Tuesday: Hili dialogue

January 9, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the Cruelest Day, Tuesday January 9, 2024, and National English Toffee Day. Actually, I’m lying: it’s National Apricot Day, but I messed up and celebrated that yesterday. So we’ll do a day reversal and celebrate English toffee, whose real day was yesterday. Heath Bars, which grow ever smaller, are delicious examples of chocolate-covered English toffee:

From Wikipedia

It’s also National Clean Off Your Desk Day, National Word Nerd Day (my word today is “ratiocination”), Play God Day (don’t all atheists do that?), National Cassoulet Day (cultural appropriation), and, finally,= Non-Resident Indian Day in India, celebrating Indians who don’t live in India but draw attention to the country, like author V. S. Naipal.

Here’s a cassoulet I had at Josephine Chez Dumonet in Paris last November. Look at that big sausage from 6 o’clock to 9 o’clock!

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the January 9 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Well, this is a surprise, but a pleasant one: the UN’s own experts are actually asking that Hamas-loving body to investigate the sexual assaults and torture of Israeli women.

U.N. experts on Monday demanded accountability for sexual violence against Israeli civilians during the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, saying that mounting evidence of rapes and genital mutilation point to possible crimes against humanity.

Israeli authorities have opened an investigation into possible sexual crimes during the most deadly attack on Israel in its history. Hamas denies the abuses.

“The growing body of evidence about reported sexual violence is particularly harrowing,” two U.N.-appointed independent experts said in a statement on Monday. The statement referred to allegations of sexual torture including rape and gang rape as well as mutilations and gunshots to genital areas.

“These acts constitute gross violations of international law, amounting to war crimes which, given the number of victims and the extensive premeditation and planning of the attacks, may also qualify as crimes against humanity,” the experts said.

“Each and every victim deserves to be recognised, regardless of their ethnicity, religion or sex, and our role is to be their voice,” they added.

Israel’s diplomatic mission in Geneva welcomed the statement. “The whole international community must fully recognise the brutal and terrorist nature of Hamas, and the responsibility of those who have been shielding them for years, including the Palestinian Authority,” it said.

Will the UN do anything, though? I’m not holding my breath, for remember how long UN Women took to condemn the sexual assaults of October 7?

Here’s a video of a released hostage recounting the sexual damage inflicted on her fellow hostages by Hamas. She also describes the death of  her father and sister on October 7 (thanks to Tom Gross’s newsletter). It’s heartbreaking:

*I expected something like this was coming from John McWhorter at the NYT: an op-ed called “Claudine Gay was not driven out because she was black.”

No, the charge that ultimately led to Gay’s resignation was plagiarism, of which more than 40 alleged examples were ultimately unearthed. And plagiarism and related academic charges have of course also brought down white people at universities many times. Ward Churchill was fired from the University of Colorado for academic misconduct, including plagiarism, in 2007 in the wake of his controversially assailing people working in the World Trade Center towers on 9/11 as “little Eichmanns.” The president of the University of South Carolina, Robert Caslen, resigned thanks to a plagiarism episode in 2021. And the president of Stanford, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, resigned because of questions of data manipulation just last July.

For many, the central issue seems to be that Gay’s plagiarism would not have been uncovered at all were it not for the efforts of conservative activists, which is true. The question then is whether the people who led the charge to oust Gay from her job — principal among them the right-wing anti-critical-race-theory crusader Christopher Rufo and the billionaire financier and Harvard donor Bill Ackman — were acting out of racial animus or even an opposition to Black advancement.

And here things get slightly more complicated. Rufo and Ackman are unabashedly opposed to what both perceive as an ongoing leftward drift at elite universities such as Harvard. And both are opposed to the D.E.I. — or diversity, equity and inclusion — programs that are increasingly prominent on campuses, within corporations and elsewhere. According to Ackman, D.E.I. is “not about diversity” but rather is “a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed.” Rufo and Ackman both believed that, in accordance with the precepts of D.E.I., Gay had been appointed as Harvard president more for her skin color than for her professional qualifications.

