Thursday: Hili dialogue

October 17, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, October 17, 2024, and a week until I’ll be in Vegas (speaking, not gambling). It’s National Pasta Day, which is multiply appropriated from different cultures. Here is a favorite: spaghetti carbonara, made, as Wikipedia notes, is

 . . . a pasta dish made with fatty cured pork, hard cheese, eggs, salt, and black pepper. It is typical of the Lazio region of Italy. The dish took its modern form and name in the middle of the 20th century.

Javier Somoza, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also Four Prunes Day (what you’re supposed to eat to stay “regular”), forgive An Ex Day, World Trauma Day, and the start of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot (the students have put a Sukkot booth up in the Quad to counteract the tent that was put there by the anti-Israeli students and was taken down Monday).  Here’s the tent:

And the Sukkot booth (a tradition), which went up yesterday.  Such are the dueling ideologies we face on campus. Or rather, an ideology of murder dueling with a centuries-old religious tradition.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 17 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*From the NYT by Nicholas Confessore: “The University of Michigan doubled down on DEI. What went wrong?” (archived here)

A decade ago, Michigan’s leaders set in motion an ambitious new D.E.I. plan, aiming “to enact far-reaching foundational change at every level, in every unit.” Striving to touch “every individual on campus,” as the school puts it, Michigan has poured roughly a quarter of a billion dollars into D.E.I. since 2016, according to an internal presentation I obtained. A 2021 report from the conservative Heritage Foundation examining the growth of D.E.I. programs across higher education — the only such study that currently exists — found Michigan to have by far the largest D.E.I. bureaucracy of any large public university. Tens of thousands of undergraduates have completed bias training. Thousands of instructors have been trained in inclusive teaching.

When Michigan inaugurated what it now calls D.E.I. 1.0, it intentionally placed itself in the vanguard of a revolution then reshaping American higher education. Around the country, college administrators were rapidly expanding D.E.I., convinced that such programs would help attract and retain a more diverse array of students and faculty.

Today that revolution is under withering attack. Energized by backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement and the right-wing campaign against “critical race theory” in public institutions, at least a dozen states have banned or limited D.E.I. programs at public universities. After the Oct. 7 attacks, as campuses across the country erupted with protests against Israel, critics accused D.E.I. programs of fostering antisemitism. In the fever of the 2024 campaign, Republican influencers and politicians have recast D.E.I. as an all-purpose boogeyman — the root cause of defective airplanes, the collapse of a Baltimore bridge and the near-assassination of Donald J. Trump.

But even some of Michigan’s peer institutions have soured on aspects of D.E.I. Last spring, both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences said they would no longer require job candidates to submit diversity statements; such “compelled statements,” M.I.T.’s president said, “impinge on freedom of expression.”

Michigan hasn’t joined the retreat. Instead, it has redoubled its efforts, testing the future of an embattled ideal. A year ago, the university inaugurated what it calls D.E.I. 2.0. At Michigan’s flagship Ann Arbor campus, the number of employees who work in D.E.I.-related offices or have “diversity,” “equity” or “inclusion” in their job titles increased by 70 percent, reaching 241, according to figures compiled by Mark J. Perry, an emeritus professor of finance at the university’s Flint campus and a D.E.I. critic. (The school’s own figures, which count the D.E.I. work force differently, show less growth over time and a much smaller staff as of last year.) When school began in August, brightly colored flags around campus promoted the goals of D.E.I. 2.0.

But all is not well, as Confessore found.  You’ll have to read the long article to see, but here’s a hint:

Her [Princess-J’Maria Mboup, the head of the University’s Black Student Union] discontent reflected a tension I found threaded throughout D.E.I. at Michigan, a pervasive uncertainty around whom — and what — D.E.I. is really for. Like most schools, Michigan officially celebrates diversity of every kind and inclusion for all; the school’s own definition of D.E.I., which cites 13 distinct kinds of identity, is as sprawling as the university itself. On campus, I met students with a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives. Not one expressed any particular enthusiasm for Michigan’s D.E.I. initiative. Where some found it shallow, others found it stifling. They rolled their eyes at the profusion of course offerings that revolve around identity and oppression, the D.E.I.-themed emails they frequently received but rarely read.

