Archive for 2023
October 13, 2023
IF IT WEREN’T DONE BY AN APPROVED PROTEST GROUP, IT WOULD BE “INSURRECTION” WITH SOLITARY CONFINEMENT ALL AROUND: Pete Buttigieg chased off the stage by climate protesters.
As I was playing that video out loud, Meade said, “Why doesn’t a Cabinet Secretary have better security?” And that made me think perhaps the interruption was considered desirable — by Buttigieg, by the Biden administration/campaign. It isn’t hard to generate ideas about why getting interrupted by extreme and rude climate activists might be advantageous.
And yet Buttigieg’s response was so weak. . . . If the interruption had been anticipated, Buttigieg should have been prepared.
Well, Pete Buttigieg.
IT’S WHO THEY ARE, IT’S WHAT THEY DO: Michelle Goldberg: The leftist impulse to justify Hamas’ attack on Israel is pretty disturbing. “If you’re a left wing Jew watching your friends celebrate mass murder this week then you have my sympathy, but the case that you were naïve is pretty self-evident at this point. It’s not like the sympathies of the Squad or the leaders of the Women’s March or various BDS campus group have been a closely guarded secret.”
FLASHBACK: The CDC, Colombian Hookers, the Secret Service, and Ebola: Reasons why Americans don’t trust institutions. “The White House played favorites in the investigation. Nepotism in hiring is one thing. Favoritism is another, perhaps worse, sin, particularly when the investigation and punishment reek of elitism.”
Now that’s the norm, of course.
YOUR TERMS ARE ACCEPTABLE:
I won’t have any kids until the 2nd amendment is abolished. I’m sorry but I don’t want my kids to fear for their lives every time they are dressed up in their uniforms. Congress must act immediately!
— •🥷🏻 (@MessiEra10_) October 12, 2023
MATTHEW CONTINETTI: The Shame of Academe.
As Israel mourns some 1,200 dead, prays for the release of more than 100 captives, reels from the worst day in its history, and mobilizes some 360,000 reservists, student activists and the international Left have mobilized to defend, apologize for, and appease evil. . . .
After the terror attacks against America on September 11, 2001, similar scenes of denunciation and celebration played out in Iraq and the Palestinian territories. Now, after Israel’s 9/11, they take place openly and unabashedly in the heart of the West.
Whatever this is, it is not progress. The grotesque tableaux represent social fracture, dissolution, ideological sorting, and weakening of confidence. They are a bad omen. Many of the protesters are young males asking for a fight. The last war with Hamas, in the spring of 2021, was accompanied by a surge of anti-Semitic violence in the United States. The Jewish community must prepare for another hateful backlash when Israel launches its ground campaign to destroy Hamas.
The toxic atmosphere of anti-Semitism has several sources. One is the corrupt university system. Fifty-one U.S. student groups have written a letter that concludes, “We support the resistance, we support the liberation movement, and we indisputably support the Uprising.” The president of NYU’s student bar association said that Israel’s “apartheid regime is the only one to blame” for the chaos. Thirty-one “Palestine Solidarity Groups” at Harvard University echoed her despicable sentiment. Swarthmore Students for Justice in Palestine said it “honors the martyrs” of Hamas. Graffiti writers scrawled “Long live the intifada” and “Israel is dead” on Stanford’s sidewalks. Students at George Washington University, one of the most expensive private institutions of higher learning in the country, held a “Vigil for the Martyrs of Palestine.” This is a small sample of dangerous student idiocy. A full catalogue would be endless.
Campus anti-Zionism and leftwing anti-Semitism are not new. The organizations behind the rallies and letters and social media posts have been around for a while. Democratic Socialists of America, Black Lives Matter, Students for Justice in Palestine, and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in the United Kingdom have spent years preparing for this moment. What they have set in motion is stunning, nonetheless.
The behavior of university administrations is just as shocking. They have either been mealy-mouthed or morally imbecilic.
There is a strong case to be made for reevaluating the place of higher education in our society. Its role seems to be growing less beneficial, and more toxic, every day.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Stanford Instructor “Suspended for … [Alleged] ‘Identity-Based Targeting” of Students in Connection with the Israel-Gaza War”.
An instructor at Stanford University has been suspended for what the president and provost called “identity-based targeting” of students in connection with the Israel-Gaza war.
Rabbi Dov Greenberg, director of the Chabad Stanford Jewish Center, said he was told by three students who were in the room that the instructor asked Jewish and Israeli students to identify themselves during a session for a required undergraduate course called “Civil, Liberal and Global Education.”
The teacher told the Jewish students to take their belongings, stand in a corner, and said, “This is what Israel does to the Palestinians,” Greenberg said, citing the student accounts. The instructor then asked, “How many people died in the Holocaust?” When a student answered, “Six million,” the lecturer said, “Colonizers killed more than 6 million. Israel is a colonizer.”
Why are our universities such cesspits of hate and misinformation?
LIGHTNING DEAL: COOFANDY Men’s Henley Knit Sweater. #CommissionEarned
I’M OK WITH THIS: Big Tech Struggles to Turn AI Hype Into Profits.
AI often doesn’t have the economies of scale of standard software because it can require intense new calculations for each query. The more customers use the products, the more expensive it is to cover the infrastructure bills. These running costs expose companies charging flat fees for AI to potential losses.
