Wednesday: Hili dialogue

January 31, 2024 • 6:45 am

I’m feeling a bit better, though I must have been invaded by some kind of virus. A covid test is negative (I’ll test once more), but I think I’ll be fine in a day or so.

My test:

Welcome to Hump Day (“Olunaku lwa Hump” in Luganda) January 31, 2024, and the last day of the month. February awaits! It’s also National Hot Chocolate Day.  Here’s a mug of hot chocolate (note extra whipped cream) at Angelina in Paris, best taken with a Mont Blanc chestnut-cream-flavored pastry:

It’s also Scotch Tape Day (it was first marketed on this day in 1930), Hug an Economist Day, Brandy Alexander Day, and what is perhaps the worst food day of the year, Eat Brussels Sprouts Day. For followers of the silent Meher Baba, it’s also Amartithi in Meherabad, India.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the January 31 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*According to the WSJ, which must have amazing sources, Iran held a meeting of terrorist groups in Tehran and basically told them that they were on their own: Iran would not get involved in a war with the US, Israel, and their allies, as that would ruin its “plausible deniability”:

Weeks after Israel invaded Gaza in response to Hamas’s deadly attack on Oct. 7, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei convened a meeting of militia leaders across an alliance Tehran calls “the axis of resistance.”

The attack, which Khamenei had publicly praised as an “epic victory,” marked a crescendo of four decades of Iranian efforts to train and arm a network of nonstate militant groups as a way to threaten its enemies and extend its influence in the Middle East.

But behind closed doors, the Iranian leader told senior Hamas representatives, along with Lebanese, Iraqi, Yemeni and other Palestinian militia leaders, that Tehran had no intention of directly entering the conflict and widening the war, according to two high-ranking officials from Hamas and two from Hezbollah. Side battles, he told the delegates, risked distracting the world from Israel’s devastating incursions in Gaza. The message: Hamas was on its own.

Now the axis faces a moment of truth. As Iran’s allies stoke even more fires across the region—from attacks on shipping in the Red Sea to Sunday’s drone strike that killed three U.S. troops in Jordan—they are pushing their benefactor closer to the brink of a direct conflict with Washington that it has long sought to avoid.

Iranian military and financial power forms the backbone of the alliance, but Tehran doesn’t exert full command and control over it. Not every member shares Iran’s Shiite ideology, and all the groups have domestic agendas that sometimes conflict with Tehran’s. Some operate in geographically isolated areas, making it tricky for Iran to provide weapons, advisers and training. That includes Hamas, which is a Sunni movement, or the Houthis in Yemen, whose attacks on shipping have upended global trade flows and triggered U.S. and U.K. counterstrikes.

U.S. officials blamed Sunday’s drone strike on an Iran-backed group, and the White House on Monday said it believed the perpetrators were supported by Kataib Hezbollah, an Iranian militia ally based in Iraq, with forces in Syria. President Biden said he was weighing how to retaliate. Iran rejected any involvement.

For Tehran, the power of the axis lies in the plausible deniability that comes from each member’s operational and territorial autonomy. Iran gets to distance itself from the militias even as they serve Iran’s strategic interests, countering U.S. and Israeli power in the region.

This deniability has been seriously hurt by the October 7 attack, and subsequent attacks by Iran-funded groups like the Houthis, have hurt hopes Iran had for the release of money held by the U.S. or from relief of sanctions on its nuclear program.  According to this article, Iran neither wants nor needs further involvement in Middle Eastern conflicts, though it still funds some of the participants:

Iran had built its axis of resistance to ensure its own survival, not that of Hamas. While the Palestinian group is an important ally, Iran wasn’t going to risk the destruction of its strongest partner, Hezbollah, to save it, said Emile Hokayem, an expert on security and nonstate actors in the Middle East with the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

“They’re not going to deploy Hezbollah in a war the Iranians don’t see as existential,” he said.

:But this implies, happily, that Hezbollah is not going to pull a Hamas-style attack on northern Israel. (Note that the UN is supposed to keep Hezbollah at bay, but runs like chickens when they are around.)

*The BBC has apparently adopted DEI statements (h/t Jez) The link is to the Torygraph piece:

BBC staff are being told not to hire candidates who are “dismissive” of diversity and inclusion, The Telegraph can disclose.

