream, but this is what I keep in my freezer. To avoid weight gain, I eat it out of the carton, taking only five largish spoonfuls as a serving.

It is a very dark and chocolate-y flavored, as this video shows. The woman in the video suggests topping it with maple syrup. It sounds weird, but I may try it! (This video recommends the ultra chocolate as Trader Joe’s best flavor at 11:38, with the the mango sorbet close behind.)

 

It’s also Hug an Atheist Day, National Doughnut Day, National Fish and Chip Day in the UK, National Gun Violence Awareness Day (in the U.S.) and Tourette Syndrome Awareness Day.

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

Da Nooz:

*In a NYT op-ed, Frank Bruni lays out “The absolute worst argument for why Trump won’t win.” Here’s the argument in one paragraph”.

Americans won’t be that reckless with the country’s future and won’t stoop that crudely and cruelly low. When it’s finally time to cast ballots — when the full weight of that decision hits them — they’ll realize that whatever their disappointment in the current president, it’s no match for the disgust that the former one elicits. They’ll recognize, however grudgingly, that Trump is an unserious person, unfit for a serious country.

Why is it so bad? Bruni says because “It’s a dangerous reprise of the (greater) confidence that Democrats felt about Hillary Clinton back in 2016. And look how that turned out.”  Here’s why we should be worrying that Trump could win (as if I need another dose of tsuris!):

I’d point out that when he lost in 2020, we were mid-pandemic — that surely hurt him — and Biden was the one who represented change. Now, weirdly, Trump does.

I’d point out that to go by opinion polls, more voters have reservations about Biden’s age (81) than about Trump’s (77 until next week). And those reservations are deep.

I’d point out that while Biden received roughly seven million more votes than Trump did four years ago, about 45,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin were the difference between Biden’s victory in the Electoral College and a tie with Trump. Those states — along with Pennsylvania, Nevada and a few others — could be decided as closely this time around.

Last, I’d point out that many of the voters who will give Biden or Trump his margin of victory aren’t attuned to the scariest and most negative details about Trump that I’ve just laid out. And in a fragmented and chaotic news environment, they may be supping on information entirely different from what the crowd who cannot envision Trump’s election consumes.

These shallowly and sporadically engaged voters might just gasp at the prices of groceries and houses, dismiss the verbal crossfire between Biden and Trump as a more intense version of familiar political warfare and choose Trump. Not acknowledging the very real possibility of that is dangerously complacent, and it fails to recognize how forcefully Biden and his supporters need to make the argument for him. The case against Trump is indisputably damning — but it may not be enough.

Yes, we should worry (I rarely need an excuse), but here is the latest poll summary from FiveThirtyEight.  It’s a squeaker!

 

*Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon is going to jail, though for only four months and on a contempt of Congress charge.

A federal judge Thursday ordered Steve Bannon to surrender by July 1 to serve a four-month prison sentence for defying the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack and former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The former Trump adviser was found guilty in July 2022 of contempt of Congress and sentenced in October of that year, but U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols in Washington allowed him to remain free while he appealed.

In a unanimous decision last month, a three-judge appeals-court panel rejected Bannon’s arguments that his conviction wasn’t valid because he was following his lawyer’s advice when he refused to comply with a House subpoena demanding documents and testimony. The panel said Bannon’s advice-of- counsel defense wasn’t valid in contempt-of-Congress cases and would impede the legislature’s investigative authority.

Though Bannon plans to continue to press his arguments, Nichols, a Trump appointee, said at a hearing Thursday that the time had come for Bannon to serve his sentence. “I can no longer conclude that his appeal raises substantial questions of law,” the judge said.

I don’t like this dude even though I did back his right to speak at the University of Chicago (they tried to deplatform him and I defended him in a Chicago Tribune op-ed, but he never showed up).

