Tuesday: Hili dialogue

June 6, 2023 • 6:45 am

Good morning on the Cruelest Day: Tuesday, June  6, 2023, and National Gingerbread Day. The cookies are fine, but give me a warm gingerbread cake with a scoop of vanilla ice cream melting over it.

It’s also the D-Day Invasion Anniversary and the anniversary of my late parents.

On top of that, it’s Atheist Pride Day, National Churro Day (cultural appropriation), National Yo-yo Day, National Applesauce Cake Day, National Higher Education Day, National Huntington’s Disease Awareness Day, and UN Russian Language Day, which isn’t going to go down well this year. 

And there’s a new Google Doodle today, the winner of the annual national contest representing an idea. This year’s theme was “I am grateful for. . . ” and was won by Rebecca Wu, who was grateful for her sisters. Click the link to see her statement. Rebecca won a $30,000 college scholarship and a $50,000 technology package for her school.

Here she is with her sisters:

 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the June 6 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Last weekend’s gun toll in Chicago: 9 dead, 37 people shot but survived. Brandon Johnson, our new mayor, promised to reduce crime, but he has a reputation for being soft on crime. He says that his plan to cut crime needs more time to work.

*It looks as if the Ukrainian “spring offensive” has begun, though Zelensky won’t admit it.

Ukrainian forces stepped up their artillery strikes and ground assaults in a flurry of offensive military activity that by Monday was raging along multiple sectors of the front line, American and Russian officials said.

Ukraine has remained silent about military operations after months of preparing for a major counteroffensive in the war. But the American officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the surge in attacks was a possible indication that Kyiv’s long-planned counteroffensive against Russian forces had begun.

The officials based their assessment in part on information from U.S. military satellites, which detected an uptick in action from Ukrainian military positions. The satellites have infrared capabilities to track artillery fire and missile launches.

One difficulty in determining the exact start of a counteroffensive, beyond Ukraine’s operational security measures, is that the fighting could well begin with feints or diversions that are hard to decipher.

. . . The reported Ukrainian attacks were taking place to the east of where many analysts expected the counteroffensive to start. But even starting in that eastern area would allow Ukraine to try to accomplish the same goal: heading south toward the Sea of Azov and cutting the “land bridge” that connects Russian-occupied Crimea to Russia.

It would be lovely if Ukraine got Crimea back, but I’m not sure that even the Crimeans want that now. Good luck to Ukraine, but they really need to fix their uniforms (see next item):

*Speaking of Ukraine, the NYT also reports that Ukrainian soldiers are often putting Nazi symbols on their uniforms.

Since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine last year, the Ukrainian government and NATO allies have posted, then quietly deleted, three seemingly innocuous photographs from their social media feeds: a soldier standing in a group, another resting in a trench and an emergency worker posing in front of a truck.

In each photograph, Ukrainians in uniform wore patches featuring symbols that were made notorious by Nazi Germany and have since become part of the iconography of far-right hate groups.

The photographs, and their deletions, highlight the Ukrainian military’s complicated relationship with Nazi imagery, a relationship forged under both Soviet and German occupation during World War II.

That relationship has become especially delicate because President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has falsely declared Ukraine to be a Nazi state, a claim he has used to justify his illegal invasion.

But here’s the explanation:

Ukraine has worked for years through legislation and military restructuring to contain a fringe far-right movement whose members proudly wear symbols steeped in Nazi history and espouse views hostile to leftists, L.G.B.T.Q. movements and ethnic minorities. But some members of these groups have been fighting Russia since the Kremlin illegally annexed part of the Crimea region of Ukraine in 2014 and are now part of the broader military structure. Some are regarded as national heroes, even as the far-right remains marginalized politically.

The iconography of these groups, including a skull-and-crossbones patch worn by concentration camp guards and a symbol known as the Black Sun, now appears with some regularity on the uniforms of soldiers fighting on the front line, including soldiers who say the imagery symbolizes Ukrainian sovereignty and pride, not Nazism.

. . . So far, the imagery has not eroded international support for the war. It has, however, left diplomats, Western journalists and advocacy groups in a difficult position: Calling attention to the iconography risks playing into Russian propaganda. Saying nothing allows it to spread.

