Thursday: Hili dialogue

September 4, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, September 4, 2025, and National Macadamia Nut Day, a nut right up there with cashews and pistachios as The World’s Best Nut.  Here’s how they’re grown in Hawaii: watch and learn!

It’s also Eat an Extra Dessert Day and National Wildlife Day. Here’s some international wildlife I photographed in South Africa.  Kitty!

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 4 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*I feel vindicated because I’ve said that if Trump is ever defeated, it will be by the courts. And, although the Supremes haven’t weighed in yet, Trump has been stopped by several federal judges. Tuesday an appeals court judge blocked Trump’s use of a major weapon to deport people without a hearing: the Alien Enemies Act.

A federal appeals court late Tuesday rejected President Trump’s attempts to use an 18th-century wartime law to deport immigrants he has accused of belonging to a violent Venezuelan street gang.

The decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, was the first time that federal appellate judges had weighed in on the substantive question of whether Mr. Trump had properly invoked the law, the Alien Enemies Act, as part of his aggressive deportation agenda. While the ruling by a divided three-judge panel of one of the most conservative courts in the country was a defeat for the administration, the issue was still likely to be heard by the Supreme Court.

Mr. Trump had made the Alien Enemies Act, which was passed in 1798, the centerpiece of his earliest efforts to summarily deport a group of Venezuelan immigrants he claimed were members of the street gang Tren de Aragua. In March, he issued a presidential proclamation that drew on the law’s sweeping powers to round up and expel members of a hostile nation in times of declared war or during an invasion or predatory incursion.

But the appellate panel, in a 2-to-1 decision, rejected his assertions that the American homeland was in fact under invasion by Tren de Aragua, rebuffing the idea that immigration, even at a large scale, was synonymous with a military breach of U.S. borders.

“A country’s encouraging its residents and citizens to enter this country illegally is not the modern-day equivalent of sending an armed, organized force to occupy, to disrupt or to otherwise harm the United States,” Judge Leslie H. Southwick wrote for the panel’s majority. “There is no finding that this mass immigration was an armed, organized force or forces.”

That finding could have legal and political implications given that Mr. Trump has used claims that immigrants are invading the United States not only to justify his use of extraordinary laws like the Alien Enemies Act but also to devise a broader anti-immigration narrative.

Yes, I’m betting this will go to the Supreme Court, but I’m heartened that the ruling, though not unanimous, was made by a very conservative court in New Orleans.  And the use of the “Alien Enemies Act” was always dubious. I’m curious whether the Supreme Court will take it or let the ruling stand. Trump may be able to make up his own “laws”, but even the Supreme Court is supposed to adhere to existing law (unless it doesn’t).

*In the latest issue of the Heterodox Academy’s magazine Inquisitive, Daniel Diermeier, our former provost and now President of Vanderbilt, has a short article called, “Rank methods: it’s time to replace college rankings with something better.”  We’ve all used, for example US News & World Report‘s ratings of colleges and grad schools.

Last year, a report published by NORC at the University of Chicago and funded by Vanderbilt University assessed the construct validity of five prominent rankings systems, including that of U.S. News. Among the issues it found were subjective weights, proxy measures of questionable relevance, inconsistencies in data quality and a lack of transparency. Key data points were missing, while data for other important metrics, such as graduate outcomes, were incomplete. A major problem, the study found, is that there is no shared definition of what “good” looks like for colleges. Each ranking creates a target and then purports to hold colleges to that subjective standard.

These flaws matter for the students and families who look to rankings for some semblance of guidance. The rankings obscure one of the great strengths of U.S. higher education, which is the range of institutions that can serve students with very different wants and needs. Students are instead steered toward one view of what makes a good college that may not reflect what matters to them.

In addition, data issues lead to a situation where important attributes of colleges are misrepresented. Consider how U.S. News treats affordability and graduate indebtedness — the amount of loan debt students incur to pay for an education at a given school. Its assessment is based on data solely about students who receive federal aid. But at some top-tier private schools, including Vanderbilt (where I serve as chancellor), many students receive loan-free aid, and some lower-income students may even be able to attend for free.

. . . ignoring or making the best of rankings isn’t enough. The fact is that students and their advisers need a way to make sense of the complex decision about college options. We need to go further and develop an alternative that eventually displaces rankings. What we need is not another rankings system, but a ratings system, one that quantifies true measures of academic quality and accessibility. It should be data-driven, transparent, stable, and applied to every institution, public and private, in the country. It should also allow students to personalize their list based on what matters to them, rather than relying on someone else’s subjective idea of what “good” should look like.

Back in 2001, Bard College president Leon Borstein pulled no punches in his assessment of college rankings. Diver quotes him: “It is the most successful journalistic scam I have seen in my entire adult lifetime. A catastrophic fraud. Corrupt, intellectually bankrupt, and revolting.’’ Almost a quarter-century later, enough is enough. Many universities have mastered the art of playing the rankings game. But rankings regimes are failing students and their families. We owe it to them to build something better.

