Hundreds of Yale University students participated in an anti-Israel demonstration on campus Friday night. Non-students participated, too.
Students pitched tents to make an encampment outside the Schwarzman Center where a Board of Trustees meeting was being held with top university officials.
There were about a dozen police cruisers from the New Haven Police Department and the university as the demonstration began. Mostly the police presence was to direct traffic and make sure traffic flowed without interruption.
New Haven police said, “We are assisting Yale at their request, but our involvement thus far has been limited to ensuring traffic is flowing freely.”
Things turned violent when a female Jewish student was stabbed in the eye with a Palestinian flag by a male protester. She reported the physical attack but police said they could do nothing.
A female Jewish student has been stabbed in the eye with a Palestinian flag outside Yale University.
Sahar Tartak, a Jewish student journalist was reporting on the protest outside the university where she was suddenly swarmed by a several hundred strong group of pro-Palestine… pic.twitter.com/HFNEdhBrOw
She is reported to be the editor-in-chief of the Yale Free Press. She was covering the protest. Sahar Tartak said she and a friend were suddenly surrounded by demonstrators. They were singled out, she said, because they were wearing Hasidic Jewish clothing. The crowd formed a blockade around them to stop them from filming the protest.
Even the left finds the day more than a little glum just now though that’s because the world hasn’t ended yet. Remember—end-of-the-world doomsday scenarios make environmentalists happy, so when the end of the world fails to arrive on schedule, they get the sads.
Like The New Republic, which [asked] this week [in 2022]:
A person could be forgiven for being cynical about Earth Day in 2022. Even ExxonMobil celebrates the holiday. . . ExxonMobil doing Earth Day is a lot like arms and aerospace giant Lockheed Martin co-opting International Women’s Day—a holiday which began as a protest of capitalism and war. . .
Ask Bob Langert about the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and he starts to chuckle. “When we meet the regulators, it’s kind of nice,” says the senior director for social responsibility at the McDonald’s Corporation. “We just got an award from the EPA. When we see the regulators, we always hope it’s because they’re giving us an award.”
* * * * * * * *
The idea of the rich corporate villain gleefully dirtying Mother Earth is powerful and appealing. Children of the 1980s encountered this supervillain in comics, movies, public awareness videos, and science textbooks. Times were good for mandatory recycling, for mandatory emissions reductions, for anything mandatory aimed at restraining corporate polluters.
But in the late ’90s, something peculiar started happening. The men in suits were still middle-aged, round, and white. They were still just as concerned with profit and golf. Very few of them sported tie-dyed attire, aside from the occasional whimsical Jerry Garcia tie. But the men in suits started caring. Or at least acting like they cared. Which, if you ask a spotted owl, is the same thing.
So environmental activists across the nation bought their own ties and started dealing with corporations as almost-equal partners in planet saving. Businesses in turn learned that it’s pretty easy being green.
Behind this increase lies the simple reality that only a comparatively small number of Americans can afford the mind-numbingly high fees that American universities extort from their captive domestic market. Foreign students, the overwhelming majority of whom are either the children of wealthy foreign elites or directly sponsored by their governments, represent a serious source of funding for American colleges, public and private alike. These students often pay full or near-full tuition and board, and help public universities balance the books in the face of budget cuts. More broadly, they augment revenue by helping to fill federally funded programs that are based on racial and ethnic quotas.
Depending on how you look at it, American universities have made either an exceedingly clever or else exceedingly reprehensible bargain: Quota-filling at a profit. While this practice is generally covered with asinine bureaucratic language such as “promoting diversity” and “fostering a cosmopolitan culture” for a “global community,” it is in fact a racket by which universities take slots presumably intended for members of groups that are held to be economically and culturally deprived—and on which the universities would be obligated to take a loss—and instead sell them at a profit to the families of some of the more privileged people on Earth, while also continuing to sell identity-politics platitudes as institutional ideology.
It seems obvious enough that foreign students who can afford the cost of full tuition and board without financial aid often come from the elite segment of their societies, which in authoritarian countries often translates into overlap with the ruling regimes. When it comes to the Middle East especially—though hardly exclusively—this privileged class is both outwardly “Westernized” and soaked in the antisemitism prevalent in their home societies.
