Sunday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to Sunday, January 7, 2024, the sabbath for goyische cats and National Tempura Day. Unfortunately, Foodimentary shows this photo on its Tempura Day page, which I don’t think shows tempura:

It’s also International Programmers’ Day, National Bobblehead Day, National Pass Gas Day, and, yes, No Pants Subway Ride, which is in its 22nd year and is centered on New York. An example:

Further, it’s Christmas in Eastern Orthodox Churches and Oriental Orthodox Churches using the Julian Calendar, Rastafari, including these festivals: Christmas in Russia, Christmas in Ukraine, Ethiopian Christmas. and Remembrance Day of the Dead in Armenia.  Finally, it’s Distaff Day, not often celebrated now, Nanakusa no sekku or The Festival of Seven Herbs in Japan, and, in Cambodia, Victory from Genocide Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the January 7 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Now former President Obama is worried that Trump might defeat Biden this year, and so, according to the Washington Post, Obama (who apparently is now omniscient, trying to be the Godfather of Democrats) has advised Biden to “widen his circle.”

Former president Barack Obama has raised questions about the structure of President Biden’s reelection campaign, discussing the matter directly with Biden and telling the president’s aides and allies the campaign needs to be empowered to make decisions without clearing them with the White House, according to three people familiar with the conversations.

Obama grew “animated” in discussing the 2024 election and former president Donald Trump’s potential return to power, one of the people said, and has suggested to Biden’s advisers that the campaign needs more top-level decision-makers at its headquarters in Wilmington, Del. — or it must empower the people already in place. Obama has not recommended specific individuals, but he has mentioned David Plouffe, who managed Obama’s 2008 race, as the type of senior strategist needed at the Biden campaign.

Obama’s conversation with Biden on the subject took place during a private lunch at the White House in recent months, one of the people said, a meeting that has not been previously reported. Biden, who has long used Obama as a sounding board, invited his former boss to lunch, and the two discussed a range of topics including the 2024 election.

During the lunch, Obama noted the success of his reelection campaign structure in 2012, when some of his top presidential aides, including David Axelrod and Jim Messina, left the White House to take charge of the reelection operation in Chicago. That is a sharp contrast from Biden’s approach of leaving his closest aides at the White House even though they are involved in all the key decisions made by the campaign.

Obama also recommended that Biden seek counsel from Obama’s own former campaign aides, which Biden officials say they have done, the people said.

Obama has been even more explicit with people close to Biden, suggesting the campaign needs to move aggressively as Trump appears poised to quickly wrap up the Republican nomination. His concerns about the campaign structure were not tied to a specific moment, but rather his belief that campaigns need to be agile in competitive races, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential conversations.

Yeah, and do something about immigration. And bring back James Carville! But in the end, the die is already cast; what can Biden do between now and November to improve his chances? Only a criminal conviction could–possibly–derail Trump’s campaign.

*The NYT can’t stop analyzing the downfall of Claudine Gay, but of course they’re America’s most elite newspaper and Hahvahd is America’s most elite college. And so we get this article, “How Harvard’s board broke with Claudine Gay.” Of course I have to read it; I’m an alum.

Her six-month tenure as Harvard’s president was over. On Jan. 2, she announced her resignation.

That marked the end of one of the most tumultuous periods in Harvard’s 387-year history, a controversy that thrust the school into the public debate after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza. Not only did the university’s president lose her job, but the secretive workings of its board, the Harvard Corporation, were laid bare.

. . . But within two weeks, the once strong support had begun to dissolve, according to interviews with a dozen people with knowledge of the discussions, including those who had spoken directly with Dr. Gay, Ms. Pritzker and other board members or were briefed on their thinking and actions. They requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak about the deliberations publicly. As the board members flew to ski towns and beaches for the holidays, they had a dramatic change of heart about their president.

. . .Along with the public declaration of support they offered on Dec. 12, the board members privately asked Dr. Gay to help come up with a plan to turn things around, two people with knowledge of the discussions said. Over the next week or so, Dr. Gay and her staff created a plan they called a “spring reset,” one of the people said. Come the new year, she would appear all over campus, hold office hours and express her empathy. There would be task forces to address antisemitism and Islamophobia.

