Dianne Feinstein z”l (1933-2023)

Dianne Feinstein, former mayor of San Francisco turned Senator for CA, and oldest incumbent member of Congress, passed away at the age of 90, and as the incumbent of her seat, on the eve of the major Sukkot holiday (“festival of booths”).

Mrs. Arbel (who lived in San Francisco when we met) was a fellow congregant at SF’s oldest synagogue when Ms. Feinstein was mayor, and remembers her respectfully. As much as I disagreed vehemently with some of her policy positions, I saw her as one of the last — if not the last — representatives of the sane wing of a party that has been completely captured by unhinged radicals and neo-feudalists.

May her memory be blessed. And may G-d comfort her family, which will not even have the customary seven-day intense mourning period to recover from the shock, as a major holiday cancels the mourning period.

The Washington Examiner obviously speculates on who Gavin Nuisance will appoint to serve out the late lamented’s remaining Senate term? Himself? Klueless Kackling Kamala? If neither, who else? Some looney left whackjob? (No shortage of such in the People’s Republic of China, er, California.) Or some shill for the tech billionaires?

And considering how many “conspiracy theories” have turned out to be not that far from the truth in the past few years, I can already see a theory emerging that Feinstein — doggedly hanging on to her seat despite clearly no longer “all there” — was sped along a little by, or at the behest of, an unscrupulous political fixer.

The fact alone that I cannot 100% discount this horrifying scenario tells you all you need to know about what the US has come to — and why, despite all the local craziness, I still feel blessed to live in Israel.

Shabbat shalom and chag Sukkot sameach.

Have we finally seen peak eco-doom, if Bill Gates (!) is going soft-Lomborg?

Insty in the NYPost points out that Bill Gates is pouring some long-overdue cold water on hot-headed climate activism, and sees this as a sign that “the air has gone out of the climate crisis balloon”:

Bill Gates, however, is pumping the brakes on climate panic. 

Speaking at a New York Times event, he observed heavy-handed policies won’t work: “If you try to do climate brute force, you will get people who say, ‘I like climate but I don’t want to bear that cost and reduce my standard of living.’”

As Gates noted, many of these people are in middle-income countries, like China and India, that are the biggest contributors to carbon emissions today and whose emissions (unlike those of the United States) have been growing.

He also rained on the greens’ apocalyptic parade, saying “no temperate country is going to become uninhabitable.” 

And he cautioned against untested approaches like massive tree planting: “Are we the science people or are we the idiots? Which one do we want to be?”

Well, the climate policies the political system supports are mostly the ones likely to yield the most graft, and those the corporate world supports are mostly the ones involving massive government subsidies.

But it’s interesting to see Gates softening his tone; it feels as if climate outrage has passed its sell-by date.

Oh, sure, there are still kooks in Europe gluing themselves to roadways and the occasional nut throwing oil on famous works of art, but it’s all started to seem rather forced.

When you see a shift in a social trend like this, it’s almost always happening for the same reason: The people behind it have figured out it’s doing the left more harm than good.

It’s of a piece with the sudden de-emphasis of ESG (environmental, social, governance) as a tool of corporate management. 

In both cases, the detached, well-off white people who mostly run the left dreamed up causes and slogans, which their follow-the-herd peers uncritically adopted until they ran into reality and the rest of the world noticed. 

(More to the point, recent polls show Donald Trump actually pulling ahead of Joe Biden.)

The reality, as Gates is reminding us, is there’s not actually a climate “crisis” calling for drastic action tomorrow, and running businesses and institutions as if there is one is counterproductive and even outright destructive. 

Another reality is the great mass of people around the globe knows this and has lost patience with it.  

Likewise, investors have figured out ESG is just a way for managers to substitute fuzzy, hard-to-assess performance metrics — basically a “net wokeness” calculus — for clear and well-defined metrics like, you know, how much profit managers produce for shareholders.

It’s not really surprising that, on reflection, shareholders would rather have profit than trendy causes, and voters would rather have jobs and functioning societies than nonstop apocalyptic rhetoric.

Some would say that Bill Gates should recognize a scam when he sees one — such as selling IBM an operating system he didn’t actually have at the time, then go out and buy somebody’s “quick and dirty operating system” for a song and a dance and tweak that to IBM’s feedback. Suffice to say that eventially even Microsoft (under its current CEO Satya Nadella) realized the train of having an OS monopoly had left the station and changed their corporate strategy accordingly.

As for the polls: it takes a heart of stone not to laugh.

BONUS ITEM: speaking of scams, this is a pretty amusing one: a group of Gen-Z’ers, with the help of social media “engineering”, set up a fake steakhouse with a 2-year waiting list for bookings, and NYC’s foodies and food critics lapped it up. Pictures of the “chef” meeting with JFK, 20s mobsters, and all manner of other celebrities from the past, accompanied by babble about having to “suspend linear time”… I can just see somebody doing this here in Tel-Aviv, though I suspect fewer people would fall for it 😉

Looking around before Yom Kippur: Mordechai Kedar claims Israeli opposition politicians trying to tell Saudi leader to hold out for a better deal under a post-Netanyahu government; Arnold Kling’s field guide to the anti-woke; John Anderson AO interviews Aboriginal activist about strange “The Voice” initiative to effectively create a third chamber of Parliament.

(a) in a short video message (in Hebrew), Arabist Dr. Mordechai Kedar claims a longtime Saudi contact “close to the regime” has told him that Israeli opposition politicians have told Crown Prince (and de facto ruler) Moḥammed bin Salman (MBS) to not go for a peace deal with Netanhahu, because “they will soon be in power and the Palestinians will get a much better deal”.

Dr. Kedar hedges, since all sorts of rumors can circulate in Arab society, and their tenacity bears no relationship to their veracity. However, I know exactly the type here that would do this.

Personally, I’m rather skeptical that this would have much effect anyway. MBS, whatever his faults, strikes me as a pragmatist rather than an ideologue, and appears to be at least shrewd enough to survive in his position. He surely is acquainted with “only De Gaulle could get France out of Algeria” and “only Nixon could go to China”. Then again, he’s never had to deal with such pesky things as winning an election.

(b) At his Substack “In my tribe”, Arnold Kling lays out a taxonomy of different antiwokists:

The anti-Woke come across to me as like the blind men and the elephant. Each faction intuits a different aspect of Woke. Here is a list of the factions, some of the exemplars of the factions, and what they see.