Michigan’s own data suggests that in striving to become more diverse and equitable, the school has also become less inclusive: In a survey released in late 2022, students and faculty members reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging. Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics — the exact kind of engagement D.E.I. programs, in theory, are meant to foster.

Indeed. One could imagine that the “D” in DEI stands for “divisive”, for DEI taught according to racial activism ideology buys into the hierarchy of victim hood and oppression that is the very opposite of Dr. King’s vision of “color blind” treatment.

*The UN troops in Lebanon, UNIFIL, are supposed to keep Hezbollah reigned in and not attacking Israel (see UN Security Council Resolution 1701), but UNIFIL long ago abandoned that task. Israel asked both them and Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) to get out of the way in southern Lebanon as they destroyed Hezbollah. UNIFIL and the LAF refused. So did the UN, through Secretary-General Gutteres, and Spain and France, whose troops, as do many others rotate through UNIFIL.  And there is plenty of evidence that UNIFIL and the LAF are cheek by jowl with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, with, for example, UNIFIL bases just a few hundred yards from Hezbollah’s tunnels.

Here is one example:

What this means is that Gutteres and all those who refuse want to use UNIFIL and the LAF as human shields to protect Hezbollah, just as Hamas uses Gazan civilians. It is baffling until you realize that Gutteres hates Israel and want to protect Hezbollah.   Shoshana Bryen goes after this stupidity in the Jewish News Service:

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is a decorated retired Army officer. He was supportive of Israel’s foray into Lebanon in the beginning. It would have been hard for him not to be, as Israel delivered justice for hundreds of U.S. and Allied military personnel murdered by Hezbollah in Lebanon and elsewhere. But his Oct. 12 phone call with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant pivoted into this:

“The secretary strongly emphasized the importance of ensuring the safety and security of [United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon] UNIFIL forces and Lebanese Armed Forces and reinforced the need to pivot from military operations in Lebanon to a diplomatic pathway as soon as feasible. Sec. Austin also raised the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza and stressed that steps must be taken to address it.”

There is a lot that remains troubling in those two sentences.

Israel seeks no conflict with either UNIFIL or the LAF. If they get out of the way, they will have no problem. The Israel Defense Forces is destroying Hezbollah’s vast arsenal in Southern Lebanon, doing the job that had been entrusted to both UNIFIL and the LAF, largely at the U.S. taxpayer’s expense. Between 2006 and 2022, according to the U.S. State Department, the LAF received more than $3 billion in U.S. funding. For UNIFIL, the United States pays about 25% of the tab (the United Nations wanted 26.94%, but Congress capped it). In 2023, the assessment was $143 million. But despite the infusion, both organizations failed in their stated mission, either out of fear or out of commonality with an internationally labeled terror organization.

. . . . Back to the present: Negotiations work best when the parties agree on an endgame and discuss, even acrimoniously, how to get there. Israel seeks security for its people; the removal of the military and political power of Hamas and now Hezbollah as well; and the return of the hostages. As long as Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and friends believe the endgame is the destruction of Israel, their surrender is necessary.

There was nothing then and there is nothing now to negotiate with evil.

And the UN is doing everything it can—in concert with many EU countries—to ensure that Israel doesn’t get the security it wants.  Helping them is Lloyd Austin and Anthony Blinken.

