P.M. Carpenter

Gaza redux

The NY Times:

"The Biden administration in recent days has pushed Israel to carry out a more surgical campaign in this next phase of the war, limiting the number of civilian deaths."

Righto. Good for the Biden administration.

"As part of that shift, Israel was considering restricting combat operations in specific areas of Gaza to protect civilians."

Seems reasonable. 

"But by Friday afternoon, Israeli warplanes ['had struck more than 50 locations in'] Khan Younis, the largest city in southern Gaza where hundreds of thousands of Gazans have sought shelter in recent weeks." Nearly 200 were killed.

So much for Israel's cooperation with its nearly lone benefactor.

Rewinding a bit, so-called "deconfliction" zones were understood to previously exist, as stipulated under international laws of war. Yet during the first phase of the war, in the north, Israel Defense Forces bombed the legally protected Jamalia refugee camp (60-100 killed) and two U.N.-run schools (more than 200 killed) where displaced Palestinians had sought shelter and safety.

The despairing futility of our bilateral relations is skulking in the opening quote, which reports that the Biden administration has been "pushing" Israel to modify its tactics. This administration — as any administration would — will ask, cajole and plead, but it will not threaten and carry out, whenever "push" justifiably comes to shove, the termination of the U.S.'s $3.3 billion a year in military aid.

Push should have morphed into emphatic shove years ago. The Biden administration, as have others, has begged Israel to cease its illegal West Bank settlements. Only to be snubbed. And therein lies the preemptive destruction of an equitable, permanent, postwar peace agreement, which Biden very much hopes to pursue.

He shouldn't bother. The U.S. will never suspend its military aid, and Israel knows it, so its leaders will always lack an incentive to seek a fair, two-state solution. The latter is the Holy Grail of this conflict, but Biden can't even effectively pressure Israel to stop with the massive civilian death counts in this latest of wars. Because the U.S. squandered its leverage long ago. And, to repeat, Israel knows it.

***

Nowhere to go for safety, even when told where safety reigns.

The telling: "Israel has been telling civilians to head to the area of Al-Mawasi ... or parts of Rafah." The result: "Yousef Hammash [a Norwegian Refugee Council aid worker] woke up in the southern Gaza city of Rafah on Friday to the booming sounds of explosions."

It's almost a sick kind of joke played on the innocently displaced. Palestinians specifically located in and around Khan Younis, which was just struck from the air, were being "directed" by the Israeli military "to evacuate further south, to Rafah," which was also under bombardment.

"Rafah is not safe at all," said 37-year-old Gheed al-Hessi, who moved there in October at the IDF's urging. “Since the very beginning of the war, many, many buildings and many families were hit." She added that the locals, both new and old, have only one question: "If the Israeli forces threaten us and ask us to evacuate and to leave Rafah, where are we going to go?"

Not to worry, Ms. al-Hessi. The IDF is sure to have some enticing travel tips for you, although the itinerary map may resemble a mousetrap. 

October fell short the blockbuster fundraising month I needed, but the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream of this site's financial security shall never die.

This message especially for long-time readers who have yet to click on the Make A Donation button in the sidebar: please do so, today. Thank you, —P.M.

A reading lesson for Mike

God's vicar, Mike Johnson, sometimes known as the speaker of the House but always known as a scientifically illiterate Christian fundamentalist who is now intent on cramming his learned ignorance into American law, is much in need of some emergency remedial reading. You know, something from the Enlightenment Age or later, in place of Mike's usual readings from the Middle Ages.

I have chosen something rather light, yet still profound, for him. We would not want to overtax his medieval mind right off, which would only frighten him and forever foreclose the admittedly slim possibility of his intellectual liberation from Elmer Gantryesque indoctrination. It's a poem, written and delivered in 1955 by the physics Nobel Prize winner and all-around genius Richard Feynman to the National Academy of Sciences. This work is Hawking-like, a brief history of evolution, ending with the stunningly beautiful line: I / a universe of atoms / an atom in the Universe.