But before Dr. Gay could send the board additional details, more trouble erupted. On Dec. 19, new allegations of more than 40 examples of plagiarism in Dr. Gay’s academic work emerged, first reported in conservative media outlets. When she sent her latest plan to the board the next day, some members told her they liked it, but to others, it showed that she didn’t understand the urgency of the expanding crisis, according to people with knowledge of board members’ thinking.

. . .Cracks in the board’s support were starting to show. Especially concerned was Timothy R. Barakett, Harvard’s treasurer and a relatively new member of the corporation. From early on, he didn’t think keeping Dr. Gay was tenable. He told his fellow board members that Dr. Gay’s poor leadership and academic conduct might disqualify her from the presidency, those who spoke with him said.

Mr. Barakett didn’t think Dr. Gay’s apologies got it right and argued that she was failing to take full responsibility for her plagiarism, according to donors, professors and others who spoke with board members.

At first, Mr. Barakett was an outlier in the group. But his arguments slowly won supporters on the board. One was Paul J. Finnegan, a co-founder of Madison Dearborn Partners, a private equity firm. In mid-December, he caught word of a recent closed-door session at the Harvard Club of New York City where Flynn Cratty, a prominent Harvard academic, pointedly criticized Dr. Gay’s and the university’s commitment to academic freedom.

A week later, Mr. Finnegan and Tracy Palandjian, another board member, listened to Dr. Cratty and other professors air their concerns about Harvard’s leadership at a dinner in Cambridge, Mass.

Interlude: Gay began receiving threats and harassment. The Board members, being rich, scattered to various fancy places during Christmas vacation, and during this vacation they talked to people who favored Gay’s departure. Pro-Gay sentiment waned.

The board had been ground down by new allegations of plagiarism, the drumbeat of news articles, and the barrage of criticism and advice from influential strangers and loved ones.

For weeks, the focus of board conversations had been on finding a way to keep Dr. Gay and end the crisis on campus. But by the day after Christmas, that had changed, people briefed on the events said. The board members agreed that they were dealing with a crisis of leadership and that the best path forward for Harvard was without Dr. Gay in the president’s chair. Everyone agreed it was time for Ms. Pritzker to call her.

Pritzker asked Gay, as the NYT says, “Did she think there was a path forward with her as the school’s president?” And that’s when Gay realized that she was done for.

There’s more, but that’s  how it ended. I feel bad about the threats that Gay experienced, which nobody should have to tolerate. But in the end it was her own behavior that made her presidency untenable. At least we get the story of what happened behind the scenes.

*Speaking of Gay (and I can’t imagine I’ll be writing more about this), Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who we saw chatting about Claudine Gay with Douglas Murray, has now put her thoughts on paper at Unherd:  “Claudine Gay and the mafia of mediocrity.” (h/t Rosemary)

It’s probably “nuff said” to note that Hirsi Ali compares Gay’s qualifications for her job to that of the performance of Hirsi Ali’s Somali countryman, Nasra Abukar Ali, in the 100-meter dash at the International University Sports Federation Summer World University Games in China. Here’s that cringeworthy performance:

How did Abukar Ali even qualify for that team? It turns out that one of her relatives interceded to get the athletic standards lowered. The parallel drawn by Ayaan:

After Gay’s shambolic performance in Congress, similar questions were asked and answered by the public. The most obvious being: how did someone with a wafer-thin scholarly record of only 11 journal publications over a period of 26 years get to become the president of Harvard? Allegations and proof of nearly 50 instances of plagiarism followed. How on earth was this overlooked? Where were the gatekeepers?

The Harvard Corporation, the authority responsible for hiring the university’s president, chose a different path from the one taken by the Somali Minister of Sports. After a series of denials and statements of “unanimous support for the president”, threats against the New York Post and accusations of bigotry, they persuaded Gay to step down. Nevertheless, she continues to stay employed by Harvard as a tenured professor, retaining an annual salary of around $900,000. As for the university itself, the result is at least a billion dollars in withdrawn commitments from various donors, more congressional probing, a slump in applications from prospective students, and the trashing of its reputation.