To analyze this position as mere racism, though, is hasty. No one is trading in stereotypes of Black talent by asking why Gay was elevated to the presidency of Harvard given her relatively modest academic dossier and administrative experience. It was reasonable to wonder whether Gay was appointed more because she is a Black woman than because of what she had accomplished and whether this approach truly fosters social justice. There was a time when the word for this was “tokenism,” and there is a risk that it only fuels the stereotypes D.E.I. advocates so revile.

To put it succinctly: Opposing D.E.I., in part or in whole, does not make one racist. We can agree that the legacy of racism requires addressing and yet disagree about how best to do it. Of course, in the pure sense, to be opposed to diversity, opposed to equity and opposed to inclusion would fairly be called racism. But it is coy to pretend these dictionary meanings are what D.E.I. refers to in modern practice, which is a more specific philosophy.

. . .D.E.I. advocates may see their worldview and modus operandi as so wise and just that opposition can only come from racists and the otherwise morally compromised. But this is shortsighted. One can be very committed to the advancement of Black people while also seeing a certain ominous and prosecutorial groupthink in much of what has come to operate under the D.E.I. label. Not to mention an unwitting condescension to Black people.

. . . The idea that a menacing right-wing mob sits ever in wait to take down a Black woman who achieves a position of power is a gripping narrative. But its connection to reality is — blissfully — approximate at best. It is facile to dismiss opposition to modern D.E.I. as old-school bigotry in a new guise. The lessons from what happened to Professor Gay are many. But cops-and-robbers thinking about racial victims and perpetrators will help answer few of them.

This stuff is really heterodox for the NYT, but you can always count on McWhorter to give a sensible take. And here, to me, he seems right. It was plagiarism that brought Gay down, but it was the enthusiasm for DEI that brought her up in the first place.

*The Washington Post reports on a kerfuffle between Business Insider—which has, in three articles, reported plagiarism by Neri Oxman, the wife of Bill Ackman (whose own tweets about Claudine Gay’s own plagiarism helped bring down the Harvard President)—and BI’s owner, Spring.  I posted about the BI business yesterday. At any rate, like me, Springer isn’t doubting Oxman’s plagiarism but wonders why BI is so hot on her heels.  She is, after all, not a big macher like Gay, so what’s going on? The Post:

Neither Ackman nor Oxman, whose companies didn’t respond to requests for comment, have pointed to any factual errors in the articles.

Still, Ackman’s complaints seemed to get the attention of Axel Springer, the German media giant that owns Business Insider. On Sunday, the company released an unusual statement saying it would “review the processes” that led up to the articles’ publication, while acknowledging that the stories were not factually wrong.

“While the facts of the reports have not been disputed, over the past few days questions have been raised about the motivation and the process leading up to the reporting — questions that we take very seriously,” the statement read.

Business Insider staffers were surprised by the Axel Springer statement, which many had not realized was coming until a New York Times reporter shared it online, according to a Business Insider employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly. A person familiar with Axel Springer’s operations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve company confidences said Business Insider was involved in the drafting of the statement.

In a Sunday afternoon email to employees that was reviewed by The Washington Post, Business Insider global editor in chief Nicholas Carlson appeared to push back on the idea that the stories needed a review. Carlson wrote that he would “welcome” the review but argued for the news value of the stories given Oxman’s position as what he called a “well-known academic” and start-up founder.

“I made the call to publish both these stories,” Carlson wrote. “I stand by our story and the work that went into it. I know that our process was sound. I know our newsroom’s motivations are truth and accountability.”

And here’s one possible reason, which isn’t the one I suspected (I thought that BI went after Ackman via his wife because they were angry at what he did to Claudine Gay):

But the dispute over the Oxman stories appears to touch upon an issue of major importance to Axel Springer and its CEO, Mathias Döpfner: Israel.

The company supports Israel openly in a way that would be unusual for a nonpartisan American media firm. Axel Springer employees in Germany — though not at its U.S. properties — must sign a mission statement that affirms Israel’s right to exist, among other issues. In 2021, the Israeli flag flew for a week in front of the company’s offices after Döpfner mandated it as a statement against antisemitism, telling anyone who had a problem with the flag to leave the company.

