DON SURBER ON THE IMPACT OF HAMAS: The October 7 atrocities have the American press playing it straight. Sorta. Which is huge.
Plus: “The media is working overtime to cover up for Biden, who repeatedly has sided with Palestinian terrorists in his half-century in DC. He is the man who financed this horrific terrorism — gunmanism as the Beeb would say — by giving Iran $6 billion for five hostages.”
DUE TO OPEN BORDERS, A LOT: How many terrorists are already in the US?
WHEN STEVEN WALT QUOTES AUDEN, IT’S A LOW, DISHONEST REFERENCE.
“As early as 1944 he had abandoned the stanza…that ended, ‘We must love one another or die.’ This line was more widely quoted and admired than perhaps anything else in his work…and in 1957 he told a fellow poet, ‘Between you and me, I loathe that poem.’”
He began to refuse to allow it to be anthologized, and when a friend of his complained he was making his most memorable poem invisible in this way, Auden responded, “if, by memorability, you mean a poem like September 1, 1939, I pray to God that I shall never be memorable again.”
The moral relativism that suffused Auden’s poem and reaction to the invasion of Poland is perfectly and precisely mirrored today by people like Stephen Walt, who quote words Auden himself came to view with contempt and shame.
Just as the nations that imposed the Versailles treaty on Germany were not doing it evil—after all, Germany had set in motion the events that effectively destroyed pre-WW1 Europe and led to the deaths of 20 million people for which it was rightfully being forced to pay reparations—so too Israel has done no “evil” to Hamas. It disengaged from Gaza in 2005 and thus made it possible for Hamas to take operational control of the area after an election in 2007. Every conflict between Israel and Hamas in the 16 years since has been the result of an aggressive and unprovoked attack on Hamas’s part. Then came this past week.
Stephen Walt’s repellent relativism is a perfect reflection of the bizarre hunger on the part of those unwilling to face the true meaning of Hamas’s attack.
So much that passes for intellectualism today is simply built around remembering something you learned as a freshman in college, out of context.
SOONER OR LATER IT ALWAYS DOES: Arnold Kling: When Social Justice Equals Genocide: It’s time to understand the dangers of radical ideology. “The conduct by Hamas on October 7 was shocking, but it was a shock that could be contained. It is more difficult to process the way that some groups praised Hamas and its barbarity. Nobody in the West praised 9/11.” No but some of them bit their lips pretty hard.
Plus: “It was as if a social justice organization were taken on a tour of Auschwitz and came away waving swastikas.” To be fair, the National Socialists saw themselves as working for social justice.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: M.B.A. Job Offers in Short Supply as Tech, Finance, Consulting Dial Back Recruiting.
Companies are dialing back or delaying hiring of M.B.A.s this fall, a sharp turn from the supercharged recruiting seasons of years past.
Career officers and students at Yale University, Columbia University and Northwestern University say businesses are spending less time on campus than in recent years to hire second-year M.B.A. candidates, or holding off on job offers. That has students thinking about their Plan B if top-tier companies aren’t making offers. EY, Amazon and Boston Consulting Group are rethinking hiring strategy, or saying they will make moves when next year’s business picture becomes clearer, the companies and campus officials say.
Any drop-off in corporate demand for M.B.A.s is startling for students who applied to graduate school in 2021 and 2022 during a white-collar hiring spree with swelling salaries to match. Since then, the three main sectors that hire M.B.A.s at top schools have hit turbulence. Tech giants made big job cuts, consulting firms put start dates on hold and deal making slowed in finance.
During the fall, M.B.A. candidates normally lock in jobs for postgraduation the following spring, but that is happening less this year, students and career-guidance offices say. Schools are encouraging students to be patient and have a Plan B in mind.
“Things have changed on a dime,” said Aakash Patel, a second-year M.B.A. candidate at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.
Patel, 29, said many of his classmates are looking for jobs after their summer internships didn’t result in full-time offers, as is common. In some cases, companies said their performance was good, but the economic climate wasn’t, according to Patel.
Companies in tech, finance and consulting, which recruit 70% or more of some top business schools’ newly minted grads, according to schools’ employment reports, are slow-walking hiring or limiting candidates they are willing to consider.
EY, a major recruiter of M.B.A.s, is scaling back recruiting in consulting because the firm doesn’t anticipate the economy will significantly bounce back by next year when these graduates would start, said Errol Gardner, EY’s global vice chair for consulting.
But all the best people tell me that Bidenomics is working.
FOLLOW THE SCIENCE! The FDA Is Hiding the Ball on COVID Vax Study. “The FDA still lists the studies they required as ‘ongoing,’ but when asked the FDA admits that they have the results in hand. They just won’t let anybody see them. . . . We can all be pretty certain that if the results were “Hey, no problem, everything is cool with the vax,” we would have seen the results immediately. This is pretty good evidence that the results are something that looks quite a bit different, although I admit this is only speculation. But it is speculation based on years of experience being gaslit by our public health establishment. They seem allergic to telling us the truth.”
