Since the IDF entered Gaza after October 7, we’ve seen many photos and videos of the vast underground network there. Now that the IDF is in southern Lebanon, it has discovered an even more sophisticated network of tunnels. In Gaza, Israel found the tunnels after Hamas’ attack on southern Israel. In Lebanon, Hezbollah was still in the readiness stage for a massive and deadly invasion of northern Israel:
According to IDF spokesman Brig. Gen. Daniel Hagari, the complex was designed for a Radwan battalion to arrive, suit up, then head into Israel on foot and on motorbikes.
IDF forces captured the complex late last week and found anti-helicopter missiles, mortar shells, rifles and other munitions.
One of the operatives was holed up in the bunker, and was killed by the Air Force.
Some of these tunnels were right next to UN posts in the region:
Note that preparations with Iran for the October 7 attack by Hamas began in the first year of the Biden administration. No coincidence.
Also, the US has issued this threat – to Israel:
The Biden Administration’s warning to suspend arms to Israel unless the “humanitarian situation” in Gaza improves is deeply disturbing. Israel strongly denies that any crisis exists and works daily to ensure a fully adequate food supply to Gaza. Though I’ve spent my career…
Notably, the letter from U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was addressed to Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, bypassing Netanyahu.
The letter demands that Israel take concrete steps to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza within 30 days. In addition to ensuring regular aid transfers, the U.S. also calls on Israel to allow Red Cross visits to Palestinian detainees and to halt Knesset legislation that would prevent the Palestinian aid agency UNRWA from operating in Israel.
The deeper implication of the Blinken-Austin letter is that if Israel does not address the humanitarian crisis in northern Gaza within 30 days, it could face a severe arms crisis, as the U.S. continues to delay shipments of heavy bombs. Failure to meet the U.S. demands could jeopardize the continuation of military aid, which requires approval from both Blinken and Austin.
It seems it was a mistake for Israel to trust the US. But for a long time, support for Israel was bipartisan. That ended with Obama, and the Biden administration (otherwise known as Obama’s third term) has continued the confrontational hostility, which has increased in this election year in order to placate the Democrats’ very large left flank.
The partial remains of Andrew “Sandy” Irvine are believed to have been found on the slopes of Mount Everest, a century after he died alongside his fellow British climber George Mallory while attempting – or just possibly returning from – the first ascent of the mountain.
The two men, part of a British expedition to climb the north-east ridge, were last seen making a push for the summit on 8 June 1924. They never returned, leading to one of the most enduring mysteries in mountaineering – whether the two men died after reaching the summit, as members of their team believed.
Mallory’s remains were found in 1999, and last month, a team of climbers and film-makers discovered a foot encased in a climbing boot and sock – on which was sewn a label identifying it as Irvine’s.
If you go to the link and look at the photo of the label (it can’t be embedded here for copyright reasons), you’ll see something very much like what I use to sew into my clothing when I went to sleep-away camp. Of course, come to think of it, although that didn’t happen 100 years ago, it was – well, let’s just say a very long time ago.
The finding of the foot, sock, and boot doesn’t solve the mystery of whether the men reached the summit or not. I like to think they did, but my guess is that we’ll never know.
Prof Joe Smith, director of the Royal Geographical Society, said of the discovery: “Sandy was an exceptional figure and made a significant contribution to our understanding of Everest and the Himalaya. This discovery of his remains provides an element of closure for his relatives and the wider mountaineering community, and we are grateful to Jimmy and his team for enabling this and ensuring Sandy is in safe hands.”
On behalf of the 16,000 men and women represented by the National Border Patrol Council, we strongly support and endorse Donald J. Trump for President of the United States.
(2) I haven’t written about this yet, but it’s pretty spectacular:
SpaceX’s last ~40 hours:
– launch of history’s largest and most powerful rocket, Starship, completing the first-ever midair catch of a rocket booster and an on-target ocean landing of the upper stage
– launch of Falcon Heavy with an interplanetary NASA spacecraft headed to one… pic.twitter.com/Xv9ZyBpkEG
(3) Kamala Harris consents to an interview with Fox’s Bret Baier. My guess is that he will go fairly easy on her. Hope I’m wrong about that.
(4) CBS recently edited Harris’ interview to make her seem smarter, and now CBS has edited Speaker Johnson’s interview to make him seem stupider.