There are the rushing waves
mountains of molecules
each stupidly minding its own business
trillions apart
yet forming white surf in unison

Ages on ages
before any eyes could see
year after year
thunderously pounding the shore as now.
For whom, for what?
On a dead planet
with no life to entertain.

Never at rest
tortured by energy
wasted prodigiously by the Sun
poured into space.
A mite makes the sea roar.

Deep in the sea
all molecules repeat
the patterns of one another
till complex new ones are formed.
They make others like themselves
and a new dance starts.
Growing in size and complexity
living things
masses of atoms
DNA, protein
dancing a pattern ever more intricate.

Out of the cradle
onto dry land
here it is
standing:
atoms with consciousness;
matter with curiosity.

Stands at the sea,
wonders at wondering: I
a universe of atoms
an atom in the Universe.

Since the Greek philosophers Democritus and Leucippus 2,400 years ago to today's reasonably educated schoolchildren we have known about "a universe of atoms" and that we humans are "atoms with consciousness." Darwin helped to explain the rest. If even schoolchildren are aware of reality — its combination of physics and evolutionary biology — is it not time for God's vicar, Mike Johnson, to awake from his slumber of fundamentalist dogmatism? Or at least to stop peddling it in his secondary, constitutionally secular job as House speaker? 

A ruling of inconvenience for Trump

Republicans may soon regret having successfully peddled the legal argument that a sitting president — say, Bill Clinton — can be sued while serving in office.

Unless ultimately overturned by this ultraconservative Supreme Court in the same hypocritical fashion with which its predecessor installed George W. Bush in the White House, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled today that "Donald Trump can be sued over claims that he incited violence on Jan. 6, 2021," reports Politico.

The list of potential plaintiffs with legal standing would be of considerable length, beginning with the families of five dead Capitol Policemen. Others injured would also have the right to sue the prime pusher of insurrectionism.

If reelected, Trump could be slammed with dozens of civil suits, each one of which could cost him millions of dollars. All told, the judgments could run into real money, i.e., even for a man who (just barely) rates as a billionaire.

Even better, an avalanche of justifiable legal vengeance might distract the already incompetent over-coifed buffoon from setting in motion the entirety of his multiplicitous designs for a virtual dictatorship.

But the plaintiffs might want to avoid, if at all possible, suing the scofflaw in a federal court. Because one of Trump's designs is his personal proprietorship of the U.S. Department of Justice, which would thwart every attempt at legal redress while also abolishing all departmental integrity.

A short item on prolonged stupidity

DealBook: "[Elon Musk is] making life more difficult for Linda Yaccarino, X’s C.E.O., as she attempts to revive the company’s embattled finances. (That said, in an internal memo on Thursday she praised Musk’s comments [at DealBook's summit this week] as 'candid and profound' and urged employees '​not be distracted by sideline critics who don’t understand our mission.')"

X is projected to lose about $75 million in ad revenue this year. Hence the critics "who don't understand" their mission would include everyone who grasps the rather uncomplicated concept that the mission of private enterprise is profit, not deficits.

That aside, Yaccarino's characterization of Musk's DealBook comments as "profound" is the very essence of corporate Newspeak. Only the seriously brainwashed and dictatorially oppressed would regard, on the basis of a doubleplusgood memo, that "Go fuck yourself. Go. Fuck. Yourself." is exemplary of profundity. (Unless one is employed by the Mafia or the closely related Trump campaign.)  

Ms. Yaccarino is reportedly paid $6 million annually to pump out ignorance-is-strength memos and flash come-hither looks to corporate advertisers. I could understand, then, her self-interested devotion to a contemptible pig like Elon Musk. Except for this: Ms. Yaccarino's net worth is also reported at $40 million.  

As Elon would undoubtedly put it, that's some real fuck-you money. Nevertheless, Linda hangs on. My only guess as to why is that she authentically believes that Elon is one profound guy. 

Was Antony Blinken bamboozled or complicit?

In the annals of cynical diplomacy, which have long dominated the profession at large, Israel's Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu has earned a special, possibly unique place of distinction. Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made him an offer he likely wouldn't refuse: to dissemble sheepishly while privately laughing. Sure enough, the p.m. shook Blinken's hand, grabbed the offer and ran with it.

