I have landed!

May 12, 2024 • 9:00 am

This is my 29,000th post on this site!

For some reason my flight to Amsterdam, though nothing out of the ordinary for a west—>east across-Pond flight, was exhausting. Perhaps it was the Person of Size next to me in the middle seat, who tended to ooze over the armrests (I was in the aisle seat) preventing me from sleeping after dinner and two movies: Past Lives (quite good) and the documentary “Being Mary Tyler Moore” (surprisingly good). But my attempt to get three hours of sleep was a dismal failure, doomed by encroaching avoirdupois.

But Amsterdam is lovely, and I’ve never been here at this time of year. It’s sunny and warm (78°F, 26°C) with blue skies and sun. A generous local humanist and skeptic is putting me up for the week, and I’m on a quiet, leafy street near the Museum District. Here’s the view from my bedroom):

Right now I’ll try to recover my energy and;  have a look around; I’m told there’s a good Balinese restaurant nearby.

Oh, and Happy Mother’s Day; there’s a Google Doodle; click to see where it goes.

Today’s Masih: The Iranian Morality Police are at it again, but the tee-shirt wearing girl was saved from their clutches.

Speaking of which, this is Iran before the Revolution, when women could wear what they want (tweet sent by Matthew):

From Malcolm; a cat with a video on its collar chasing another cat:

From Barry; the Peacemaker. As he says, “Such a stern look. “Guys! Cut it out! Behave!”

And from my feed. You’d think the bees would go sleep in the hive, but some apparently don’t:

Sunday: Hili dialogue

May 12, 2024 • 3:47 am

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has hit upon a money-making scheme:

A: I’ve never seen such a sundial.
Hili: See, a sundial with a cat would sell very well.


In Polish:

Ja: Takiego zegara słonecznego jeszcze nie widziałem.
Hili: No popatrz, a zegar słoneczny z kotem świetnie by się sprzedawał.

Bill Maher’s latest bit

May 11, 2024 • 11:30 am

Here’s an eight-minute Real Time bit in which Bill Maher goes after the media for blowing up the campus protests out of proportion. To counteract this trend, Maher proposes five rules for proper journalistic coverage of the news.

One such rule is that the media should stay away from quoting the “angriest people on social media with too much time on their hands.” Tell me about it!

At the end of the bit, Maher answers the question, “What do we do if he wins?” (The “he” is obvious.)

Iris and discussion

May 11, 2024 • 10:30 am

I’ll be off for O’Hare soon, but heres a photo of Irises I took on my way home. I don’t know when you’ll hear from me again, but before that I’ll have had a belly full of french fries with mayo or peanut sauce.

In the meantime, feel free to discuss politics or whatever you want. I’ll throw out some starter questions, but you can ignore them. I would, however, like to know the readers’ opinions. Three of the four questions are about the war, as that’s been much on my mind.

a.) What the deuce is Biden up to with Israel? He does know that the IDF considers Rafah important in getting rid of Hamas, right? So why is he trying to prevent a serious military operation there? Does he want Hamas to win and maintain power?

b.) The UN has revised the death toll of Gazan civilians, reducing it considerably and halving the number of women and children killed). Given that, and given the fact that the new ratio of civilians killed to Hamas fighters killed is a bit more than 1:1; AND given that that ratio is lower than any similar ratio in modern warfare (the U.S. is a grim 3:1 in its Middle East conflicts and other fights go up from them, AND, given that these deaths can be imputed largely to Hamas, who encourages Gazans to die for propaganda purposes and uses them as human shields, AND that Israel takes steps to reduce the civilian death toll, including warning civilians of strikes and providing humanitarian aid, then why is the death toll of Gazans considered way too high for this war? So high, in fact, that mostly the whole world hates Israel, falsely accusing it of genocide because of the number of civilian deaths. Is there supposed to “death equity”, so that for every civilian killed and Israeli should die as well? This truly baffles me.

c.) Why is Israel so prominent among conflicts given that in other places, like Yemen and Syria, far more people have died and there is much more starvation? Why don’t we hear more about Syria, where the forces of Bashar al-Assad have killed an estimated 300,000 people, mostly Muslims? This isn’t mere “whataboutery,” for the conflict there is ongoing, serious, and has killed more than ten times the civilians that have died in the war between Israel and Hamas.

d.) Is Donald Trump ever going to be convicted of anything? Will he win this fall’s election, whether or not he’s found guilty? Why do so many Americans vote for a person whose mental illness is palpable, and on display every day?

