Monday, December 25, 2023
Merry Christmas
Sunday, December 24, 2023
"Die Hard" Is a Christmas Movie!
"Die Hard" IS a Christmas Movie!
I had fun putting this post together.
I ran across this right after Christmas and decided to post it on my blog for NEXT Christmas, I also have a meme that I use in December everytime the movie comes up.
My Wife doesn't think that "Die Hard" is a Christmas movie...I Disagree, I bought a couple of Christmas themed T-shirts and one of them looks like this..
The shirt will be washed then packed away for reappearance in2022 and 2023, Yes I wore it.
The debate over whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie or not rages anew every December. Fans of the Bruce Willis action classic will likely litigate this until the end of time. That debate extends to the cast and crew, as well. Recently, another star of the film weighed in to say yes, Die Hard is as Christmas as It’s a Wonderful Life.
De’voreaux White, who played Argyle, John McClane’s limo driver, recently wrote a piece for Newsweek about his time on the Bruce Willis classic and how he landed the gig. About halfway into the column, White lays the Christmas debate bare.
“Die Hard is one of the original action-packed movies, however, it’s also a Christmas cult classic,” he wrote. “That’s what it is; Argyle said so!”
White joins a growing list of people that worked on Die Hard that say it’s a Christmas movie. That includes the movie’s writer and director.
John McTiernan said his view on the movie changed over the years.
“We hadn’t intended it to be a Christmas movie, but the joy that came from it is what turned it into a Christmas movie,” the director said in a video for the American Film Institute last year.
Writer Steven E de Souza was unequivocal. Die Hard, he said, is more of a Christmas movie than White Christmas, the Bing Crosby classic. He laid out his argument during an appearance on the Script Apart podcast last year.
Steven E de Souza created a checklist that he believes all Christmas movies must meet. You can watch his dissertation on the subject below. But if you don’t have four minutes to spare, in short, he said Die Hard checks all of the boxes and then some.
If you think Die Hard is a Christmas movie, Bruce Willis is here to ruin the party, pal. The star of the movie says it’s not, and he wants you to stop asking him about it.
Fans and critics have wanted him to end this debate for years, but he never weighed in until 2018, 30 years after the movie came out.
“Die Hard is not a Christmas movie,” he said through gritted teeth at the end of his Comedy Central Roast. “It’s a g** da** Bruce Willis movie.”
This full-throated rebuke came after an evening of abuse from his friends and hired-gun comedians. So, take it with a grain of salt.
If he believes this way, then he’s in the minority. An IGN poll found that 78 percent of people believe Die Hard is a Christmas film. More than 18,000 people voted in favor of the idea. Only 5,000 said it’s not.
And it’s not an arbitrary distinction. One of the biggest criteria for a Christmas movie, for most of us, is that you watch the movie at Christmas time. You wouldn’t watch Rudolph or Frosty in June. A survey from DISH found that more people watched Die Hard at Christmas than they did Home Alone, Miracle on 34th Street, or The Santa Clause
Friday, December 22, 2023
Lufthansa buys the B737 after a 28-year Hiatus.
I thought this was interesting because Germany being involved in Airbus, although they do have Boeing Wide bodies in their fleet. I get the "Not putting all their eggs in one basket" philosophy and not being totally beholden to one manufacturer.
I remember being stationed in Stuttgart and seeing the Lufthanza 737's come screaming in because of the JT8D engines were not exactly quiet, LOL
I see those pictures and I can still hear those engines screaming.........And another memory, The airport would hire "jaegars" or Hunters to cull the rabbit populations every once and a while because those huge jackrabbits would FOD the hell out of a motor when one got ingested during a roll.
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Lufthansa was the launch customer for the 737-100, which made its first flight (pictured) in 1967 and entered service with the airline in 1968.
Credit: Boeing
Before Lufthansa finally signed an order for the Boeing 737-100 in early 1965, Boeing had to guarantee the airline that it would not cancel the program. Three years later, the 737 entered service with the German airline. Now, 58 years after its first order and 28 years after it last bought the type, Lufthansa is coming back to the aircraft.
The airline’s supervisory board on Dec. 19 approved of a firm order for 40 737 MAXs that could grow to 100 aircraft, including options. While Lufthansa has the flexibility to change to other versions closer to their delivery dates, the group’s priority is the 737-8. The carrier also ordered 40 Airbus A220-300s plus 20 options and secured 40 options for more A320neos. Deliveries are planned to start in 2026 and continue through 2032.