And one exmple (circle is mine):

In April, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry posted a photograph on its Twitter account of a soldier wearing a patch featuring a skull and crossbones known as the Totenkopf, or Death’s Head. The specific symbol in the picture was made notorious by a Nazi unit that committed war crimes and guarded concentration camps during World War II.

The patch in the photograph sets the Totenkopf atop a Ukrainian flag with a small No. 6 below. That patch is the official merchandise of Death in June, a British neo-folk band that the Southern Poverty Law Center has said produces “hate speech” that “exploits themes and images of fascism and Nazism.”

The solution: if you’re courting the world’s good will, it’s not good optics to use a symbol that the SS used in World War II:

The Nazi Totenkopf

*It’s clearly a NYT day: here’s new op-ed. “I’m in high school. I hope affirmative action is rejected, and replaced with something stronger.” Stronger? What could that be? Well, the author is Sofia Lam, an Asian American, and she’s concerned about all people, regardless of ethnicity, that are denied the chance to go to college because of socioeconomic deprivation. She has a good solution of how to advance the deprived when the Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action:

Properly measuring a student’s achievement requires assessing the obstacles surmounted to attain it.

Our race-based system of preference, however, doesn’t seem to work this way. Underprivileged white and Asian American kids, including some living just a few miles from my house, do not benefit from affirmative action. How fair is a system that seems to give an affluent African American student an advantage over an underprivileged white or Asian American one, simply on the basis of skin color?

If the current policy is struck down, colleges seeking to maintain a diverse student body will be compelled to focus on socioeconomic status instead of race. Doing so can result in racial diversity, but in a fairer way.

Of course we’ll still be faced with the problem of how much to lower the merit-based entry bar to admit the socioeconomically deprived, but somehow it seems fairer to put all people who lacked opportunity on the same scale rather than give preference to those with specified ethnicities.

* According to Wikipedia, the Benin Bronzes are

. . . a group of several thousand metal plaques and sculptures that decorated the royal palace of the Kingdom of Benin, in what is now Edo State, Nigeria. Collectively, the objects form the best examples of Benin art and were created from the thirteenth century by artists of the Edo people. The plaques, which in the Edo language are called Ama, depict scenes or represent themes in the history of the Kingdom.  Apart from the plaques, other sculptures in brass or bronze include portrait heads, jewelry, and smaller pieces.

Many of them are gorgeous (see here), but hundreds were looted by the British at the end of the 19th century and now reside in the British Museum and othere European museums. They were clearly looted and belong to Nigeria. And museums were getting ready to give them back. Now, according to the NYT, “The repatriation of the Benin bronzes to Nigeria has hit a snag.” What’s the snag?

After years of ignored pleas and stonewalled requests, deals were finally coming together to return some of Africa’s most prized treasures to the continent.

The Smithsonian Institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the German government announced they were returning scores of sculptures, plaques and ornaments, known as the Benin Bronzes, that British soldiers had plundered in 1897 from Benin City, in what is now Nigeria but was once the center of a kingdom. Plans were underway for a glittering new museum designed by the British Ghanaian architect David Adjaye to showcase and protect the returned treasures.

But that plan has run aground since Nigeria’s outgoing president announced he had transferred ownership of the looted items to a direct descendant of the ruler they had been stolen from. At a moment when museums worldwide are trying to come to grips with contested artifacts in their collections, this development underscores how complex restitution efforts can be.

The confusion began in March, when President Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria, who left office on Monday, issued a declaration handing over the artifacts — which include decorated brass plaques, carved ivory statues and ceremonial masks — to Ewuare II, the current oba, or ceremonial king, of Benin. It decreed that any returned artifacts “may be kept within the palace of the oba,” or in any location that he considers secure.

In other words, they are private property of the king, and that doesn’t seem right. But the oba says this:

The oba wants the bronzes displayed in museums in Nigeria and around the world, a representative of the royal family said, but the passing of the treasures into private hands spread anxiety among some museums that are negotiating returns of looted items to Nigeria.

Some museums are having thoughts about giving them back, though many others are saying they don’t care if they’re the king’s property so long as they go back to Nigeria. I guess I take the middle ground. They clearly should be returned to Nigeria, but, as with discussions of the Elgin Marbles, this should be done with the proviso that they belong to the country as a whole and should be exhibited to all in a museum. This should be part of a written agreement. It’s good that they’re going back, though!

