Sunday: Hili dialogue

December 24, 2023 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Sunday, December 24, 2023, and we have one day until Christmas and, more important, the beginning of Coynezaa. It’s also National Eggnog Day, celebrating one of the world’s worst forms of booze (or any drink). It is unpalatable, not good for you, and most often contains so little booze that you have to fill your tummy with fat just to get a buzz on. And the drink is getting worse over time, too. Look at this!

“Pumpkin pie spice eggnog” by Joelk75 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

It’s also the Feast of the Seven Fishes, Super Saturday, and Christmas Eve, which has the following forms of observance:

From Pinterest:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the December 24 Wikipedia page.

There will be only a very truncated Hili tomorrow, and posting will be light because it’s the anniversary of the birth of baby Jesus and of course all we Jews must celebrate the appearance of the world’s most famous member of our faith.

Da Nooz:

First, The Quote of the Week, recounted by Andrew Sullivan:

“This is the most election in our lifetime,” – Kamala Harris, the Claudine Gay of politics.

Although it looks as if Tr*mp will be elected (if he’s not in jail), if Biden becomes President next year we’re facing the prospect of Harris running the country.

*As you know, Trump is facing four federal charges in a D.C. court for trying to overturn the last Presidential election: one count each of conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, a different count of obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and one count of conspiracy against the right to vote. These are the most serious charges he faces, though of course there are many others. Now the U.S. Supreme Court has decided not to speed up a decision on whether Trump is immune from prosecution for these charges:

The Supreme Court declined Friday to fast-track a decision on whether Donald Trump is immune from prosecution over his efforts as president to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.

The high court’s denial of a request from special counsel Jack Smith—announced in a one-sentence order—that it bypass a lower appeals court increases the chances that the former president’s trial on charges that he interfered in the election will be delayed beyond its scheduled March 4 start date. Trump’s lawyers have been seeking to push back the trial, so far without success.

The justices’ move leaves the issue in the hands of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which has scheduled expedited proceedings. Trump’s appeals brief is due Saturday, and the government will have until Dec. 30 to file a response. Arguments before the circuit court are set for Jan. 9, and the losing party will likely appeal to the Supreme Court.

Trump’s effort to stay in the White House after losing the 2020 election will continue to cast a long shadow over his effort to win in 2024 as his various cases unfold. Meanwhile, his campaign is trying to mitigate any damage by playing down the importance of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol and arguing that he is under attack because he’s standing up for his supporters.

It’s not clear to me why the Supreme Court’s denial of review will delay his March trial on four insurrection-related charges.

*According to the NYT, Vladimir Putin is ready to declare a cease-fire in Ukraine, so long as he gets to keep what he’s already gained.

Buoyed by Ukraine’s failed counteroffensive and flagging Western support, Mr. Putin says that Russia’s war goals have not changed. Addressing his generals on Tuesday, he boasted that Ukraine was so beleaguered that Russia’s invading troops were doing “what we want.”

“We won’t give up what’s ours,” he pledged, adding dismissively, “If they want to negotiate, let them negotiate.”

But in a recent push of back-channel diplomacy, Mr. Putin has been sending a different message: He is ready to make a deal.

Mr. Putin has been signaling through intermediaries since at least September that he is open to a cease-fire that freezes the fighting along the current lines, far short of his ambitions to dominate Ukraine, two former senior Russian officials close to the Kremlin and American and international officials who have received the message from Mr. Putin’s envoys say.

In fact, Mr. Putin also sent out feelers for a cease-fire deal a year earlier, in the fall of 2022, according to American officials. That quiet overture, not previously reported, came after Ukraine routed Russia’s army in the country’s northeast. Mr. Putin indicated that he was satisfied with Russia’s captured territory and ready for an armistice, they said.

How much of Ukraine does Russia control? Here’s a map of the parts of Ukraine under Russian control as of October 10. (Crimea is a lost cause.) It’s not the whole country, but I don’t think President Zelensky wants to give it back. But perhaps, given the dire situation of Ukraine, this is the best he can do. As for Putin, my words for him aren’t suitable for a family-oriented website:

*The New York Post reports that Harvard cleared President Claudine Gay of plagiarism even before it investigated the charges!

Harvard cleared its president Claudine Gay of plagiarism before it even investigated whether her academic work was copied, The Post reveals today.