The at-hand issue concerned not some throwaway dispute between Israel and the world, such as the many U.N. resolutions Netanyahu's government has illegally ignored for decades, but potentially the outbreak of a major Middle East war, sucking in Iran, Syria, Lebanon and the United States.

Blinken's proffered demand, which he described as "the toughest to date," was that Israel devise a "clear plan" for minimizing civilian deaths before the Israel Defense Forces resumed their assault on Gaza. According to The Washington Post, his demand "resulted in concrete assurances that they would change how their war is waged."

What The Post neglected — Blinken too, possibly — is that the concrete will never harden. Netanyahu will persist in pouring vats of Palestinian blood into the mixture to keep the body count flowing smoothly. He knew that, of course, as he shook Blinken's hand.   

The proof of Netanyahu's betrayal was immediate. The next morning, this morning, the temporary cease-fire between Israel and Hamas unraveled; both sides blaming the other for having violated its terms. "Moments after the deadline passed," reports The NY Times, "Israeli airstrikes soon thundered again across the battered coastal strip."

Also immediate was the Gaza Health Ministry's announcement that 109 Palestinians had been killed in the strikes, and hundreds wounded. The IDF simultaneously announced to the inhabitants of one southern city in Gaza — where fleeing refugees from the north had been advised by the IDF to go, for safety — to evacuate at once, close to the Egyptian border. For the Israeli military was declaring the entire city a war zone.

No word on how much time the freshly cloistered Palestinian refugees had before the city's annihilation commenced. The war's empirical evidence would suggest that a reasonable period was far from uppermost in the Israeli government's mind. Domestic pressure to resume the war forthwith had been building alongside pressure to allow more time for hostage exchanges. Jingoism won out.   

Either Blinken was blinkered when he and Bibi shook hands on the secretary's demand for minimizing civilian deaths or he was simply playing the diplomatic game of infinite cynicism while surrounded by tens of thousands of at-risk human lives. After all, when Henry Kissinger died this week, the sitting U.S. secretary of state noted approvingly that the recently departed had "really set the standard for everyone who followed in this job."

Still, the responsibility for honoring the American-Israeli agreement was Netanyahu. He never had any such intention, as he and his military forces swiftly demonstrated. And for that, he has earned an especially prominent place in the history of cynical diplomacy.

The TV viewing of Trump's favorite Europeans

Only The New Yorker would publish such a delightful piece as this, about "Slow TV," a phenomenon I was unfamiliar with.

Most art, even the naturalistic stuff, comes in espresso form: the complexities of human perception are picked when ripe, roasted to intensity, milled, tamped down, and infused into something that’s quickly consumed. It is surprising, then, to find a challenge to this ancient premise arriving in a novel entertainment form—suddenly everywhere—known as "slow TV."

The term is deceptive. Slow TV is slow compared only with normal broadcast timetables. It runs not at the warp speed of narrative drama but at the rate of actual experience. It is not scripted or heavily edited; it is more concerned with movement than with tension, contrast, or character....

The capital of slow TV is, at the moment, Norway.... Soon after [a 7.5-hour 'real-time recording of a train journey, from Bergen to Oslo, in 2009'], Norway’s public-service broadcaster, NRK, aired a twelve-hour program about firewood. It featured people chopping logs and then discussing how to stack it. That took four hours; the remaining eight of "National Firewood Night" depicted the logs burning in a fireplace. (Stephen Colbert: "It destroyed the other top Norwegian shows, like 'So You Think You Can Watch Paint Dry' and 'The Amazing Glacier Race.'") Yet slow TV has been bizarrely popular. Half of the Norwegian population reportedly tuned in to [one slow] show. The final episode of "Seinfeld," by comparison, got forty-one per cent of households in the U.S....

Slow TV [popular also in Sweden and Finland] seems slow in part because, unlike our standard experience of the world, it’s unshaped by interior consciousness. Instead of drowning out its viewers’ inner lives, it seems to want to be a backdrop that can give rise to their own reflections. A slow-TV program is like a great view you encounter on vacation: it’s always there, impervious, but it gains meaning and a story depending on what it conjures in your head.