*In contrast to the long NYT profile of Ibram X. Kendi that was in the NYT (I wrote about it in yesterday’s Nooz), the National Review has a much more critical piece called “The Lies and Fall of Ibram X. Kendi” (it’s archived here; h/t Rosemary). It’s a snarky piece that begins by dissing Nikole Hannah-Jones and Robin DiAngelo, then goes on to Kendi, getting in a few licks at the New York Times piece at the end:

But nobody impressed me more than the Cut Creator, Ibram X. Kendi. If people like DiAngelo and Rao were paler Joan the Baptists, then the experience of Kendi (born Henry Rogers in Philadelphia, name changed at age 32) was like witnessing the advent of the anti-racist messiah himself. Why, it was even right there in the title of his book. How to Be an Antiracist — which came out in mid 2019 to significant (and retrospectively ominous) plaudits among the “woke set” but complete indifference among the world at large — was one obscure black academic’s solution to all the textbook American racial oppression he had read about as a child but never quite suffered during his middle-class upbringing yet felt he should have. And once George Floyd died at the hands of Officer Derek Chauvin, its fantasy narratives might as well have been placed in advance and doused in gasoline, merely awaiting a lit match.

What is racism, per Kendi? Anything that oppresses minorities but most especially African Americans. What is “antiracism”? Anything that promotes their social, economic, or physical well-being. How to be “antiracist”? It’s simple: Question literally every single decision you make in life on a granular level. Does voting for this candidate or referendum advance “antiracism”? How about reading this book? Wearing these clothes? Boycotting this show? Not boycotting this show? (How about this hummus? It’s made by Zionists!) The logic wasn’t even particularly compelling, merely ironclad in its suffocatingly recursive and intentionally ill-defined way. “There is no neutrality in the racial struggle,” warned Kendi, and the book (and his subsequent lectures on it — which might have cost you $20,000 a pop, provided you were an institutional sponsor) made it clear: Every single choice we make marks us like Cain as “racist” or — hopefully, the way Calvinists reckon with future salvation — as “antiracist.”

Future generations will barely believe it, but this stuff had its moment. Kendi became a multi-millionaire off the Floyd agonistes among liberal and corporate America, as I noted a year ago. The man had hustle and an easy way with conversational patter, as well as the willingness to fearlessly reductio his thesis all the way to absurdum. It captured a certain zeitgeist. No wonder he was showered with $55 million for his Boston University “antiracism center,” and no wonder he fumbled it all. It all collapsed when we shuddered ourselves out of the 2020–21 punch-drunk daze. Being surprised at the fact of Kendi’s mismanagement is like being surprised that you can’t really promote Eddie Murphy from street hustler to floor trader in the span of a month.

Strangely enough, I end with today’s “news hook” instead of beginning with it: The New York Times Magazine is out this week with an autopsy on the rise and fall (to date) of Kendi. The piece is of course written with all due sympathy — in this narrative, the audience is assumed to understand that Kendi is a well-meaning crusader beset by the cruelties of academic expectations — and for once I don’t particularly recommend it to you. It treats the entire phenomenon of Kendi-ism as the unique travail of one put-upon college administrator unused to disbursing large amounts of cash. (Ray Stantz once warned Peter Venkman that the harsh realities of the private sector would make him long for the cushiness of academia, but apparently academia has raised its game as well.) Great pains are made to distinguish his theories from Robin DiAngelo’s: For her, racism is a state of inexpiable white original sin that one must constantly apologize for. For Kendi, it is merely something you oppose by micro-interrogating every single action you take on a relentless second-by-second basis. The Times wants you to understand that his is the more sensible way to reckon with your failures.