The person familiar with Axel Springer’s discussions said company leaders are concerned that the reporting on Oxman could have been antisemitic or anti-Zionist — even though it consists primarily of straightforward comparisons between Oxman’s publications and the texts she allegedly plagiarized from.

This pledge to Israel wouldn’t hold in America, but the Germans have different laws about speech than does the U.S. Anyway, stay tuned. I’m sure BI will keep examining Oxman, and I guess Ackman is going to vet the whole world for plagiarism.

*In the last couple years I’ve noticed, despite a lack of accidents, that my auto insurance has jumped substantially. It’s no small expense, either! The Wall Street Journal says this is a nationwide trend (also for housing insurance), and tells us why. The article title pulls no punches: “Buying home and auto insurance is becoming impossible.”

For many Americans, getting insurance for both their cars and homes has gone from a routine, generally manageable expense to a do-or-die ordeal that can strain household budgets.

Insurers are coming off some of their worst years in history. Catastrophic damage from storms and wildfires is one big reason. The past decade of global natural catastrophes has been the costliest ever. Warmer temperatures have made storms worse and contributed to droughts that have elevated wildfire risk. Too many new homes were built in areas at risk of fire.

As losses mounted, inflation only made matters worse, boosting the cost of repairing or replacing cars or homes.

Climate change also has made it harder for insurers to measure their risks, pushing some to demand even higher premiums to cushion against future losses.

. . .“I’ve been here 27 years, and we’ve never increased auto rates in the way we have in the last two years,” said Allstate CEO Wilson.

Wilson asked hundreds of his company’s agents at a fall event in Orlando how customers were reacting. “I was like, ‘How’s it going? What are people saying? If I’d said to you three years ago we were going to raise auto prices by 17.5% in one year, you would have thrown me out.’ ”

I have a 2000 (that’s right) Honda Civic with about 83,000 miles on it, but I still pay far more than I used to. When I asked why, they basically told me “prices have gone up” and “you’re older now, and older people pay more.” I already don’t have insurance to repair my old car if it gets dinged or in a wreck: just damage to the other person and coverage for their medical expenses.  And, as the article concludes, either bite the bullet or forego coverage (which is not optional for cars in Illinois).

*This headline from the BBC is irresistible: “Mouse filmed tidying up man’s shed every night.” What? (h/t Matthew) But I’ll take my excerpt from the NYT, which has picked up the story and published it under the rhyming headline “‘Welsh tidy mouse’ tidies tiny Welsh house.”

There was something strange going on in Rodney Holbrook’s backyard shed.

For several months, someone — or something — had been apparently tidying up after the 75-year-old retiree. Every morning when he checked on his workbench, miscellaneous items had been cleared away and placed in a small box nearby.

At first, it was some bird food and nuts being moved around. Then, a few screws he had left out mysteriously appeared in the box.

Mr. Holbrook, a passionate wildlife photographer who lives near the town of Builth Wells in Wales, had his suspicions over the identity of the meticulous helper — it certainly wasn’t his wife. To investigate, he set up a night-vision camera and caught the mysterious visitor.

“Lo and behold, I got a video of the mouse,” he said. “Tidying up for me.”

In videos captured by Mr. Holbrook, a small mouse carries clothes pegs, cups and even cable ties to the box, with an enviable focus. A stick more than twice its length is no problem. A cork goes neatly into the pile, as do lids.

“I’m just awed by it, really,” Mr. Holbrook, a retired postal worker, said. “Every day I take it all back out again — and it’s all back in.”

But why does Tidy Mouse do this? Well, there are some theories which belong to the people who made them.

Of course, whether Welsh Tidy Mouse is intentionally decluttering is speculative. Mr. Holbrook believes the rodent may be trying to cover some nuts in the box to shield them from other rodents’ eyes.

That’s one possible explanation, according to Megan Jackson, a researcher at the University of Bristol who studies motivation using mice in labs. Another is that the mouse is building some kind of nest.

“We know that mice have a really strong drive to forage,” she said. Searching for interesting things in the environment to bring back and hoard, she said, is “intrinsically mouse-y behavior.”

In her research, Dr. Jackson said she had created a similar situation in which lab mice were encouraged to forage nesting material and carry it back to a box. “Mice are willing to put in a lot of effort to work at something they find rewarding,” she said.

