UM, INTENTIONALLY? How Multiculturalism Fuels Hate.
Archive for 2023
November 26, 2023
HMM: Rebel Offensive in Myanmar Drives Junta Into Retreat. “Amazingly, public demonstrators in Yangon recently dared retribution to chant slogans against China, a major source of arms and other support to the junta, assembling in front of the Chinese Embassy on November 19.”
FEMINISTS ARE JUST ANOTHER LEFTY FRONT GROUP WHO GET THEIR MESSAGING INSTRUCTIONS FROM OTHERS: Mayim Bialik Rips on Women’s Orgs and Their Silence. “There has been an abhorrent and conspicuous absence of women’s organizations around the world unequivocally condemning the systematic rape and torture of women on October 7 by Hamas. Brutal gang rapes, sexual torture, and murder of fetuses happened- period. Where are the ‘BELIEVE THEM’ voices? These crimes against women were in many cases documented by the terrorists themselves and broadcast for the world to see.”
It’s inconvenient for the narrative, so the front groups will dutifully ignore it.
OPEN THREAD: Don’t worry, tomorrow’s Monday.
I MISS THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES. The Terminator franchise should take a break from the big screen in order to evolve.
I had low expectations, and only watched the first episode because an InstaPundit reader was among the writers. But it was great and I was bummed when they canceled it after two seasons.
BOB MCMANUS: An antisemitic riot in an NYC high school needs more than just ‘I’m outraged.’
Mayor Adams finally caught up with events Saturday; predictably, he was, ahem, shocked.
“The vile show of antisemitism at Hillcrest High School was motivated by ignorance-fueled hatred, plain and simple, and it will not be tolerated.”
The thing is, it was tolerated, for almost a week, until this newspaper blew the whistle and City Hall spooled up its outrage generator.
The NYPD had responded to the riot, so the commissioner and the Department of Education were both well aware of what happened. Which means the mayor had to know what happened. So what was the plan before this newspaper’s Sue Edelman broke the story? Hope no one noticed?
And now that it’s all out in the open, the question becomes this: What precisely does Adams mean by “will not be tolerated?”
Three Hillcrest scholars face “superintendent’s suspensions,” but because of supposed privacy claims, we’ll never know who was punished and how. The consequences lack the moral authority an immediate announcement and crackdown would have.
There should be criminal prosecutions. It should be easy. This was planned on social media and there was lots of shared video. I’d also like to see a federal civil rights investigation. There might be a federal civil rights conspiracy case here.
Plus:
We’ve spent the past few years inserting “social justice” into the curriculum, at the expense of knowledge and tolerance. Now the intellectual engagement the Hillcrest scholars bring to the Oct. 7 massacre is a knee-jerk “chase a Jew.”
That’s where “anti-racism” leads.
HOW’S THAT SPACE PROGRAM COMING ALONG? If a Future Asteroid Threatens to Destroy Earth, Could We Stop It?
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: A Jewish professor at USC confronted pro-Palestinian students. He’s now barred from campus.
Related: Rahm Emanuel vandalism attack proves ‘anti-Zionism’ equals antisemitism.
WELL, GOOD: The Scent of Hope: Innovative Treatment Restores Sense of Smell in Patients With Long COVID. “Using an image-guided minimally invasive procedure, researchers may be able to restore the sense of smell in patients who have suffered with long-COVID, according to research being presented this week at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).”
WHEN THE NEIGHBORS ARE ALL OLDER, TOO: Some seniors prefer age-restricted communities, while others want intergenerational living. There is little research to show which option is healthier.
I’m generally opposed to age-segregation, but I can see the appeal of 55+ communities for some, especially in light of rampant ageism.
ROBIN HANSON: After Eating, Software Will Bite The World.
In my experience, most software just bites.
GOODER AND HARDER, DC: DC’s City Council Slashed Police Funding. Now, Its Members Want More Cops as Shootings Plague City.
Washington, D.C.’s city council in the summer of 2020 voted to slash millions from the police budget. Now, as homicides surge in the nation’s capital, liberal council members want more cops.
After D.C. saw 13 homicides in just the first five days of August, left-wing council members Brianne Nadeau and Phil Mendelson touted their efforts to secure more resources for police, with Nadeau especially stressing the city’s “hot spots.” Those efforts mark a stark turnaround for the council members, both of whom voted to cut $15 million from the city’s police budget at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020. Nadeau at the time endorsed “calls to defund MPD” and “get police out of schools,” while Mendelson praised a 2021 police reform report that lamented D.C.’s “harmful over-reliance on policing and incarceration” and called for a “realignment and reduction of MPD’s size, responsibilities, and budget.”
Nadeau and Mendelson’s sudden support for additional policing reflects the political toxicity of the “defund the police” movement, which swept liberal cities following George Floyd’s death but has since prompted backlash. City officials in New York and Los Angeles, for example, cut funding for police in 2020 only to restore law enforcement budgets a year later, citing spikes in violent crime.
D.C. Police Union chairman Gregg Pemberton said the council’s “flip-flop” reflects an effort to avoid blame “regarding exponential increases in violent crime.”
And exponential increases in shoplifting and car thefts as well, as the hits just keep on coming:
6248 cars stolen to date in DC, including one stolen in my neighborhood Thanksgiving Day….#DistrictofCrime pic.twitter.com/dAGLtxM6Dd
— ANC6B10 (@Anc6B10) November 26, 2023
NAPOLEON REVIEW: Blunt-force charisma from Joaquin Phoenix in Ridley Scott’s dark, epic biopic.
