Wednesday: Hili dialogue

September 25, 2024 • 6:50 am

There will be no “Readers’ Wildlife” today as we are down to two sets of photos and I must hold onto them. If you would like photos featured more regularly, please send them in.

Welcome to the first Hump Day (“Araw ng umbok” in Filipino) of autumn: it’s September 24, 2024, and National Lobster Day.  Here is the incredible March of the Lobsters:

Lobsters are opportunistic predators that eat almost everything on the seafloor. To avoid being eaten, they take shelter during the day in their caves, with only their head and two large antennae protruding, thus protecting their vulnerable abdomen. However, when autumn arrives, the lobsters living near the island of Bimini in the Bahamas must migrate to deeper waters to avoid the hurricane season. During this migration, they have to traverse very smooth sandy bottoms where they would be highly exposed.

The ancestral solution to this problem is that the lobsters gather on the seafloor, forming long queues of up to fifty animals that interweave with each other. In this way, the antennae of the lobster behind protect the abdomen of the one in front. These formations move at a cruising speed, but if a threat arises, they quicken their pace and can reach speeds of up to five meters per minute. To avoid falling behind, the lobsters hook their first pair of legs onto the tail of the individual in front, preventing separation. In this way, they manage to cover 80 km in a week, reaching deeper waters away from the fury of hurricanes.

A video from PBS, which includes a mock camera-toting “spy lobster” used to film. :

It’s also National Quesadilla Day, National Cooking Day, National Crab Meat Newburg Day, and National Women’s Health and Fitness Day. 

There’s a Google Doodle today in which you play an animated game against people throughout the world (dozens, if you wish!); it involves popcorn and I’ll be darned if I can figure it out. Click on the screenshot to begin playing.

Google’s rationale:

On this day in 2020, the largest popcorn machine ever-created was awarded a world record in Thailand.

About the Doodle:

Popcorn’s origins date back to the early 16th century. Since maize was such a widespread crop among Mesoamerican civilizations, many cultures made popcorn and used it to decorate their ceremonial garb. The snack became a staple in the United States during the 1800s, and was first eaten as a breakfast meal with milk! The first-ever popcorn maker was invented in the 1890s, allowing more people to enjoy the crunchy treat.

From farms to fairgrounds to films, popcorn has since exploded in pop-ularity throughout the world. Different countries and regions now have their own flavorful spins for this timeless snack: pipoca in Brazil, nori-topped popcorn in Japan, Za’atar popcorn in the Middle East, maple popcorn in Canada — the list goes on!

Whether it’s caramel-coated, kettle-cooked, smothered in butter, or just lightly salted, popcorn is a fun and light treat that’s always a-maize-ingly delicious.

Meh.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 23 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The war between Israel and Hezbollah continues, with Reuters reporting that an Israeli strike killed the head of Hezbollah’s rocket division, Ibrahim Qubaisi:

An Israeli airstrike on Beirut killed a senior Hezbollah commander on Tuesday as cross-border rocket attacks by both sides increased fears of a full-fledged war in the Middle East.
Israel’s military said the airstrike on the Lebanese capital killed Ibrahim Qubaisi, who it said was the commander of Hezbollah’s missiles and rocket force. Two security sources in Lebanon described him as a leading figure in the Iran-backed group’s rocket division.

From the “As Lebanon reels from Israeli attacks, the future is murky for a wounded Hezbollah.”

Swaths of southern Lebanon are smoldering ruins. Highways are clogged with thousands fleeing the possibility of an even bigger war between Israel and Hezbollah. As towns and villages prepared for funerals on Tuesday, Lebanon was just beginning to grapple with the fallout from its deadliest day in decades.

A vast wave of Israeli airstrikes on Monday targeting parts of the country where Hezbollah holds sway killed hundreds of people and plunged Lebanon into a deep state of uncertainty over what Israel would do next, how deeply the militia had been damaged and what sort of response its remaining forces could muster.

Israel said it had hit more than 1,000 sites, mostly in southern and eastern Lebanon, aimed at the fighters and military infrastructure of Hezbollah, the Lebanese political party and militia it has been fighting along the Israel-Lebanon border for 11 months. At least 558 people were killed in the strikes, including 94 women and 50 children, Lebanon’s health minister told reporters on Tuesday.