Academic [James] Lindsay and [Helen] Pluckrose, Chris Rufo the book author (not the activist). Sees the Woke as a philosophical school that is Marxist and incoherent. Thinks that it is important to go after Foucault and the whole Critical Theory crowd. […]

Black Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Shelby Steele. Sees Woke as White Guilt. Thinks that it is important to understand that in America racism has declined to the point where it can no longer be the chief cause of black-white gaps in education and crime.

Left Wing Ruy Texeira, Freddie DeBoer. Sees Woke as taking the Democratic Party in the wrong direction. Thinks that it is important to focus on economic inequality, not the race-gender agenda.

Non-religious Eric Kaufmann, John McWhorter. Kaufmann writes, “Wokeness is about making historically marginalized groups sacred.” Sees Woke as invading the space being vacated by Christianity. Thinks it is important to regard Wokeness as a dogma.

Old Liberal Jonathan Haidt, Yascha Mounk, Jonathan Rauch. Sees Woke as too intolerant, especially on free speech. Thinks that it is important to stand up for old-fashioned liberal values while avowing that conservatives are eewww and Donald Trump is a much bigger threat to liberal values.

Psychological Jordan Peterson, Rob Henderson. Recently, Chris Rufo appears to have joined this group. Sees Woke as a pathology. Thinks that it is important to remember the validity of normal common sense.

Status game Brian Chau, Erik Torenberg, me. Sees Woke as a weapon used to change the rules of status competition so that different people win. Worries that intellectual life is being taken over and ruined by Midwits.

Trans[-butadiene] exclusionary Heather Heying, Andrew Sullivan. Sees Woke as a setback to feminism and to gay rights. Thinks it is important to recognize that gender is binary, that men are different from women, and that gay is different from gender-fluid.

(c) I hear a lot on Sky News Australia about a referendum on “The Voice” — not some new talent-hunting show on Aussie TV, but (as I understand it) an attempt to create another Parliamentary chamber for Aboriginals and Torres Straiters.

Predictably, this is a big thing with woke whites — but do Aboriginals themselves want this? At least one fierce opponent of the scheme is Aboriginal herself.

Former Australian deputy PM John Anderson AO, on his video channel, interviews activist Anthony Dillon, the son of an Aboriginal police officer and a white mother, about what is really causing “the gap” and how neither “The Voice”, nor woke racial groveling more broadly, will help Aboriginal people one whit. A renewed embrace of personal responsibility in the broader culture, and measures to curb alcoholism and gambling addiction would. The latter negatively affect Aussies of all backgrounds but hit Mr. Dillon’s community especially hard.

Near the beginning of the video, a Thomas Sowell quote pretty much sums it up:

In fact, Mr. Dillon explicitly says around 54 minutes in that this applies to those wanting to make “reparations” to the Aboriginals as well, and that the true agenda many of the white activists for this (and The Voice specifically) is not actually solving any Aboriginal problems, but perpetuating them and ensuring there will be jobs and career advancement opportunities for people who will have to (not-)”help” the “downtrodden”.

(d) Tonight the whole country will shut down for a day of fasting, prayer, and reflection, as it does every year. This year we also remember the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War.

May you be signed and sealed in the Book of Life

Gmar chatima tova

Shabbat shuva musical delight: two Bach cantatas: J. S. Bach, “Ich Habe Genug”, BWV 82 (Gardiner) and a Glenn Gould rarity, “Widerstehe doch der Sünde”, BWV 52

“Resisteth though sin” and “I have enough”.

Shabbat shalom and chatima tova

UK PM delays most idiotic “net zero” deadlines; a smal legal victory by muzzled musicologist against UNT

(a) Once in a while, British Tories remember that they are not Trudeaupian wokies in Tory clothing. PM Rishi Sunak announced a delay on the most idiotic and unrealistic “net zero” deadlines:

Net Zero targets are to be watered down, as long as the Cabinet approves it.

The key points are:

• Petrol/diesel ban pushed back to 2035
• Transition to heat pumps switch will be forced only when buying a new boiler, and from 2035.
• Upcoming property energy efficiency requirements scrapped.
• No ban on oil and gas in the North Sea.

There is of course loads of the usual waffle about green jobs, extreme weather and so on. That was inevitable, given the political outlook.

But the PM has at last recognised the huge costs to ordinary people, and has decided to go for their vote.

(b) Via Insty, the Fifth Court of Appeals has slapped down the Board of Regents of the University of North Texas for its failure to stop the violation of First Amendment rights perpetrated by overzealous DIE enforcers on musicologist Timothy Jackson.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has handed down another defeat to the University of North Texas and a victory to Allen Harris in a lawsuit defending the First Amendment rights of Professor Timothy Jackson, after UNT shut down his journal, The Journal of Schenkerian Studies. The decision can be located here.

In January of last year, Allen Harris had already prevailed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas. The District Court Judge Amos Mazzant rejected UNT’s motion to dismiss the complaint of Professor Timothy Jackson in a strong decision available here.

Ordinarily, the case would then proceed to discovery and eventually to trial. But UNT invoked its right to a special appeal (called an interlocutory appeal) that is allowed only to the state under the doctrine of sovereign immunity. At first, Texas was expected to make an argument defending UNT’s right to do whatever it wanted with Timothy Jackson’s journal.

The Journal of Schenkerian Studies is dedicated to a late 19th/early 20th-century Austrian-Jewish music theorist, Heinrich Schenker, and his systematic, graphic methods of music analysis. In July 2020, Timothy Jackson defended Schenker in the pages of the Journal from an attack by Hunter College Professor Philip Ewell. Professor Ewell labeled Schenker a “racist” and, indeed, the entire tradition of Western classical music as “systemically racist.” This dispute would have remained a typical academic tempest in a teapot, but the University of North Texas swiftly condemned Jackson’s defense of Schenker and classical music. At UNT, defending classical music and its theory against charges of “racism” is a “thought crime.”

Graduate students quickly condemned Professor Jackson for “racist actions” and various other derelictions that they claimed hurt their feelings. Calls for Professor Jackson to be fired quickly escalated, and the vast majority of Jackson’s fellow faculty members jumped on the bandwagon. Sixteen of them signed a graduate student petition calling for his ouster and for censorship of the Journal. Discovery revealed that at least one did so without even reading or understanding what the petition said.

The most important thing at the University of North Texas was to demonstrate pious commitment to “anti-Racism,” no matter how irrational or lacking in substance–or contrary to evidence. As the Dean of the College of Music admitted in open court, the Journal was “put on ice.”

