Monday, April 29, 2024

Tweets / Xeets Of The Day

 

He must've taken President Biden's WHCA remarks to heart --

 

 

Sunlight is the best disinfectant --

 


Evergreen --

 


It's a conundrum --

 


It might be a conundrum if Thomas had ethics --

 


... or shitstains like Bill "Low" Barr --

 


... or lying MAGAt sleazebags like Santos/ Kitara/ Anthony Devolder --

 


Bootsie kisses the ass ... er, ring.  Weak!  --

 


The MAGAt mindhive is alive and well in Georgia and New Jersey --

 

 


Dem Rep. Moskowitz trolls potential Trump VP pick, puppy killer Noem --


 

 

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Comments As Week 2 Of Trump Trial Begins




Salon.com's Chauncey Devega has collected some observations as the second week of the Malignant Loser / Don Snoreleone / Rip van Stinkle's trial in the hush money / election interference case begins. Some excerpts: 

Cheri Jacobus, ex-Republican strategist:

"Trump seems small, shriveled, old, pathetic, and weak, falling asleep, (among other things), and whining in pressers and on Truth Social to the point where anyone else would have been tossed in the slammer for violating the gag order. He has no family with him, no friends, and mistakenly thought the streets around the courthouse were blocked because the streets were void of pro-Trump protesters. In fact, the main street was open and only one Trump supporter showed up. [snip]

 Trump's cartoonish image of "strength" fed to the unwashed masses at his rallies and who watch FOX News does not hold up in the harsh reality of a Manhattan courtroom. His makeup is gaudy and weird, he doesn't get the special lighting, there is no music for his "entrance", and no sea of MAGA red hats."  (our emphasis)

Dr. John Gartner, psychologist and author of "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President":

"Trump's trial in Manhattan is providing more evidence of his apparent cognitive decline. Trump fell asleep 4 out of 6 days of his own trial. Falling asleep is not in and of itself particularly specific to dementia. I fall asleep at dinner parties, because I’m old and work too hard. Bill Clinton was famous for it. But can you remember a criminal defendant repeatedly unable to stay awake at his own trial? I can’t. It’s obviously very rare. [snip]

However, dementia patients frequently pass out during the day. And come to think of it, this may be the first criminal trial I’ve been aware of where the defendant appears, in my opinion, to have dementia. Is it a coincidence that it’s also the only one I’ve ever known where the defendant can’t remain awake most days? Trump appears to be losing control of his basic biological functions. One is sleep-wake. The other may be excretion. Twitter blew up when both Ben Meiselas and George Conway reported they had heard from multiple credible sources in the courtroom that Trump was loudly passing gas, and the smell was overpowering.This was judged by Snopes to be unconfirmed. But, personally, I happen to trust the people who reported it. I don’t believe they would make that up. There have been unconfirmed reports of Trump using adult diapers.

Normally, this would be a personal matter, but America really needs to know if Trump is incontinent. His apparent disease is progressing rapidly before our eyes and yet we’re being gaslit that this is 'Trump being Trump.' That’s true, but it is also Trump appears to be dementing, and the mainstream media doesn’t seem to want to report on that story." (our emphasis)

There are more observations from David Rothkopf and Brynn Tannehill, so please read Devega's entire article.  

 

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Today's Tomorrow Cartoon

 

 (click to enlarge) 


 As protests and counter protests appear to spread at campuses over the dire situation in Gaza, college and local officials are presented with the problem of allowing protesters the right to demonstrate while not allowing hate speech and intimidation of students to occur. Calls for involving the National Guard are extreme, as are some protesters' genocidal call for "free Palestine" / the elimination of Israel. A steady and patient approach on the part of officials is what's needed at this point, but may not hold given the heated and volatile environment.


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The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

 

The good:

A history professor whose formula has successfully predicted the outcome of all but one presidential election since 1984 has indicated that President Joe Biden is tracking to win in 2024.

Allan Lichtman, who has been teaching at American University for five decades, uses a system of 13 “keys” to the White House to make his call.

In a recent interview with the Guardian, Lichtman noted that Biden has already got two keys under his belt: the incumbency key, and the contest key, after he faced no serious contenders for the incumbent party nomination.

“That’s two keys off the top. That means six more keys would have to fall to predict his defeat. A lot would have to go wrong for Biden to lose,” Lichtman said.

He will likely make his final prediction in August, according to the Guardian.

The other keys, which are structured as true or false questions, include whether or not the incumbent candidate has been tainted by a major scandal, whether there has been social unrest during the term, whether the incumbent has achieved major military successes or failures, and whether or not the challenging candidate is charismatic or a national hero.