Good old Diermier to come up with something better, and that’s a rating system where students and/or their parents weight the factors more important to them, and then the algorithm spits out a ranking tailored to each student. Will this happen? Maybe, but you’ll probably have to pay for it.

*The AP has long been anti-Israel in its news slant, and nowhere can you see that better now than in this new article on Israel enhancing its nuclear facilities. As reader Norm said when sending the link, “Now, according to the AP, Israel is as bad as Iran. One has to give the AP credit for its creativity in finding new ways to express its hatred for Israel. Will we see if the rest of the media piles onto this new and fertile grounds for criticism? Time will tell.”

 Construction work has intensified on a major new structure at a facility key to Israel’s long-suspected atomic weapons program, according to satellite images analyzed by experts. They say it could be a new reactor or a facility to assemble nuclear arms — but secrecy shrouding the program makes it difficult to know for sure.

The work at the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center near the city of Dimona will renew questions about Israel’s widely believed status as the Mideast’s only nuclear-armed state.

It could also draw international criticism, especially since it comes after Israel and the United States bombed nuclear sites across Iran in June over their fears that the Islamic Republic could use its enrichment facilities to pursue an atomic weapon. Among the sites attacked was Iran’s heavy water reactor at Arak.

Seven experts who examined the images all said they believed the construction was related to Israel’s long-suspected nuclear weapons program, given its proximity to the reactor at Dimona, where no civilian power plant exists. However, they split on what the new construction could be.

Three said the location and size of the area under construction and the fact that it appeared to have multiple floors meant the most likely explanation for the work was the construction of a new heavy water reactor. Such reactors can produce plutonium and another material key to nuclear weapons.

The other four acknowledged it could be a heavy water reactor but also suggested the work could be related to a new facility for assembling nuclear weapons. They declined to be definitive given the construction was still in an early stage.

International criticism? Really? Look, although Israel neither admits nor denies it has nuclear weapons, everyone knows they do.  Iran doesn’t—yet? But Israel hasn’t used its nuclear weapons, and even when attacking Iran’s facilities used conventional weapons. It’s not Israel’s nukes that we need to be afraid of—it’s Iran’s attempt to manufacture them.

*A letter from editor Len Gutkin in the Chronicle of Higher Education shows a rare unanimity of opinion between Princeton President  Christopher L. Eisgruber and Yale Law Professor Yale Law’s Keith E. Whittington: both oppose the use of mandatory diversity statements in hiring faculty.

Princeton’s president, Christopher L. Eisgruber, has fiercely defended DEI initiatives in the face of pressure to disavow them from the Trump administration. But in his forthcoming book, Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right, he recommends that colleges jettison at least one such initiative, namely “politically loaded practices like mandatory diversity statements for job candidates.” Given that Eisgruber has accused other college leaders, as The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch put it, “of carrying water for the Trump administration,” his concession on diversity statements matters. If even the Ivy League’s biggest defender of the status quo ante Trump has turned against diversity statements, it seems likely that they’re on the way out.

A report released at the beginning of last month by the Heterodox Academy (HxA) suggests, however, that the practice might be hanging around for a little while yet. In an analysis of faculty job ads from the fall of 2024, researchers found that a little under a quarter of searches continued to require DEI statements, sometimes in apparently surreptitious ways meant to get around state bans. Almost 27 percent of private institutions requested such statements, as compared to 19 percent of public institutions. Humanities and STEM fields asked for DEI statements at about equal rates.

HxA “identified 70 job ads with DEI statement requests from public institutions” in states — Florida, Kansas, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, North Carolina, Texas, and Utah — where the use of such statements has been banned at public colleges. What they found in such cases is that, rather than requesting standalone documents, search committees would fold requests for DEI statements into other, more general parts of the application, like the cover letter or the teaching statement. They would also sometimes avoid the words “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion,” opting instead for phrases like “innovative and inclusive pedagogies” or “a safe, welcoming and dynamic learning environment of belonging.” (The search for euphemisms for DEI seems to degrade institutional prose, already in a dire state, even further.) And in some cases, they would add language meant to signal an interest in viewpoint diversity. (HxA is careful to note that it makes no claim about the legality or otherwise of any of these tactics.)

How much longer will search committees be allowed to require, for instance, “a statement that addresses past and/or potential contributions to antiracism,” as a 2024 search for a professor of biochemistry put it? Not much longer, I suspect; there’s simply too much scrutiny of these unpopular search criteria from hostile politicians. And the more we learn about their actual use over the last several years, the more dubious they look from both a constitutional and an academic-freedom point of view. In a recent article in the Nebraska Law Review, Yale Law’s Keith E. Whittington assembles the most comprehensive case yet made against the practice; he shows beyond serious doubt that diversity statements have very often served as political litmus tests.

Well, if you ever doubted that they served as political litmus tests, you’re oblivious. They need to go (they’re not permitted at the University of Chicago). But, like Gutkin, I think they’ll be around for a while, as colleges will do anything they can, even dissimulating or being duplicitous, in trying to maintain “diversity” (we’re of course talking about ethnic diversity). As for diversity of opinion or thought, well, I can’t see a way to mandate that. It’s largely irrelevant for the sciences, but the humanities try for conformity of though, hiring progressives whenever they can.