- Aircraft likely to be flown by subsidiaries
- The move should help negotiate pricing
“With today’s aircraft order, we are accelerating the largest fleet modernization in our company’s history,” says Detlef Kayser, an executive board member responsible for fleet and technology. “This increases our order list of around 200 aircraft to 280—plus an additional 120 purchasing options for further state-of-the-art short- and medium-haul aircraft. We are pleased that both Airbus and Boeing were able to convince us on all commercial and technological aspects. In addition to this, the decision for the Boeing 737-8 will also give us more flexibility for the procurement of short- and medium-haul aircraft in the future.”
“Our relationship with the Lufthansa Group has led to a number of industry-changing achievements, and we are delighted to see the 737 return to an original launch customer’s fleet,” Boeing Commercial Airplanes CEO Stan Deal says.
Lufthansa bought its last 737-300 in 1995, after having ordered a total of 146 since the aircraft’s launch. The airline never went for the 737 Next Generation (737NG) and has so far stayed away from the 737 MAX. Its last 737-300 was retired in 2016. The group has since become an all-Airbus narrowbody operator across its various subsidiaries: Lufthansa, Swiss, Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines and Eurowings. ITA Airways, in which Lufthansa is seeking to acquire a 41% stake, is also an all-Airbus airline. SunExpress, a leisure carrier jointly owned with Turkish Airlines, is operating a mixed 737NG and MAX fleet and purchased a further 90 737 MAXs at the Dubai Airshow in November.
According to company sources, one major factor in the decision was for Lufthansa Group to become less dependent on Airbus as a sole-source supplier of narrowbodies. In future campaigns, Lufthansa can now more credibly stage competitions between the A320neo and 737 MAX and likely achieve better pricing. Airbus narrowbody slots are sold out until 2030, and the aircraft-maker currently has little incentive for big discounts unless a strategic customer needs to be retained at all costs.
Unlike its narrowbodies, Boeing’s widebodies have significant exposure at Lufthansa Group. Swiss operates Boeing 777-300ERs. Austrian’s long-haul fleet consists of Boeing 767s and 777s. Lufthansa Airlines is one of the few operators of the Boeing 747-8 and has also begun introducing the Boeing 787-9. Lufthansa Cargo operates an all-777F fleet. And Lufthansa was part of the launching customer group for the 777-9, the first of which is now expected to arrive in mid-2025.
Through November, Boeing had received firm orders for 686 737 MAXs this year. In the same period, Airbus sold 1,248 A320neo-family aircraft, showing how much of a prestige win Lufthansa’s order must be for Boeing.
It is still unclear which of the group’s airlines will operate the new 737s, although they will not be deployed to the main brand serving the Munich and Frank-furt hubs nor to Swiss in Zurich. The MAXs could end up being operated at Eurowings, Austrian or Brussels Airlines given the size of the order. Lufthansa says the decision will be made at a later stage. Eurowings has a fleet of about 100 aircraft and could move over to the MAX if all options are exercised.
The 40 A220-300s Lufthansa ordered are slated for its new City Airlines affiliate. Swiss is the only A220 operator in the group, with nine -100s and 21 -300s in service. ITA Airways committed to 22 of the aircraft, with seven coming from Airbus and 15 sourced through Air Lease Corp. Delta Air Lines is by far the aircraft’s largest customer with orders for 131, followed by JetBlue Airways with 100 units. AirBaltic and Breeze Airways have bought 80 aircraft each, and Air France and Air Canada have committed to 60 each.
The Lufthansa A220 deal is a particular blow for Embraer, which had pitched the E2 in the competition against the A220.
City Airlines is planned to start operating feeder services at the Frankfurt and Munich hubs beginning with ex-Lufthansa A319s in 2024. The new affiliate was set up because an agreement allowing the group’s existing regional airline, Lufthansa CityLine, to operate larger mainline aircraft expires in 2027.
The group operates Mitsubishi CRJ-900s and Embraer 190 and 195s at CityLine, Air Dolomiti and Austrian but says it has no plans to buy new aircraft to replace them.
Tuesday, December 19, 2023
"Young Americans Turn against Social Security"
I have been out of town visiting my mom up in Tennessee and was unable to post.
