Wednesday: Hili dialogue

January 3, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the first Hump Day ( कुब्ज दिवस in Sanskrit) of the New Year: Wednesday, January 3, 2024; and it’s National Chocolate Covered Cherry Day. It’s hard to find a good one, as the cherry must not be too cloying and the liquid should be liquid (preferably with some alcohol) rather than goo.

It’s also Festival of Sleep Day, Humiliation Day, National Drinking Straw Day (paper only, please), J. R. R. Tolkien Day (he was born on this day in 1892), and the tenth of the Twelve Days of Christmas,

Here’s Tolkien himself talking about The Lord of the Rings and writing in Elvish:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the January 3 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*As an alum, I have no choice but to give Harvard President Claudine Gay’s resignation top billing.

Faced with a new round of accusations over plagiarism in her scholarly work, Harvard’s president Claudine Gay announced her resignation on Tuesday.

She became the second Ivy League leader to lose her job in recent weeks amid a firestorm intensified by their widely derided congressional testimony regarding antisemitism on campus.

Here are the details:

  • Dr. Gay’s resignation marked an abrupt end to a turbulent tenure that began in July. Her stint was the shortest of any president in the history of Harvard since its founding in 1636. She was the institution’s first Black president, and the second woman to lead the university. Read her resignation letter.

  • The latest accusations against Dr. Gay were circulated through an unsigned complaint published Monday in The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online journal that has led a campaign against Dr. Gay over the past few weeks. The new complaint added additional accusations of plagiarism to about 40 that had already been circulated in the same way, apparently by the same accuser.

  • Support for Dr. Gay’s nascent presidency began eroding after what some saw as the university’s initial failure to forcefully condemn the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and some pro-Palestinian student responses. Outrage grew in early December after Dr. Gay gave what critics saw as lawyerly, evasive answers before Congress when asked whether calls for the genocide of Jewish people were violations of school policies.

From the Harvard Crimson:

University Provost Alan M. Garber ’76 will serve as Harvard’s interim president during a search for Gay’s permanent successor, the Harvard Corporation — the University’s highest governing body — announced in an email on Tuesday.

Gay’s resignation letter is here.  She did bring up racism:

Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.

And Colin Wright is giving himself plaudits for predicting what her resignation letter would say:

Her resignation notes that she’ll return to her academic professorship in political science. That’s sort of expected, as Presidents can be fired at will, but it’s a lot harder to get rid of a tenured professor. Still, if a student could get kicked out for that kind of plagiarism. .  . Anyway, perhaps she made a deal with Harvard.

*The IDF has regained some of its competence, as a “Zionist” drone killed a very important leader of Hamas, deputy leader Saleh al-Arouri, taken out in Beirut (along with two other Hamas military leaders) by an Israeli drone. The Times of Israel has better information than the NYT, however. the NYT implies that al-Arouri was struck in a car (below), but that isn’t the case:

The deputy head of Hamas, Saleh al-Arouri, and two leaders of its armed wing were killed in an explosion in Lebanon on Tuesday, the group said on its official Telegram channel.

They died in what Hamas described as a “Zionist raid” in a suburb of Beirut, the Lebanese capital. Videos from the scene verified by The New York Times show at least one car engulfed in flames in front of a high-rise building as dozens of people gather in the area.

Two senior U.S. officials confirmed that Israel was responsible for the strike. One official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal discussions, said it was most likely the first of many covert strikes Israel will carry out against Hamas officials or operatives with any connections to the deadly Oct. 7 assault that killed 1,200 people.

But the Times of Israel says, correctly, it wasn’t in a car, but in an office:

The explosion shook the Lebanese capital’s southern suburbs, which are a stronghold of Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas. The explosion caused a fire on Hadi Nasrallah Street, south of Beirut.

Six people in total were reported killed in the explosion, a precision strike on a third-floor apartment said to serve as a Hamas office. Unconfirmed reports said two of the dead were Hamas figures who reported to Arouri.

