It is DECEMBER, the month of Christmas and, most important, of the personal holiday of Coynezaa, which extends from Christmas through my birthday (December 30). Celebrated worldwide, it honors the wonder of Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus).
Here’s the December page from the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, which I love. Celtic Studies Resources says this:
The image below is a detail from the Très Riches Heures of Jean, duc de Berry (Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 65) calendar image for December. It features a wild boar hunt. The building in the background is the Château de Vincennes, where the Duc de Berry was born in 1340, on November 30. The forest bordering the estate was famous for its game (and was reserved as a royal forest). The leaves are still on the trees, though they do suggest late autumn, on the cusp of winter.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the December 1 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Trump has given his nomination for the director of the FBI, and it looks dire. One could say that Kash Patel would be the first Indian-American director of the agency, but that would be the only bit that would appeal to the Left. Instead, the guy wants to wreck the bureau! (Article is archived here.)
President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Saturday that he wants to replace Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, with Kash Patel, a hard-line critic of the bureau who has called for shutting down the agency’s Washington headquarters, firing its leadership and bringing the nation’s law enforcement agencies “to heel.”
Mr. Trump’s planned nomination of Mr. Patel has echoes of his failed attempt to place another partisan firebrand, Matt Gaetz, atop the Justice Department as attorney general. It could run into hurdles in the Senate, which will be called on to confirm him, and is sure to send shock waves through the F.B.I., which Mr. Trump and his allies have come to view as part of a “deep state” conspiracy against him.
Mr. Patel has been closely aligned with Mr. Trump’s belief that much of the nation’s law enforcement and national security establishment needs to be purged of bias and held accountable for what they see as unjustified investigations and prosecutions of Mr. Trump and his allies.
Mr. Patel “played a pivotal role in uncovering the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, standing as an advocate for truth, accountability and the Constitution,” Mr. Trump said in announcing his choice in a social media post.
He called Mr. Patel “a brilliant lawyer, investigator and ‘America First’ fighter who has spent his career exposing corruption, defending Justice, and protecting the American people.”
Mr. Patel, a favorite of Mr. Trump’s political base, has worked as a federal prosecutor and a public defender, but has little of the law enforcement and management experience typical of F.B.I. directors.
“shutting down the agency’s Washington headquarters, firing its leadership and bringing the nation’s law enforcement agencies ‘to heel'”???? What is going on here. Is Patel going to catch criminals or not? So far Trump’s nominations have all seemed problematic to me, some deeply so. We will have to buckle up for four years of a bumpy ride.
*Benny Gantz, Israel’s former defense minister and member of the War Cabinet until given his pink slip this year, has criticized Netanyahu for caving to America’s pressure to agree to a cease-fire with Hezbollah. Now, in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Gantz argues that that cease-fire is deeply problematic. (article archived here).
The lesson of Oct. 7, 2023, is that Israel must be uncompromising and proactive when it comes to protecting itself. Underpinning the current, temporary cease-fire arrangement with Hezbollah is the strong likelihood that Israel will be forced to return to another painful and costly round of fighting in Lebanon. A sustainable agreement must not only address the threat from Hezbollah and promise effective and reliable international involvement, but it must be clear about the source of regional instability: the Iranian regime.
. . . Lebanon has become Iran’s plaything. The fundamentalist regime in Tehran envisions using Hezbollah to destroy Israel and, ultimately, to dominate the region. This can never be allowed to happen.
. . . Hezbollah has been holding the state and people of Lebanon hostage for decades. To change the reality in Northern Israel and Lebanon, restore security and stability to Israel, enable Lebanon to wrestle free of Iranian domination, and continue building a prosperous future for the region, Israel must pursue a more long-term comprehensive plan. Southern Lebanon must be stabilized. That stability must prove itself over time. The following steps are essential:
He then proposes that Israel must be given the freedom to act against threats throughout the country, not just near the border, that the UN forces in Lebanon (the cowardly UNIFIL) must be strengthened, that the U.S. must get involved in peacekeeping, that the UN Security Council must impose a weapons embargo on all Lebanese organizations save the police and Lebanese army, and that peace talks between Israel and Lebanon must begin, monitored by the U.S. Good luck with this! But he finishes with the truth:
Unlike the Iranian regime, which seeks to subjugate Lebanon and exploit its people, Israel seeks to coexist with its neighbor to the north. Israel’s wars have always been waged against Hezbollah and other terror organizations—never against the people of Lebanon.