Well, whatever the reason, it’s adorable! I found the Tidy Mouse video on YouTube (hosted by the Guardian). This mouse deserves all the treats it can eat! (I think he’s covering up food.)

. . . and a post-tidying photo from the NYT (see the caption):

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is confusing, for sometimes she has to clean up too. Given that she’s a determinist, both she and Andrzej have to clean up because they’re compelled by the laws of physics.

A: I have to clean up.
Hili: I don’t understand the words “have to”.
In Polish:
Ja: Muszę posprzątać.
Hili: Nie rozumiem słowa “muszę”.

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

From Beth:

From Stacy via Marcus, a most excellent cartoon by David Ostow:

A made-up Tintin book, from America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy. Notice that Snowy is also fat!

From Masih; this Iranian “holiday” is shameful:

From Debra; no matter what you think of Fetterman, put this on the “good” side:

From Malcolm: a very sleepy moggy. The staff shouldn’t have disturbed it!

From Barry: a cat who grew up with dogs. This just isn’t RIGHT!:

From my own feed, a panda having pure fun:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a Czech Jewish woman who died at only 25 in Auschwitz:

Tweets from Matthew: a sea anemone reproducing asexually by fission (second tweet) and adhering to an aquarium wall:

I’ve had my differences with Philip Ball, an editor at Nature, but we do agree on one thing:

35 thoughts on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. On this day:
    681 – Twelfth Council of Toledo: King Erwig of the Visigoths initiates a council in which he implements diverse measures against the Jews in Spain.

    1349 – The Jewish population of Basel, believed by the residents to be the cause of the on-going Black Death, is rounded up and incinerated.

    1431 – The trial of Joan of Arc begins in Rouen.

    1693 – 1693 Sicily earthquake: The first of two earthquakes destroys parts of Sicily and Malta. After the second quake on 11 January, the death toll is estimated at between 60,000 and 100,000 people.

    1793 – Jean-Pierre Blanchard becomes the first person to fly in a balloon in the United States.

    1799 – British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger introduces an income tax of two shillings to the pound to raise funds for Great Britain’s war effort in the Napoleonic Wars.

    1806 – Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson receives a state funeral and is interred in St Paul’s Cathedral.

    1816 – Humphry Davy tests his safety lamp for miners at Hebburn Colliery.

    1839 – The French Academy of Sciences announces the Daguerreotype photography process.

    1909 – Ernest Shackleton, leading the Nimrod Expedition to the South Pole, plants the British flag 97 nautical miles (180 km; 112 mi) from the South Pole, the farthest anyone had ever reached at that time.

    1918 – Battle of Bear Valley: The last battle of the American Indian Wars.

    1923 – Juan de la Cierva makes the first autogyro flight.

    1927 – A fire at the Laurier Palace movie theatre in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, kills 78 children.

    1957 – British Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden resigns from office following his failure to retake the Suez Canal from Egyptian sovereignty.

    1960 – President of Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser opens construction on the Aswan Dam by detonating ten tons of dynamite to demolish twenty tons of granite on the east bank of the Nile.

    1962 – Apollo program: NASA announces plans to build the C-5 rocket launch vehicle, then known as the “Advanced Saturn”, to carry human beings to the Moon.

    1991 – Representatives from the United States and Iraq meet at the Geneva Peace Conference to try to find a peaceful resolution to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

    1992 – The first discoveries of extrasolar planets are announced by astronomers Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail. They discovered two planets orbiting the pulsar PSR 1257+12.

    1996 – First Chechen War: Chechen separatists launch a raid against the helicopter airfield and later a civilian hospital in the city of Kizlyar in the neighboring Dagestan, which turns into a massive hostage crisis involving thousands of civilians.

    2005 – Mahmoud Abbas wins the election to succeed Yasser Arafat as President of the Palestinian National Authority, replacing interim president Rawhi Fattouh.

    2007 – Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduces the original iPhone at a Macworld keynote in San Francisco.

    2015 – The perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris two days earlier are both killed after a hostage situation; a second hostage situation, related to the Charlie Hebdo shooting, occurs at a Jewish market in Vincennes.