A recruitment policy document says applicants should be asked to “explain what diversity and inclusion means to you and, should you be successful, what opportunities do you see for you to promote, celebrate or encourage diversity and inclusion in your role?”

The guidelines, used in a major non-editorial department of the BBC, tell recruiters: “Don’t hire [candidates who are] unsuited to the organisation” if they are “dismissive or derisory of diversity and inclusion and surrounding topics”.

Managers are also directed not to offer jobs to candidates who show a “lack of interest in learning more where no evidence of education and understanding of diversity and inclusion was given”.

Critics have claimed that diversity and inclusion can be a way for organisations to promote controversial ideas.

Earlier this month, The Telegraph revealed that ministers were planning a crackdown on civil servants “using their jobs as a vehicle for political activism” in relation to diversity and inclusion initiatives.

Commenting on the recruitment guidelines, a BBC source said: “The BBC is not a welcoming place for those with conservative opinions. Management talks about diversity without embracing diversity of thought.

“The place that I have given years of my working life, and that I sincerely cherish, currently feels captured by Left-wing activists and is unable to deliver on our core principle of impartiality.

“Hiring on the basis of adherence to diversity and inclusion ideology excludes most conservative-minded people, and indeed much of the population.”

Robin Aitken, a former BBC journalist and author, said: “These guidelines illustrate just how embedded DEI [Diversity, Equality and Inclusion] ideology is in the BBC. The rules act as a mechanism to maintain groupthink and screen out anyone who is sceptical of this novel doctrine of diversity and inclusion.”

“The BBC is now hiring not on the basis of skill or merit, but instead on people’s political attitudes to diversity.”

This is of course compelled speech, and would be illegal in the U.S. (the BBC is a state-sponsored media). Presumably Britain doesn’t have rules against compelled speech, but if it does it should be enforcing them at the Beeb.  The DEI statements are very similar to those used for academics applying for jobs in the US.

*If you’re planning on going to Paris for this summer’s Olympics (I’m not!), be prepared for massive sticker shock. The NYT gives a list (and also a quiz) of some of the prices you’ll have to pay for hotels, transportation, and tickets to the Games.

The opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics promises to be spectacular: On the glittering waters of the Seine, a flotilla of barges will carry about 10,000 athletes to the foot of the Eiffel Tower, as nearly half a million spectators line the four-mile route to cheer on the event of the century.

Good luck, though, getting any one of the 100,000 ticketed seats to be front and center at the party. Those are mostly sold out — and the few left cost an eye-popping 2,700 euros, about $2,930 each. Tickets to watch another popular Olympic event, 10-meter men’s platform diving, are now only available through special-service hospitality packages starting at €875, or women’s artistic gymnastics finals, a perennial crowd pleaser: around €1,799.

Here are some other price hikes.

Many hotels and rental apartments have doubled or tripled their typical summer rates (think an average of €1,000 a night instead of €300), and some have even quintupled them. Airfares are rising fast. The cost of a Paris Metro ticket is temporarily doubling. Even the Louvre Museum and Palace of Versailles have ratcheted up admission fees.

For some reason the Metro increase really bothers me, as do the museum price increases. It’s price-gouging, pure and simple. You have to be rich to go to the Olympics. More:

Paris is like a jewel box: dazzling but compact. With around 15 million visitors expected, and just around 85,000 guest rooms, hoteliers are taking full advantage of outsize demand. So are Parisians: Many are planning to flee the city, and are renting out their apartments at top dollar. Average Airbnb prices for Olympic dates have surpassed €500 a night.

At a typical Ibis hotel, a chain similar to Holiday Inn, expect to pay €400 to €700 a night for a fairly basic double room with Wi-Fi and breakfast, compared with €90 to €200 normally. A double room at the more upscale Hotel Ducs de Bourgogne near the Pont Neuf is priced on Booking.com at €1,500 a night, compared with €300 normally in summer.

Oy! Ibises are often my go-to hotels, though not in Paris.  And forget about actually seeing the games:

If you’ve already gotten reasonably priced tickets, count yourself lucky. Around seven million have been purchased since sales began nearly a year ago on the official Paris 2024 ticketing website. But you can still get into a variety of events, especially team sports at venues outside Paris, including soccer at the 80,700-seat stadium in St.-Denis.