It’s only a matter of time before people start accusing Israel of “genocide” against Lebanon. Indeed, I think that’s already happened.
*And here is something more that the NYT has found to blame on our election loss to Trump: our messed-up dating culture! It’s by New York playwright Sarah Bernstein. It’s all about “bro culture” and the “manosphere”. And that, says Ms. Bernstein, has given us the Trumpster.
Click to read, or find it archived here.
An excerpt, starting with two representatives of “bro culture”:
Joe Rogan. Elon Musk. Representatives of bro culture are on the ascent, bringing with them an army of disaffected young men. But where did they come from? Many argue that a generation of men are resentful because they have fallen behind women in work and school. I believe this shift would not have been so destabilizing were it not for the fact that our society still has one glass-slippered foot in the world of Cinderella.
Hundreds of years after the Brothers Grimm published their version of that classic rags-to-riches story, our cultural narratives still reflect the idea that a woman’s status can be elevated by marrying a more successful man — and a man’s diminished by pairing with a more successful woman. Now that women are pulling ahead, the fairy tale has become increasingly unattainable. This development is causing both men and women to backslide to old gender stereotypes and creating a hostile division between them that provides fuel for the exploding manosphere. With so much turmoil in our collective love lives, it’s little wonder Americans are experiencing surging loneliness, declining birthrates and — as evidenced by Donald Trump’s popularity with young men — a cascade of resentment that threatens to reshape our democracy.
. . . Recently, men’s and women’s fortunes have been trending in opposite directions. Women’s college enrollment first eclipsed men’s around 1980, but in the past two decades or so this gap has become a chasm. In 2022, men made up only 42 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds at four-year schools, and their graduation rates were lower than women’s as well. Since 2019, there have been more college-educated women in the work force than men.
. . . Our modern fairy tales — romantic comedies — reflect this reality, promoting the fantasy that every woman should have a fulfilling, lucrative career … and also a husband who is doing just a little better than she is. In 2017, a Medium article analyzed 32 rom-coms from the 1990s and 2000s and discovered that while all starred smart, ambitious women, only four featured a woman with a higher-status job than her male love interest.
This doesn’t seem logical to me How can an cultural change favoring women cause this kind of backsliding. Yes, the denigration of men, both black and white (viz. the pro-Harris speeches of Obama) might make them resentful? And if you look at the reasons people voted for Trump, it’s mainly the economy and immigration, not resentment of men or women. (Why would women resent their sex’s success, anyway?) The whole article is mishigass, and Ms. Bernstein should stick to playwriting. Or did the times want to blame Trump’s victory on yet another societal issue?
*President Zelensky of Ukraine has made a proposal to end the fighting in his country as Russia tries to grab as much of the country as it can. It involves bringing the part of his country still controlled by Ukraine under the aegis of NATO (i.e., NATO membership), with the Russian-controlled part subject to diplomatic negotiation:
An offer of NATO membership to territory under Kyiv’s control would end “the hot stage of the war” in Ukraine, but any proposal to join the military alliance should be extended to all parts of the country that fall under internationally recognized borders, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a broadcast interview.
Zelenskyy’s remarks on Friday signaled a possible way forward to the difficult path Ukraine faces to future NATO membership. At their summit in Washington in July, the 32 members declared Ukraine on an “irreversible” path to membership.
However, one obstacle to moving forward has been the view that Ukraine’s borders would need to be clearly demarcated before it could join so that there can be no mistaking where the alliance’s pact of mutual defense would come into effect.
“You can’t give an invitation to just one part of a country,” Zelenskyy said in an excerpt of the interview with Sky News. “Why? Because thus you would recognize that Ukraine is only that territory of Ukraine and the other one is Russia.”
