I understand the snark here:

This is the most remarkable human achievement ever, 1600 feet of high speed rail after 9 years and 11 billion dollars

It takes about 5 minutes to walk 1600 feet so a high speed rail for that is a really big deal

California is so competent

The Fresno River Viaduct in Madera County is one of the first completed high-speed rail structures. At nearly 1,600 feet long, high-speed trains will travel over the riverbed and will run parallel with the BNSF Railroad.

Meanwhile, a little south of this remarkable achievement, the most notable feature of this project to me was the amount of massive diesel machinery scattered about the landscape. Oh, and torn-up landscape.

On a recent trip to Fresno, we were considerably delayed on the trip up, but on the trip back the delay was so great that we turned around and backtracked until we could reach side roads to find our way home. Apparently, some parts of the (temporary, I hope) roadway built to accommodate the rail construction had collapsed due to water saturation.

Maybe they miscalculated the parts of the roadway which they should elevate above ground level. Despite the engineering reports of soil saturation, etc. that preceded construction.

Saving Hamas

The Biden Administration: Building Bridges of Understanding

The Barbieland Intifada on our university campuses is just a distraction. But one that may have gotten out of control of the Ruling Class to some extent. Why doesn't the Barbieland Intifada appreciate that plan to build a floating bridge to deliver food to Hamas?

Tough piece by Lee Smith in Tablet: The Palestinian terror organization refuses to release hostages while clinging to its last stronghold in Rafah. So why is the Biden administration throwing the full weight of the U.S. government at Israel to prevent it from routing Hamas?

Reports are circulating that the Israelis are planning an operation in Rafah to eliminate the last Hamas stronghold in Gaza. . . Bizarrely, the White House's statements and actions show that Hamas' survival is more important than the security of a traditional American partner, Israel; more crucial to American interests than the preservation of the U.S.-led order of the Middle East; more precious than the dozens of American lives that Hamas ended on Oct. 7; more valuable than however many Americans and Israelis are still alive in the terror army's tunnels.

Why? As the money and prestige that the U.S. has invested month after month in protecting Hamas demonstrate, the Biden administration sees the terror group as a valuable asset.

A day after the massacre, before Israel's campaign against Hamas even began, Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote that he was encouraging the Turkish government's "advocacy for a cease-fire." It makes no difference that the tweet has since been deleted, since the White House has produced no shortage of evidence since that its top priority is to deter Israel from defeating Hamas, by increasing Israel's vulnerabilities at every turn, and conditioning aid on Israel adopting a purely defensive posture. . .

The president abdicated America's historical role of vetoing anti-Israel activity at the U.N. Instead, the U.S. delegation abstained from a key Security Council resolution in March demanding an immediate cease-fire--thereby putting America's diplomatic weight behind Hamas' demand that it should be allowed to keep its hostages and continue ruling Gaza. The White House then sanctioned Israeli civilians on the West Bank for crimes dreamed up by left-wing pro-Palestinian organizations, while ignoring a Palestinian terror wave aimed at murdering Jewish civilians who were guilty of crimes like stopping at a red light, buying gas, and herding sheep. Much of the false reporting supporting the pro-Hamas offensive is channeled through U.S. Army Gen. Michael Fenzel. The U.S. Security Coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority are spending taxpayer resources to build a Palestinian terror army on the West Bank that may soon be repurposed for Gaza, too.

By compelling Jerusalem to "surge" food aid and energy to Gaza, the White House broke Israel's siege, and demanded an ally resupply its adversary at wartime. Whenever Israel goes on the offensive, Biden and aides publicly threaten to stop resupplying arms. . .

Hmmmm . . .

It's useful to remember that what distinguishes the Palestinians from other ethno-national groups born of the breakup of the multiethnic empires of Europe and the Levant after World War I is that their claim on the world's attention issues largely from their willingness to hire themselves out as terrorist mercenaries.

On whose behalf were the Palestinians acting when they destabilized the region with their gruesome Oct. 7 attack? Iran--but also the Biden administration. The two share an interest in collapsing the traditional U.S.-led order of the Middle East that Donald Trump had restored, after Barack Obama began the process of dismantling it.

Up until Obama, the pillars of America's security architecture were the Persian Gulf's oil-rich Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia, and, in the eastern Mediterranean, Israel and Egypt. Early in his first term Obama signaled he intended to undo that order when he gave a speech in Cairo and invited officials from the Muslim Brotherhood, existential enemies of the military regime then led by Hosni Mubarak. Within two years, the White House withdrew its support for Mubarak during the Arab Spring revolutions and ushered in a Muslim Brotherhood government. Egypt became the first pillar of the old U.S. security order to fall.

Obama's aides made it clear that his second term would be devoted to securing a nuclear deal with Iran.

Okay, this piece leaves out a lot of information that might soften views toward the role of the USA, but if you read the whole thing, I think the "Saving Hamas" thesis hangs together pretty well.

You may ask, "If the Biden administration is so hostile to Israel, why to the pro-Palestinian protesters on campus still call Biden a murderer"?

Well, they were primed. From an earlier post:

Helen Dale provides a droll introduction to Lorenzo Warby's analysis of Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth in Our postcolonial trash needs taking out.

After Hamazis gleefully killed a stack of Jews - - one of the largest terrorist killings ever; per capita, the most murderous terror killing ever; the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust - - within hours, various academics told us how it exemplified decolonisation.

When you look into the history, this turns out to be literally true.

The "lesson" of decolonisation was that if you terrorise settlers - - if you kill entire families - - they leave. . .