Israel has vowed to target all leaders of Hamas after the terror group’s devastating October 7 attack on Israel that killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and saw the abduction of over 240 others.

Israel has a long memory, and the other Hamas officials, including the head of its political wing and the head of its military wing, are in hiding, but for the rest of their lives they’ll be living in fear. Just remember how, after 1972, Mossad pursued the killers of the Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich.

More, according to Tom Gross’s newsletter:

Al-Arouri was wanted on multiple counts of murder, including of many Americans and Israelis.

In September 2015, the Obama administration declared al-Arouri to be a “specially designated global terrorist,” and in 2018 the US government put a $5 million bounty on his head.

Does Israel get $5 million now?

It was a “surgical” strike, as these photos show (they come from a post on a website, Balkonic.com run by a friend of Malgorzata.  The damage was largely confined to one floor:

What’s notable about this killing is that it is exactly what everybody wants: surgical, with an absolute minimum of civilian deaths. And yet it doesn’t matter: there are worldwide protests planned and the West Bank is rioting. This shows that even when the world gets the kind of strike on Hamas it deems acceptable, it still objects. And that means that those who object are really rooting for Hamas, not Palestinian civilians.

*Speaking of the war, or perhaps of a future war, there’s now evidence that HEZBOLLAH (no, not Hamas), has built a network of tunnels in southern Lebanon, far more sophisticated and extensive than Hamas’s several hundred km of tunnels in Gaza. Remember, though, this is based on the word of one man, though he implies it’s the result of a large project:

The Lebanon tunnel project was begun and developed long before the one in Gaza. Existing intelligence indicates a vast tunnel network in southern Lebanon, deep and multi-pronged.

At the Alma Research and Education Center, which focuses on the security challenges on Israel’s northern border, researchers have spent many years investigating Lebanon’s underworld. Tal Beeri, the director of Alma’s Research Department, who served for decades in IDF intelligence units, has exposed that subterranean network in material based on considerable open-source intelligence.

Several years ago, Beeri managed to track down on the internet a “map of polygons,” covering what he called the “Land of the Tunnels” in southern Lebanon. “The map is marked, by an unknown party, with polygons (circles) indicating 36 geographic regions, towns and villages,” he wrote in 2021 paper.

Go to the site to see the map of where the tunnels are and a diagram of one network. But wait! There’s more!:

“In our assessment, these polygons mark Hezbollah’s staging centers as part of the ‘defense’ plan against an Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Each local staging center (‘defense’) possesses a network of local underground tunnels. Between all these centers, an infrastructure of regional tunnels was built, interconnected [with] them.”

Beeri assessed that the cumulative length of Hezbollah’s tunnel network in south Lebanon amounts to hundreds of kilometers.

North Korea’s role in Hezbollah’s tunnel project was researched until 2014. What do you know since then?

Digging tunnels in Lebanon was done from the start with the assistance of North Korea — as far back as the 1980s and especially toward the end of the 90s. There is evidence of this. North Korea has historic expertise in the digging of tunnels in mountainous and rocky areas.

Oy! Here’s a very short video:

*According to the Washington Post (and didn’t you expect this?), Trump’s popularity is greater than ever after the January 6 insurrection.

Three years after the Jan. 6 attack, Republicans are more sympathetic to those who stormed the U.S. Capitol and more likely to absolve Donald Trump of responsibility for the attack than they were in 2021, according to a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll

In follow-up interviews, some said their views have changed because they now believe the riot was instigated by law enforcement to suppress political dissent — a baseless conspiracy theory that has been promoted heavily in right-wing media and by Trump in his speeches and in his legal fight against the four-count federal indictment he faces in D.C.

“From a historical perspective, these results would be chilling to many analysts,” said Michael J. Hanmer, director of the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland.

But Republican views are more fractured than those of Democrats, who remain largely in agreement that the riot was a violent threat to democracy for which Trump bears responsibility. “In the current context of hyper-partisanship, there seem to be some divisions among Republicans,” Hanmer said. Independents, according to the poll, mostly side with Democrats.