I will check from O’Hare, and I’m hoping for a plethora of comments.  Say whatever you want.

A prognostication: Biden is sabotaging his re-election

May 11, 2024 • 8:15 am

This article, from Claire Berlinski‘s Substack site was written by her as well as by John Oxley, and paints a picture of Biden as a doddering old fool with no clear take on foreign policy. Biden, they say, has waffled so much on his Israel policy, including his decision to stop most military weapons sold to Israel, that he’ll lose the vote of both Muslims and Jews—a hard thing to do.  It also includes ten summaries of and links to other articles, all criticizing Biden and all worth reading. It’s a valuable piece, and those of you who are so certain that Biden will win should read the whole thing. (Claire abhors Trump, by the way; like me, she just wants the Left on a sane foundation.)

Claire, by the way, is the daughter of evolution opponent David Berlinski, but seems to have a whole lot more common sense.

Clicking on the headline may get you one free read, but you also may wish to subscribe, as I enjoy Berlinski’s prose—and ideas. (The articles are written by Berlinski and other people.) Try clicking on the headline:

I’ll quote a lot of her short article, and be sure to read the Bret Stephens article mentioned in the first sentence (it’s archived here).

I just saw this column by Bret Stephens, who echoes my sentiments almost verbatim. I hadn’t seen that when we recorded this last night, and obviously, he hadn’t listened to this podcast.1 But he wrote more or less exactly what I’ve said here.

All of this is disastrous for Biden, and thus disastrous for us all.

I figured until this that he was basically a savvy politician who understood why the American electorate put him in power quite well. Normalcy. Not extremism. But I was wrong. He’s in a bubble. He doesn’t understand how much of his support comes from people like me.

People like me—and I suspect the majority of Americans, even still—loathe the far right. They also loathe the far left and the Islamists. People like me have for years rejected the argument that Biden is dangerously in the sway of the Islamists and the far left on the grounds that it’s absurd to say so. Befuddled though he may be, Biden is clearly an old-fashioned center-leftist, firmly in the postwar American tradition. He’s not going to do anything grotesquely offensive in office. Trump, meanwhile, is literally—not just metaphorically or hyperbolically—insane, a Clusterfuck B personality disorder on cloven hooves. It really is an open question whether the American republic would survive another term under his aegis.

I still maintain this—passionately. For all his deficits, and there are so many, there’s no option but Joe Biden. The prospect of a second Trump presidency is too terrible to consider.

But until recently, I had allowed myself not to consider it. I believed, in some primitive, unjustifiable way, that it just couldn’t happen. That Americans will somehow come to their senses before Election Day.

I no longer think so. What this tells me is that Biden is so out of touch that he’s confused the campus of Columbia with mainstream American opinion. It’s an unforced and terrible error. It tells me the people around him—including his cabinet—are giving him awful advice. Neither he nor his advisors have properly understood how many Americans want to vomit when they see those spoiled, pampered, Hamas-loving campus imbeciles demanding “humanitarian aid”—for themselves. So they don’t get peckish during their sleepover parties with their little chums.

It’s not just the greasy-pole climbers like Elise Stefanik who feel this way. There’s a broad American center that cannot stand what we’ve recently seen emerging from these institutions. They will instinctively and immediately understand that Biden has decided to pander to them at the expense of our ally, and they will understand that in doing so, he has made us weaker. They may not be able to admit or articulate to themselves what causes them to stay home on Election Day. But it will be this—this, and our withdrawal from Afghanistan, our timidity in arming Ukraine, our misbegotten efforts to coax Iran back into a nuclear deal it clearly does not want. This—and Biden’s infernal mumbling, stuttering, and slurring. This—and the massive, coordinated information war that Russia and China will mount on Trump’s behalf. (There will be a hell of an October Surprise. I promise.) This, and the failure of our judiciary to swiftly put Trump behind bars— not for paying off a porn star, but for attempting a coup. All of this, together, is enough to win Trump reelection.