*Good news for Democrats: Nebraska, another state important in keeping the Senate Democratic, has less of a chance to turn Republican than we thought. The Washington Post reports that an independent is giving the GOP candidate a real fight in Nebraska’s Senate race:

As a Trump-endorsed Republican in a deep-red state, Sen. Deb Fischer might expect an easy reelection. Instead, she’s in perhaps the tightest Senate race in America — so says the election data site 538 — against a rookie politician named Dan Osborn, a mechanic turned union leader with tattooed forearms and a level gaze. Fischer’s trouble boils down to what might be called a George Norris problem.

Around here, few discussions of Nebraska politics go very long before someone drops Norris’s name. Arguably the most important U.S. senator left out of the history books, the pragmatic Republican crossed the aisle in the 1930s to help Franklin D. Roosevelt bring electricity to rural America, among other big doings.

. . . Osborn, 49 and running as an independent, has that history in mind as he crisscrosses the state in his campaign manager’s pickup truck, 30,000 miles and counting. They make rubber and glass a lot sturdier nowadays, but the spirit of the campaign is familiar. Osborn offers himself as a nonpartisan servant of the state’s working people and family farmers and sensible folks tired of the circus.

. . . To Fischer’s claim that Osborn is a Democrat in disguise and would caucus with Senate Democrats, Osborn replies that he has always registered as an independent and would seek to organize a caucus of independent senators who would potentially determine control of the chamber.

, , , Osborn touts as proof of his nonpartisan style his success in coaxing a Republican member of Congress to visit the picket line and in working with the Republican governor to encourage a settlement. Fired soon after the strike ended, he decided to take his shot on the campaign trail. “After 20 years of punching a clock at the same place, working 70 hours a week with the same people, I’m enjoying it,” he told me. “I didn’t ever go to the State Fair before.”

A new internal poll by SurveyUSA shows Osborn with 50 percent of the likely votes and a six-point lead over Fischer, up from a one-point lead in the same poll last month. And data suggest that Osborn is winning 1 in 5 Trump voters. He’ll need that many or more to win as an independent in these highly partisan times. But if it can happen anywhere, Nebraska’s the place.

This victory is, of course, crucial in ensuring that the Senate remain Democratic. But of course the 60-vote filibuster rule still appplies there.

*The WSJ has a click-baity headline: “The guru who says he can get your 11-year-old into Harvard.” I’ll bite:

Seven children flew into New York in late July to meet with the college counselor they believed would get them into Harvard University or another top-flight U.S. college. Two traveled from Switzerland, two from Australia, one from the United Kingdom.

The youngest was 11.

They were there to meet Jamie Beaton, a 29-year-old Rhodes scholar from New Zealand with a reputation as the man who has cracked the code on elite college admissions—and who is Wall Street’s favored partner to mine the rich vein of parental anxiety embedded in the college process.

Beaton’s message to the kids distilled: Optimize childhood by starting to build skills and interests years before high school. Strategically choose areas where you can excel—if you aren’t going to be a top performer in an activity, drop it and move to something else. And find ways to be unique, whether through entrepreneurship, scholarship or well-placed PR.

“A great education transformed my life,” said the chief executive and co-founder of Crimson Education. “It can change yours too.”

The kids took note of every word. “He’s like the Steve Jobs of college counseling,” said one of the attendees, a Japanese high-school student.

Private equity is also paying attention. Crimson, launched in 2013, is now valued at $554 million after several funding rounds, according to PitchBook. Investors include venture capital giants Tiger Management and related firm Tiger Global Management, plus Icehouse Ventures, former New Zealand Prime Minister John Key and Verlinvest, a Brussels-based fund created by the founding families of Anheuser-Busch.

. . . Clients pay Beaton’s firm from $30,000 and $200,000 for a four- to six-year program that includes tutoring in academics and test-taking, and advice on how to gather stellar teacher recommendations and how to execute extracurricular projects. Those can range from writing a book, to publishing an academic research paper or starting a podcast.

That’s a lot of dosh, so I suppose going to Harvard (note the name “Crimson”) carries enough cachet to rate that kind of money. I wonder if, say, going to Harvard as opposed to another good school adds that much money to a student’s expected lifetime income. I have no idea, but “love of learning” plays no role in this process. It’s simply geared to ticking all the boxes that Harvard uses.

