Wednesday: Hili dialogue

August 31, 2022 • 6:30 am

Welcome to Hump Day, or “Hump Päivä, as the Finns say. It’s the final day of August, 2022, and National Trail Mix Day.  My preferred trail mix is, I fear, unhealthy: M&M’s (chocolate ones), raisins, and peanuts.

It’s also Eat Outside Day, National Matchmaker Day, and National Diatomaceous Earth Day (?).  The last link tells you how to celebrate it:

EP Minerals, the creators of National Diatomaceous Earth Day, say the day can be used to learn more about diatomaceous earth. The best way to do this may be to use it, so pick some up! Food grade diatomaceous earth can be consumed, and diatomaceous earth has many other home uses that make the day easy to celebrate.

Yes, as a source of silica, the food-grade stuff has some benefits, but the last thing we want to do today is eat diatomaceous earth.

Not many things of note happened on August 31, but they include:

Four more were to follow in the summer and fall of 1888, and Wikipedia even gives a morgue photo of Nichols, whose throat had been cut (trigger warning: dead person):

And here, five years later, is the first flight of a Zeppelin, with the caption and a Wikipedia description:

On 2 July 1900, Zeppelin made the first flight with the LZ 1 over Lake Constance near Friedrichshafen in southern Germany. The airship rose from the ground and remained in the air for 20 minutes, but was damaged on landing. After repairs and some modifications two further flights were made by LZ 1 in October 1900, However the airship was not considered successful enough to justify investment by the government, and since the experiments had exhausted Count Zeppelin’s funds, he was forced to suspend his work.

Below is a photo of the first flight, although it looks a bit retouched. The gas, of course, was hydrogen, which was to lead to the big Hindenburg disaster in 1937. Now Zeppelins (there are a few) use helium gas.

Why they no longer use hydrogen as the lifting gas (note the swastikas on the tail):

The wooden tower still stands, and I’d like to see it, for this is where WWII really began. Made of wood, it’s still the tallest wooden structure in Europe (118 m or 387 feet):

There are four versions of this work, two in oils and two in pastels. Both painted versions have been stolen and recovered.  Here’s the recovery of the one stolen in 2004, back in the Museum in 2006 but before it was re-hung after restoration in 2008 (there was water damage after the theft). I didn’t know it was so big! One of the pastel versions was auctioned off for nearly $120 million in 2012.

 

Da Nooz:

*You’ve probably heard this one, so I’ll just say it: former Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev, admired for dismantling Soviet control of Eastern Europe, died yesterday at the age of 91. From CNN’s obituary:

“Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev died this evening after a severe and prolonged illness,” the Central Clinical Hospital said, according to RIA Novosti Tuesday.
The man credited with introducing key political and economic reforms to the USSR and helping to end the Cold War had been in failing health for some time.
With his outgoing, charismatic nature, Gorbachev broke the mold for Soviet leaders who until then had mostly been remote, icy figures. Almost from the start of his leadership, he strove for significant reforms, so the system would work more efficiently and more democratically. Hence the two key phrases of the Gorbachev era: “glasnost” (openness) and “perestroika” (restructuring).

*Lordy, Ukraine has gone on the offensive, launching an attack in the southern Kherson region of the country—just north of the Crimean Peninsula. Rather, it’s a counter-offensive, as that land was taken by Russia early in the war:

Fierce battles have been reported as Ukraine tries to retake the Russian-occupied southern Kherson region – but military experts have told the BBC it “won’t happen quickly”.

“Heavy fighting is continuing, our soldiers are working around the clock,” said Vitaliy Kim, who heads the neighbouring Mykolaiv region.

Ukraine earlier said it had broken through Russia’s first line of defence.

But Russia said Ukrainian troops had been defeated during a failed attack.

The defence ministry in Moscow also said there had been heavy casualties among the Ukrainian forces, but the claims by both Ukraine and Russia have not been independently verified.

Kherson became the first major Ukrainian city to fall into Russian hands in the opening days of Moscow’s invasion that began on 24 February.

I’m growing more optimistic as the plucky Ukrainians hang on, but still think they’ll come out of this a substantially smaller country.

*And more about the plucky Ukrainians: they’re tricking the Russians into wasting expensive cruise missiles on dummy targets. According to the Washington Post, Ukraine has constructed mock artillery batteries out of wood, and they fool drones, who report the location of the fake batteries to Russian ships in the Black Sea, who launch cruise missiles. (American cruise missiles cost about $2 million each.)