That toll marked a terrible milestone for Lebanon: Monday was the country’s deadliest day since its 15-year civil war, which ended in 1990.

“The victims of a strike by the Israeli enemy on the village of Arnoun. Targeted in their homes!” read text over a photo shared on social media of three women killed in one of the strikes.

The death toll given by the health ministry did not differentiate between fighters and civilians, and the strikes overwhelmingly hit parts of the country where Hezbollah dominates, suggesting that Israel had struck another fierce blow to the group. That capped a week in which Israel also blew up electronic devices distributed by Hezbollah, killing dozens of people and injuring thousands more, and assassinated a group of its military leaders in an airstrike near Beirut.

Some experts on Hezbollah suggested that Israel’s recent attacks had largely debilitated the group, leaving its membership in disarray.

All I can say is that Lebanon shouldn’t have provoked Israel by firing daily barrages of rockets into northern Israel. And, according to Malgozata’s back-of-the-envelope calculations below, the ratio of civilians killed to Hezbollah fighters killed is very low for warfare. I sent her the article and she sent back this:

I did a short and primitive calculation. They say that there are 558 killed, among them 94 women and 50 children. I assumed that all women were non-Hezbollah and that the same number of killed men were non-Hezbollah. And the result of my calculation was that Israel killed 328 Hezbollah members and 238 civilians. Not even a one to one ratio! Lowest in the world! This means that Israel’s targeting was extremely precise. They report should have included  that.

Of course you can question the assumptions, but Israel does have a reputation for a very low proportion of “collateral” killings. But never mind: the world is gong to come down on Israel for “provoking” a wider war.

*Controversial law professor Amy Wax has been suspended for a year (on half pay) by Penn for inappropriate remarks. This is one fight in which I truly don’t have a dog, because I haven’t followed the Wax case at all.

The University of Pennsylvania is suspending Amy Wax, a tenured law professor accused of making racist, sexist and antigay comments, in a case that has tested the limit of academic freedoms and freedom of speech.

The outcome of the closely watched case, following more than two years of university proceedings, marked a rare instance of a tenured U.S. professor being severely reprimanded for their comments. However, the decision fell short of her being let go, which some student groups have called for over the years.

Wax, a former assistant to the U.S. Solicitor General who has argued 15 cases before the Supreme Court, will be suspended for a year on half pay, taking effect in the fall of 2025, according to a public letter sent by the university dated Tuesday. The measure also includes the loss of her named chair and the loss of summer pay in perpetuity.

The university said Wax has “a history of making sweeping, blithe, and derogatory generalizations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status,” both inside and out of the classroom. The decision, which follows a three-day hearing held in May last year, was approved by the university’s interim President J. Larry Jameson.

Wax, 71 years old, declined to comment on the suspension but has previously said her comments have been taken out of context. The professor has written extensively, including in an essay for The Wall Street Journal, on the importance of academic freedom, “free speech and the values of free inquiry.”

In the letter announcing the decision, university administrator John L. Jackson, Jr. defended the institution’s stance, saying Wax had failed to provide a fair and equal environment for her students.

“Academic freedom is and should be very broad,” Jackson said. “Teachers, however, must conduct themselves in a manner that conveys a willingness to assess all students fairly.”

They do give two quotes from Wax which could be construed as contributing to a climate of bigotry and harassment against minorities, but there’s a whole history here that I siimply don’t know:

The university’s ruling against Wax includes specific references to comments made by the professor, including a 2022 appearance on Fox News’s “Tucker Carlson Today” in which she made a series of derogatory claims about Black people.

During the appearance, Wax asserted that “Blacks” and other “non-Western groups” harbor “resentment, shame and envy” against Western people for their “outsized achievements and contributions even though, on some level, their country is a shithole,” according to the decision published in 2023 by then Penn President Liz Magill.

Penn Law School’s then-Dean, Ted Ruger, received separate complaints from students and alumni citing Wax’s public comments, including a statement that America would be “better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration,” Magill said.