Tickets priced from €90 to €250 also remain for volleyball, handball, archery, badminton and weight lifting, mostly for non-medal competitions.

But blockbuster sports have become all but inaccessible, unless you are willing to splurge. Tickets to events like gymnastics and diving are currently unavailable on the official website. Prices topped €600 before the blocks that had been made available sold out.
I’m staying the hell away from Paris this summer. And they don’t even mention restaurant prices!

*The Daily Caller reports (and there’s evidence to back this up) that the city of San Francisco had a program to give large amounts of money to black and Latino men, but only if they became transgender women. Check the three links in the report to verify its assertions.

Several San Francisco residents are suing city officials over an allegedly “illegal” program that provides taxpayer funds to black and Latino biological men who “identify as females.”

In November 2022, Democratic Mayor London Breed, who is listed as a defendant, announced the “Guaranteed Income for Trans People (GIFT) Program,” which provides “low-income transgender San Franciscans with $1,200 each month, up to 18 months to help address financial insecurity within trans communities,” according to a press release. Judicial Watch, a nonprofit legal group, filed the suit on behalf of several plaintiffs Monday against Breed, arguing the program is unconstitutional because of its “preferential treatment.”

“Specifically, Plaintiffs contend that any expenditure of taxpayer funds or taxpayer-financed resources on the GIFT program is illegal under Article 1, section 7 of the California Constitution because the program’s grant of preferential treatment to biological males who identify as females is immediately suspect and presumptively invalid and cannot survive strict scrutiny review,” the complaint reads.

The lawsuit named Breed, José Cisneros, treasurer of the City and County of San Francisco, John Doe, the executive director of the Office of Transgender Initiatives of the City and County of San Francisco, and Carmen Chu, city administrator of the City and County of San Francisco, as defendants.

The GIFT program initially opened to 55 applicants and provided an income as well as access to “gender-affirming medical and mental health care,” according to Breed’s press release. The funds were first distributed in January 2023 and will continue through 2024, according to the program’s website.

Undocumented individuals can also apply to the program if they meet the other criteria, according to the website.

“We know that our trans communities experience much higher rates of poverty and discrimination, so this program will target support to lift individuals in this community up,” Breed said in a statement.

The plaintiffs allege that the program is little more than racial and sexual discrimination since only transgender minorities can apply and asked the court to enjoin the city from using taxpayer dollars to fund the program, according to the complaint.

I don’t think it’s transphobic to say that this program is illegal in both discriminating for and against people based on their race and gender status (note further that transgender women get the supplement but not transgender men). If you’re going to single out people for financial help this way, shouldn’t it be based almost entirely on financial need, not race or gender status? This program is clearly illegal on Constitutional grounds.

*The Guardian discusses new research that may have answered the question, “Why are moths attracted to light?” Okay, so why do moths circle artificial lights, and, if they’re hot, like candles, eventually incinerate themselves? Any biologist would guess that this is a maladaptive byproduct of behavior that evolved as an adaptation. And that would be correct:

Now researchers believe they have a more compelling answer: rather than being attracted to light at night, moths and other flying insects become trapped in their glow. It is the unfortunate consequence of a neat trick evolved over millions of years failing in the modern world.

According to Dr Sam Fabian, an entomologist at Imperial College London, moths and many other insects that fly at night evolved to tilt their back to wherever is brightest. For hundreds of millions of years, this was the sky rather than the ground. The trick told insects which way was up and ensured they flew level.

But then came artificial lighting. With fresh sources of illumination to contend, moths found themselves tilting their backs to street lamps. This sent them into endless loops around the lamps, the insects trapped by their evolutionary instincts.

Fabian and his colleagues captured insect flight paths around lights using high resolution, infrared motion capture in the lab and high-speed infrared video recordings in Costa Rica. The footage reveals that time and again, moths and dragonflies turned their backs to artificial lights, playing havoc with their flight paths.

“If the light’s above them, they might start orbiting it, but if it’s behind them, they start tilting backwards and that can cause them to climb up and up until they stall,” Fabian said. “More dramatic is when they fly directly over a light. They flip themselves upside down and that can lead to crashes. It really suggests that the moth is confused as to which way is up.”

The work, published in Nature Communications, suggests artificial lighting may not draw flying insects out of the darkness but simply trap those that fly past. “It’s almost like having a net,” Fabian said.

