An eventful week

A lot has happened in the last few days -- so I thought I'd do a quick overview.

The funniest item is something that didn't happen.  A passel of goofy religious nutballs on social media had worked themselves into a frenzy of anticipation that "the Rapture" was going to arrive on September 23 -- that is, yesterday.  As far as I can tell, it didn't -- there have been no news reports of intolerant, judgmental prigs ascending into the sky to pester God for the rest of eternity and leave the rest of us in peace down here.  Such matters are, in any case, open to interpretation:


The true Rapture, the only one worth celebrating, occurred in 1981, but we can still enjoy it today:


On to more serious matters.  Freedom of expression scored a major win this week when Jimmy Kimmel's show was restored on ABC.  I know little about Kimmel and have never seen his show, but there was a vital matter of principle at stake here.  Last week, the megatrumpazoidified FCC had pressured ABC to drop the show because the government didn't like something Kimmel had said.  What he said that they didn't like is completely irrelevant.  The point is that state power was used to deplatform a person for speech that politicians objected to.

This was a direct, frontal attack on the First Amendment, and it was widely recognized as such.  Several Republican senators, notably Ted Cruz, spoke out against the censorship, as did Tulsi Gabbard -- a rare case of Republican politicians explicitly opposing Trump's position.  It was not their statements that restored Kimmel's show, however, but public pressure.  As I noted on Saturday, after Kimmel was dumped, so many people went to cancel their subscriptions at Disney (ABC's parent company) that the cancellation page repeatedly crashed.  This win for free expression was achieved by people power.  The corporations have little respect for the Constitution or democracy, but they do respect our money.  Remember that for the future.

What may be the most important event of the week attracted relatively little notice in the US.  For several days, Russian drones had been flying into the airspace of Poland and Romania, and on Friday three Russian jets flew over Estonia for twelve minutes.  Clearly the Putin regime was testing NATO's resolve, and this week it got its answer.  Poland's prime minister, Donald Tusk, declared that Poland will shoot down Russian planes that violate its airspace.  Other NATO members soon backed up Poland -- even Trump agrees, at least for now -- and Poland's deputy prime minister told off Russia in blunt terms at the UN:

Your insane nationalism contains a lust for domination that will not cease until you realize that the age of empires is over and that your empire will not be rebuilt..... If another missile or aircraft enters our space without permission -- deliberately or 'by mistake' -- and gets shot down, and the wreckage falls on NATO territory, please don’t come here to whine about it.  You have been warned.

This is the proper way for democracies to talk to gangster regimes.  If you worry that this stance is dangerously aggressive, don't.  In 2015 another NATO country, Turkey, actually did shoot down a Russian warplane which briefly overflew its territory.  The Putin regime bitched and whined, but took no real action.  It's even less likely to do so now, after the disastrous Ukraine war has exposed the shitty quality of its military.  Most likely Putin will tell his pilots to keep the hell away from NATO's borders.

Finally, a staggering betrayal of democratic solidarity and Western principles.  The treacherous, craven, filthy "leaders" of the UK, Canada, Australia, and Portugal declared that they are rewarding the slaughter of October 7 by recognizing a Palestinian state, something that has never existed and never will (the French president did the same later in the week).  Hamas is celebrating.  The move is opposed by the leaders of the UK's two major opposition parties, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage, and by overwhelming majorities of the British and French peoples.  As I have pointed out before, supporting a two-state solution at this point is like demanding an al-Qâ'idah state on the border of the US within two years after the September 11 attack.

Some good might come of this, if Israel carries out its threat to retaliate by annexing part or all of the West Bank and thus puts an end to this nonsense once and for all.  If anyone would have the guts to do it, it's Netanyahu.  But the vile act of these groveling bootlickers of jihadism has brought a stain of shame upon their countries, which will linger long after they have left office.