Saturday Miscellany

First, sometimes history happens when you are not paying attention. Nay, even when you do not notice it.

While Kamala and Co. are agonizing about the fate of Palestinian terrorists, Saudi Arabia has taken a slightly different tack.

Consider this, from Twitter, from the account @HamasAtrocities

A rare sight in Auschwitz The Saudi Sheikh Mohammed Al-Isa and his entourage pray inside the extermination camp in memory of those who perished in the Holocaust The video is causing a lot of anger among many Arabs, after Saudi Arabia banned prayers in memory of Ismail Haniyeh.

Putting them together, you can see that Saudi Arabia has not embraced the Palestinian distraction and is working to build a nexus of relationships with Israel.

Moreover, can you weigh the irony of seeing Western intellectuals libeling Israel for defending itself, calling it a genocidal regime, while the Saudis remind us of the real genocide?

Second, you might be wondering what happens when you have diversity quotas for women agents in the Secret Service.

Susan Crabtree reports:

EXCLUSIVE and BREAKING: During a Donald Trump visit to North Carolina yesterday, a woman Secret Service special agent abandoned her post to breastfeed with no permission/warning to the event site agent, according to three sources in the Secret Service community. Shortly before Trump's motorcade arrival -- I'm told five minutes beforehand -- the site agent was getting ready for the arrival. (The site agent is the person in charge of the entire event's security.) The site agent went to do one final sweep of the walking route and found the agent breast-feeding her child in a room that is supposed to be set aside for important Secret Service official work, i.e. a potential emergency related to the president. 

A working agent on duty cannot bring a child to a protective assignment. The woman was out of the Atlanta Field Office. The woman agent was in the room with two other family members. The agent and her family members bypassed the Uniformed Division checkpoint and were escorted by an unpinned event staff into the room to breastfeed, the sources said. Unpinned means they have not been cleared by the Secret Service to be there. 

When contacted about the incident, Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said the incident did not have an impact on the event. and it's under review. "All employees of the U.S. Secret Service are held to the highest standards," he said. "While there was no impact to the North Carolina event, the specifics of this incident are being examined. Given this is a personnel matter, we are not in a position to comment further."

Third, once-Great Britain is still undergoing labour pains. The latest directive to the National Health Service requires doctors to ask anyone, male or female, who is undergoing radiography, if he or she is pregnant.

Fourth, speaking of diversity hires, Neil deGrasse Tyson, a man who often pretends to speak for science, offered this definition of the difference between men and women. From the Twitter account of Dr Eli David:

Neil deGrasse Tyson takes pride in “communicating science”. Here he explains that XX/XY chromosomes don't determine if you are male or female, and instead, each day you can wake up and decide that “today I feel like I am female or male” This is the state of science today.

Fifth, if you are a writer you should never take advice from David Brooks. A self-important mediocrity, Brooks does not write well and does not think at all.

In his latest column he advises young writers not to read Tom Wolfe.

There are certain writers you should never read before you yourself sit down to write, like P.G. Wodehouse and Tom Wolfe. For if you do, you will not be able to get their voices and rhythms out of your head, and you will have to confront the absolute certainty that you can’t pull off what they did. In Wolfe’s case you’ll find that you can’t quite replicate the raw energy of his prose: the fun; the snap, crackle, pop; the fuzzy effusions of new sociological categories — masters of the universe, social X-rays.

Maybe if you are David Brooks you will never be able to develop your own style, and you will believe that next to Wolfe’s raw energy you will feel inferior.

In truth, you cannot improve your writing if you do not learn from the masters. And if you find Wolfe too intimidating perhaps you should find a new occupation.

Sixth, never say that Gen-Zers are not entertaining. They might not be able to do jobs, but they will amuse you with their childish antics.

The New York Post reports:

When baker Amy Gastman was hiring for a baking assistant and barista, she was inundated with applications. But some stood out — for the wrong reasons.

London-based Gastman, the owner of the vegan bakery Eat by Amy, slammed prospective Gen Z workers for their unprofessional resumes and emails, which listed being a Harry Styles fan or having a “brat summer” as notable achievements or skills.

“The applications from Gen Z included things like brat summer, being Harry Styles’ number one fan, being skilled at getting tickets for sold-out concerts, an apathy for working,” the millennial baker told Newsweek.

“One person even included that they’re rubbish at baking even though the job is for a baking assistant.”

Seventh, another one bites the dust. This time another Ivy League president resigned. As you know, Minouche Shafik of Columbia was the fifth  such president who lost her job for being grossly incompetent. All but one have been female. So much for diversity hires.

Nothing surprising, except, why did it take so long?

The Wall Street Journal has the story:

Minouche Shafik resigned Wednesday as Columbia University’s president, ending an embattled 13-month term during which her New York City campus was the scene of a series of chaotic and sometimes violent protests by students, faculty and other activists. 