In general, if they aren’t telling you stuff, it’s not because the stuff would make them look good.
THE ENEMY WITHIN: Minnesota AG Keith Ellison’s Chief of Staff Promotes Pro-Hamas Rally.
DAN MCLAUGHLIN: Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Moral Rot of Anti-Zionism: The widely praised writer signs his name to propaganda for the massacre of innocents. “What it says is that anti-Zionism has utterly rotted Coates’s capacity for moral judgment or human empathy.”
To be fair, he was always pretty much a sham.
YOUR “MARTYRS” ARE PUTZES AND YOU’RE NOT SO HOT YOURSELF: ‘How Dare You Slander the Names of Our Martyrs’: Inside a George Washington Professor’s Pro-Hamas Tirade.
Related: Rasmussen: America Agrees: Eradicate Hamas.
UPDATE: New Poll: American Support for Israel Soars After Hamas Slaughter.
THE ROT IN HIGHER EDUCATION: ASU President Defends Lefty Professor Who Assaulted TPUSA Journo, Ignores pro-Hamas Agitators on Campus.
WOKE ANTISEMITISM: A RECKONING. In their rationalizations of violence against Jews and Israelis, they’ve outed themselves as the extremists they are.
JOURNALISM: “In 1922, The New York Times published its first article about Adolf Hitler. The reporter, Cyril Brown, was aware of his subject’s anti-Jewish animus but he wasn’t buying it. ‘Several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded,’ Brown wrote, ‘and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers.’ Two years later, the Times published another news item on the future architect of the Holocaust: ‘Hitler Tamed by Prison.’ The Austrian activist, the piece said, ‘looked a much sadder and wiser man,’ and ‘his behavior during his imprisonment convinced the authorities that [he] was no longer to be feared.’ Many got Hamas wrong. But they shouldn’t have. Again and again, people say they intend to murder Jews. And yet, century after century, the world produces new, tortuous justifications for why anti-Jewish bigots don’t really mean what they say—even though they do.”
WAR, AND RUMORS OF WAR: 2,000 US troops on notice to deploy as Israel-Hamas war intensifies.
WHAT DO YOU DO when your medical provider wants you dead?
NYC – Dr. Dana Diab is an ER physician at Lenox Hill (@lenoxhill).
Dina Diab took to Instagram rejoicing Zionist settlers [aka jews] were murdered, raped, beheaded, and kidnapped by the Hamas terror group on Saturday October 7th.
Jewish patients beware. pic.twitter.com/uS71Qz5oJh
— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) October 16, 2023
IRANIAN OPERATIVES IN LONDON NEED TO START DISAPPEARING: Iran accused of threatening ‘terrified’ BBC staff in London.
The Guardian has been told that journalists at the BBC’s Persian language news outlet are being targeted with offensive messages and threats of sexual assault, with reports of family members based in Iran being arbitrarily detained.
In one message, an Iranian-British journalist working for the BBC says she was told: “On Westminster Bridge is a very deep river. It doesn’t matter that you don’t live in Iran – we can also do whatever we want in London.”
The proper response of a civilized government to threats like this is Al Capone-like.
YEAH, THAT’LL HELP. Biden to Visit Israel Amid Gaza Crisis, as Fears Grow of Wider War.
OPEN THREAD: Roll with it.
THIS WON’T HELP ANYTHING:
The secretary says that the US is aware that Hamas may try and seize or destroy such aid once it enters Gaza but asserts that the US will condemn such actions if they happen and work to prevent them in the future. (3/4)
— Jacob Magid (@JacobMagid) October 17, 2023
SPACE: NASA’s Psyche Mission Proves Awesomeness Still Exists in a Horrible World. “Asteroid mining has so far been the stuff of science fiction, including the upcoming season of the Apple TV+ series For All Mankind, which will depict a different, accelerated space race centered on asteroid mining. We’ll have to wait a while longer for science fiction to become reality in our timeline.”
WELL, SHE’S A NEW YORK STATE ASSEMBLYWOMAN.
NY: @JeniferRajkumar wants to background check every person who buys a 3d printer that's "capable of creating firearms". Who wants to tell her? https://t.co/FaLFbUoYdZ
— Aaron Slodov (@aphysicist) October 16, 2023
REMINDER: “In order to support Ukraine, the U.S. has expended its missile and artillery round stockpiles. The most optimistic estimates claim it will take six to eight months to replenish them. In order to support Israel, the U.S. has moved naval assets to the Indian Ocean and eastern Mediterranean. Does this expose the western Pacific to Chinese attack? In a U.S.-China war in the western Pacific, sea power will play the preeminent role. And right now, the U.S. Navy is short of warships. If a TV admiral says otherwise, he’s lying.”
AS LONG AS IT’S NOT ICE 9: Strange Form of Ice Found That Only Melts at Extremely Hot Temperatures.
NOW OUT FROM ANDREW WAREHAM: The Pinchbeck Peer: Book 7: A New Veneer.
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