In July 2020, Professor Jackson stood alone against this tide. Had the case been allowed to proceed after Mazzant’s strong decision on the motion to dismiss, the Journal would likely be back in publication by now. Yet censorship is so important at the University of North Texas that the state exercised its right to a special appeal in order to halt discovery in its tracks.

Before the Texas Solicitor General’s office filed its brief, it was expected that the state would defend the university’s rather strained claim to be defending “professional” editorial practices. Perhaps sensing that this argument was a stone-cold loser, however, the state limited its appeal to a hyper-technical issue: Whether Timothy Jackson could sue the Board of Regents under the doctrine established by Ex parte Young, 209 U.S. 123 (1908), a doctrine which every lawyer studies in law school but most swiftly forget thereafter.

Under that doctrine, citizens seeking to vindicate their civil rights may not sue branches of state government, which public universities like the University of North Texas clearly are. Sovereign immunity protects them. Plaintiffs can, however, sue individual state employees in their “official capacity.” As the Fifth Circuit summarized it: “The rule is based on the legal fiction that a sovereign state cannot act unconstitutionally, and therefore, when a state actor [like a university bureaucrat] enforces an unconstitutional law, he is stripped of his official clothing and becomes a private person subject to suit.”

Texas argued that Jackson’s suit should be thrown out because he sued the wrong bureaucrats in their “official capacity.” He could not sue anyone on the UNT Board of Regents because, Texas argued, they had not been directly involved in censoring him.

In its briefing, Texas argued over and over again that the Board of Regents was never involved in violating Professor Jackson’s First Amendment rights. More than a dozen times, Texas stated that the Board “had no direct connection with the specific acts of retaliation” against Jackson.

But, as Allen Harris pointed out, this was a misrepresentation to the court. The Fifth Circuit agreed, Professor Jackson had written a letter (July 31, 2020), imploring the Board to intervene to halt the violation of his First Amendment rights. But, as the Fifth Circuit noted, “[r]ather than respond to this letter and do its job of safeguarding the policies of UNT, the First Amendment rights of faculty, and academic freedom, the Board ignored Professor Jackson’s letter.”

The ruling is a clear warning to do-nothing boards of trustees and boards of regents that they have an affirmative duty to ensure that public universities uphold constitutional rights in education. From now on, they will also enjoy a no qualified immunity from personal suit, at least in the Fifth Circuit. UNT’s Board of Regents had direct governing authority over all UNT officials. They too can therefore be held accountable under the Ex Parte Young for sitting idly by while career university bureaucrats trampled Professor Jackson’s free speech.

An appeal on this narrow, technical issue will help civil-rights plaintiffs going forward. It clarifies the rights of plaintiffs and who can be sued.

A small victory, but it’s a start. I think that a hefty punitive damages payout by UNT to Prof. Jackson would be a good start “pour encourager les autres”. Something on the order of nine figures.

“Fahrenheit 451” as a howto manual, Canada edition; Biden wants to work with Xi to “accelerate climate change”

(a) Dear Canada: “Fahrenheit 451” is not a howto manual. Good grief:

As reported in the Post Millennial, the Ontario Ministry of Education has decided that “all books available to students are [to be] inclusive” and in line with the notion of “equity.” The Peel District School Board took this to their dark, bureaucratic heart, and decided to remove books such as The Diary of Anne Frank, the Harry Potter series, and — quelle horreur — Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar. It’s probably useless to ask why Carle’s classic and beloved children’s book would be one of the choices. Perhaps the caterpillar’s eating habits, which lead him to become rather big, encourage fat-shaming.

After the various complaints as well as criticism from Ontario Education Minister, the Peel District School Board reversed the decision, but refused to accept any culpability. After all, they were just following orders as laid out by the Ontario Ministry of Education. And to be fair, given how vague the guidelines were, maybe the librarians shouldn’t be blamed. They were instructed to sift through all of the books published prior to 2008, and determine if there was anything offensive or unpleasant in them, based on an ideology that is deliberately constructed to find everything offensive.

This reminds me of the scene in the late lamented Tom Sharpe‘s satire on the Apartheid regime, “Riotous Assembly”, where dimwitted police officers referred to somebody’s possession of “subversive” books such as “The Red Badge Of Courage” and “Black Beauty”.

Ed Driscoll at Insty’s place quotes Ray Bradbury directly:

[Captain Beatty speaking to fireman Guy Montag]
“You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, What do we want in this country above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right?…Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, to the incinerator.”

Ray Bradbury, “Fahrenheit 451”

(b) Meanwhile at the UN, F. Joe Biden says he wants “to work with China on accelerating the climate crisis”

Biden says he wants to work with China on "accelerating the climate crisis" pic.twitter.com/EWxRdvyuew

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 19, 2023

No wonder Tom Sharpe changed his cosmic address: Terran reality has become too absurd for him to satirize.

Speaking of which: “If you can’t read the sexy kids’ book in Congress without grossing people out and having them tell you to please stop, Dad, maybe children shouldn’t read it.”

And this. A banana republic without bananas, indeed.

(c) Insty, on his substack, discusses “Senator” Fetterman’s schlub-wear, and why it is a good idea to put on a suit now and then.

Completely agree with Insty that having some dress standards is a good thing. In fact, during COVID lockdowns, I made a point of dressing for work every day even though I was working from home: it literally made me feel better. (Eric Metaxas said the same thing in an interview). Of course, I come from a place that, at least in my youth, was extremely clothes-conscious: “de kleren maken de man” (clothes make a man) is not a Dutch proverb for nothing, and people entering a house or store were routinely sized up by how they dressed.

As a result, Fetterman-style shlump-wear feels too (psychologically) uncomfortable to me even around the house, let alone outside. Bizarrely, polos and slacks (my usual work clothes in summer) are considered almost formalwear here in Israel, while they’re comfy dress-down for me. I stopped wearing dark suits (hitherto my default work attire) fairly shortly after arriving in Israel, since people kept wondering if I was either a chareidi (so-called “ultra-Orthodox”) who’d lost his head covering, or a lawyer 🙂

Is Prigozhin really dead?; Acorn, the unsung British heroes behind the smartphone

(a) Irene Kenyon at “Into The Void” [*] is quite skeptical about Yevgeni Prigozhin being quite as dead as claimed.