This will be a tough case as it pits freedom of speech against speech that creates a climate inimical to learning. Wax sounds like a garden-variety bigot, but I’ll reserve judgement until the inevitable lawsuit occurs.  Here’s a tweet from FIRE, which supports Wax:

*I am a diehard opponent of capital punishment, as it’s not a deterrent, costs more in the end than life without parole and, perhaps most of all, if someone’s exonerated, you can’t let them go if they’ve been executed. Now, the state of Missouri was set to execute a man yesterday (I’m writing this on Tuesday; will update) whom even prosecutors say is innocent:

Marcellus Williams has spent more than two decades on Missouri’s death row fighting his execution for a murder he says he did not commit. On Tuesday, Williams, 55, is scheduled for a repeatedly delayed execution that has raised alarms related to DNA evidence and questions of fairness from his 2001 trial.

After two last-minute execution reprieves starting almost a decade ago, momentum to reexamine Williams’s decades-old conviction has gathered from unlikely sources, including the local prosecutor from the office that convicted him. Williams has since received an outpouring of support from legal groups like the Midwest Innocence Project and a member of Congress. The family of the victim in the 1998 St. Louis stabbing now opposes Williams’s execution.

. . . . On Aug. 11, 1998, Felicia “Licia” Gayle, a former reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was found stabbed to death in her suburban St. Louis home. Though forensic evidence at the crime scene included fingerprints, footprints, hair and DNA on a kitchen knife, the investigation stretched on for more than a year without an arrest

Williams, who has denied killing Gayle, was eventually convicted of hermurder despite his DNA not matching the forensic evidence recovered from the crime scene. His current attorneys said his conviction was built upon testimony from two unreliable witnesses who had incentives to point the finger at Williams: reward money and a bargain for shorter sentences in their own criminal cases.

Not a match! That’s pretty exculpatory to begin with, and it includes hair, footprints, fingerprintes, and DNA!

Williams was twice spared from execution, first by the state Supreme Court in 2015 and in 2017 when Gov. Eric Greitens (R) granted Williams a reprieve.

Persuaded by arguments that new DNA testing exonerated Williams, Greitens appointed a board of inquiry to investigate the new claims. The board was abruptly disbanded in 2023 by Greitens’s’ successor, Gov. Mike Parson (R), before it issued a final report. Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R) set a 2024 execution for Williams.

Parson said last year that it was “time to move forward” with the execution.

I’m hoping that when I wake up tomorrow, Williams will still be alive.

*In the NYT, guest editor Isabella Glassman asserts that “Careerism is ruining college.” I think she’s right (the article is also archived here):

The recently publicized tensions on college campuses, particularly those in the heavily scrutinized Ivy League, are among many forces at play for students today. But there’s another that has not yet captivated the news cycle.

It’s called pre-professional pressure: a prevailing culture that convinces many of us that only careers in fields such as computer programming, finance and consulting, preferably at blue-chip firms like Goldman Sachs, McKinsey or big tech companies, can secure us worthwhile futures. It is an inescapable part of the current college experience, like tailgating or surviving on stale dining hall food. It not only steers our life choices, it also permeates daily life and negatively affects our mental health.

This pressure is hardly exclusive to Ivy League students. In the 2022-23 academic year, 112,270 students majored in computer science, more than double the number nine years earlier. In the 2021-22 academic year, undergraduate institutions handed out 375,400 business degrees. Unsurprisingly, the number of students pursuing humanities has declined dramatically.

Last year, 315,126 undergraduates applied for the 2,700 available undergraduate intern positions at Goldman Sachs.

Beyond the right major, the not-so-secret formula for the perfect résumé demands participation in a relevant extracurricular activity, which explains the competitive process at some selective schools to join pre-professional clubs.

. . . There is some economic reality behind the madness.

Real wages have remained moribund since the 1970s, a hard pill to swallow in the face of the last several years of inflation. Today’s young adults feel worse off than their parents because their salaries no longer buy a suburban starter home with a picket fence. House prices have outpaced inflation, making homeownership a bigger challenge. Gen Z-ers have more student loans than millennials, and big, corporate salaries seemingly promise a salve for all one’s financial worries.