Note that most moths fly at night, and so need a way to orient themselves in the dark. The stars are a good way of doing that, particularly because moths are light, flying organisms and can’t depend on gravity. Here’s a figure from the original paper showing the three types of maladaptive responses to artificial light. This, of course, could and probably does lead to a serious deficit of moths in urban areas:

 

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili looks a little portly:

A: I have a problem.
Hili: So solve it.
In Polish:
Ja: Mam problem.
Hili: To go rozwiąż.
And a picture of Baby Kulka:

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

This is the absolute best recent political cat video I’ve seen. I can’t post it directly, but click on the screenshot to see it on Facebook:

From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:

From Jenny, the Bayeux Tapestry with Pooh characters, drawn by the original Pooh artist, Ernest Shepard.  But Eeyore, my spirit animal, has an arrow in his butt!!!

From Masih, a very sad tweet. The second one I put up yesterday. His father was executed as a “spy for Israel” (i.e, for political protest), and his five year old son cut off his hair:

More possible plagiarism from Harvard, this time from the chief diversity officer. Check out the quotes: some of it is self plagiarism, in which words are recycled between papers, which isn’t a sin except the second papers purport to be from new studies. There are also genuine cases of Claudine-Gay-like plagiarism, in which words are lifted and there’s a citation somewhere, but without quotation marks.

From Roz, the second is a singing cat (volume way up!):

From Jez. Ouch!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a boy gassed upon arrival, age 10

One tweet from Dr. Cobb; FLUFFY! (It’s a bad cat). Be sure to look at the whole picture.

21 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Impulsively insinuating comestible comment :

    Check out the newer foaming machines – e.g. “Instant” brand – or check for cans of cold foam in the dairy section.

    I’m thinking milk and cereal can use a 21st century refresh with foam.

  2. On this day:
    1606 – Gunpowder Plot: Four of the conspirators, including Guy Fawkes, are executed for treason by hanging, drawing and quartering, for plotting against Parliament and King James.

    1747 – The first venereal diseases clinic opens at London Lock Hospital.

    1862 – Alvan Graham Clark discovers the white dwarf star Sirius B, a companion of Sirius, through an 18.5-inch (47 cm) telescope now located at Northwestern University.

    1865 – American Civil War: The United States Congress passes the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, abolishing slavery, and submits it to the states for ratification.

    1901 – Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters premieres at Moscow Art Theatre in Russia.

    1915 – World War I: Germany is the first to make large-scale use of poison gas in warfare in the Battle of Bolimów against Russia.

    1918 – A series of accidental collisions on a misty Scottish night leads to the loss of two Royal Navy submarines with over a hundred lives, and damage to another five British warships.

    1919 – The Battle of George Square takes place in Glasgow, Scotland, during a campaign for shorter working hours.

    1928 – Leon Trotsky is exiled to Alma-Ata.

    1942 – World War II: Allied forces are defeated by the Japanese at the Battle of Malaya and retreat to Singapore.

    1943 – World War II: German field marshal Friedrich Paulus surrenders to the Soviets at Stalingrad, followed two days later by the remainder of his Sixth Army, ending one of the war’s fiercest battles.

    1945 – US Army private Eddie Slovik is executed for desertion, the first such execution of an American soldier since the Civil War.

    1945 – World War II: About 3,000 inmates from the Stutthof concentration camp are forcibly marched into the Baltic Sea at Palmnicken (now Yantarny, Russia) and executed.

    1949 – These Are My Children, the first television daytime soap opera, is broadcast by the NBC station in Chicago.

    1950 – President Truman orders the development of thermonuclear weapons.

    1953 – A North Sea flood causes over 1,800 deaths in the Netherlands and over 300 in the United Kingdom.

    1958 – Cold War: Space Race: The first successful American satellite detects the Van Allen radiation belt.

    1961 – Project Mercury: Mercury-Redstone 2: The chimpanzee Ham travels into outer space.

    1968 – Vietnam War: Viet Cong guerrillas attack the United States embassy in Saigon, and other attacks, in the early morning hours, later grouped together as the Tet Offensive.

    1971 – The Winter Soldier Investigation, organized by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to publicize alleged war crimes and atrocities by Americans and allies in Vietnam, begins in Detroit.