*Reuters, which according to the last post is a reliable source, has a new article on exactly how Israel created the exploding beepers that plagued Hezbollah.

The agents who built the pagers designed a battery that concealed a small but potent charge of plastic explosive and a novel detonator that was invisible to X-ray, according to a Lebanese source with first-hand knowledge of the pagers, and teardown photos of the battery pack seen by Reuters.

To overcome the weakness – the absence of a plausible backstory for the bulky new product – they created fake online stores, pages and posts that could deceive Hezbollah due diligence, a Reuters review of web archives shows.

The stealthy design of the pager bomb and the battery’s carefully constructed cover story, both described here for the first time, shed light on the execution of a years-long operation which has struck unprecedented blows against Israel’s Iran-backed Lebanese foe and pushed the Middle East closer to a regional war.

A thin, square sheet with six grams of white pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) plastic explosive was squeezed between two rectangular battery cells, according to the Lebanese source and photos.

The remaining space between the battery cells could not be seen in the photos but was occupied by a strip of highly flammable material that acted as the detonator, the source said.

This three-layer sandwich was inserted in a black plastic sleeve, and encapsulated in a metal casing roughly the size of a match box, the photos showed.

The assembly was unusual because it did not rely on a standard miniaturised detonator, typically a metallic cylinder, the source and two bomb experts said. All three spoke on conditions of anonymity.

Without any metal components, the material used to trigger detonation had an edge: like the plastic explosives, it was not detected by X-ray.

Hezbollah X-rayed the beepers, but didn’t detect the sheet. Here’s a diagram of the Deadly Beepers from Reuters. The story is fascinating (and free), and you can read how Israel (which hasn’t admitted how it made these things or even did make these things) deceived Hezbollah about using non-standard battery cells:

*Finally, a message to the NYT’s Tom Friedman, who keeps banging the drum for a two-state “solution” in the NYT. Dear Mr. Friedman, A TWO STATE SOLUTION WILL NOT WORK NOW. ISRAEL DOESN’T WANT IT ON SECURITY GROUNDS, AND NEITHER DOES PALESTINE, WHICH WANTS NOT TWO STATES, BUT ONE STATE FROM “THE RIVER TO THE SEA.”  The man is, I’m afraid to say, an idiot.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is, well, pondering:

A: What are you doing?
Hili: I’m pondering.
In Polish:
Ja: Co robisz?
Hili: Rozważam.
And a picture of sweet Szaron.

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

From Cat Memes:

From The Dodo, and from a real book, too:

And from somewhere on the Internet:

From Masih, a heartening post from last July:

*From Luana, who says that Kamala is doubling down on her promises to a group whose support she desperately needs:

From Malcolm: two entangled seals get rescued:

From Satan:

Two from my feed. First, a friendly seal:

This is pretty scary!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I retweeted (or re-Xed):

And one tweet from Dr. Cobb.  “Who knew?” is his comment. I sure didn’t!

50 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. A question about DEI. I must have this wrong but it appears that with DEI, equality of outcomes is the primary objective. That being so doesn’t it then follow that all students must either pass at the same level or, if one is going to fail then they must all fail. How is that of any use?

      1. “Using Latin names for plants may be racist, the University of Michigan has warned, in guidance to prevent the influence of colonial “power structures” on visitors.

        This sounds like a joke, but apparently they’re serious.

    2. DEI advocates don’t care about equality of outcomes in the sense that you and I do: that all students might achieve mastery of a subject, overcoming whatever disadvantages they came to school with. “Outcomes” in DEI-speak means that “equity-deserving groups” will all be represented in desirable social roles at least in proportion to their number in the population. Preferential hiring and admission that ignores preparation and achievement and focuses on group markers is demanded to increase diversity. (And if they are over-represented in prisons they must be decarcerated, again without regard to criminal achievement.)