    2015 – A mass poisoning at a funeral in Mozambique involving beer that was contaminated with Burkholderia gladioli leaves 75 dead and over 230 people ill.

    Births:
    1773 – Cassandra Austen, English painter and illustrator (d. 1845). [Elder sister of Jane Austen. The letters between her and Jane form a substantial foundation to scholarly understanding of the life of the novelist.]

    1854 – Jennie Jerome, American-born wife of Lord Randolph Churchill, mother of Sir Winston Churchill (d. 1921).

    1859 – Carrie Chapman Catt, American activist, founded the League of Women Voters and International Alliance of Women (d. 1947).

    1870 – Joseph Strauss, American engineer, co-designed the Golden Gate Bridge (d. 1938).

    1875 – Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, American sculptor and art collector, founded the Whitney Museum of American Art (d. 1942).

    1890 – Karel Čapek, Czech author and playwright (d. 1938). [Coined the word “robot”.]

    1892 – Eva Bowring, American lawyer and politician (d. 1985).

    1893 – Edwin Baker, Canadian soldier and educator, co-founded the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (d. 1968).

    1898 – Gracie Fields, English actress and singer (d. 1979).

    1908 – Simone de Beauvoir, French philosopher and author (d. 1986).

    1913 – Richard Nixon, American commander, lawyer, and politician, 37th President of the United States (d. 1994).

    1920 – Clive Dunn, English actor (d. 2012).

    1925 – Lee Van Cleef, American actor (d. 1989).

    1939 – Susannah York, English actress and activist (d. 2011).

    1941 – Joan Baez, American singer-songwriter, guitarist and activist.

    1943 – Scott Walker, American singer-songwriter, bass player, and producer (d. 2019).

    1944 – Jimmy Page, English guitarist, songwriter, and producer.

    1951 – Crystal Gayle, American singer-songwriter and producer.

    1954 – Philippa Gregory, Kenyan-English author and academic.

    1956 – Imelda Staunton, English actress and singer.

    1965 – Joely Richardson, English actress.

    1980 – Sergio García, Spanish golfer.

    1987 – Paolo Nutini, Scottish singer-songwriter and guitarist.

    1993 – Katarina Johnson-Thompson, English long jumper and heptathlete. [ A double world champion and double Commonwealth Games champion in heptathlon and a world and double European champion in indoor pentathlon.]

    Death is a distant rumor to the young. (Andy Rooney):
    1799 – Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Italian mathematician and philosopher (b. 1718). [The first woman to write a mathematics handbook and the first woman appointed as a mathematics professor at a university.]

    1848 – Caroline Herschel, German-English astronomer (b. 1750).

    1918 – Charles-Émile Reynaud, French scientist and educator, invented the Praxinoscope (b. 1844). [The Praxinoscope was an animation device, the successor to the zoetrope.]

    1923 – Katherine Mansfield, New Zealand novelist, short story writer, and essayist (b. 1888).

    1947 – Karl Mannheim, Hungarian-English sociologist and academic (b. 1893).

    1961 – Emily Greene Balch, American economist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1867).

    1995 – Peter Cook, English actor and screenwriter (b. 1937).

    2013 – Brigitte Askonas, Austrian-English immunologist and academic (b. 1923).

    1. Woman of the day:
      Caroline Herschel, German-English astronomer (b. 1750) died on this day in 1848.

      The younger sister of astronomer William Herschel, with whom she worked throughout her career, she discovered several comets, including the periodic comet 35P/Herschel–Rigollet, which bears her name.

      She was the first woman to receive a salary as a scientist and the first woman in England to hold a government position. She was also the first woman to publish scientific findings in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, to be awarded a Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1828), and to be named an honorary Member of the Royal Astronomical Society (1835, with Mary Somerville). She was named an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy (1838). The King of Prussia presented her with a Gold Medal for Science on the occasion of her 96th birthday (1846).

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Herschel

  2. I admire McWhorter, but no plagiarist should have to be compared to Ward Churchill. That guy is in a class by himself. If I recall, he invented scholars for the purpose of citing his work.

