Author Archives: eehines

Claudine Gay’s Resignation Letter

Posted on by
Reply

Here it is, via Ricochet’s Editors [emphasis in the original]:

Dear Members of the Harvard Community,
It is with a heavy heart but a deep love for Harvard that I write to share that I will be stepping down as president. This is not a decision I came to easily. Indeed, it has been difficult beyond words because I have looked forward to working with so many of you to advance the commitment to academic excellence that has propelled this great university across centuries. But, after consultation with members of the Corporation, it has become clear that it is in the best interests of Harvard for me to resign so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge with a focus on the institution rather than any individual.
It is a singular honor to be a member of this university, which has been my home and my inspiration for most of my professional career. My deep sense of connection to Harvard and its people has made it all the more painful to witness the tensions and divisions that have riven our community in recent months, weakening the bonds of trust and reciprocity that should be our sources of strength and support in times of crisis. Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor—two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am—and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.
I believe in the people of Harvard because I see in you the possibility and the promise of a better future. These last weeks have helped make clear the work we need to do to build that future—to combat bias and hate in all its forms, to create a learning environment in which we respect each other’s dignity and treat one another with compassion, and to affirm our enduring commitment to open inquiry and free expression in the pursuit of truth. I believe we have within us all that we need to heal from this period of tension and division and to emerge stronger. I had hoped with all my heart to lead us on that journey, in partnership with all of you. As I now return to the faculty, and to the scholarship and teaching that are the lifeblood of what we do, I pledge to continue working alongside you to build the community we all deserve.
When I became president, I considered myself particularly blessed by the opportunity to serve people from around the world who saw in my presidency a vision of Harvard that affirmed their sense of belonging—their sense that Harvard welcomes people of talent and promise, from every background imaginable, to learn from and grow with one another. To all of you, please know that those doors remain open, and Harvard will be stronger and better because they do.
As we welcome a new year and a new semester, I hope we can all look forward to brighter days. Sad as I am to be sending this message, my hopes for Harvard remain undimmed. When my brief presidency is remembered, I hope it will be seen as a moment of reawakening to the importance of striving to find our common humanity—and of not allowing rancor and vituperation to undermine the vital process of education. I trust we will all find ways, in this time of intense challenge and controversy, to recommit ourselves to the excellence, the openness, and the independence that are crucial to what our university stands for—and to our capacity to serve the world.
Sincerely,
Claudine Gay

Couple things about this. First and foremost is the letter’s existence. Harvard allowed her to resign, and Harvard is retaining her as a professor. Harvard has not fired her for cause, of which there are two (as I wrote earlier): her dishonesty and her bigotry.

Her bigotry was made blatantly manifest during her testimony late last year before the House Education and the Workforce Committee wherein she refused to condemn the antisemitic bigotry going on at the school over which she was presiding, and which she affirmed in the weeks following with her overt denials that there was anything wrong in her testimony.

Her dishonesty is plainly demonstrated by her plagiarism—and not just that she did it once or twice, an occasion that could be written off as hugely sloppy personal editing, but by the vast frequency with which she engaged in her naked, unattributed copy-pasting.

Then there’s her professional victimhood move in playing that race card—her ouster was fueled by racial animus. I have no doubt that she did get some scurrilous correspondence in response to her own behaviors. However, the thrust of the push to get her out was fueled by her own rank bigotry and disgusting dishonesty, either one of which should have been, and should be, disqualifying for her continued association in any way with Harvard.

And this: there is not a syllable of apology for her misbehaviors that have brought her to this partial pass. There is not a single minim of acknowledgment of her misbehaviors. It’s almost as if the lettered (now ex-) President and still professor is incapable of recognizing bigotry and dishonesty when it’s inside her.

Finally this: it says volumes about the moral failure of the Harvard management team that they have made the conscious decision to retain this paragon of dishonesty, this epitome of bigotry, as a professor, presuming to teach young minds.

What To Do on Getting a New PC?

Posted on by
Reply

Kurt Knutsson offered a checklist for this in a recent Fox News article, and it could be a useful checklist, but for one glaring error (IMNSHO).

That error relates to securing the new PC from hackers. In Knutsson’s checklist, that doesn’t occur until the fourth step. His first step is thereby made the most dangerous thing a new PC/laptop owner can do.

When you first open your new PC, Windows will ask…to connect to your Wi-Fi. Select whatever network you use and input your password. You can then click on “connect automatically” so Windows won’t ask you for a password every time you want to connect to the internet.