      If equality of scholastic achievement ever was brought about by DEI efforts (or by anything else), this would take the steam out of expanding DEI further which thrives on failure, not success. The careers of administrators, consultants, academics, struggle-session facilitators, HR departments, and students enrolled in grievance-studies programs all rest on DEI failing always to meet its public-facing objectives. It must be doubled down at every budget conference and strategic planning session.

      1. So true, Leslie. If DEI “worked”, the entire bureaucracy profiting from it would lose its raison d’etre. It is a ruse.

    3. Equal outcomes applies to groups, not to individuals. They’re fine with some students getting high grades and others failing, so long as blacks are not under-represented in the first category and not over-represented in the latter.

      [Of course black students being over-represented in the high achievers, should that ever occur, would not be a problem (cf. professional basketball); in a similar way, women being over-represented in veterinary science is not a problem, whereas women being under-represented in engineering is a problem.]

      1. Were I to succeed in my Aeronautical Engineering studies in Poland (back in the early 1980s) I would have to be the only ONE OF TWO students that passed all the way to the diploma; the other one would have to be the only girl among the 16 boys when we began our studies.

        Even the Communist authorities limited themselves to giving extra points at entrance exams to the children of manual laborers and farmers. If they went for “equality of outcomes” the country would soon look like North Korea. Able to produce only hunger and ammunition.

  2. That ant face made the Internet rounds about a year ago and irritated me because it is very deceptive. The photo is just the lower portion of an ant’s face, the reddish “eyes” are the base of the antennae and the spiky “teeth” are just setae above the mandibles. An entire ant face is pretty cool on its own.

    2. Good for you! There is enough creepiness around without turning ants into horror movie actors. Even the movie Them just made the ants bigger.

    4. The 25th image in this series has another look at an ant’s face, and a brief comment from the poster about the first image. It sounds like this 25th pic is more accurate, along the lines of what you wrote.

  4. One guess about why Lloyd Austin is suddenly so concerned about UNIFIL is that the organization has 10,058 troops from 50 countries, including large numbers from Italy, France, Poland, Ghana, Malaysia, Spain, Indonesia, and Germany.* That means that there is a large probability of an international incident if UNIFIL personnel don’t get out of the way.

    The underlying problem here is that U.N Secretary-General Gutteres—in saying that UNIFIL will stay put—seems to be willing to use this international contingent as human shields to protect Hezbollah. So, I can understand Secretary Austin’s concern. What the U.S. administration should be doing in my view is to back Israel by telling UNIFIL personnel to get out of the way. With Hezbollah at Israel’s northern border, I doubt that the Israelis are in the mood to make nice.

    * See https://unifil.unmissions.org/unifil-troop-contributing-countries

    1. No UNIFIL should absolutely not move out of the way. Where will it end? Why does Israel think that it can tell the entire world what to do? First it tells the population in Gaza to move from one place to a different place until they are all cornered and still that place is not safe and gets bombed. Then Israel decides that it can tell the population in Lebanon to move from one place to the next, as if moving your entire life from one moment to the next were that simple. And now, it can order the UN to move its peace keeping forces from the area? I feel for Israel, I do, but peace and security cannot and will not be achieved this way. Israel needs to find another way, if not diplomacy, then it must go around UNIFIL and reach its ever moving goal (first it was Hamas, the it was Hezbollah, now it has its sights on Iran, then I guess it will be Portugal because António Guterres is Portuguese). I know that this comment will not be well received here, but Israel having the audacity of telling the UN to move blue helmets out of the way is a step too far for me.

