Thursday: Hili dialogue

November 23, 2023 • 6:45 am

It’s Thanksgiving in America–Thursday, November 23, 2023 and for some reason it’s National Espresso Day (it should be National Turkey Day). Below is a photo of me making espresso yesterday morning, the first step in constructing my morning latte.

At any rate, I give thanks that I’m still alive, but otherwise the world is going to hell. You can see what a variety of people give thanks for by read the Free Press collection “What we’re grateful for,” including short responses by Jon Haidt, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bari Weiss, Mayam Bialik, and various staffers at the site.

It’s also Doctor Who Day (it premiered on this day in 1963), National Cashew Day, Eat a Cranberry Day, National Day of Mourning, Labor Thanksgiving Day in Japan, Repudiation Day inFrederick County, Maryland, United States. the day they repudiated the Stamp Act in 1765. Finally, it’s Fibonacci Day, explained on the Checkiday site:

November 23—or 11/23—is the date of Fibonacci Day because the first series of numbers in the Fibonacci sequence are 1, 1, 2, and 3. The sequence is created by adding the previous two numbers to get the third number, so it begins as follows: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, and 144. Commonly studied in high school and college classes, it can be described with the mathematical equation Xn+2 = Xn+1 + Xn.

Today’s Google Doodle (click on screenshot) goes to a page on Thanksgiving of 2023:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the November 23 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

UPDATE:  This morning the NYT notes there’s been a delay in the prisoner/hostage swap and in the cease-fire, which won’t take effect until at least Friday.

The temporary cease-fire paired with the release of hostages held in Gaza and Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails will likely not begin until Friday at the earliest, Israeli officials said on Wednesday night, as negotiators continued to hammer out details of an agreement between Israel and Hamas that would see a pause in fighting to allow for groups of hostages and Palestinian prisoners to be released.

The new timing for the releases came in a statement issued by the National Security Council through the Israeli prime minister’s office, and appeared to rule out the possibility that hostages could be freed on Thursday, as many of their families had hoped.

The Israeli military also said that it “continued to fight in the Gaza Strip,” highlighting that the agreement to pause the fighting was not yet in place.

At a news conference on Wednesday night, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the agreement for a temporary cease-fire was a step toward Israel’s objective of freeing all of the captives held in Gaza, and that Israel intended to continue its military campaign. “I want to be clear: the war continues,” he said.

The rest of the Nooz was written late afternoon yesterday.

*The biggest news is the impending hostages-for-terrorists swap which appears to have been agreed upon, but details are still unclear, and are likely being hammered out even now:

Hours after Israel and Hamas agreed to a temporary cease-fire and the release of some hostages and prisoners, negotiators were hammering out crucial details of the deal.

As of Wednesday afternoon, they had not announced specific plans for an exchange of at least 150 Palestinian women and children jailed by Israel for at least 50 Israeli women and children held in Gaza, including when people would be released and who will be included.

The Israeli military also said that it “continued to fight in the Gaza Strip,” highlighting that the agreement to pause fighting for at least four days was not yet in place.

Some details did begin to emerge, however. The cease-fire is expected to begin at 10 a.m. local time on Thursday, according to an Israeli official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. The official said that Israel does not expect hostages to be freed until as late as 10 p.m., because Hamas may need time to organize their release.

At a news conference on Wednesday night, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the agreement was a step toward Israel’s objective of freeing all of the captives held in Gaza, and that Israel intended to continue its military campaign: “I want to be clear — the war continues.”

Note: it’s a three-terrorists-per-hostage swap, which is ludicrous, but reflects the sentiment of the Israelis, who badly want their people home (remember that they traded a thousand terrorists for a single Israeli soldier). What’s still unresolved:

Among the issues still under discussion, according to Israeli officials:

  • Hamas and Israel still disagree on how many captives are held in Gaza, making it hard to work out who exactly will be released, according to four Israeli officials who spoke anonymously to discuss a sensitive matter.