“When the UAVs see the battery, it’s like a VIP target,” said a senior Ukrainian official, referring to unmanned aerial vehicles encountering long-range artillery replicas.

After a few weeks in the field, the decoys drew at least 10 Kalibr cruise missiles, an initial success that led Ukraine to expand the production of the replicas for broader use, said the senior Ukrainian official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military matters.

The use of rocket system decoys, which has not been reported previously, is one of many asymmetrical tactics Ukraine’s armed forces have adopted to fight back against a bigger and better-equipped invading enemy. In recent weeks, Kyiv’s operatives have blown up rail and electricity lines in occupied Russian territory, detonated explosives inside Russian arms depots and assassinated suspected collaborators.

Very foxy! But why on earth would “senior Ukrainian and U.S. officials” reveal this? You can bet the Russian drones will be making closer inspections from now on.

*Speaking of Ukraine, I wasn’t aware that when Christopher Hitchens was alive, he maintained that Ukraine would eventually have to give Russia land concessions for peace, and that the intercession of NATO only prolonged the agony. I guess this is why I’ve seen several mentions of Hitchens in connection with the war.

In a Twitter Threadreader (I wasn’t aware that those existed, either), Dmitry Grozoubinski takes apart Hitchens’s argument in a collection of 18 tweets–all on one page.

Grozoubinski says this claim is based on a number of faulty or dubious assumptions, including that Russia can sustain a strong invasion, that Ukraine will inevitably negotiate from a position of weakness, and so on. Dmitry isn’t absolutely confident that Ukraine will win, but he does say this:

17/ Every shipment, and every hard won victory that shipment enabled, has increased Ukraine’s bargaining power, humiliated Russia, and left it more and more isolated on the world stage as the quick victory it promised allies like China turned to smoke.

18/ Don’t listen to the fatalists and the fools. Give Ukraine what you can spare, and trust they’ll use it right.

Victory may not be inevitable, but the defeat contrarians prognosticate is more distant every day.

*According to the NYT, two top public university systems, the University of California and the University of Michigan, have failed to increase minority admissions in the face of statewide bans on affirmative action. The Supreme court has already scheduled an October hearing on two challenges to affirmative action (from Harvard and North Carolina)

The outreach programs are extremely costly. The University of California system says it has spent more than a half-billion dollars since 2004 to increase diversity among its students.

In the briefs, lawyers for the universities argue that, without affirmative action, achieving racial diversity is virtually impossible at highly selective universities.

“Despite persistent, vigorous and varied efforts to increase student body racial and ethnic diversity by race-neutral means,” the brief from Michigan stated, “the admission and enrollment of underrepresented minority students have fallen precipitously in many of U-M’s schools and colleges” since the end of affirmative action.

. . . The Supreme Court is scheduled on Oct. 31 to hear the lawsuits brought by the anti-affirmative action organization Students for Fair Admissions that challenge the race-conscious methods that Harvard and the University of North Carolina use to pick freshman classes.

The organization says that Harvard discriminates against Asian Americans and that North Carolina gives an admissions boost to underserved racial minorities. And the group argues in its own brief, filed this week, that ending affirmative action nationwide would help improve diversity at the University of California and the University of Michigan, “because they could better compete with universities who currently use race.”

. . . Affirmative action is banned by local edict in nine states, including Michigan and California.

*The deforestation of the Amazon is the subject of a long, semi-animated piece in the Washington Post. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is not only no fan of environmentalism, but he’s corrupt. That combination is helping destroy one of the world’s precious resources, the Amazonian rainforest, at a depressing pace:

This mismatch — too few inspectors for too much deforestation — is one of a cascading series of shortfalls and failures that are enabling criminals to raze the world’s largest rainforest with impunity. Law enforcement misses the majority of deforestation in the Amazon. The fines that the few state and federal inspectors herewrite are seldom paid. The occasional cases that spill into the criminal justice system languish for years. And in the rare instance of a criminal conviction, it almost never draws a prison sentence, The Washington Post found in areview of a year’s worth of cases.

The violent and lawless erasure of the Amazon is perhaps the world’s greatest environmental crime story. Scientists warn that the forest, seen as vital to averting catastrophic global warming, is at a tipping point. But in Brazil, home to about 60 percent of the Amazon, nearly one-fifth has already been destroyed. And virtually no one, law enforcement officials say, has been held accountable.