The Somalia relative who got that terrible runner her privilege was sacked within 48 hours. To Hirsi Ali, Harvard waited much longer:

All of which raises a peculiar question: if the Sports Ministry of a war-torn African country is able to show ethical clarity when objective standards of merit have been violated, what is holding back the leadership of America’s most renowned university? The answer, I suspect, lies in the three-letter acronym that has been menacing American and other Western institutions of higher education for the past decade: DEI, which supposedly stands for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

DEI is the equivalent, in this narrative, to the relative of the runner who got the athletic standards lowered.  Gay, of course, didn’t do herself any favors by portraying herself, in both her letter of resignation and NYT op-ed, as a victim of demagogues and racists. And so Hirsi Ali concludes:

In her graceless attempt to portray her downfall as something more than the result of her exposure as a fraud, Claudine Gay alleged that there was “a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society… Trusted institutions of all types — from public health agencies to news organisations — will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility.”

The reality is very different. Harvard — like the New York Times, which published her screed — has done the work of unravelling public faith all by itself. It has made a mockery of itself as surely as the Somali Sports Ministry did when it fielded a manifestly unqualified runner. The difference is that Harvard humiliated itself for the sake of an ideology, as opposed to plain nepotism. Until that ideology is extirpated not just from one university but from American education as a whole, the mafia of mediocrity will continue to march on — and produce many more Claudine Gays along the way.

This seems a bit too harsh to me, but on the other hand nobody was willing to say that they should pick a Harvard President based on their merits, and not on their sex and race. Now people are more willing to say this, and that will promote, I hope, the faster erosion of an identity-based over a merit-based system of hiring and promotion in academia.

*The NYT reports that last week Hezbollah sent a passel of rockets—over 40 of them—at Israel, all in response to the presumed Israeli killing of Hamas leader  Saleh al-Arouri in Beirut.  Fortunately, due to the Iron Dome, and perhaps the incompetence of Hezbollah (which, like Hamas, uses human shields), there were no injuries:

The Lebanese militia Hezbollah fired a volley of rockets toward a small military base in northern Israel on Saturday morning, in what the group said was an initial response to the assassination of a senior Hamas commander in Lebanon five days ago that has raised fears of a wider conflagration.

Hezbollah said in a statement that the strikes had caused casualties, but there were no immediate Israeli reports of injuries and the assault was initially perceived by analysts as more of a symbolic response to the assassination than a significant escalation.

The Israeli military said in a statement that roughly 40 rockets had been fired from Lebanon toward Mount Meron, an area housing a military radar station that is roughly five miles south of the Israel-Lebanon border. The military said that it had responded by striking a militant group in Lebanon that had been involved in the rocket fire.

Hezbollah could still respond with a more forceful attack, while Hamas has not retaliated for the assassination of the senior commander, Saleh al-Arouri. Mr. al-Arouri was killed on Tuesday in Beirut in an attack attributed by Hamas and Hezbollah to Israel. Lebanese and U.S. officials have also ascribed the attack to Israel, though Israel has not confirmed that.

At least for now, the limited nature of the exchange on Saturday tempered fears that Mr. al-Arouri’s killing would immediately lead to a major escalation between Hezbollah and Israel.

A tweet showing the strikes.

🔴 Massive Rocket Alerts [08:06:30] – 94 Alerts:

• Southern Golan — Almagor#Israel #RocketAlert #RedAlert pic.twitter.com/TO4kmTNK8E

— ILRedAlert (@ILRedAlert) January 6, 2024

Of course this shows the complete impotence of UNIFIL, the United Nation’s Interim Force in Lebanon that is supposed to keep the peace in that country. As Wikipedia notes,

According to its Mandate, established by United Nations Security Council Resolutions 425 and 426 in 1978, UNIFIL is tasked with the following objectives:

*confirm the withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon

*restore international peace and security

*assist the Government of Lebanon in ensuring the return of its effective authority in the area.