  • Israel published a shortlist of 300 Palestinians who could be released from Israeli jails, but had yet to narrow the list to 150 names.

  • The pause would allow for an increase in humanitarian aid to Gaza, through both the Egyptian and Israeli borders. But there was not yet agreement on the amount of supplies that would be allowed through, according to the fifth Israeli official.

The pause will likely also allow Hamas to rearm, though that was a matter of considerable dispute in Israel’s government and military; and Israel is forbidden to use drones other other forms of observation to see what Hamas will be up to during the pauses. You can be sure that they’ll be up to no good.

*The Washington Post provides a few more details, but these may well change by Thanksgiving (note that Hamas and Israel have not agreed on how many hostages there are, or who they are.

The pause is to be extended an extra day for the release of every 10 additional hostages, Israel said, adding that its forces will resume the war afterward. President Biden welcomed the deal in a statement that also thanked the leaders of Qatar and Egypt. Three Americans — two women and a girl — are expected to be among those released in the first wave of hostages, a senior Biden administration official told The Washington Post.
The final legal steps of enacting the agreement began Wednesday with the publication of a list of about 300 Palestinians being held in Israeli prisons. The law allows Israeli citizens who have been victims of militant attacks to challenge the release of prisoners at the Supreme Court. At least one advocacy group, the Almagor Terror Victims Association, filed a petition Wednesday to block the deal, according to Israeli media. The court rejected the appeal Wednesday evening. The list of detainees includes 123 minors.

*As I predicted, the IDF has found the “smoking gun”, the huge complex of tunnels and terror offices under the al-Shifa hospital. I’ll have more on that in a bit, but all I can do now is tell the NYT, the Washington Post, and the Guardian to stuff it for their constant, almost gleeful, reporting that there’s no good evidence for Israel’s claim of a tunnel complex under the hospital. They’ll have to report the truth now, but even as I write this on Wednesday evening, with Israeli sources, including video, showing that the “smoking gun” has indeed been found, the NYT  remains silent on the issue.  Israel always said it would take time, especially because the tunnels may well have been booby-trapped.  It took about a week, all the while with the liberal MSM jeering at the IDF for attacking a hospital where there wasn’t really any terrorists. The liberal MSM is wrong.

UPDATE: This morning the NYT reports on the new findings of tunnels and facilities, but their article is about as dismissive as you can get, beginning this way:

The Israeli military sought on Wednesday to bolster its assertions that Hamas uses tunnels beneath Gaza’s largest hospital, releasing a series of videos that it said showed “dozens of meters of a tunnel system” beneath the complex of Al-Shifa Hospital.

The first ten words are speculative and superfluous; perhaps Israel wants to destroy the tunnels and find hostages rather than merely “bolster its assertions”.  I can guarantee this: they’d still be excavating and exploring the tunnels if the world already believed they existed.  Here’s a tweet:

More later.

*Surprisingly, to me at least, conservative columnist Bret Stephens (whose parents were secular Jews), has had the clearest take on the Israel/Hamas war not just of NYT op-ed writers, but of NYT reporters. You can see that in his latest column, “The ‘cease-fire now’ imposture.” First, he quotes Hillary Clinton:

“Remember,” the former secretary of state said, “there was a cease-fire on Oct. 6 that Hamas broke by their barbaric assault on peaceful civilians and their kidnapping, their killing, their beheading, their terrible, inhumane savagery.”

Those three words — “that Hamas broke” — aren’t trivial. They give the lie to the “Cease-Fire Now” mirage, or imposture, that has become a rallying cry at pro-Palestinian demonstrations. They are at the heart of what the war is about, and the key to how it can end. And they are the bright dividing line between those who would allow Hamas to get away with murder, and those who would refuse.

And here’s the crux of the matter, and why I take the “Cease-fire now” mantra to mean: “Israel must lose this war”:

The Israeli government and Hamas agreed on Wednesday morning to a four-day cease-fire in which Hamas would free 50 of the hostages. But Hamas did that only because it’s under intense military pressure. It could get a real and lasting cease-fire for the people of Gaza — and probably safe passage out of the territory for many of its members — in exchange for releasing all the hostages, surrendering its arms and renouncing its rule in favor of some other Arab power.