. . .nearly every [legal] tool has been dulled to the point of ineffectiveness, snagged by bureaucracy, case overloads and a grinding appellate system that has long stymied the country’s criminal justice system. The atrophy has deprived Brazil of what should be its most potent weapons against deforestation: credible regulations and the threat of consequences for those who violate them.

“It’s the economic theory of crime,” said Jair Schmidt, a government environmental analyst who studies law enforcement failings. “Will you make more money from deforestation than you stand to lose if you are cited for an infraction?”

And the answer is that, at present, you gain a lot more from clearing the forest than you stand to lose for breaking the law—if you’re even caught.

*And here’s an article worth reading, a bit snarky but it rings true. It’s from Leighton Woodhouse’s Substack site, Social Studies comes a snarky article that smells like truth: “The Lumpenbourgeoisie“. The argument is this: because so many people go to college, the value of a college degree has declined. And that has created a new niche:

So over the last couple of decades we’ve been minting more college graduates than ever, but their career prospects are bleaker than they used to be. It’s a quandary that has forced these new job entrants to adapt in ways that have transformed the industries they’ve infiltrated.

Quite understandably, these young, educated professionals aspire to the upper-middle class lifestyles that they believed their college degrees promised to provide for them. But as less than a third of college degrees awarded each year are in STEM fields, they tend to lack clearly marketable skill sets. Their Comparative Literature and Political Science classes haven’t taught them how to build or design new products or how to plan and implement new business strategies. What they have in abundance, however, is cultural capital, and more specifically, its college-inculcated subvariant, moral capital.

What’s the result of having that “moral capital”? The creation of “moral industries” like the policing of society by various progressive initiatives:

But probably no industry has scooped up more of this labor market overflow than the non-profit sector. Unlike in tech and media, in the world of progressive NGOs, there is an actual organic demand for the moral capital that these job applicants have spent four years of college accumulating. There, one’s finely calibrated sensitivity to microaggressions, one’s native fluency in the obscure grammar and lexicon of social justice speak, and one’s acute ability to discern the structures of racism in literally anything are assets rather than liabilities. And from there, one can literally create the consumer market for those talents out of thin air, simply by inventing new social problems to solve.

He uses the explosion of the DEI industry (especially in colleges) as one example of an unfilled consumer market. (It’s rapidly being filled.)

The business model is simple: extortion. The non-profit world’s moral technicians scan the landscape for organizations, whether public or private, that can afford their services, diagnose them as acutely infected by some form of structural oppression or another, and then offer up their suite of services to set them on their public path to healing and redemption. As Malcom Kyeyune has noted, the ideology of wokeness operates like a political protection racket, insinuating its practitioners into every industry and enterprise as intermediaries between creators and their creations. You can run your company, you can write your screenplay, you can draft your bill, you can bring your product to market — but not without bringing in an outside team of minders to ensure that it conforms to the ideological standards of the moral intelligentsia, for a hefty fee. For a class devoid of any discernible skills of actual economic value, this parasitical function is an enviable source of political and social power.

And there’s GOOD NEWS!:

*. . . good news for Lucas the Penguin from the San Diego zoo, who’s afflicted with a bad case of bumblefoot, an infection that causes sores. That gave him a limp that made the other penguins reject him. But now they’ve made him a special orthopedic shoe, padded on the bottom, so he can walk almost normally. Not only is he getting better, but the other penguins now accept him, and he even has a girlfriend! Here’s a heartwarming video:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron are upset that they’re not getting in on food:

Hili: They are picking apples again.
Szaron: And what do we get out of this?
In Polish:
Hili: Oni znowu zrywają jabłka.
Szaron. I co nam z tego?

******************

From Malcolm, an amazing underwater dancer:

From Nicole:

From the Internet. Would you use the toilet?

The Tweet of God, who despises us and holds us like a spider over a fiery pit:

From Malcolm: High five and fist bump with a kitten:

From Luana, showing the growth of the DEI industry in one school, including at the botanical gardens and arboretum. Total tab: $15.6 million!

From Simon, a cat reacting vicariously to a cartoon cat:

From Ken, who adds this:

“Here’s Alan Dershowitz being interviewed on far-right network Newsmax by Sean Spicer. (You remember him, don’t you, Jerry?)

The Dersh claims he’s become a verb, which sounds like the worst metamorphosis since Gregor Samsa woke-up a bug.