Norway's slow TV has also featured a "twelve-hour real-time" knitting special and, for those who are really into slow, a "continuous five-day program on travel by boat" — the show that half of Norway watched.

I know what a twelve-hour show on knitting would conjure in my head: not a vision, but a paralytic sensation of numbness. No disrespect to Norwegians intended.

Anyway, I learned something of quirk about Norway, which inspired me to pass along this morsel of international peculiarity as well. Yesterday I learned that bamboo lemurs on the island of Madagascar consume enough cyanide in their daily eponymous staple to kill five human beings. Evolution made them immune to the poison's usual effect. The earliest stages of bamboo lemur evolution had to be pretty dicey, though.

The right wants just about everyone to "go fuck themselves"; even themselves

Elon Musk's dubious performance at the Dealbook summit yesterday was scarcely a one-0ff in the irascible world of neofascists, which is to say, those in the Republican Party and those who adore it.

Vice President Dick Cheney may have set the slangy trend when, in 2004, he told Democratic Sen. Pat Leahy — on the Senate floor, no less — to go "fuck yourself." This rather direct expression of disapproval — or some variation of it — has now become so common in the vicious Trumpian universe of politics that even mainstream newspapers often no longer bother to bowdlerize it.

The latest incident comes from not an unusual source of mercurial profanity, just one — in somewhat typical Republican fashion — who flips and flops on most everything with uncommon velocity and frequency. In short, whatever the moment calls for.

I write, as you may have guessed, about the aways quotable Kevin McCarthy. He's seemingly done with kidney-punching his partisan colleagues; he has moved on to bigger targets more deserving of a blow to some vital organ. Alas, his most recent experience with over-the-top, spur-of-the-moment emotion came on a bodily separated phone call. So a verbal assault was all he had. From The Washington Post:      

During a phone call with McCarthy weeks after his historic Oct. 3 removal as House speaker, Trump detailed the reasons he had declined to ask Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and other hard-right lawmakers to back off their campaign to oust the California Republican from his leadership position.

During the call, Trump lambasted McCarthy for not expunging his two impeachments and not endorsing him in the 2024 presidential campaign, according to people familiar with the conversation.

"F--- you," McCarthy claimed to have then told Trump, when he rehashed the call later to other people in two separate conversations, according to the people. A spokesperson for McCarthy said that he did not swear at the former president and that they have a good relationship. A spokesperson for Trump declined to comment.

Aside from the Post's unwarranted expurgation of a Merriam-Webster entry, there is, conspicuously, a problem with McCarthy's story (as with all his stories). He claimed to have said "Fuck you" to Trump, just as we might claim to others that brilliantly comical remark we made to a cop who ticketed us; a remark that, in actuality, came to us only five miles later.

This rather spoils the story. Nevertheless, in the retelling its spirit is there — the right's unending pursuit of reducing the beautifully kaleidoscopic English language to monosyllabic Trumpian bile. 

A half-day in the life of Truth Social

Yesterday afternoon, in a moment of feeling masochistically deprived, I dropped by Trump's online asylum, Truth Social. That should get me caught up with torturing myself, I figured. Boy was I right. I didn't read all of his midday posts — c'mon, man, I'm not suicidal — but enough to stumble across a harmoniously deranged triad of the laughable, the frightening, and the typically absurd, in that order.

I believe we heard this before: 

"Getting much better Healthcare than Obamacare for the American people will be a priority of the Trump Administration. It is not a matter of cost, it is a matter of HEALTH. America will have one of the best Healthcare Plans anywhere in the world. Right now it has one of the WORST!" 

Ask not what he means by "It is not a matter of cost, it is a matter of HEALTH." Neither he, I, nor anyone else could possibly explain it; good health is, in one way or another, unavoidably and almost entirely a matter of cost. It should go without saying that Trump would never actually get around to implementing or even trying to pass whatever he might have in mind healthcare-wise, which is nothing. He may be unaware, however, that "Obamacare" no longer carries a negative connotation. Last year, the Kaiser Family Foundation surveyed the public, carefully including the once-derided word. It asked, "In general, do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of the health reform bill signed into law in 2010, known commonly as the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare?" The result, as you can see, was 60-40 in favor of Obamacare. So as a general-election pitch, Trump might want to rethink his healthcare bullshit. 