I choose neither. But I lament the twilight of the fanaticism that gave us such brief phenomena as Ibram X. Kendi, if only from a detached, aesthetic, “may you live in interesting times” perspective. This man gave America the simplest, most easily applicable binary solution to all of our racial problems. It didn’t matter that it was stupid, at least not from the perspective of his personal enrichment. For a while, it sold. Now that it doesn’t? It’s time for the think pieces. What we lived through in 2020, during the Floyd meltdown and its aftermath, was a onetime necrotic bloom during which the first carrion-feeders on the scene were able to fatten themselves up to spectacular proportions on the collapsed body of American progressive racial and political angst. The first-mover advantage went to the Kendis and DiAngelos of the world, already lean and hungry from years of preparation — and if you, like me, have grown to appreciate the majestic adeptness of cynical operators, then why not salute how quickly they denuded our national carcass, leaving us with the bones? Why not, unless you care about the future of American civil society?

Well, it’s pretty much true, even if it does sound like it was written by H. L. Mencken (imagine what he would do with Kendi). And I don’t have much to say except that there is a place for the NYT’s generally laudatory piece but also a place for the National Review’s snark. Overall, I think Kendi’s pretty much done as a national figure now. As one of his friends said in the NYT piece, ““I don’t know of anybody more ill suited for fame than Ibram Kendi.”

*Colin Wright has challenged a critic of the Kass Review to a Debate, constantly upping the amount that the critic would get donated to his favorite children’s hospital. No dice! Read or hear about it in “Eager to Affirm Yet Unwilling to Debate“. The text is below, and the audio at the link is a 12-minute podcast of Colin reading his Quillette essay on this cowardly doctor (link below). I myself avoid debates, but if I had been a vocal critic of the Kass Report like O’Brien, I sure as hell would debate, especially to get that much money donated to a children’s hospital. Some text from the link.

Some of you will already know, based on recent articles I’ve published here, that my Manhattan Institute colleague Leor Sapir and I have been doing our best to encourage a particularly aggressive gender-affirming pediatrician named Dr. Michael O’Brien, to participate in a debate on the UK’s Cass Review and so-called gender-affirming care more broadly.

Our offer to have him engage with Dr Sapir came after O’Brien had publicly responded to Do No Harm senior fellow January Littlejohn on X, where he claimed the Cass Review was “a sham at best, and you’d know that if you were at all qualified.”

Long story short, we decided to test the limits of the gender activists’ “no debate” policy by starting a GoFundMe to raise money for a children’s hospital of Dr. O’Brien’s choice if he agreed to participate in a good-faith scientific debate on the topic.

We ended up raising over $30,000, and still he refused to debate. So I think we did a good job exposing the level of absurdity we’re dealing with here. It’s impossible to maintain the moral high ground on “no debate” when failing to engage effectively blocks $30,000 from sick and injured kids. It’s logically and morally indefensible.

But I won’t give too much away, since that’s the point of this episode. A couple days ago I published an overview of the entire thing in a Quillette essay titled “Eager to Affirm, Yet Unwilling to Debate.”

This episode is the audio of me reading that essay.

And you can find the essay on Quillette here.

*From Tablet we have an article about being Jewish at Harvard this year: “Harvard’s golden age turns to mud.” The first sentence, emitted by the commencement speaker, stuns me.

“I was called antisemitic by power and money because they want power and money.”

Thus said Harvard’s 2024 commencement speaker, Maria Ressa. Fittingly, her deployment of antisemitic tropes in front of tens of thousands of students, professors, and families at graduation last week encapsulated the absolute chaos that has engulfed Harvard University for the last year.

THEY want power and money? Who are “they”? You know the answer, of course, it’s those pesky Zionists. That this person has not been called out for bigotry stuns me. But let’s look at other bits of the piece:

After all, just the week prior, dozens of students and faculty gathered by the gates of Harvard to gleefully exclaim “intifada, intifada, coming to America.”

This of course followed an almost monthlong illegal encampment of students and professors in the center of Harvard Yard demanding a complete and total divestment from “the Zionist entity.” Although the participants used bolt cutters in an attempt to break open Harvard’s gates, depicted our Jewish President as a devil replete with horns and a tail, violated all time, place, and manner restrictions, called for the violent destruction of the Jewish state, and established a self-appointed security system that monitored and recorded Jews like me on our way to class, they were handsomely rewarded.