    1988 – Doug Williams becomes the first African American quarterback to play in a Super Bowl and leads the Washington Redskins to victory in Super Bowl XXII.

    2001 – In the Netherlands, a Scottish court convicts Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and acquits another Libyan citizen for their part in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. [Private Eye magazine still argues that this was a miscarriage of justice.]

    2020 – The United Kingdom’s membership within the European Union ceases in accordance with Article 50, after 47 years of being a member state.

    2022 – Sue Gray, a senior civil servant in the United Kingdom, publishes an initial version of her report on the Downing Street Partygate controversy.

    2023 – The last Boeing 747, the first wide-body airliner, is delivered.

    Births:
    1769 – André-Jacques Garnerin, French balloonist and the inventor of the frameless parachute (d. 1823).

    1785 – Magdalena Dobromila Rettigová, Czech cookbook author (d. 1845).

    1797 – Franz Schubert, Austrian pianist and composer (d. 1828).

    1868 – Theodore William Richards, American chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1928). [The first American scientist to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, earning the award “in recognition of his exact determinations of the atomic weights of a large number of the chemical elements.”]

    1872 – Zane Grey, American author (d. 1939).

    1892 – Eddie Cantor, American singer-songwriter, actor, and dancer (d. 1964).

    1896 – Sofya Yanovskaya, Russian mathematician and historian (d. 1966).

    1900 – Betty Parsons, American artist, art dealer and collector (d. 1982).

    1902 – Tallulah Bankhead, American actress (d. 1968). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]

    1915 – Alan Lomax, American historian, author, and scholar (d. 2002).

    1921 – Carol Channing, American actress, singer, and dancer (d. 2019).

    1921 – Mario Lanza, American tenor and actor (d. 1959).

    1923 – Norman Mailer, American journalist and author (d. 2007).

    1929 – Rudolf Mössbauer, German physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2011).

    1929 – Jean Simmons, English-American actress (d. 2010).

    1937 – Philip Glass, American composer.

    1942 – Derek Jarman, English director, stage designer, and author (d. 1994).

    1945 – Brenda Hale, Baroness Hale of Richmond, English lawyer, judge, and academic. [Served as President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom from 2017 until her retirement in 2020.]

    1956 – John Lydon, English singer-songwriter. [AKA Johnny Rotten.]

    1956 – Guido van Rossum, Dutch programmer, creator of the Python programming language.

    1961 – Lloyd Cole, English singer-songwriter and guitarist.

    1970 – Minnie Driver, English singer-songwriter and actress.

    1981 – Justin Timberlake, American singer-songwriter, dancer, and actor.

    There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman? (Woody Allen):
    1606 – Guy Fawkes, English conspirator, leader of the Gunpowder Plot (b. 1570). [His co-conspirators Ambrose Rookwood, Robert Keyes, and Thomas Wintour were also executed for treason by hanging, drawing and quartering on this day.]

    1933 – John Galsworthy, English novelist and playwright, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1867).

    1955 – John Mott, American activist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1865).

    1956 – A. A. Milne, English author, poet, and playwright, created Winnie-the-Pooh (b. 1882).

    1974 – Samuel Goldwyn, Polish-American film producer, co-founded Goldwyn Pictures (b. 1882).

    1976 – Ernesto Miranda, American criminal (b. 1941).

    1990 – Eveline Du Bois-Reymond Marcus, German zoologist and academic (b. 1901).

    1990 – Rashad Khalifa, Egyptian American biochemist and academic (b. 1935).

    2007 – Molly Ivins, American journalist and author (b. 1944).

    2012 – Dorothea Tanning, American painter and sculptor (b. 1910).

    2014 – Anna Gordy Gaye, American songwriter and producer, co-founded Anna Records (b. 1922).

    2016 – Terry Wogan, Irish radio and television host (b. 1938).

    1. Woman of the Day
      [Text from Wikipedia]

      Tallulah Brockman Bankhead (born on this day in 1902, died December 12, 1968) was an American actress. Primarily an actress of the stage, Bankhead also appeared in several prominent films including an award-winning performance in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944). She also had a brief but successful career on radio and made appearances on television. In all, Bankhead amassed nearly 300 film, stage, television and radio roles during her career. She was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1972 and the Alabama Women’s Hall of Fame in 1981.