That Hamas has done none of these things isn’t shocking: It’s a terrorist death cult. What’s shocking is that people in the Cease-Fire Now crowd don’t appear to have much interest in making any demands of Hamas equivalent to those they make of Israel.

They want Israel to stop firing. But do you often hear them insisting that Hamas return the favor? They want Israel to provide Gaza with humanitarian relief in the form of electricity, fuel and other goods. But I haven’t seen those protesters in the street demanding that Hamas provide Israel with humanitarian relief in the form of immediately freeing all hostages. They claim to want a “free Palestine” for all its people. But I never hear them criticize Hamas’s dictatorship, or its contempt for the civil and human rights of its own people, or its members’ avowedly antisemitic boasts of slaughtering Jews.

Stephens knows what “Cease-fire now” means, though apparently we’re going to have a temporary one:

For Israelis, what “Cease-Fire Now” means is “Surrender Now.” No wonder they decline to heed the call.

Finally, Stephens takes on—and answers—the tough question:

What about for Palestinians — women, children and noncombatant men for whom the calls for a cease-fire are supposedly intended? Would they benefit? In the short term, of course: Palestinian lives would be saved if Israel held its fire.

But a cease-fire wouldn’t spare just civilians. It would spare, and embolden, the main fighting force of Hamas. It would also embolden terrorist allies like Hezbollah. That’s a virtual guarantee for future mass-casualty attacks against Israel, for ever-larger Israeli retaliation, and for deeper misery for the people of Gaza. No Israeli government of any political stripe is going to allow the territory to rebuild so long as Hamas remains in charge.

Instead of Cease-Fire Now, we need Hamas’s Defeat Now. Only on that basis does a lasting peace for Israelis and Palestinians alike have any chance to follow.

Hamas must be defeated and cannot be allowed to persist. Only with that outcome—the explicit Israeli goal of the war—can Israel and Palestine coexist without ripping out each other’s throats.

*For another view, see Bernie Sanders’s contorted essay on the war, in which he claims to want peace for both sides, but blames everything on Israel. At the same time, he claims that Hamas must be removed from power but yet denies Israel the ability to do that. He also says that giving Gaza new leadership is Israel’s responsibility. though that can be argued.  Progressives will love the piece (remember that the Democratic Socialists of America, of which Bernie is one, announced an “all out for Palestine” demonstration on October 7, before Israel had responded to Hamas’s attack on that same day (see below). But in the end Sanders doesn’t offer any good solutions except “Hamas is bad but Israel is bad too. Israel has to fix things. And, by the way, the U.S. has to stop givng Israel so much money and start supporting Palestine.” This, says the sweating Democratic Socialist, will guarantee a two-state solution. Well, maybe he’s right, but he also is no friend of Israel.

Posted OCTOBER 7, the day of the attack, before Israel had even begun to respond. What does that tell you?

*This is plenty weird, and people are already crying “terrorism” about it. It involves a car that blew up at a checkpoint monitoring the Rainbow Bridge connecting Canada and the U.S., killing two.

A vehicle speeding toward a U.S.-Canada bridge from the American side crashed and exploded at a checkpoint in Niagara Falls on Wednesday, leaving two people dead and prompting the closing of four border crossings in the area, authorities said.

There was no immediate information on the cause of the incident, but it raised concerns on both sides of the border. The White House said President Joe Biden was “closely following developments,” and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said officials were “taking this extraordinarily seriously.”

“This is obviously a very serious situation in Niagara Falls,” Trudeau said in Parliament before excusing himself from Question Period in the House of Commons to be briefed further.

The two deceased people were in the vehicle, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press. The official was not authorized to discuss details of the investigation publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

. . .Jim Diodati, the mayor of Niagara Falls, Ontario, told The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that what happened appeared to be “an isolated incident.”