The only blemish on Lichtman’s record is in 2000, when he predicted that Al Gore would defeat George W. Bush.

But Lichtman claims that call was nonetheless correct, since Gore won the popular vote. He contends that Gore would have won the election was he not wronged in Florida, which Bush won by a razor thin margin, prompting a recount dispute and highly controversial Supreme Court decision.

He was among a select few who predicted former President Donald Trump’s win in 2016...

As with polls six months out from an election, take this with more than a ton of salt, and keep doing the necessary hard work to win (volunteer, donate, vote).  But, let's face it: he does have a better record than any polling outfit we've ever seen.

The bad:

“I’m profoundly disturbed about the apparent direction of the court,” J. Michael Luttig told me. “I now believe that it is unlikely Trump will ever be tried for the crimes he committed in attempting to overturn the 2020 election.”

I called Luttig, a former federal judge with extensive conservative credentials, to solicit his reaction to this week’s Supreme Court hearing over Donald Trump’s demand for absolute immunity from prosecution for any crimes related to his insurrection attempt. On Thursday, Luttig posted a thread critiquing the right-wing justices for their apparent openness to Trump’s arguments—but that thread was legalistic and formal, so I figured Luttig had a lot more to say.

And did he ever. Luttig lacerated the right-wing justices for harboring a “radical vision” of the American presidency, and pronounced himself “gravely” worried that Trump will never face accountability for alleged crimes committed in attempting to destroy U.S. democracy through extensive procedural corruption and the naked incitement of mob violence.

Luttig’s fear that Trump may very well skate centers on the lines of questioning from the court’s right-wing majority about Special Counsel Jack Smith’s ongoing prosecution of Trump. As many observers noted, those justices appeared largely uninterested in the question before them—whether Trump’s alleged crimes related to the insurrection constituted official presidential acts that are immune from prosecution after leaving office.

Instead, the justices dwelled on the supposed future consequences of prosecuting presidents for crimes, and seemed to want to place some limits on that eventuality. That suggests the justices will kick the case back to lower courts to determine whether some definition of official presidential acts must be protected (and whether Trump’s specific acts qualify).

The corrupt Republican Supreme Court already showed its hand by accepting an appeal on what was a slam-dunk finding by the appeals court, then dragging out hearings until the end of its term in April.  That they appear at best to be headed toward a mixed bag of opinions and possibly remanding it back to the trial court means more delay and judicial obfuscation in service to one Malignant Loser.

The ugly: 

Dueling demonstrations on the UCLA campus Sunday resulted in skirmishes between groups showing support for an encampment of pro-Palestinian protesters and counter-protesters rallying around the university's Jewish students.

A group of demonstrators "breached a barrier that the university had established separating two groups of protestors on our campus, resulting in physical altercations," according to a statement from Mary Osako, vice chancellor of UCLA strategic communications. "UCLA has a long history of being a place of peaceful protest, and we are heartbroken about the violence that broke out."

The Westwood campus protests followed similar demonstrations on the campus at the University of Southern California, amid a controversy over the school's decision to cancel the valedictorian's speech. The USC protests also experienced some minor clashes in the crowd, along with dozens of arrests.

It's unclear if anybody was arrested at UCLA on Sunday. Video showed most of the confrontations involved pushing and yelling. Some minor injuries were reported...

When legitimate protests turn violent, the reaction is for police to be called in and start cracking heads. That serves no one except some police who like to beat up people and some people who like being beat up for the cameras.  All that is needed is for someone, somewhere to be seriously injured or killed and the fat will be in the fire.  The evil Hamas terrorist attack and Netanyahu's unrestrained response now have consequences that have washed up on our shores.


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Sunday, April 28, 2024

Across The Universe, Cont. -- Little Dumbell Nebula

 

(click on image to enlarge)

From NAASA/ESA, April 23, 2024: In celebration of the 34th anniversary of the launch of the legendary NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers took a snapshot of the Little Dumbbell Nebula (also known as Messier 76, M76, or NGC 650/651) located 3400 light-years away in the northern circumpolar constellation Perseus. The photogenic nebula is a favourite target of amateur astronomers.

M76 is classified as a planetary nebula. This is a misnomer because it is unrelated to planets. But its round shape suggested it was a planet to astronomers who first viewed it through low-power telescopes. In reality, a planetary nebula is an expanding shell of glowing gases that were ejected from a dying red giant star. The star eventually collapses to an ultra-dense, hot white dwarf.