In a threatening legal letter to The Post in late October, the college called allegations that she lifted other academics’ work “demonstrably false,” and said all her works were “cited and properly credited.”

Days later Gay herself asked for an investigation and Harvard tore up its own rules to ask outside experts to review her work, saying it had to avoid a conflict of interest.

And the experts then found she did need to make multiple corrections to her academic record.

The bare-knuckled law firm Harvard employed to try to keep the plagiarism allegations from ever coming to light told The Post it would sue for “immense” damages.

Harvard never revealed an investigation had been launched as the lawyers put pressure on The Post to kill its reporting.

. . .The Post’s disclosure of how Harvard cleared Gay without investigating her, then aggressively tried to cover up the probe, thrusts the actions of the head of its governing body, billionaire Hyatt heiress Penny Pritzker into the spotlight.

How Pritzker — the Senior Fellow of the Harvard Corporation who was a commerce secretary under Pres. Obama — handled the crisis will now come under scrutiny. A member of her household staff told The Post Thursday that Pritzker was not available to comment. Harvard declined to confirm Friday that she knew the contents of the legal letter before it was sent.

. . .The Corporation cast aside the college’s procedures, which set out a formal process for investigating faculty accused of plagiarism, saying it was to avoid a “conflict of interest” because of Gay’s status.

Instead it appointed a four-member sub-committee to determine what to do. They in turn asked three experts, all political scientists who are not at Harvard, to investigate. Harvard and Clare Locke never told The Post of this significant change in Harvard’s position.

The college has never disclosed who was on the subcommittee or the names of the three experts.

This is a rather confusing article that goes back and forth, but it seems that Harvard bypassed its usual procedure for investigating faculty, appointed a special subcommittee of experts to investigate the claims of plagiarism, but before the subcommittee issued its findings the Overseers were threatening the Post for trying to run the story. The Overseers also asserted, before an investigation, that Gay had done nothing wrong. Those threats are reprehensible.

If the Post is right, Harvard didn’t do an objective investigation, but was determined to clear Gay before looking into the charges. I still think she needs to go, but it looks as if Schmarvard will defend her to the hilt, even as liberal media like the Washington Post and The Atlantic call for her to resign. What do you expect when only two of the members of Harvard’s Board of Overseers are academics and seven of the other nine are from the world of business, finance, or law?

*Andrew Sullivan’s new Weekly Dish article “The second coming of Donald Trump” outlines “some of the unpleasant, brutal truths we need to face in 2024.” And I quote:

Donald Trump is likely to be the next president of the United States.

There has been no comeback like this since Nixon. Trump now leads Biden in the swing states, and in the country at large. His issues — inflation, immigration, crime— are ascendant again. The multiple lawsuits against him have backfired, shoring up his Republican support, and lending credence to his largely spurious, but rhetorically effective, claim that he is the target of a witch hunt.\

Ukraine will never win back its lost territory.

The most delusional Ukraine supporters were telling us not so long ago that total victory was in sight. It wasn’t and isn’t. Obama’s key insight remains true: Ukraine will always matter far more to Russia than to Europe or the US, and so, “we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for.”’

The two-state solution in Israel/Palestine is dead.

The horrors of the last few months — the depraved, anti-Semitic terror attacks of Hamas and the devastating IDF campaign in response — have changed Israel. The vulnerability exposed on October 7 will ensure that no serious Palestinian state or even entity will win majority Israeli support in the future.

DEI is incompatible with a free society.

On the surface, making our democracy more inclusive and diverse seems like a no-brainer. And it is! We should do all we can to maximize opportunities for everyone, regardless of background, race, sex, and so on.

But what DEI does, as more people are beginning to understand, is very different. It replaces individual rights with group rights; it turns every human activity into a zero-sum struggle of identities; far from reducing racism, it intensifies it, by its obsession with what divides us over what unites us. In places of learning, it places the demands of “social justice” above the pursuit of truth, and so it has not so much enhanced education as replaced it with ideological conformity.

and

Joe Biden is too old to be re-elected.

Let’s be fair: he has his moments of lucidity. He has passed significant legislation beyond anything his predecessor did. He is, at heart, a decent guy, and that counts for something. He has done his duty in saving us from a second Trump term in 2020, but is now liable to undo that very achievement by running again in 2024, and losing, possibly badly.