From the Auschwitz Memorial:

Tweets from Matthew. His latest book is launching in a few days, but is already available on Amazon UK:

A kid who’s done nothing illegal (giving a cop the finger) sticks up for himself. Nor is it illegal to curse at a cop, and you don’t have to give  your name in this situation. The cop doesn’t know the law!

This bear is either tame or too young to be aggressive:

36 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. If anyone “Dershowitzed” Dershowitz, Dershowitz “Dershowitzed” Dershowitz. How much “Dersh” would a Dershbag Dersh if a Dershbag would Dersh Dersh?

      1. I wonder if Dersh knew that message that had to be a troll, but went ahead and published it anyway for the clicks. Essentially trolling his critics for the publicity, and in his mind one-upping the sender by going with the gag. It’s not like he’s going to feel embarrassed by people saying he was trolled by false statements someone made to him. He could even turn it around and say he was letting the jury of public opinion make up its mind, and it’s not for him as a zealous advocate (for himself!) to decide the truth.

  2. That underwater dancer is indeed amazing.

    I once gave a NC state trooper the finger. He didn’t react well, but I didn’t go to jail. He deserved it.

      1. 🙂

        Ken, did you see that essay in TNYRoB by Laurance Tribe about the Dobbs decision?

        1. I read the publicly available blurb. Guess it’s time to renew my TNYRB subscription. I’ve gotten spoiled by free content.

    2. I made the mistake of giving the finger to some dude one rainy night in Seattle, sometime in the 90’s. Anyway, after flipping the dude off (I don’t even remember why, but I don’t get angry easily, so it was some form of auto-fuckery I responded to) I get to the next stoplight and I see his car doing an illegal u-turn. As he approached, driving recklessly, he rolled down his window and started flipping me off and screaming. My window was shut, so I couldn’t hear him, but I could tell the dude was unhinged, big-time. I thought: “I got a road rager here.” I kept driving and he got right behind me. Shit! After about a half mile of making turns with the nemesis still following, I decided to pull into a gas station. It was crowded, but he still followed. I just sat, waiting for the next pump to open, or for him to exit his car, in which case I would have bolted and got a good head start. A pump opened, I pulled up and went inside to pay, acting nonchalant as if I didn’t even know he was following. I paid for a a bit of gas and walked back out, aloof. Then I heard the screaming. I don’t remember what he said, invective and scorn, and once I took a quick glance to see where he was, now standing outside his car, I didn’t look his way. I just pumped the couple bucks of gas, and couldn’t wait for the craziness to end. I was happy when a lot of other customers were looking at the guy, wondering what was going on. Again, I acted like I wasn’t involved, got in my car, took off, and wasn’t followed. I’ve never blatantly flipped off a car/person again. Probably safer to flip off a cop.

      1. Definitely a scary situation there!

        I’m usually on a motorcycle and so I don’t do things to provoke other drivers. No contest between me and a car or truck. If another driver does something irritating enough to get me mad I just cuss at them in the privacy of my own helmet.

        “Intentionally” provoke I should say. I have had people come after me anyway a couple of times before. One because I passed them. A perfectly normal speed and legal pass, and it provoked this guy (always guys?) to have a road rage fit. He actually followed me home, which was only a couple of minutes away, and parked at the end of my drive way.

        Another guy was provoked into a rage because I was in front of him going through a school zone and he thought we were through it and yet I had not increased my speed to normal. He was in a hot-rodded muscle car and suddenly was sideways out of control coming down my right side half on and off the road, while hanging out his window and furiously giving me the business. Almost took me out, maybe 6″. Funny thing was that he also very narrowly missed the sign marking the end of the school zone as he slid sideways down the grassy shoulder ahead of me.

        1. Yeah, best keep your cool while on a bike. It doesn’t take much to provoke people on the road, it seems, and you’re two instances were instigated by really minor or perceived “transgressions”. Sheesh, humans are strange.

          “Always guys?” sure seems to be! Same thing with most shootings, esp. mass shootings…

  4. As any parent of an infant with colic knows (or should know), diatomaceous earth is a remedy for that. Colic comes from gastric gas pain, and the stuff absorbs gas. It just takes a few days to get to the point of being effective. Conversely, if you quit giving it, it takes several days to find out that you should not have stopped.

    But it is good stuff!

  5. On cursing at and flipping off cops (or anyone else for that matter): The one issue is whether cursing at or flipping off a cop is illegal or not, and clearly it is not. And the cops should be informed of this, certainly.

