LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: Two Law School Deans on the Massacre in Israel: Moral clarity from Scalia Dean Ken Randall, and lack thereof from NYU Dean Troy McKenzie. “In addition to implicitly expressing the view that the righteousness of massacring babies and so forth is just a matter of opinion, McKenzie is being far from forthright. While the NYU SBA does not speak for NYU Law as an institution, it nevertheless is not merely a student group, but part of the NYU administration. The SBA has representation on sixteen different law school faculty-student committees, including admissions and faculty hiring.”
Archive for 2023
October 11, 2023
ISRAEL REAPS WHAT JIMMY CARTER SOWED: He did nothing to prevent this same regime from gaining power in Iran in 1979.
The war launched by Iran-backed Hamas and Hezbollah against Israel has roots that go back centuries, but a more recent critical node in the story is the Iranian Revolution of 1979, when militant Islam achieved state power in the ancient Persian land. Then, the world watched as a longtime American ally — the shah of Iran and the Pahlavi dynasty — was ousted from power with the tacit acceptance of the Carter administration, which had been critical of the shah (and other American allies) for “human rights” violations. The revolutionary regime backed “students” who seized the U.S. embassy and 52 American hostages for 444 humiliating days, while President Jimmy Carter belatedly responded with a deeply flawed rescue mission that ended in disaster and further humiliation for the United States. Since then, the Islamic regime that has governed Iran, as Michael Ledeen noted in 2008, has been at war with Israel and the United States. Today, Israelis (and Americans in Israel) are reaping what Jimmy Carter sowed.
As Jay Nordlinger wrote in his 2002 piece on how awful the man was as president, “Carterpalooza,” “No one quite realizes just how passionately anti-Israel Carter is. William Safire has reported that Cyrus Vance acknowledged that, if he had had a second term, Carter would have sold Israel down the river. In the 1990s, Carter became quite close to Yasser Arafat…In The Unfinished Presidency, [Douglas] Brinkley writes, ‘There was no world leader Jimmy Carter was more eager to know than Yasir Arafat.’ The former president ‘felt certain affinities with the Palestinian: a tendency toward hyperactivity and a workaholic disposition with unremitting sixteen-hour days, seven days a week, decade after decade.’ Neat, huh?”
“PLAGIARISM” COMES FROM THE LATIN WORD FOR KIDNAPPING: Should Using An AI Text Generator To Produce Academic Writing Be Plagiarism?
CDR SALAMANDER: Prelude to Slaughter: How Israel & Everyone Else Got Here.
Entire books have been written on how the Gaza Strip came in to being. We’re not going to go back to Biblical times on today’s post, but we will stick to living memory that goes back to 1950 when the Gaza Strip had a population of about 120,000. Today, it has a population of about 2.3 million. The various Arab-Israeli wars ebbed and flowed around Gaza over the decades, but even in peace Egypt never wanted it back. Israel tired of being an occupying force, and under pressure from local and international Smartest People in the Room™, they hoped for the best in 2005 & unilaterally withdrew its settlements and security forces from Gaza. The Gazans then had “elections” and in the end Hamas took over the Gaza Strip and have had it ever since.
Hamas. You know, the terrorist organization. Those guys.
Yeah, those guys. Remember how Reuters used to tell us that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.
October 10, 2023
FIGHT THE ALGORITHMS! “Time for a blog revival. Some of us have never left.”
Preach it!
I HAVEN’T READ IT, but I gather William Forstchen’s Day of Wrath is basically about a bigger scale Hamas-style atrocity in the United States. Couldn’t happen, of course, it’s not like we’ve allowed millions of unvetted men of military age across our borders. Just bought a copy, though. (Bumped).
OPEN THREAD: Be here now.
THERE ARE SOME SECTIONS OF THE UNITED STATES COLONEL MORON, THAT I WOULD NOT ADVISE YOU TO INVADE: TikTok clown says colonizers in the dis-United States are going to be next.
In a war of extermination against these clowns, I like my odds.
THE PROSPECT OF GLOBAL AND REGIONAL WAR LOOMS, BUT I’M NOT FULLY CONFIDENT IN OUR LEADERSHIP:
@dadyatias
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Chandrayaan-3’s measurements of sulfur open the doors for lunar science and exploration. “Sulfur in soils near the moon’s poles might help astronauts live off the land one day, making these measurements an example of science that enables exploration.”