The U.S. FBI’s field office in Buffalo and other agencies were investigating the blast. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul traveled to Buffalo from the state capital, Albany.

The explosion happened on the U.S. side of the Rainbow Bridge, which connects the two countries across the Niagara River.

. . . Speaking to WGRZ-TV, witness Mike Guenther said he saw a vehicle speeding toward the crossing from the U.S. side when it swerved to avoid another car, crashed into a fence and exploded.

Canadian PM Justin Trudeau calls this a “serious situation”, but I’m guessing it’s not connected with terrorism (but where did the explosion come from?). And if it was a terrorist act, the people involved botched it. Nevertheless, security is being ramped up in the area, including at the Buffalo, New York airport.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is hunting:

Hili: Something was here and went away.
A: Where to?
Hili: And that is the right question.
In Polish:
Hili: Tu coś szło i poszło.
Ja: Dokąd?
Hili: I to jest właściwe pytanie.

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

From Susan:

From Facebook:

From Barry, somewhat salacious but true (I may have posted this before):

From Masih; another brave Iranian women flout the morality police, who scare the devil out of me in their black chadors and sashes:

From Simon, and yes, it’s true: the Rolling Stones concerts are going to be sponsored by the American Association of Retired Persons:

From Jez. This is wickedly clever!

 

From my own “home” feed, an affection moggy:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a boy gassed upon arrival, age four:

Three tweets from Matthew. First, the world’s best job:

Also from Dr. Cobb; this is a fairly well known photo of a kiwi carrying an egg:

Fun fact about Peter Lorre:

30 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Two headlines currently on UK news sites. I wonder if these sorts of thing are related:

    “UK net migration in 2022 revised upwards to 745,000” (that’s over 1% of the population in one year; other recent years are similar).

    “Dutch election: Anti-Islam populist Geert Wilders wins dramatic victory” (Wilders has campaigned on a no-immigration, “borders closed” stance.)

    1. Wilders also campaigned on banning the Quran, but has said that he’s willing to set it aside if necessary to form a coalition government.

      Wow – I can edit comments again! :o)

    2. The UK is also under the rule of a right-wing party that claimed Brexit would dramatically reduce immigration.

  2. Happy Thanksgiving, all!

    I am going to make a prediction, which I rarely do: If the ceasefire happens, when it ends Hamas’s fellow-travelers will ignore the fact that it was temporary, and blame Israel for ending it. (And, if it doesn’t happen, they will blame Israel.)

  4. Happy Thanksgiving!
    IRT the Fibonacci sequence, I request help from the mathematicians in this forum. I can’t compute the formula shown from Checkiday. Is it missing parentheses? At any rate, here’s the formula I found:
    Fn = Fn-1 + Fn-2 for every n > 1, where

    3. The formula doesn’t normally involve parentheses, but without formatting n, n-1, n-2 as subscripts would be better shown as a function:
      F(n) = F(n-1) + F(n-2), F(0)=0, F(1)=1.
      X(n+2) = X(n+1) + X(n), as Checkiday ought to have had it, is of course the same thing.

  5. On this day:
    534 BC – Thespis of Icaria becomes the first recorded actor to portray a character on stage.

    1499 – Pretender to the throne Perkin Warbeck is hanged for reportedly attempting to escape from the Tower of London. He had invaded England in 1497, claiming to be the lost son of King Edward IV of England.

    1644 – John Milton publishes Areopagitica, a pamphlet decrying censorship.

    1733 – The start of the 1733 slave insurrection on St. John in what was then the Danish West Indies.

    1867 – The Manchester Martyrs are hanged in Manchester, England, for killing a police officer while freeing two Irish Republican Brotherhood members from custody.

    1876 – Corrupt Tammany Hall leader William Magear Tweed (better known as Boss Tweed) is delivered to authorities in New York City after being captured in Spain.

    1910 – Johan Alfred Ander becomes the last person to be executed in Sweden.

    1921 – Warren G. Harding, 29th President of the United States, signs Willis–Campbell Act, into law, prohibiting doctors from prescribing beer or liquor for medicinal purposes.

