OPEN THREAD: Happy Saturday.
Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds
November 25, 2023
ARNOLD KLING: Is The Overton Window Moving to the Right?
Recently, Tablet published a symposium called What Now? It was an opportunity for Jews to offer opinions that they probably would not have articulated prior to the October 7 Hamas pogrom. Titles of the essays include:
End DEI
Replace American Communal Jewish Leadership
Get a Gun
Deport Violent Radicals
What has shocked Jews much more than the atrocities of Hamas are the atrocities committed by Progressives. It turns out that Progressives support a Palestinian cause that seeks not peace and dignity for all but to drive Jews out of the Middle East completely. Progressives say that the “context” justifies rape, murder and kidnapping of innocent people. Under the doctrine of intersectionality, Progressives manage to link support for Islamic theocrats to LGBTQ rights.
The Overton Window has clearly moved for many American Jews. The Ivy League is now disgraced. Imagine if on college campuses there were students marching around in Ku Klux Klan hoods shouting racist slogans. And imagine they were doing this right after the death of George Floyd. That is what the pro-Hamas demonstrations feel like to Jewish students.
After George Floyd was killed, we had riots everywhere, which were widely defended by all the best people, and only one reaction was even tolerated in most of the public sphere. But when a Jewish pro-Israel marcher was murdered by a pro-Palestinian professor, it barely made a ripple in the national conversation.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Ariane 6 completes long-duration static-fire test.
Related: Ariane 6 Passes Last Full-Duration Rehearsal Before Inaugural Flight.
Also: Ariane 6 cost and delays bring European launch industry to a breaking point. “In the decade since this agreement was reached, there have been at least three factors that have precipitated a crisis in European launch. One is the rise of SpaceX, which, through its reusable Falcon 9 rocket, has come to dominate the commercial market with prices about half those offered by the Ariane rockets. Because it has optimized for speed, SpaceX can also launch far more frequently and efficiently than Europe.”
The Europeans have a development cycle measured in decades. SpaceX has one measured in months-to-years.
AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Recurring Supereruption Discovered Near Italy Could Blow Again.
#JOURNALISM:
Online rumors claimed the perpetrator of a stabbing attack was an immigrant. The BBC found that the man was an Irish citizen who had lived in the country for 20 years. Police blamed a “lunatic faction driven by a far-right ideology” for the riot in Dublin. https://t.co/cMrCCOKNGQ
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) November 25, 2023
He’s not an “immigrant.” He’s just someone who . . . immigrated 20 years ago.
UPDATE: Bill Quick in the comments: “Can’t imagine why the Regime Media hates X so much.”
Related: Diversity Stabbing of the Day.
ANOTHER UPDATE: From the comments:
They are going to kill Elon Musk. They HAVE TO.
They can’t exist if he does.
They are going to MURDER him.
He’s a smart guy. I assume he’s taken precautions.
GOVERNMENT HEALTH CARE: “Troubling” – England’s Silent Scandal of Missing Lung Tests.
SO YOU’RE SAYING THAT THE ANTINUCLEAR MOVEMENT KILLED MILLIONS OF PEOPLE? Pollution from coal power plants contributes to far more deaths than scientists realized, study shows.
BASIC MALFUNCTION CLEARING DRILL: Learn the Tap, Rack, Bang. “There are a lot of brand new gun owners out there who haven’t had much time with their new pistols. Maybe they haven’t even thought about the possibility of a malfunction, but they need to. No one wants to rely on a handgun to protect themselves or their family and have it fail to go bang. That can ruin your whole day.”
It’s a behavior, not a disease. And it might just be looked at as evolution in action. Meanwhile maybe focus more on actual infectious diseases? You “public health” folks don’t seem very good at dealing with those.
UM: Dear Annie: Our son-in-law pigs out at family dinners, and we’re disgusted by it.
Dear Annie: My 40-year-old son-in-law has horrible manners. At dinner, if we have a buffet set up with six pieces of chicken, and there are six people eating, he will grab four pieces.
Six pieces of chicken isn’t a buffet, for most Americans it’s a Snack Pack. A buffet should have enough food to feed everyone, with a comfortable surplus. One piece of chicken per person doesn’t count, at least not in America. Maybe in Bangladesh, or post-Green Sri Lanka. What is wrong with you people?
SCIENCE: Trial results support ‘new gold standard’ for head and neck cancer radiotherapy.
Have you noticed how “gold standard” always means “indisputably the best approach,” until you start talking about, you know, the actual gold standard?
THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA awards $2.3 million to study growing food in lunar dust.
MEANWHILE THEY’RE TRYING TO FIRE AMY WAX FOR INSENSITIVITY: Will the med school prof who helped remove posters of kidnapped Israelis be held to UPenn’s nondiscrimination policy? “Canary Mission shared footage of UPenn Assistant Professor Mohammed Alghamdi wielding scissors as students took down images of Israelis who have been kidnapped by Hamas terrorists. Alghamdi is still listed as a professor on the university web page.”
ANTISEMITISM RUNS RAMPANT IN BLUE STATES: Jewish teacher hides in Queens high school as ‘radicalized’ students riot: ‘They want her fired.’
Hundreds of “radicalized” kids rampaged through the halls of a Queens high school this week for nearly two hours after they discovered a teacher had attended a pro-Israel rally — forcing the terrified educator to hide in a locked office as the teen mob tried to push its way into her classroom, The Post has learned.