There’s lots of data in the poll; here are two pieces. First, there’s been a drop in those holding Trump guilty of fomenting insurrection, but the proportion of those holding him responsible for l’affaire January 6th is of course much higher among Democrats than among Republicans.

And the huge political divide about whether Trump was guilty of lying about voter fraud. The ratio of Dems to Republicans is more than four to one!

*Russia is making a big-time effort to destroy and demoralize Ukraine via missile attacks. The latest is a big strike on Ukraine’s two largest cities, Kyiv and Kharkiv. killing five and injuring more than a hundred.

Ukraine’s two largest cities came under attack early Tuesday from Russian missiles that killed five people and injured as many as 130, officials said, as the war approached its two-year mark and the Kremlin stepped up its winter bombardment of urban areas.

Air defenses shot down all 10 of the Russian Kinzhal missiles, which can fly at 10 times the speed of sound, out of about 100 of various types that were launched, claimed Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine’s commander-in-chief.

But other missiles got through in Kyiv and in Kharkiv, the provincial capital of the northeastern region. In Kyiv and its surrounding region, four people were killed and about 70 were wounded, while in the Kharkiv region, one person was killed and about 60 were hurt, the Interior Ministry said.

The Kh-47M2 Kinzhal is an air-launched ballistic missile that is rarely used by Russian forces due to its cost and limited stocks. The barrage fired Tuesday was the highest number used in one attack since the start of the war, Ukraine air force spokesperson Yurii Ihnat said.

The latest round of attacks by Russia began Friday with its largest single assault on Ukraine of the war, as fighting along the 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line has subsided into grinding attrition amid winter. At least 41 civilians were killed since the weekend.

I’m starting to get a bit nervous about the war. The world’s attention is in the Middle East now, and American Republicans are threatening to withhold aid to Ukraine contingent on reform of our immigration laws. We should help Ukraine because it’s the right thing to do.

***

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, some visitors came with something tasty.

Hili: They brought it.
A: What did they bring?
Hili: I don’t know but it looks promising.
In Polish:
Hili: Przynieśli!
Ja: Co przynieśli?
Hili: Jeszcze nie wiem, ale wygląda obiecująco.

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

From Richard:

From Barry (I don’t know who did the cartoon):

From Linkiest:

From Masih, an execution of a political prisoner who spent 14 years in jail and was tortured. How far will Iran go?

From Luana: two types of cats. (Tomorrow we’ll see the two types of d*gs.)

From Orli Peter: a counseling magazine turns chicken (see excerpt below). Orli’s distressed, for she’s a trauma therapist who started a nonprofit organization to help traumatized Israelis.

An except (their bolding):

The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) has stood by its decision to remove a column about Jewish trauma over 7 October from its latest magazine because of fears of a possible backlash.

The professional body pulled the piece by mental health practitioner Dr Sandi Mann from the January issue of its Counselling At Work magazine.

In it, Dr Mann told how Jews in Manchester are struggling to come to terms with the Hamas massacre in southern Israel. This month’s issue will be the first in 10 years that does not include her regular column, entitled Workplace Matters.

The scrapped column, headlined ‘A community in traumatic stress’, describes the trauma of the city’s Jews in the aftermath of the Hamas massacre of more than 1,200 people in southern Israel. It was apparently scrapped on deadline because of concerns about possible ramifications.

From Bryan we get Andrew Doyle (Titania’s alter ego) on pronouns. You may not agree:

From Barry, who says, “I don’t think he’s wrong.” Do you?

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a two-year-old girl gassed upon arrival.

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb.  First, a Roman cat with a nice slogan:

From Matthew, who’s convinced these are surely Drosophila.  And he’s probably right. Credit in the tweet.