I have no idea how Biden made this decision, or why. How could he fail to appreciate that it’s the political kiss of death to be lauded by Ilhan Omar? Her words will be on GOP attack ads from now until Election Day.

In capitulating to his party’s loons and cranks, Biden has breathed life into a GOP argument that until now was easy to dismiss—viz., that the crackpots are secretly running his administration.

This is a disastrous headline for Joe Biden:

(The headline below is from a WBMA, an ABC news site in Birmingham, Alabama).

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., speaks at a rally outside an Amazon facility on Staten Island in New York, Sunday, April 24, 2022. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Here’s a new tweet by AOC, echoing the misguided claim that invading Rafah is a “red line”. What she doesn’t say it that crossing that line would make both Israel and the world safer.  In other words, AOC (and Biden) simply want Hamas to persist as the rulers of Gaza.

If AOC, Omar, and the other “squaddies” were in college, they’d be encamped.

Saturday: Hili dialogue

May 11, 2024 • 6:45 am

Well, I’m off this evening traveling on cat Sabbath to Amsterdam, as it’s Saturday, May 11, 2024, and Eat What You Want Day.  This video tells you what I want to eat today:

It’s also American Indian Day (should be “Native American Day”), Mother Ocean Day, International Migratory Bird Day, Sun Awareness Day, National Babysitter’s Day (when will they learn to put the apostrophe in the right place?), National Train Day, and Windmill Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 11 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Hamas has been rewarded for attacking Isral by a UN vote (largely symbolic) granting Palestine a kind of quasi-statehood.

The United Nations General Assembly on Friday overwhelmingly adopted a resolution declaring that Palestinians qualify for full-member status at the United Nations, a highly symbolic move that reflects growing global solidarity with Palestinians and is a rebuke to Israel and the United States.

The resolution was approved by a vote of 143 to 9 with 25 nations abstaining. The Assembly broke into a big applause after the vote. The United States voted no.

The resolution was prepared by the United Arab Emirates, the current chair of the U.N. Arab Group. The 193-member General Assembly took on the issue of Palestinian membership after the United States in April vetoed a resolution before the Security Council to recognize full membership for a Palestinian state. The majority of Council members supported the move, but the United States said recognition of Palestinian statehood should be achieved through negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.

The U.S. is right. This is one of the stupidest moves the UN has made yet, and that’s saying a lot. But wait! There’s more!

“The U.S. is resigned to having another bad day at the U.N.,” said Richard Gowan, an expert on the United Nations for the International Crisis Group, a conflict prevention organization. But he added that the resolution “gives the Palestinians a boost without creating a breakdown over whether they are or are not now U.N. members.”

The U.N. charter stipulates that the General Assembly can only grant full membership to a nation-state after the approval of the Security Council. Examples of that include the creation of the states of Israel and South Sudan. The resolution adopted on Friday explicitly states that the Palestinian issue is an exception and will not set precedent, language that was added during negotiations on the text when some countries expressed concern that Taiwan and Kosovo might follow a similar path to pursue statehood, diplomats said.

Sorry, but why is Palestine an exception and Taiwan is not? At any rate, this is symbolic (though of course will incite more people against Israel) because the Security Council has to approve full statehood, and the U.S. won’t let that happen, despite Biden’s current waffling and weaseling.  Besides, neither Israel nor Palestine want a state. Try again in another 40 years or so.

*Glenn Loury has published an autobiography called Late Admissions, a tell-all book reviewed in today’s NYT by Pamela Paul. (It’s archived here.)  I didn’t know that Loury’s past was that checkered!  Note that now he says he’s a conservative:

This is far from the first reversal, political or personal, for Loury, 75, one of the most celebrated and reviled Black intellectuals of the past half-century. While public debate has too often devolved into lobbing grenades from entrenched positions, Loury’s tumultuous life, his swings from the right to the left and back again, his remarkable, barrier-busting successes and his considerable frailties and failures, have taught him to always recognize that he could be wrong and to keep an open mind, no matter how vehement his opinions. He outlines this ragged road to wisdom in his remarkably candid memoir, “Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative.”