Microsoft used AI from its partner OpenAI to launch GitHub Copilot, a service that helps programmers create, fix and translate code. It has been popular with coders—more than 1.5 million people have used it and it is helping build nearly half of Copilot users’ code—because it slashes the time and effort needed to program.
It has also been a money loser because it is so expensive to run.
ndividuals pay $10 a month for the AI assistant. In the first few months of this year, the company was losing on average more than $20 a month per user, according to a person familiar with the figures, who said some users were costing the company as much as $80 a month.
Microsoft and GitHub didn’t respond to requests for comment on whether the service is earning money.
Then it isn’t.
WE’VE DISCUSSED THESE PROBLEMS BEFORE: How a Series of Air Traffic Control Lapses Nearly Killed 131 People.
One of the FedEx pilots commandeered the air traffic control radio frequency. He ordered Southwest to abort its takeoff. It didn’t. The FedEx crew blasted the engines to climb away from the Southwest plane. “On the go,” a FedEx pilot radioed.
The FedEx plane, which had three crew members, skimmed less than 100 feet over the other jet. The 128 people aboard Southwest Flight 708 continued on their way to Cancún, Mexico. Passengers were unaware that they had nearly died.
In a year filled with close calls involving U.S. airlines, this was the one that most unnerved federal aviation officials: A disaster had barely been averted, and multiple layers of the vaunted U.S. air-safety system had failed.
Read the whole thing.
OH, I WON’T: Don’t overlook Biden’s empowering of antisemites.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Meet the UVA Student Leader Who Is ‘Proud to Stand in Solidarity’ With Hamas.
YEP: The Specter Of Barack Obama’s Deeply Held Anti-Israel Ideology Hovers Over Israeli Attacks.
However, any fair-minded critique of Israel is a far cry from Obama’s well-established and radical views on the Middle East that stem, by his own admission, from his affinity for radicals such as Frantz Fanon, whose brain-dead swagger produced such sentiments as “decolonization reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives.” . . .
And it’s probably time to admit that, while attempting to bury their aims under layers of academic sophistication, Obama and his acolytes used his presidency to destabilize the Middle East in the service of a left-wing ideology that excuses antisemitism and justifies terrorist violence.
In August, Tablet magazine published a much-discussed, comprehensive interview between David Samuels and Obama biographer David Garrow. The biggest headlines that emerged from that interview had to do with Garrow uncovering letters where Obama wrote in detail about his gay sex fantasies. But buried beneath that revelation was a substantial discussion of Obama’s anti-Israel politics. Or as Tablet’s David Samuels put it, “Obama’s hostility to American exceptionalism also seemed linked to his hostility to Israel, or more specifically to America’s identification with Israel.” As Samuels went on to note, the inexplicable fixation Obama had with making Iran — the world’s leading state sponsor of terror attacks, and the same country behind Hamas’ atrocities in Israel over the weekend — a regional hegemon in spite of Israeli (and Saudi) objections is ample proof of that. . . .
Finally, there was Obama’s embrace of Robert Malley. In December of 2007, the Obama campaign put out a press release listing Malley as a campaign adviser. Malley had previously worked on Middle East issues for the Clinton administration, though he was not well-liked by the Jewish community because his father, journalist Simon Malley, was a friend and sympathizer of Yasser Arafat, the head of the PLO terror group. Robert Malley himself had also written a series of essays for the New York Review of Books on Middle East issues that led prominent Jewish commentator and the former owner of The New Republic, Marty Peretz, to call him “a rabid hater of Israel. No question about it.”
I confess I hadn’t thought much about Malley in the last 15 years, other than to assume he was up to no good. This summer I learned he was the Biden administration’s special envoy to Iran and that he had been fired once again, and this time it was serious enough that he lost his security clearance and was being accused of mishandling classified info. Only in the past few weeks have the real facts come into sharper relief: “Robert Malley helped to fund, support, and direct an Iranian intelligence operation designed to influence the United States and allied governments, according to a trove of purloined Iranian government emails.”
Iran, of course, was actively involved in funding and coordinating Hamas’ atrocities this past weekend. At the same time this was all being planned, the apparently traitorous Malley was working on Iran issues in an administration that made the questionable decision to give Iran billions of dollars in a desperate attempt to jumpstart Obama’s Iran nuclear deal.
Just in case you wonder, here’s an explication for the Obama/Biden administration’s otherwise inexplicable policy on Iran.
October 12, 2023
YES:
Harvard students are legit worried that their open Hamas support will affect future job opportunities with Goldman. https://t.co/OBS2H9dZlW
— Wilfred Reilly (@wil_da_beast630) October 11, 2023
LIFE AMONG THE BARBARIANS: Music Festival Survivor Details Escape From Hamas: ‘They Hunted Us For Hours.’
THIS MAY HAVE BEEN IRAN’S GOAL: ‘India-Middle East-Economic Corridor is effectively dead’: Fears grow as Israel declares war on Hamas.
OPEN THREAD: Do it up right.
WHAT A GREAT WEEK FOR NYC’S POLICE COMMISSIONER TO BE OUT OF THE COUNTRY: NYPD suits up, expands patrols for mass protests, possible violence as Israel-Palestinian war rages.
Police Commissioner Edward Caban did not attend the briefing held at City Hall because he was out of the country, a source told the Daily News. He was visiting Qatar, according to a second source.
The Qatar Peninsula has a photo of Caban meeting that nation’s minister of the interior, which it ran on Monday.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: U.S. to pursue stronger collaboration with allies in military space programs.