  3. Tintin en Amérique is a genuine title:

    The story tells of young Belgian reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy who travel to the United States, where Tintin reports on organized crime in Chicago. Pursuing a gangster across the country, he encounters a tribe of Blackfoot Native Americans before defeating the Chicago crime syndicate.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintin_in_America

        1. No this is not a genuine Hergé comic. He was very ppoular in France and Belgium and there have been many parodic versions of his covers and even fake tintin albums – some very funny, others more questionable (not really for children). Best.

  4. I would like to add a bit of British non mouse related news, if I may.

    Paula Vennells, erstwhile CEO of the British Post Office is going to hand back her CBE (a medal) because of the Post Office scandal which occurred partly on her watch.

    She was awarded the gong in 2019 for services to the Post Office, which it has transpired included covering up (at the very least) the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history.

    1. Well, that’s a tiny bit of good news.

      I don’t think Americans know much about the UK post office scandal. I followed the news about it for years on this blog https://ukcampaign4change.com/

      I’m considering watching the dramatization of the scandal that just aired (Mr Bates v The Post Office), but I’m afraid I’ll just be enraged all over again. Have you seen it?

      2. I haven’t seen it, and for the same reasons. The scandal came to my attention in about 2002 through the union’s back-channel communications (the CWU were fighting several cases for their members, but we had nothing of note to help).
        Maybe I’ll watch it in a few weeks, but it’s likely to go into rant-mode.
        Toby Wossname is having a good run on meaty rôles of late.

    2. Meanwhile news in Scotland is just breaking that the Crown Office/ Procurator Fiscal (who conduct prosecutions in Scotland, while in England and Wales the PO could conduct prosecutions without reference to the Crown Prosecution Service) knew of serious problems with the PO’s evidence as far back as 2015. How many prosecutions took place after then has still to come out (the 10pm news hasn’t happened yet).
      For the Americans : routinely the PO would lie in their interrogations that “nobody else has ever reported a problem with Horizon” (the IT system at the centre of the problem) – which would automatically invalidate a prosecution under CPS rules (and PF rules, in Scotland ; not sure about Northern Ireland), which would be why the PO conducted it’s own prosecutions, rather than going through the CPS – no external oversight. Lieing in an interrogation is effectively illegal in the UK (but AIUI, perfectly acceptable in American practice).
      That aspect has a lot of blood still to be let. I bet the PO, as well as the military, and possibly others are going to lose the ability to conduct prosecutions themselves before this is out. Amongst other things, that would mean no more MPs patrolling the streets of garrison towns, and soldiers serving sentences in normal prisons.
      But the news is still breaking. The house of cards is still tumbling, and as ever, the cover-up is probably going to prove more damaging than the original crime.

      Fujitsu (who wrote/ ran the software/ hardware/ communications system in question, “Horizon”) have been keeping extremely schtum. But they’re coming into the spotlight too. Who (in the PO) signed off on accepting the software/ hardware/ communications in the state they were in in 1999? And who accepted Fujitsu not fixing the problems in a version 1.0 release? Or 2.0? Or 3.0? And what does this say about acceptable standards in software “engineering”?
      When I first heard about the drama, I tried finding out what the actual hardware and software problems were, but couldn’t get past screeds of legalese.

  5. Bravo to Fetterman. That wall should be the moral equivalent of an oak cross to certain other members of Congress who might think of stopping by.

  6. The District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals hears oral argument this morning in Donald Trump’s frivolous claim that he is completely immune from criminal prosecution for all acts taken while he held the US presidency. Coverage of the argument starts at 9:30 am Eastern and oral livestreams will be available on most of the major networks, CSPAN, and SCOTUS’s own website.

    My prediction, FWIW, is that Trump will lose, tout suite, 3-0, in front of the three-judge panel that hears the argument today. Trump will then, in an effort to delay the inevitable, file a pro forma motion to have his case heard by the entire DC Circuit Court of Appeals sitting en banc, which will also promptly be denied when none of the judges in active service on the DC Circuit vote to grant en banc review.

    Trump will then seek review in SCOTUS. (Those who have been following the case may recall that counsel for Trump recently opposed having the special counsel’s request that SCOTUS hear this case, in the interests of expediting the matter, even before that DC Circuit heard the direct appeal from the trial court’s denial of Trump’s immunity motion.)