He was a star Ph.D. graduate in economics from M.I.T. and the first Black tenured professor of economics at Harvard. He was a darling of the neoconservative movement and was tapped to be deputy secretary of education during the Reagan administration.

But that was before he was charged with assaulting his ex-mistress. Before he was arrested for drug possession. Before he was exposed as both a serial philanderer and a crack addict. He’d left two daughters from his first marriage back in Chicago; he barely acknowledged a son born to a former girlfriend, until the son was fully grown.

A 1995 New Yorker profile described Loury’s first public downfall thus: “Loury was emerging as exactly the kind of person he had warned Black America to avoid: a violent, irresponsible, drug-using womanizer who put his own pleasure above the demands of his career and the needs of his family.”

In recounting all that’s happened since, “Late Admissions” does something that is rare in fiction but almost unheard-of in memoir: It presents both an unlikable and an unreliable narrator.

In an unusual introduction, Loury explains that he hopes to build trust with the reader by exposing his obfuscations and prevarications, warding off anything terrible a reader might say about him by saying it all, himself, first. One title he considered for the book, he told me, was “The Enemy Within.”

He goes into the controversy that’s arisen about the Death of George Floyd, which I’ve written about and now watched the movie saying Floyd wasn’t murdered and read the counter-narrative arguing that Floyd was indeed murdered (see here).  I have to say that I’m coming down on the latter side, but haven’t had time to review the very long rebuttal and write something. This may be as far as I get.  You can find the book, which comes out on May 14, here.

*Like many of us, Andrew Sullivan is peeved that Trump keeps delaying his trials, forestalling whatever day of reckoning is to come. The title of his piece this week,”Getting away with it, yet again“, tells the tale.

I really don’t want to be a Debbie Downer yet again, but it seems pretty clear to me at this point that the legal resistance to Donald Trump’s deep corruption, pathological recklessness, managerial incompetence, and outrageous attempts to steal an election and then prevent a peaceful transfer of power … have, well, failed.

By “failed” I don’t mean, of course, that Trump will definitely not be convicted in his current trial, or that the other cases — from the January 6 insurrection to the classified documents to the Georgia pressure campaign — won’t proceed at some point. I mean something more salient: none of this is likely to happen or seriously dent Trump’s popularity before the looming election this November. His antagonists had four years to prosecute and delegitimize him, and it wasn’t enough time. (Bill Maher chiefly blames Merrick Garland for preternatural dithering — “Attorney General Barney Fife.”)

Judge Cannon has now indefinitely postponed the Florida trial for Trump’s grotesque and dumb mishandling of classified documents. It looks fishy to me, but her pre-trial shenanigans do not appear outside her judicial prerogatives. If the DOJ had wanted to prosecute Trump in this complicated case — involving national security, executive privilege, the limits of discovery with classified information — they might have begun a little sooner than last year.

The Georgia case just got upended by Fani Willis’ hubris, as her romantic relationship with one of her prosecutors gave Trump’s lawyers a chance to delay the trial by asking the Georgia Appeals Court to rule on whether Willis should be disqualified. The federal January 6 case is suspended mid-air as SCOTUS ruminates on the question of presidential immunity.

Which leaves us with one case likely to be decided before the November election: the current, patently political prosecution of Trump for alleged violations of federal campaign law in concealing hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels. Technically, it seems pretty clear to me that Trump is guilty as sin, and may even be convicted by a New York City jury. Michael Cohen, after all, went to jail for the same crime. But the case itself is a stretch by Alvin Bragg, straining to elevate state financial misdemeanors into multiple federal felonies. Worse, the coverage this week is likely, if it has any political impact, to help Trump in his framing of the prosecution as personal persecution.

. . . So did Trump wear a condom? Boxer shorts? Was the fucking fully consensual? Yes, some of this was necessary because Trump, absurdly, is still denying he ever met the broad alone. But icky is icky, and humiliating people with the details of sexual encounters, even if they are scummy people like Trump, tends to backfire. And it’s hard to see how he politically loses from this trial. If the jury hangs, Trump wins. If he is convicted, he has an obvious appeal option, especially given the racy irrelevance of some of the testimony allowed by the judge this week. If he’s acquitted, we’ll never hear the last of it.