Depressed yet? Read the second part of his article, “The Gay Science”, about Claudine Gay’s missteps. Just a brief quote:

Watching Harvard president Claudine Gay twist in the wind has not been an edifying spectacle. You’d be inhuman not to feel for her. But it is now inescapably clear that, in her parsimonious and unremarkable publications, she violated Harvard’s own student standards on what Harvard now (hilariously) calls “duplicative language” and the NYT calls “insufficient citation.” She couldn’t even come up with her own phrases in an acknowledgment! Her sins are not the most egregious type of plagiarism, but they cannot be excused by saying, as the Harvard Corporation does, that they were unintentional. While it’s lovely to see a CRT-based institution recognize intent as a valid category — try that on the pomo left! — the rules forbid plagiarism among students “whether you do it intentionally or not.” For Harvard faculty, however, we have found out that the standard is lower! You can commit the sin students get expelled for, as long as it does not rise to the level of “research misconduct,” and you didn’t mean to rip someone else off. That’s how Gay has escaped accountability.

I’m with Sully all the way on this one, sad as it is. Watching Ukraine fade out of the national interest, like a computer screen logging off, is pretty damn distressing. But Trump winning is more than I can bear.

*From associate editor Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post, an op-ed in her paper, “Harvard’s Claudine Gay should resign.” (Marcus quotes some of the by now well-known instances of plagiarism, but I’ll omit those.

She plagiarized her acknowledgments. I take no joy in saying this, but Harvard President Claudine Gay ought to resign. Her track record is unbefitting the president of the country’s premier university. Remaining on the job would send a bad signal to students about the gravity of her conduct.

This was not my original instinct. I thought, and continue to believe, that Gay’s accusers and their allies were motivated more by conservative ideology and the desire to score points against the most elite of institutions than by any commitment to academic rigor. This was, and is, accompanied by no small dose of racism, and the conviction that a Black woman couldn’t possibly be qualified to lead Harvard.

In addition, the initial reports of plagiarism seemed small-bore. . .

. . . And yet. The instances of problematic citation in the work of Gay, a political scientist, have become too many to ignore. Some go well beyond routine use of the same language. The Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium reported that “in at least 10 instances, Gay lifted full sentences — even entire paragraphs — with just a word or two tweaked.”

Harvard said it launched an inquiry into Gay’s conduct after being contacted by the New York Post in October about plagiarism allegations. It said an independent panel of three respected political scientists with no ties to Harvard had examined Gay’s published works and found instances of “inadequate citations” that, “while regrettable, did not constitute research misconduct” because there was no evidence of intentional deception or recklessness.

It said Gay had submitted four corrections to two articles and, after questions were raised about her dissertation, promised to update that document as well to fix “duplicative language without appropriate attribution.” Most of the scholars involved told the Harvard Crimson that they were untroubled by the conduct.

Really? Here’s what Harvard tells its students. “Taking credit for anyone else’s work is stealing, and it is unacceptable in all academic situations, whether you do it intentionally or by accident.”

And: “It’s not enough to have good intentions and to cite some of the material you use.”

And this: “When you write papers in college, your work is held to the same standards of citation as the work of your professors.”

Which raises the question: Is the university president’s work being held to the same standards? It sure doesn’t look that way.

*According to the Associated Press’s “Oddities” section, a woman in Alabama with the anomaly of having two uteruses (uteri?) gave birth to two babies on the same day, one from each uterus:

An Alabama woman with two uteri and two cervixes has given birth to two babies after carrying one of them in each uterus.

Kelsey Hatcher of Dora, about 28 miles (45.06 kilometers) northwest of Birmingham, gave birth to two girls on Wednesday and Thursday after a combined 20 hours of labor.

Hatcher was diagnosed with a double uterus, also called uterus didelphys, when she was 17. The rare congenital condition occurs in 0.3% of women, according to a report published by the University of Alabama at Birmingham. There is an “estimated one-in-a-million chance” of carrying a baby in both uteri, also known as a dicavitary pregnancy, the report says.

The older child, Roxi, was born on Tuesday, and Rebel arrived on Wednesday. Hatcher told WVTM-TV that both she and the newborns are healthy. Her husband, Caleb, was with her in the hospital, she said.