An aircraft that was supposedly carrying Wagner chief Yevgeni Prigozhin and founder Dmitry Utkin somehow magically exploded near Moscow and killed all aboard. Why do I say “supposedly?” Because although Russia claims it confirmed through DNA analysis the identies of those abroad, anything Moscow says in my mind is automatically suspect. In this case, I have to ask whom the confirmation of Prigozhin’s death benefits. If the remains weren’t confirmed, that means Putin and his goons screwed up again, like they did with Navalny with their failure to murder him by placing the nerve agent, Novichok, in the opposition leader’s underwear. That paints Putin as inept.

After Prigozhin’s supposed “coup” in June that “suddenly” stopped when his troops turned around before reaching Moscow, Putin had to attempt to rebuild his strongman reputation, because exiling Prigozhin to Belarus and singlehandedly putting a stop to this alleged “coup” certainly didn’t work to rebuild Putin’s respect among Russia’s elites.

So Prigozhin had to die, but Prigozhin also made a lot of money for Putin, and that’s something that would be difficult to give up. So what’s the answer? Confirm that Prigozhin died aboard the aircraft. Confirmation of death means no one will be looking for Prigozhin any longer. Putin gets to flex his muscles again, as the strongman of Russia, and Prigozhin gets to continue making money for the Kremlin, and for Putin, in Africa, where Wagner has been looting metals and minerals and stealing billions of dollars.

Occam’s Razor it’s not. But this is Russia. The one thing they’re good at is denial and deception.

Go read the rest, which also has updates about her new job.

(b) On a completely different subject, here is a pretty neat video summary by John Coogan[**] about how the British computer company Acorn first developed the ARM (Acorn RISC machines) architecture and, fallen on hard times when their own Archimedes computer failed to sell well (owing to lack of application software), ended up creating a joint venture (likewise called ARM) with Apple and VLSI to license the tech to all comers… and ended up powering the mobile revolution, and now Apple’s computers (including the Macbook Pro M1 I’m writing this on).

[*] Named after Black Sabbath’s often-imitated, never-surpassed doom metal song?

[**] “Soylent Green is people!”

Rosh HaShana 5784

Tonight is Rosh HaShana (literally, “head of the year”), the Jewish New Year, It is out with the old, and in with the new.

“Gone is the old year” (Das alte Jahr vergangen ist), BWV 690 (followed by several other settings of that chorale). 

And in with the new: here is a performance of the motet, “Singeth unto the L-rd a new song” (Singet den H-rrn ein neues Lied, or in the original Hebrew, shiru l’Ad-nai shir chadash), BWV 225 — a piece that stunned even the notoriously hard-to-impress Mozart when he first saw the score.

A good, wonderful, sweet, and fulfilling new year 5784 (tashpa”d) to all.

Shabbat shalom and shana tova!

Battle of Britain Day videos

Today is the anniversary of the climactic day in the Battle of Britain: September 15, 1940. In observance thereof, here is the closing scene of the eponymous ensemble-cast 1969 movie

And, naturally, this edit of Iron Maiden’s “Aces High” with scenes from the movie

There goes the siren that warns of the air raid
There comes the sound of the guns sending flak
Out for the scramble we’ve got to get airborne
Got to get up for the coming attack

Jump in the cockpit and start up the engines
Remove all the wheel blocks, there’s no time to waste
Gathering speed as we head down the runway
Gotta get airborne before it’s too late

Running, scrambling, flying
Rolling, turning, diving, going in again
Running, scrambling, flying
Rolling, turning, diving

Run
Live to fly
Fly to live
Do or die
Won’t you run
Live to fly
Fly to live
Aces high

[Guitar solo]

Move in to fire at the mainstream of bombers
Let off a sharp burst and then turn away
Roll over, spin ’round to come in behind them
Move to their blindsides and firing again

Bandits at eight o’clock move in behind us
Ten ME-109’s out of the sun
Ascending and turning our Spitfires to face them
Heading straight for them I press down my guns

[Repeat chorus]

Mitt Romney retires from politics, calls upon Biden, Trump to do the same; ḤRG on Israel’s constitutional crisis “both sides are at fault”; lost Steely Dan track recreated

Very quick take as I have a jampacked work day ahead of me with the upcoming Jewish New Year.

(a) Mitt “Pierre Delecto” Romney, age 76, has decided not to seek a second term as Senator: “it’s time for a new generation of leaders“. He calls upon both Biden and Trump to follow his example.

Another reliable bellwether of establishment thinking, WaCompost commentator David Ignatius, “Biden should not run again in 2024” (via Insty and Jordan Schachtel).

(b) Meanwhile here in Israel, my favorite Times of Israel analyst Ḥaviv Rettig Gur finds fault with both sides in the constitutional crisis we either already have on our hands or shortly will. Both sides treat Basic Laws as sacrosanct or disposable depending on how it suits them; he sees only one durable solution that none of the political or judiciary establishment seek to advance, namely the creation of a true constitution. I could personally live with a set of enhanced Basic Laws, but with a supermajority required (ideally 2/3rd, but even 70 MKs would be a vast improvement) for creation or amendment.

(c) blood pressure medicine:

During the recording of the “Gaucho” album, Steely Dan spend endless sessions perfecting a track called “The Second Arrangement”, until… a rookie engineer’s assistant accidentally erased the multitrack tape. They tried to re-record it but never were able to recapture what they thought they had lost, so abandoned it and substitute a new track “Third World Man” on the album.

Now it turns out the engineer had recorded the basically-complete track on his cassette recorder — the audio quality was not even suitable for FM radio, but when it was found a few months ago, it was good enough for a collective of professional musicians (and Steely Dan fans) to use it as the blueprint for a reconstruction. The video above is the result — the best Steely Dan track they never released.

Looking around, Sept. 13: Supreme Court hearings; Biden impeachment

(a) Yesterday was an unprecedented 13-hour day of hearings at Israel’s Supreme Court, hearing appeals against a law that bars the court from using the criterion of “unreasonableness” to strike down a law or government decision, as well as the government’s arguments in the law’s defense.

The government hired its own counsel, as the Attorney-General refused to defend the law in court, saying it was unconstitutional on its face. To those crying out “insubordination!” and “unprecedented!”: well, New Mexico’s Attorney-General just told the state governor likewise that his office would not defend the “gun public health emergency” decrees as they blatantly violate the Second Amendment.

Jeremy Sharon sums up the hearing: it\s too much to do justice by selective quoting.

