SHE JUST CONDONES MASS MURDER OF JEWS, IT’S NOT LIKE SHE RETWEETED A SEXIST JOKE OR SOMETHING:
Karen Attiah is a columnist for the Washington Post, and its international opinion editor.
Archive for 2023
October 15, 2023
EVEN THE REPUBLICAN SQUISHES ARE BAILING ON THEM: Huntsman family, longtime Penn supporters, will halt donations to ‘unrecognizable’ University. “In an email to Magill obtained by The Daily Pennsylvanian, Huntsman — a former University trustee, governor of Utah, and United States ambassador — said that the Huntsman Foundation will ‘close its checkbook’ on future donations to Penn. Huntsman, whose family has donated tens of millions to Penn over the course of three generations, wrote that the University had become ‘almost unrecognizable’ due to administrators’ response to antisemitism.”
CHICKENS FOR KFC:
IT’S NOT JUST HARVARD: Dartmouth student and local groups blame Israel for Hamas’s massacre.
Who are these rapscallions, you may ask? “Ramsey Alsheikh ’26 is the president of the Palestine Solidarity Coalition of Dartmouth Students, Hayden El Rafei ’24 is a member of the Dartmouth Asian American Studies Collective and Roan V. Wade ’25 is an organizer with Sunrise Movement at Dartmouth. They submitted this column on behalf of the above organizations.”
UPDATE: Roan Wade, btw, is another “Chicken for Colonel Sanders:”
“Art has always been a way for me to have a voice, a way of silently shouting my beliefs, a way of seizing space, a way of fighting those who have attempted to strip me of my voice. I view art as a means of communicating the revolution, raising class consciousness, and increasing awareness of intersectional struggles for our collective liberation. My work feeds the flames of revolution whether through creating art directly intended as a form of protest, or by using my own experiences with queer youth homelessness, housing and food insecurity, homophobia, sexism, and sexual harassment and violence to highlight that the personal is political. In these dystopian times, everything is political, including all my work.”
The distinction between Corby and Oswald Mosley is pretty much gone. If it ever existed.
JOHN HINDERAKER: It’s Time To Crush Gaza. “When a country is invaded by a foreign power, the only sane response is to retaliate with massive, overwhelming, disproportionate force. And when an invader commits the kinds of atrocities that we have seen over the last week, unprecedented in modern times, vengeance must be the order of the day. War is a terrible thing. But the Gazans started this war, and war is what they are going to get. Every resulting casualty should be laid at the foot of Hamas and all Gazans who have supported and collaborated with Hamas–a large majority, by all indications.”
OPEN THREAD: Ring out the weekend.
IT LOOKS LIKE MY CHICAGO X ALBUM THAT WAS LEFT IN THE BACK SEAT OF A FRIEND’S CAR ON A HOT DAY: The Milky Way is warped, and it might be the work of dark matter.
WELL, IT’S PROBABLY CAUSED BY THE INTERNET AND SOCIAL MEDIA: Massive Review Finds ADHD Is More Prevalent in Adults Than We Realized.
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Pro-Hamas protests show how higher education has finally crossed the line.
THIS SEEMS RIGHT: Obama, Biden administrations failed Israel: Misplaced trust in Iran among factors that spawned Hamas attack. Though it’s hard to say someone failed until you know what they were trying to do.
YES, PLEASE! REPLACE THE ‘CIVIL’ SERVICE! If you read nothing else today or this week, take the few minutes required to read Glenn’s Substack column on “Rethinking the Civil Service.” If you worry about the intrusive Deep State or the oppressive regulatory power of the Administrative State, the heart of both are the 2.1 million career civil servants working as the executive branch bureaucracy.
“The modern civil service system (post-Pendleton Act) – like so many calamities of the 20th Century – sprang from the brain of Woodrow Wilson, a political scientist before he was president, who wrote of the importance of separating politics from administration. In his view, cool, technocratic administrators would execute the policies chosen by politics – though with the suggestion that politics should generally defer to their expertise. That theory may have seemed beguiling in the late 19th Century, but by the 21st Century it has become clear that that’s not how any of this works,” Glenn explains.
Prior to my journalism career, I spent nearly three years (1982-85) as a Reagan political appointee at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which “manages” the civil service. There were some successes, including especially reforming the pension system from a defined benefit to a defined contribution basis. But the fundamentally unaccountable nature of bureaucracy was only counter-acted by the determined efforts of political appointees seeking to carry out the Reagan policy agenda endorsed by the electorate.
There were surveys at the time that suggested Reagan actually carried a majority of votes among that generation of civil servants. Boy, has that changed! Contemporary studies of campaign contributions by donors who identify themselves as federal workers routinely show 90-95 percent giving to Democratic candidates and causes.
Civil service reform has never been a top-10 public policy issue, but it should be because it is at the root of factors that shape the responsiveness and accountability, and lack thereof, the public gets from federal departments and agencies. Glenn’s analysis is the most perceptive I’ve read in a long time and should be shared widely among everybody who cares about the future of this country as a solid first step toward getting civil service reform front and center in the 2024 campaign.
FLASHBACK: Higher Ed’s Prejudice Problem.
ROGER KIMBALL: Juvenal on this Mad, Mad World.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Israel Cuts Off Gaza From All Updates On Taylor Swift And Travis Kelce.
WHY ARE VANGUARD MUTUAL FUNDS INVESTING IN THE CCP MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX? Vanguard invests in Chinese military-linked companies: report.
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Yikes: Biden Glitches so Badly During a Speech That His Wife Has to Rescue Him.
ABOLISH THE CIVIL SERVICE? I have thoughts at Substack.
INFORMATION COMBAT: Hamas and the Information War
…defeating Hamas in a city fight or even a village often means killing civilians living in the area. The military term is collateral damage. The civilians were not targets, but they were in the battle zone. In death the dead become Hamas information warfare assets.
The latest How to Make War information warfare update.
BOB GRABOYES: Arugula for Asphalt Crews: Unintended Elitism of Healthcare Wonks. “The biggest problem with healthcare policy may be that those who design healthcare policy mostly design it for people who design healthcare policy. . . . We policy folk reside in a variety of institutions: medical facilities, corporations, universities, think tanks, legislative offices, regulatory agencies and advocacy groups. But we broadly share certain characteristics. . . . The problem is that many of America’s most serious health problems reside in people whose lives and jobs do not remotely resemble those of healthcare professionals or policy-shapers.”
PROPORTIONALITY…FAIRNESS…WHATEVER YOU WANT TO CALL IT REARING ITS UGLY AND ANTI-SEMITIC HEAD:
Hamas created the Middle Eastern equivalent of an Einsatzgruppe, which were the Nazi military units tasked with one thing…the destruction of Eastern European Jewry. Should Israel treat them as if they are a standing army fighting under the flag of a sovereign nation, or as a savagely Jew-hating gang of maniacs that have been inculcated with one idea their entire lives…that the life of a Jew means nothing, and taking that life is a good thing? Himmler and Heydrich would be proud of the Pallies!
Well, they certainly were proud of their Middle Eastern allies back in the day: Nazi Antisemitism & Islamist Hate.
RIP: Actress Suzanne Somers dead at 76. “‘She survived an aggressive form of breast cancer for over 23 years.’”
SELF-DEFENSE ADVICE: Troubled Times.