Years ago, I bought a new laptop from a major seller, and in short order, it arrived, direct from the seller’s factory in Shanghai, PRC. At the time, in my naivete, I thought that was pretty cool. However, before I connected the laptop to my LAN, much less to the Internet, I swept it with an anti-malware software package that I moved onto it via a thumb drive, something I’d always done heretofore just on GPs. My brand, spanking new, fresh from the factory laptop had come with a factory-installed Trojan malware package. (When I corresponded with the seller about this, that entity showed zero interest in dealing with the matter. I’ve declined to do business with that company since.)

So. Contra Knutsson, it’s a Critical Item that the first thing you do after applying power to your brand new PC/laptop, wherever it was assembled, is to sweep it with your anti-malware package, which you install from a thumb drive (not by any connection to your LAN or to the Internet), and clear out any malware that may already be present. In truth, preinstalled malware is a pretty rare thing, but it would take only one occurrence to infect all of your devices.

Once that sweep-and-clear operation has been done, it would be good to work through Knutsson’s checklist. One further recommendation, though: if the Windows OS (or the Mac OS) allows it, do the computer security settings step next, then install your preferred browser and set up its security/privacy settings. Then do the Windows (Mac) update step, and then proceed through the checklist.

But malware sweep first.

President Plagiarist

Posted on by
Reply

Harvard’s, not the one currently sitting, on occasion, in the White House. Claudine Gay has been caught out again.

Seven of Gay’s 17 published works have already been impacted by the scandal, but the new charges, which have not been previously reported, extend into an eighth: In a 2001 article, Gay lifts nearly half a page of material verbatim from another scholar, David Canon, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin.
That article, The Effect of Minority Districts and Minority Representation on Political Participation in California, includes some of the most extreme and clear-cut cases of plagiarism yet. At one point, Gay borrows four sentences from Canon’s 1999 book, Race, Redistricting, and Representation: The Unintended Consequences of Black Majority Districts, without quotation marks and with only minor semantic tweaks. She does not cite Canon anywhere in or near the passage, though he does appear in the bibliography.

Gay’s…performance…goes downhill from there.

Is it the case that here, too, every word she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the”?

In the end, on Tuesday she resigned as Harvard President. The Harvard management team cravenly allowed her to resign, rather than firing her for cause—of which there were two: her dishonesty and her bigotry. Harvard management, even more cravenly, are keeping her on the professorial payroll. Never mind that she should be fired altogether for cause—of which there are two: her dishonesty and her bigotry.

It’s unfortunate that Harvard continues to employ this person, and her continued employment demonstrates that the school doesn’t care about her dishonesty or her bigotry. From that, Harvard should be disqualified from any further government funding, from any level of government.

Western Battery-Car Adoption Anxiety

Posted on by
Reply

The Wall Street Journal ran an article centered on how “western anxiety about Chinese EVs could prove self-defeating,” with a subheadline that summarized the thesis:

The US and Europe risk slowing electric-vehicle adoption by excluding Chinese suppliers from subsidies and raising tariffs

I have a hard time seeing the downside to slowing battery car adoption. Leave aside the tremendous drain that charging all those battery cars (assuming widespread adoption) would have on our already near or at capacity electric power grid and generating capacity for that grid.

Battery cars are tremendously polluting and damaging to our environment, from dirt in the ground to end-of-life battery disposal. Mining the metals—lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper, and on and on, metals that are used in far greater quantity in battery cars than in gasoline- diesel- or natural gas-powered vehicles—is extremely damaging, both from the toxicity of the metals themselves and from the toxicity of the tailings from the mining operations.

Processing those metals into battery-car-usable components is intensely energy demanding (have I mentioned the strains on anyone’s electricity grid?).

Disposing of those so-far unrecyclable dead batteries at their end of life is enormously polluting as they leach out of even the most well-kept landfills.

The risk is that the West cuts off its nose to spite its face. Slow down the shift to EVs too much to build local supply chains and give domestic manufacturers time to adapt, and Chinese technology might simply pull farther ahead….

Meh.

The technologies involved are useful, they should be pursued apace, and the supply chain problems need to be worked for a host of different reasons. However, it’s a Good Thing that battery cars are not being rapidly incorporated into our transportation systems.

A Karen Sues a Company

Posted on by
Reply

So, what else is new? Not this one; it just happened to catch my eye. A Florida Karen, Cynthia Kelly, is suing Hershey’s over its Reese’s labeling, which Kelly claims is misleading advertising. The image below is the cause of her ire and the center of her (proposed class-action) suit:

She would not have purchased the candy had she known there was not actually ap face carved into the item. Given the image, she plainly expected, also, that there would already be a bite taken out of the item. Why would she buy a candy that had already been partly eaten?

This is the depth of the…foolishness…to which so many Precious Ones and outright lawfare gold diggers have stooped.