Bonus tweet (h/t Malgorzata): An IDF soldier who also sings opera entertains his brothers in arms in Gaza:

29 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. On this day:
    250 – Emperor Decius orders everyone in the Roman Empire (except Jews) to make sacrifices to the Roman gods.

    1521 – Pope Leo X excommunicates Martin Luther in the papal bull Decet Romanum Pontificem.

    1749 – The first issue of Berlingske, Denmark’s oldest continually operating newspaper, is published.

    1833 – Captain James Onslow, in the Clio, reasserts British sovereignty over the Falkland Islands.

    1870 – Construction work begins on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, United States.

    1911 – A gun battle in the East End of London leaves two dead. It sparked a political row over the involvement of then-Home Secretary Winston Churchill.

    1913 – An Atlantic coast storm sets the lowest confirmed barometric pressure reading (955.0 mb (28.20 inHg)), for a non-tropical system in the continental United States.

    1933 – Minnie D. Craig becomes the first woman elected as Speaker of the North Dakota House of Representatives, the first woman to hold a Speaker position anywhere in the United States.

    1947 – Proceedings of the U.S. Congress are televised for the first time.

    1953 – Frances P. Bolton and her son, Oliver from Ohio, become the first mother and son to serve simultaneously in the U.S. Congress.

    1957 – The Hamilton Watch Company introduces the first electric watch.

    1977 – Apple Computer is incorporated.

    1990 – United States invasion of Panama: Manuel Noriega, former leader of Panama, surrenders to American forces.

    1993 – In Moscow, Russia, George H. W. Bush and Boris Yeltsin sign the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START).

    1999 – The Mars Polar Lander is launched by NASA.

    2002 – Israeli–Palestinian conflict: Israeli forces seize the Palestinian freighter Karine A in the Red Sea, finding 50 tons of weapons.

    2009 – The first block of the blockchain of the decentralized payment system Bitcoin, called the Genesis block, is established by the creator of the system, Satoshi Nakamoto.

    2018 – For the first time in history, all five major storm surge gates in the Netherlands are closed simultaneously in the wake of a storm.

    2019 – Chang’e 4 makes the first soft landing on the far side of the Moon, deploying the Yutu-2 lunar rover.

    2020 – Iranian General Qasem Soleimani is killed by an American airstrike near Baghdad International Airport, igniting global concerns of a potential armed conflict.

    Births:
    106 BC – Cicero, Roman philosopher, lawyer, and politician (d. 43 BC).

    1722 – Fredrik Hasselqvist, Swedish biologist and explorer (d. 1752).

    1793 – Lucretia Mott, American activist (d. 1880).

    1853 – Sophie Elkan, Swedish writer (d. 1921).

    1892 – J.R.R. Tolkien, English writer, poet, and philologist (d. 1973).

    1897 – Marion Davies, American actress and comedian (d. 1961).

    1909 – Victor Borge, Danish-American pianist and conductor (d. 2000).

    1916 – Betty Furness, American actress and television journalist (d. 1994).

    1921 – Isabella Bashmakova, Russian historian of mathematics (d. 2005).

    1926 – George Martin, English composer, conductor, and producer (d. 2016). [And “Fifth Beatle”.]

    1929 – Sergio Leone, Italian director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 1989).

    1937 – Glen A. Larson, American director, producer, and screenwriter, created Battlestar Galactica (d. 2014).

    1942 – John Thaw, English actor and producer, played Inspector Morse (d. 2002).

    1945 – Stephen Stills, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer.

    1946 – John Paul Jones, English bass player, songwriter, and producer.

    1956 – Mel Gibson, American-Australian actor, director, producer, and screenwriter.

    2003 – Greta Thunberg, Swedish environmental activist.