As Roger Kimball asked yesterday of Columbia, “The whole unseemly spectacle raises at least two large questions. One, why are American colleges and universities such hotbeds of virulent antisemitism? A corollary to that question is why the antisemitism is more pronounced and reflexive the more elite is the institution? Right on cue, Yale was on board announcing its ‘solidarity’ with the Columbia protests, as were other tony institutions.”
On April 11 1966, Glen Campbell was drafted in as a last minute rhythm guitarist for a recording session with Frank Sinatra. Unable to believe that he was in the presence of his idol, he spent much of his time at the studio on Sunset Boulevard, in Los Angeles, gazing worshipfully at the man laying down the vocal for Strangers In The Night. The attention did not go unnoticed. “Who,” Sinatra hissed, “is that f______ guitar player?”
By the time his anonymous sideman had become a superstar in his own right, just two years later, Old Blue Eyes might well have remarked that Glen Campbell’s talents as a singer, no less, were equal even to his own. Along with an impeccable knack for phrasing and interpretation, the then 30-something Arkansan’s sense of implacable mournfulness – a quality later described by his fourth wife, Kim, as “a special sense of longing that lived in the centre of [his] soul,” – lent gravitas to the most unlikely material. In his telling, even the impossibly camp Rhinestone Cowboy sounded oddly forlorn.
In 2024, this ghostly quality is real. The new album Glen Campbell Duets: Ghost On The Canvas Sessions sees a man who has been dead for knocking on eight years now joined by a bevy of notables on a spirited reimagining of his final studio album, Ghost On The Canvas, from 2011. With contributions from Dolly Parton, Eric Clapton, Carole King, Elton John and Daryl Hall (among others), the cast list is indeed stellar. Inevitably, though, Campbell’s own oak tree of a voice refuses to be cowed into anything approaching shared-billing.
Campbell’s music wasn’t really my favorite genre, but he was a brilliant guitarist and singer who made it all look so easy — while quietly fighting numerous demons inside him. Read the whole thing.
The U.S. is considering sending additional military advisers to the embassy in Kyiv, the latest show of American commitment to Ukraine as Russia appears to be gaining momentum in the two-year conflict.
The advisers would not be in a combat role, but rather would advise and support the Ukrainian government and military, according to Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder.
“Throughout this conflict, the DOD has reviewed and adjusted our presence in-country, as security conditions have evolved. Currently, we are considering sending several additional advisers to augment the Office of Defense Cooperation (ODC) at the Embassy,” Ryder said in a statement to POLITICO, noting that “personnel are subject to the same travel restrictions as all embassy employees.
The ODC “performs a variety of advisory and support missions (non-combat), and while it is staffed exclusively by DOD personnel, it is embedded within the U.S. Embassy, under Chief of Mission authority like the rest of the Embassy,” Ryder added.
What was most intriguing about the Harper’s piece was what was missing. At first, I thought I’d accidentally skipped over a section. But then I did a command-F and realized, no, I was right. There’s no mention, at all, of the pandemic. Or of Covid. Or of lockdowns. Or the resultant boom in streaming content as studios rushed to sate the desires of audiences stuck at home. Or the resultant theatrical crash as local and state governments kept theaters closed in New York and California, crushing the ability to distribute films domestically and putting the entire theatrical economic ecosystem at risk.
Audiences were already turning to streaming, for sure—note the rapid decline in DVD and Blu-ray sales in this post’s chart titled “U.S. Home Entertainment Market by Category” that begins in 2008, right around the same time Netflix introduced streaming—but the lockdowns undoubtedly hastened the process. Every studio decided at the same time they needed to build up a subscriber base NOW NOW NOW, and they were happy to pay handsomely to do it. How do we know they paid handsomely? Well, the screenwriters were putting up what appeared to be record-breaking numbers, as best as we can tell from WGA dues collected in 2023.