I saw the article and read it, and unfortunately, I tend to agree with it to an extent. I have been planning my retirement without Social Security in it despite my paying into it since the early 1980's. I believe that they will put a "means" test on it when it comes for me to retire since I have my own retirement, they will find a way to either cut my benefits or deny me completely because it wouldn't be fair for me to have extra money when others will not. The politicians have been kicking this can down the road since the 1970's and it took off especially in the 1990's with the proliferation of SSDI and "Crazy Checks". that were paid out if you could prove that your kid was "mentally challenged" and a lot of people saw this as an extra income stream and had their kids certified for the extra money. My attitude was and still is that if they had left it alone for the old people, the money would be fine, but they opened it up as a piggy bank for a bunch of other stuff and squandered it.
Younger generations in the U.S., including millennials and Gen Zers, are much more likely to believe that the Social Security system needs reforming than those in their 60s and 70s.© Photo-illustration by Newsweek/Getty
Younger generations in the U.S., including millennials and Gen Zers, are much more likely to believe that the Social Security system needs reforming than those in their 60s and 70s, according to a recent survey conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies on behalf of Newsweek.
The poll was conducted on December 8 among a sample population of 1,500 eligible voters in the U.S.
Some 40 percent of respondents said they believe that the Social Security program currently pays out more to retirees than it is receiving in Social Security tax payments, while 26 percent disagreed with this statement.
Millennials (those aged between 27 and 42), Gen Zers (those aged between 18 and 26), and Gen Xers (those aged between 43 and 58) were more likely than boomers (those older than 59 years old) to think that Social Security should be reformed.
According to the poll, 56 percent of Gen Zers, 76 percent of millennials and 69 percent of Gen Xers believed the system should be reformed, against 50 percent of boomers.
There were also overwhelmingly more millennials (52 percent) thinking that the system isn't getting as many tax payments as it was handing out benefits to retirees than any other generations, including Gen Z (39 percent), Gen X (25 percent) and boomers (39 percent).
"In general, millennials and plurals—our name for Gen Z—are skeptical that Social Security benefits as robust as those retirees like me currently enjoy will be available to them when they retire," Morley Winograd, author of three books on the millennial generation, told Newsweek.
"They have been told by Republicans in Congress, seconded by deficit hawks in think tanks, that the money will run out before they can claim it," he said. "None of that is true. But, luckily, the younger generation's skepticism of experts and politicians will help prevent the kind of unnecessary tinkering with future, never present, Social Security payments that some older folks advocate."
While boomers are the richest generations on the planet, millennials remain burdened by the debt "many of them incurred by paying excessive and economically unjustified tuition prices when we decided to make them the first generation in American history to have the majority of the burden of paying for higher education fall on them and their parents," Winograd said.
The older generation has on average a net worth 12 times higher than millennials, who are worth an average of $100,000.
What's the State of the Social Security Program?
Social Security is currently facing an uncertain future as it is expected to face a 23 percent across-the-board benefit cut in 2033, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, unless something changes until then. For an average newly retired couple, that means $17,400 less.
Fixing the Social Security system is becoming an increasingly urgent issue, according to Richard Johnson, director of the Program on Retirement Policy at the Urban Institute, a Washington-based think tank, told Newsweek.
"By law, Social Security payments cannot exceed the program's resources. The program now pays out more in benefits than it collects in revenue," the expert said.
While the Social Security's trust fund is currently making up the difference, this trust fund is widely expected to run out by 2034. "When that happens, Social Security will be able to pay less than 80 percent of promised benefits," Johnson said, citing the conclusion reached by several experts.
"Unless policymakers fix Social Security's finances in the next 10 years, millions of retirees and people with disabilities would plunge into poverty."
For Johnson, the solution might involve cutting benefits or increasing taxes—a change that would be unpopular among retirees, but necessary. "Fixing Social Security sooner rather than later would share the pain of any benefit cuts or tax increases among more people, reducing the pain for later generations," Johnson said.
Winograd is a little more positive on the outlook of the program, saying that a resilient U.S. economy could keep Social Security afloat.
"Whether or not Social Security is able to maintain its current levels of payments or not depends on what assumptions you make about the performance of the U.S. economy in the future—an impossible thing to predict with any degree of accuracy," Winograd said.