But in case you wonder why I oppose the “judicial reform” as currently proposed, even though I personally do think that our baga”tz (the Hebrew acronym for High Court of Justice) has arrogated to itself excessive powers (by filling a judicial vacuum left by a Knesset reluctant to act as a ‘constitutional assembly’): I give you the chair of the Knesset’s Law and Justice Committee, Simcha Rothman MK. To be clear: quasi-constitutional Basic Laws in our country do not require the supermajorities that are the norm everywhere else (typically 2/3) — a simple majority of 61 out of 120 MKs will do.

Rothman in his prepared remarks and answers to the justices totally rejected any right the court had to review Basic Laws, insisting that “in a democracy the people are sovereign.”  […]

Asked if the court would still be unable to intervene if, for example, the Knesset passed a law to hold elections only once every 10 years or to ban Arabs from voting, Rothman said merely that if a government made mistakes it could be replaced at the ballot box by the people.

Rothman was essentially asserting his belief and that of the current government that the executive must have unrestrained power to express the will of the majority, while Hayut insisted that true democracy can only be upheld if the rights of the entire public, not just the majority, are protected at every moment — a true microcosm of Israel’s current constitutional crisis.

And there you have it. This is another example of the half-baked droppings [sic] of a midwit who thinks he’s a genius. The Left’s ranks are filled with such clowns; this is just the “Right”-wing mirror image. I have no time for either. It is no accident that intellectual proponents of reform such as the Kohelet Policy Forum have been quietly distancing themselves from this indefensable dreck.

I do not expect an ruling for about a month. As explained by Jeremy Sharon, it might well take the shape of leaving the specific “unreasonableness” law intact but asserting that Basic Laws generally are subject to judicial review, or of sending the law back to the Judicial Committee of the Knesset for further debate and amendments without striking it down in substance.

In the Jerusalem Post, Herb Keinon looks at the composition of baga”tz.

The liberal vs conservative dichotomy on courts is not unique to Israel. In the US, for instance, there is always much discussion about this balance and how one president’s appointments to the court will either maintain or disrupt that balance.Most observers say the US Supreme Court is today a conservative court, with the consensus being that six of the nine judges are conservative, and three are liberal. These worldviews and political philosophies are reflected in the opinions they write.In Israel, it is a bit trickier to come up with such a clear-cut scorecard for several reasons.One reason is because of the number of justices – the more judges, the more likely that there will be some who are more difficult to classify and who defy easy categorization.

Further, the court’s frequent changes in composition – due to the mandatory retirement age of 70, contrasted with lifetime appointments in the US – make it more challenging to pigeonhole and present a clear ideological picture.This doesn’t prevent one from trying.Yediot Aharonot on Tuesday profiled the court and drew the following conclusions: Seven justices were classified as liberal ([Chief Justice Esther] [Ḥ]ayut, [Yitzhak ] Amit, Uzi Vogelman, Daphne Barak-Erez, Anat Baron, [Ruth] Ronnen, and [Khaled] Kabub).Four were considered conservative: [Noam] Sohlberg, David Mintz, Yosef Elron, and Alex Stein. Four others – Yael Willner, a religious woman who wears a head covering; Ofer Grosskopf; Gila Canfy Steinitz, the wife of former cabinet minister Yuval Steinitz; and [Yechiel] Kasher – were classified as judges whose judicial orientation is not clear.Assuming this is an adequate reflection, a court that has seven liberal judges, four conservative ones, and four whose opinions vary, making it difficult to pigeonhole, is not as imbalanced a court as is often perceived.Furthermore, the orientation of the four judges with unclear positions and the characterization of Kabub and Ronnen as liberals can be debated.

Another reasonable scorecard of the judges’ record might look like this: five liberal justices (Hayut, Vogelman, Amit, Barak-Erez, and Baron); five conservative justices (Sohlberg, Mintz, Elron, Stein, and Wilner); two who could be considered centrist in their judicial philosophies (Kasher and Kabub); two others leaning centrist toward the conservative side (Canfy Steinitz and Grosskopf); and one centrist leaning toward the liberal side (Ronnen).Tuesday’s high-profile hearing that was broadcast live shined a spotlight on the court and its proceedings. One consequence may be exposing the public to a court with justices whose judicial philosophies are not as monochromatic as previously thought. 

(b) So House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy announced an impeachment inquiry into Abu Hunter, a.k.a. F. Joe Biden. Ed Driscoll has a field day with the faux outrage of the Pravdamedia: “it’s not like we warned the left repeatedly that they’re not going to enjoy living under the new rules they created.”

(c) I am shocked, shocked, I tell you, that gambling is going on in this establishment!

CIA whistleblower: position on COVID origins changed by “significant monetary incentive”. (via Insty)

Hab’ich nicht mit diesen Leuten/Hunderttausend Arschhurerei.

[With apologies to J. S. Bach’s “Coffee Cantata”. The original said “Kinder” [children] instead of “Leute” [people] and “Hudelei” [vexations] instead of the term for male prostitution that rhymes with it.]

Looking around, September 12 edition

There’s so much insanity and corruption going on that I don’t know where to start. A laugh is as good a place as any:

• Biden comforts 9/11 victims by talking about how his Jenga tower fell down
• Shuttered adult bookstores cite fierce competition from school libraries

Today our Supreme Court comvenes to hear arguments for and against the “unreasonableness cancellation law” — in other words, on whether a law curtailing the power of itself is constitutional. Despite the media excitement being ginned up ahead of this “fateful” day, it is quite unlikely the court will rule hastily, given both the gravity of the matter at hand and the need to reach majority and dissenting opinions (I very much doubt they will vote 15-0) in an unprecedented full 15-judges panel. (Normally, our Supreme Court President convenes panels of 3, 5, 7, 9 judges from among the full set of 15.)

Netanyahu has signaled openness to a unilateral softening of the “reform” blitz, and one of the two de facto opposition leaders — former IDF CoS Benny Gantz, head of the National Union party — has signaled his willingness to accept “any compromise that preserves democracy”. His rival opposition leader, Yesh Atid chair Yair Lapid, claims this is all just a ploy to bamboozle the Americans and the protesters, and that he won’t fall for it. Both are skeptical that Netanyahu can garner the backing of his coalition — although there has been some back-tracking on the part of even Smotrich, and the chareidi (“ultra-Orthodox”) parties have been trying to distance themselves recently from a deeply controversial “reform” that is widely blamed on them and no longer serves their narrow interests if it ever did.

The other news item I’d like to highlight today is a poll by John Zogby, normally a Biden booster, who now sees “catastrophe” for the re-election:

Longtime Democratic pollster John Zogby has always liked President Joe Biden.