Speaking of the collapse of physical media, this is another key factor in the evolution of the business of Hollywood that gets short shrift in the feature. I don’t think you can fully understand the hard turn to IP and the reliance on foreign box office grosses in the form of big-budget spectacle without grappling with the collapse of DVD and home video alongside the increase in advertising costs that accompany every movie opening on 2,500 or more screens. It’s harder to recoup the cost of a mid-budget movie if you don’t have an extra eight figures of disc revenue coming in for every movie with Matt Damon in a courtroom on the cover. As much as it pains me to say this as a physical media die-hard, most folks are content not owning anything so long as they think they can stream it whenever they want. Customer behavior matters.
In 2010, James Cameron told the Washington Post that DVDs were bad for the Gaia and other living things, and needed to be eliminated (while simultaneously having multiple versions of Avatar coming out that same year on DVD):
It’s a consumer product like any consumer product. I think ultimately we’re going to bypass a physical medium and go directly to a download model and then it’s just bits moving in the system. And then the only impact to the environment is the power it takes to run the computers, run the devices. I think that we’re not there yet, but we’re moving that direction. Twentieth Century Fox has made a commitment to be carbon neutral by the end of 2010. Because of some of these practices that can’t be changed, the only way to do that is to buy carbon offsets. You know, which again, these are interim solutions. But at least it shows that there’s a consciousness that we have to be dealing with carbon pollution and sustainability.
Related: John Nolte: Refusal to Release Subscriber Numbers Means Netflix Likely Peaked. “Streaming is merit-based. We will only purchase your product if we like your product. Netflix has so far trounced the competition, but the days of Hollywood making money producing content no one watches are thankfully coming to an end. With cable TV, it was easy to raise revenue by raising prices. The customer had nowhere else to go. That’s not the case with streaming. Wall Street and Hollywood are looking at peak Netflix and gulping.”
Chief Iran deal promoter Ben Rhodes, in a video commenting on last weekend’s attack, emphasized Israel’s recent strike on IRGC personnel in Syria, claiming that Iran could have, in response, escalated even further via Hezbollah rockets from Lebanon. What played out last Saturday, he said, was not the “worst-case outcome.”
Noah Rothman and Jim Geraghty both reject the idea that Iran’s attack was somehow “designed to fail.” Rather, Noah writes, “its aim was to kill as many Israelis as possible.” In hindsight, the idea of America striking a lasting deal with Iran was always fanciful; in recent months, Iran-backed militias’ drone attacks on U.S. outposts in Jordan, Iraq, and Syria, Iran-backed Houthiattacks on Red Sea vessels, and now this have made that conclusion inescapable.
To the contrary, as the Wall Street Journal reported, long-running outreach to Israel’s other Middle Eastern neighbors helped to minimize the damage from what could have been an overwhelming assault by Iran. Per the Journal’s timeline, this included efforts to build an air-defense system dating back decades, which at last gained steam following the Trump-era Abraham Accords between Israel and the UAE/Bahrain. Then, under Biden, “the Pentagon shifted Israel from its European Command to Central Command, which includes the rest of the Middle East, a move that enabled greater military cooperation with Arab governments under U.S. auspices.” The top U.S. commander in the region at the time reportedly convened a meeting of Israeli and Arab military officials “to explore how they could coordinate against Iran’s growing missile and drone capabilities.”
Fast-forward two years, and with Iran vowing to respond to the strike in Syria, the U.S. was able to put a plan into action, coaxing the UAE and even Saudi Arabia to share intel, according to the WSJ, while Jordan allowed the U.S. and others to use its airspace. The result was an incredible success, and demonstrated unmistakably which Middle Eastern governments are willing to partner with the West — and which one never will.
Noah, without getting his hopes up, writes that Biden should push to restore conventional-arms embargoes at the U.N. level, apart from unilateral sanctions imposed when they expired and now being expanded. Doing so would force a confrontation with Iran’s enablers there, communicate that the White House takes the threat from Tehran seriously, and reflect a stark reality: “The JCPOA is dead and gone.” Few mourn the loss.
The New York Times reported on Saturday that a high-tech missile hit a Russian-made S-300 air defense system at Shikari, citing two Iranian officials. Western officials told the newspaper that the strike was intended to show Tehran that Israel could break through Iran’s defense systems undetected and paralyze them.
According to the Times report, the missile was from a warplane fired “far from Israeli or Iranian airspace” and did not enter Jordanian airspace so as to not to involve Amman after it assisted in shooting down hundreds of Iranian aerial threats launched at Israel last weekend.