M76 is composed of a ring, seen edge-on as the central bar structure, and two lobes on either opening of the ring. Before the star burned out, it ejected the ring of gas and dust. The ring was probably sculpted by the effects of the star that once had a binary companion star. This sloughed-off material created a thick disc of dust and gas along the plane of the companion’s orbit. The hypothetical companion star isn’t seen in the Hubble image, and so it could have been later swallowed by the central star. The disc would be forensic evidence for that stellar cannibalism.

The primary star is collapsing to form a white dwarf. It is one of the hottest stellar remnants known at a scorching 120 000 degrees Celsius, 24 times our Sun’s surface temperature. The sizzling white dwarf can be seen as a pinpoint in the centre of the nebula. A star visible in projection beneath it is not part of the nebula.

Pinched off by the disc, two lobes of hot gas are escaping from the top and bottom of the ‘belt’ along the star’s rotation axis that is perpendicular to the disc. They are being propelled by the hurricane-like outflow of material from the dying star, tearing across space at two million miles per hour. That’s fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in a little over seven minutes! This torrential ‘stellar wind’ is ploughing into cooler, slower-moving gas that was ejected at an earlier stage in the star’s life, when it was a red giant. Ferocious ultraviolet radiation from the super-hot star is causing the gases to glow. The red colour is from nitrogen, and blue is from oxygen.

The entire nebula is a flash in the pan by cosmological timekeeping. It will vanish in about 15 000 years.

[Image description: A Hubble image of the Little Dumbbell Nebula. The name comes from its shape, which is a two-lobed structure of colourful, mottled glowing gases that resemble a balloon that has been pinched around a middle waist. Like an inflating balloon, the lobes are expanding into space from a dying star seen as a white dot in the centre. Blistering ultraviolet radiation from the super-hot star is causing the gases to glow. The red colour is from nitrogen, and blue is from oxygen.]


Credit:  NASA, ESA, STScI, A. Pagan (STScI)

 

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Today's Cartoons

 

(click on images to enlarge)

(John Buss, @repeat1968; context here)

(Ann Telnaes, Washington Post)

(Mike Smith, Las Vegas Sun)

(Ted Littleford, @tedlittleford)

(John Deering, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette)

(Bill Bramhall, New York Daily News)

(Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press)

(Adam Zyglis, The Buffalo News)

(J.D. Crowe, Alabama Media Group)

(John Branch, Houston Chronicle)

(Ivan Ehlers, The New Yorker)


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Vids Of The Day -- Decency

 

We already posted a quote from last night's White House Correspondents' Association dinner (a.k.a., "nerd prom"), but we wanted to share two clips of emcee Colin Jost of SNL that also spoke truth to the assembled "journalists."  Worth a look:

 

 

 


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Lawsuits Take On Tesla's Autopilot Failures




Right-wing egomaniac and our would-be overlord Elon Musk has a big problem at Tesla. It's not only that the company's stock value is falling, and sales are dropping. His company is being sued in multiple venues for the car's Autopilot failures, which have resulted in numerous serious crashes. From the Washington Post:

"At least eight lawsuits headed to trial in the coming year — including two that haven’t been previously reported — involve fatal or otherwise serious crashes that occurred while the driver was allegedly relying on Autopilot. The complaints argue that Tesla exaggerated the capabilities of the feature, which controls steering, speed and other actions typically left to the driver. As a result, the lawsuits claim, the company created a false sense of complacency that led the drivers to tragedy.

Evidence emerging in the cases — including dash-cam video obtained by The Washington Post — offers sometimes-shocking details: In Phoenix, a woman allegedly relying on Autopilot plows into a disabled car and is then struck and killed by another vehicle after exiting her Tesla. In Tennessee, an intoxicated man allegedly using Autopilot drives down the wrong side of the road for several minutes before barreling into an oncoming car, killing the 20-year-old inside."  (our emphasis)

Meanwhile, Musk is arrogantly predicting AI will be the savior of his company, as he is staking much of his electric vehicle efforts on what he calls the "robotaxi":

"To allay investors’ concerns, Musk has made lofty promises about launching a fully autonomous 'robotaxi' in August. Soon, he said during Tuesday’s earnings call, driving a car will be like riding an elevator: you get on and get out at your destination.

'We should be thought of as an AI or robotics company,' Musk told investors. 'If somebody doesn’t believe Tesla is going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company. But we will.'”