"But, for instance, if the economy were to grow at the 5.2 percent rate GDP grew in the third quarter of this year, there would be no problem with Social Security benefits in the foreseeable future," he said.
"Of course, this is a difficult rate to sustain, but with disruptors like AI now starting to change the productivity rates of the U.S. economy in ways as profound as the internet and personal computing did in the go-go 1990s, there is no reason to believe that the U.S. economy won't continue to outperform the expectations of most economists, who are still waiting to see if the recession they forecasted for last year and the year before arrives," he added.
"And, besides, if the system does turn out to need more money, it can be quickly and equitably raised by simply removing the income cap on paying Social Security taxes, which is one of the more egregious regressive elements of our current tax laws and very unpopular with young voters now flooding the electorate."
Saturday, December 16, 2023
Win the War in the EW Spectrum
Why did I post this article? my long time fellow bloggers know what I did in the service and it has been a bit since I did anything like this on my blog. My specialty was Sigint and how the Soviet Army did its thing. my knowledge is so antiquated and out of date, but the interest still is there. I know that the Chinese are working on their stuff preparing for war and the Soviets er I mean Russians have a lot of good equipment, and we have been mired in low intensity conflicts for 20 years and haven't been preparing for a peer or a near peer conflict plus we have a lot of the "DEI" stuff running rampants through the ranks, I have a real concern that we will get our asses handed to us and I have no faith on the clowns in DC to do the right thing or senior leadership either.
I snagged this from a 3rd party email from work.
Credit: L3Harris Technologies
We have all seen the grim images of tanks rolling through muddy fields and buildings reduced to rubble by missile strikes. However, some of the most crucial battles taking place in Ukraine are invisible to the naked eye. In recent months, the Russian military has stepped up its use of the electromagnetic spectrum, executing advanced electronic warfare tactics to disrupt, deny and/or degrade Ukrainian drones and other systems. Russia has demonstrated an ability to intercept and decrypt tactical communications in real time—capabilities that Ukrainian military leaders say are slowing their counteroffensive.
U.S. Air Force practitioners of electronic warfare (EW) are in a sense operating with one eye blindfolded. In today’s environment, they are relying on outdated information and are hamstrung by slow processes and systems that may fail to take advantage of all available information sources across the electromagnetic operating environment. They lack an integrated architecture connecting all echelons—from distributed jammers to edge nodes to U.S.-based processing centers—that would enable them to analyze, reprogram and command and control (C2) disaggregated electromagnetic spectrum operations (EMSO) assets effectively at the speed of need.
Make no mistake: If the U.S. loses the fight over control of the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS), it loses the fight in all other domains. To ensure dominance in future conflicts, the U.S. Defense Department must significantly accelerate investments in building out EMSO capabilities. By modernizing an EMSO data architecture and taking full advantage of widely employed commercial technologies, we can give our warfighters a critical edge to outsmart and outmaneuver adversaries.
The Air Force has made data the centerpiece of its innovation agenda, with plans to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and robust, cloud-to-edge networks in order to dramatically shorten the time it takes to deliver mission-critical data to warfighters as part of an improved electronic warfare integrated reprogramming process. This approach would enable real-time electromagnetic battle management of distributed offensive and defensive EMS effects in support of long-range Air Force kill chains.
Incremental improvements will not get the U.S. military where it needs to go in the time frame required. A major shift must occur to move from a platform-centric EW approach to a data-centric, enterprise-wide construct comprised of smaller, smarter and connected EW systems that are decentralized across the battlespace.
Many of the technologies underlying this new approach are already used in the commercial world. Today’s warfighter is familiar with distributed smart sensors, onboard analytics, integrated communications, AI, machine learning, cloud computing and other technologies at the heart of our mobile society. To achieve future EMS dominance, these same technologies and concepts must apply to EMSO and EW integrated reprogramming. Here’s how:
• Leverage a cloud-connected EMSO data-sharing architecture. A cloud-connected data architecture provides a flexible, scalable and cost-effective foundation for many of the Air Force priorities, including the ability to integrate software from a “marketplace” of open applications with no vendor lock.
• Deploy an advanced edge-processing node. An enterprise node would consolidate critical EW enablers into a single “roll-on/-roll-off” device to bring advanced, open standards processing, databases and applications to the combat edge.
