Republicans are like the dog that caught the car when it comes to abortion. Kari Lake backtracks on her support of the 150 year old Arizona abortion law, which embodies the goals of much of the pro-life movement. Trump tries to avoid the issue by saying that it has been returned to the states, thereby avoiding a commitment to a federal ban. In fact, as I understand it, the Dobbs decision merely said that there is no right to abortion and that nothing prohibits states from restricting it. That alone doesn’t preclude a federal ban.

Even if you think the Arizona law goes too far, there just doesn’t seem to be any inspired leadership here. How hard would it be for Trump or some other Republican leader to call on Biden or Harris to compromise on the issue? “Republicans believe in exceptions to their position. Will you agree to exceptions to yours? Will you agree to reduce your 39-week protection for abortion rights to 24, unless it is necessary to save the mother’s life?” I’d love to see them choke on that one.  Put them on the spot for once. They will never agree to any exceptions to their commitment to abortion on demand for any reason until the moment of birth. This should make it very easy for any Republican politician to paint them as extremists. And yet, it just doesn’t happen.

An Australian judge ordered a halt to the construction of an offshore natural gas project because the company running the project neglected to perform all the consultations with interested parties required to meet environmental requirements.  If you read the entire dry, boring, citation-heavy opinion you would never know what the missing consultation was all about. The developers neglected to consult with the Custodian of Whale Dreaming who asserts that Spirit Whales will be injured by the project. See, this summary of this article.

I think it is right and good that administrative law requires considerations of actual, substantive environmental harms and injury to substantive community interests.  For example, I would oppose paving over the Alamo or Yorktown or digging up an established Native American burial ground to build a theme park centered on sex, guns, and whiskey or a toxic smokestack plant (well, the toxic plant is out for sure).  But deference to the sensibilities of Spirit Whales who, according to native Australian fables, tell the fish of the sea what to eat, when to mate, and where to migrate strikes me as rather problematic.

I have long understood that people only see what they want to see. Open miracles are not what people want to see – and so they ignore them.

Iran attacked with a range of weapons, all meant to overwhelm Israeli defenses. 120 long range ballistic missiles. These suckers leave the atmosphere, and drop straight down with incredible speed and lethal force. In the history of the world, nobody has ever intercepted such an attack.  Iran had every reason to think their missiles would succeed. And these missiles, carrying dozens of tons of explosive warheads, were absolutely designed to destroy their targets.

So, we went and saw Civil War Saturday. A ton of hype about this film and I was cautiously optimistic that it would be an interesting story with dramatic elements and a message that, hopefully, wasn’t wokist claptrap.

To say that I was disappointed is an understatement. I won’t spoil the movie, because what you’ve seen in the previews is pretty much the entire movie. There is no explanation for the conflict, no reason why the states are still acting as units, nor why California and Texas are allies while Oklahoma and Oregon as on the same side. In a way that isn’t important. Trying to come up with a semi-logical story around the reason for a conflict isn’t as important as what the story could be…assuming it’s a good story. I mean, I rather enjoy The Purge series of movies. They don’t make any sense, but are fun movies that have interesting characters such that you care what happens to them.

I can understand how a genuine pacifist could so strongly deplore the inherent tragedy of war that the reasons for its prosecution are deemed unworthy and a generic sympathy for civilians caught in the middle is natural for all.  What is harder to understand is how people purportedly motivated by such sentiments readily dismiss culpability for the horrific, inhumane acts of Oct 7 in which brutal civilian casualties were not incidental to a military objective but entirely intentional.

The woke moral framework is a strange beast.

From IBM

That enormous piece of equipment is a 5MB hard drive in 1956.  Produced by IBM, it was a technological marvel of its day.  That chip in my hand below is a 1TB SSD card for my computer.  For those keeping score at home, my SSD card holds not twice as much data, and not three times as much data – no, it holds 209,715 times as much data, and I can lift it with my fingers rather than a forklift.  And my SSD card uses A LOT less electricity, as well.  And is much faster and much more reliable.  If you were to stack 209,715 of those IBM hard drives to store the same amount of data as my chip, that stack would be nearly 300 miles tall.  My chip is more convenient.

The Boston Herald is appealing the FBI’s refusal to release records related to Whitey Bulger. The Bureau claims there are ongoing related investigations. Bulger died in 2018 and had been convicted for over thirty felonies including eleven murders in 2013. His longtime associate Flemmi is serving a life sentence.  Bulger evaded capture for 16 years on the FBI Most Wanted lList, a duration that many suspected was an indication of the Bureau’s preference that the extent of their corrupt involvement not come to light.  He was 81 when finally captured in California. 

Given the Bureau’s scandalous history regarding Bulger, we have every right to be skeptical about the existence of an ongoing related investigation of any kind after all this time. Perhaps they are pretending to investigate one of Whitey’s murders they missed.