Musk's "lofty promises" are causing too many to put their lives in his greedy and indifferent hands, while he works on solving autonomy. It's hard to comprehend that this erratic mogul's SpaceX company also has a virtual lock on NASA's space flight program, and its subsidiary Starlink satellite system which Ukraine relies on. It's like giving a James Bond villain the the nuclear codebook, which may be his next goal.

 

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Sunday Reflection: Prejudice And Faith



"Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends." - from "Go Set a Watchman", the second and final novel by author Harper Lee (4/28/1926 - 2/19/2016). Her bestselling masterpiece "To Kill A Mockingbird" won Lee the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. She later went on to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Arts for her work.

(photo: Lee in 2010. Penny Weaver)

 

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QOTD -- Deaf Ears?

 

"... I'm sincerely not asking you to take sides. I'm asking you to rise up to the seriousness of the moment. Move past the horse race numbers and the gotcha moments and the distractions, the sideshows that have come to dominate and sensationalize our politics, and focus on what's actually at stake..." -- President Biden at last night's White House Correspondents' Association dinner, admonishing our puerile media to recognize what's at stake in this election, even more so than it was in 2020 -- the preservation of our democracy.  Sadly, this likely fell on hundreds of deaf ears in the audience.  If you Google the dinner, you'll find the predominant top line coverage is of the President's "zingers" in describing the Malignant Loser, and of the pro- Palestinian protests outside the dinner venue.  Sic transit gloria, America.


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Saturday, April 27, 2024

Today's Cartoons

 

(click on images to enlarge)

(Bill Bramhall, New York Daily News)

(Pat Bagley, The Salt Lake Tribune)

(Ann Telnaes, Washington Post)

(Matt Wuerker, Politico)

(Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press)

(Bruce Plante, caglecartoons.com)

(Robert Ariail, Spartanburg Herald-Journal, SC)

(Ward Sutton, The Boston Globe)

(Drew Sheneman, The Star-Ledger, Newark, NJ)

(Steve Breen, Creators.com)

(Jack Ohman, San Francisco Chronicle)

(Ali Solomon Mainhart, @alisolomain)


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QOTD: Republican Governors And Unions




Thom Hartmann, writing for CommonDreams.org about the recent victory by the UAW to organize in the hostile South:

"The UAW’s successful unionization effort last week at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee—the first successful unionization effort at a car factory in the South since the 1940s—is breaking the brains of Republicans in that region. They’re truly astonished that workers might not trust their corporate overlords with their working conditions, pay, health, and retirement. [snip]

Southern autoworkers, though, aren’t listening to the GOP’s BS any more: A unionization vote is set for the week of May 13 at a Mercedes plant in Alabama, and more than half the workers there have already signed a card indicating their desire for union representation.

The problem for Republicans is that unions represent a form of democracy in the workplace, and the GOP hates democracy as a matter of principle. It’s why conservatives have opposed every effort to expand voting rights from the Jim Crow era, through fighting woman’s suffrage, to opposing voting rights legislation from 1965 to this day." (our emphasis)

The six MAGA Republican governors' statement that Hartmann reproduces is a reactionary, pre-New Deal screed that belongs in the 19th century, as does their corrupt party.

The UAW's successful fight against the major automakers last fall provided a big spark to union organizing, with President Biden walking the picket lines as the most pro-union President. The UAW got wage increases that reflected the wages and benefits they gave up when the industry was struggling, only to have the corporations deny them later.

 

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Tweets / Xeets Of The Day

 

Corrupt Republican SCOTUS will find a way --

 


Yoo- hoo, Melon Melania! -- 

 

 

 


Puppy-killing Republican VP material --

 

 

 

 

More trash Republicans --

 


 

Slovakia (and Hungary) deserves a government worthy of its citizens --

 

 

Rejected with prejudice --

 

 

 

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The Master Of Corruption And His Subjects

 



We're offering this extended excerpt from Francis Wilkinson's op/ ed in yesterday's Los Angeles Times because it powerfully distills the essence of the rot pervasive in the cult of the Malignant Loser, most recently seen in the corrupt workings of the Republican Supreme Court:

I have badly underestimated Donald Trump. Thursday was the day that his justices — it turns out that they are indeed his justices on the Supreme Court, just as he claimed — got it through my thick head: Trump is not just competent but masterful. He is not just capable, he is supreme.