. . . it seems unlikely to me that an electorate that breezed past “grab ‘em by the pussy” is going to stop short at a federal financial fiddle. A recent poll found that 45 percent of Americans believe that the Stormy case is irrelevant to Trump’s fitness for the presidency — up a bit from 39 percent last summer. The slippage seems to come mainly from one demo:

[A]mong independents who lean Republican, the share calling those charges not relevant to Trump’s fitness has climbed from 57 percent to 73 percent, and the share of true independents saying the same has risen from 29 percent to 45.

Oy, gewalt! Whether Trump is a philanderer is not the issue, but whether he was involved in covering up financial dealings, which speaks to his honesty. Granted, its not a capital crime, but it does seem to me “relevant to his fitness” as President.

*Instead of a TFIF today, Nellie Bowles’s (whose new book, Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History, got shellacked in the Washington Post) has published an excerpt from her new book in a column called, “The Day I Stopped Canceling People.” Nellie’s first cancellation was when she decided not to interview a white friend who had written a book in which a black woman was made to look bad in a quote.  Apparently the quote was accurate and kosher, but Nellie didn’t want bad optics.  Her words (article is also archived here):

To do a cancellation is a very warm, social thing. It has the energy of a potluck. Everyone brings what they can, and everyone is impressed by the creativity of their friends. It’s a positive thing, what you’re doing, and it doesn’t feel like battle, but like tending the warm fire of community. You have real power when you’re doing it, and with enough people, you can oust someone very powerful.

The easy criticism of a cancellation is: You went after someone who agrees with you on almost everything except some tiny differences? Some small infraction? It seems bizarre. But that’s the point. The bad among us are more dangerous to the group. Mormons don’t excommunicate a random drag performer. They excommunicate a bad Mormon.

I watched all the presidential debates in 2016 with some family members who are conservatives. After Hillary lost, I couldn’t stomach going over there for a few months. I was too upset, and I couldn’t handle seeing them happy. But that’s not a cancellation. I had no power over these family members, or sway in their community. I couldn’t make them apologize for being happy that Trump won.

A cancellation isn’t about finding a conservative and yelling at them. It’s about finding the betrayer in your midst. They look and talk like you. They blend in perfectly. But they’re not like you.

The author I canceled existed in my community. She went to the parties I went to and showed up at the same events as me. The goal was to slice her carefully out, and I was thrilled to do my part. By showing where I stood, I felt closer to my friends. But also, in some ways, doing what I did is the price of admission to the club. To ignore the drumbeat was to suggest that I didn’t care. I definitely did care.

I saw later that the event was canceled altogether after I withdrew. Her book tour didn’t work so well. The book didn’t sell so well. I never saw her at another party, and I never heard from her again—and I was fine with that.

Nellie’s gloating about cancellation disappeared when she fell in love with someone with whom she had political disagreements (Bari Weiss, whose hiring at the NYT Bowles had argued against), and she goes on to discuss the topic of cancellation in general.

*MIT and Penn, two schools involved in those disastrous Congressional hearings, with the President of Penn losing her job, have both had their encampments cleared.

Police on Friday cleared pro-Palestinian encampments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania, the latest efforts by colleges across the country to rein in escalating protests.

. . .On MIT’s Cambridge, Mass., campus, police arrested 10 graduate and undergraduate students, the school said Friday. None resisted, and the students were taken off campus by MIT police officers to be booked, a spokeswoman said.

“The escalation of the last few days, involving outside threats from individuals and groups from both sides, has been a tipping point,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth said. “It was not heading in a direction anyone could call peaceful. And the cost and disruption for the community overall made the situation increasingly untenable.”

MIT said police also arrested several protesters on Thursday after they marched to a campus building and blocked a garage.

. . . In Philadelphia, Penn said police arrested about 33 protesters who were cited for “defiant trespass” after repeated warnings. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, said a day earlier that it was “past time” for the school to disband the encampment on Penn’s College Green, which had grown in recent days.