But what is missing in this race to perceived economic safety is the emotional toll. The number of young adults ages 18 to 25 who have had at least one depressive episode has doubled from 2010 to 2020. Almost two-thirds of college students have reported feeling “overwhelming anxiety” within a given year, and experts have pointed to the cocktail of coursework, pressure to participate in extracurricular activities and concerns over choosing a career as causes.

Her solution involves both schools and parents:

Selective colleges and universities can fix this by overhauling their on-campus recruiting systems to prevent finance and consulting firms from pushing students to commit earlier and earlier. No student should have to determine her first career path before junior year begins.

Then there are the parents, who have enormous influence on their children’s career choices. Take a deep breath. A kid’s first word doesn’t need to be “revenue” or his first language Java.

Well, Glassman doesn’t mention the reason I think careerism is ruining college, and it’s that I favor a liberal-arts education.  I got one, and at a terrific school (The College of William and Mary) that was full of teachers whose speciality was not research but teaching. I was on an education high for four years, learning ethics, Old English, fine arts, philosophy, and so on, and the desire to keep educating myself in these subjects has stuck with me. I can’t imagine that kind of experience if you’re just obsessed with finance or computers.  I don’t diss those people who are fixed on getting that kind of job, but I do think they’re missing something about the wonder of life and human thought, and though I knew I wanted to be a biologist by the end of freshman year, I also wanted to learn about. . well, nearly everything.

*And from the AP’s “oddities” section, we have an article called “The birth of a spectacled bear bring joy to a farming community in Peru.” (By the way, spectacled bears are called, in Spanish, “Osos de anteojos”, as “anteojos” (“in front of the eyes”) is the word for spectacles. For some reason I love that Spanish name.)

 A spectacled bear was born in a rescue center built by a Peruvian farming community that has protected these animals for more than two decades.

The bear cub, which does not yet have a name, was discovered after park rangers in the community of Santa Catalina de Chongoyape, in northern Peru, noticed that a female bear named Lola did not leave her den.

“They heard different noises and only these days the little bear has begun to come out with its mother,” said Edivar Carrasco, the president of the community.

Born in mid July, the little bear is the second birth after a female was born six years ago in a fenced area of several hectares where food and care are provided to ailing bears.

The farming community manages an ecological reserve where spectacled bears (Tremarctos ornatus) and other animals such as the white-winged guan (Penelope albipennis) are not hunted and can find a safe habitat for their lives in its carob trees and other types of flora.

The spectacled bear is a vulnerable species, according to the Red List of Threatened Species released by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

It is known worldwide thanks to Paddington Bear, a children’s storybook character created in 1958 by British writer Michael Bond.

Here’s the cub!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZohDj7e7iM

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is worried that winter is coming:

Hili: Is the night warm?
A: There is no frost.
Hili: That’s not what I asked.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy to jest ciepła noc?
Ja: Mrozu nie ma.
Hili: Nie o to pytam.

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

From Cat Memes:

 

From Things With Faces:

From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:

From Masih, we have an honest reporter. I don’t think telling the reporter to move is legal, though I can understand the Iranians’ concern. Listen to what she says at the end!

From Orli.  SJP has been banned on a number of campuses, and I suggested in a letter to the student newspaper that we might consider this at the University of Chicago because of SJP’s repeated violations of protesting rules. Instead, the organization got a slap on the wrist: a note in its dossier.

From my feed. I think it’s an elk, and remember that most deer shed their antlers every year, which means a huge metabolic investment in regrowth. It’s sexual selection, Jake! Antlers help you leave more copies of your genes.

From Malcolm, ducks + watermelon = fun.  Sadly, the Botany Pond mallards didn’t much care for melon. Click on the screenshot, and leave the sound up:

A heartwarmer that may make you tear up (sound on):

From the Auschwitz Memorial; if you’re never going to visit (it’s near Krakow, Poland), I highly recommend you take this live guided tour. Going there was one of the most emotional moments of my life, and everybody should see it one way or another. It’s only 14 Euros, is live, and lasts 2.5 hours:

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, another heartwarmer. Can you imagine the experience of hearing your daughter’s heart beat in another person?