*Robert Hanssen, who spied on the U.S. for Russia, and did plenty of damage to our national intelligence, died yesterday while serving a life sentence (actually, 15 consecutive life sentences) in America’s toughest prison, ADX Florence Supermax in Colorado.

Hanssen, 79, was found unresponsive at the supermax prison in Florence, Colo., about 6:55 a.m., according to a news release from the Justice Department. Medical staff tried and failed to save Hanssen, the release stated.

The former FBI agent was sentenced to life in prison for espionage in 2002. His actions were so damaging that two decades later the FBI has a webpage explaining what Hanssen did and how they uncovered his ruse.

Hanssen was arrested Feb. 18, 2001, for spying on behalf of Russia and the former Soviet Union, according to the FBI. He used the alias “Ramon Garcia” with his Russian handlers, with whom he exchanged highly classified national security information for $1.4 million in cash and diamonds.

“The information he delivered compromised numerous human sources, counterintelligence techniques, investigations, dozens of classified U.S. government documents, and technical operations of extraordinary importance and value,” the FBI said.
Hansen was an FBI analyst who wanted the money from spying. Arrested in 2001, he spent his entire period of incarceration in the Florence prison—a tough go of it. Here’s his mug shot taken on the day he was arrested:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili wants to be an icon now: her smile is like that of the Mona Lisa.

A: What are you doing here?
Hili: I’m pretending to be a Gioconda.
In Polish:
Ja: Co tu robisz?
Hili: Udaję Giocondę.

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

From Ben:

From Beth, a Bizarro Cartoon from Wayne and Piraro:

From Science Humor:

From Masih, revenge is a dish best served cold:

From Simon, a flying squirrel with a penchant for drama. The last scene shows how they actually look from below when they’re gliding:

Barry didn’t know this about the Godfather, and neither did I:

. . . and here’s that scene, one of the best in a fantastic movie:

A naughty cat painting sent in by Gravelinspector:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, mother and 8-year-old daughter gassed upon arrival:

Tweets from Dr. Cobb. The first one is ineffably sweet, but be sure you put the sound up:

This was the day that they came down on the protestors at Tiananmen Square:

This is lovely to see but not super rare: I’ve seen something similar:

25 thoughts on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. “… it’s Atheist Pride Day”

    Oh good, the day on which I can express pride for how I personally (?) find no evidence or reason for the god hypothesis, and apply greater weight to the null hypothesis, whether I want to or not. Furthermore, the conclusion matches independent observations I had nothing to do with.

    Hmmm… what’s the best way to do that?

    Perhaps a comparison: I feel as much pride for ending up as an atheist (whether I want to or not) as I do for going deep-sea fishing (adeep-sea-fishist), curling (acurlist), or whaling (awhalist).

    … somehow I get the feeling this explanation of mine is not going well.

    1. ^^^adding correction to my previous comment:

      deep-sea fishing, curling, and whaling are activities, so I am highlighting how infatuating with god is a type of activity.

      However, another angle would be these ideas – things which we know do not exist :

      A-chunk of uranium the size of Jupiter-ist

      A-diamond the size of a refrigerator buried in my backyard-ist (from a Sam Harris piece).

      A-wisdom teeth in my jaw-ist (a PCC(E)/ Victor Stenger (maybe) idea).

      … thanks.

        1. I couldn’t find where I heard/read the uranium idea. I am not a physicist but if it exceeds critical mass it goes into a nuclear chain reaction.

          It might be buried in a Sam Harris podcast or a book I don’t have handy – I’m guessing Victor Stenger.

      2. Perhaps there is not a refrigerator-sized diamond on earth, but there’s this:

        The space diamond is virtually an enormous chunk of crystallized carbon, 4,000 kilometers in diameter. The stone is located at a distance of 50 light years from Earth, in the Constellation Centaurus. Scientists believe that the diamond is the heart of an extinct star that used to shine like the Sun.

        If we were able to snag it, could you imagine what that would do to the world diamond market?

        1. I’ll tell you what – I’ll look the other way, and you can feel free to bury that puppy just to the left of my swimming pool, but please save the grass to cover it back up before you leave.

