Apr
20
2024

But Let's Bomb Those New Guinea Cannibals Back to the Stone Age

Matthew Continetti states the obvious: Israel Is Right to Reject Biden’s Bad Advice.

News broke Thursday evening of an Israeli strike inside Iran. In doing so, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the advice President Biden had given him after Iran’s April 13 drone and missile attack on the Jewish state. At the time, Biden told Netanyahu not to escalate. “You got a win,” Biden said to Bibi. “Take the win.”

Israel demurred. And was absolutely right to. Whatever happens next, it is worth reflecting on the idiocy of Biden’s comments.

Not only do Biden’s words capture the mindset responsible for the chaos that has engulfed the world during his presidency. His comments also raise the question of what a “win” against Iran would really look like — and why America has not pursued that goal.

The architects of our Afghanistan debacle should be extremely modest in making suggestions about how other countries should defend themselves.

On a related note, Biden may not be trying to appease Iran as much as he's trying to appease the Israel-haters inside his own party. John Hinderaker notes a big reason why that's misguided: Joe, It Isn’t About Israel.

The evil that is now running rampant across our country is ostensibly directed at Israel, but Israel is only the pretext, a target of convenience. We have seen in recent months that “anti-Zionism” is merely a cover for anti-Semitism. If Israel disappeared tomorrow, the anti-Semites here, in Western Europe and elsewhere, wouldn’t miss a beat.

But it doesn’t stop there. In Iranian and al Qaeda ideology, Israel is only the Little Satan. America is the Great Satan.

Hinderaker includes a tweeted video of some brave souls who took some American flags to a "pro-Palestine protest" in New York. The results (vandalism, theft, threats) tend to confirm Hinderaker's thesis. Data point:

Under new K-12 Social Studies standards adopted in January 2024, public school students in Minnesota will be told that the great evil of world history is “settler colonialism.” And it turns out that, despite the countless instances of invasion and migration through human history, there have been only two instances of “settler colonialism.” Imagine that! The two instances are, of course, Israel and the United States.

So, if you thought that the Ayatollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden were hopeless cranks whose ideas could never catch on, think again. They are accepted by mobs in New York City, at MIT, at Harvard, at Columbia, at Penn, and so on. Worse, in some states at least, they are accepted by the liberals who run the public schools.

Sigh.

By the way: mystified by today's headline? See the USA Today story: Was Joe Biden's uncle eaten by cannibals during World War II? (Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies: nope.)

And then you can be amused by USA Today's semi-dismissal of this yarn as just one of Biden's "long history of embellishing stories".

Not Biden's "long history of lies and delusions".

Also of note:

  • Suggestion: Ask her to name more than two examples of "settler colonialism". Damien Fisher profiles two brave souls who have ensconced themselves into the local white supremacist patriarchy: 'Pro-Hoe' Activists and BLM Leaders Bring DEI to NH Public Schools. They are both tedious, but I'll concentrate on Rachael Blansett, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Justice Director at Oyster River School District (Durham/Lee/Madbury NH), salary $95-105K.

    Blansett, who never worked as a regular classroom teacher before getting the Oyster River job, is responsible for “work(ing) with teachers, administrators, and students to integrate DEIJ throughout the district. (Blansett) will lead trainings for teachers, revise curriculums so they align with district values of equity and inclusion, and act as a resource for anyone in the Oyster River community to ask questions about DEIJ taught in a classroom,” according to the district.

    Blansett's LinkedIn page — what she chooses to share with the world — contains a couple of presentations she's apparently authored or co-authored: "Are You Down With the Cause" and "White Tears in the Classroom". In the former, she identifies herself (because it's important!) as a "Black/biracial, queer femme"). In the latter (subtitle: "Examining how whiteness & white supremacy presents within the classroom"), Robin DiAngelo is approvingly quoted on "white fragility":

    I've had people tell the term itself is offensive…which is classic white fragility.

    Why would anyone send their kids to Oyster River schools?