    A different question, which is often not discussed when such videos are shot, posted and viewed, is whether it is wise to curse at, flip off or otherwise provoke a cop, or any other person (unless, of course, there is a good and concrete reason for doing so). Any such rude or antisocial behavior comes with the risk of the situation escalating, so that we should, in general, roundly condemn such behavior, even if it is not illegal. The cop, or any other slighted person, is just a human being who may be having a rotten day for any number of reasons, so that kind and friendly behavior is always to be recommended as oppossed to rude and provocative behavior. Of course, a cop should never allow such a situation to escalate out of control, but realistically speaking, it will happen occasionally.

    So when I see such videos (and there are plenty of them on the internet), I always think, yes, the person may be within their rights to do or say this or that, but they sure are being an ass, and they share some portion of the responsibility if the situation should escalate.

    1. But can’t your argument be turned around? Couldn’t we equally argue that rather than roundly condemning a person for flipping someone else off, shouldn’t we instead respond with tolerance and understanding that perhaps the flipper is simply having a rotten day?

      Condemn seems like such a strong reaction to me. Of course, maybe you don’t mean it so strongly. I’m not sure I’d be up for condemning people on general principle for flipping someone else the bird. That seems like a worse “offence” to me than flipping someone the bird. Not to mention that there are sure to be plenty of circumstances in which I think it is appropriate to flip someone off.

      I get the escalation prevention, and I agree. At least to a certain extent. But not to the extent of excusing people who react with violence to someone who flips them a bird rather than limiting their response to words or gestures in return.

      1. Right, I meant “condemn” not as “condemn to death”, but as “express strong disapproval of”.

      2. Being civil is how we maintain civilization.
        Of course we agree that it is wise to give those who are uncivil the benefit of the doubt that they are under some unknown stress, but that is also the argument against lashing out at strangers, even if you are having a bad day.
        There is always the possibility that the person you are lashing out at is having the worst day of their life, and just barely holding it together. Or they were, until you started screaming at them over some frivolity.
        Of course this is from New Jersey. NJ is one of those places where you stand a decent chance of encountering a seven year old smoking a cigarette who tells you to “go f*** yourself”.

        In this particular situation, the kid had nothing whatever to gain by initiating an interaction with police officers by making an obscene gesture, and following it up with a combative and aggressive attitude after the police officer stopped. This is compounded when it occurs in a small town, where the kid has a pretty good chance of encountering those cops again. If that future encounter is one where the cop has some discretion about whether to issue a warning or a citation, bird boy is going to be at some disadvantage.
        There are a lot of things that are legal, but are not always wise.

        1. I see you are addressing the specific incident related above, but I was not. I was addressing something from the comment I responded to. I don’t think a civil society should be condemning, in the general sense, relatively benign offenses like flipping someone a bird. That kind of draconian moralizing is barbaric in my opinion. It seems very much like the sanctimonious moralizing of the church from earlier eras. Of course, as I said, perhaps other people using the word condemn mean it to be somewhat less drastic than what I consider it to mean.

        2. So civility for everyone except the Garden State? 🙂

          Kinda reminds me of the saying attributed to the Peruvian General Óscar Benavides: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”

          1. When they sent me to McGuire AFB for classes, we ended of billeted in a hotel in town, and bused to the base every day. I was really astounded to see people, apparently as a result of road rage incidents, pull both their cars over and fight, right beside the highway.
            It appears to me that people there at least have a lot more tolerance for aggressive confrontation and obscene language and gestures than I am used to, and that would reasonably include interactions with the police. On the other hand, the sandwiches are legendary.

          2. The sandwiches are great. But they’re even better across the Delaware River in Philly (though my Jersey friends would probably flip me off for saying so).

    2. Yes, the bird is legal. It’s not about that. It’s a matter of respect. We don’t seem to have that ethic anymore. We are on a first-name basis with everyone. I can call you all sorts of names and say the most disgusting things to you just because I want to (you’re ugly, you’re worthless, you are beneath me, I don’t like you, you’re disgusting). It seems we’ve simply lost the idea that others have dignity, worthy of respect. Instead, foul , demeaning language is ubiquitous . . . especially so, if you’re seen as a cop, a teacher, a black person, a beggar, a driver, a complete stranger. And it’s hard to simply dismiss from your mind, speech directed at you. It’s really hard.