      Bankhead was a member of the Bankhead and Brockman family, a prominent Alabama political family. Her grandfather and her uncle were U.S. senators, and her father was Speaker of the House of Representatives. Bankhead supported liberal causes, including the budding civil rights movement. She also supported foster children and helped families escape the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Bankhead struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction; she reportedly smoked 120 cigarettes a day and talked openly about her vices. She also openly had a series of relationships with both men and women.

      Her adventures are too numerous to detail her, but here are a couple of examples:

      Finding she had a gift for mimicry, she entertained her classmates by imitating the schoolteachers. Bankhead claimed that her “first performance” was witnessed by none other than the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur. Her Aunt Marie gave the famous brothers a party at her home near Montgomery, Alabama, in which the guests were asked to entertain. “I won the prize for the top performance, with an imitation of my kindergarten teacher”, Bankhead wrote. “The judges? Orville and Wilbur Wright.” Bankhead also found she had a prodigious memory for literature, memorizing poems and plays and reciting them dramatically.

      Arriving in New York, [aged 15, having won a competition by sending in a photo of herself] Bankhead discovered that her contest win was fleeting: she was paid $75 for three weeks’ work on Who Loved Him Best and had only a minor part, but she quickly found her niche in New York City. She soon moved into the Algonquin Hotel, a hotspot for the artistic and literary elite of the era, where she quickly charmed her way into the famed Algonquin Round Table of the hotel bar. She was dubbed one of the “Four Riders of the Algonquin”, consisting of Bankhead, Estelle Winwood, Eva Le Gallienne, and Blyth Daly. Three of the four were non-heterosexual: Bankhead and Daly were bisexuals, and Le Gallienne was a lesbian. Bankhead’s father had warned her to avoid alcohol and men when she got to New York; Bankhead later quipped “He didn’t say anything about women and cocaine.” The Algonquin’s wild parties introduced Bankhead to marijuana and cocaine, of which she later remarked “Cocaine isn’t habit-forming and I know because I’ve been taking it for years.” Bankhead did abstain from drinking, keeping half of her promise to her father.

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

  4. Brussels sprouts, roasted with a balsamic glaze, or shaved and sautéed with butter, cranberries, and toasted pecans. Delicious.

    1. Cropped after frost and Definitely a good way to enjoy this maligned vegetable, even just oven roasting in olive oil is wonderful when they are slightly caramelised.

  5. I’m not seeing the “compelled speech” angle to the BBC’s DEI policies. What am I missing?

    To me “compelled speech” means being required to express some particular sort of opinion etc. to others; e.g., the police requiring you to tell everyone that your house hasn’t been raided (as opposed to forbidding you to tell anyone that it has), or your employer requiring you to go on television saying how great they are.

    I don’t see anything in what Jerry quoted to suggest that the BBC is doing that, unless you count this: :::A recruitment policy document says applicants should be asked to “explain what diversity and inclusion means to you and, should you be successful, what opportunities do you see for you to promote, celebrate or encourage diversity and inclusion in your role?”:::

    if “applicants should be asked to explain …” is “compelled speech” then pretty much every recruitment process ever involves “compelled speech”. Applications will be “asked to explain” why they want the job (and if they say they don’t, they probably won’t get it). They will be “asked to explain” what relevant qualifications and experience they have (and they will do better if those are impressive). Etc.

    Surely there’s nothing intrinsically nefarious about the pattern “We would prefer to employ people who have such-and-such values, and would like them to tell us so”, and asking for that isn’t “compelled speech” in any useful sense. (That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea; that depends on the employer, the specific values in question, etc.)

    1. I do see your point. Where I will take issue is with the bit you quote, challenging applicants to explain what DEI means to them and how they will serve DEI in their work with the Corp. This, particularly the second half, is clearly advertising that supporting DEI is a job requirement as much as, say, trying to get the facts straight. Taken with this, the first half then makes clear that only certain explanations of “what DEI means to me” will be considered acceptable. If I said “DEI must DIE!”, it would signal that I couldn’t meet the job expectation to support it and I would not get the job.

      While this may not be compelled speech and I generally support the right of private businesses to hire or not hire for any reason they choose, I would not buy the products or services of a company that collected and broadcast the news (or anything else) under this system of hiring. Because the BBC is supported by taxes, that is an excellent reason to call for its de-funding, even if we can’t order them to stop doing it.