    I look for SCOTUS to deny Trump’s request for pretrial certiorari in this case. (Although presidential immunity presents a novel constitutional issue, if Trump is convicted at trial he will have an opportunity to seek review again from the SCOTUS during the post-trial appellate process — the usual manner in which issues in federal criminal prosecutions are handled.)

    Trump should lose unanimously before SCOTUS in his bid to have his immunity issue heard before trial (as Nixon lost unanimously in his effort to resist production of the Watergate tapes, and as Bill Clinton lost unanimously in his effort to postpone the Paula Jones civil suit so long as he was still in the White House.)

    It would not surprise me, however, to see the vote be 8-1 against Trump, with Ginni Thomas’s husband casting a lone vote in dissent without opinion (as he did when the Court rejected Trump’s claim of blanket executive immunity as to the documents sought by the Jan. 6th committee). After all, Clarence has to keep things copacetic on the homefront with his wingnut wife.

    If this is the way the case breaks down procedurally, the trial of Trump DC case shouldn’t be delayed much beyond its current scheduled March start date.

    As a bit of added interest, Trump will be taking the unusual step of attending today’s oral argument in person — presumably to he can put on his best snarl face before the three judges sitting on the bench and engage in the occasional stage whisper when counsel for the government makes an argument that Trump takes exception to.

    1. I hope you’re right in your analysis. The trial needs to move forward. Today will be an interesting news day—particularly as Trump will be in attendance in court.

    2. If we’re lucky, Trump won’t resist an impulse to engage in a bit of grandstanding before the judges and be charged with contempt of court. He may do so assuming it will make him look good to his base. The Court would not be amused.

    3. Thanks for the analysis, Ken. Trump shows up for the media attention and I’m sure his marks give him more money. Plus, he likes any opportunity to spout his BS.

      As an aside, I have about 100 pages left of Ellroy’s American Tabloid. That’s one wild read with lots of moving parts and some very memorable characters (Pete Bondurant-yikes!); thanks for the recommendation.

      1. As someone blurbed American Tabloid, Ellroy’s prose is so hardboiled, it bounces. 🙂 His entire Underworld USA Trilogy is well worth reading — as is the rest of his oeuvre, for that matter.

    4. Very good analysis, but I would rather expect a 7-2 vote, with Alito to join Thomas in shamelessness.

  7. With plagiarism – and its identification – comes power over expression, over free speech.

    Seems worth highlighting that vertical component of the dialectical strategy, so it isn’t lost in the dialectical political warfare (which it is).

    As well as the moral dimension to plagiarism, in particular demoralization as the first stage of Ideological Subversion (Yuri Bezmenov).

    The Senate Hearing Did Not Take Place (concept borrowed from Jean Baudrillard).

      1. I usually hope that if my comments are searched, James Lindsay’s stuff / New Discourses will come up. I am only a reader/listener – no other connection. I do not pretend to have learned this on my own. I think everyone should check it out – “so we can beat it” (Lindsay’s regular intro quote)
        Cheers

  8. I was pleasantly surprised by the statement from the U.N. regarding sexual violence against Israeli women and girls. It took too long but it was necessary, if only to blunt accusations of hypocrisy. We’ll learn through their subsequent actions whether the statement was sincere or just lip service.

    John McWhorter is, of course, correct that the criticism against former Harvard president Claudine Gay was not racist and that opposition to DEI is not prima facie evidence of racism. He is always so balanced and reasonable.

    I still think that the attacks on Oxman are an effort to get at Ackman, but I do find the Axel Springer angle interesting. We’ll see. I’m hoping that the plagiarism craze will go away when the next shiny object comes into view. I don’t think that a widespread plagiarism witch hunt is in anyone’s interest.

    Finally, please keep the web site going if you can. Not only is it a platform for you individually, the site provides a platform for many of us as well. We have more impact together than separately. I know that the site is super time-consuming, but hope that you are willing to carry on.

    2. Another bright spot in the UN’s machinations is this:
      https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/jan/09/un-envoy-criticises-one-sided-who-approach-trans-health-guidelines

      The World Health Organization has struck a committee — membership announced in mid-December — to prepare a framework for enhancing trans-gender care and enshrining self-identification of gender in legal definitions. The committee’s work would get turned into a “declaration” or “convention” that member states would be expected to ratify, similar to UNDRIP. The committee has been stacked with trans activists, violating the WHO’s own rules for avoiding bias and conflict of interest in developing guidelines for treatments.