Next I was greeted by Trump's unequivocally fascistic chief executive view of the Fourth Estate and U.S. Constitution:   

"MSNBC (MSDNC) uses FREE government approved airwaves [wrong, of course; it's cable or satellite], and yet it is nothing but a 24 hour hit job on Donald J. Trump and the Republican Party for purposes of ELECTION INTERFERENCE. Brian Roberts, its Chairman and CEO, is a slimeball who has been able to get away with these constant attacks for years.... Our so-called 'government' should come down hard on them and make them pay for their illegal political activity. Much more to come, watch!" 

You'll notice he doesn't say MSNBC lies, as do Fox News, Newsmax and OAN. And speaking of the media's "slimeballs" — real presidential verbiage, that — can anyone ever outdo the recently retired Rupert Murdoch in veritable slimeballsiness? Even he knew Trump is a threat to democracy and the rule of law, but the once and possibly future king was profitable, Rupert always reckoned, and Rupert's profits consistently outweighed such petty civic concerns. But above and threateningly beyond Trump's characteristic prattle about a biased news network is his promise to "come down hard" on "MSDNC" (so clever) — and by extension, any other outlet he finds offensive. When he writes "Watch!" he means the First Amendment should watch out.  

Finally: "Spoke with Mark Fisher yesterday, a great guy, very honored to have his and BLM’s support. I have done more for Black people than any other President (Lincoln?)."

Sorry, but Fisher's video remarks are so breathtakingly idiotic — as is Trump's self-comparison to Abraham Lincoln — they leave me speechless. (I will say, as reported by MTN.com, that Fisher "hasn't been a member of BLM Rhode Island for over a year." Just another Trump falsification: that he has "BLM's support.")

So there you have it; a brief tour of Trump's online asylum — the faintly preferable alternative to sticking pins in your eyes. Still, I have to admit, there one can find some of the entertainingly dumbest thoughts ever to traverse American politics; the vague and indescribable thrill that comes with being frightened half to death; and the fascinating theatre of the insanely absurd.       

Mr. K is no more

I can't say I have anything fresh to say about Henry Kissinger. Hosannas and obloquies will fill newspaper columns for 24-48 hours, and then he'll be forgotten by Americans just as most of our history is. So my having little to say is hardly a loss to future humanity.

I lean to the obloquy camp. Fresh or not, I will say that Kissinger tried to divorce human ethics from all human activity in the foreign affairs realm. He succeeded brilliantly. From orchestrating the cruel regime of Chili's Pinochet to assisting Nixon in his vastly dishonorable, mass-murdering ways in Vietnam and Cambodia, few have triumphed so amorally as Mr. Kissinger did.

Ben Rhodes, President Obama's deputy national security adviser, has written much the same now that Kissinger is no more. "[He] exemplified the gap between the story that America, the superpower, tells and the way that we can act in the world. At turns opportunistic and reactive, his was a foreign policy enamored with the exercise of power and drained of concern for the human beings left in its wake.... [Kissinger mistook] cynicism — or realism — with wisdom."

But, as with everything in life, it's complicated, which is why I qualify my sentiment as one of leaning to the critical camp. From Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy to cracking open China's closed doors there's no question that he accomplished some good, some of it worthy of emulation. SoS Antony Blinken said from Tel Aviv that Kissinger "really set the standard for everyone who followed in this job."

That could be read cynically, I suppose. 

Elon Musk is the world's most offensive jerk, and he just proved it, again

This, from the MeidasTouch Network:

"Today, in a public conversation with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times DealBook Summit, Twitter [I love that] CEO Elon Musk was asked about his thoughts about the many companies and brands that have stopped advertising on Twitter [love it again] following Musk's antisemitic comments on the platform recently. His response was simple: ..."