Under the Ukrainian Constitution, Ukraine can’t recognize territory occupied by Russia as Russian.
. . . “If we want to stop the hot stage of the war, we should take under the NATO umbrella the territory of Ukraine that we have under our control. That’s what we need to do, fast. And then Ukraine can get back the other part of its territory diplomatically,” he said.
An invitation for Ukraine to join NATO is one key point of Zelenskyy’s “victory plan,” which he presented to Western allies and the Ukrainian people in October. The plan is seen as a way for Ukraine to strengthen its hand in any negotiations with Moscow.
This is a bit confusing to me. The Ukrainian constitution prohibits recognizing Russian-controlled parts of the country as “not Ukraine”, but it is willing to talk about giving away some of those parts in a diplomatic settlement. And will Trump agree to this when he takes office? Russia, after all, wants desperately to prevent any of Ukraine from joining NATO.
*The WaPo reports on the earliest known recording of country music (article archived here). This one was found on a was cylinder, was recorded by a black man, and was from 1891! (See recording below.)
Levin immediately knew what he had.
“A true unicorn,” he says now.
In the world of early recordings, unicorns are cylinders that are reputed to exist but that have never been found. A session with cornetist Buddy Bolden, say, or a monologue from Mark Twain. What Levin heard coming out of his player was another name on his undiscovered list, New Orleans performer Louis Vasnier. The unlabeled cylinder he’d bought contained Vasnier singing and braying his way through “Thompson’s Old Gray Mule,” a song later recorded by hillbilly masters Uncle Dave Macon and Riley Puckett.
This month, Archeophone, a specialty label devoted to restoring recordings dating back to the 19th century, released a 45-rpm record of the 1891 performance. Label co-founder Rich Martin’s research on Vasnier comes with a revelation: The oldest country recording in existence was recorded by a Black man.
Martin wants to revisit the complicated relationship country music has had with race. Credit and record deals have typically been hard to come by for Black musicians. It took until 2000 for the Country Music Hall of Fame to induct its first Black artist, Charley Pride, and only two others have joined him. (There are 155 members in total.)
“Black artists by and large, who were the ones who performed and recorded, get wiped out of the picture because they say, ‘Well, it’s not really country,’” Martin says. “So ours is partly a project of reclamation.”
And the recording (Vasnnier, as you might guess from his name, was from New Orleans):
Martin’s research found that Vasnier’s musical performances were advertised with banjo accompaniment, but “Thompson’s Old Gray Mule,” a song written by Thomas P. Westendorf in 1884 (as “Old Thompson’s Mule”), features a piano. The song opens with Vasnier naming the title and record company before the music starts and he sings the story of the farmer’s mule. The sound will take some getting used to for anyone expecting the fidelity of modern recordings, but the singer’s voice is powerful and cuts through the technological limitations of the medium. The highlight of the song has to be the chorus, where Vasnier delivers a comic, snorting re-creation of the donkey delivering “eh-aws.”
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is jocular:
Hili: Are there moderate fanatics?Andrzej: No, this is a contradiction.Hili: It’s a pity, it would be easier to live with them.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy są umiarkowani fanatycy?
Ja: Nie, to jest sprzeczność.
Hili: Szkoda, bo łatwiej by się z takimi żyło.
*******************
From Meow:
Another cat (or a cat-on-a-cat, this one from Cat Memes:
A restroom sign from Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs: Someone was either authoritarian or had OCD:
Masih reports another arrest of a woman protestor in Iran:
17-year-old Negar Dabbagh was arrested in Iran for insulting @khamenei_ir the Leader of Islamic Republic , encouraging protests,
criticizing the murderous regime and bravery removing her compulsory hijab.
Her “crime”? Speaking out against a regime terrified of its own people… pic.twitter.com/HhCPoHJ77i— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) November 25, 2024
From Luana: Olfactory oppression! For more about the thesis, go here.