  6. Always a treat to visit this page. I am gob smacked about why moths (and other insects) are “attracted” to lights. Maybe I’d read it somewhere but I always thought it was bc they use celestial lights to navigate in straight lines. That is, by keeping a light at a fixed point in ones field of view, they would be be flying straight much like how sailors would use celestial objects for navigation. But the truth seems to be significantly different, and that is awesome!

    1. “My eyes say their prayers to her
      Sailors ring her bell
      The way a moth mistakes a light bulb
      For the moon and goes to hell”

      Tom Waits, “Black Market Baby”

  7. PCC(E) : Presumably Britain doesn’t have rules against compelled speech,

    Britain has long loved rules on compelled speech. From having an “established” church (with fines for non-attendance), to requiring use of a particular prayer book (and inciting the Covenanteers in the run-up to the Wars of the Three Kingdoms), to (most recently exercised) the Act of Settlement dictating the religion of aspirants to the Throne.
    Being able to object to what your neighbour thinks is an established practice here, from “local derbys” in the fitba to objecting to having legal immigrants, or having to learn our neighbours languages in school, beating down on diversity is a very popular behaviour here.

  9. Judging from the NYT report, Iran is worried that it will be held directly responsible for the behavior of its proxies, and is trying to get the message out that it doesn’t want escalation. If true, this implies that U.S. retaliatory strikes and U.S. administration warnings are having their desired effect. That’s good news. Of course it remains to be seen if Iran is only feigning concern while continuing to foment an expansion of the war. My guess is that Iran has its domestic problems to deal with and in fact does not want a hot war with the U.S.

    I know it’s wrong, but I sure do love Brussels Sprouts!

  10. Thyroid mentioned wikipedia and populations yesterday.
    There’s about 800,000 and their descendants missing from all the Arab countries and Iran. They are Jews who got kicked out of the Islamosphere in 1948 with nothing. “Where are your Jews” asked the Israeli ambassador to the Arabs at the UN last month.
     
    That’s MORE than the number of Pals who voluntarily left Israel when the Arab press and gvts told them to get out of the way of the fighting while they “throw the Jews into the sea.”
    Those Pals were gamblers who LOST big time.
    See https://themoderatevoice.com/what-pro-palestine-student-groups-get-wrong/

    So their descendants live, safe but prejudiced against in Lebanon, Syria. Except when they start fights and ruin places like Jordan and Lebanon.
    For more on this and why no Arab country will EVER take in another Palestinian:
    my article again, variously syndicated:
    https://themoderatevoice.com/worst-houseguests-ever-the-palestinians/

    Almost no Pals have ever seen their “homeland”, only 75+ year olds. It has changed utterly, the UN have convinced them it is “theirs”: ressentement, theocratic violence and vengeance is their animating base value.

    So: not refugees, and not camps. I’ve SEEN them in Lebanon myself. Not “camps”.

    It demeans us to take their monstrous moral claims seriously.
    D.A.
    NYC

  11. A moth comes into a chiropodist’s. ‘Can you help me, please?’ the moth asks. ‘I’m desperate. My wife has left me. My business has gone downhill. I’m in complete despair. You’ve got to help me.’

    ‘But how can I help you?’ said the chiropodist. ‘What you need is a psychiatrist. Why did you come and see me?’

    ‘The light was on,’ said the moth.

  13. I’m not surprised on the Iranians staying in the background. Despite it all, they’re not fools and are quite cunning and devious.

  14. From on this day: Right before the 1988 Superbowl I would drive past a local bar in upstate NY and the whole bar was covered in pro Denver signs, etc. I didn’t understand why upstate NY should be rabid Denver fans. I was invited by a friend to watch the game at this same bar. I hadn’t been following the NFL but I understood when I saw the opposing team quarterback. He was black. In the first quarter Denver’s qb throws a long td pass and everybody cheered and shouts of “take that you n-word”! rang out. This was 1988.Things have gotten better, there are all kinds of good black and white quarterbacks now. But I don’t think the woksters will ever admit it. And I do believe they are going to set race relations back. By the way, Doug Williams blew Denver out of the water. The bar lost interest in the game.

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