          1. Your swimming pool must be an ocean of some sort! 🙂 Either way, I’m glad you’re on board in case something happens. Keep in touch.

  2. Not a fan of the right in general, but is it just me or is the NYT article about Ukrainian soldiers wearing nazi symbols trying to subtly associate or conflate the notion of far-right in Ukraine with the notion of far-right in the US? I’m not implying there are no similarities, but this reminds me of the “accuse anyone of being a nazi for disagreeing with you” sort of tactic that the “woke” uses.

    This also reminds me of the Hili dialogue from a few days back about the bipartisan debt-ceiling bill where NYT described the extreme faction of republicans as “far right”, and oddly enough, the equivalent in democrats as “hard left” as opposed to “far left”, perhaps to portray the extreme on the left as somehow less worse than their extreme counterpart on the right. This is despite the fact that the “far left” holds beliefs that are radical and authoritarian in nature (i.e. “woke”).

    These subtle details are really manipulative and contributes to the breakdown of discourse since anyone who’s not on your team is branded “the enemy”.

    1. I am not sure about the truth of the matter, but I’ve read hints here and there that what we would call far right views are rather common over there, including racism and anti-semitism.

    2. The Russians want to frame the conflict as a purely defensive on on their part, because Ukrainians are Nazis, and thus it is a moral imperative to root them out and crush them.
      I do think there is a similar effort among the leftist tacticians here to try to make anyone that poses a political threat to them as Nazis.

      But more about the symbolism pictured. The Nazis used a lot of symbols from the shared Nordic heritage as an attempt to legitimize their claim to be the future of Western Europe.
      Obviously, the skull and crossbones is a pretty widely-used symbol. The particular one in the image is a Prussian symbol, dating at least as far back as Frederick the Great. Some folks might advocate abandoning old historical symbols that were also used by the Nazis, but not everyone concurs.
      Also, most people in the world are not quite as hypersensitive about this sort of thing as we have become.
      A lot of Nazi symbols are part of bike culture, probably because a bunch of the bikers in the 50s were veterans who liberated Europe and brought home lots of souvenirs. I have some relatives who were part of that culture. They wore that stuff mostly because it made them look edgy and vaguely dangerous.
      That sort of brings us full circle to the Ukrainian troops. That guy sleeping in the trench definitely wants to exude an air of toughness, and to be seen by the Russians as part of a group of dangerous badasses.
      Overall, although there are certainly antisemites in Ukraine, they do not seem to be particularly numerous or powerful. Both the President and recent PM of Ukraine are Jewish. The NYT wrote in 2019 that the Jewish community in Ukraine is the 3rd or 4th largest in the world.
      A Pew survey indicated that antisemitic views were held by a much smaller percentage of people than in neighboring countries.

  3. On this day:
    1813 – The Battle of Stoney Creek, considered a critical turning point in the War of 1812. A British force of 700 under John Vincent defeats an American force twice its size under William Winder and John Chandler.

    1822 – Alexis St Martin is accidentally shot in the stomach, leading to William Beaumont’s studies on digestion.

    1889 – The Great Seattle Fire destroys all of downtown Seattle.

    1892 – The Chicago “L” elevated rail system begins operation.

    1894 – Governor Davis H. Waite orders the Colorado state militia to protect and support the miners engaged in the Cripple Creek miners’ strike.

    1912 – The eruption of Novarupta in Alaska begins. It is the largest volcanic eruption of the 20th century.

    1934 – New Deal: U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 into law, establishing the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

    1942 – The United States Navy’s victory over the Imperial Japanese Navy at the Battle of Midway is a major turning point in the Pacific Theater of World War II. All four Japanese fleet carriers taking part—Akagi, Kaga, Sōryū and Hiryū—are sunk, as is the heavy cruiser Mikuma. The American carrier Yorktown and the destroyer Hammann are also sunk.

    1944 – Commencement of Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Normandy, with the execution of Operation Neptune—commonly referred to as D-Day—the largest seaborne invasion in history. Nearly 160,000 Allied troops cross the English Channel with about 5,000 landing and assault craft, 289 escort vessels, and 277 minesweepers participating. By the end of the day, the Allies have landed on five invasion beaches and are pushing inland.