      1. Oh, I understand. You feel for Israel but these pesky Jews should just swallow the massacre of October 7, constant bombardment from Hezbollah from Oct. 8 2023, Iran’s plans to eradicate Israel from the map and find a way to behave in a more civilized manner. You probably would tell that they have “the right to defend themselves” but not by killing even one civilian kept as a human shield and not by trying to move them out of harm’s way. And, as you say, they should curb their appetites – what a Jewish chutzpah: first they go after this nice organization, Hamas, now after Hezbollah and they even plan to get rid of the glorious nation of Iran which leaders only want to finish the job started so nicely 85 years ago.

        2. Djenkuje Bardzo (sp?) my friend. Well said.

          Let’s also not forget that since 1975 the UN has been a club for Arabs to beat up Israel and other democracies. The dice are loaded.

          Not saying they do no good in some other contexts, they do. But in the Middle East they’re a malign and destructive influence.

          And as for “GLOBAL BOILING!” Guiterez, he’s utterly The Worst Sec. Gen ever.
          A total global joke.

      2. Umm. . . . terrorists should not use human shields, period. It’s against the rules of war and is in fact a war crime. Why on earth should it be okay for Hezbollah to hide with UNIFIL or Hamas amidst innocent Gazans. What you are saying is that Israel cannot defend itself against attack by terrorists; that “there must be another way”. What way would you suggest? That Israel just take all attacks and not try to defend itself. And, do you not know that it’s not a moving goal–that Hezbollah has been firing rockets at Israel for a year. And do you not know that Iran launched TWO unprovoked missile attacks against Israel.

        It is a humanitarian thing to do to tell UNIFIL to get out of the way. Your comment is certainly of the nature that “Israel has to not respond to attacks if the attacker uses civilians as shields.” I suppose you oppose World War II, too?

        It really does seem that you’re protecting anti-Israel terrorists here, as you have no solution that will allow Israel to protect itself against terrorists, if those terrorists hide (as they have) behind human shields. I am baffled that you WANT to keep human shields in place, and have no admiration for Israel for trying to work around those human shields.

        Sorry, but this is an obtuse comment that seems motivated by the sentiment “Israel cannot defend itself”. You statement about moving targets is just completely wrong.

        1. Yes, Israel can defend itself. Yes, terrorists should not use human shields. yes, there MUST be another way. Israel should not be allowed to pursue in any way it chooses. Sorry that you disagree, but it should not be a race to the bottom.

          And yes, Malgorzata you are right when you say
          “You probably would tell that they have “the right to defend themselves” but not by killing even one civilian kept as a human shield and not by trying to move them out of harm’s way.” UNIFIL are not just civilians, they have a mandate to be there and one that was renewed just a few months ago. I am not a military expert, nor a middle east expert, so I do not know what are the other ways there are, I am just a civilian with an opinion.

          1. Not any way it chooses: it does its best to avoid killing anybody but terrorists. And no, you haven’t suggested any viable way.

            As for “race to the bottom,” that’s simply rude.

            Your opinion, I’m sorry to say, is uninformed; UNIFIL can get out of the way because they are accomplishing nothing in reigning in Hezbollah, And you want Israel to defend itself without killing “even one civilian”. That’s completely ridiculous.

          2. If you are not a military expert but you want to have an opinion it would be prudent to read what real military experts think about Israel’s way to conduct this war. Try John Spencer, Alexander Fox, Richard Kemp, Australian generals etc.  They all say that their army (U.S. British, Australian) wouldn’t be able to conduct this war with such a low ratio of civilians killed vs. combatants. 

            And when it comes to UNIFIL you could read about the behavior of the UN Peacekeeping force on the Syrian Golan Heights who escaped to Israel (without anybody asking them to do it) as soon as the Syrian civil war started. You could also read something about the UN Peacekeeping force on Sinai in 1967 when Nasser wanted to annihilate Israel and ordered them to go away. They ran so quickly that they didn’t even have time to inform the Israelis (whom they were supposed to guard) that they would not be able to fulfill their mandate.