Because Trump is clumsy at his alleged crimes, surrounding himself with flagrant thugs, telling obvious lies, leaving prolific trails of damning evidence, offering ridiculous defenses for indefensible conduct, I had long concluded that he is incompetent at crookery along with his other manifest failings. That’s true as far as it goes. But for all his mad greed and compulsive lawlessness, for all his sleaze and stupidity, crime is ultimately not Trump’s game. Trump is nothing like a master criminal. But he is a master of something far more sinister and complex: corruption.

Crime is a largely private endeavor. Corruption is public. It seeps into the muscle and sinew of democratic society and institutions; it devours from within. The Supreme Court, drunk on arrogated power, cut loose from rudimentary ethics, has been eaten alive by it. But the court is just one plot of a vast terrain that Trump has conquered — not with crime, but corruption.  [snip]

Trump has already succeeded at corrupting much of what’s corruptible. Government. Elections. Foreign policy. Democracy. Religion. Above all, people, and mostly men. Truckloads, boatloads, tiki-torch-parade-loads, courtloads of weak men all standing in the shadow that Trump casts.

The Republican Party has been corrupted absolutely. House Republicans have combined McCarthyism with Larry, Moe and Curlyism to twist Congress to comically corrupt ends — all to serve the greater degeneracy of Trump. In the Senate, the young hyenas, Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), study Trump’s demagogy and lick their chops, hoping for a turn at democracy’s carcass.

The establishment has utterly caved. Former Atty. Gen. William Barr’s endorsement of Trump this week, after having called Trump unfit, a psychologically damaged incompetent who cares only about himself, was barely newsworthy. What is Barr but another in the long line of weak men, one more debased Republican offering fealty to the grease king? Trump thanked Barr by humiliating him again.

But it was the Republican Supreme Court — mostly men again — that put the shiv a little deeper in democracy’s back this week. Originalists or textualists, all sounded more or less Trumpist as they seriously entertained Trump’s argument that his assaults on the constitutional order are protected by the Constitution itself. There is no way to make honest sense of such a liar’s mash. But Larry, Moe and Curly aren’t just chairing committees in Congress. They wear robes and furrowed brows now, too. And they seem eager to pretend that crimes are just constitutional exercises of power, and that one ex-president is a king.

Richard Nixon, a self-made, and self-corrupted, man who studied geopolitics and government assiduously, never achieved such a broad subjugation of American values and institutions. Trump, the ignorant, n’er-do-well heir to his father’s crooked fortune, has achieved so much more. Trump hasn’t just captured the trenches of conservative America, he has taken the commanding heights. He owns all of it, from the most racist backwater saloon to the Federalist Society clubhouse. They are his corrupted subjects. He is their corrupt and demented king. If he can somehow get through the next few perilous months, he may yet render corruption sacred, and the republic irredeemable.

We may yet be irredeemable as a democratic republic, whether or not the Malignant Loser succeeds in winning the election.  Rot this pervasive isn't eradicated by one or two elections.  Does anyone doubt that if he loses he will call for a violent reaction?  Does anyone doubt that if he wins he'll forever change our country into the dystopian authoritarian regime he so admires in Russia, China, North Korea and elsewhere?  Institutions?  We've seen Masha Gessen's timeless warning that our institutions will not save us repeated over and over again.  For now, we need to hope for the best but be prepared for the worst.

(Photo:  Trump at the National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 6, 2020, following the Senate's acquittal of him in his first impeachment trial / Evan Vucci, AP)

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A Debatable Call By Biden

 

Appearing on Howard Stern's radio program yesterday, President Biden said he was "happy to debate [Trump]", reversing previous statements that he'd have to see how the Malignant Loser / Al Caporn "behaves" before committing to a debate. He should have stuck with that earlier position, one with which we heartily agree. The broken political media has been clamoring for their usual gladiator-style, content-free poo-flings that only generate income for them, and a forum that the Malignant Loser is looking to exploit.  "Debate" is the wrong term for what Presidential debates have devolved into, especially in the politics-as-performance era of the bullying, defaming and lying Malignant Loser.

An approach that Biden should have taken would be to commit to a few individual town halls, where he can address voter questions directly without the filter of broken media inquisitors who are looking for their "gotcha" moment.  Town halls would still generate traffic for the media, albeit not as much as the bloodsport that the Malignant Loser would bring into viewers homes with a "debate." However, now that he's opened the door, Biden will be hard pressed to walk it back under pressure from those same media outlets. Self-inflicted wound? It may turn out to be that.

 

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Iconic NYC Museums And Galleries

 

We're back to New York City with architect Michael Wyetzner for a fascinating look at how four iconic museums and art galleries were designed and how their architecture and context evolved over time:  the massive Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, and the original Whitney Museum of American Art (now Met Breuer). 