“I think that he’ll be regarded as a great president,” he said Friday on a podcast he shares with his son Jeremy Zogby, also a pollster.

But even the Biden fan in chief sees a disaster around the corner for the Democrat’s reelection chances based on new polling from CNN.

“This new poll is catastrophic for the president,” said Zogby, who anchors the liberal desk in the Secrets Weekly White House Report Card published on Saturdays.

While concerned about Biden’s extremely low approval rating, “lower than his three immediate predecessors were at this stage,” Zogby focused on the Democratic numbers in the CNN survey that show liberals want Biden out of the race.

After flipping through Biden’s 39% approval rating and the feeling by a large majority that they are worse off under Biden, Zogby turned to those who don’t want Biden to run again, at an eye-popping 73%, he said.

“That includes up to 65% of Democrats, which is devastating,” Zogby said before turning to his son.

Jeremy Zogby is not a Biden homer or cheerleader and has doubted the president’s effectiveness since his first days in the White House. His analysis was equally biting.

“I knew it was catastrophic a hundred days in because, No. 1, Joe Biden did not live up to his promise of toning things down, being the adult in the room,” he said.

“Within a hundred days, his approval rating shot low, and it was the biggest collapse in modern presidential polling. About 900 days later, Joe Biden has, I believe, the lowest approval rating in modern presidential polling,” said Jeremy Zogby, the managing partner of the firm his father founded, John Zogby Strategies.

While they highlighted CNN’s finding that Biden and former President Donald Trump are about dead even in a 2024 head-to-head, John Zogby noted that minorities, especially blacks and Hispanics, are abandoning Biden and that that is a red warning flag.

What’s more, he talked up the finding that former Trump U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley would beat Biden in a head-to-head, something to consider as Trump faces dozens of charges that are likely to tie him up in court during the reelection.

“The next number is the one that I think is perhaps the most devastating of all,” John Zogby said. “In a head-to-head matchup against Nikki Haley, and this should be of the greatest concern to the White House, Nikki Haley scores 49% to Joe Biden’s 43%.”

“This is catastrophic,” Zogby said.

Paraphrasing Insty, the “Democratic” party is flogging policies that poll well with neurotic upper-class whites, and in the process turn off the minorities they claim to champion.

Looking around, 9/11 anniversary edition: Morocco earthquake; Biden confused in Vietnam; Israeli officials visit Saudi Arabia for UNESCO meeting

Today is the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Always remember.

(a) Following a deadly earthquake in Morocco that killed over 2,000 people, Israel, France, and many other countries offer to send rescue teams… and were left waiting for permission. (Morocco did admit a Spanish rescue dog team — Spain still controls two small enclaves at Ceuta and Melilla, a holdover from colonila days.) What the heck is going on?

(b) Behold the “leader of the Free World” in VIetnam:

Much more at the link: “I’ll just folloow orders here”; “dog-faced pony soldiers” redux;…

(c) In a historic first, Israeli officials overtly visit Saudi Arabia for a UNESCO conference. (We know a number of covert visits have been going on for a while.)

(d) and also at home, PM Netanyahu faces an unexpected coalition crisis following remarks — in the context of whether it is safe for Chasidim to go on their traditional pilgrimage to the town of Uman in Ukraine, where R’ Nachman of Bratzlav lies buried[*] — that “G-d hasn’t always protected us in Europe and Ukraine”, with various MKs of the Ashkenazi chareidi party UTJ (United Torah Judaism, or as some call it United Tyrannosaur Jackasses) panning the PM’s “ignorance” and MK Israel Eichler blaming Zionism for the Shoah. This in turn elicited outraged responses from the Education Minister Yoav Kisch and the head of Yad Vashem Dani Dayan — normally at odds with each other but this time united against this “blood libel”.

Presumably this will blow over — but you realize now why with even quite traditional Israelis, Eichler and the likes of him rank in popularity somewhere between a plague of locusts and an outbreak of ziba.

[*] Never mind that the very concept of pilgrimages to the graves of saints reminds me more of the Flemish Catholics of my youth than of my own faith.

Matt Ridley on how the public isn’t being told the WHOLE truth about “climate change”

Matt Ridley, Ph.D. biologist, well-known popular science writer, and ) a retired member of the British House of Lords (being the 5th Viscount Ridley) responds in the Telegraph (paywalled, cached copy) to Patrick Brown’s whistle-blowing article on how he self-censored to get published in what I call an “apex predator journal”:

We have known for years that distinguished scientists who think that global warming is a problem but not a “crisis” get ostracised, cancelled or rejected by peer reviewers. Meanwhile, even the most trivial study that comes to an alarmist conclusion – such as a notorious one that found fish behaviour to be affected by carbon dioxide – gets rushed into print and celebrated in the media. Junior scientists notice and tailor their texts accordingly. 

One of the biggest measurable impacts of increased carbon dioxide is global greening – the recent increase in green vegetation on the planet, equivalent to twice the area of the United States and counting. But as I discovered when I broke a story on this in 2015, pointing this out brings a hail of professorial hate down on your head. I was even singled out in a Boston University press release for daring to suggest that more green vegetation might not be bad news. 

[Patrick] Brown says that “there is a taboo against studying or even mentioning successes since they are thought to undermine the motivation for greenhouse gas emissions reductions”. The problem is all solutions are taboo. If I waved a magic wand and gave the world unlimited clean and cheap energy tomorrow, I expect many climate scientists would be horrified: they would be out of a job. 

Those who argue that climate change is real and a problem, but that other environmental issues are more urgent – overfishing of the oceans, invasive alien species, reliance of poor Africans on bushmeat and charcoal, to name three – are treated as heretics to be persecuted. 

It’s not just climate change. The main science journals have been quick to accept the Chinese regime’s insistence that a lab leak could not have caused the pandemic, refusing to publish several papers that argued otherwise and to investigate the issue, while rushing into print half-baked studies that seemed to implicate the seafood market in Wuhan. One such study purported to have found possible evidence that raccoon dogs were infected and was hyped. The total debunking of that study last month by Professor Jesse Bloom was ignored. 

Taxpayer, you are not hearing the whole truth from the academics you fund.

For a lie that is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies — Alfred Tennyson, “The Grandmother”

Related: BBC ‘disinformation’ reporter caught putting falsehoods in her own CV.