The video below is of my 14-year-old grandson. For the last several weekends, he and I have worked together to turn a pile of miscellaneous detached parts into a running go-kart. This is the moment we first fired it up and let it rip.

I suggested to him a few months ago that we do this project, and I confess I was completely riddled with ulterior motives. Besides merely wanting to hang out with him, I wanted him to gain experience working with hand tools. I wanted him to feel the exhilaration of working on something for an extended period of time, needing to learn entirely new concepts to succeed, and then to have the exhilaration of success after working on something hard. I wanted him to learn a little bit about mechanics. And I wanted to amplify his already noticeable attraction to embodied work. I wanted to stoke the fire of excitement and deep satisfaction that emerges when, having applied newly acquired knowledge, things finally begin to work as you originally imagined. That first time he pressed on the throttle and the torque converter really engaged and started turning the rear axle…well…it was a magical moment for both of us.

Jews in the 20^th century were dynamos. Jews were major players in Hollywood, in the worlds of finance and law, hard sciences and soft.  Jews were hard working, risk-taking, and deeply ambitious. Indeed, in the ruins of the Holocaust was born three generations of hungry, hard-driving people, people who helped make every country they lived in far richer and more successful. (I often offer that the countries that, it is suggested, are “run by the Jews” are far better off than those without Jews.) And indeed, Jews sought to understand what Judaism is – there was a mass movement from the 1970s through the 1990s of Jews “returning,” of finding meaning and purpose in the core of the religion.

But over the past 2-3 decades, all of that has been in decline. Schools that used to send the majority of their graduating classes to the finest institutions, now send a handful, at best. The societal boredom and ennui that has led to the current navel-gazing idiocy has also infected the Jews of America (and even Israel), leading to a lot more hedonistic narcissism, and a lot less purpose and meaning.

A wave of drones and ballistic missiles have been launched from Iran to Israel Saturday night, marking a new phase in the wider Middle East conflict. While Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp has been behind many attacks against Israel, tonight is the first instance of a direct assault from the territory of the Islamic Republic against the Jewish State.

The extent of the attack is not yet clear. The New York Times reports that more than 200 drones and missiles have been launched in the retaliatory strike—a response to the deadly strike on an Iranian embassy in Syria.

Thanks to a universal culture of paganism and violence, G-d has destroyed the world in an apocalyptic flood. A single boat, crammed with survivors, bobs along on top of the waves.

This is no pleasure cruise. There are no promenades or portholes. Indeed, there is but one window, and it only looks upward. Nobody knows what is going on. In that boat, layered within the smells of animals, their food and their waste, the air is thick with fear and doubt.

Yesterday the prime minister of Japan, Fumio Kishida, spoke to a joint session of Congress. It’s a remarkable fact, given the history, that today Japan is one of our closest and most reliable allies, and its people among the most pro-American in the world. (Kishida’s family is from Hiroshima.)

During his remarks, Kishida reminded the U.S. of its history of being a champion of freedom and democracy in the world:

My new set of noise-cancelling headphones arrived yesterday.  I bought them for when neutral observer is watching a Great Courses lecture on her computer and has the volume turned ALL THE WAY UP because she isn’t wearing her hearing aids.

Anyway, I examined the outside of the box, and noticed the following safety tips (brief discussion following each one):

April 10, 2024 was the 112th anniversary of the day that the British passenger and mail-carrying ocean liner RMS Titanic slipped her surly mooring bonds in the English port of Southampton and set sail on her maiden voyage across the Atlantic.

In her honor, and on that date, I embarked on an excursion I don’t undertake much anymore, unless under protest: I gritted my teeth, girded my loins, screwed my courage to the sticking place, and drove to Pittsburgh.  My destination, on Pittsburgh’s North Shore, was the Carnegie Science Center.  It’s almost adjacent to Heinz Field (which is now called something else), and is at the center of a rats’ nest of narrow roads, twisty alleys, and one way streets that confound any GPS system I’ve ever had the misfortune of using.  The last time I was in the vicinity, which was a couple of years ago for the Immersive Van Gogh Exhibit (which was great, BTW), I spent about twenty minutes going round and round in circles afterwards, before I got myself pointed in the right direction, or at least in a direction I recognized and from which I could figure out how to get home. (To be perfectly clear, it’s not the absolute worst rats’ nest of narrow roads, twisty alleys, and one-way streets I’ve ever been in, in my life, but it’s up there in the top two. What makes it better than the other is that, at least in Pittsbugh, the directional signs are posted in a language, and a script, that I can read and understand. Other than that, there’s not much to choose between them.)

The notion of color-blindness derives from the principle that moral persons of conscience  should disregard race in judging their fellow human beings. It is a sincere aspiration but not necessarily meant as a description of reality. It was once considered a non-controversial  mainstay of the American ethos. 

No longer. The term “color-blind” has become an object of scorn among America’s elite. The usual crowd directing our national groupthink has determined that proclaiming color-blindness is intentionally deceptive, simply a cheap cover for racism.