Universities across the country are engulfed in prolonged campus demonstrations by organized Hamas and Palestinian protesters who rail against the Israeli military response in Gaza to the Hamas attack of October 7. Their message breaks into two broad categories. The first accuses Israel of genocide and lesser offenses in conducting its operations in an intense urban environment where soldiers and civilians are in constant close contact with each other. The second attacks the legitimacy of the Jewish state, insisting that “Palestine must be free from the river to the sea.”

The protesters insist that their occupation of campus facilities is protected constitutionally as part of the freedom of speech and assembly guaranteed under the First Amendment to the Constitution. These controversies are surely headed to the courts, as some students (and their sympathizers) have been arrested and may well be charged with criminal trespass, while other student groups continue to press demands for the divestment of shares of Israeli institutions and American firms that do business with Israel, while condemning in open letters universities for what they regard as an inexcusable infringement of their rights. On this matter, the students are in the main wrong on the legal issues, and the universities were mainly right in setting hardline deadlines (from which many have since retreated) to dismantle protest encampments.

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SCENE: Living room of LUCY and RICKY RICARDO. LUCY paces nervously in front of ETHEL MERTZ, who is seated on the couch.

Georgia Power completes Plant Vogtle nuclear project

If you were a fan of the various incarnations of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert’s movie review shows, then you’ll probably enjoy Matt Singer’s book about them, Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel and Ebert Changed Movie Forever (Putman 2023). 

I recently read the book and was struck by something Singer said about film viewing, “Watching movies, especially as a working critic or journalist can feel like a very solitary act. But as Siskel and Ebert proved, film is best enjoyed and most appreciated with someone to talk about the experience. Everywhere I have studied or written about movies, I have found wonderful communities of friends and colleagues whose companionship have made the movies seem like something bigger than mere strips of celluloid or masses of data on hard drives.”

The importance of a film community continues to be proven here at Ricochet with Andrew Miller’s Moving Pictures Club (a successor to Vince Guerra’s Movie Fight Club). I remembered  this post I wrote for a blog way back in 2008 (you might notice the historical details).

People are desperate for meaning, for being part of something greater than themselves. People are, rightly, interested in making their lives something more than long. 

If society/religion/nation offer that vision, and people buy into it, then it can be an outlet for this need. Even if the vision is no deeper than “Greater Russia.” Nationalism is an outlet, and not necessarily a bad one.

The horrified reaction to Kristi Noem’s anecdote about shooting one of her hunting dogs is interesting – though I offer no opinion on the shooting itself. But because it illustrates so perfectly how being sheltered from the world of agriculture affects one’s thinking about animals. Farmers and ranchers, in my experience, have a far more utilitarian view of animals than is typical of people outside of that world. Effete Westerners have developed such a Disney-esque sentimentality about animals that some of them are consciously choosing to have pets instead of children. When they talk of their “fur babies,” they’re not being facetious.

I was at a July 4th gathering once, at a friend’s small ranch. My friend and his family (wife + 2 boys) raised a small herd of beef cattle. During the party, a large stray dog got into the pasture where his cattle were grazing and the dog was getting a great deal of pleasure out of chasing the cattle around the pasture. But it was extremely hot, and the cattle were dangerously stressed. The dog’s behavior was harming the cattle and the economic prospects of my friend and his family. When the dog continued to come back and chase the cattle, even after being run off a couple of times, my friend loaded up his shotgun during the middle of the party, walked out into the pasture in full view of all of his guests, and shot the dog. That wasn’t his first choice, but he certainly didn’t hesitate.

I had another friend who was a commercial pig farmer and he would routinely and proactively kill young piglets who were not thriving alongside their siblings. He simply couldn’t accommodate the needs of the frail ones.

I highly recommend the most recent Ricochet podcast.  I don’t always listen, but this morning I was involved in a particularly intricate farm maneuver, and I needed something to distract myself, so I put it on.

It’s wide-ranging and discursive, and although I’m going to focus in this post only on two short bits of it, you should probably listen to the whole thing.

James, Rob, and Peter set up the nexus of my concern at the six or seven-minute mark, where they discuss the differences between the college protests of the 1960s and those of today. I think they make two salient points: 1) their contention that, irrespective of ideology or anything else, the students of the 1960s were far more literate and grounded in facts and history than those who have come along some sixty years later; and 2) their contention that–although the protests of the 1960s didn’t actually end the Vietnam War–a “heroic myth” took hold in the minds of those who’d participated, and that that heroic myth has come down through the ages, imbuing the 1960s with a cachet as an idyllic age of campus protests that accomplished something revolutionary and progressive, and which took the world in a new and better direction, all thanks to the idealistic and non-judgmental young people who showed the rest of the world the way.

I know a more robust system of advocates who were truly patient advocates would make a tremendous difference. The patient advocate who greets you or your loved one in the hospital to discuss your care is not working for you. She is working for the hospital to improve the profitability of the hospital and move you or your loved one to a secondary care facility as soon as possible to open up that bed for someone else while providing income to the other center which is part of the same organization.

Who in the system takes responsibility for making sure that you or your loved one is receiving optimal care? Not the doctor you have been seeing for years. He may not even have admitting privileges to the hospital he sends you to. You are at the mercy of the system and the basic sense of decency of their employees.     

Shelley Duvall is sad and mad.

“‘I was a star; I had leading roles,’ she said, solemnly shaking her head.”

The human act of articulation enriches understanding, not just for the hearer, but also for the one who is doing the work of articulation. Going through the process of putting something into words forces our thought process through a nozzle that imposes coherence and an increase of logical rigor. Putting our thoughts into words not only puts the hearer’s understanding on firmer footing, but actually strengthens the speaker’s own grasp of the subject. This is one reason I believe widespread use of AI language models could have the unintended side-effect of diminishing the sum total of human understanding in the world.

I learned this affect of articulation through experience, when I and my colleagues observed that when we encountered a complicated or thorny bug in our code, surprisingly often, if we put the problem we were having into words, the mere act of articulation made the solution to our problem obvious. The logical structure imposed by putting things into words makes us think more cogently about the problem we are facing.