    1966 – March Against Fear: African-American civil rights activist James Meredith is wounded in an ambush by white sniper James Aubrey Norvell. Meredith and Norvell are photographed by Jack R. Thornell, whose photo will receive the 1967 Pulitzer Prize in Photography, the last one to be awarded in the category.

    1971 – Soyuz 11 is launched. The mission ends in disaster when all three cosmonauts, Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev are suffocated by uncontrolled decompression of the capsule during re-entry on 29 June.

    1975 – British referendum results in continued membership of the European Economic Community, with 67% of votes in favour.

    1985 – The grave of “Wolfgang Gerhard” is opened in Embu, Brazil; the exhumed remains are later proven to be those of Josef Mengele, Auschwitz’s “Angel of Death”; Mengele is thought to have drowned while swimming in February 1979.

    Births:
    1519 – Andrea Cesalpino, Italian philosopher, physician, and botanist (d. 1603).

    1599 – Diego Velázquez (date of baptism), Spanish painter and educator (d. 1660).

    1799 – Alexander Pushkin, Russian author and poet (d. 1837).

    1850 – Karl Ferdinand Braun, German-American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate in 1909 for physics (d. 1918).

    1851 – Angelo Moriondo, Italian inventor of the espresso machine (d. 1914).

    1868 – Robert Falcon Scott, English sailor and explorer (d. 1912).

    1875 – Thomas Mann, German author and critic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1955).

    1896 – Henry Allingham, English World War I soldier and supercentenarian (d. 2009).

    1903 – Aram Khachaturian, Armenian composer and conductor (d. 1978).

    1906 – Max August Zorn, German mathematician and academic who is noted for Zorn’s Lemma (d. 1993).

    1909 – Isaiah Berlin, Latvian-English historian and philosopher (d. 1997).

    1918 – Edwin G. Krebs, American biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2009).

    1932 – David Scott, American colonel, engineer, and astronaut who was the commander of Apollo 15.

    1936 – Levi Stubbs, American soul singer; lead vocalist of the Four Tops (d. 2008).

    1939 – Gary U.S. Bonds, American singer-songwriter.

    1956 – Björn Borg, Swedish tennis player; winner of eleven Grand Slam singles titles including five consecutive Wimbledons.

    1960 – Steve Vai, American musician.

    Today is a good day for someone else to die! [Dwarfish battle-cry.]

    1832 – Jeremy Bentham, English jurist and philosopher (b. 1748).

    1948 – Louis Lumière, French film director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1864).

    1961 – Carl Gustav Jung, Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist (b. 1875).

    1962 – Yves Klein, French painter (b. 1928).

    1968 – Robert F. Kennedy, American soldier, lawyer, and politician, 64th United States Attorney General (b. 1925).

    1976 – J. Paul Getty, American businessman, founded the Getty Oil Company (b. 1892).

    1979 – Jack Haley, American actor (b. 1897).

    1991 – Stan Getz, American saxophonist and jazz innovator (b. 1927).

    2005 – Anne Bancroft, American film actress; winner of the 1963 Academy Award for Best Actress for The Miracle Worker (b. 1931).

    2006 – Billy Preston, American singer-songwriter, pianist, and actor (b. 1946).

    2013 – Jerome Karle, American crystallographer and academic; awarded the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for research into the molecular structure of chemical compounds (b. 1918).

    2013 – Esther Williams, American swimmer and actress (b. 1921).

    2015 – Vincent Bugliosi, American lawyer and author; prosecuting attorney in the Tate–LaBianca murders case (b. 1934).

    2015 – Ludvík Vaculík, Czech journalist and author; noted for The Two Thousand Words which inspired the Prague Spring (b. 1926).

    2016 – Peter Shaffer, English playwright and screenwriter; works included Equus and Amadeus (b. 1926).

    1. >1906 – Max August Zorn, German mathematician and academic who is noted for Zorn’s Lemma (d. 1993).

      What’s yellow and equivalent to the Axiom of Choice?
      Zorn’s Lemon!

      That joke used to bring down the house at the mathematicians’ comedy club.

      1. That joke used to bring down the house at the mathematicians’ comedy club.

        And it’s corollary : Don’t ask a mathematician to do a job that an architect should do.