The mayhem at Hillcrest High School in Jamaica unfolded shortly after 11 a.m. Monday in what students called a pre-planned protest over the teacher’s Facebook profile photo showing her at a pro-Israel rally on Queens Oct. 9 holding a poster saying, “I stand with Israel.”
“The teacher was seen holding a sign of Israel, like supporting it,” a senior told The Post this week.
“A bunch of kids decided to make a group chat, expose her, talk about it, and then talk about starting a riot.”
Hundreds of kids flooded into hallways and ran amok, chanting, jumping, shouting, and waving Palestinian flags or banners.
Who are these kids, and who taught them that this was okay? And will they be appropriately punished for what amounts to an attempted lynching?
Related: In red America, standing up for Israel isn’t controversial.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Voters See American Dream Slipping Out of Reach, WSJ/NORC Poll Shows: Fewer believe that anyone who works hard can get ahead.
he American dream—the proposition that anyone who works hard can get ahead, regardless of their background—has slipped out of reach in the minds of many Americans.
Only 36% of voters in a new Wall Street Journal/NORC survey said the American dream still holds true, substantially fewer than the 53% who said so in 2012 and 48% in 2016 in similar surveys of adults by another pollster. When a Wall Street Journal poll last year asked whether people who work hard were likely to get ahead in this country, some 68% said yes—nearly twice the share as in the new poll.
The survey offers the latest evidence that Americans across the political spectrum are feeling economically fragile and uncertain that the ladder to higher living standards remains sturdy, even amid many signs of economic and social progress.
Half of voters in the new poll said that life in America is worse than it was 50 years ago, compared with 30% who said it had gotten better. Asked if they believed that the economic and political system are “stacked against people like me,” half agreed with the statement, while 39% disagreed.
It’s only taken three years of Bidenomics to get this far. Where will we be if he gets four more years?
DEMOCRATS ARE RETURNING TO THEIR SEGREGATIONIST ROOTS: Liberals Once Embraced Interracial Marriages Like Mine. What Changed? My wife is black. I’m white. When we got married in 2007, progressives cheered. Today, they wonder if I’m up to parenting my own kids.
Also, leftists are basically morons.
HE’S RIGHT OF COURSE: Joel Kotkin: The West cannot accept Gazan refugees. Unconstrained mass migration from dangerous regions would be disastrous for America.
The stunning victory of anti-Muslim Dutch politician Geert Wilders suggests that the nation of a proposed “Muslim ban”, temping down on immigration from Islamic countries, is no longer outside the realm of political discussion. This movement can only gain steam given the sometimes openly anti-Semitic protests by Muslims in support of the Hamas pogrom.
President Donald Trump’s crude tactic of using immigration policy to stop the migration of anti-American terrorists and their supporters into the United States has already established a precedent of sorts. Trump’s initial executive order included seven predominately Muslim nations – Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen – and later was expanded in 2020 to include Venezuela and others.
Trump’s ban was quickly dismissed by President Biden, but the drive against increasingly uncontrolled immigration is clearly gaining popular support, particularly in Europe. Left-of-center politicians like Biden are clueless about the political evolution taking place throughout the West. Rather than looking for ways to impose greater scrutiny over immigrations. Biden’s only discussion of a ban has been aimed at sometimes violent nationalist Israeli settlers: looking at what is happening on campuses and the streets, [that’s] hardly the biggest threat.
There are economic ramifications, of course, such as the cost of housing and caring for poor refugees forcing some cities, like New York, as well the UK to look for ways to send them elsewhere. But culture also plays a role. This has been made painfully clear during recent mass pro-Hamas demonstrations on college campuses, and on the streets of London, New York, and Paris. These protests were driven largely by Middle Eastern immigrants and students from the Middle East whose hatred of Israel and Jews in general has been incubated by universities.
Universities may need more tuition to pay their exploding bureaucracies but sovereign nations still have a choice on who to allow to reside or emigrate. We would be loath, rightfully, to allow white racists from South Africa, neo-Nazis, or operatives of North Korea into our countries.
Ireland witnessed its worst civil disorder in decades after rioters marauded through Dublin city center looting shops and setting buses and police cars on fire in a spate of violence that appeared to be triggered by a stabbing attack that injured three children.
Irish police said Friday that 13 shops were damaged and 34 people arrested following the riots, which followed the attack by an unidentified man outside a school on Thursday afternoon. Garda Commissioner Drew Harris said on Friday that he had not seen such levels of violence “for decades.” He added that it had been caused by a “lunatic, hooligan faction driven by far-right ideology.”
The police are still investigating the stabbing outside a school that left a five-year-old girl in critical condition. Two other children and two adults were also harmed. A man in his 50s was taken into custody, the Irish police said, declining to comment on his nationality or his motive.
Fiery but mostly peaceful anti-immigrant protests. Expect more.
November 24, 2023
OPEN THREAD: Enjoy.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: China’s Landspace aims to build a stainless steel rocket. “The Zhuque-3 (Vermillion Bird 3) will use stainless propellant tanks and clusters of Tianque methane-liquid oxygen propellant rocket engines, according to a presentation by Landspace CEO Zhang Changwu at the Mingyue Lake Aerospace Information Industry International Ecosystem Event in Chongqing, China, Nov. 21. The two-stage launcher will have a payload capacity of 20 metric tons to low Earth orbit (LEO) when expendable. Recovery of the first stage downrange will allow 16.5 tons to LEO, while a landing back at the launch site will offer a capacity of 11 tons to LEO. A render of the rocket shows grid fins and deployable landing legs on the first stage.”
This all sounds . . . familiar somehow.