And noisy cane rats. (Sound up, of course):

29 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. “I was on an education high for four years, learning ethics, Old English, fine arts, philosophy, and so on, and the desire to keep educating myself in these subjects has stuck with me. I can’t imagine that kind of experience if you’re just obsessed with finance or computers. I don’t diss those people who are fixed on getting that kind of job, but I do think they’re missing something about the wonder of life and human thought, and though I knew I wanted to be a biologist by the end of freshman year, I also wanted to learn about. . well, nearly everything.”

    [ animated GIF : Orson Welles clapping in Citizen Kane ]

    1. Well I was a physics/math major a year ahead of Jerry but with a (much) less open attitude toward courses in arts and humanities. I grudgingly took the required 42 semester hours of these so called “distribution courses”, learning a bit of middle english, sociology, French Civilization, econ, phiolosophy, and so on. The professors were apparently excellent, as to this day I can recall specific instances of those classes from more than fifty years ago and the books and content set a fine launching pad for a broad range of lifelong learning. Because of the nature of that liberal arts college and fine faculty, even I, a luddite in comparison to Jerry, could benefit greatly as a total human being.

      1. Everything to gain there, indeed.

        There are limits one might find – I give an example :

        I chose Geography, with zeal, for one semester. I even stuck it out after the few weeks or so they gave to adjust the course load.

        Oh, woe is me – the one course decision that could be categorized as a mistake. Even had an unprepared-for-exam dream about it in the past year or so.

        [ insert wise aphorism here ]

      2. I was a physics/math major too. But I had a bad experience in high school that put me off the arts.

        Our physics teacher recommended the book “Brighter than a Thousand Suns” by Robert Jungk. I used it for an essay in history. I got a failing grade because the teacher said the book was completely inaccurate. This was long before the internet (1968) and I didn’t know anyone who could give me a second opinion. (Turned out the history teacher was right).

        But it seemed a lesson in the vagueness of the arts compared to math and physics and I took the bare minimum of arts courses thereafter.

  2. Amy Wax has essentially been punished for heresy, for having opinions and asking questions that flout left-wing taboos. This quote might seem damning:

    Wax’s public comments, including a statement that America would be “better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration,” …

    But it’s not even a complete sentence, and in context it’s much less heinous. Here it is (from a live interview with Glenn Loury):

    “I find Asian support for [Democratic] policies mystifying, as I fail to see how they are in Asians’ interest. We can speculate (and, yes, generalize) about Asians’ desire to please the elite. As long as most Asians support Democrats and help to advance their positions, I think the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration.”

    As for the other quote, she certainly has used some plain speaking and blunt language. E.g.:

    “You have to understand that I come to this whole question of immigration with an unanswered question in my mind, something I got interested in years ago, and I have tried to get people to answer it. And the question is: Why are successful, peaceful, orderly, prosperous, technologically advanced, democratically sound countries so rare and so few, and why do they clump up in one tiny corner of the globe, namely Europe, the Anglosphere? We also have Japan, which is a wonder, I think, in many ways, a very admirable country. Perhaps Taiwan. And why is the rest of the world essentially consisting of, in various degrees, failed states? Why do we have a post-Enlightenment portion of the world and a pre-Enlightenment portion of the world? And I guess, to be really crude about it, you would use Trump’s succinct phrase: Why are there so many shithole countries? Of course the moment you say that, people just get outraged: Oh, my God, you are a racist for saying that. And that, of course, lets them off the hook; they don’t have to answer the question, which is convenient.”

    By the way, such quotes are from interviews and talks. There’s no good evidence that she used language like “shithole countries” in class or when teaching students, or that she was ever rude to students or treated them unfairly.

  3. If real wages have been flat that means that nominal wages have kept up with inflation. So I don’t know what Grossman is saying. But suppose that her claims about the economic woes of her generation were true, how would delaying recruiters from coming to campus improve anything? The students would still worry about their employment prospects upon leaving campus. Their worries would somehow just go away and they would start reading Camus or Dostoevsky? There is no logic here.