  4. I wouldn’t assume that those Nazi symbols mean the same things to the Ukrainian soldiers as they do to us. The death’s head in particular has a longer tradition that it’s association with the SS. (Even in Nazi Germany it was also used by tankers as an homage to the hussars.) It also wouldn’t be the first time that a group adopted in defiance a symbol forced on it by their enemies.

  5. A few notes

    “Brandon Johnson, our new mayor, promised to reduce crime, but he has a reputation for being soft on crime”

    Don’t worry the death toll will go up some more.

    “It would be lovely if Ukraine got Crimea back, but I’m not sure that even the Crimeans want that now”

    The Ukraine will never get Crimea back (in my opinion). The predominant language in Crimea is Russian (not Ukrainian). For various reasons, I have close ties (for an American) to Crimea and am quite familiar with the place. The Russian invasion of Crimea back in 2014 was relatively bloodless. Why? Because Crimea is naturally part of Russia, not the Ukraine. This all goes back to Catherine the Great.

    “Well, the author is Sofia Lam, an Asian American, and she’s concerned about all people, regardless of ethnicity, that are denied the chance to go to college because of socioeconomic deprivation”

    I am (mostly) in agreement with Sofia Lam (and by inference J. Coyne) about this. However… Class-based AA won’t work. In real life AA/Diversity are just polite words for racial quotas. A class-based system (not matter how just) won’t produce the racial results that the defenders of AA demand and will not be accepted.

    The battle over the specialized high schools in New York City (NYC) should make this clear. A generation (or two) ago, the poor but smart, kids were predominantly Jewish and gained entry to the specialized high schools by getting top scores on the SHSAT. These days the poor but smart, kids are predominantly Asian and gain entry to specialized high schools by getting top scores on the SHSAT. Nothing has really changed (other than the demographics of the winners). What has changed is demands for racial quotas are quite real these days and 50-60 years they were not. The NYC system works well. Is it much loved? No. Is it much hated? Yes.

    1. I had thought—silly me—that calls for affirmative action by family income meant that smart but poor kids would have financial assistance to attend schools that their families wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford, but that they were capable of excelling in. Maybe this doesn’t apply for public high schools and so this type of affirmative action would have no effect. But if poor kids are going to be given preference regardless of their scholastic ability, then it is just race-based quotas by another name and the idea should be strangled in the womb. You will get kids who aren’t smart, just poor, and they might be of lower over-all quality than when standards were relaxed just a little to slip more of them in. At least when race was the only criterion, well-off black kids got in and were (usually) smarter than average. Now you won’t get those kids because they’ll be excluded by income. The only saving grace over race-based quotas is that mediocre black kids from families doing very well thank you very much won’t retain their automatic leg up over poor, smart Asian or white kids. Yes, there will be more black students offered places but only because they are poorer as a group, not because they are smarter. And the well-off smart kids of all races will still get shafted.

      The idea that the ranks of the poor contain legions of smart kids just waiting to be discovered by an admissions lottery weighted in their favour is just as self-deluding as the same idea applied to races. By all means find talent wherever it lies. But don’t assume it’s lying there in abundance waiting to be picked up.

      Edit: The beauty of financial assistance for poor but bright students is that it’s not zero-sum. The student given a scholarship need not displace a self-funded student, as happens with race quotas where a black student displaces a Jewish student, because his funding allows the school to create a new, additional place for him.

      1. “I had thought—silly me—that calls for affirmative action by family income meant that smart but poor kids would have financial assistance to attend schools that their families wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford, but that they were capable of excelling in.”

        Many schools (including Harvard) waive all expenses if your family income is low enough.

        “But if poor kids are going to be given preference regardless of their scholastic ability, then it is just race-based quotas by another name and the idea should be strangled in the womb.”

        At least in the US, this is wrong. Poverty is not uniformly distributed by race. However, income based AA (without regard to academic ability) would be much likely to favor poor white and Asians versus the current approach.

        “At least when race was the only criterion, well-off black kids got in and were (usually) smarter than average.”