(5) There’s no love lost between Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi these days. Pelosi herself said that they haven’t spoken since he got the boot as a 2024 candidate:
Pelosi (D-CA) spoke with British journalist Jonathan Freedland in a recent episode of “The Guardian’s Politics Weekly America” podcast where she revealed Biden has not spoken to her since he was forced out.
“Not since then, no,” she said. “But I’m prayerful about it.”
By the way – do you agree with me that Biden has seemed somewhat more with it ever since it happened? Maybe he’s been getting more rest.
Ana Kasparian is – or used to be until recently – a “progressive journalist.” But she’s had one of those mugged by reality experiences – literally [my emphasis]:
“The Young Turks” co-host Ana Kasparian explained what drove her to ditch the Democratic Party while on Jillian Michaels’ “Keeping It Real” podcast on Monday.
The progressive media host described feeling “politically homeless” over the past few years, as she started seeing an intolerance to debate and the free exchange of ideas as well as an embrace of soft-on-crime policies by the left that she believed were detrimental to society.
She ripped efforts to “demonize and even dehumanize the other side” while admitting she used to be a person who believed you could not be friends with conservatives or someone who supported former President Trump. …
Kasparian said a turning point for her was when she was scolded by liberals after confessing she was fearful to leave her house after being sexually assaulted by a homeless man while walking her dog in Los Angeles in 2022.
I want to pause here and point out what grabbed my attention. The first thing is that, although I’m not familiar with her work as a “media host,” if she was on “The Young Turks” she was definitely to the left. So for someone such as that – who is publicly affiliated with that wing of the party and whose livelihood depends on it – to go through a political change experience, the incident that sparks it would ordinarily be fairly dramatic as well as something that hits in a very personal way. After all, the left has had a “strong intolerance to debate” as well as “soft-on-crime policies” for many years. And yet Kasparian only began her change journey after her 2022 experience.
That’s not a criticism by me, by the way. I applaud her for waking up to the situation rather than denying it, however late her change occurred. She goes on:
“Before I knew it, I started getting these messages, and it’s really, really harsh stuff, about how, ‘You are painting a picture of the homeless community. How could you be like this? These are your unhoused neighbors and they need help,’” she said of the negative messages she received.
“A few people accused me of being racist, even though I had never disclosed the race of the individuals who did this to me. And in fact, they were white,” Kasparian continued.
Does any of that ring a bell for you? It immediately reminded me of the story Barack Obama told in 2008 about his own grandmother, that “typical white person” who raised him and whom he casually threw under the bus in his effort to give a lofty speech about race in America. To refresh your memory, I wrote this at the time:
And along the way [Obama] managed to make what I felt was one of the single most revoltingly self-serving statements I’ve ever heard in a speech. …:
“I can no more disown [pastor Wright] than I can my white grandmother—a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”
And please read what actually happened to Obama’s grandmother as he previously related the story in his book. Turns out she was nearly mugged, and her allegedly racist comment was made not in front of Obama but reported secondhand by his grandfather. Obama’s grandmother appears to have mentioned to the grandfather that the aggressive panhandler who bothered her was black, and the grandfather told Obama that was the real reason she was afraid.
I’m sure you can see the parallels here, and the way Obama’s example of what counts as racist remarks set an example for the sort of reactions Kasparian got. Of course, it’s not just due to Obama. But I strongly believe that this sort of reaction became more common during his candidacy and presidency: that one cannot speak ill of a person from a leftist-protected group – be it a black person or an “unhoused” person or an “undocumented” person or whatever – even though that person has obviously acted in such a way that it is appropriate to speak critically of him or her.
So that’s what Kasparian ran into. It’s astounding that she was shocked by the reaction she got, but apparently she was. I think it’s because, until it happened to her, it was easy for her to just tell herself that other people – people on the right who said similar things – were bigots because that’s just how they were already defined. She knew she wasn’t a bigot, plus of course she also knew her assailant wasn’t even black and that it was merely an assumption of her holier-than-thou critics that he was. But they were treating her the way Obama spoke of his “typical white person” of a grandmother.
Here’s more of Kasparian’s story, which ends this way for now:
Today I’m less certain and more curious than I was four years ago. I’ve made humiliating mistakes while covering political news because I was previously unwilling to consider or understand the perspective of Americans who vote differently from me.
That’s quite an admission, and I admire her for it. Few people are capable of it. What’s more:
The point of this new project is the pursuit of intellectual freedom and open mindedness. I want to nurture curiosity without fear of offending the sensibilities of loyal partisans. I reject arguments about the evils of platforming people who are considered too naughty to converse with. I want to facilitate dialogue.