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Friday, April 26, 2024

More QOTD -- On Trump Immunity Claims

 

"...Rather than grapple with the situation at hand — a defeated president worked with his allies to try to overturn the results of an election he lost, eventually summoning a mob to try to subvert the peaceful transfer of power — the Republican-appointed majority worried about hypothetical prosecutions against hypothetical presidents who might try to stay in office against the will of the people if they aren’t placed above the law.

"It was a farce befitting the absurdity of the situation. Trump has asked the Supreme Court if he is, in effect, a king. And at least four members of the court, among them the so-called originalists, have said, in essence, that they’ll have to think about it." --  Jamelle Bouie, New York Effing Times, on the corrupt Republican Supreme Court's review of the Malignant Loser's claims of absolute immunity from crimes committed while in office (see also QOTD, below).


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Today's Cartoons

 

(click on images to enlarge)


(David Rowe, Financial Review, Sydney)

(Bill Day, caglecartoons.com)

(David Horsey, The Seattle Times)

(Clay Jones, claytoonz.com)

(Rick McKee, caglecartoons.com)

(Pat Bagley, The Salt Lake Tribune)

(Christopher Weyant, Boston Globe)

(Chris Britt, Creators.com)

(Dave Granlund, politicalcartoons.com)

(Adam Zyglis, The Buffalo News)

(Jeremy Nguyen, @jeremywins)


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Tweets / Xeets Of The Day

 

While the Malignant Loser's arguments fell flat, his enablers on the Court want delay --


 

 


Wishing wife a happy birthday, outside his hush-money-to-porn-star trial. Classy! --



And his pathetic lies about why supporters and family aren't showing up at his trial -- 

 

 


And his lies about being kept from the campaign trail -- 

 


Thanks, Merrick Garland -- 



The profound delusions of MAGAts, part infinity --  



Our broken media: the whining isn't limited to the Malignant Loser -- 



Saluting Russian nuclear technology genius on this anniversary --



The barbecue was cancelled by order of the fire department. Happy Friday! -- 


 

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Weekend Music

 

Glasgow, Scotland's, indie band Belle and Sebastian have a new single out, "What Happened To You, Son?" timed with a tour of major North American cities this Spring before heading back to Europe. As usual, a great tune with energy and lyrics open to plenty of interpretation.  Have at it, and enjoy!

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Protesters' Call To Divest From Israel

 



Perhaps the most prevalent demand voiced by pro-Palestinian (some students would say "pro-Hamas") demonstrators across college campuses nationwide is the demand that the university disclose their investments and divest from Israel. It has the echoes of a generation ago, when universities and other institutions were called upon to divest from South Africa's racist apartheid government. But as an analysis by CNN notes, any impact on Israel may not be as impactful as expected:

"The specific demands of the protesters vary somewhat from school to school yet the central demand is that universities divest from companies linked to Israel or businesses that are profiting off its war with Hamas. Universities have largely refused to budge on this demand, and experts say divestment may not have a significant impact on the companies themselves. [snip]

Charlie Eaton, assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Merced and author of 'Bankers in the Ivory Tower,' said Columbia can 'absolutely' make the choice to divest from Israel-linked investments.

'It’s not unreasonable practice for schools to make decisions about how they invest based not just on maximizing investment returns, but also around principles of equity and justice in what they invest in,' he said.

But Mark Yudof, chairman of the Academic Engagement Network, which opposes campus antisemitism, said it’s not a simple solution to implement.

“The truth is it’s sometimes murky to figure out who is doing business in Israel and what the relationship is to the war,” Yudof said. [snip]

However, none of the universities have announced plans to divest from Israel-linked investments and some experts say they will be very reluctant to accept this demand.

'A significant obstacle to divestment is that any university supporting divestment would be sending a clear signal that they either: (a) acquiesce in; or (b) support the destruction of the State of Israel and its citizens,' said Jonathan Macey, a professor at Yale Law School.

Macey said that while such a move may be supported by protesters, it would be 'viewed as hostile and threatening to many students, faculty and staff.'"  (our emphasis)

There are also demands -- some puerile, some dangerous -- by some for police to be banned from campus (USC, Columbia), for a boycott of Israeli universities (Columbia again), and for a "free Palestine," which essentially means the elimination of Israel and replacement with a Palestinian state "from the river (Jordan) to the sea (Mediterranean)." A number of the demonstrators see that as the goal, and divestment as a first step.

(photo: Encampment at Brown University. Sophie Park / Washington Post)

 

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