Howard Stern “does the neurotic”

A bit overwhelmed with work and ever more bizarre news stories. So for comic relief, this story about how Howard Stern’s fear of COVID has been straining his (2nd) marriage to Beth Ostrofsky.

Radio host Howard Stern recently admitted that his paranoia over a new strain of COVID-19 has gotten him into a fight with his wife.

During a Wednesday segment of his Sirius XM radio show, the shock jock conceded that he’s paranoid and “neurotic,” especially when it comes to the virus, and noted that his wife, Beth Ostrosky Stern, is less so. 

As he explained, this has led to tension and arguments with her as media outlets have been warning about a new coronavirus strain and his wife wants to go out and socialize.

The topic came up when a guest caller asked the radio host whether he thought it was risky to return to the studio for his show amid the new warnings about another COVID-19 outbreak.

Stern admitted the fear of getting sick has been weighing on him and his relationship.

He said, “I’m going crazy with this. My wife yelled at me last night. We got into a fight.”

He added, “You know how paranoid I am about getting COVID. I haven’t gotten it, and I’m pretty safe, and I really don’t want to get it.” 

[…]

He also explained how the argument with his wife went over his COVID concerns: “She goes, ‘That’s what you do. Every time I say I’m going to do something, you bring up COVID.’” Giving his reply to her, he said, “I’m just telling you, I’m scared. Am I wrong?”

[…]

Stern added [on air], “It makes me nervous. I’m neurotic. Listen, I have a lot of issues. I’m a neurotic. You know what a neurotic is?”

Co-host Robin Quivers answered his question, “Yes, a person with no real problems, but who makes them up.”

“Yeah. I make a ton of problems,” he responded. 

ANd with that, an excuse to post the little-known, but lovely Genesis instrumental “Do The Neurotic”, which they used as the B-side for the singles “In Too Deep” and “Throwing It All Away”. Being very familiar with the band’s music and composition process, I’d say it’s an edited studio improvisation — in those days, the band would routinely jam together for hours over a couple of weeks, then ‘mine’ the recorded improvisations for melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic ideas that lent themselves to being reworked into songs.

Have a nice weekend and Shabbat Shalom

Scientist: I left out part of the truth to get my climate change paper in Nature

https://www.thefp.com/p/i-overhyped-climate-change-to-get-published

[blockquote]

So why does the press focus so intently on climate change as the root cause? Perhaps for the same reasons I just did in an academic paper about wildfires in Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious journals: it fits a simple storyline that rewards the person telling it. 

The paper I just published—“Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California”—focuses exclusively on how climate change has affected extreme wildfire behavior. I knew not to try to quantify key aspects other than climate change in my research because it would dilute the story that prestigious journals like Nature and its rival, Science,want to tell. 

This matters because it is critically important for scientists to be published in high-profile journals; in many ways, they are the gatekeepers for career success in academia. And the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives—even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society. 

To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change. However understandable this instinct may be, it distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.

[…]

The first thing the astute climate researcher knows is that his or her work should support the mainstream narrative—namely, that the effects of climate change are both pervasive and catastrophic and that the primary way to deal with them is not by employing practical adaptation measures like stronger, more resilient infrastructure, better zoning and building codes, more air conditioning—or in the case of wildfires, better forest management or undergrounding power lines—but through policies like the Inflation Reduction Act, aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. 

So in my recent Nature paper, which I authored with seven others, I focused narrowly on the influence of climate change on extreme wildfire behavior. Make no mistake: that influence is very real. But there are also other factors that can be just as or more important, such as poor forest management and the increasing number of people who start wildfires either accidentally or purposely. (A startling fact: over 80 percent of wildfires in the US are ignited by humans.)

In my paper, we didn’t bother to study the influence of these other obviously relevant factors. Did I know that including them would make for a more realistic and useful analysis? I did. But I also knew that it would detract from the clean narrative centered on the negative impact of climate change and thus decrease the odds that the paper would pass muster with Nature’s editors and reviewers.

This type of framing, with the influence of climate change unrealistically considered in isolation, is the norm for high-profile research papers. For example, in another recent influential Nature paper, scientists calculated that the two largest climate change impacts on society are deaths related to extreme heat and damage to agriculture. However, the authors never mention that climate change is not the dominant driver for either one of these impacts: heat-related deaths have been declining, and crop yields have been increasing for decades despite climate change. To acknowledge this would imply that the world has succeeded in some areas despite climate change—which, the thinking goes, would undermine the motivation for emissions reductions. 

This leads to a second unspoken rule in writing a successful climate paper. The authors should ignore—or at least downplay—practical actions that can counter the impact of climate change. If deaths due to extreme heat are decreasing and crop yields are increasing, then it stands to reason that we can overcome some major negative effects of climate change. Shouldn’t we then study how we have been able to achieve success so that we can facilitate more of it? Of course we should. But studying solutions rather than focusing on problems is simply not going to rouse the public—or the press. Besides, many mainstream climate scientists tend to view the whole prospect of, say, using technology to adapt to climate change as wrongheaded; addressing emissions is the right approach. So the savvy researcher knows to stay away from practical solutions.

Here’s a third trick: be sure to focus on metrics that will generate the most eye-popping numbers. Our paper, for instance, could have focused on a simple, intuitive metric like the number of additional acres that burned or the increase in intensity of wildfires because of climate change. Instead, we followed the common practice of looking at the change in risk of an extreme event—in our case, the increased risk of wildfires burning more than 10,000 acres in a single day.

This is a far less intuitive metric that is more difficult to translate into actionable information. So why is this more complicated and less useful kind of metric so common? Because it generally produces larger factors of increase than other calculations. To wit: you get bigger numbers that justify the importance of your work, its rightful place in Nature or Science, and widespread media coverage.

[…]

Another way to get the kind of big numbers that will justify the importance of your research—and impress editors, reviewers, and the media—is to always assess the magnitude of climate change over centuries, even if that timescale is irrelevant to the impact you are studying. 

For example, it is standard practice to assess impacts on society using the amount of climate change since the industrial revolution, but to ignore technological and societal changes over that time. This makes little sense from a practical standpoint since societal changes in population distribution, infrastructure, behavior, disaster preparedness, etc., have had far more influence on our sensitivity to weather extremes than climate change has since the 1800s. This can be seen, for example, in the precipitous decline in deaths from weather and climate disasters over the last century. Similarly, it is standard practice to calculate impacts for scary hypothetical future warming scenarios that strain credibility while ignoring potential changes in technology and resilience that would lessen the impact. Those scenarios always make for good headlines.