    1. Good that I’m not the only one who noticed.

      Real wages stagnating / barely growing is a severe problem, but not due to inflation. Instead real wages not keeping pace with productivity increases means that the benefits from the productivity go to the capital / the asset holders. That’s why the stock market and real estate prices are steadily going up – because assets are more valuable than labor.

      So if you have no assets to begin with, you need a really, really well paying job to start buying assets – compared to a decent paying job in the 1970ies.

      1. Does the concept of “real” (after-inflation) wages include total compensation including benefits paid by the employer out of his labour budget, or only cash paycheque wages? I read a media report a few years ago of a study claiming that the skyrocketing cost of U.S. health insurance since the 1970s has consumed the entire gain in labour productivity that workers might otherwise have expected to see reflected in their cash wages. This is a striking effect, if true, because not all jobs come with any health insurance or other non-statutory benefits at all.

        Labour unions say they believe that employee benefits come out of profits, as an add-on to cash wages. Economists say they come out of the compensation budget, which the firm must stay within to leave enough operating profit to attract investment capital. Since both wages and benefits are tax-deductible in the hands of the employer, he is indifferent as to which form he pays them. If the insurance carrier raises the premiums he and all other local employers have to pay to keep their workers enrolled, all employers are free to transfer money from the future paycheques to the insurance company as foregone wage increases.

        In this analysis, collective action by labour to extract economic rents as rises in both benefits and cash wages reduces the value of labour and encourages firms to make do with less of it.

        1. All analysis I have seen (e.g. from Prof. Mark Blyth) show that the share capital takes from the economic productivity vs. the share labor takes has increased over the last decades and moved outside the bounds of the distribution during normal peace time.
          This is consistent with asset prices rising consistently. Economy good? Stocks are up. Economy bad? Stocks are up. Interests low? Stocks are up. Interests are high? Stocks are only up by a bit. Similar picture with gold and real estate.

          As for health benefits – I have no clue for the US. But since the effect is the same for the UK, where you have the NHS as a system and you see similar issues – albeit on a lower level – in e.g. Germany I’d say it’s reasonable to assume it applies to the US as well.

          1. So clearly the secret is to buy assets and get rich. Stocks do fall in price, as any investor knows. Over time, they mostly rise, true. Even a person earning a modest wage who can’t afford individual stocks can invest continuously in an index-traded mutual fund. The important thing is to live on less than your means so you have money to save and invest. Save first, starting now, then live on what you have left, and don’t go into debt to buy things that depreciate faster than the loan is paid off….which is almost every personal purchase except real estate. Avoid expensive high-taxed recreation like tobacco and alcohol. Gambling in Canada is a good deal because winnings aren’t taxed. So much for the nanny state making good decisions for us!

            (House affordability is a large, multifactorial problem in a class by itself.)

  4. I also don’t see how Prof. Wax’s opinion about black resentment, even taken out of context, is derogatory to black people or contributes to a climate of bigotry. If she said black people are lazy, or stupid, or if she said some specific named black person must be lazy or stupid and deserves to fail her class because he’s black, or should be sterilized, that would be derogatory and bigoted in my book. But racially based resentment, by enough black people so you notice, of white people and their more successful culture is just a fact of American life that even foreigners are aware of. For many of us, it’s the one thing we know about America. (Of course a lot of us blame white people! Foreigners aren’t necessarily informed or thoughtful just because they are foreigners living in racially homogeneous countries with universal free healthcare.)

    I believe most Americans, if you had to do it all over again, knowing what you know now, would have not built a slave economy in the southern colonies. For the British Crown to allow slavery to get established in the plantations of the West Indies and America was a colossal mistake made in a time when slavery was the norm. If all those African people had been left in Africa — there is no way that more than a tiny fraction would have been allowed in as legal voluntary immigrants even today, what became the United States would be a much happier place. Less diverse (as you measure it), less resentful, and less envious.

    When Prof. Wax expresses skepticism about immigration and diversity, I think she is making fair comment, not bigotry.

    1. But racially based resentment, by enough black people so you notice, of white people and their more successful culture is just a fact of American life that even foreigners are aware of.