    1924 – Edwin Hubble’s discovery, that the Andromeda “nebula” is actually another island galaxy far outside our own Milky Way, is first published in The New York Times.

    1946 – French naval bombardment of Hai Phong, Vietnam, kills thousands of civilians.

    1959 – French President Charles de Gaulle declares in a speech in Strasbourg his vision for “Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals”.

    1963 – The BBC broadcasts An Unearthly Child (starring William Hartnell), the first episode of the first story from the first series of Doctor Who, which is now the world’s longest running science fiction drama.

    1971 – Representatives of the People’s Republic of China attend the United Nations, including the United Nations Security Council, for the first time.

    1976 – Jacques Mayol is the first man to reach a depth of 100 m (330 ft) undersea without breathing equipment.

    1981 – Iran–Contra affair: Ronald Reagan signs the top secret National Security Decision Directive 17 (NSDD-17), giving the Central Intelligence Agency the authority to recruit and support Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

    1991 – Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury announces in a statement that he is HIV-positive. He dies the following day.

    1992 – The first smartphone, the IBM Simon, is introduced at COMDEX in Las Vegas, Nevada.

    2001 – The Convention on Cybercrime is signed in Budapest, Hungary.

    2003 – Rose Revolution: Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze resigns following weeks of mass protests over flawed elections.

    2005 – Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is elected president of Liberia and becomes the first woman to lead an African country.

    2015 – Blue Origin’s New Shepard space vehicle became the first rocket to successfully fly to space and then return to Earth for a controlled, vertical landing.

    2019 – The last Sumatran rhinoceros in Malaysia, Imam, dies, making the species officially extinct in the country.

    Births:
    1837 – Johannes Diderik van der Waals, Dutch physicist and thermodynamicist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1923).

    1868 – Mary Brewster Hazelton, American painter (d. 1953).

    1887 – Boris Karloff, English actor (d. 1969).

    1888 – Harpo Marx, American comedian and musician (d. 1964).

    1915 – Anne Burns, British aeronautical engineer and glider pilot (d. 2001).

    1924 – Josephine D’Angelo, American baseball player and educator (d. 2013). [One of the sixty original players to join the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) for its inaugural season.]

    1927 – John Cole, Irish-English journalist and author (d. 2013).

    1934 – Robert Towne, American actor, director, and screenwriter.

    1943 – Sue Nicholls, English actress.

    1946 – Diana Quick, English actress.

    1954 – Bruce Hornsby, American singer-songwriter and pianist.

    1963 – Gwynne Shotwell, American businesswoman, President and Chief Operating Officer of SpaceX.

    1968 – Kirsty Young, Scottish journalist.

    1970 – Zoë Ball, English radio and television host.

    1979 – Kelly Brook, English model and actress.

    1984 – Lucas Grabeel, American actor, singer, and songwriter.

    1992 – Miley Cyrus, American singer-songwriter and actress.

    An autobiography is obituary in serial form with the last installment missing:
    1534 – Beatriz Galindo, Spanish Latinist and educator (b. c. 1465).

    1585 – Thomas Tallis, English composer (b. c.1505).

    1899 – Thomas Henry Ismay, English businessman, founded White Star Line (b. 1837).

    1910 – Hawley Harvey Crippen, American physician and murderer (b. 1862). [One of the first criminals to be captured with the aid of wireless telegraphy.]

    1937 – Jagadish Chandra Bose, Bangladeshi-Indian physicist, biologist, botanist, and archaeologist (b. 1858).

    1979 – Merle Oberon, Indian-born British actress (b. 1911).

    1990 – Roald Dahl, British novelist, poet, and screenwriter (b. 1916).

    1991 – Klaus Kinski, German-American actor and director (b. 1926).

    1995 – Junior Walker, American singer and saxophonist (b. 1931).

    2001 – Mary Whitehouse, English educator and activist (b. 1910).

    2005 – Constance Cummings, American-English actress (b. 1910).