            Or you could read about UN Peacekeepers in Srebrnica who escaped and allowed the greatest massacre of European Muslims in Europe. UNIFIL has a tradition they could quote. But no. They can’t leave poor Hezbollah. Otherwise Jews could win and that is against human rights. For so many centuries it was a human right to kill Jews with impunity that now it has become difficult to accept tha Jews are actually defending themselves.  

          3. I’ll add to Malgorzata’s comments on UN “peacekeepers,” that they hardly covered themselves in glory in Rwanda, where they failed to intervene when ~one million Tutsis were slaughtered. There was a time when Canadians were proud of their participation in the blue helmets, but you don’t hear much about it at all after Rwanda. And one cannot deny that the UN is institutionally opposed to Israel defending itself, and that local employees of their programs (viz. UNRWA) are corrupt beyond any hope of fairness.
            Sometimes, regrettable as it may be, war can be both just and necessary.

      3. I do hope that reports about Israeli forces firing shots at UNIFIL personnel turn out to be wrong, but seriously, what’s the point of having UNIFIL there? They haven’t kept Hezbollah from attacking Israel, so they might as well get out of the way while Israel does their work for them.

      4. Throwing those few “feel for Israel,” breadcrumbs in there is certainly OK, but I strongly get the idea that you really… don’t.

      5. If you think Israel is going to attack Portugal to spite the UN you are not a serious person.

        The UN is not some jumped-up supra-sovereign government that can deploy “its” army of policemen wherever it chooses. Israel is fighting a war. It might be a war you think it should lose, or be hobbled in its efforts, but you are on the sidelines. Israel is fighting to win. If the UN’s militarily ineffective peace observers find themselves in a war zone they have to get out of the way for their own safety. They can’t defend themselves, much less defend Lebanon. If the governments running the countries those peace observers are citizens of allow them to be used as human shields for one side in the conflict they are failing their soldiers.

  5. Breaking news: Yahya Sinwar may have ceased to be.

    Otherwise, re. things that are divisive, is it divIsive or diVISSive? The latter seems to have crept in. When did that start, and why? There’s only one S.

    1. Now that would be great news. Making the world a better place, one bullet at a time.
      (I wasn’t always this cynical, but it really feels like the world took a wrong turn a while ago, and Israel is trying to correct its course, by whatever means necessary.)

      I’m not a native speaker, but I’ll stick with “divIsive” . Although I wish there were fewer occasions to use the word.

      1. “Making the world a better place, one bullet at a time” Is that what we have come to? I guess so. In WWII it would have been “making the world better, one bomb at a time”. The world is a grim place.

    2. English person here, with 60+ years experience of speaking the Queen’s English. DivIsive.

  7. So, DEI isn’t working. No surprise there. DEI has a ‘reality’ problem. Of course, ‘reality’ is a ‘problem’ that needs to be overcome. This goes way back. No less than Mao launched the ‘Great Leap Forwards’ to quickly industrialize China (without the help of despised ‘experts’). Of course, the GLF failed (as did the later Cultural Revolution). China (these days) is very sane and holds ‘experts’ in high esteem. The insanity (called DEI) has moved to the U.S.

  9. Even the liberal NYT readers are dubious about D.E.I. The most upvoted comment (over 2500 likes):

    If someone wanted to find a way to destroy American universities, they wouldn’t be able to find a better tool than D.E.I.

    An enormous bureaucracy that drains resources and drives up the already astronomical price of college while contributing next to nothing to the advancement of actually underprivileged students. It has a profoundly negative effect on campus life by turning it into victimhood Olympics.

    Through its influence on hiring it actively works to exclude people on both ideological and racial grounds, and it further tilts the already wildly imbalanced campus politics. Moreover, as this article demonstrates, by trying to infuse every aspect of teaching and research with DEI considerations it further erodes the distinction between activism and scholarship and remakes entire disciplines in its shape (and not for the better).

    Finally, by politicizing the university it undermines the already problematic standing of higher education among the American public. As I said, one of the most pernicious things ever to happen to American higher education.