      Agreed. This is the whole basis of Critical Race Theory and of the “Grievance Studies”. “Whiteness” is equated with being successful. That is why Israelis are “white” whereas Palestinians are “of color”. That’s why Asian-Americans are “white adjacent”.

    2. I agree with you again Leslie.
      She’s not quite my cup of tea but her voice is important, for diversity of opinion alone.

      A sidenote: Did you know she did a degree in medicine before she became a lawyer? As a med school dropout but successful lawyer/trader I admire anybody who excelled in such fields. I’ve listened to her on Hanania and another podcast.

      Nobody I think is denying she’s a smart cookie. Some of her ideas…. meh… I’m not so hot on but the persecution of her is terrible on free speech grounds alone.
      If she can’t speak… and others can’t speak… how will we know how wrong she is or is not? THAT is why we need people like Prof Wax.
      D.A.
      NYC

  5. On Amy Wax, Wikipedia has more detail, including Glenn Loury’s remarks about her interview with Loury. His comments about the relationship between her remarks about Asians and the ways Jews used to be criticized are striking. He is not someone who would call her out for heresy-talk.

  6. There is one “how to” course that I might suggest for the required curriculum of all colleges – well actually all high schools, but the chances of that happening are vanishingly small: and that is entrepreneurship…how to create a business…how to put your unique combination of skills and ideas into a self-sustaining entity. I was kibbutzing STEM curriculum content history and ideas for a group of regional business leaders who were self-tasked with creating a regional public (in the U.S. sense) school with advanced coursework and curriculum that the regular local schools could not or would not ( in any case, did not) provide. In a workshop, one of our leaders pointed out that we had a cultural problem to overcome. In our region, a successful career was defined as signing the back of a paycheck every week for thirty years. That is you have a steady and stable job with one of our big employers such as NASA, a DoD facility, a hospital system, or public education system. He said that while fine and stable for the individual, this attitude was different than in Silicon Valley on the West Coast, where a successful career was defined as signing the FRONT of a paycheck every week for thirty years. In other words the west coasr culture prepares and pushes you to create and own a company, not simply work fir one. This would require our school, in addition to science, technology, engineering, and APPLIED math, to include coursework on how to start a business, intelkectual property, patents, and the like. This would allow incredible new freedom of opportunity for graduates and a potentiak pool of new economic opportunity for a region which is very much tied to government funding.

    1. Our school had a vocational education class for business back in the late 70’s and students ran the school store and handled all aspects of it. They also were placed with local businesses around our smallish town. Those of us in college prep classes kinda looked down on the kids who did this, but many of those same kids ended up becoming successful small business owners and were more successful that many of my peers who didn’t go into STEM fields. One of my buddies started a mail order auto parts business in high school, pulling parts from junked cars, boxing them up, and shipping to whoever asked for them. Fast forward many years, and he jumped on the e-commerce train when it was in the formative years, and was able to retire quite young and quite rich.
      After getting my BSME, I went on to an MBA after gaining some work experience, and our capstone project was setting up a mock small business and then working with a local store for a short time to learn all aspects of their operation. It was the same thing that the Voc Ed class did in HS, and I certainly learned a heck of a lot about the true nature of business, accounting, taxes, politics, the market, and most importantly, people.

    2. I would vote for financial literacy course before an entrepreneur course.

      Everyone needs the first. Few become entrepreneurs.

      And I would include statistical literacy in the course. (Help people understand that everything is a distribution.)

      1. Virginia has a required financial literacy course for high school graduation and we had the tech ed (business) teacher in the workshop. She said that the course had nothing on starting a business or intellectual property, but had she had the discussion we were having that morning, before advising on the financial literacy course curriculum, she would have supported the addition as very appropriate.

        1. We had a “Bachelor Survival” class for seniors in HS that ended a year or two before I became a senior. Boys were taught how to balance a checkbook, how to do simple cooking, and other household responsibility tasks. Something like that would be good today, and instead of segregating by sex, it could just be called “Life Skills”.