Videos posted to social media by news outlets showed helmeted officers, with riot shields and zip ties, detaining people after Penn’s public-safety department warned protesters to leave.

And Harvard’s in for trouble, too:

At Harvard, a spokesman Friday said administrative referrals to place encampment protesters on involuntary leave continue to move ahead.

“The encampment favors the voices of a few over the rights of many who have experienced disruption in how they learn and work at a critical time of the semester,” said Alan Garber, Harvard’s interim president.

Garber at a meeting late Wednesday offered protesters a chance to meet with university officials to address their questions about the university’s endowment, but only if they first voluntarily ended the encampment, the Harvard spokesman said. Garber also reiterated that Harvard wouldn’t use its endowment as a political tool.

The school said protesters declined by deciding to continue the encampment.

So far quite a few of these things have been taken down, including ours, and there have been, as far as I know, no injuries. Only two cowardly schools—Brown and Northwestern—have bargained with the encampers, and that’s to their shame. 2,000 protesters have been arrested. Harvard’s tactic of allowing a “questions meeting but only after disbanding the site seems reasonable, but even that won’t work. And so the Schmarvard protesters will go the way of the others.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has yet another reason to hate Kulka:

A: What are you looking for?
Hili: I left something there but Kulka probably ate it.
In Polish:
Ja: Czego tam szukasz?
Hili: Zostawiłam tu coś, ale chyba Kulka to zjadła.
And a picture of the affectionate Szaron:

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

From The Dodo Pet:

I can’t remember where I found this, but it was somewhere on Facebook:

From Jesus of the Day. I guess they take the money out of your estate:

From Cate: Stickers found on the north side of Chicago. The one on the left is particularly good:

From Masih; quotidian life in Iran. Note that there’s now a ten-year sentence for Iranians sending a video to Masih!

From Scott, who notes, “I’ve never cared in the slightest about the Eurovision contest. But I think I’ll tune in this time to support Eden Golan, the 20-year-old Israeli who’s now in notoriously antisemitic Malmö, Sweden to perform, surrounded by a convoy of a hundred police cars and helicopters trying to stop the crowds from pulling another 1972 Munich Olympics.”

Here’s Golan being booed at her dress rehearsal. It’s simply because she’s Israeli. Morons. But she stuck it out as she’s a stalwart Israeli:

The demonstration that keeps Golan in her hotel!

And a relevant tweet:

From Luana; look at this impeccable encampment!

From Malcolm; a demonstration of the “Mercator Effect“: the unrealistic size of land as it gets farther from the Equator:

From Simon; Larry the cat is being a bit ribald:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a ten-year-old girl gassed upon arrival at the camp:

Two tweets from Professor Cobb; the first part of his findings when researching Crick’s life. Can you see why “80 CG” would have been better?

A great idea: a milk bottle for multiple kittens. And yes, look at their ears:

Andrzej on the “Biden-Sinwar-Khameni Pact”

May 10, 2024 • 9:20 am

I discuss the war in the Middle East with Malgorzata a lot and, like  Roseanne Roseannadanna, I ask a lot of questions. Andrzej had written a precis of his view of what’s going on there for Listy, and Malgorzata translated his Polish into English just for my sake. I thought I’d post Andrzej’s take on this site, but if you read Polish, you can see the original on Listy here.  (Yahya Sinwar is of course the leader of Hamas.)

As you can see, Andrzej is incensed at Biden’s decision to withhold arms from Israel and sees this as a sign that Biden is concerned more with his own reelection and with achieving comity with Iran than with defeating the terrorism of Hamas. Remember, these are Andrzej’s views, not mine, but I have to say there’s substantial (though not complete) overlap

Biden-Sinwar-Khamenei Pact

Andrzej Koraszewski

The former U.S. ambassador to Israel said there was no doubt that Biden had sided with Hamas. On Holocaust Remembrance Day, the American President announced that he intends to stop supplying weapons to Israel (with the exception of missiles for the Iron Dome). In other words, the American President announced that he would try to avoid too many Jewish casualties, but eliminating the threat to Israeli civilians interferes with his plans to cooperate with Iran.