Spanning 32 years, from the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 to its title character’s death on St Helena in 1821, it casts Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise, reign and downfall as both a prickly psychodrama and a sweeping military epic, in which the intimate lives of its central players and the fate of France itself become instantly and anxiously entwined.
Napoleon himself is played with startling blunt-force charisma by Joaquin Phoenix, who is working again with Scott for the first time since 2000’s Gladiator. Phoenix’s undisguised soft Californian accent is one of a number of details that might irk historical sticklers – television’s Dan Snow has already chimed in with a list of inaccuracies, to which Scott’s not unreasonable response was “get a life”. But on screen it’s oddly ideal, reinforcing the idea that this Corsican roughneck can never fully settle into the role for which history has him picked out.
We get the measure of the man almost instantly at the Siege of Toulon, as the French Republican forces lay siege to the British-occupied harbour fort. In the dead of night, as Napoleon leads the advance, a cannonball tears through the shoulder of his horse – the film earns its 15 certificate fast – though almost before he hits the ground he hurriedly barks “I’m OK,” and strides on, shaken but resolute, and smeared with the blood of his steed.
The whole sequence is astonishing – mounted on a scale and pegged out with a clarity that makes the filmmaking itself feel like the work of a supreme military tactician. But extraordinarily, Scott keeps on bettering it.
I saw Napoleon on Thanksgiving afternoon in Fort Worth, with a rather intimate crowd about ten other people in the theater besides Nina and I. Fortunately, globally, the film is doing quite well, because it wasn’t going to make back much of its rumored $200 million budget from that multiplex! I’m surprised to see the film is getting far harsher reviews in America than in England (the above passage is from the London Telegraph). Yes, like Scott’s Gladiator, Napoleon is first and foremost a movie, and like most historic-themed epic films, it plays very fast and loose with the facts. (For example, yes, Napoleon was sent to Egypt, but no, he didn’t shell the pyramids for kicks and grins along the way). But it’s definitely an epic well worth seeing on the big screen while you have the chance. (Though I’m looking forward to the four-hour plus cut that’s allegedly coming to Apple TV next year.)
READER FAVORITE: Calphalon Premier Space-Saving Hard-Anodized Nonstick 5-Quart Saute Pan. #CommissionEarned
I WAS A BETA TESTER FOR STARLINK, BUT I WON’T BE FOR THIS: Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain implant startup, quietly raises an additional $43M.
REDSTEEZE, OTHERS POINT OUT WHY ‘PRO-HAMAS’ RIOTERS IN NYC ARE ABLE TO GET AWAY WITH IT:
The pro-Hamas mob smashed the window of a New York kosher restaurant. Because, you know, terrorizing Jews in America will #FreePalestine. pic.twitter.com/WUEDQsgTVg
— Aviva Klompas (@AvivaKlompas) November 26, 2023
The past couple of months of anti-Semitic protests are also a glowing testament to the left’s decade+ obsession with “anti-bullying” in the education system:
The fifteen years – and billions in public funds – we spent on “anti-bullying” and empathy education were clearly a smashing success. https://t.co/VUR75ei4xN
— Abigail Shrier (@AbigailShrier) November 26, 2023
ONE DAY IT WILL ACTUALLY BE FULL SELF-DRIVING: Tesla FSD 12 Rolling Out to Tesla Employees.
IT’S LONG BEEN RECOGNIZED AS AN UNHEALTHY ENVIRONMENT: Natalie Portman says children should not be working in Hollywood — after she was ‘sexualized’ in first movie at age 12.
UPDATE (From Ed): Hollywood Is a Sex-Grooming Gang.
(Updated and bumped.)
WILL THIS BE THE NEXT BIDEN EXCUSE? Corruption can increase environmental efficiency and improve economy in developing countries, study argues.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: What Makes Hamas Worse Than the Nazis.
In October 1943 Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, delivered a notorious speech to 50 of his senior lieutenants in Posen. “I want to speak frankly to you about an extremely grave matter,” he said. “We can talk about it among ourselves, yet we will never speak of it in public. … I am referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. … It is a page of glory in our history that has never been written and is never to be written.”
By total contrast, the Hamas killers 80 years later attached GoPro cameras to their helmets so they could livestream their atrocities over social media. Although the Nazis burnt Jews alive in barns on their retreat in 1945, they did not film themselves doing it. There are plenty of photographs of Nazis standing around death-pits full of Jewish corpses, but these were taken for private delectation rather than public consumption.
When on January 27, 1945, the Red Army reached Auschwitz, they only found 7,000 living skeletons there out of a normal camp population of 140,000, because the Nazis had marched the rest westwards, partly in order kill the death-marchers but also because they did not want evidence of their crimes to be uncovered. Gassing operations there had ended in November 1944, and attempts were made to destroy the gas chambers. “Killing installations had been dismantled,” writes Sir Ian Kershaw in his book The End, “and attempts made to rase the traces of the camp’s murderous activities.”
The sheer glee with which Hamas, by contrast, killed parents in front of their children and of children in front of their parents, was broadcast to the world. Nazi sadism was routine and widespread, but it wasn’t built into their actual operational plans in the way that Hamas’s sadism has been.
Read the whole thing.
Related:
Photos of the hostages have been placed on the train tracks leading to Auschwitz. Then as now, Jews were ripped from their home and sent to their death. pic.twitter.com/uICSujgt6F
— Aviva Klompas (@AvivaKlompas) November 26, 2023
BAD MEDICINE: A Wave of Jew-Hatred in the Medical Fields.