• Harness the power of AI and machine learning. Integration of AI and machine learning algorithms into the edge-processing node enables rapid identification and classification of unknown threat signals and assists with C2 through AI-informed EMSO development in real time.
The future is now. To invert the adversary’s cost curve, industry must deliver solutions that use data as a weapon. Establishing a resilient, cloud-to-edge architecture that supports dynamic reprogramming and electromagnetic battle management is a vital path toward weaponizing EW data and achieving overmatch.
U.S. military leadership must retain the strategic vision and willpower to invest in these capabilities while establishing an acquisition framework that enables industry and academia to contribute to enterprise-wide solutions. Furthermore, the Air Force must have confidence that these rapidly developed technologies will harness data in unprecedented ways that inform how it operates and helps it win in future threat environments.
U.S. adversaries have studied the EMSO playbook for decades. They are using widely available technologies to field more advanced systems. It is time for the U.S. to do the same. After all, the battlespace may be invisible, but it holds the key to mission success across land, sea, air, space and cyberspace. Most important: Spectrum dominance increases the chances of bringing soldiers, sailors and airmen home safely. And that is a goal worth pursuing
Wednesday, December 13, 2023
Quora Question "What are the benefits of Gun Registration?"
I saw this question and decided to answer it honestly, I did it while I was on break at work, and here and there if you know what I mean. I decided to give it a fair answer than rant and scream about it. here is the answer I gave on the Quora forum:
Initially it could be used to track the ownership of a firearm in the case of its use in a crime and if the owner can account for it. Basically, narrows down the subject pool. That being said, once the government goes from benevolent to tyrannical, once the government has that information, once they decide that a certain class of people cannot own any sort of firearms, they already know who they are. This happened to the German Jews in the 1930's when their rights as German citizens were stripped by edicts from the Nazi government, one of them being that they had to wear that “Star of David” on their clothing, and all jew owned businesses had to identify as such with signs. This of course led to “ Krystallnacht” where the brownshirts trashed Jewish owned businesses because they were blamed for the “Reichtag” fire which the Nazi's actually set but used to blame the Jews. The results were the destruction of the identified Jewish businesses. They also had their firearms seized earlier because the German government knew about them before the Nazi's took over and the Nazi's used the power of government to strip away the means of defense of their political opponents. You can't do the “Final solution to the Jewish problem “if they make it difficult on you. “ It can't happen today” is the phrase bandied about, but I will bring up a recent history event….Covid…remember during the height of the scare there were talks of stripping the rights of the “unvaxxed” putting them in camps, taking their kids away “ firing them, and banishing them from society, all in the name of “ the public good”, the same language used by the brownshirts against the Jews in Germany in the 1930's. Remember the hysteria? The fear? Certain groups tapped into that fear for their own purposes. We as a society are still recovering from it. Australia did put people that refused to vaxx into camps. As I recall in Victoria I believe, going by memory here. That is one of the fears is that if the government goes full tyrannical, and your guns are already seized they can do to you and yours with no repercussions. Sure, they can put you in a camp but if they get pain in the process, it slows them down.
I have used this quote before, the government is to serve the people, not the other way around, and right now there are a lot of people that believe that they by their schooling, family and beliefs have it in their hearts that they know what is best for “us” and if we just would get with the program under their tutelage utopia will arrive. Well real life doesn’t work like that, they believe that there should be 2 classes of people, the rich and the poor and the poor would be beholding to them for leadership, guidance, sustenance and so forth. Such people if they depend on you, will do what you say. Well, the middle class we tend to have our own wealth and tend as a group to be armed. so, they can’t run roughshod over us because we don’t depend on them.
It is a truism of history, registration always eventually to confiscation. And after confiscation, comes persecution, The Turks did it to the Armenians, Stalin did it to the Ukrainians, The Holomdor is real to them. Pol Pot did it to his fellow Cambodians, and there are more examples in history. The truth of it is that there comes no good if the government knows how among the citizens are armed. kinda keeps them honest. And if someone says “You can’t fight an F-15” or some other high tech weapon system, as I recall the Vietnamese did pretty good as did the Afghans.
Sunday, December 10, 2023
Campus Antisemitism is on the Rise and soon an Elite school degree will be worthless.