A much more useful analysis would focus on changes in climate from the recent past that living people have actually experienced and then forecasting the foreseeable future—the next several decades—while accounting for changes in technology and resilience. 

In the case of my recent Nature paper, this would mean considering the impact of climate change in conjunction with anticipated reforms to forest management practices over the next several decades. In fact, our current research indicates that these changes in forest management practices could completely negate the detrimental impacts of climate change on wildfires.

[/blockquote]

Jordan Peterson on Poutine Castreau: “narcissist who never spoke a truth in his life”; Niall Ferguson on why we learn simple, elegant and wrong lessons from history

Two great interviews to watch:

(a) The Telegraph’s Steven Edginton interviews Jordan Peterson on Canada under Poutine Castreau:

(a’) Joel Kotkin on how the “news media” have largely becoime advocacy media, them sameless Pravdamedia.

(a”) speaking of narcissistic poseurism

(b) Niall Ferguson on why people looking for simple, elegant, and wrong theories of history learn the wronglessons from it, and how people who study history more deeply are unpleasantly surprised to learn the lessons they don’t want to. Particularly how history is highly nonlinear, chaotic, and small decisions can have huge consequences while major decisions haven none, and history as we know it is “a series of forking paths,,,, whith a keen aae

Neologism of the day: “Greenlash” — about the German electorate’s response to insane, immiserating energy goals

Via Steve Green (a.k.a. “Vodkapundit”) at Insty’s place:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/04/germany-is-the-sick-man-of-europe-and-its-causing-a-shift-to-the-right-top-economist-says.html

Sinn said investor doubts about the feasibility of Germany’s sustainability goals also play into the description of the country as the “sick man of Europe.”

One target currently in the sights of the German government is becoming carbon neutral by 2045. These plans came into sharp focus as Europe looked to detach itself from Russian gas supplies following the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and prices shot up.

Some described Germany’s ambitions to move away from Russian gas as “wildly optimistic,” particularly in light of the country’s climate targets.

But there are growing signs of public disenchantment in the shift to a more sustainable Europe, with a so-called “greenlash” emerging as people feel the cost impacts.

Sinn suggested there would be political ramifications as a result of the focus on sustainability.

“There is a backlash clearly … The population is now moving to the right,” Sinn said, referring to the popularity of the right-leaning Alternative for Germany party, which won a district council election for the first time in June.

“I am not moving to evaluate anything here, but … the policies which were, for ideological reasons, completely overdrawn … Pragmatism is a little bit missing in current policy,” he added.

Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

More cynical mind might wonder whether the immiseration of Germany’s middle class is just collateral damage of a poorly thought out, overly ambitious transition to “green energy” — or whether it is indeed the goal.

Steve Green adds: “The [‘sick man of Europe’] label was originally used to describe the German economy in 1998 as it navigated the costly challenges of a post-reunification economy. The difference then is Germany was going through the expensive process of lifting the formerly Communist east into affluence. Now Berlin is trying to smother the whole country with eco-communism.”

ADDENDUM: on a completely unrelated subject, here is a creative solution (by the president of an Orthodox synagogue in Jerusalem) to the dispute of whether or not the new light rail in my hometown should run on Shabbat. Effectively, if I may call it that: turn it into a giant “horizontal Sabbath elevator”: free on Shabbat (so no money or digital currency needs to be handled, and no buttons be posted), electronic turnstiles open (so no need for passes or even buttons to open/actuate them), automatic stop at every station (so no need to push buttons for stop requests), and non-Jewish drivers.

Change my mind: Management overproduction hypothesis

A good week, everyone, and happy Labor Day weekend to my American readers.

While discussing the professional woes of a close relative, which essentially boiled down to “too many managers, not enough people to do the work” at his large IT employer, I saw an eerie similarity with the British National Health Service drowning in literally lethal bureacratic entropy, and with US colleges drowning in administrative bloat (item (c) at the link).

It would be too facile to say one is just like the other. But these three very different types of large bureaucratic organization do have one thing in common: while the number of professionals doing the actual work (doctors and nurses, full-time faculty, engineers, programmers) stays roughly constant or even drops, while the number of administrators balloons.

There is actually an upper limit to how many people are willing to study medicine and have the skill set to complete medical school. In contrast, the number of people who can get a college degree in anything related to administration keeps going up and up — and I’m not only talking about noxious gender/ethnic grievance studies, which are only a small minority of that — as universities keep setting the bar lower and lower to ensure that “everybody can go to college” — even people in the lower half of the bell curve.

So, while the annual supply of graduates in actually useful professions does not appreciably rise[*], that of overcredentialed, undereducated, midwits with delusions of brightness keeps going up and up, and once hired, they hire more underlings to strengthen themselves in internal turf wars, who then in turn do the same,…

And thus the people doing the actual grunt work are being micro- and nanomanaged by ever more MBA-NPCs who for the most part have not a clue what the actual work on the shop floor is like.

Under the circumstances I’ve seen in some of these places, or have first-hand information about, it’s surprising that any work gets done at all. This is especially true once you factor in that the same people who nickel-and-dime the actual “hands on the shop floor”[**] routinely give each other fat pay raises and promotions.

[*] Efforts can being made. Israel just opened an additional medical school, and colleagues at a well-known interdisciplinary research institute have told me about the decision by the management there to open an MD-Ph.D. program. Furthermore, graduates from well-reputed medical schools abroad (in the US, Germany,…) who passed their medical board exams in that country no longer have to retake them in Israel. But it takes many years to turn medical school freshmen into doctors.

[**] In academia, since laying off tenured faculty is so difficult (short of very expensive buyouts), this is done by increasingly replacing teaching by actual faculty by “contingent faculty”: adjuncts who are being paid pennies on the dollar and have no job security of any kind, let alone tenure.

Sabbath musical delight: Polina Ositenskaya plays J. S. Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor BWV 582 [addendum: Igor Zhukov]

One of my two favorite organ pieces of all time (the other is Bach’s Fantasy and Fugue in G minor BWV 542) played here in a piano arrangement.

It doesn’t say whose arrangement, but it’s not the one by Eugen d’Albert [a Liszt pupil] so beautifully played by Angela Hewitt, and which does not add octave doublings to the harp-like arpeggios of the 15th variation. I suspect it may be Georgy Catoire‘s.

And speaking of Russian School performances, here is Igor Zhukov playing his own transcription:

Enjoy, have a nice weekend (and Labor Day weekend in the US), and shabbat shalom!