Saturday: Hili dialogue

Well, it’s CaturSaturday again, this time on January 18, 2025. I just remembered that in two days we will have a new President, and I’m trying to accept this with equanimity, since I can’t change it.  It’s also National Peking Duck Day, an arrant cultural appropriation, but a great dish.  The best one I had was in fact in Beijing, when a few geneticists and I went to the restaurant known as “sick duck” because it’s across the street from a hospital. Here’s what it’s like to eat in a high-class duck restaurant:

It’s also Thesaurus Day, National Gourmet Coffee Day (for me that is every day), and Winnie the Pooh Day, occurring on the birthday of author A. A. Milne in 1882. Here is the original Winnie-the-Pooh set of animals owned by Christopher Robin (Milne’s son), labeled  “Christopher Robin’s original Winnie-the-Pooh stuffed toys, on display at the Main Branch of the New York Public Library (clockwise from bottom left: Tigger, Kanga, Edward Bear (“Winnie-the-Pooh”), Eeyore, and Piglet) Roo was also one of the original toys, but was lost during the 1930s.”

Da Nooz:

*It looks as if the war between Gaza and Hamas is over, at least for the time being, and it also looks as if Israel has lost. I say this because the “deal” approved by both Biden and Trump appears to leave Hamas in power, and has a grossly disproportionate exchange of hostages for Palestinian terrorists:

According to a leaked copy of the agreement, over 1,700 Palestinian prisoners are to be freed in return for 33 Israeli hostages in the first phase of the deal: 700 terrorists, 250-300 of whom are serving life terms; 1,000 Gazans captured since October 8 in fighting in the Strip; and 47 rearrested prisoners from the 2011 Gilad Shalit deal

You don’t see the world press talking about this disproportionality. Given the agreement, many of those terrorist will just join Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad and aim to kill more Israelis.

It’s a bad deal for Israel; in my view, if Hamas stays in power, they’ll have not only lost the war, but the terrorism will continue, supplemented with thousands of new Palestinian terrorists released from jail.  In net, I think that more Israeli civilian lives will be lost with this deal than if the IDF just fought on. The details from the NYT (archived here):

The full Israeli cabinet began meeting Friday night to vote on an agreement for a cease-fire and the release of hostages in Gaza, according to two Israeli officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to publicly discuss it. The deal is seen as the best chance to end the devastating 15-month war in the enclave.

The meeting comes after Israel’s security cabinet — a small forum of senior ministers — approved the cease-fire agreement earlier in the day, overcoming a key hurdle after Israeli and Hamas negotiators resolved remaining disputes.

Here’s Einat Wilf, a whip-smart politician who’s starting her own party in the Knesset.  She proposes the only peace plan that I think is reasonable, but she was blindsided by Trump’s agreement with the present deal:

How President Trump Can Fix the Middle East | Dr. @EinatWilf pic.twitter.com/y5QfjwckiM

— Israeli Citizen Spox (@IsrCitizenSpox) January 15, 2025

And Jonathan Conricus, who used to be the IDF’s spokesperson as well as a career IDF member.  He doesn’t like the deal, either.

‘As the deal is now, I struggle to understand why Israel agreed to it’

The hostage-ceasefire deal may well have additional aspects that would become apparent only with the passage of time, but what we know of it today is not good, @jconricus tells @benitalevin pic.twitter.com/15GonbigMk

— i24NEWS English (@i24NEWS_EN) January 16, 2025

*Unless Tik Tok gets new non-Chinese owners, it is doomed by this weekend. It will become an ex-app, pining for the fjords and singing with the Choir Invisible. (Article archived here.)

*As usual, I’m going to steal three items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news summary at the Free Press, called this week “TGIF: Hard pivot.”

→ Karen Bass promised to stay in her lame small town, Los Angeles: The embattled mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, made a funny promise before taking office. She promised that, as mayor of Los Angeles, she wouldn’t travel to Africa at all. She even made that promise on the record.