The second and third tasks have been complete failures, despite the presence of 10,000 UN troops in Lebanon from 46 nations. Though their three aims are specified above, they do nothing to carry out the restoration of peace or securing the government’s authority. Lebanon is in fact controlled by Hezbollah, which has installed a puppet leader as the country’s president, and Hezbollah must approve the appointment of all government ministers.  The only way that the UN could enforce its mandate would be if it were allowed to take military action against Hezbollah, but it can shoot only in self defense, and Hezbollah leaves the UN troops alone.  Thus the terrorist organization has humiliated the UN, or, rather, the UN doesn’t care if Hezbollah attacks Israel (see here, here, here, and here for confirmation). It’s time that people knew about this, and time that the world demanded that the UN either withdraw from Lebanon on the grounds of uselessness, or that UN troops perform their duties and get rid of Hezbollah in Lebanon.  Neither will happen, of course.

*Reader Pyers sent a pro-atheist article in the Sunday Times of London: “We don’t need God or faith to be thankful” (it’s paywalled unless you subscribe, but you can find it archived here)

He added: “I like Matthew Parris who is one of the better commentators on British life, He was a Tory MP but has moved to the centre ( probably the Tory party left him!) and now votes for the Liberal Democrats.   Anyway, he has written a very good pro-atheist piece in this morning’s paper which I think you will like….

An excerpt:

We humans, meanwhile, cannot help seeking a supreme being, an ultimate master, whether or not such an entity exists. Implanted within us as social animals is a template: the shape of a natural order of things that rises to an apex. Every set of bosses looks upwards to the next boss up. But where’s the ultimate boss? “Natural law,” say the sages: mankind’s innate moral compass. But who set that compass?

. . . Why, though? Why have we been bred to join the dots up into an overarching apex-tipped pattern? . . .

Thus the individual finds purpose in the group. But in whom does the group find purpose? “Almighty God,” he says, “is the natural object of … love, reverence, fear, [and] desire of approbation.” In mountaineering terms we trace in our own natures the lower slopes of the Matterhorn and, concealed by the mists that cloud its pinnacle, induce a summit.

The key to natural religion is purpose and design. Butler’s age knew only that we’d found ourselves on this planet, designed with a set of purposes. To the question “to what ultimate end?” contemporary science offered only the hypothesis of a supreme being. In its day, Butler’s thesis was (to my mind) persuasive. He died in 1752, before Napoleon was born, or he might have attempted an answer to the emperor. Laplace ducked.

Charles Darwin, who was 18 when Laplace died, could have begun an answer. Today, as the science of genetics advances, we can complete it.x

Once you accept that we are born pretty much equipped with the machinery to act, feel and behave as humans do, and to desire, to fear, to trust, to question, to believe, to love, to regret, to show gratitude and to feel the forces of both moral obligation and moral shame … once you accept that survival, procreation and teamwork are what natural selection has equipped us for, every human impulse is explicable in those terms. Those (for example) who give, find satisfaction in being thanked. Those who thank, attract future favours. Thus is mutual support reinforced within the species.

Natural selection has designed us to seek and serve structures of authority, to command and be commanded, and to find meaning, purpose and satisfaction in service to something (or someone) greater than ourselves. We are bred to bend the knee. We are retrievers, aching for the ultimate stick. The ache, however, does not make the stick. Hunger does not imply a meal.

Well, this is of course a hypothesis, not an answer, but it is probably close to an answer. We have no idea what neuronal pathway or what evolution tendencies led us to be religious, and there are various theories. One (espoused most prominently by Pascal Boyer) is that humans evolved to seek agency, and in our pre-scientific days the “agency” for things like diseases or natural disasters could only be a supernatural deity. Another theory is that we are evolved to obey those in positions of authority, especially our parents, for listening to those with more experience gives us a higher chance of survival and reproduction.  This is close to Parris’s theory.  And there are other theories, too.  So Parris doesn’t really have the answer; he has an answer.