  7. I have to disagree. No DNA match is NOT exculpatory. It only means Williams didn’t leave his. The blood could have come from an accomplice. One thing the article didn’t mention is the reason why he was arrested is he tried to sell the victim’s laptop (and other things). Nevertheless, from what I’ve read, I think he IS innocent and this is a travesty.

  8. Even when I went to college—1974-1978–a large plurality of my peers were careerists, in that they were pre-meds. Some I encountered behaved as if they’d sell their mothers to a wh*rehouse if it would help them get in! The competition could be nasty. (I, too, started with pre-med in mind, but moved to geology after my freshman year.)

    Using college as a pathway to a career has been around a long time. The difference, as I see it—although I’m so far out of academia that my opinion shouldn’t count for much—is that the schools themselves are promoting the careerism today. That was not the case when and where I went to school (SUNY-Binghamton). There, the pre-meds got a great liberal education despite themselves, and they are almost surely better doctors as a result.

    Why are colleges promoting careerism? Probably because that’s where the money is: computer sciences, business, engineering, STEM. Since colleges and universities depend so much on external grant funding, it’s in their interest to promote those disciplines. The humanities are subsidized in part by these well-funded disciplines, so depend on them for support.

  9. Little reported fact: Note that Hizballah purposely “convince” Christian Lebanese in their jurisdiction to babysit their missiles in their homes expecting the Israelis to bomb them. The smoldering remains of their homes are then taken over by Hezb’s forces.
    There’s a real estate angle to this conflict.

    Be that as it may, and I pity the Christians and Druze of Lebanon, all terrorists must be destroyed.

    Consider 8,000 missiles launched at the US from, say, Mexico or Canada in the last year. What do you think WE’D do in that event?

    D.A.
    NYC

  10. Re Iranian big shots’ vacation at the Millenium Hotel.
    The care and feeding of alien, enemy diplomats is a problem the US and Switzerland have to contend with. It is part and parcel of being a superpower.

    Interestingly to our friends here I’m sure: Diplomats (the regular kind, not guests this week for a Manhattan party near me at the UN)… from Iran, North Korea etc. get a special type of diplomatic visa limiting them to a small-ish (I want to say 50 miles or so) circumference of travel from NYC and Washington D.C. within which they can be diplomats from the terrorist states they represent. Such visas are VERY rare in int’l law. And not outside those prescribed circles. I don’t know how it is policed — or whether it is. But Mullah X of the Iranian Mission or Comrade Kim from the DPRK pretty much have to stick to NYC / DC areas.

    Usually, foreign friends and tourists arriving at US airports are given permission to enter the entire country – but enemy diplomats have a more prescribed area. Like my doggie has a leash! hehehe

    I think it is a cold war hangover when we did that with visas to the darn Soviets.

    We have to have them here bc we have the UN. Sad but true.

    D.A.
    NYC

  11. Re.: A general education.

    Great goal. I really enjoyed the (few) liberal arts courses I could fit into my schedule (engineering, 1979-84). And I got all As in them.

    However, financial reality must enter in. I really did go to university in order to get a good job. And I did. And it really raised me up financially (along with hard work and a bit of luck).

    I got no financial aid, despite being a straight-A student on HS, in one of the best public high schools. I tested out of 2 quarters of calculus at university (1979; those were the only AP classes available at the time).

    I had to work the entire time of my university education. I couldn’t afford to travel or drink (I laugh at kids complaining today: Cruises! Going out to eat and drink!). And I had to borrow a little at the end to finish up. My tuition went up by a factor of 10 (no kidding) from my first quarter to my last one.

    I simply didn’t have the time or money to take lots of general courses. I needed a clearly marketable skill in as short a time frame as I could get it. I do not regret anything. I enjoyed my work throughout (with the exception of a handful of dickhead bosses).

    Thankfully, I’ve always been an avid reader; and I’ve never stopped learning on my own.

    I also think the society is not obligated to pay for a “great college experience” for all comers. Economic realities must enter in. This is why there’s resistance to the get-out-of-jail free idea of student debt forgiveness. If you borrowed $250,000 to get a degree in sociology at an Ivy, you made a big mistake and you probably had very bad advisors.

  12. Re: A general education.
    I’m down with Father Guido Sarducci’s University. And his Law School!

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