I refused to quote MTN's version of what Musk said. He did not say the boycotting firms "can go f-asterisk-ck themselves." And I apologize for running this video version, too — he also did not say they "can go [expletive deleted] themselves" — but this was the shortest clip I could find this early in the reporting. I'm sure more literal, honest versions will appear soon, but I wanted to get something up now.

Because there's not a minute to waste when it comes to further demonstrating that Musk is the most offensive jerk — in every way imaginable — on earth. Doubtless his toothless redneck fans on "Twitter" will roll in the aisles with much gaiety and delight, as will your average middle-school male. Beyond that emotionally stunted crowd, I cannot envision anyone with any taste, class or mental sophistication thinking that Elon Musk is an admirable human being.

***

Yep.

MAGA morons with monetized accounts and ad revenue sharing cheering on Elon while he tells advertisers to go f*ck themselves is peak MAGA.

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) November 30, 2023

Voters, Trump, and a possibly dystopian economic future

I'm not as confident that "Donald Trump is on pace to win back the White House" as Eric Levitz of New York Magazine is. It's true that His Indictedness recently showed polling leads over President Biden in several battleground states. But those statistics have gripped too many political journalists with sense of permanency. Hey guys, it's November 2023, not 2024.

What will probably last is voters' preference for Republicans — hence Trump — when it comes to handling the economy. Real 'Ripley's Believe It Or Not' stuff, for sure. But let's face it, the average American voter has the memory capacity and macroeconomic understanding of a dung beetle.   

Still, the electorate is what it is. And should it carry out its suicidal preference for an unhinged, criminal ignoramus in the White House, this, as Levitz notes, is what they can expect:  

"[Trump's] agenda includes imposing a 10 percent tariff on all foreign-made goods, enacting large deficit-financed tax cuts, and slashing America’s foreign-born labor force through mass deportations and immigration restriction. Taken together, this constitutes a recipe for a drastic increase in U.S. consumer prices."

Which is to say, inflation — the biggest albatross the electorate has foolishly hung around Biden's neck. The poor creature is only a third the size it was not long ago, but since when did American voters start reading newspapers?    

Last summer, an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that 69% of Americans believe in angels. "People turn to angels for comfort," said a nondenominational pastor in California. He neglected to mention religious faith — the antithesis of empirical reason.  

These must also be the voters who believe Trump and Republicans and their thoroughly irrational, wholly discredited macroeconomic policies will somehow benefit them. Their political beliefs are grounded only in faith and whatever they find comforting. The empirical economic record of these GOP nincompoops is either unknown to them or it's simply dismissed.  

Their belief in angels hurts no one, however. If only we could say that of their politics. 

Hamas is thanking Israel for all the death and destruction

As Israeli military forces have reduced Hamas's size, the group has only grown in respect.

"Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and the elation over the prisoners’ release have deepened support for Hamas in the Israeli-occupied West Bank," reports The Times. "For some Palestinians living under military occupation in the West Bank, the freed prisoners have become a potent symbol of Hamas’s ability to achieve tangible results and its willingness to fight for the Palestinian cause."

Prime Minister Netanyahu's pledge to "eradicate" Hamas is a worthy ambition. But, with depressing predictably, his exceptionally violent efforts to do so have had a boomeranging, self-destructive effect.

The more Palestinians killed by the IDF — for the moment, estimates range from 13,000 to more than 15,000, roughy 10,000 of whom were women and children — the deeper the livings' resentment against the occupying killer and, understandably, the greater the admiration for Hamas the avenger. Violence may deplorably beget violence, but in this case it was only violence that secured the release of Palestinians detained without trials (again, women and children). 

In addition to Hamas's reduction in size by the Israeli military is a terrorist-incubation period in progress. As youthful Palestinian males watch their family and friends being annihilated by 2,000-pound Israeli bombs, these youngsters are being radicalized. In short order they'll replace Hamas's dead, possibly in greater numbers than the group's entirety before 7 October.

Thus while Netanyahu's ambition is a worthy one, his methodology in achieving it will likely result only in a larger, stronger, even more determined enemy. And then there's Iran, which could not be more pleased with the prime minister's overall strategy and self-destructive tactics.