According to The New York Times, this is a “turning point”. We are actually seeing a qualitative change. Biden said out loud what he had quietly said for days. Restrictions on American arms and ammunition supplies had actually begun earlier, although there were official attempts to deny this. Now, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the American president, citing concern for the Palestinian civilian population, decided that he must save Hamas from final defeat and create the conditions for the creation of a Palestinian state under Hamas.

We hear that it is still just a threat, that supplies will be halted “if,” but the Pentagon confirms that they have already been halted.

Is the American president naïve, or is he just pretending that he does not know what he is demanding? In all the months since Hamas started the war, American condemnations of Hamas have been nothing but empty words. There has been no firm pressure on Qatar or Iran, no demand for the expulsion of Hamas leaders from Qatar, no demand for the immediate release of Israeli hostages, no threats to move the U.S. military base out of Qatar, and no ultimatum to Tehran. On the contrary, all the American grievances were directed at Israel, Hamas’s information about Israel’s alleged crimes was taken seriously, human rights were turned into a laughing stock, a tool for constantly accusing Jews, no one blamed “President” Abbas for supporting Hamas’s barbarism, and the American administration gave permission for public hatred of the Jewish state.

The U.S. President has previously asserted that “Hamas does not represent the Palestinians.” He did not reveal the secret of how he knew this, and he also pretended that he had no knowledge of Palestinian opinion polls, or who supposedly represented these Palestinians and how they did it.

Meanwhile, Tehran said on the same day that it may be “forced to change its nuclear doctrine and build nuclear bombs if its existence is threatened.” The fact that Iran either already has nuclear weapons or is a few weeks away from building them has been known for some time. Now they have apparently decided that they have gotten green light from Washington and it is time to stop pretending that they are not aiming at acquiring nuclear weapons at all. Thus, there is no longer a need for a fatwa (which President Obama happily talked about, but which no one has ever seen), which supposedly stated that Islam forbids the production of nuclear weapons.

The new UN statements on readiness to recognize the “State of Palestine” were probably not related to President Biden’s statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day, but it is easy to guess that the atmosphere was already considered favorable for taking this step, because there is a possibility that the US in the Security Council will not block the proposal, and the General Assembly resolution itself will certainly obtain the required majority, so journalists will consider it a binding decision of the UN anyway, and that’s what it’s all about.

So what does this “turning point” for America mean? Israeli historian Gadi Taub, in an article published on the same day, wrote:

In the eyes of the Biden administration Hamas is the smaller problem. The bigger problem is Benjamin Netanyahu. The U.S. is willing to live with Iran’s proxies everywhere, as part of its “regional integration” policy—i.e., appeasing Iran. But they are unwilling to live with Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. The stubborn Netanyahu clearly does not want to learn from his would-be tutors like U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken how to “share the neighborhood” with genocidaires in Gaza, Judea and Samaria, Lebanon, and Tehran, whom his electorate understands to be bent on murdering them.

Tony Bardan, an American scientist from the Center for Research on Terrorism of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, recently wrote that Israel is facing a choice whether to remain an independent state or to be a client-oriented country in the service of a great power. Bardan reminds us that the latter has already happened once. Herod the Great was practically the governor of Rome, and it ended with the destruction of the temple, and in the following decades the genocide of the Jews and the exile of most of the survivors.

Gadi Taub, describing today’s American frolics in the Middle East—insidious attempts to overthrow the elected leader of the Israeli government and then collusion with a possible “U.S. own” Israeli prime minister—shows that for the Democratic Party, the enemy is Netanyahu rather than Islamic terrorism (not seen as a threat to America and the entire democratic world) and rather than another nuclear-armed enemy of democracy nor a genocidal Hamas.

The American president repeated his usual mantras about Israel’s right to defend itself and about his steadfast support for its ally, while doing everything in his power to save Israel’s genocidal enemy and strengthen its main sponsor.