An Israeli official told The Washington Post that the assault “was intended to signal to Iran that Israel had the ability to strike inside the country.”
Undoubtedly the best moment in the testimony of Minouche Shafik, the President Columbia University, before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce last week was elicited by Representative Jim Banks. Why, he wanted to know, was the word “folks” spelled “folx” throughout an official guidebook for the School of Social Work?
Shafik coyly suggested that perhaps the authors did not know how to spell, which might well be the case. But you cannot watch her squirming response without feeling the hot, sticky, and slightly nauseating air of disingenuousness wash over the proceeding.
“Folx,” as Shafik must be aware, is just the latest instance of weaponized orthography disseminated by the academic left. Think “Latinx” and you are on the right track. “Folx” is the certified preferred term for the LGBTQWERTY+ “community,” something Shafik, the leader of an Ivy League outpost of “wokeness,” must surely know.
And she very, very likely does:
The page has since been deleted, but here's an archive from December 2023 from @Columbia University:
But when in doubt, deploy a little academic taqiyya to keep the red state represenatives guessing:
They implement this insane made up language and terminology because they just think like "latinx" it will be widely accepted, and then when people notice it, they claim stupidity and feign ignorance about it. https://t.co/oVNyhy9npQ
At this point, I’d be adding the usual “update Newspeak Dictionaries accordingly” line, but our betters in Silicon Valley are already on the case: I just noticed that my spellchecker in both Outlook and Word doesn’t redline “folx,” so at some point, it became an approved word at Microsoft. (But oddly, at least for the moment, not on my devices built by those reactionary neanderthals at Apple. I assume that will be fine-tuned in the next iOS update, if not sooner.)
This is the perfect time for a documentary honoring Dan Rather. Really.
We’re watching the collapse of NPR as a trusted news source in real time thanks to Uri Berliner’s withering expose on the far-Left platform. Most mainstream journalists are covering up the fact that the U.S. President is in obvious mental decline.
Media outlets have yet to account for promoting the Russian Collusion hoax, one of many Fake News stories that eroded trust in the Fourth Estate.
Reporters now all but cheer on free speech repression, burying scandals like The Twitter Files.
What better moment to honor an anchor who still won’t cop to getting a massive story wrong?
The Washington Examiner, citing an internal CBS investigation into the scandal, sums up Rather’s work:
“an attempt by a prominent organ of the mainstream media to influence the outcome of a presidential election with a false and fraudulent story just two months before Election Day.”
Today, Rather might be given a promotion.
We’re still waiting for a single media outlet to apologize for burying the Hunter Biden laptop story. In the 2000s, the media was both left-leaning and willing to criticize itself.
In an era where the DNC-MSM have fixated on their hatred of Bad Orange Man and their supporters as the cause of everything wrong in America, it’s difficult to see anyone in the guild attack their own in 2024.
According to sources, local English major Charlie Miller was able to ace her final exam by simply writing in the word “racism!” for every answer.
“Yeah, I completely forgot to study last night so I figured I would try it,” she said. “90% of my lectures this year were just hour-long sessions of my professor saying ‘racism’ over and over again in different inflections, so I figured my chances were pretty good if I made that the answer to all the test questions.”
The Skidmore College English professor who delivered the passing grade explained her rationale. “Charlie’s test answers weren’t technically correct, but they spoke to a deeper truth: everything is racist. At Skidmore College, creating leftist radicals who can find racism everywhere and help us burn down Western Civilization is much more important than educating people. For that reason, we decided to give her a passing grade!”
Somebody’s on her way to becoming the next CEO of NPR! (Or Google, the New York Times, MSNBC, etc.)
I know a little about Second Civil War fiction since I’ve written a best-selling series of novels about it. And you know what I focused on? How America gets into a Second Civil War and what happens when it does. How do things change? What expectations are upended? How would things work out in that situation? That’s what’s interesting about the concept. That’s what we want to know. And frankly, that’s what teaches us what to avoid so we never get into that situation again no matter how much the Democrats try to provoke Round Two.