      So the good news is that the UN’s special rapporteur on violence against women and children (the “envoy” in the Guardian headline above) has written directly to the UN Secretary-General urging him to put the kibosh on this committee out of her concerns for the harms to women and children from the committee’s mandate and composition.

      The nice part is that her letter cites all the objections that the evidence-based gender movement had articulated in letters and petitions prepared over the extended Coynezaa holiday break when almost everyone’s attention was elsewhere. There is no guarantee that the Secretary-General or the WHO will pay any attention to her (or us), but this is still a gratifying development.

  9. My mother had cats that copied the dog. She trained the dog to wait on the door mat when she came in from outside to have her paws wiped free of mud. After a couple of weeks, the cats started waiting for their paws to be wiped. Mind you, if I had to lick mud off me, I would be happy to have any assistance on offer.

    I can only assume that in the video above, the cat was happy to join in the waiting for permission to eat, because this system meant that the dogs would not try to slurp up the cat food with itp’s higher protein content.

  10. Elder of Ziyon’s report on the Lebanese hit the other day.

    https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2024/01/reports-indicate-arouri-assassination.html
    I’m not sure most of the housing stock in Beirut would NEED a separate missile to “open up” the wall, but kudos for taking it into account. I loved my time in Beirut, but it is… kind of shabby. I know the specific neighborhood, it is a shia ghetto where Nasrallah lives (presumably underneath).

    Note the separate car shot in the operation. Not sure why, but cool.

    Consider just how many non-superpowers are capable of such technical sophistication.
    Heroes.

    D.A.
    NYC
    https://www.sdjewishworld.com/2024/01/07/oped-so-called-two-state-solution-is-lunacy/

  11. I love the tidy mouse video but am still wondering about the motivation. If mice regularly hide food under ‘piles of stuff’, wouldn’t other mice know that ‘piles of stuff’ are good places to look for hidden food? None of that stuff looks particularly cozy for making a nest, and after repeated dismantling the mouse would figure out that it wasn’t going to work in that capacity.

    1. Admission to Mouse U requires a demonstrated ability to bin clothes pins, paper clips, and bits of torn-up paper.

  12. a sea anemone reproducing asexually by fission (second tweet) and adhering to an aquarium wall:

    Hmmm, we never covered “sea anemones” as a distinct group in palaeontology – “no hard parts ; minimal potential for preservation” would probably be sufficient justification. Ditto jellyfish – the other unmentioned member of the coelenterates (sorry, “Cnidarians”). Assuming that anemones are essentially corals without shells, it would seem fairly hard for them to fission, once they’ve started to form a test.
    OTOH, many classes of corals have internal divisions (septæ) which often have a radial distribution, and generally at least bilateral symmetry, if not more complex symmetry. So now I’m wondering if these septæ actually record the traces of previous fissions. Since all parts of a coral test live or die together (or indeed, bleach together), sharing a genome is no more challenging than your fingernails and toenails sharing a genome via the reproductive abilities of your germ cells.
    Hmmm, Wiki time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral#Asexual tells me that there are several modes of division available in the soft corals, including one I didn’t consider ?

    Transversal division occurs when polyps and the exoskeleton divide transversally into two parts. This means one has the basal disc (bottom) and the other has the oral disc (top); the new polyps must separately generate the missing pieces

    That would be … interesting.

  13. Trigger warning: both Heath bars and Skor no longer use real butter, i.e. the
    spread that comes from milk from animals. They use cocoa butter, which is a plant product.
    Anyone who rightly demands real butter will have already noticed this. I remember in my youth buying what was called almond crunch: : butter (animal) crunch coated with chocolate and finely crumbled almonds on top. The BEST.

    No longer. READ labels on candy and baked goods; you will 99% of the time see Cocoa Butter….not real butter. This is cheating. To get real butter buy imported cookies! French and Belgian ones use butter. American baked goods and sweets are all just cheats and frauds.

Comments are closed.