“I went to Africa every couple of months, all the time,” she told The New York Times in 2021. “The idea of leaving that, especially the international work and the Africa work, I was like, ‘Mmm, I don’t think I want to do that.’ ” But she decided: “Not only would I of course live here, but I also would not travel internationally—the only places I would go would be D.C., Sacramento, San Francisco, and New York, in relation to L.A.” Not only would she live there? Thank you for promising to fulfill the literal bare minimum requirement of your position, Karen.

Los Angeles is a city of 3.8 million people and a budget of $13 billion, and the mayor is talking about living there like it’s a major sacrifice. She’s talking about living in Los Angeles as the mayor in a fabulous house like I talk about visiting Pittsburgh to see my in-laws. Yes, I promise: Not only will I hang out with my in-laws, but I will eat the pizza everyone says is so special and I will say that it’s the best even though it is so cold and chewy. Mayor Bass is talking about living in Los Angeles like Pete Buttigieg probably talked about moving to wherever he had to move to get the nickname “Mayor Pete” (South Bend, Indiana—for eight years, my god, Peter). And Karen Bass couldn’t even stick the landing! When the fire alerts blared and the wind whipped, Karen Bass literally got on a plane to Ghana for a party. I’m not saying that the mayor needs to be perfect, but the bar can be higher than stays in town. It really can be. I’m a homebody, guys. I never leave. I’ll take the Hancock Park house. Yes, Los Angeles, I’ll be your mayor. I will drink your local green juices and say it’s delicious.

*The conservative and religious press seems to be delighted at the fact that Richard Dawkins, Steve Pinker, and I have left the FFRF because of a kerfuffle about sex; the theme that most draw from this is that the atheist community is fragmenting (partly true), but also that atheists are themselves religious (partly true in the case of the FFRF), but also   See this from The American Thinker, a conservative venue, Click to read this piece by Dr. Mack Random, a Christian

→ Chicago, on the other hand: Tens of thousands of devices (laptops, iPads, cellphone hot spots) purchased by Chicago Public Schools just within the 2023–2024 school year have been lost or stolen, with thousands of them ending up overseas. Last year alone, the district lost $23 million worth of devices, according to the CPS Office of the Inspector General (pro tip: when your school district is so top-heavy that it has an Office of the Inspector General, it’s too top-heavy). They also didn’t use the device-tracking tool: “Although CPS had been paying a vendor for geo-tracking services, the OIG found that it barely used this service but should be doing so.”

To lose that many devices and to ignore the device tracking service you also paid for—well, to me it indicates that basically someone within the system is selling these things off and pocketing the cash. A theft ring. A grimy, depressing little theft ring, but at more than $20 million in revenue, we’re talking a pretty nice one (call me guys, I’m in).

Meanwhile, the city’s credit rating dropped from a BBB+ to a paltry BBB, meaning the credit agency believes the city is more likely to default. I can’t pretend to know what this means (debt and credit are things I choose not to engage with; when you’re a debutante, everywhere you go has valet), but it doesn’t sound good.

And the kicker:

→ Biden’s money for Jewish institutions went to pro-Hamas groups: The Biden administration’s fund to protect institutions that are at risk of terrorist attacks—and which Biden touted as one of his big Jewish safety measures—has actually been funding mosques that preach pro-terrorist attacks. Mosques receiving the funding have leaders who call October 7 “a miracle” and such (you can imagine). Curious how that cash got rerouted specifically to the most antisemitic mosques I’ve ever read about.

*The conservative and religious press seems to be delighted at the fact that Richard Dawkins, Steve Pinker, and I have left the FFRF because of a kerfuffle about sex. The theme that most of these venues draw from this is that the atheist community is fragmenting (partly true), that atheists are themselves religious (partly true in the case of the non-supernatural quasi-religiosity of the FFRF), but also that atheism of all stripes are simply filling the “go0d-shape hole” that runs through all humanity.