  • He's probably right. Jesse Walker is tired. It's Another Day, Another Doomed Plan To Defund NPR.

    Rep. Jim Banks (R–Ind.) announced yesterday that he will introduce a bill to defund National Public Radio (NPR). Marsha Blackburn (R–Tenn.) has said she hopes to do the same in the Senate. We live in strange times, anything can happen in politics, and there may be no faster route to looking like a fool than to issue a prediction. With that throat-clearing out of the way: No, of course Congress isn't about to defund NPR.

    This latest wave of Defund NPR! sentiment follows an article by Uri Berliner in The Free Press, in which the NPR editor and reporter—make that former NPR editor and reporter, since he has since resigned—argues that the network "lost America's trust" by shutting out opinions disfavored by the center-left hivemind. I think Berliner's piece wavers between claiming too much (it would have been more accurate, though probably less SEO-friendly, to replace "lost America's trust" with "saw its niche grow somewhat smaller") and claiming too little (it ends with a plea not to defund public radio, since Berliner believes there's "a need for a public institution where stories are told and viewpoints exchanged in good faith"). But at this point the specifics of his essay are almost beside the point, since the debate it has unleashed goes far beyond what the article says. The proof is that people have been using it as a springboard to call for cutting off NPR's federal dollars even though Berliner goes out of his way to stress that that's not the result he wants.

    Walker provides three reasons why NPR-resistance is futile: (1) Biden would veto a defunding bill; (2) NPR's government-funding network is a tangled web that would be difficult to extract from "the rest of the public-broadcasting ecosystem"; and (3) come on, "most of the GOP has no serious interest in defunding public broadcasting."

    I've said this before: NPR is great to listen to, if you enjoy people who are unaware of how much they sound like Titania McGrath.

  • She was pretty good on Saturday Night Live. Kevin D. Williamson does a reality check: Caitlin Clark’s Salary Isn’t an Injustice.

    There is, however, an economic answer to the question of why Caitlin Clark, the University of Iowa standout and first overall pick in Monday’s WNBA draft, will make an annual salary of only around $77,000 compared to the $12.1 million or so that Victor Wembanyama, the first overall pick in last year’s NBA draft, made this season. That reason is the number 4,067, which is the average attendance at games hosted by Clark’s new team, the Indiana Fever, and the number 40, which is how many games the Indiana Fever will play during the upcoming WNBA regular season. For Wembanyama and his San Antonio Spurs, those numbers are 18,110 and 82, respectively—with average ticket prices far greater than the $41 Fever fans paid in 2021. Add in the fact that the NBA is reportedly poised to sign a TV rights deal this summer worth between $60 billion and $72 billion over a multi-year period and the reason for the discrepancy becomes even clearer.

    Total WNBA revenue in the coming season is projected to be around $200 million, which is a nice bit of money—but NBA revenue is 52.5 times that, about $10.5 billion. For comparison, consider: The most successful car salesman in Poughkeepsie makes a pretty good living, but the most successful car salesman in Los Angeles has private-jet money—not because he is necessarily a better car salesman, or because he has an Ivy League MBA, or because he puts in more hours, but because he is at the top of a much bigger market. A pretty good actor in Hollywood makes a heck of a lot more money than the best actor in Copenhagen, which is why we have all those people named Mikkelsen and Mortensen running around in the California sunshine to which Danes must adapt with some difficulty. As it happens, there isn’t technically any rule that says Caitlin Clark has to play in the WNBA instead of the NBA. She could always go take Nikola Jokic’s job.

    Since I mentioned it:

    See? Told you.

  • Not exactly unexpected. Jerry Coyne reports: Dickey Betts died. He was 80, so it's somewhat surprising that he made it that far.

    Jerry has a number of videos, and if you want to see/hear some amazing guitar playing, check them out. He also protests the "bizarre" Rolling Stone list of the "250 greatest guitarists of all time", which has Betts at #145. I agree with Jerry: that's remarkably insane..