    2003 – Kyle Rittenhouse, American conservative personality. [That’s one way of describing him…]

    Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an death’s the other. (Tennessee Williams):
    1641 – Jeremiah Horrocks, English astronomer and mathematician (b. 1618). [The first person to demonstrate that the Moon moved around the Earth in an elliptical orbit; and the only person to predict the transit of Venus of 1639, an event which he and his friend William Crabtree were the only two people to observe and record. Most remarkably, Horrocks correctly asserted that Jupiter was accelerating in its orbit while Saturn was slowing and interpreted this as due to mutual gravitational interaction, thereby demonstrating that gravity’s actions were not limited to the Earth, Sun, and Moon.]

    1795 – Josiah Wedgwood, English potter, founded the Wedgwood Company (b. 1730). [And grandfather of both Charles Darwin and his wife Emma.]

    1875 – Pierre Larousse, French lexicographer and publisher (b. 1817). [France’s Dr Johnson?]

    1903 – Alois Hitler, Austrian civil servant (b. 1837). [If he’d died 13 years earlier…]

    1946 – William Joyce, American-British pro-Axis propaganda broadcaster (b. 1906). [Nicknamed “Lord Haw-Haw”, he was hanged for high treason.]

    1966 – Sammy Younge Jr., American civil rights activist (b. 1944).

    1967 – Jack Ruby, American businessman and murderer (b. 1911).

    1979 – Conrad Hilton, American businessman, founded the Hilton Hotels & Resorts (b. 1887).

    1980 – Joy Adamson, Austrian-Kenyan painter and conservationist (b. 1910). [Wrote Born Free about raising Elsa the lion cub. Coincidentally, the actor Bill Travers, who played Adamson’s husband George in the 1966 film adaptation, was born on this day in 1922.]

    2009 – Betty Freeman, American philanthropist and photographer (b. 1921).

    2014 – Phil Everly, American singer and guitarist (b. 1939).I

    2023 – Elena Huelva, Spanish cancer activist and influencer (b. 2002). [Credited with increasing the visibility of childhood bone cancer while dispelling misconceptions and myths about the disease.]

  2. Andrew Doyle

    That was an astonishing delivery, in range and clarity, in so short a time frame.

    I think about the reaction if one ignores the compelled speech of pronouns – the strength of that emotional condition. Very much like the emotional warfare in thought reform (see Robert J. Lifton):

    Not a quote just me writing out :”Just admit that one little thing, you would not want betray your friends, would you?” kind of warfare.

    I wonder what other compelled speech could be made easier to accept in the wake of the easy test case of pronouns :

    2 + 2 = 5 if we use a Diverse, Inclusive, and Equitable value of 2?

    1. Not just compelled speech. Requiring you to share your pronouns is a demand for you to reveal your gender identity, a legally protected characteristic in many countries.

    2. Agree wholeheartedly, TP. With you and Andrew Doyle.

      My suggestion for people worried that they won’t get hired or promoted unless they indicate their pronouns is to say, “I/me”. After all, they are the only pronouns one can use about oneself.

      My suggestion for employers is to reject un-read the resumes from applicants who put their pronouns in their cover letters. Why hire a self-confessed troublemaker who will sue you if you misgender him?

    3. Or exist in the real world where 2 + 2 = 5 for large values of 2 and small values of 5

  3. Perhaps most promising amid l’affaire Gay events this morning is news from Bari Weiss’ The Free Press that Professors Pinker and Flier, members of the recently formed faculty Academic Freedom Committee, have had a dinner meeting with some Harvard Corp Fellows. I believe that such direct communication from highly respected senior faculty representatives is critical for the Fellows’ deliberations regarding President Gay’s replacement.

    1. Twitter is awash with black scholars claiming the the right wing and white supremacists could not bear for a black woman to be in a position of power. It was pure racism.

      Quite bizarre take tbh since none of them seem to think that plagiarism is of any great concern.

      Would they accept a medical misdiagnosis or negligence from a doctor if he was black seems to be an equivalent analogy. Yet they defend an academic who was not fit for purpose just because she was black.

  4. And Colin Wright is giving himself plaudits for predicting what her resignation letter would say

    She plagiarised his tweet.

    NB I thought it would be a nice irony, if I plagiarised the above comment, which I did, from the first reply to Colin Wright’s tweet.