In exchange for packing up their foul-smelling tents and open-air laundry, all graduate and almost all undergraduate students had their suspensions revoked. The encampment leaders will meet with senior university officials to discuss a Palestinian studies department, and the Harvard Management Corporation, which oversees Harvard’s $50 billion endowment, will invite them for a seat at the table to discuss divestment, and President Garber personally asked for reinstatements and an expeditious disciplinary process.

That same week, the Harvard antisemitism task force, led by a professor who has repeatedly labeled antisemitism at Harvard as “exaggerated,” quietly updated their timeline. Rather than submit recommendations to combat Jew-hatred during the spring semester as promised, the task force now has a revised date of fall 2024.

. . .Despite countless op-eds and interviews, seldom are the personal experiences and stories of the students themselves highlighted. As a result, too often Harvard professors themselves belittle the plight of Jewish students and publicly denounce not the antisemitism, but the mere accusations of antisemitism, on campus.

As a Jewish student at Harvard University, I have had my learning interrupted by students calling for the globalization of the intifada, sat directly next to classmates who praised the terrorist groups Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, listened to 34 student groups blame the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust on Jews themselves, been exposed to countless death threats, and perhaps most infamously, had a university president who described calls for Jewish genocide to be “context-dependent.”

And there are plenty of other stories about the plight of Jewish students. In this case, yes, data is the plural of “anecdotes”. And Harvard continues to lose Jewish students. Want more? Here’s one more point:

Earlier in the year, close to 100 Harvard faculty and staff published a cartoon depicting the hand of a Jew, imprinted with the Star of David and the dollar sign, holding nooses around the necks of an Arab and a Black man.

Please, sir, can I have some more?

In early April, Harvard deployed 24/7 private security to stand guard in front of the Palestine Solidarity Committee’s “Apartheid Wall.” The wall was replete with offensive Holocaust imagery and a quote from the U.S.-designated terrorist group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. However, when it came to Chabad installing a menorah during Chanukah, not only did Harvard not provide any security, but also instructed that it be removed each night.

That’s heinous. These are grounds for a Title VI lawsuit, and if I’m not wrong such a suit has indeed been filed against Harvard.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is being very sneaky!:

Hili: And I thought I had gained the trust of a sparrow.
A: And what happened?
Hili: It had doubts about my sincerity.
In Polish:
Hili: Już myślałam, że zdobyłam zaufanie wróbelka.
Ja: I co?
Hili: Zwątpił w moje przyjazne intencje.

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

This came from Matthew; I don’t know where he got it. It’s a compilation of notes on free will from Francis Crick. Matthew found it while writing Crick’s bio. Click to enlarge. Note that Crick is a determinist, and even knows that “chaos” is deterministic. He was a smart man.

From Barry, again with the source unknown:

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:

From Masih, who introduces those shot up by Iranian police for protesting:

From Colin Wright; now even the anatomists have got into the act:

From Barry: a cat resistant table. This has got to be frustrating for moggies!

From Simon. I wonder if this is true right now, or depends on the outcome of an appeal. If true, it means The Donald can’t visit his golf course in Scotland.

From Malcolm; the cat doesn’t want walkies!

From the Auschwitz Memorial; one that I posted.

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. I might have posted the first one before. If so, here it is again:

How many babies does this hen need to look after?

Barbra Streisand singing at age 13

June 6, 2024 • 12:45 pm

Here’s an amazing and rare find: a recording of Barbra Streisand singing a popular favorite, “You’ll never know“, at age 13!  And she’s already really good at that age, recognizable as La Streisand without knowing her age.