    2006 – Betty Comden, American actress, singer, and screenwriter (b. 1917).

    2006 – Alexander Litvinenko, Russian spy and defector (b. 1962). [Poisoned with a radioactive cup of tea by Russian agents.]

    2012 – Larry Hagman, American actor, director, and producer (b. 1931).

    2016 – Andrew Sachs, German-born British actor (b. 1930).

    2016 – Joe Esposito, road manager for Elvis Presley (b. 1938).

    1. Happy Thanksgiving to WEIT’s US readers!

      Comments are back and so is the edit function, which I haven’t seen in a very long time. Kudos to our host’s tech guy – what excellent service on a holiday!

  7. I always admired Bernie Sanders for his intelligent, liberal, views on almost all issues. I could have voted for him. But, I am very disappointed at his deeply troubling stance on Israel. Does he mean what he says or is he trying to appease some part of his constituency. This late in his political career(he’s 82) you’d expect a more principled stance.

    1. I also read the latest email from Bernie Sanders.
      It appears that #FeelTheBern has become #SeeTheEmbersDim
      (I voted for him in the 2016 primaries, but not in the subsequent election.)

    2. “This will guarantee a two-state solution.” Well it takes two to dance the tango. And since 1948, there was, at best, one willing to dance.

      Jean

  8. “The biggest news is the impending hostages-for-terrorists swap which appears to have been agreed upon”
    There is indeed very little hope for long term peace and stability in the region if when it is announce that Palestinian women and children will be released from jail in Israel, we immediately assume they are terrorists. Yes, no doubt there are violent militants who perform acts of terror among the Palestinian population, yes, from some of your earlier posts you have convinced me that those, call them terrorists, are not exclusively adult men, but do we immediately have to state/think/believe that this is a “hostages-for-terrorists swap”?

    1. They are terrorists. They are foreign women and minors who have been convicted of serious crimes carrying prison sentences and Hamas wants them back. They aren’t just being held in stockades without trial. Do you think Hamas wants just ordinary civil criminals and other ne’er-do-wells sprung from Israeli jails so they can live their ne’er-do-well lives on the Gaza side of the fence? Of course this is a hostages-for-terrorists swap.

      Israeli has a law that allows the families of people killed by now-jailed terrorists to contest the release of their relative’s murderer in swaps like this. Families to be affected have already sued and been rebuffed. Someone really badly wants this deal to go through.

      The only good thing about this swap is that it puts these criminals back in the cross-hairs of the IDF once the shooting resumes. They might be safer in an Israeli prison.

      1. The information on the NYT page linked above gives a very different description of what those 300 prisoners are. The article links to the original page from Israel, but unfortunately I can’t read it to get more details. The article clearly states that:

        a) most of those listed have not been convicted of their crimes (so they have not been tried yet, or if they have they have not been convicted)

        b) there is a wide range of charges from throwing stones to murder. A crime is a crime, but a crime is not always terrorism and again, apparently most of these people have not been convicted even tough some of the arrests date back to 2015…

        c) very few of these people seem to actually be from Gaza

        Again, given what I have read I think that calling the people on this list terrorist is premature, unhelpful and likely wrong.

        Here is an excerpt from the NYT article:

        “All the names on the list were described as “security prisoners,” or people who had been arrested in connection with politically motivated crimes. The offenses listed include supporting terrorism, acts of violence and throwing stones. There are several charges of attempted murder. Most of those listed had not been convicted on the charges.

        There were 32 women and girls listed, including two 18-year-olds and a 15-year-old. Of the boys, 144 are 18 years old and 123 are between 14 and 17.

        All of their cases predate the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, but the vast majority occurred within the last two years.

        Most of the accused were listed as living in the West Bank; 76 came from East Jerusalem and five from Gaza, according to the data. None was listed as living in Israel or having Israeli citizenship. Qadura Fares, head of the Palestinian Authority’s Commission for Prisoners’ Affairs, said in a phone interview that though he was not personally involved in the negotiations, his understanding was that people who had spent the most time in prison would be prioritized for release. The earliest arrests on the list date back to 2015.”