These can’t be identical twins, which result from the splitting of a single fertilized egg, so I suppose you can call them just “twins”. I presume they result from a single act of insemination.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is in the holiday spirit:

A: What are you doing?
Hili: I’m watching how God is being born.
In Polish:
Ja: Co ty robisz?
Hili: Patrzę jak się Bóg rodzi.

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

I guess the source is given at the bottom:

From Linkiest. I wonder if this is real:

From a source I can’t recall:

From Masih, sound up. Hypothesis: those Iranians who are found to have danced are more likely to be shot at protests. One data point:

Gad can be funny:

These two tweets make me ineffably sad. And it’s the youngest folks (the ones who hate Israel the most) who are the most biased. When I was younger, blacks and Jews worked together for civil rights.

From Merilee. We’re not even going to have a Christmas party this year; the University is in a financial squeeze:

From Barry, two fantastic “side eyes”:

From the Auschwitz Memorial. a girl gassed upon arrival, age seven.

Two tweets from Matthew Cobb. First, “pseudomelanistic” tigers from India’s Simlipal National Park.

Reserved parking for Santa. But only airplanes or drones (or flying sleds) can see this!

35 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  1. I am afraid that President Gay’s resignation would be of no use. The Corp selected her and appears to continue to defend her. So what different knowledge, skills, and other capabilities should one expect from a successor appointed by the same board with an unchanged culture and philosophy that appointed and defends her?

    I think the problem is centered a bit north of President Gay on the org chart.

  2. “It’s not clear to me why the Supreme Court’s denial of review will delay his March trial on four insurrection-related charges.”

    Because the trial can’t proceed until his immunity claims have been finally decided. If SCOTUS had taken the case, they could make a final determination relatively quickly. Declining it means that the D.C. circuit court has to handle it first. They might go fast or slow. Whichever side loses will then appeal to SCOTUS, introducing another round of delay.

  3. “. . . your work is held to the same standards of citation as the work of your professors.” I guess that means plagiarism is no longer an offense at Harvard. I saw a tweet yesterday suggesting that, for consistency sake, Gay should plagiarize her letter of resignation, too.

  4. I liked the many clever references Sullivan drops, like The Gay Science – a work of Nietzsche. In the sense of “joyous”.

    Just in case.

  5. ” The multiple lawsuits against him [Trump] have backfired, shoring up his Republican support,”

    The lawsuits were not about killing his popularity they were about holding him accountable to the law. Yes, the right wing propaganda machine stepped into high gear to support Trump but it was always going to do that.

  6. The post regarding antisemitic attitudes by minorities supports my idea that all the talk of antisemitism post Oct 7 is simplified: there are 3 separate sources of antisemitism. The first is the classic european antisemitism espoused by the alt-right. The second is expressed mostly by muslims but this is more a part of an ethnic/religious conflict and doesnt quite resemble european antisemitism. The third is really just an expression of anti-white bias. The people expressing it (some of whom are white) dont give a fig for the Israeli/Hamas conflict and many couldnt find Israel on a map of the middle east. They simply see Israelis as white, Hamas as POC and are happy to jump in with hate speech since they sense Jews are on the defensive

    1. Agree. And this is the kind of systemic racism one could have an interesting conversation about, including the first and third forms that show up at different rates in different demographics (old white people vs. younger black and hispanic people).

  7. Marcus is ridiculous here:

    “… I thought, and continue to believe, that Gay’s accusers and their allies were motivated more by conservative ideology and the desire to score points against the most elite of institutions than by any commitment to academic rigor. This was, and is, accompanied by no small dose of racism, and the conviction that a Black woman couldn’t possibly be qualified to lead Harvard.”

    No, her accusers know she never deserved her job. No one who works hard in any field–and certainly academia–won’t be miffed to see someone less qualified get hired or promoted over herself. Crying racism won’t work here, as it was racism that vaulted her to the presidency of Harvard. Gay has been caught, and she is guilty of multiple transgressions and should be fired.

    1. Hate to break it to you guys, but her accusers are not a monolithic group with only one set of beliefs. The Republican politicians are presumably motivated by gaining political advantage. There is no reason racism from both sides is not possible. And there are some people who (at least try) to look at the situation objectively or whose “institutional loyalty” only goes so far.

  8. I think Biden is probably one of the last of the true statesmen. People make remarks about his age but with age comes experience. Biden was a statesman during the cold war. He’s seen it all. I think it’s because of Biden that we haven’t seen the conflict in the Middle East escalate to world war 3. It’s a shame people can’t see this and obsess over his mortality.