I don’t know what my political identity or label is, and I’m not even sure I want to be pigeonholed. This is my effort in pursuing extreme honesty and humility in the quest for common ground and truth without the constraints of a tribal identity.
Last night I happened upon this video, which is relevant. The topic is the difficulty of changing one’s mind, and the ways in which people deny evidence that would cause them to do so:
Now Chris Rufo picks up on allegations that there was quite a bit of plagiarism in a book written by Kamala Harris with a co-author:
At the beginning of Harris’s political career, in the run-up to her campaign to serve as California’s attorney general, she and co-author Joan O’C Hamilton published a small volume, entitled Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. The book helped to establish her credibility on criminal-justice issues.
However, according to Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian “plagiarism hunter” who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world, Harris’s book contains more than a dozen “vicious plagiarism fragments.” Some of the passages he highlighted appear to contain minor transgressions—reproducing small sections of text; insufficient paraphrasing—but others seem to reflect more serious infractions, similar in severity to those found in Harvard president Claudine Gay’s doctoral thesis. (Harris did not respond to a request for comment.)
I doubt this will hurt her with anyone already planning to vote for her. And the fact that there is already a co-author dilutes the charges, as well.
There’s so much news on Harris and Walz every day that there’s no way I can cover it adequately, but suffice to say that the gist of it is that it’s going poorly for them. Just to take one example: Walz’s efforts to come across as a macho hunter (see this) – an effort that, to coin a phrase, has backfired. It puzzles me that anyone would think it a good approach in the first place, though. Do people really look at a photo of a person pheasant hunting and think, “wow, I hunt pheasants too, I think I’ll vote for this guy!”?
Along those lines we have this ridiculous ad. Was it meant to be funny, or what? I vote for “what”:
I’ve seen some very funny takedowns of it, and they’re all maximally unwoke. The ad strikes me as being tongue-in-cheek, but even if that’s true it falls incredibly flat. The tone is so off-putting and strange that it’s in the uncanny valley. Who on earth is this ad appealing to?
Nevertheless I counsel against false confidence. I have no idea who will win this election; about half of America would vote for a piece of seaweed if it was running against Donald Trump. Plus, there’s “rigging” and vulnerable voting security. But I must say that I’ve never seen a worse election campaign than that of Harris/Walz.
Launched from southern Lebanon, a drone was able to penetrate Israeli air defenses undetected and hit the Golani Brigade’s base some 40 miles into Israel from the border. It struck on Sunday just after 7pm – at dinner time – and while the military has not released any details about the impact site, photos from the scene make it clear the drone hit the base’s dining hall. …
Both the timing and the location of the strike suggest that Hezbollah had gathered enough intelligence and possesses the capabilities to maximize the number of casualties. The Golani Brigade is regarded as an elite Israeli infantry unit and has been deployed to southern Lebanon as part of Israel’s ground operation there.
Four soldiers were killed, and more than 60 others were injured, eight of them seriously, bringing the total number of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers killed since the start of the ground operation two weeks ago to at least 18.
Sunday’s assault is also the single bloodiest attack on IDF troops inside Israel since the beginning of the war last October.
If Israel didn’t have extremely good warning and interception systems, the death toll in Israel over the last year would have been far higher. But although those systems detect some drones, other drones can evade them and that’s what happened to the soldiers in the dining hall. They had no warning whatsoever.
More about the problem posed by drones can be found here:
Hezbollah has been operating drones, primarily for reconnaissance purposes, since before the Second Lebanon War in 2006. With the advancement of Iran’s unmanned vehicle program over the past two decades, Hezbollah, like other Iranian proxy organizations, has been equipped with a large number of cutting-edge Iranian-made tools for reconnaissance, attack, and target destruction.
The UAV that struck the military base was likely a “Mirsad” drone manufactured by the Iranians. It’s a small aircraft with an explosive warhead of about 44 pounds that can reach speeds of about 124 mph. …
Hezbollah holds an unknown quantity of heavy and large cruise missiles of the DR3 model, originating from Russian-made Tupolev drones converted into “suicide” vehicles that can reach ranges of over 124 miles with a heavy warhead of 661 pounds. These come with significant advantages but also clear drawbacks.