See this from The American Thinker, a conservative venue, Click to read this piece by Dr. Mack Random, a Christian:

An excerpt:

Coyne expressed his concern that the FFRF was drifting outside its original mission, such that an organization that ostensibly exists to promote freedom from religion has begun to embrace a religion-like ideology, complete with its own dogma, heretics, and excommunication process.  Rather than accept being silenced within his community, Coyne rightly resigned and aired his dissatisfaction with the issues infiltrating the FFRF.

Irony in the Mission

The irony here is profound.  Coyne’s and FFRF’s shared mission, to “educate the public about non-theism and keep religion out of government and social policies,” suffers from the same issues Coyne criticizes.  But here the problem isn’t mission drift.  The problem is the original mission.  Their ideal world would remove religious contexts, doctrines, and moral arguments from schools and government, which also favors the establishment of atheism (or non-theism) as a de facto state religion.  Although FFRF-supporters may not view atheism as a religion, I and many others do.  I imagine that Kat Grant does not identify her transsexual ideology as a religion, but Coyne is making that analogy, if not that actual argument.

Coyne’s critique of Grant’s “transsexual ideology” as a religion-like framework is apt.  However, he fails to see the parallel between this critique and the broader implications of FFRF’s mission.  The term “separation of church and state” is not found in the Constitution.  The establishment clause of the Constitution reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”  By seeking to exclude religious voices from public service, FFRF violates the principles it claims to uphold.

The Fallout

Jerry Coyne, Steven Pinker, and Richard Dawkins — all prominent voices in the atheist community — resigned from FFRF’s Honorary Board in protest of this censorship.  Their departure underscores a deeper issue: the suppression of free thought within a community that ostensibly champions it.  I pray  they will also appreciate the irony that their mission results in the silencing of religious individuals in their own communities, just as the FFRF silenced Coyne in his.

It appears as if Dr. Ransom thinks that atheism is a religion, which is bonkers. Atheism is the absence of any religious belief, and, in the U.S., that means the absence of any belief in supernatural beings who take an interest in our lives.  By arguing that the First Amendment doesn’t really separate church from state, and that it “excludes religious voices from public service” (it’s not clear what that means), Ransom goes against everything the founders said they intended when the wrote the Constitution. And of course people can tout their faith in Congress, and in the Presidency, but no religion can be the basis of government policy.  As for the atheist “suppression of free thought,” what do atheists do but consider the counterarguments for faith in their writings (think of the Four Horsemen’s books!). I wrote a whole book on science versus religion that continuously quotes religious people, so they are not at all silenced.  Although they don’t come off well, that is not my fault!

A much better article is in the Deseret News, which, though owned by the Mormon Church, isn’t all goddy in its news. Here’s a piece I mentioned before by Valerie Hudson, a distinguished professor at Texas A&M University.

An excerpt:

Some celebrated the departure of the three board members, with one atheist noting, “The trash has taken itself out.” Other atheists took the opposite tack: “It amazes me that a group that understands the vital importance of falsifiability to the scientific method is now so keen to agree to gender ideology. If you think something ‘is’ because a person says it is, you are not respecting science, logic or truth itself. You’re doing what the religious nuts do, by saying it’s ‘their truth’, like material reality is open to interpretation. The FFRF should be embarrassed by the nonsense they’ve bowed down to.”

There have been a number of interesting analyses that identify religious elements in gender ideology, such as sacred castes, holy days, intolerance of dissent, belief in that which cannot be falsified on the basis of empirical evidence, ceremonial religious processions, belief in reincarnation and transubstantiation, moral prescriptions and proscriptions, revered texts, shunning and excommunication. Maybe Freedom From Religion Foundation apostates like Dawkins, Pinker and Coyne are right in sensing that a new religion is seeping into the atheist community.