    2. Yes, Biden has seen it all. But I don’t think folks are so concerned with his mortality as they are with his forgetting it all.

      1. Yet he hardly seems this way. He fell of his bike once and sometimes he’s a bit tired but really he’s just as sharp as any other statesman. I think it’s pure ageism.

        1. I gather that you haven’t seen the dozens of videos of his gaffes. Of course, you won’t find them on Left-ish sources.

          1. I have seen the gaffes on the “Left-ish” sources, many times. They just don’t ridicule them, unlike the “Right-ish” sources. Biden is prone to gaffes and he’s always made misstatements–even when he was much younger. What you won’t see on the “Right-ish” sources is Trump saying that an “impaired” Biden will start WW II or speeches where Trump thinks he’s running against Obama, which is what Trump has been saying for months now and the rightwing media refuses to mention this. After Trump said Obama was president on Fox News and was corrected by Brian Kilmeade he still insisted Obama was running the country. Don’t forget about Trump accusing immigrants of “poisoning our blood”–straight out of Hitler’s speeches. At least Biden doesn’t openly admire fascists, Communists or Nazi dictators.

    3. Be careful about wanting Biden to be considered a statesman. “A statesman is a successful politician who is dead.” – Thomas Brackett Reed (and many others later)

    4. A Trump/Biden rematch/sequel is a horrible idea to start with, as Trump cannot swear to “protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” as he has made it quite clear that he’s in it only for himself. This alone should disqualify him, but it doesn’t even seem to be a consideration. So it doesn’t really matter if Biden is a true statesman, decent, or whatever, because that doesn’t seem to qualify him.

      It’s The Media® who’s looking forward to the coming brawl, not the voters. They will double-down and expand every nasty comment and conspiracy about both of them. Easier, faster, and “let’s you and him fight” is a proven strategy.

      Even better this year, the average citizen has access to ChatGPT, Dall-E, and voice capture software. We can have “David Attenborough” do voice promos for or against both of them. It will be a circus.

  9. On this:
    1777 – Kiritimati, also called Christmas Island, is discovered by James Cook.

    1814 – Representatives of the United Kingdom and the United States sign the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812.

    1818 – The first performance of “Silent Night” takes place in the Nikolauskirche in Oberndorf, Austria.

    1826 – The Eggnog Riot at the United States Military Academy begins that night, wrapping up the following morning.

    1865 – Jonathan Shank and Barry Ownby form The Ku Klux Klan.

    1871 – The opera Aida premieres in Cairo, Egypt.

    1906 – Reginald Fessenden transmits the first radio broadcast; consisting of a poetry reading, a violin solo, and a speech.

    1913 – The Italian Hall disaster in Calumet, Michigan results in the deaths of 73 striking workers families at a Christmas party participants (including 59 children) when someone falsely yells “fire”.

    1914 – World War I: The “Christmas truce” begins.

    1943 – World War II: U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower is named Supreme Allied Commander for Operation Overlord.

    1944 – World War II: The Belgian Troopship Leopoldville was torpedoed and sank with the loss of 763 soldiers and 56 crew.

    1953 – Tangiwai disaster: In New Zealand’s North Island, at Tangiwai, a railway bridge is damaged by a lahar and collapses beneath a passenger train, killing 151 people.

    1964 – Vietnam War: Viet Cong operatives bomb the Brinks Hotel in Saigon, South Vietnam to demonstrate they can strike an American installation in the heavily guarded capital.

    1968 – Apollo program: The crew of Apollo 8 enters into orbit around the Moon, becoming the first humans to do so. They performed ten lunar orbits and broadcast live TV pictures.

    1973 – District of Columbia Home Rule Act is passed, allowing residents of Washington, D.C. to elect their own local government.

    2018 – A helicopter crash kills Martha Érika Alonso, first female Governor of Puebla, Mexico, and her husband Rafael Moreno Valle Rosas, former governor.

    2021 – Burmese military forces commit the Mo So massacre, killing at least 44 civilians.

    Births:
    1731 – Julie Bondeli, Swiss salonist and lady of letters (d. 1778).

    1818 – James Prescott Joule, English physicist and brewer (d. 1889). [An interesting combination.]

    1822 – Matthew Arnold, English poet and critic (d. 1888).