I kid you not – this is an actual thesis from a PhD in “Olfactory Ethics”— From her thesis: “The broad aim of this thesis is to offer an intersectional and wide-ranging study of olfactory oppression by establishing the underlying logics that facilitate smell’s application in… https://t.co/3uoXN0OIhp
— Justin Hart (@justin_hart) November 30, 2024
From my Bluesky feed (it’s hard to find posts to put here from that venue), the moon over Rio.
— Moon lover (@mo1nlover.bsky.social) 2024-12-01T06:36:43.598Z
From Malcolm: a one-minute horror film:
1 minute content but Horror Film effect 🔥 pic.twitter.com/5hClFT9Sld
— Black cat (@Cat__offi) October 18, 2024
From my Twitter feed:
Growing up is understanding that in Titanic, Rose decides to throw away a $250 million pendant in memory of an unemployed man who she had sex with one time.
Meanwhile, her husband worked hard all his life to maintain her and give her and her children a life of luxury, who… pic.twitter.com/CR90t6PCqA
— ฿₳₮₮ⱠɆ ฿ɎⱤĐ (@BattleByrd) November 30, 2024
From the Auschwitz Memorial. I stood on this platform, and it is an overwhelmingly sad experience. I retweeted the post.
Hundreds of thousands of Jews, as well as Roma and others, were sent to their deaths from this platform.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2024-12-01T08:04:34.323Z
A funny story reposted by Matthew:
Fabulous story from John Banville about his late wife, Janet Dunham. You can find the full interview here: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/n…
Also from Matthew: a 114-year-old genuine color photo:
Travel back 114 years to the winter glow of 1910 and this evocative French autochrome of a lone woman with her umbrella, taken in a country lane by Antonin Personnaz (1854-1936). It almost feels like a painting! (It was taken in colour and is not colourised)
— BabelColour (@babelcolour.bsky.social) 2024-11-29T20:14:59.525Z
Is the olfactory ethics research perhaps a humanities equivalent to basic science research in the sciences? Dr. Louks is in the English Dept at Cambridge according to her bio.
Smells bad to me….
You have to understand that to Trump, and many others, not just conservatives, the FBI has been heavily politicized during the Biden Administration. There were what should be infamous activities around “domestic terrorists” such as parents who protested at school board meetings and Catholics. (This is in addition to their tampering with evidence in the Mar-a-Lago search. That famous picture of documents with classifications was staged.) And if bringing the Agency to heel sounds bad, we are left with the two-thousand year old question, Who guards the guardsmen?
The way to depoliticize the FBI, if you think the whole edifice is rotten and not doing its job, as you imply, is not to appoint a “revenge” head who is unqualified to lead the organization. You find some competent person who doesn’t “owe” Trump.
Regarding the first country-western recording, here is a shameless plug for Archeophone. I’ve been buying their discs for over twenty years. They do great stuff. Their Phonographic Yearbook series, in particular, covering the years 1904-23 is a wonderful collection of the hits of the past.
I’m finding a bunch of early 20th c. material on my music subscription service, but cannot find that label actually written out.
E.g:
Elizabeth Spencer
Irving Gillette
Billy Murray (LOL!)
Albert Campbell
… “Vintage Recordings”,… but no Archeophone… perhaps in time…
Recently, I thought I would give Spotify a shot. Twice while driving I asked Android Auto to play “Mendelsohn’s Violin Concerto”. Google responded with ” asking Spotify to play ‘Mendelsohn’s Violin Concerto in E Flat Minor, Opus 64′”. “You beaut” I thought, “you know exactly what I want.” I got something by Mobi.
Two days later I tried again. Google responded, again, with ” asking Spotify to play ‘Mendelsohn’s Violin Concerto in E Flat Minor, Opus 64′”. I got somebody’s Piano Concerto instead.
Sigh.
I nearly jumped out of my chair at the one minute horror story!
The John Banville story is brilliant.