Analysts "caution that support for [Hamas] is limited to a minority of residents." (The analysts are speaking of the West Bank's population; here I'm assuming the same for residents of Gaza.) I'm a trifle puzzled by The Times' wording of caution, since its verb form means warn. I doubt that's the pro-Hamas impression the Grey Lady intended to make. At any rate, it's the wording of "a minority" that's essentially meaningless — 10%, 35%, 49%? — but still worrisome. 

Even 10% of just Gaza's population is about 220,000. Forty-seven percent of that is under the age of 18 — 103,400. The male percentage of the 10-19 age group is 23. That would mean nearly 24,000 young men either now or will, when older, harbor some form of "support for Hamas" — roughly the group's total size in early October. 

For now, as Ghassan Khatib, director of the Jerusalem Media and Communication Center, has noted, Palestinians are increasingly fearful about their vulnerability and feel they "don’t have any alternative. The only game in town is Hamas."

The old saw about unintended consequences was ideated for this very moment. 

Biden, haunted by history, is taking heat from Arab and Jewish Americans alike

From The Times:

Just weeks after the start of the Israel-Hamas war, Mr. Biden had invited a small group of prominent Muslim Americans to the White House to discuss Islamophobia in America. The participants were blunt with him.

They told him that his embrace of Israel after the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks was seen by many as permission for Israel’s bombing in Gaza. They said the president’s statement casting doubt on the death toll among Palestinians was insulting. And they said the fatal stabbing of a 6-year-old Muslim boy outside Chicago was just one devastating result of the dehumanization of their community....

Some younger [WH] staff members, particularly those with Arab or Muslim backgrounds, have said they feel disenchanted with the president they serve....

"There’s this sense that the trauma of one people counts more than the trauma of another," said James Zogby, the president of the Arab American Institute, which has been polling the community for 27 years. "It’s like there are two intolerables, and they’ve decided which one they’re going to accept."

Peter Beinart, the incisive Jewish-American commentator I quoted two days ago, is also displeased with the White House:

"I will vote for Joe Biden... but I’m not going to lie about what he did.... And the truth is that Joe Biden bears a lot of blame for this continuing pattern of defeating ethical Palestinian resistance and making it easier for Hamas to make the argument that the Palestinians get better results when they kill Israelis. And Biden did this by never using America’s leverage with its $3.8 billion in military aid or its protection of Israel in international forums; never using that to stop settlement growth even as it ramped up under this radical government...; and sticking with this kind of corrupt, discredited Mahmoud Abbas by moving towards a Saudi normalization deal that essentially was going to sideline Palestinians except maybe with the barest of fig leaves."

Again, The Times:

Dr. [James] Zogby, who has advised several Democratic campaigns on their Palestinian platforms, including Mr. Biden’s in 2020, said he believed the repercussions of the war would span generations.

Just as the Hamas attacks evoked the vulnerability and trauma of the Holocaust, Dr. Zogby said, Israel’s response evoked what Palestinians call the Nakba, or "catastrophe," the 1948 displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the war surrounding the creation of Israel 75 years ago.

"It’s not as if, from the earliest days, that we didn’t know how this was going to end," he said of the war in Gaza [bold added]. "When the dust settles, and the tears dry, what we’re going to have is more dead bodies, more anger and more extremism."

Which is why, to repeat the history of this conflict — its genesis, now inexorably haunting Biden — Secretary of State George Marshall and Defense Secretary Robert Lovett intensely opposed President Truman's actions in 1948, instead strongly advocating that the U.S. not choose sides. Let the United Nations handle the Palestinian-Jewish question, they insisted, just as the organization was in the process of doing. It's that, said Marshall and Lovett, or face the wrath of the Arab world — and all that comes with it — for generations to come.

The two presidential advisers were not playing 900-number psychics; they were simply addressing the conflict from a logical, national security point of view. But Truman, as he was wont to do, went with impetuosity.   

Speaker Johnson is already on this, Dr. Glashow

My dear, Nobel Prize-winning Dr. Sheldon: Why all the needless curiosity and questions? Just ask God's vicar, Mike Johnson, sometimes known as the speaker of the House.