The organization’s website describes the group’s purpose in these terms: “The Foundation works as an umbrella for those who are free from religion and are committed to the cherished principle of separation of state and church.” Perhaps, like charity, that principle of separation begins at home.

The first quote, calling us “trash” is by The Hateful Atheist, who deserves no attention. The second is a comment by reader Luisa on the post about Richard Dawkin’s resignation from the FFRF.

*Andrew Sullivan’s new column is called “Regime change of another shit-show?” He’s betting on the latter when Trump takes office. An excerpt:

My feelings will be, well, complex. There is a wave of relief that the decrepit Biden has finally gone, that the muggy political air has been cleared for a bit, and that the insistent Kulturkampf of the woke left may finally relent a little. We may even move out of our post-neocon paralysis in foreign policy.

At the same time, of course, I have what can only be called intermittent waves of nausea and panic triggered by the memory of the last, long four years of being tethered to a mercurial, malevolent bully who wouldn’t ever shut up or leave us alone.

But attached to that nausea is something else: boredom. He just doesn’t get to me the way he used to. When I read about his provocations toward Canada and the Panama Canal, for example, I merely found my eyes rolling gently backward. Good one, Donnie. But you’re not gonna trigger my amygdala this time. You busted it already.

Same with the Bobby Kennedy nonsense and the Elon Musk madness — a man whose political judgment seems as finely honed as an autistic 14-year-old who just discovered TikTok. Musk is an American genius in some things. No question about that. But so, so fragile and immature, as Sam Harris gently dissects here.

. . .What would I hope for in Trump 2.0? I’d say a coherent evolution of the GOP into a classically conservative party: leery of big government and foreign interventionism, culturally conservative and pro-family, champion of Medicare and Social Security, restrictive of immigration, defender of color-blindness and merit. I would be thrilled if they really got rid of DEI throughout the federal government and made federal college funding conditional on ending DEI initiatives in higher education. Vance gets it, I think, and he remains the best hope for a serious new right. But if Trump were the necessary reagent to bring this about, he’s also an obstacle to it. He doesn’t have the message discipline, legislative skills, and strategic cunning to pull it off.

What do I fear? Among the possible horribles: some kind of dumb-ass Trump overreach on immigration, prompting far-left street protests/riots, followed by some leap into the draconian dark with the US military on the streets, its reputation in the toilet; a spike in inflation caused by tariffs and an economic downturn as cheap immigrant labor disappears; a crisis over Taiwan that we bungle. Or yet another criminal move by Trump precipitating another crisis in the rule of law.

What do I expect? Not much. Trump has two years with a razor-thin margin in the Congress before he becomes a lame duck. His team currently has no agreed-upon legislative strategy — one big bill via reconciliation? two bills with immigration control first? tariffs before tax cuts? — and this never bodes well. The Speaker himself hangs by a thread. When I think of Reagan and Thatcher, I recall shrewd legislative outreach, a plan for economic pain and then relief, and a strategy designed not to get too far over the skis (Thatcher took her own sweet time to take on union power, as Andrew Neil remembers in the Dishcast this week; Reagan was always aware of going too far). No such foresight is currently visible to me in Trump world.

I don’t expect much, either, and never thought that Trump was going to do even a quarter of the stuff he promised (threatened) to do.  And no, I don’t hope that Trump 2.0 will produce a coherent evolution of the GOP.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has insomnia:

From Stacy: radium suppositories! Perfectly harmless!

From Jesus of the Day:

From somewhere on Facebook:

From Masih, a video showing how global Iranian youth really are, even though the regime prevents them from learning about other countries.

From BTS to Billie Eilish; Iranian youth know global icons, but have no idea who Khamenei is. This is the real Iran the West never shows.

Hey @khamenei_ir, you and your outdated clerics may think you control the narrative, but these young rebels are proving you can’t even… pic.twitter.com/1daaSJ0KQD

— Masih Alinejad Read More