    4. The boundaries of illegality and arseholery are not coincident. I see this sort of thing most often in relation to dash cam videos. You see an incident where two cars collide, say, and person A was legally in the wrong but person B could have avoided the situation by doing something slightly different e.g. maybe taking their foot off the gas for a second. Person B is an arsehole in the situation no matter what the law says.

    5. I take it that it is legal for a school administrator or superintendent or school board to impose a consequence (suspension, expulsion) for a student’s repeated flipping the bird or cussing a teacher. Same with an adult parent? If not, that is a “carrot” for teacher recruitment and retention.

      Is it illegal for a cop to cuss back? There are those who say a cop shouldn’t be surprised, that it is part of the job, that they should be able to take it, or do something else. Well, that is certainly a “carrot” to prompt one to go into law enforcement. Regarding those human primates who direct these sweet burblings at cops, is it that one shouldn’t expect all that much of them? Or is that the bigotry of low expectations?

      As a matter of principle, ought judges, public employees like cops, be required to similarly take it on the chin from miscreants standing before them? But they don’t, do they? I saw a video of a judge in a pre-trial or bail hearing adding on the days of incarceration in response to each instance of insufferable mouthing off. Have you thoughts on that, Counsellor Kukec?

      I take it employers don’t have to tolerate such behavior from employees, that that behavior falls under the umbrella of “insubordination” and therefore is just cause for firing. (One also contemplates what recourse an employee has to an employer exhibiting such behavior.)

      What if the admirable human primate specimen in the video repeatedly cussed out and verbally abused and gave the finger to a kindergartner? Is the parent or other responsible adult – inescapably having this loutish, Philistinic behavior imposed on them – restricted to mere fatuous tut-tutting and hand-wringing in response? Call the cops who can’t do anything about it?

      I’m reminded of doing front yard work and two fine Christian (would they deny it?) males in their late teens/early twenties in their car turning in the cul-de-sac and the one in the front passenger seat blessing me with the finger. Obviously an Exceptional American human primate. I felt so unworthy of such rarefied acknowledgment.

    1. A bear can tell if someone is menstruating supposedly …

      Sharks can. I recall taking a woman skindiving out on the reef years ago in a skiff I had. We’d both just gotten into the water when we espied a fin in the water nearby, and she confided to me she was being paid a visit by her Aunt Flow. I wasted no time grabbing her by the thighs to help her scramble over the gunwale back into the boat.

    2. That trope (and Ken’s “shark” one) got examined recently in the “between News and Archers” slot on Radio 4, in a 4-week series on periods (and more general gynae) entitled “28-ish days later”. I can’t remember which of the 28-off 1/4 hour segments it was in, but both were thoroughly debunked. According to presenter, India Rakusen, and her various interviewees, there are precisely no recorded cases where a bear attack has been definitely shown to be the result of the bear choosing to attack a woman on the basis of her “menstrual” smell. Ditto sharks. Of course, that does leave the window open for “undetected” cases – no body found, no investigation, etc – but the ball is very much in the court of people recycling the trope to actually provide some proof that it’s real.
      Actually, having cited a BBC radio documentary, I wonder what Snopes has to say about it. They’re very much in the debunking business. Here they do a lot of general menstrual debunking, but not that specific one. A moderately amusing – and perfectly plausible – “close encounter” ; we had a bear in the “sewage” pit one morning on the 3rd (or was it 4th?) site in Russia. The toolpusher said he got several hundred dollars for the skin, once the roughnecks had cleaned it. But I can’t see Snopes as having addressed that trope. Oh well.

  8. Actually, those statements by Hitchens on Ukraine were made by Peter Hitchens, Christopher’s brother, who is still alive. That is also who Dmitry Grozoubinski was responding to.

      1. I know for a fact that Peter Hitchens has, on at least one occasion, read the pages of this august web site. I made an uncomplimentary remark about him in a comment and he actually responded.

  9. “So over the last couple of decades we’ve been minting more college graduates than ever, but their career prospects are bleaker than they used to be. It’s a quandary that has forced these new job entrants to adapt in ways that have transformed the industries they’ve infiltrated.

    Quite understandably, these young, educated professionals aspire to the upper-middle class lifestyles that they believed their college degrees promised to provide for them.”

    I’m one of these though I got a Welding Technology degree as well and now I spend ten hours a day welding in a tank. While the (non-skilled) working class factory drones I share space with are every bit as contemptible as I was lead to believe as a child the work itself is pretty satisfying and occasionally I bump into other skilled tradesmen that have much to recommend them.

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