In this video, musician and music analyst Fil takes her performance of the song apart and extols her accuracy of pitch (and deviations from perfect pitch that actually improve the song), as well as her enunciation (as in the “L” in “love” at 2:23). Now you may think that a 15-minute analysis of a two-minute performance is overdoing it, but I greatly enjoyed Fil’s sonogram analysis and his acerbic remarks about autotuning, a new phenomenon that I abhor. Autotuning is ruining popular music.

The song is perhaps most famous from the Vera Lynn version from 1943. I can imagine the GIs overseas listening to it while looking at a picture of Betty Grable.

Here’s a version in which a later Barbra does a duet with the incarnation above.

I’ll add that Babs has one of the two greatest voices of our time for singing popular music. The other, of course, is Karen Carpenter. And Joni Mitchell is up there, too. I’d add Joan Baez, but she was a folk singer.

h/t: Tom

Teachers’ union in Portland pushes pro-Palestinian propaganda on pupils

June 6, 2024 • 11:10 am

 

Here’s another instance of a teachers’ union imposing its political values on students.  And course it comes from Portland, Oregon. You have to remember that teachers’ unions don’t exist for the benefit of the students, but for the teachers themselves. As the Daily Signal reported in 2011:

As former American Federation of Teachers president Al Shanker infamously quipped: “When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.”

And here we have a paradigmatic case of where interests of teachers and students don’t coincide, or rather, when teachers appear so “progressive” that their unions urge teachers to propagandize students in favor of Palestine.  The two articles below documenting this are both conservative—the National Review and The City Journal—but just check the sources and judge for yourself. Christopher Rufo, for example, is widely demonized, but mainly because he’s a Republican who advised Ron DeSantis. In fact, I think his exposing DEI stuff and showing its weaknesses have been salubrious. And so is this exposé. But again, read and judge.

I have to emphasize that these are lesson plans made by the Portland Association of Teachers, and it’s not clear whether any of this material has yet been foisted on students.

Click on the two headlines below to read, or check out this series of tweets by Rufo documenting the teaching material.

From the National Review, by Ryan Mills:

And the City Journal piece by Rufo:

From the National Review Piece:

Jewish leaders and concerned parents in Portland, Oregon are accusing the local teachers’ union of indoctrinating students with anti-Israel messages and engaging in one-sided, pro-Palestinian activism as the war in Gaza continues to rage.

The 32-page guide, “Know Your Rights! Teaching & Organizing for Palestine within Portland Public Schools,” was published last month by the Oregon Educators for Palestine in collaboration with the teachers’ union. It offers legal advice to educators “teaching about the genocide in Palestine,” and advice on how to teach about the ongoing conflict.

The fact that parents and Jewish leaders say that the teachers’ union is actually “indoctrinating students” implies that this material is being taught, but it’s not clear. However, the guide seems to have disappeared, as the link above goes nowhere. Never mind; you can find the link below.

There’s more:

The teaching guide does not mention that Gaza is governed by Hamas, which the U.S. designated as a foreign terrorist organization in 1997. And critics note that while it focuses on the plight of Palestinians, it makes no mention of Hamas’ terrorist attack on October 7, which killed about 1,200 innocent people, mostly Israeli civilians, and led to the war.

The guide accuses Israel of engaging in “settler colonialism” and says that the “Zionist settler colonization of Palestine has been widely compared to settler colonialism in the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and elsewhere.”

. . .For younger students, the guide recommends lessons, books, and videos from various far-left education outfits, including Woke Kindergarten, the Palestinian Feminist Collective, and Social Justice Books. It includes a visual guide titled “So You Made it to a Protest!” and “Lil Comrade Convos,” which urges young kids to discuss “power.”

Older students are directed to lessons on “Renewable Energy in occupied Palestine,” “Unions,” “Genocide of Palestinians,” “Queer Voices From the Fight For Palestine Liberation,” and “No Freedom Without Reproductive Freedom for Palestinian Women.”

What can you say except “Oy vey!” (if you’re a Zionist). But Rufo has more evidence in a working link and some tweets, so I’ll quote the second article as well. And the link in the first sentence, to the “Teach Palestine” resources, is working, though I don’t see how to download it.