    1. “… victimhood Olympics”. That’s good. If only The NYT wrote as well as the commenter you quoted.

  10. “I wonder if, say, going to Harvard as opposed to another good school adds that much money to a student’s expected lifetime income.”

    My wife has always been smitten with Ivy League schools, while I had expressed the same doubts as Jerry had, above. As a result of an argument with my wife over this issue about 25 years ago, I did a little digging and I recall finding two research papers on this subject, which looked at this question from an interesting perspective. Rather than comparing the average, say, Michigan State University graduate with the average Harvard Graduate, they actually looked at the pool of folks who were ACCEPTED at Ivy League schools but chose instead to attend major state schools (for financial or other reasons), and compared them with the Ivy League grads. Both papers found no significant difference in the salaries of each group 5 years after graduation. In fact, as I recall, the salaries of the state school grads were about $100/year higher — a statistically insignificant figure. The moral of the story, as I understood it, was that success was really all about YOU, not your school. If you’re the kind of person who COULD HAVE attended Harvard, you’re likely to be as successful as a person who actually did. From my own experience, the major state schools have the ability successfully accommodate the needs of the average students, the geniuses, and the idiots.

    I regret that I no longer have copies of or cites to these two studies. I also realize that these studies do no answer the exact question that Jerry raised, which sought to compare lifetime earnings, not salaries 5 years after graduation.

  12. Re the 11 year old trainee suck-up heading to Harvard, couldn’t that be considered child abuse?

  13. Wow, $250,000,000 spent on DEI at the University of Michigan since 2016! That money would have been better spent quietly giving full rides to underserved students. We’d have 3,800 graduates living lives of empowerment in their communities. Silly me, I’m too much of a simpleton to see how runaway spending on a fail philosophy is inclusive.

  14. I’d argue that DEI is systemic racism. It teaches that some groups are by nature unable to succeed without assistance and creates a culture of victimhood. It removes agency of the individual. It enforces the idea of plantation racism, in which one group is in control of the other’s freedom. It is also prescriptive racism, as minorities are expected to live down to a certain level of stereotypical behavior and performance. And when it doesn’t succeed, the only solution is to throw more money at it and work harder at silencing those who disagree.

  15. Elite private colleges already do give full free rides to promising underserved students. The competition for the small number of disadvantaged students who can cope with the course demands is tight, though, and spending more on that effort would bring in more students closer to the bottom of the barrel who will simply fail, or transfer to a less demanding school, squandering the university’s investment in them. Minority students admitted under DEI on the other hand are often the well-off elites of their respective racial groups, even foreigners, who will pay full freight and then some. Because they are an income stream, the college will keep them enrolled even if they are failing.

    Spending on DEI can be seen as an investment in brand marketing. The colleges surely know how many extra list-price tuition dollars each dollar of DEI spending brings in. If they were -> are losing money on DEI, they will stop doing it.

    The colleges aren’t philanthropies. They are profit-making businesses, clubs really. (They aren’t investor-owned but they still seek profit to protect the endowment.). They care not that putting the DEI money into scholarships would (big maybe) pump 3800 grads into poor communities. The Finance Committee would ask, “Why on earth would we want to do something like that??” (In reality the grads would go to work on Wall St. or as Washington lobbyists anyway.)

    Follow the money. If something doesn’t seem to make sense, it’s only because the money isn’t visible.

  16. Leslie, you hit the nail on the head. U-Mich’s brand is centered on being the “Berkley of the Midwest”, very liberal. This fits their brand and what their prospective students and donors.

    It’s the same in corporate America. We do DEI because our ESG scorecard requires it to maintain investors, and thus our executive leadership’s bonuses are tied to achieving certain goals for training, hiring, and promotions. Until there is outcry against it that affect some aspect of profitability or share price, as happened at a couple of companies, we will continue doing it.

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