        At least in the US, this is wrong. Harvard admit well-off black kids. They have an average SAT score of 703.7. The average white admit has a score of 744.7. The average Asian admit has a score of 766.6. Harvard is quite typical in this respect. For universities as a whole AA admits have lower SAT scores than whites or Asians. See the 2009 work of Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade that found an Asian-American student must earn an SAT score 140 points higher than a white student, 270 points higher than a Hispanic and 450 points higher than an African-American, all else being equal. So if a white applicant scored 2160 on the SAT, lower than last year’s Harvard average, an Asian-American would need to hit 2300, well into the 99% percentile, to have an equal chance at getting in.”

        “Yes, there will be more black students offered places but only because they are poorer as a group, not because they are smarter.”

        At least in the US, this is wrong. Shifting to a class-based AA (versus race-based) would dramatically reduce the black admits.

        “The idea that the ranks of the poor contain legions of smart kids just waiting to be discovered by an admissions lottery weighted in their favour is just as self-deluding as the same idea applied to races. By all means find talent wherever it lies. But don’t assume it’s lying there in abundance waiting to be picked up.”

        I tried to research this point and failed.

        1. By “smarter than average”, I meant that black kids from well-off families would be expected to be smarter than the average black kid, not necessarily smarter than the average for all applicants of all races. The SAT scores you cite show that well-off blacks coming to Harvard are less scholastically accomplished than the run-of-the-mill for other races, a fact that I think everyone knows, me included, except that many underestimate through wishful thinking the magnitude of the skills gap between blacks and others that dooms racial preference policies.

          Suggest you not be so quick to call something flatly “wrong” (three times no less) when it may be down to your misunderstanding of my unclear writing. Any expression like “smarter than…” needs to be completed as “smarter than what” before you can pounce on it as “wrong”. “Could you clarify . . .?” would be more collegial. But I’ve lost interest now.

  6. Here’s another look at the Crimea situation:

    Mats Andersson

    What is the likelihood of Crimea being returned to Ukraine?

    Up until this morning, I would have said about 50/50.

    Now, after the Nova Kakhovka dam was blown up, I say it’s near 100%.

    Russia would never have blown up Crimea’s water supply if they weren’t preparing to evacuate Crimea.

    Simple as that. Yes, there’s going to be flooding in Kherson and upstream, there’s going to be a huge mess in Ukraine. But that’s short term, and also affects Russian-occupied territory; they lose electric power from the hydroelectric power plant, and they will also have to close down the Zaphorizhie nuclear power plant.

    Long term, this makes Crimea impossible to defend for Russia. This means they don’t even intend to.

    1. I was wondering when someone would mention that possibility. It was the first thing I thought of when I heard the news, but in all the speculating I’ve seen Anderson is the first to mention this.

    2. Russia is not leaving Crimea. Not voluntarily. They are not walking away from their Black Sea Fleet. If sabotage of a dam makes it difficult to defend Crimea, then it is most plausible that the responsible party is one who wants to impede Russia’s ability to defend Crimea. If the damage of such sabotage to Crimea can be managed and it is outweighed by perceived benefits elsewhere in the war, then you might have a different party responsible.

      But, yes, if Russia were to voluntarily leave with no intentions of returning, that dam would go. And so would much else.

  7. The Godfather scene is amazing. I had no idea that the cat’s appearance was entirely fortuitous. The way that Brando pets and manages the kitty tells me that he knows how to pet cats, that they like to be touched around the base of the ears, for example. It’s pretty amazing that he was able to manage the cat for the entirety of the scene. Usually a cat will start to get annoyed at the attention over that much time and will protest by threatening to bite, biting, or foot-peddling to eviscerate the perpetrator. Brando knows cats!

  8. There is a good docudrama series on Netflix (also on Paramount + and a couple other streaming services) about the making of The Godfather called “The Offer”. That’s where I first learned that the cat was a stray and not scripted. I found the series extremely interesting and well done; I had no idea how crazy making that movie was. Maybe not as crazy as making Apocalypse Now, but it was no joke! Nothing came easy.

    The black dog is still lurking.. 🙁 …perhaps linked to insomnia?

    1. So what happened to the Godfather’s kitteh after the scene was completed? Did Coppola return her to the streets, or did someone adopt her (I hope!)?

      1. I thought you posed a good question and googled it and nada. It seems the cat wandered off and was never heard of again. Sort of trippy when you think about it.

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