In a world that has returned to the old rut of murderous Jew-hatred, Israel is dependent on American aid and care. But, Taub writes, the United States keeps Israel on a leash, rationing ammunition, forcing it to uncontrollably deliver humanitarian aid that falls into the hands of Hamas, maintaining its power over the people of Gaza, and in the diplomatic field supporting unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state. And while the U.S. helped repel a massive rocket attack by Iran, it forced only a symbolic response from Israel. America’s primary goal today is to ensure the survival of Hamas as ruler of the Gazan fortress.

The United States treats Israel as Jews have always been treated – with superiority and contempt. They invited the prime minister’s political rival (Gantz) to the talks, tried to summon the commander-in-chief of the Israeli army for separate talks, and did not protest when a caricature of an international court threatens to issue an arrest warrant for Israeli leaders. Moreover, there is a great deal of evidence pointing to U.S. government financial and organizational support for Israel’s internal divisions and political destabilization of the country at a time of struggle for existential survival.

Let’s not kid ourselves, the “turning point” is just the climax. Even if not everything is going according to plan and Benny Gantz has not yet decided to cooperate fully, and Prime Minister Netanyahu apparently refuses to give in to pressure, the American alliance with Hamas is delaying the final defeat of this terrorist organization. And the campaign of relentlessly dishonest accusations against Israel is intensifying with each passing day the hostility towards the Jewish state, hostility towards Jews, and sympathy for enemies not only of Israel, but also of America and the rest of the democratic world.

The intentions of the allies are clear: the poster of the BDS movement says it bluntly:

NOTE: A commenter below points out that this is not from the BDS movement, but from an anarchist site. So ignore the figure below.

For Islamists, Hamas’s war with Israel is intended only to open the gate to further fighting. For President Biden, only his election campaign and the expectations of his electorate are important. The option to support the Islamic Republic of Iran was chosen by President Obama, and Biden probably really believes that Israel should learn to live with a Palestinian state armed by Iran and with Lebanon in the hands of Hezbollah. If Israel is not ready for this, so be it—America will continue to pretend to defend human rights. The question of why this human must be a genocidal terrorist might be considered tactless.

Readers’ wildlife photos

May 10, 2024 • 8:15 am

Our photo tank is running low, so while I’m gone for the next week you might consider putting together a batch of photos for posting here.  Thanks!

Here is part 2 of Ephraim Heller’s survey of the birds of Bhutan (part 1, with an introduction, is here).  His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here is installment #2 of photos from my April 2024 birding tour of Bhutan. We begin with a photo of the Paro valley, including the Paro dzong. Paro is the site of Bhutan’s only international airport, as it is the only valley near the capital of Thimpu wide and flat enough for commercial passenger jets. Consequently, most international visitors enter Bhutan here.

Today I post my photos of Phasianidae (pheasants, grouse, and allies) and Columbidae (pigeons and doves). Descriptions of the species below are taken from Wikipedia.

Blood Pheasant (Ithaginis cruentus) male and female. Blood pheasants live in the mountains of Bhutan, Nepal, Sikkim, northern Myanmar, Tibet and central and south-central China, where they prefer coniferous or mixed forests and scrub areas near the snowline. They move their range depending on the season, and are found at higher elevations during the summer. With snow increasing in fall and winter, they move to lower elevations.

Male:

Female:

An Himalayan Monal (Lophophorus impejanus) female. These are native to Himalayan forests and shrublands at elevations of 2,100–4,500 m (6,900–14,800 ft). It is the state bird of Nepal. The male has spectacular colors, but I was able only to photograph the female, which is darn pretty.

A Barred Cuckoo-Dove (Macropygia unchall):

Mountain Imperial-Pigeon (Ducula badia), Bhutan:

An Oriental Turtle-Dove (Streptopelia orientalis):

A Spotted Dove (Spilopelia chinensis). While native to Asia, the species has become established in many areas outside its native range including Hawaii, southern California, Mauritius, Australia, and New Zealand:

A Wedge-tailed Green Pigeon (Treron sphenurus):

Equipment: All animal photos were shot using a Nikon Z9 camera and Nikkor Z 400mm f/2.8 TC VR S lens. Landscape and architectural photos were shot either with a Nikon Z9 and Nikkor Z 70-200mm f/2.8 VR S lens or with an iPhone 11.

You can see more of my photos here.