I saw this on the NY Post and it had a lot of information that I wasn't aware of, I wondered where all these hamas supporters came from and they all looked "middle eastern" with the usual "useful idiots mixed in and it is soo bad that they have had to cancel Christmas celebrations because of the disruptions by the hamas supporters, and this isn't an isolated thing, this is happening all over the country, having these "supporters" disrupt the Christmas celebrations...I guess it tracks because they are non believers because they believe in marxism or islam. so disrupting Christmas services is a calling for them.
The article from the New York Post.
After Oct. 7, the public was shocked at what it saw and heard on America’s campuses.
Americans knew previously they were intolerant, leftwing and increasingly non-meritocratic.
But immediately after Oct. 7 — and even before the response of the Israeli Defense Forces — the sheer student delight on news of the mass murdering of Israeli victims seemed akin more to 1930s Germany than contemporary America.
Indeed, not a day goes by when a university professor or student group has not spouted antisemitic hatred.
Often, they threaten and attack Jewish students, or engage in mass demonstrations calling for the extinction of Israel.
Why and how did purportedly enlightened universities become incubators of such primordial hatred?
After the George Floyd riots in 2020, reparatory admissions — the effort to admit diverse students beyond their numbers in the general population — increased.
Elite universities like Stanford and Yale boasted that their so-called “white” incoming student numbers had plunged to between 20% and 40%, despite whites making up 68%-70% of the general population.
The abolition of the SAT requirement, and often the comparative ranking of high-school grade point averages, have ended the ancient and time-proven idea of meritocracy.
Brilliant high school transcripts and test scores no longer warrant admissions to so-called elite schools.
One result was that the number of Jews has nosedived from 20%-30% of Ivy League student bodies during the 1970s and 1980s to 10%-15%.
Jewish students are also currently stereotyped as “white” and “privileged” — and thus considered as fair game on campus.
At the same time, the number of foreign students, especially from the oil-rich Middle East, has soared.
Most are subsidized by their homeland governments.
They pay the full, non-discounted tuition rates to cash-hungry universities.
Huge numbers of students have entered universities who would not have been admitted by the very standards universities until recently claimed were vital to ensure their own competitiveness and prestige.
Consequently, they are no longer the guarantors of topflight undergraduates and professionals from their graduate programs.
Faculty are faced with new lose/lose/lose choices of either diminishing their course requirements, or inflating their grades, or facing charges by Diversity/Equity/Inclusion commissars of systematic bias in their grading — or all three combined.
The net result is that there are now thousands of students from abroad, especially from the Middle East, far fewer Jewish students and student bodies that demand radical changes in faculty standards and course work to accommodate their unease with past standards of expected student achievement
And, presto, an epidemic of antisemitism naturally followed.
In such a vacuum, advocacy “-studies” classes proliferated, along with faculty to teach them.
“Gender, black, Latino, feminist, Asian, queer, trans, peace, environmental and green”-studies courses demand far less from students, and arbitrarily select some as “oppressed” and others as “oppressors.”
The former “victims” are then given a blank check to engage in racist and antisemitic behavior without consequences.
Proving to be politically correct in these deductive gut courses rather than pressed to express oneself coherently, inductively and analytically from a repertoire of fact-based knowledge explains why the public witnesses faculty and students who are simultaneously both arrogant and ignorant.
At some universities “blacklists” circulate warning “marginalized” students which professors they should avoid who still cling to supposedly outdated standards regarding exam-taking, deadlines and absences.
All these radical changes explain the current spectacle of angry students citing grievances, and poorly educated graduates who have had little course work in traditional history, literature, philosophy, logic or the traditional sciences.
Universities and students have plenty of money to continue the weaponization of the university, given their enormous tax-free endowment income.
Nearly $2 trillion in government-subsidized student loans are issued without accountability or reasonable demands that they be repaid in timely fashion.
Exceptions and exemptions are the bible of terrified and careerist administrators.
Faced with an epidemic of antisemitism, university administrators now claim they can do little to curb the hatred.
But privately they know that should the targets of similar hatred be instead blacks, gays, Latinos or women they would expel the haters in a nanosecond.
What is the ultimate result of once-elite campuses giving 70%-80% of their students as becoming hotbeds of dangerous antisemitism and watered-down curricula that cannot turn out educated students?
The Ivy league and their kindred, so-called elite campuses may soon go the way of Disney and Bud Light.
They think such a crash in their reputations is impossible given centuries of accustomed stature.
But the erosion is already occurring — and accelerating.