But this movie ignores the civil war stuff and is all about journalists on a road trip. Despite the fact that most journalists today are loathsome communists, that’s not necessarily a bad way to show us around the Second Civil War. You could get lots of perspectives, and you can see and learn what happens and why through reporter characters. But the only perspectives we get are about the reporters themselves, and they’re annoying people – which is at least a taste of realism. But they never talk about the war itself. There’s no context to all the mayhem.
Remember, it’s the world-building that’s interesting to us, not these characters. I don’t care about the characters. You have a jaded war correspondent. And another jaded war correspondent. And a third jaded war correspondent. And a fourth war correspondent who’s young and isn’t quite jaded yet but who gets jaded at the end. That’s not interesting, and that’s not what I’m trying to buy when I throw down nearly 20 bucks for a ticket to a movie called “Civil War.”
Look, the actors are competent. They’re just playing boring people. And the movie is boring. That’s the crime. The lesson Andrew Breitbart always taught about political movies is to be good first. Be interesting. Make a good movie. Then you can get your message across. He didn’t object to the idea of a left-wing viewpoint. “JFK” is a left-wing movie with an idiotic message, but it was interesting. I couldn’t take my eyes off it, even though it was unbelievably stupid. I barely kept my eyes open here.
Alex Garland is not an untalented filmmaker. The Englishman has made a few vaguely interesting movies. The problem is he shoots this one like a movie-of-the-week. It is very workmanlike. What he wants to do is set up really interesting shots like helicopters flying around the Washington monument. That’s a pretty cool image. A gun battle at the White House? Yeah, that’s an interesting concept. But not the way he does it. You can see this was not a big-budget movie. All the battles have like 10 people.
America has collapsed. When you leave New York to drive to Washington on a circuitous route that takes you through Pittsburgh, everything is empty but there are a lot of cars burned out on the highways—a completely familiar trope by now, and understandable as a directorial choice since showing millions of corpses would be expensive.
Instead, it appears the entire Eastern seaboard has been depopulated, which would be quite the feat. We follow our crew of journalists as they wend their way south. They pass a gas station where gun-toting yahoos have strung up a couple of people they hated in high school for being looters. Later, they end up in a shootout in an office park and then in some kind of refugee camp in a high-school football stadium where people are warming their hands over a garbage-can fire and smile at each other pacifically. Then they’re in the middle of a gun battle between two warring forces. Who are they? We don’t know.
The movie seared the conscience of Manohla Dargis of the New York Times and made her profoundly uncomfortable. You’d think a movie critic who’s seen horror movies and war movies for decades wouldn’t be so seared and uncomfortable. I think she’s seared and uncomfortable because she wanted to be—wanted to find this depiction of an America literally at war a ripped-from-the-headlines unnerving thing. It’s fine, I guess, but rest assured (spoilers follow here) the only reason the movie exists is that, in the final moments, we see the Donald Trump stand-in pumped full of bullets.
That scene alone will so thrill Molly Jong-Fast that she might even dye her hair a normal color. You can stay home and watch a Walking Dead rerun.
Anyway, I promised to spoil the entire plot, so here it is…
First off, why are only two states fighting to remove President GreatHairRedTie after he basically declared himself dictator with an unelected third term? This makes zero sense, including historical sense. People from all over the country would form battalions and join a side. Then, we learn that the remaining 48 states broke apart into the Florida Alliance, the New People’s Army, and the Loyalist States. Okay, but what are they doing?
There are over two dozen Loyalist States, so why does it look like only 11 people are protecting the president at the White House?
There are over two dozen Loyalist States on the president’s side and only two states in the Western Forces against the president. Why is the president losing?
Why did that guy admit to the redneck he was from Hong Kong? Darwin demanded that the idiot get shot.
What happened to the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force?
Why doesn’t the president use low-level nukes to wipe out the Western Forces?
Why is there no air war or no one in command of the air?
Why is President GreatHairRedTie sitting in the Oval Office waiting to be killed instead of hiding deep in a bunker with the nuclear codes?
Finally, the Critical Drinker notes that Civil War is “a movie that says nothing, does nothing and ultimately accomplishes nothing. It’s a film so deathly afraid of sparking controversy and division that it remains neutral to the point of neutering itself.” Yet another reminder that the film isn’t the second coming of Dr. Strangelove, The Manchurian Candidate or the aforementioned JFK, each full of leftist agitprop, that are all simultaneously extremely controversial — and great movies.