The heavy drone requires a massive launcher that must be placed in a building or on a truck and can be detected relatively easily. In recent weeks, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has successfully documented the destruction of several such drones hidden in civilian homes in southern Lebanon. So far, there is no known successful launch of this weapon …
[The article goes on to describe other types of drones in Hezbollah’s arsenal, and then this] … The Shahed-136 has so far proven to be one of the most significant assets in Hezbollah’s drone arsenal. It has a quiet electric motor and an extremely low radar signature, making it very hard to intercept. It has a range of almost 500 miles and an armor-piercing warhead of about 18 pounds. Due to its difficulty in interception, it is relatively slow and flies at a speed of only about 75 mph, a fraction of that of other suicide drones in Hezbollah’s possession.
However, its relatively simple systems give it another advantage – it’s very cheap, costing only $20,000 per unit, which means it can be held in large quantities, as Hezbollah does. It’s very easy to launch and needs only minimal ground space for deployment. All these qualities make it a perfect drone for attacking in a swarm tactic, as Hezbollah has already demonstrated.
Drones of this type are relatively new and military defenses all over the world are struggling to keep up with the threat they represent:
Tal Inbar, a senior research fellow at the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, explains that the defense establishment is not surprised by this: “The problem starts with topography. The terrain in Lebanon is mountainous, unlike the plain where Gaza is located. It’s carved with mountains and valleys and makes it very difficult to detect aircraft flying low and using the terrain to hide in it.” In conclusion, Inbar says: “We don’t yet have a system that’s a game-changer. Our success will come from the systems and a precise concept of operation.”
A possible partial solution to the threat is a return to using Vulcan cannons, which fire small shells at a tremendous rate and can be placed at many key points throughout the north as a complementary part of the interception array.
Additionally, the entry of a laser system into operational service can at least partially assist in closing gaps during drone swarms and improving interception capabilities.
It was a long long time ago – perhaps fifty years ago – when I first heard the claim that Christopher Columbus was Jewish. In the intervening years I’ve also read that it’s not so.
But that’s why it was no surprise to read an article about a study that purports to prove through DNA that Columbus actually was of Jewish origin:
To solve the mystery researchers conducted a 22-year investigation, led by forensic expert Miguel Lorente, by testing tiny samples of remains buried in Seville Cathedral, long marked by authorities there as the last resting place of Columbus, though there had been rival claims.
They compared them with those of known relatives and descendants and their findings were announced in a documentary titled “Columbus DNA: The true origin” on Spain’s national broadcaster TVE on Saturday.
“We have DNA from Christopher Columbus, very partial, but sufficient. We have DNA from Hernando Colón, his son,” Lorente said in the programme.
“And both in the Y chromosome (male) and in the mitochondrial DNA (transmitted by the mother) of Hernando there are traits compatible with Jewish origin.”
Around 300,000 Jews lived in Spain before the ‘Reyes Catolicos’, Catholic monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand, ordered Jews and Muslims to convert to the Catholic faith or leave the country. Many settled around the world. The word Sephardic comes from Sefarad, or Spain in Hebrew.
Then again, who names a Jewish kid “Christopher”? When I read the report it seemed to me more likely that Columbus had some Jewish ancestry but did not, as we currently say, “identify” as a Jew. And I see that some experts agree:
“The recent DNA evidence regarding Columbus is very interesting and helps to illuminate his biography and the era in which he lived. I would offer one caveat, though: While it indicates that Columbus had Jewish heritage, it does not indicate that Columbus was a professing, Jew,” said Jonathan Ray, professor of Jewish studies at Georgetown University. …
“For over a century, if not since his own lifetime, people have been obsessed with Columbus’s origins. He is a fascinating, flawed and enigmatic figure,” added Perelis, the author of the 2016 book Blood and Faith: Family and Identity in the Early Modern Sephardic Atlantic.
“I encourage people to read his own writings to appreciate his complex identity—he was an autodidact, who took advantage of the explosion of knowledge after the birth of printing to create an eclectic theology that had many Judaic elements—but in a deeply Christian, mystical vein,” Perelis said. “Genetics doesn’t make someone Jewish.”…
It sounds about right to me.
Jason Guberman, executive director of the American Sephardi Federation, goes on to say that he thinks Columbus’ ancestors were conversos. Perhaps. Of course, if Columbus was Italian as widely reported, it wouldn’t make as much sense although it’s also possible that his Italian-Jewish ancestors converted to Catholicism.