At the present rate, a Stanford law degree, a Harvard political science major or a Yale social science BA will soon scare off employers and the general public at large.
These certificates will signify not proof of humility, knowledge and decency, but rather undeserved self-importance, vacuousness and fanaticism — and all to be avoided rather than courted.
Friday, December 8, 2023
"I've reported on Hamas for over a Decade"
I saw this on CNN of all things......dang......
Still busy with work, working Saturday also.....
Editor’s Note: Ilene Prusher is a journalist and author who spent two decades covering the Middle East. She teaches journalism at Florida Atlantic University, where she is the digital director of MediaLab@FAU. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.
We arrive at Erez Checkpoint. Israeli soldiers thumb through our passports, examine every item in our bags, then wave us through. After a long walk through a barricaded no-man’s land, Palestinian officers register our names and passport numbers, then press us for a list of people we’re planning to meet. Our Palestinian fixer intervenes, reminds the guys with the guns to be nice to us foreigners, and presto: We’re in Gaza. On the list of the three or four people we’re scheduled to see in the course of the day is at least one senior official in Hamas.
Ilene Prusher - Jordana Miller© Provided by CNN
This is a routine I participated in, on and off, for 16 years of my life while reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the American media throughout the 1990s and 2000s, up until my last trip to Gaza in January 2009 at the end of another Israel-Hamas war that shocked the world and caused needless death and destruction. Later, in 2014, I covered a far deadlier 50-day Israel-Hamas war for TIME magazine, this time from southern Israel, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, mainly because by then I had two toddlers at home and no longer believed entering Gaza was worth the risk.
In nearly every trip I made — and there were too many to count — I met with Hamas officials, like seemingly every good journalist did. Like many others, I was curious to hear their viewpoint and, back when peacemaking was a thing and Israel was turning territory over to the Palestinian Authority, I was keen to understand why they wouldn’t get on board with the land-for-peace deal known as the Oslo Accords.
The Oslo process for dividing the land with Israel to create a zone of Palestinian autonomy — and possibly statehood — had been embraced, at least tepidly, by the late Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). But Hamas, the PLO’s most significant Palestinian rival, was fundamentally opposed to peace with Israel, insisting the only path forward was “armed resistance” aimed at eradicating Israel. Throughout the 1990s, when the peace process was moving forward, Hamas sought to derail it by blowing up Israeli buses and cafes. By the early 2000s, when peacemaking ground to a halt, they had killed hundreds of Israeli civilians in this manner, leading to further separation of Israeli and Palestinian societies.
The Hamas leaders and spokesmen who agreed to our interviews were rarely what you would expect of representatives of a terrorist organization. They were men who were fluent in English, logical-sounding about their grievances and highly educated to boot, usually in engineering or medicine. They portrayed themselves as part of a “political wing” of Hamas, one that was unaware of what was being planned by the more secretive military wing. Often, these spokesman insisted, they had no idea that an attack was imminent.
By and large, we reporters ate it up. Our editors wanted us to have access to this shadowy group and to explain its lure for average Palestinians — and in particular, the strategic challenge it presented to Arafat. By claiming that the organization’s left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing, Hamas made it easy for themselves to evade tough questions — like, why target civilians rather than military targets? — and convenient for so many of us to feel like we were putting our fingers on the Palestinian pulse rather than sitting down for tea with terrorists.
So we sipped their bitter brews, and they talked a good game. “Look, we take no joy in seeing Israeli civilians get blown up,” one spokesman told me — back in the day when Hamas’ worst weapon was a suicide bomber in an urban area — before going on to insist that these attacks were the only rational answer to what they saw as the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. When I asked why Hamas wouldn’t take a crack at negotiations instead, they responded that there was no point in talking to Israel — and Israel wasn’t exactly jumping to talk to Hamas either. The spokesman insisted I not use his name with that almost-empathetic quote about not taking joy in killing Israelis. In retrospect, I wonder if he said it because he knew it sounded good to the Western ear.
Hamas played other games with language, presenting themselves as reasonable by saying that its leaders would in theory agree to a long-term hudna, or truce, with Israel. Their words sound nice — who wouldn’t chose a lasting truce over the horrific killing and destruction we are now witnessing? — but the reality was that Hamas would never ink a permanent deal with Israel because, their leaders told me, Islam forbade it.