BLM WEIGHS IN:
https://twitter.com/BLMChi/status/1711793142742073573
Related:
Now let the snivelling apologists for rape, murder and torture explain how this, too, was justified. https://t.co/8h7DLHKofD
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) October 10, 2023
IS THIS REAL LIFE? OR JUST A FANTASY? Physics Revelation Could Mean We’re All Living in a Simulation.
I have some related thoughts here.
BREAKING:
French journalist at major outlet confirms the beheading of babies at a kibutz in Israel at the hands of Hamas, saying she has seen images of the atrocities and has cross-checked them, and her colleagues saw the bodies as well.
Horrific https://t.co/SLcSASDpHE
— Alicia Smith (@Alicia_Smith19) October 10, 2023
Also:
This is the most newsworthy sounbite out of his press conference. Why won't Sullivan just say that we are refreezing the assets? https://t.co/R1KxW1NXVL
— Joe Concha (@JoeConchaTV) October 10, 2023
If I had to guess, it’s because the White House is desperate not to let this little unpleasantness, or however they’re rationalizing it behind the scenes, derail their resurrection of Obama’s Iran Deal.
THIS IS THE NEW YORKER’S DREAM FOR AMERICA: Is this America — men shuffling in slippers, barely alive?
To be fair, these particular men haven’t had their coffee yet. I’m not very alive at that point in the morning either.
IT CAN HAPPEN HERE: Those Hamas terrorists had to blow their way through Israel’s border wall and fence in order to attack and slaughter hundreds of innocent civilians, including infants who were beheaded. As horrendous as such attacks are, it may be easier for terrorists to commit even worse atrocities here because of the open border with Mexico.
COLOR ME UNSURPRISED: Running may work better than drugs for depression.
BUT DOES ANYONE CARE, BELIEVE, OR HEED WHAT HE SAYS? Biden Discusses Hamas in National Address.
PRIME BIG DEAL DAY: C9 by Champion Apparel. #CommissionEarned
THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Why isn’t Antifa condemning the tide of anti-Semitism?
And yet Antifa is nowhere to be seen. The thing these lefties fearmonger about all the time — the creeping return of the boiling hatreds of the 1930s — feels more real than ever and they’re saying nothing. It’s a strange anti-fascism that takes a break when something very much like fascism rears its repulsive head.
To the modern left, everything is fascism except actual fascism. Everything is ‘like the 1930s’ except the slaughter of Jewish youths, the kidnapping of Jewish grandmothers, the rise of mobs demanding a second Holocaust.
‘Fascist!’, they cry at everyone they disagree with, like real-life versions of Rick from The Young Ones. Yet when real Nazi scum show up, like that mob in Sydney crying ‘Gas the Jews!’, they turn coy.
Back Brexit and they’ll call you far right. Say a man can never become a woman and they’ll brand you a fellow traveller of fascism. Wonder out loud if we should try to do something about illegal immigration and they’ll say, ‘This is starting to feel a bit 1930s’.
But wipe out entire Jewish families? Gun down Jewish festivalgoers? Kidnap an elderly woman who survived the Holocaust? Mock Jews on the streets of our cities? Then they’ll erm and ahh. That’s ‘resistance’ apparently, not racism. It’s a rebellion, not fascism. It’s a ‘day of celebration’, as Novara Media’s commissioning editor said of Hamas’s invasion of Israel on Saturday, not a return of the bigotries of the 1930s.
Not anti-war, merely on the other side, to coin an Instaphrase.
MARK JUDGE: The Virgin Mary is a 1980s New Wave Teenager.
I HAVE NEVER IN MY LIFE BEEN SO ASHAMED TO BE AN ALUM OF NYU LAW: I knew Hakeem Jeffries (same class) and watched him devolve from a pretty nice guy to a race-hustler (thanks, Derek Bell) but that’s nothing:
I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE AND IT IS WEIRD: AI was told to design a robot that could walk. Within seconds, it generated a ‘small, squishy, and misshapen’ thing that spasms. “Kriegman said the researchers weren’t quite sure why the robot had this peculiar shape — and why it was filled with holes.”
THE WASHINGTON POST PLANS HUNDREDS OF BUYOUTS: It wants to reduce its workforce by 240 people after deciding that its previous revenue projections were “overly optimistic.”
—The Washingtonian today.
Related: Why the ‘coding for all’ movement is more than a boutique reform.
—The Washington Post, October 17th, 2014.