I have obtained a collection of publicly accessible documents produced by the Portland Association of Teachers, an affiliate of the state teachers’ union that encourages its more than 4,500 members to “Teach Palestine!” (The union did not respond to a request for comment.)

The lesson plans are steeped in radicalism, and they begin teaching the principles of “decolonization” to students as young as four and five years old. For prekindergarten kids, the union promotes a workbook from the Palestinian Feminist Collective, which tells the story of a fictional Palestinian boy named Handala. “When I was only ten years old, I had to flee my home in Palestine,” the boy tells readers. “A group of bullies called Zionists wanted our land so they stole it by force and hurt many people.” Students are encouraged to come up with a slogan that they can chant at a protest and complete a maze so that Handala can “get back home to Palestine”—represented as a map of Israel.

Other pre-K resources include a video that repeats left-wing mantras, including “I feel safe when there are no police,” and a slideshow that glorifies the Palestinian intifada, or violent resistance against Israel. The recommended resource list also includes a “sensory guide for kids” on attending protests. It teaches children what they might see, hear, taste, touch, and smell at protests, and promotes photographs of slogans such as “Abolish Prisons” and “From the River to the Sea.”

In kindergarten through second grade, the ideologies intensify. The teachers’ union recommends a lesson, “Art and Action for Palestine,” that teaches students that Israel, like America, is an oppressor. The objective is to “connect histories of settler colonialism from Palestine to the United States” and to “celebrate Palestinian culture and resistance throughout history and in the present, with a focus on Palestinian children’s resistance.”

The lesson suggests that teachers should gather the kindergarteners into a circle and teach them a history of Palestine: “75 years ago, a lot of decision makers around the world decided to take away Palestinian land to make a country called Israel. Israel would be a country where rules were mostly fair for Jewish people with White skin,” the lesson reads. “There’s a BIG word for when Indigenous land gets taken away to make a country, that’s called settler colonialism.”

Before snack time, the teacher is encouraged to share “keffiyehs, flags, and protest signs” with the children, and have them create their own agitprop material, with slogans such as “FREE PALESTINE, LET GAZA LIVE, [and] PALESTINE WILL BE FREE.” The intention, according to the lesson, is to move students toward “taking collective action in support of Palestinian liberation.”

I can’t stop quoting!

. . . .The recommended curriculum also includes a pamphlet titled “All Out for Palestine.” The pamphlet is explicitly political, with a sub-headline blaring in all capital letters: “STOP THE GENOCIDE! END U.S. AID TO IRSAEL! [sic] FREE PALESTINE!” The authors denounce “Zionism’s long genocidal war on Palestinian life” and encourage students to support “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” policies against Israel.

You can peruse the teaching guide, and I’ll put up a few tweets by Rufo demonstrating what’s in it. It starts with lessons from kindergarten through grade 2 (roughly ages 5-7).

Here’s one I found from high school plans; click to read the whole lesson plan:

What the hell is going on here? This is blatant political propagandizing of the type that UNRWA foists on kids in Gaza, but it’s in AMERICA. Of course whether you consider Portland “America” is a matter of taste these days, but I don’t think any parent save someone blatantly pro-Hamas would want their kids fed one-sided propaganda these days. Particularly Jewish parents!

All I can say is that the parents of Portland should nip this nonsense in the bud, pronto.

Teachers’ unions of course have often taken stands inimical to the well-being of their charges: they are notoriously loath to fire teachers who are incompetent or even drunk, they are often pro-DEI, and they pushed schools to close down during the pandemic, a move that now, I think, is seen as deeply unwise, having set children’s education back by a long spell without really conferring much benefit to health.  And this post is one more example of how a teachers’ union, apparently besotted by Palestine and rife with anti-Zionism, is not teaching but propagandizing.

 

h/t: Luana, Rosemary