    1868 – Emanuel Lasker, German chess player, mathematician, and philosopher (d. 1941).

    1886 – Michael Curtiz, Hungarian-American actor, director, and producer (d. 1962).

    1895 – Noel Streatfeild, English author (d. 1986).

    1895 – Marguerite Williams, American geologist (d. 1991).

    1905 – Howard Hughes, American businessman, engineer, and pilot (d. 1976).

    1910 – Max Miedinger, Swiss typeface designer, created Helvetica (d. 1980).

    1922 – Ava Gardner, American actress (d. 1990).

    1923 – William C. Schneider, American aerospace engineer (d. 1999).

    1924 – Lee Dorsey, American singer-songwriter (d. 1986).

    1927 – Mary Higgins Clark, American author (d. 2020).

    1940 – Anthony Fauci, American physician, Director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

    1945 – Lemmy, English hard rock singer-songwriter and bass player (d. 2015).

    1946 – Jan Akkerman, Dutch rock guitarist and songwriter.

    1956 – Anil Kapoor, Indian actor and producer.

    1957 – Hamid Karzai, Afghan politician, 12th President of Afghanistan.

    1960 – Carol Vorderman, Welsh television host.

    1961 – Mary Barra, American businesswoman, current CEO and chairwoman of General Motors.

    1963 – Caroline Aherne, English actress, producer, and screenwriter (d. 2016).

    I was court-martialled in my absence, and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence:
    1524 – Vasco da Gama, Portuguese explorer and politician, Governor of Portuguese India (b. 1469).

    1873 – Johns Hopkins, American businessman and philanthropist (b. 1795).

    1914 – John Muir, Scottish-American geologist, botanist, and author, founded Sierra Club (b. 1838).

    1931 – Carlo Fornasini, micropalaeontologist (b. 1854).

    1931 – Flying Hawk, American warrior, educator and historian (b. 1854).

    1935 – Alban Berg, Austrian composer and educator (b. 1885).

    1971 – Maria Koepcke, German-Peruvian ornithologist and zoologist (b. 1924).

    1999 – Bill Bowerman, American runner, coach, and businessman, co-founded Nike, Inc. (b. 1911).

    2008 – Harold Pinter, English playwright, screenwriter, director, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1930).

    2010 – Elisabeth Beresford, English journalist and author (b. 1926). [Created the Wombles, who are now back on BBC Radio.]

    2016 – Rick Parfitt, British musician (b. 1948). [Massive Wagons’ single “Back To The Stack” is a tribute to him.]

    2016 – Liz Smith, English actress (b. 1921).

    2016 – Richard Adams, English author (b. 1920).

  10. I heard that at Cornell-Harvard football games the Harvard students would derisively “moo” at the Cornell students. The Cornell students would shout back “safety school”.
    Turns out the Cornell students were right.

  11. I see the two tweets by Henderson as a glass half full. The young people my wife and I have had any hand in raising —white ones — are less antisemitic than our own generation was. The race-hustler POCs who see political advancement from antisemitism are going to be encouraged to take a long walk off a short dock.

    1. Yes I see this too in my kids and in the students I teach.

      Also wanted to say: I’m ok with “uteruses” not “uteri”. What say you Leslie?

      1. That’s a good question, Mike. I think in colloquial speech, including medical communication to patients, making the plural with the usual English -es would be appropriate for clarity. But in actually explaining the condition to a patient, I would probably (not that I ever have…) say something like, “Most women are born with a single uterus. When yours was being formed, it duplicated itself so it’s almost like you have two,” and then explain in more detail, without ever referring directly to her “two uteruses”. (Strictly there aren’t two complete uteruses.) There is something depersonalizing in referring to a normally single organ in the plural, as if you are referring to a collection of isolated body parts in a museum that came from more than one individual person. “The blood clot from your legs broke up in the heart and pieces went to both lungs” is fine. “Colons”, “prostates”, “spleens”, “thymuses”, “hearts”, “uteruses” just doesn’t sound right to me, even for the rare person who has a duplication in some of these. I think it comes from the same place as referring to “a patient with diabetes” instead of “a diabetic.” Some people think it’s silly but it’s the way I was taught. If she wants to tell her family and friends that she’s a diabetic with two uteruses, that’s fine.