  9. This may not be appropriate here, but overnight I kept thinking about the Ohio State DEI focussed hiring spree that was posted here yesterday afternoon. And I came to the conclusion that that had to be a hoax. Ohio State is a major state research university and such a large scale action, other than one narrowly targeted hiring, cannot be real. Can readers confirm that this really happened at Ohio State?

      1. Thanks mike. Yes I read Sailer’s material but it is still just incredible to me… to a point of disbelief! But I guess if there is wholesale renaming of buildings and species and canceling of historical figures anything can happen.

    3. Jim,

      John Sailer has followed his WSJ piece with some reports at the website for the National Association of Scholars. He says that he will be releasing source documents over the next week. Indeed, his first two short articles include links to nine full reports written by the OSU hiring committees from varied departments that document their faculty search diversity recruitment efforts.

      Apparently, Sailer felt it appropriate to give hiring committee faculty members credit for their work; their names have not been redacted from the reports. Names of student reps on the hiring committees are redacted, as are those of the applicants, but many of the latter could be easily identified with a quick Google search.

      Here is the write-up on one applicant in African Art History and Visual Culture who was not invited for a campus interview: “Very strong research profile in a desirable area for the department (colonial southeast Asia). Fantastic writing sample. He blew the interview with his DEI answer, however, which was disqualifying (all on the committee agreed on this).” Given that the form includes the applicant’s then-current job, the university from which he earned a PhD, the person’s research specialty, and his sex, it would be an easy matter to determine who this applicant was that appears to have been stiffed for DEI reasons alone. Not all departments were as “bold” in their reporting.

      https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/ohio-state-reports-dei-litmus-tests
      https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/ohio-state-reports-the-rubrics

      1. Thanks Doug and Coel. I believe it…just find it so sad. I have read Sailer’s material over the past year. Thanks for this recent reference. Btw, years ago, when NASA was diversifying the astronaut core, a good friend of mine, a white, male, former fighter pilot, made it through the last cut of applicants before selection. He was not selected but was clear to folks that he did not blame the diversity process, but rather something more traditional: the selected white male was one of the agency bosses son…just good old nepotism my friend said. In fairness the son was qualified and perhaps connections was a tie-breaker or maybe on the quantitative rubric he WAS more qualified.

  10. Well, I don’t see my earlier comment, so I will repeat it at the risk of repeating it.

    Happy Thanksgiving, all!

    I am going to make a prediction, which I generally avoid: If the ceasefire happens, even though it is to be for a specified number of days, when it ends Hamas and its fellow-travelers will blame Israel for breaking it and recommencing hostilities. (And if it doesn’t happen, Israel will get blamed for that, even though this current delay seems to be caused by Hamas.)

  11. November 22 (yesterday) marked the 50th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving in space.

    “Skylab 4 astronauts Gerald P. Carr, Edward G. Gibson, and William R. Pogue were the first crew to celebrate Thanksgiving in space on Nov. 22, 1973. On that day, their seventh of an 84-day mission, Gibson and Pogue completed a 6-hour and 33-minute spacewalk, while Carr remained in the Multiple Docking Adaptor with no access to food. All three made up for missing lunch by consuming two meals at dinner time, although neither included special items for Thanksgiving.”

    https://www.nasa.gov/history/thanksgiving-celebrations-in-space-2023/

  12. Jim B. said anything can happen. I’m reading “Nothing Is True And everything Is Possible” by P. Pomerantsev. It’s about Putin’s Russia where in the old days they would oppress opposition and now “it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd”.
    The absurdities are world wide it seems. That is not good. As others have commented in the past one wonders if there is influence that has been paid for to advance crazy ideas. Follow the money.
    Because if nothing is true then what is real? And doubts lead to confusion and inaction. Because maybe the Ukrainians are Nazis and Israel is an apartheid state. And an army of paid bots and trolls give this bs credence.

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