UPDATE: Christian Toto: Civil War – Raw, Original and Utterly Pointless. “[Nick] Offerman’s President isn’t a certain real estate mogul. In fact, he’s barely on screen. That’s another massive mistake, especially given how the story’s third act makes him such a monumental figure. Plus, casting Ron Swanson as a fascist leader is such a juicy idea why not follow through with it? Make no mistake. He’s the film’s villain. So why can’t we get to know him, at least a little?”
On Tuesday, pro-Palestinian protesters occupied offices in New York, California, and Washington demanding that Google cancel Project Nimbus, a joint contract with Amazon that provides cloud-computing and artificial-intelligence services to the Israeli government and military. Notably, one of the occupied offices belonged to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian; his office is based in Sunnyvale, Calif. Police arrested nine protesters across the country after the coordinated sit-in lasted ten hours.
It was unclear if the nine detained demonstrators were among those who were fired.
“Behavior like this has no place in our workplace and we will not tolerate it. It clearly violates multiple policies that all employees must adhere to – including our Code of Conduct and Policy on Harassment, Discrimination, Retaliation, Standards of Conduct, and Workplace Concerns,” Rackow said.
The companywide memo adds that Google “takes this extremely seriously” and will continue enforcing its “longstanding policies to take action against disruptive behavior – up to and including termination.”
Tuesday’s protests were organized by a group of tech workers known as No Tech for Apartheid, which boasts over 200 members. Though it has protested against Project Nimbus since the contract was announced three years ago, the group’s criticisms of the Google-Amazon contract with Israel have ratcheted up since October 7.
Yesterday, we told you about Google employees who were forcibly removed from Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s office after staging a ‘protest’ demanding the company end business with Israel.
One of those employees had an interesting take on Israeli women who said they were raped by the terrorists (and the many witnesses who said the same):
Exit question: “If I decided to protest any cause by occupying my employer’s office, I would be fired. Most employers would do the same. How is this remotely close to ‘McCarthyism?'”
UPDATE:
tfw you suddenly realize you were only a useless expendable luxury hire for a made-up department of a company that had so much money it didn't know what to do with it https://t.co/QepU926QUk
Outraged Papua New Guinea academics have slammed President Joe Biden for his ‘unacceptable’ suggestion that his uncle was eaten by cannibals in the country after his plane was shot down during World War II.
Biden implied on two occasions Wednesday that his maternal uncle 2nd Lieutenant Ambrose J. Finnegan had met a grisly end at the hands of cannibals after his plane was shot down by the enemy over New Guinea in 1944.
But the White House and official defense records confirmed that Finnegan died when the military plane he was in experienced engine failure and crashed into the Pacific Ocean, not over land.
Historically, cannibalism has been reported Papua New Guinea, the Pacific nation that occupies the eastern half of the island of New Guinea, but local academics say Biden’s categorization of the act is ‘very offensive’.
Michael Kabuni, a political science lecturer at the University of Papua New Guinea, told The Guardian cannibalism was previously practiced by some communities in very specific contexts and that locals ‘wouldn’t just eat any white men that fell from the sky’.
An unsettling video shows a group of people carelessly ripping bear cubs out of a tree to snap some selfies in North Carolina.
The group of about six people was caught on video Tuesday pulling three scared black bear cubs out of a tree over a fence at a Buncombe County apartment complex, ABC 13 News reported.
During the video, several of the individuals were seen posing with the cubs, with one person even dropping one while holding it.
Another cub was seen frantically running away from the group, trying to get back over the fence.
Police were called and enlisted the help of North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission special projects biologist Ashley Hobbs.
Hobbs said she saw the video of the three cubs, but only one remained when she got on the scene.
“We did follow up with the people who pulled the bear out of the tree,” Hobbs told the outlet.
“We did confront them on site that day and let them know how irresponsible and potentially deadly it could be for that cub to be separated from its mom, especially ripped out of a tree like that.
This is what happens when you didn’t grow up reading the Far Side:
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