Years ago I read a book on Blacks in country music (sorry, I don’t remember the title). It said that you Black and White musicians in the South played the same instruments, sang the same songs, and often performed together. When the recording industry came along, it originally marketed music by both Black and White Southerners as “Old Time Music.” The industry later split this into two categories: a Black man playing the guitar and singing was “Race Music,” and a White man playing guitar and singing the same song was “Hillbilly Music.” White performers eventually objected to the term, so it became “Country.” Whether a song was Country or not was a matter of marketing.
I’m guessing that the signs in the restroom are from someone with a co-worker who keeps doing it wrong.
That one-minute film was scarier than most of the full-length horror films I’ve seen lately.
I don’t know how the word “you” appeared in the sentence.
I don’t get the square root of a cat one???
Me neither. It seems to be a play on the pattern on the cat’s back below its neck that looks itself like a cat, ears and all, but I can’t get from there to the square root function.
No, more like recursion?
+1
A nice example of recursion that all Canadians of a certain age will remember, particularly if they lived in our Maritime provinces, was the box cover art for Moirs Pot of Gold Chocolates made in Halifax. (Pronounced “moy-ers”) So as not to clutter the thread with links, you can Google it to get photos. Right now there is an eBay listing of an old box (empty I presume!) for sale by someone in New Brunswick, and a text article about the history of this iconic Canadian once-tariff-protected company — spoiler alert: Hershey bought the firm from Lowney, always my least favourite candy-bar manufacturer, in 2007 and closed the plant. (The article uses an early box design, pre-recursive. Persevere.)
I think the whole cat (animal plus pattern) is seen as the back pattern squared.
Maybe “radical cat”??
(Two-cats-in-one is not a square root. And there’s no yet-smaller white cat image on the black image, so it’s not recursion. It seems I too don’t get the attempted joke, if it is one.)
The dating/loneliness article is simply stating that women prefer to date/marry men at least as successful as themselves so as the number of women doing well increases the pool of men they can date decreases. I’m not sure there is real data to back this conjecture up, but looking at all the couples versus the people not in relationships that I know there seems to be some truth to this.
The rise of on-line dating has yielded reams of big data to buttress and quantify these impressions. Louise Perry (and many others) has looked into this in her review of the sexual revolution in a recent book.
Financially successful women don’t need to trade sex for security, which sounds great. But they do for male companionship and children. (Successful men aren’t particularly interested in dating a wealthy woman because, if that’s all she has going for her, she doesn’t offer anything those men need. For one thing she will likely have wealthy parents who will judge his own success. Men already have girl-bosses at work. They don’t need one at home.)
Among the women, the sixes think they must be nines because the few men who are up to what they think their standards (as nines) should be will have sex with them if nothing better is on offer that night but then ghost them. So they won’t give a second look (or a rightward swipe) to the less sexually attractive but steady-provider men who would, maybe, marry them because they are all chasing the top 20%. But these top men aren’t interested in commitment, because they don’t have to offer commitment to get sex in the on-line dating market, as long as they are willing to pay for dates.
Women don’t want to marry down because then they will have to support their children from their own resources and, cynically, their profit from divorce will be less. They could actually lose unless they ring-fence their own assets with pre-nuptial agreements. So a career woman can’t afford to even consider most of the decent steady men who were our fathers.
All this leads to loneliness, especially when the world becomes filled with women in their late 30s with fading looks who resent men for failing to live up to their expectations, and with men who failed to attract any positive attention at all.
That is my understanding of the situation also, Leslie.
Big data and the openness of the online dating companies have taught us a lot about modern mating.
The tech just confirms and speeds up what evolutionary biologists have known all along but were branded “sexists” for telling the truth. 🙂
D.A.
NYC
Excellent comment, Leslie. Jerry is misunderstanding the article – it’s not mainly about trying to explain Trump’s reelection. This is what it is about:
That makes sense, as does Leslie. But it’s a broad phenomenon and not particularly connected to Trump.
Men should never be released from the breadwinner expectation. It is what it means to be a man. I think it’s why good men tend to lose contact with their friends from highschool and college. They are too busy being providers.