        In formal surgical or anatomical writing, I think most authors would refer to “uterus didelphys, a condition where the uterus including the cervix is duplicated, each uterus having a single Fallopian tube and ovary.” If someone was doing an anatomical study of autopsied organs, he might say, “in 1% of hearts examined, the aortic valve was bicuspid and in 0.3% of the uteri (or uteruses), the body and cervix were duplicated.”

        I don’t think it’s so much which form of the plural is correct — both are — it’s more the nuance of respectful regard for human organs and people that inhibits pluralizing them when they “normally” have only one.

        1. Thanks! Biologists are still hung up on plurals for Latin and Greek word roots: larvas vs. larvae etc. I wasn’t thinking about how to use the term with a patient – physicians have more to consider. Merry Christmas eh?

  12. It’s not clear to me why the Supreme Court’s denial of review will delay his [Trump’s] March trial on four insurrection-related charges.

    I don’t believe it will. The DC Circuit Court of Appeals is hearing Trump’s appeal of the denial of his motion for presidential immunity on an expedited basis. If Trump’s appeal there is unsuccessful (his legal argument is frivolous), he can then seek certiorari in the Supreme Court, but I expected the Court will vote to deny him discretionary pretrial review on this issue.

    If Trump is convicted after trial in the DC district court, he can raise the issue of presidential immunity, along with any other issues he has preserved in the district court, in a post-trial appeal. (This is the general practice in federal criminal cases; with few exceptions, the courts disfavor piecemeal pretrial appellate litigation.) If Trump’s post-trial appeal to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals is unsuccessful, he can then seek review by SCOTUS on the issues he has preserved, including the issue of presidential immunity from prosecution.

  14. Sullivan is mostly correct, perhaps fully correct. The one reservation I have is that I still think that a two-state solution is possible, and it might even be in Israel’s best interest to pursue that now. Certainly a one-state solution would not be a Jewish state over the long term, so a one-state solution is surely a non-starter. If a state of Palestine were in existence alongside Israel—or more graphically—*astride* Israel, that state would (potentially) become part of the global community—including the financial community. As such, Palestine would be expected to adhere to some basic norms of behavior. Hamas’s behavior would not be acceptable.

    Prime Minister Netanyahu says in his 2022 book that a Palestinian State next to Israel will only put the militant forces in closer proximity where they can attack more easily. Well, the militants are pretty close to Israel as it is and keeping them at bay through isolation hasn’t worked. This is why I don’t rule out an attempt at a two-state solution and think that today’s crisis might actually be making such a solution more likely than less.

    Trying to craft a silk’s purse from a sow’s ear, I know.

    1. I can see the silk purse in what you say, Norman. Then I read David Anderson’s “houseguests” column and all I see is a sow’s ear.

  15. Worse that plagiarism (a deliberate act) is making things up without any proof or citation as Ruth Marcus does here. I know it’s opinion, but it is also intellectually lazy and closed minded.

    “I thought, and continue to believe, that Gay’s accusers and their allies were motivated more by conservative ideology and the desire to score points against the most elite of institutions than by any commitment to academic rigor. This was, and is, accompanied by no small dose of racism, and the conviction that a Black woman couldn’t possibly be qualified to lead Harvard.”

  16. “When I was younger, blacks and Jews worked together for civil rights.”

    I think this is a generational thing, PCC(E).
    I’m 52 and my first week moving to NYC from Washington DC- in 1994 – I encountered the “Black Hebrews” in Times Sq. with their anti-semitism and earlier (1991-ish) the knifing of Yankel Rosembaum, a(n Australian!) Hassid in Brooklyn.
    “Kill the kike” the crowd in Crown Heights called and they did.

    The black-Jewish “alliance” you speak of fell apart sometime in the 1980s.

    I’ve never ever seen the old Europe style antisemitism on the same page as the old white supremacy civil rights in my lifetime.
    (I’m interested in these generational cleavages, sometimes they’re quite subtle like this one).

    best,

    D.A.
    NYC
    https://themoderatevoice.com/worst-houseguests-ever-the-palestinians/

  17. Doesn’t the presence of a woman with two uteri prove that sex is non-binary? (I kid, I kid!)

    Spellcheck criticizes neither “uteri” nor “uteruses,” so I reckon both are ok.

    FWIW (nothing at all), I once played the word “umbilici” in a game of Scrabble. And this was after my wife had played “navel” earlier in the game.

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