“I am a Bible-believing Christian," said Johnson in a Fox News interview. "Someone asked me today in the media, they said, 'It’s curious, people are curious: What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?' I said, 'Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.'" 

That makes quick work of the physicist's questions. It whisks them aside and then straight into the ashbin of ill-informed heresy. From Mike's deep reading of one ancient book, he can tell you that a Christian God created everything from beach sand to galaxies in a bang-less six days, a mere 6,000 years ago. On this, good-Christian opinions do not vary. Indeed they're not even opinions. They're facts.  

Only infidels would squander their time asking silly questions like Sheldon's.     

With God's vicar in charge of the U.S. House, I do rather wonder how its Committee on Science, Space and Technology will fare over the coming year. What great strides will it make inquiring into, for instance, Noah's Ark, the Red Sea's separability and the Shroud of Turin? 

What's The Matter With Kansas? - and the other 49 states

The Bulwark's Jonathan Last has been on the same protracted quest as I have: trying to comprehend the titanic gap between the real economy and the economy imagined by voters. He not-too-jokingly calls his latest exploration of this mysterious mismatch "Part 174 of my continuing series." My numbered entries on this seemingly unchanging topic are somewhere in the same neighborhood. 

But in Last's latest, I learned something new — surprisingly new, but also something that confirmed my suspicion all along.

For two years we've been informed by various surveys that voters believe the nation's economy is bad and likely getting worse, even though there are millions of new jobs, wages are increasing, wages have surpassed the steadily falling rate of inflation, and consumer spending is strong.

Yet economists, politicians and journalists have explained repeatedly that voters are down on the national economy — thus President Biden and congressional Democrats as well — because they're seeing no improvement in their personal lives. (The graph shows the collective answers to a Sept. 2023 NBC News poll that asked, "Which party deals with economy better?") But here's the kicker — that is, the shockingly new twist, as passed along by Mr. Last:   

"The University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment survey released its October numbers last week and The People not only think that the economy is bad, but that it’s getting worse." Nothing new there. But get this: "[Michigan’s survey also asked] people how they feel about their own lives.... The survey’s director, Joanne Hsu, notes that the October numbers showed that people feel pretty good about their personal finances." 

Hence the mystery is somewhat solved. Voters aren't gloomy about the thriving national economy because (as we have been told ad infinitum) they're feeling some personal pain. They're gloomy because they haven't the faintest notion of how the economy is actually doing. They're gloomy because they're ignorant (my aforementioned suspicion). Or, as Last sarcastically puts it:

So let’s get this straight: People think their personal financial situations are pretty good. But they think the broader economy is terrible. They also expect the broader economy to deteriorate further. And they expect inflation to get worse. Even though inflation has been abating pretty continuously and is now in a good place.

Sounds like a citizenry well equipped to make serious decisions about the future of democracy!

I happened to read Tom Nichols' Atlantic newsletter right after reading Last's piece. The timing was serendipitous. Nichols had looked at some NY Times focus group interviews with Democratic voters only, and what he saw were answers of unsettling incoherence.  

"One respondent," wrote Nichols, "a lifelong Democrat, said in the poll that 'she would vote for Mr. Trump over Mr. Biden, whom she called 'too old and a bit out of touch' and 'a bit of a doofus.' By the end of the interview, she said she’d probably vote for Biden again."

It gets worse. Another Democrat said "she strongly supports abortion rights—and did not realize that Mr. Biden does, too. She said that because states’ abortion bans had gone into effect during his presidency, she assumed it was because of him." 

Oh dear. Oh my God. Heaven help us. Nichols observed that ignorant voters — what he still charitably called "low-information voters"— are "a natural advantage for Trump," which of course is true. And ignorance seems to have reached epidemic proportions, not only throughout the usual, self-cloistered crowd of right-wing clowns, but among Democratic voters, too.   

If Donald J. triumphs next year, it won't be because of any extraordinary political talents on his part. It will be because the American electorate put a loaded gun to its already mostly empty, incoherent head, and somewhat superfluously pulled the trigger.