  5. I agree about unions versus dorms.
    I think the fuss about the “surgical strike” (which everyone would be happy with if it happened in Gaza) is because of the possibility that this might be the spark that sets off a conflagration with Iran, which in turn might set off WW III.
    Extralegal drone killings of terrorists in countries one is not at war with are not the done thing in international law, which is why Israel keeps mum about who did it. Germany and Sweden harbor or have harbored quite a few people wanted as terrorists elsewhere, among them a Tunisian national who had taken part in a major islamist terror bombing in Tunisia with many victims, but “couldn’t” be extradited for many years because of arcane asylum law interpretations. If Tunisia had decided to hit a German apartment building to take him out, I don’t think this would have been applauded internationally despite the surgical character of the operation.

    1. Muslims killing Muslims don’t count for the international Muslim outrage industry. The perps have to be “zionists” or Westerners writ large to invoke instant outrage and solidarity.

  7. I was wondering before the resignation is Gay didn’t have something on the Board, like documents proving they knew about the plagiarism when she was hired. In any event, there is a rumor that Gay gets to keep her $900,000 salary.

  10. “This is an attack on every Black woman in this country who’s put a crack in the glass ceiling,” Sharpton said.

    Really? Oh come on!

  11. Gay’s racism quip was completely predictable. Cheating and incompetence couldn’t possibly be the reason she was canned. And yes, she keeps her professorship. That’s standard. If she has any dignity, she’ll soon leave Harvard and disappear into another grievance studies department somewhere. Of course, if she keeps her $900K salary it’ll be hard for her to leave.

    Oy. Hezbollah is a troglodyte nation, too? Not a good way to start the new year.

    I loved the Israeli opera singer and the reaction of the crowd. Was that an adult beverage he had in his hand? Must have been.

    1. I must say, the gentleman is in fine voice. Carpe Diem – Seize the Day. “L’chayim ” – “to life.”

      I’m reminded of MGM’s “The Great Caruso,” (played by Mario Lanza). In one scene he says, in preparation for a performance, “snuff to open the sinuses; wiskey to relax the throat.”

      “O Sole Mio,” (“O, My Sun”) one of the all-time great Neapolitan songs.

      Off the top of my head:

      “Behold the radiant sun,
      Mid the evening shadows,
      With golden light it
      Covers all creation;

      Until it sinks below
      The world’s foundation,
      Behold the radiant stars
      Mid evening’s shadows . . . .

      And then something to the effect . . . “though the sun has set, and I am sad sitting beneath your window, I still have the sunshine of your smile.”

    1. Thanks. That looks more authentic, or at least more so. I sometimes post cartoons, but I make a real effort to identify the source.

      1. Tolkien hated fascism, fascists love Tolkien. It starts with the black slit-eyed orcs versus the pale blonde elves. Look at Meloni in Italy going to ‘Tolkien camp’ as a young person… When the films came out this was widely spoken of, when the recent series had black actors as Hobbits, it caused a trivial uproar among certain groups.
        https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hobbit-camps-fascism-italy
        Poor Tolkien would be very upset…

  15. Gay’s pathetic NYT take: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/03/opinion/claudine-gay-harvard-president.html?campaign_id=190&emc=edit_ufn_20240103&instance_id=111625&nl=from-the-times&regi_id=191682192&segment_id=154191&te=1&user_id=9cb367dcc3a7189c6ce36e4dd9668028

    I’m so thoroughly disgusted by Gay, Pritzker, Obama, Biden and all other forces that have come together to erode truth and integrity in academia.

    I switched my registration to Rep*blican last year as it is more tolerable to my soul than the elitist euphemisms and lies pushed by the current majority of the left. So, yes, on Gay’s watch, Harvard radicalized me Rightward!!!!

    Perhaps I should try to get my experience published. I would were it not for the fact that it would likely cost me ALL professorship jobs for which I’m currently under consideration.

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