*Texas has passed a draconian law that suspends the First Amendment on all public college campuses in Texas after 10 p.m.  FIRE is suing the state, as it should. (h/t Jack)

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a lawsuit today to stop enforcement of a new, unconstitutional law that turns every public university in Texas into a speech-free zone starting at 10 p.m. every day. FIRE is suing the University of Texas System on behalf of student musicians, journalists, political organizers, and religious students who span the ideological spectrum, all of whom the new Texas law threatens to silence.

“The First Amendment doesn’t set when the sun goes down,” said FIRE senior supervising attorney JT Morris. “University students have expressive freedom whether it’s midnight or midday, and Texas can’t just legislate those constitutional protections out of existence.”

In 2019, Texas was a national leader in protecting student speech, passing a robust law enshrining free speech on public university campuses. But after a series of high-profile protests over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2024, the Texas legislature reversed course and passed Senate Bill 2972, transforming the speech-protective 2019 law into one mandating that the state’s public universities and colleges impose a host of sweeping censorship measures.

FIRE’s lawsuit is challenging two major provisions of the law, which went into effect on Sept. 1. The first requires public universities in Texas to ban all “expressive activities” on campus between the hours of 10 p.m. and 8 a.m., which the law defines as “any speech or expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment.”

That is a shocking prohibition of protected speech at public universities. Under the new law, universities now have the power to discipline students at nighttime for wearing a hat with a political message, playing music, writing an op-ed, attending candlelight vigils — even just chatting with friends.

. . . . FIRE is also challenging the law’s mandate that universities ban student groups from a host of protected expression during the last two weeks of any semester or term, including inviting guest speakers, using amplified sound, or playing a drum. The Fellowship of Christian University Students at UT-Dallas, for example, would be unable to invite an off-campus minister to lead a prayer during finals.

This law will not stand! And the fact that they single out noise and amplified sounds (tactics of pro-Palestinian groups) suggest that this law has some ideological basis.  Time, place, and manner (“TPM”) restrictions can prevent after-hours noisemaking, but there is no rationale I can see for banning invited speakers during part of a term or non-intrusive demonstrations in the evening.  I doubt even the Supreme Court would uphold this University of Texas law.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is playing psychiatrist:

Hili: I order you to exit your depression at once!
Andrzej: Through the main entrance or the side door?

In Polish:

Hili: Nakazuję ci natychmiastowe wyjście z depresji!
Ja: Którymi drzwiami, głównymi czy bocznymi?

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

From Stacy:

From Diana:

From Meow: a way to keep the cat in line.

I’m about to give up on Masih: she’s gone to the Dark Side of making podcasts instead of tweets.  But we have a good substitute for her, and I love JKR’s use of profanity:

From Luana: Malcolm Gladwell reverses course on allowing trans-identified men competing against female athletes. He once thought that was okay, but now says he was “cowed” into saying it.

From Simon; I don’t think we need worry about this. You can see the quoted post (about Trump wanting a Nobel Peace Prize) here.

THE UNITED STATES WILL DECLARE WAR ON NORWAY IF THIS ABOMINATION OCCURS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!

— George Conway 👊🇺🇸🔥 (@gtconway.bsky.social) 2025-09-02T18:03:00.097Z

From Malcolm. Look at those reaction times (I don’t like some of the bits, though):

One from my feed; be sure to turn the (appropriate) music up:

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

This French Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she got to Auschwitz. She was four. Had she lived, she'd be 85 today.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-09-04T10:01:24.544Z

Two posts from Herr Professor Doktor Cobb, Ph.D. First, a fastidious octopus:

Have you ever seen an #octopus clean and then use the toilet? This individual was outside its den so I set a #gopro to record its behaviour. From Patmos, #Greece. Plenty more film and photos to follow if the trip.#marinebiology #marinelife #underwaterfilming #wildlife

— Martin Stevens (@wildlifevision.bsky.social) 2025-08-28T06:13:10.551Z

This in amazing condition for a 3,500-year-old painting:

Artist’s painting of a hippo on a flake of limestone 🦛❤️Perhaps a practice sketch, or just for the joy of painting 3,500 years ago! From Deir el-Bahri, Thebes, Egypt, c. 1479–1425 BC. 📷 The Met http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collecti…#Archaeology

— Alison Fisk (@alisonfisk.bsky.social) 2025-08-27T17:19:04.295Z

5 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
    The rightness of a thing isn’t determined by the amount of courage it takes. -Mary Renault, novelist (4 Sep 1905-1983)

  2. Hmm, what is in the frame next to Malcolm Gladwell on his right? Wouldn’t by any chance — nawww,…

  3. I agree with the Bard College prez. Who in the hell would rely on such rankings to decide on where to go to school? So easy to game to the point of being useless. At the K12 level, we once had a a superintendent of schools who promised our city council a nationally-ranked blue ribbon school each year and he pretty much delivered. All it took was two years of lead time for each candidate school with an assistant principal assigned to developing the data and filling out the paperwork…leaving nothing to chance.

Comments are closed.