Jewish cabals out here making it hard on Jewish cabals!

A group of billionaires and business titans working to shape U.S. public opinion of the war in Gaza privately pressed New York City's mayor last month to send police to disperse pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, according to communications obtained by The Washington Post and people familiar with the group.

Asked about the Zoom meeting with chat group members, the mayor's office did not address it directly, instead sharing a statement from deputy mayor Fabien Levy noting that New York police entered Columbia's campus twice in response to "specific written requests" from university leadership. "Any suggestion that other considerations were involved in the decision-making process is completely false," Levy said. He added, "The insinuation that Jewish donors secretly plotted to influence government operations is an all too familiar antisemitic trope that the Washington Post should be ashamed to ask about, let alone normalize in print."

You had to assume that university presidents were getting lots of pressure behind the scenes, given how obviously overboard their responses were. Of course, this has nothing to do with Jewishness; if the Italians were killing the Roma by the tens of thousands, I'm sure a bunch of rich Italians would be Zooming with the mayor to say that it's all justified.

The absurdity of people calling the shots because they sold a lot of coffee or arbitraged some niche in the financial system is tough to take. I'd love to see a hard cap on wealth, which is something that's not going to happen, and also something I've not heard a good argument against.

I found this piece fascinating even though it has the word "gas-lighting" in the title. Basically, in the world of devout Mormons, there's some recent online discourse of women claiming that the church has always supported career-moms, and so this writer is taking us on a deep dive into a propaganda film she watched circa 1991 called "For This Child I Have Prayed". There's even a link to the video, should you wish to watch it yourself!

Basically, it starts off by a high school senior being tempted by the secular world:

A very bright young woman in a lab coat is congratulated by a female teacher who puts her arm lovingly around her and says, "Kelly, I want to congratulate you on your excellent test scores! They were some of the highest I've seen in my thirty years of teaching." The teacher asks if she's heard back on any scholarships, compliments her "tremendous mind" and expresses hope that she will make "immense contributions" to her field of research. Kelly uncomfortably responds by saying, "But I want to have a family", to which her teacher kindly reassures her that it's possible to do both, explaining that most corporations have plans that allow maternity leave for mothers to care for their babies. She again praises Kelly's mind and encourages her to think about all of the people she can influence in the world, not just her own children. Kelly looks torn and concerned.

So Kelly has to go on a journey (an exceedingly interior journey, she doesn't get to go anywhere exciting) to decide if she wants a career or not. There are lots of deliciously 90's screenshots of Kelly with a Demi Moore in Ghost-era haircut.

Eventually she has a heart-to-heart with her mom:

Kelly's mom pulls out a letter from Kelly's older brother after he left on his mission. In it he admits how ungrateful he was for everything she did for him growing up, and how much of her life probably wasn't very exciting. He acknowledges that staying at home and raising kids wasn't easy for her, but thanks her for doing it anyway. He ends the letter by saying that when he finds the right woman to marry, he hopes she's exactly like his mom.

I agree with the author on this:

I am a little stunned by this. In this church-produced film, they admit right out loud that the mother's life often wasn't pleasant...

Yes, the film is pretty clearly acknowledging how much being a perfect SAHM will suck! You could have run this propaganda film very differently, where you promise that it won't suck because parenting will be so exciting and you'll be such an adult. But these guys have decided to go with the message that, "You'll be in charge of the grunt work that's needed to make the world go round!"

Anyway, here's the rest of that paragraph and how it wraps up:

I am a little stunned by this. In this church produced film they admit right out loud that the mother's life often wasn't pleasant, but that message is paradoxically presented against a background of heartwarming music. As a young woman absorbing this message, I was being told that my future as a stay-at-home mom would frequently be unfulfilling, but that I should be happy anyway.

Kelly asks her mom what she should do about her own schooling. Her mom says to keep at it, because her own schooling (the master's degree she abandoned) helped her become a better mom. (I was surprised her mom didn't also mention the hot guys she'd meet in her religion classes at BYU.) Kelly thanks her mom, and they hug. Emotional music plays as Kelly makes the decision to be a stay-at-home mom, not a career woman. It doesn't matter that she's only seventeen and might not meet a cute RM into girls with bowl cuts for another decade or so.

Mossy writes: Commended to your attention as much for style as for substance:
Kaiputras: The pig herders' song

Heebie's take: Somehow this article is super fun! It should be depressing - huge poverty, dying industry of pig herding, but instead it's just got a light touch and everyone is very relatable.

I saw this on Reddit:

The State Supreme Court in the southern US state of Louisiana, on April 26, gave the city of St. George the right to secede from the larger capital city of Baton Rouge. This has cleared the way for a group of wealthy white Baton Rouge residents to carve out a majority-white enclave of the largely Black city--recalling the history in the US of segregation and white flight.

Wealthy, white residents of Baton Rouge have been trying to secede from the rest of the city in some shape or form for over a decade. In 2012, a group of parents went to the state legislature to propose the creation of a separate school district which they called the Southeast Community School District. This effort failed, but the following year they tried once again and also failed.

After these defeats, they began to adopt a new strategy: form an entirely separate city. This would ensure their children would not attend school with the rest of the Baton Rouge community. This strategy went through several failed attempts for years until this year, when the state's Supreme Court finally ruled in favor of carving out the majority-white enclave of St. George into a separate city.

City-level secession has somehow not come across my pathway before. Like, I know this effect is all over the place, because wealthy suburbs are often technically a separate city from the urban core, but that usually comes about from a different historical path - white flight outside city boundaries, and they incorporate and never get absorbed into the boundary of the main city. But this is a new, different way to be terrible!

Wow, gross:*

After a meeting that lasted for hours, the Shenandoah County school board voted early Friday morning to restore the names of three Confederate officers to schools in the district.

With the vote, the district appears to be the first in the country to return Confederate names to schools that had removed them after the summer of 2020, according to researchers at the Montgomery, Ala.-based Equal Justice Initiative.

The vote rolled back a decision made four years ago, when the killing of George Floyd prompted nationwide demands for a racial reckoning.

So originally they were Ashby-Lee Elementary and Stonewall Jackson High, and then they were renamed Honey Run and Mountain View, and now they're back to the original names.

The school board's vote did not come as a shock. Many of the signs that had been taken down from Stonewall Jackson High were kept in storage rather than discarded, as if awaiting return.

*Gifted link

I'm so annoyed at myself, because I've had this article on solar storms ready to post for awhile now, and we JUST had a major solar event this weekend, so I could have looked really cool and prescient.

Anyway, the link is paywalled, but my parents sent me a hard copy, so here's a PDF.

It covers the Carrington Event, the forecasting room of the Space Weather Prediction Center, and what a Carrington-level solar storm could do to modern day communications.

It ended up cloudy here on Saturday night. Apparently the clouds cleared around 4 am and some people got some glimpses of the Aurora Borealis again, but I did not have that much gumption.