In their evenings they should be nurturing their wives and children, or working long hours at their business or profession, whatever, not out bowling or drinking or going to hockey games with the boys, unless they take at least one kid with them. If their male friends are of good quality, they will be too busy themselves doing the same thing to spend time with their old friends, either. Men shouldn’t resent being kept at home with their children. It’s where they belong when they’re not at work.
Neither should men begrudge their wives (working or not) keeping up with their friends with nights out and weekends away. It’s different for women with children. Her career no longer can be everything, the way a man’s can be, for the children. For one thing, a woman will usually outlive her husband. Bereavement is a life phase. She will be alone and will need a friend circle for emotional support that a married man does not. Men considering retirement (and not dying at work) must be able to entertain themselves so that they do not become a hindrance to their wives maintaining this support system, which doesn’t include them, and which they will need to call on soon enough.
The other thing that young men as a group need to remember is that many men do not get invited to become fathers. That may well be you and it may well mean that you will never get to have sex except by paying for it. Live with it with good grace. Most of those three-quarter million Englishmen who died in the Great War probably died virgins unless they got lucky passing through Paris on their way to Flanders.
“Women don’t want to marry down because then they will have to support their children from their own resources…”
Two of my friends married down and their husbands soon stopped going to work. Nevertheless, the wives were still left with all household chores because, well, this is women’s work, and being an unpaid maid is every good woman’s dream. Another friend never married because she realized she was too poor to support a forever unemployed man, plus the eventual children.
That 1891 recording and its background story is fascinating – now THAT should be cleaned up with some computer magic. Remember They Shall Not Grow Old? That’s the sort of clean up I imagine is possible.
For Fried Pies day :
Wes Montgomery trio (guitar/organ/drums)
Fried Pies
youtu.be/woC7R1oiq2Q?si=hSdRXmXi93Vo_hL8
… I think I put that up in prior years…
I agree about the problem of Rose’s renunciation gesture in “Titanic”. I’ve complained about it ever since I first saw the movie, back somewhere around the original release.
This tweet (in its click continuation) gives the reasons, which by and large I agree with. It’s supposed to show her standing for something and making a statement, but in clarity there is no statement made! Really it should just go to her granddaughter.
In one way I would go a bit further than this twitterer. I see little value to the entire present-day frame story. Sure, it gives them a basis for showing us what modern pressure-resistant submersibles can do. But it fails to interact in any meaningful way with the whole 1912 story. Yes, it’s meant to — but, erm, we’ve covered that! –)
My 93 year old mother recently rewatched the movie Titanic and was, again, very upset when Rose threw the necklace overboard. If she didn’t want to give it to her heirs, couldn’t she at least have given it to charity? When Mom thinks of all the sick or endangered animals it could have helped, it ruins the story for her. Yes, it’s fiction — but still! Foolish girl.
Hili: Are there moderate fanatics?
I have for some time now described myself as a fanatical pragmatist.
Ms. Bernstein’s article in the Times was deeply idiotic, spectacularly uninsightful.
I’ve lived and structured my life around 2nd wave feminism but in the past decade they’ve driven women into a ditch while running over men. I get so tired of people fighting the feminism wars of the 70s, the gay wars of the 80s and the race wars of the 60s as if they are living in those eras, not 2024.
I desubscribed to the New Woke Times last year and read what I did when I was a trader: the FT and WSJ bc you can’t lie to the investor class and keep a news business.
Times, Post etc are paid fairy tale spinners.
Forget them.
D.A.
NYC
David, I strongly disagree. I think Jerry misunderstands the article. It is not about explaining the reelection of Trump. It’s about a mismatch between what, today, women want in a romantic male partner and what is available to them. College-educated women want to marry men who are also college-educated and possibly earning a bit more than them. This collides with reality (from the article):
Among people looking for a romantic partner, this leads to resentment among both spurned men and frustrated women.
Another quote from the article:
As to today’s feminism: I disagree with it if it claims that men can be women and that women are most of the time victims of the patriarchy (women are doing well today, actually).
I’d wish more guys to go to college. I know a number of families where the wife has higher education than the husband, and they tend to be unhappy.
Moon over Rio picture is very striking!
Yes, it is.