Protests over the Israel-Hamas war began in October and continued through much of the winter at Columbia and many other schools. The protests intensified in April after Shafik testified before Congress.

The protests divided the campus, with many Jewish students saying they were fearful to pass by demonstrations. Shafik faced a backlash after calling on city police to break up an encampment, and again when students and others took over an academic building.

She has seen tenuous support from faculty and administrators, as well as calls from some alumni and donors to resign. She is the fifth Ivy League president to step down over the past year.

Eighth, herewith some added commentary on our failure to onshore manufacturing. I presented Steven Malanga’s theories in my post on Thursday, entitled: “Unemployable.”

Yesterday the Financial Times did a long analysis of the situation. For your edification:

A Fin­an­cial Times invest­ig­a­tion revealed that 40 per cent of man­u­fac­tur­ing invest­ments of at least $100mn announced in the first year fol­low­ing the pas­sage of the two laws face delays or have been paused indef­in­itely. Out of 114 large projects tracked by the FT worth a com­bined $227.9bn, some $84bn are delayed.

The set­backs raise ques­tions about whether the Amer­ican man­u­fac­tur­ing renais­sance set out by Biden can be delivered as prom­ised. They also under­score how dif­fi­cult it will be, both prac­tic­ally and polit­ic­ally, to recon­fig­ure Amer­ica’s eco­nomy to com­pete in the indus­tries set to dom­in­ate the 21st cen­tury.

As I have suggested, don’t get too optimistic about onshoring.

Shortages of competent staff are one problem. Another is international competition:

Mul­tiple firms estim­ate China pro­duces more than double global demand for pan­els, and BloombergNEF has warned that rapid innov­a­tion in south­east Asia, where the US sources the bulk of its solar pan­els and cells, means US factor­ies risk being uncom­pet­it­ive by the time pro­duc­tion comes online.

The pan­els made over­seas are far cheaper than domestic ones. US-made crys­tal­line sil­icon pan­els gen­er­ate energy at an aver­age cost of 29.5 cents per watt, accord­ing to BloombergNEF. A panel sourced in south-east Asia, mean­while, can cost under 16 cents per watt, and in China, it is 10 cents per watt.

And then, we lack qualified workers:

On top of all these other issues, man­u­fac­tur­ers are con­front­ing a his­tor­ic­ally tight labour mar­ket and short­age of trained work­ers. Asso­ci­ated Build­ers and Con­tract­ors (ABC), an industry con­struc­tion group, estim­ates that the US needs to hire half a mil­lion work­ers on top of nor­mal hir­ing to meet industry demand. The con­sult­ing firm McKin­sey estim­ates that the US semi­con­ductor sec­tor could face a short­age of up to 146,000 work­ers by 2029. The project post­pone­ments have high­lighted how hard it will be for the US to reshore stra­tegic indus­tries, says Anirban Basu, chief eco­nom­ist for ABC. “Reshor­ing is dif­fi­cult for Amer­ica because for dec­ades, we have not trained skilled tech­ni­cians. We have not trained machin­ists, we have not trained weld­ers and oth­ers that work to improve the built envir­on­ment.”

It will take more than new legislation and more than earnest politicians.

Ninth, anti-Semitism has reared its ugly head in once-Great Britain. The Telegraph reports on the way Brits now treat Jews.

The silence was deafening. From the distress of bullied children to the cold shoulder of colleagues or the parade of friends who turned out not to be friends at all, testimonies from the Jewish community in Britain reveal the same bleak experiences. 

It wasn’t just the world that changed the day Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 last year. The world of British Jews did too, as mutating strains of anti-Semitism worked their way beyond smashed shopfronts and violent protests and into the domestic and everyday. And each witness uses the same expression. The silence was deafening.

As it happens, to no one’s surprise, Muslims are a much larger voting bloc, some four million to 286,000 Jews. Examine the actions of the new Labour Prime Minister and you will see the consequences. Speak ill of Muslims and you go to jail. Attack Brits and Jews and you are a culture hero.

It’s the downside of democracy. 

Tenth, a New York Times reporter in Australia leaked a list of Jewish business people-- causing them to be harassed by the anti-Semitic left.

The New York Post has the story:

The New York Times said it took disciplinary action against a reporter who acknowledged leaking data about a WhatsApp group chat for Jewish business people that led to its members being doxxed and harassed by activists sympathetic to Palestinians.

Natasha Frost, a Times reporter who was based in Melbourne, Australia earlier this year, downloaded and shared 900 pages of content from the private WhatsApp chat that was launched by Jewish professionals in response to the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas terrorists that claimed the lives of nearly 1,200 Israelis.

Frost acknowledged to The Wall Street Journal that she shared the information with one individual before it fell into the hands of anti-Zionist activists.

It reminds us of the list of Jewish therapists, compiled by an anti-Zionist anti-Semites in Chicago. 

The only remaining question is, why does the reporter still have a job. Discipline is one thing. Losing a job is quite another.

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