However, it is indeed the case that some of Columbus’ crew were conversos, and that the sailing coincided with the edict of expulsion issued by Ferdinand and Isabella.
Much more at the link.
NOTE: It’s also been known for quite some time that many Hispanics have a small percentage of Jewish DNA, unbeknownst to them. See this:
Now, unprecedented genetic research undertaken by dozens of professors from around the world has provided evidence that almost a quarter of Latinos and Hispanics have significant Jewish DNA. The study, published in Nature Communications in December 2018, revealed that the number of descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jewish communities is far higher than even the largest estimates previously suggested.
The last official approximation of the number of people in Latin America, conducted by the United Nations in 2016, resulted in a figure of over 650 million. Add to that assessment the 60 million or so Latinos and Hispanics in the U.S., as well as the data from earlier genetic research showing that around 20% of the current population of 60 million people in the Iberian Peninsula have Jewish ancestry and the statistic becomes staggering. There could be as many as 200 million descendants of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish communities around the world today.
The Jewish DNA connection is even more pronounced in Italy in southern Italians, although Columbus is said to have come from Genoa in the north.
“Pas de Quatre” is one of the oldest ballets about which we have any knowledge. It’s from the Romantic era, when female ballet dancers first went up on pointe although in softer shoes than we have today. The aesthetic for dancers was to be an ethereal otherworldly being, gossamer-light and intensely feminine:
On the night it premiered in London (12 July 1845), it caused a sensation with the critics and the public alike. The reason for this was that it brought together, on one stage, the four greatest ballerinas of the time – in order of appearance, Lucile Grahn, Carlotta Grisi, Fanny Cerrito, and Marie Taglioni. …
The steps demand that each area of classical ballet technique is executed. These areas include adagio movements, petite allegro, grand allegro, fast footwork, graceful changes of position, and the elegant and fluid arm movements that have become a signature element of Pas de Quatre. Each ballerina has an individual variation, which are performed in succession between an opening and finale that are danced by all the ballerinas together. These variations were choreographed for the ballerina premiering in each role, and were designed to display the best features of each. …
The order of appearance of the ballerinas was done by age, from youngest to oldest, to squelch further confrontations between them.
Here is a lithograph from that 1845 production:
The original choreography is mostly lost. But in 1941 the British choreographer Anton Dolin recreated it at least in spirit. I see that in the original cast of the revival was the dancer Mia Slavenska. Strangely enough, when I was a young child in the late 1950s she was in a ballet class I took in Manhattan. She was not the teacher but rather a fellow student. She was slightly past her prime but could still dance up a storm and was a figure of high glamour. It was quite an eclectic class in terms of the students, but I think it’s safe to say that she was by far the best dancer although not the only professional dancer in the class, and I was the worst of all.
But I digress.
Dolin’s 1941 choreography was a conscious throwback to the older style, and the dancers of the mid-20th century were close enough to the 19th century that I think they were able to conjure up some of the feel of the original – although of course, how would I really know? But I doubt it could be performed effectively today because technique has taken over and the style is completely different. If you watch this video, you may come to appreciate the more delicate touch of the old ways – which, by the way, nevertheless require a steely technique, especially in the petit allegro of the small jumps. The old-fashioned approach is particularly challenging in the port de bras (arm movements) and slightly-forward lean of the torso.
I believe this was filmed in 1978 although I’m not certain. That would have made the Cuban dancer Alicia Alonso (the one with the sharpest features) around 58 years old here; she danced well into her 70s despite having only partial eyesight for most of her life. The video is somewhat blurry but not too bad:
Carla Fracci, who dances the Cerrito role (her hair is parted and she’s not wearing a wreath), is one of my favorite dancers of all time. She resembled the old lithographs come to life. This is an earlier production (1968) in which I think she’s especially fine. I’ve cued up her solo:
(1) One of the strangest things about Obama’s scold on black men for not supporting Harris enough is that most polls still show a strong majority of black men supporting her. In fact, black men may just be the demographic of men supporting her most of all other ethnic groups of men. What Obama is really saying here is that Democrats should own black votes at about a 90% level, and that anything less is unacceptable.
?This is brutal to watch. Kamala Harris without a teleprompter is the Democrat Party’s worst nightmare:
“When we think about what’s at stake in this election – well it’s packed with some stuff! Some fundamental stuff! *cackles* I say rather articulately.” pic.twitter.com/2UEboEUkgW