And then there were the outright distortions. Ahead of October 7, Hamas duped Israel into thinking that the organization was uninterested in inflaming the situation and wanted Gazans’ lives to improve. With that in mind, Israel actually relaxed the Gaza border crossings in late September — a week before the attack — to let more Palestinian laborers into Israel. Sadly, the opening to thousands of additional workers from Gaza turned Israel into an information sieve from which Hamas reportedly gathered intelligence for its attack last month.
Hamas also played fast and loose with facts they gave us reporters. During the first major Israel-Hamas war in 2008 to 2009, known as Operation Cast Lead, Hamas said that fewer than 50 of the 1,400 dead in Gaza had been combatants. But more than a year later, Hamas’ interior minister acknowledged in an interview with the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper that between 600 and 700 of its militants were killed in that war. In that and in almost every war since, Hamas or other militant groups in Gaza launched rockets that fell unintentionally on their own citizens, but rarely if ever, owned up to the error, instead blaming Israel for the deaths.
Yet how often did that stop us from reporting what they told us? That dynamic was on display last month when many mainstream media outlets immediately repeated Hamas’ claim that an Israeli air strike had devastated a hospital and killed a big round figure of 500 Palestinians. More details later emerged, indicating that it was most likely Islamic Jihad, a Hamas rival organization, that had fired an errant missile that landed on the site, and that the casualty count was much lower.
Hospitals once again took center stage in the war when Israel surrounded the Al-Shifa Hospital after claiming that Hamas had operated out of it. Hamas has long denied using hospitals despite proof that they do, and did the same this time even though there is evidence that weapons were found on site and tunnels have been built to allow the organization to use Al-Shifa as a base.
Reporters can feel they have little choice but to rely on Hamas’ numbers and denials because there are few reporters left in Gaza and few options to verify anything independently. But many journalists could be more transparent about how they don’t have independent verification and provide context on how unreliable Hamas has proved to be in the past.
One thing already clear after October 7 is that members of Hamas didn’t sound like they experienced “no joy” in the slaughter of more than 1,200 Israelis and the kidnap of more than 200. Hamas gunmen laughed as they committed the attacks, according to eyewitnesses, and they recorded themselves as they gleefully rampaged through Israeli homes.
Did Hamas change? Or was too much of the media too willing to see them as something other than what they always were?
It’s probably a bit of both. Although founded in 1987 as an expressly Palestinian organization, there is evidence that Hamas has been influenced by the style and brutality of global jihadist groups in general, and ISIS in particular. Still, Hamas’ focus has remained on “the Zionist entity,” not the US, other Western targets or other religions per se. And to the extent there was once a political wing that might have had different aspirations, October 7 left no doubt that the military wing is now the center of Hamas power and strategy.
It’s not as if most of us in the media portrayed Hamas as innocent or moderate. But for years, too many of us treated the group more like an opposition party with occasional violent outbursts than a terrorist organization. In fact, while interning at Reuters at the start of my career in the mid-’90s, I learned that we were never to call Hamas or Islamic Jihad terrorists, only militants. Several outlets mai
Journalists working in conflict zones too often pull punches in the interest of appearing neutral, or perhaps to ensure that they stay in the good graces of the gunmen in charge. Many of the questions that now reverberate in my head have no easy answers, but I can say that the ultimate goal for too many of us in the media was to ensure continued access to the big story, not to consider whether the people we were dealing with were good actors or reliable sources. Though it’s important for readers and viewers to hear Palestinian voices as well as those of Israelis, treating Hamas like a legitimate government was perhaps the worst of bothsidesism.
In 2014, a German journalist was heavily criticized for embedding himself with ISIS for a documentary. Trying to explain such a despicable group of murderers went beyond the pale, critics said. Weren’t there some actors whose behavior was so heinous that they didn’t deserve a platform or even so much as a quote, which might only afford them a measure of legitimacy?
Is this the approach we should have taken with Hamas, or ought to moving forward? In an ideal world, yes, but in this dystopian one we’re watching unfold, that may be too much to expect. In the meantime, if journalists continue to interview members of Hamas, we should report their words more critically and not take their comments at face value. We should provide context that notes how unverifiable their information is and how poor their track record for accuracy has been. And we should not shy away from asking ourselves whether our interviews afford them too much legitimacy and give them more of a platform than they deserve.
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