But there are two points to be made. First, there is no evidence for any supernatural deities. And as the late Victor Stenger used to say, “The absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence. . .if the evidence should be there.” And the evidence should be there. In fact, we have counterevidence, at least for an omniscient, beneficent, and omnipotent God: the death of innocent people for no detectable reason. Children die of leukemia; millions are killed by tsunamis, earthquakes, and hurricanes.  In contrast, where is evidence for the kind of Abrahamic God people worship? Even a Bayesian analysis puts a low prior probability of God’s existence. This is why I’m an atheist.

Second, it’s salubrious that the Times of London published this: the more atheists who go public, the less religion there will be. And that’s a good thing.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is already sick of winter (she hates the snow, which keeps her from going outside):

Hili: Will this winter never end?

A: It just returned.

Hili: Tell it to stop.

Hili: Czy ta zima nigdy się nie skończy?

Ja: Dopiero wróciła.

Hili: Powiedz jej, żeby przestała.

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

A cocktail from BuzzFeed:

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy:

Juvenile humor from Barry:

From Masih, a horrendous video showing the abduction of a 15-year old Iranian lad by regime forces. He was tortured for protesting, and died from that torture:

The video shows the heart-wrenching kidnapping of 15-year-old Barzin HamzeZadeh by Islamic regime forces. After enduring torture in prison, he tragically lost his kidney and passed away the day before yesterday. This calls for action from Western leaders: do not extend a hand to… https://t.co/mBkSCnUaXI pic.twitter.com/fPUFPRPpjT

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) January 6, 2024

From Malcolm we see Pashtet, another brave and patriotic Ukrainian cat (sound up). He likes borsht!

A cat nicknamed «Pashtet» (Pate) connected his life with the artillery crew of the M777 howitzer of the 148th Artillery Brigade of the 🇺🇦Ukrainian Airborne Forces.

Soldiers feed him borscht, sausages. Cat helps against mice and not afraid of shots, encourages the soldier☺️ pic.twitter.com/EoRpDZYXB8

— Cloooud |🇺🇦 (@GloOouD) January 5, 2024

From Simon. This is the famous duck Wrinkle, whom I believe we’ve seen before. Go see his webpage here, and his Instagram page here. (They use the female pronoun because Wrinkle’s sex was misidentified at birth; does that make him non-binary?)

Duck runs in a marathon and gets a medal 🪿 pic.twitter.com/VmiiQW562I

— All things interesting (@interesting_aIl) January 6, 2024

From messing around on Twitter (2nd tweet; first is still the best cat tweet ever).

I know that feeling 🥱 pic.twitter.com/5CcDm9uJj7

— MeMe 𝕏 MesMer (@MemeMesmer) December 27, 2023

More scrolling yields this: a meerkat with a great view!

Mobile observation platform.. 😅 pic.twitter.com/DYELoV3MOh

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) January 6, 2024

From the Auschwitz Memorial: a budding 23-year-old poet, born on this day in 1921, died in Auschwitz:

7 January 1921 | A Czech Jew Pavel Friedmann was born in Prague. A student & poet.

In #Theresienstadt ghetto in 1942 he wrote a poem "Butterfly".

Deported to #Auschwitz on 29 September 1944. He did not survive. pic.twitter.com/k0eq6JNqnN

— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) January 7, 2024

Tweets from Matthew. Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades: our next President. Is his mental illness worse not?

Trump: All I know about magnets is this, give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that’s the end of the magnets pic.twitter.com/TopK4BRsOq

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 6, 2024

And this is GREAT news: Wisdom, the oldest known living bird, has a brand-new mate! So far she’s produced 30-36 chicks. Wikipedia says this:

The USGS has tracked Wisdom since she was first tagged and estimated that Wisdom has flown over 3,000,000 miles (4,800,000 km) since 1956 (approximately 120 times the circumference of the Earth). To accommodate her longevity, the USGS has replaced her tag a total of six times.

Sound up to hear the bill-clacking:

Moments I waited a decade & a half to experience…to spend time w/the oldest known wild bird in the world—Wisdom, the Laysan Albatross!
To see her, at least 72yo, resuming pair bond activities w/a new beau, after losing her mate Akeakamai in '21, was such a meaningful treat! 🪶 pic.twitter.com/fuaI5kYVjM

— Selena Flores (@adisasterpiece) January 6, 2024