Except for the Jews in Israel. The point is that "decolonization" = "terrorism".

Another large reason, however, is an outgrowth of Postcolonial Theory, which classes Israeli Jews as "settlers": they cannot be refugee populations. And at this point, the circle closes. Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth is the ur-text of Postcolonial Theory. The book was written while Fanon was resident in Algeria during the Algerian Revolution. He was an avid supporter.

That The Wretched of the Earth is the ur-text of Postcolonial Theory says very bad things about both Postcolonial Theory and academe. The Wretched of the Earth is mostly an angry rant that mistakes Theory for evidence and treats historical events as a pick 'n' mix to feed its narrative. . .

Sounds something like what Bruce Gilley and Mary Grabar said about Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States in 2020.

Grabar, a resident fellow at The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, said her critique of Zinn was that "he misrepresents history."

"What I've tried to do is just look at what he says and provide a factual rebuttal," Grabar said. "I was quite surprised by the extent to which Howard Zinn distorted history, deliberately lied." For instance, she noted, Zinn wrote that internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II were kept secret. "Not until after the war did the story of the Japanese-Americans begin to be known to the general public," he wrote in Chapter 16. In fact, numerous newspapers and magazines wrote about the camps at the time, quite a few editorializing in favor of them.

"It's amazing what you'll find in that book when you start digging and it's really shocking that historians have not raised a ruckus and demanded the book be withdrawn," Grabar said. "He really has harmed traditional scholarship and the kinds of conversations that we should be having - having a balanced and honest look at our history, the good points and the bad points."

Grabar's talk will include what Gilley calls a "Save the Children from Howard Zinn" book drive: He's encouraging attendees to buy copies of Grabar's book to donate to local libraries and schools.

"What if everyone had a 'Debunking Howard Zinn' alongside their 'People's History'? Well, that'd be a pretty great education," Gilley said.

Wonder if Portland State wishes that Bruce Gilley and Peter Boghossian were still its big problems?

Another Book Review

I'm sure that "Perfessor" Squirrel has some great reading materials lined up for discussion in tomorrow's Book Thread. I'm usually not around on Sunday mornings, but I have run into something interesting:

Theodore Dalrymple reviews a new book: Orwell's Arresting Ambiguities

D. J. Taylor judiciously steers a course between hagiography and debunking.

George Orwell said that Charles Dickens was an author well worth stealing, which is to say, attaching to one's cause whatever it might be. If you can say "Dickens would have thought likewise," you are claiming the approval not only of a genius, but of a man of deeply generous and humane nature (never mind any squalid revelations about his actual biography).

George Orwell has suffered something of the same fate: thanks to a kind of secular beatification, everyone wants to claim him. He is, so to speak, the voice of unvarnished truth in a world of prevailing untruth. Like George Washington, he could not tell a lie.

The problem with such beatification is that it easily provokes an equal and opposite effort at debunking, which is as unrealistic as the process of beatification itself. . .

A brief book, not overly academic, which Dalrymple thinks is the best summation of Orwell's life and work.

But:

Occasionally Taylor, whose own judgment is pretty good, misses something important. For example, he describes the effect that Orwell's time in Spain had on him:

Spain, it is safe to say, politicised Orwell in a way that his exposure to homegrown socialism in the previous five years had not. To begin with, it offered him a vision of how an alternative world, founded on the principles of freedom and equality, might work.

Orwell told the general litterateur, Cyril Connolly, who had been with him at Eton, that he had seen "wonderful things" in Barcelona, then a revolutionary city in the control of the Trotskyist POUM. Taylor continues:

It was, he declared, "the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle." Churches were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Shops and cafes bore inscriptions saying that they had been collectivised. Tipping was forbidden by law, all private motor cars had been commandeered, and all the trams and taxis had been painted in the anarchist colours of red and black. "In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist."

Everyone dressed the same too, in drab overalls, Maoist avant la lettre.

Barcelona, then, was a Catalonian Pyongyang: and it is important to recall that Orwell approved of it. At this stage of his development, he was an enthusiastic totalitarian, and the shallowness of his belief that such uniformity was a triumph for freedom and equality is rather startling in a man who, a very few years later, was to be the greatest literary scourge of totalitarianism in the world. It was all to the credit of Orwell that he changed his opinion of totalitarianism so diametrically, but had he died just after the publication of Homage to Catalonia, not living long enough to write his anti-totalitarian masterpieces, he would have been remembered, if he was remembered at all, as a literary forerunner and praise-singer of some of the worst features of communist regimes. It had to be remembered too that his underlying objection to Stalin's policy in Spain was that it was not revolutionary enough, that he promoted the Popular Front, albeit as a mere tactic, rather than the immediate revolution, à la Barcelona, as Orwell would have liked.

Fortunately, Orwell's views changed.

Orwell did not have fifty years to live, let alone seventy. Perhaps for the good of his subsequent reputation, he died at the very acme of his career, having just completed an undoubted masterpiece that, notwithstanding the implosion of the Soviet Union, remains, alas, of strong current resonance.

I recommend this book unreservedly. It deals most sensitively with Orwell's multiple ambiguities without trying to fit them into a Procrustean bed. It informs, enlightens, and entertains. It restores one's faith in the value of criticism.

Reviewed
Who Is Big Brother?
by D. J. Taylor

Theodore Dalrymple was the perfect person to write this review.

Quote

Music

Basin Street Blues

Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

Last week's thread, April 27, May the power be with you

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