More on the Bee

Marie Curie won two Nobel Prizes, but let’s keep things in perspective. How many Twitter followers did she have?--Garg

Dinner with the Gordon girls, spouses and Dave and Thomas at an Asian restaurant in Monroeville--really good food.
Two patients in office yesterday brought personal pronoun information.
In their last 18 games, the Pirates have scored an average of 5.5 runs per game. Their record for that 18 games? 6-12.

Sam Wyche had a heart transplant?

This might be interesting. On 30 April 2019, St. Edmunds College, University of Cambridge, rescinded a fellowship to the young researcher Noah Carl, who self-identifies as a conservative, after pressure from leftist groups.

Catholics make up 12% of the population of Ohio and win 70% of high school state championships.

In Greek mythology, King Gordius of Phrygia tied a knot that defied all who tried to untie it. An oracle prophesied that one who would undo this Gordian knot would rule Asia. Alexander the Great simply cut the knot with one stroke of his sword. Hence the saying, "to cut the Gordian knot", meaning to solve a difficult problem by a simple, bold, and effective action.

The half brother of North Korea's Kim Jong Un - who was assassinated in Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia in February 2017, when two women smeared his face with the nerve agent VX - was an informant for the Central Intelligence Agency and met with agency operatives on several occasions, Wall Street Journal reports. 

The countries that have the fewest mass murders and the lowest homicide rates as well are the least ethnically diverse — such as Japan and nearly all European countries. So, too, the American states that have homicide rates as low as Western European countries are the least ethnically and racially diverse (the four lowest are New Hampshire, North Dakota, Maine and Idaho). 

Now that Mr. Trump is using tariffs as an all-purpose weapon, look for others to play the same game. Joe Biden’s climate proposal, released last week, suggests using tariffs against countries that don’t do what he wants on climate change. The danger is that future Presidents will also view tariffs as a diplomatic remedy for whatever ails them. Congress would do well to take back the “emergency” and “national security” blank checks on trade that it has given Presidents over the decades. (wsj)

From Brian: Folks keep talking about another Civil War. One side knows how to shoot and probably has a trillion rounds. The other side has crying closets and is confused about which bathroom to use.
      Now tell me, how do you think that's going to end?

The Energy Department is banning its researchers from joining Chinese talent-recruitment programs after finding personnel were recruited by foreign military-linked programs and lured with multimillion-dollar packages. (wsj)

In 1509, on this day, King Henry VIII of England married Catherine of Aragon.

                    

                                          More on the Bee

Jacoby had an article on the dominance of Indian-Asian kids in spelling bee championships. This is from it:

"The disproportionate success of Indians in world-class competitive spelling ought to elicit only admiration. But there’s no denying that it flies in the face of America’s vast diversity-industrial complex, which endlessly reinforces and endorses a great fallacy: that statistical disparities between racial and ethnic groups are proof of invidious discrimination.

Bigotry and injustice are real, of course, but they have no more to do with the dominance of Indians in spelling competitions than with the dominance of Kenyans in distance running, or of Russians in chess, or of African-Americans in the NBA. Or, for that matter, of men in commercial fishing or women in veterinary medicine, or of any of a thousand-and-one other examples of extreme statistical disparities among categories of people.

“Human beings are not random events,” the renowned scholar Thomas Sowell observes. “Individuals and groups have different histories, cultures, skills, and attitudes.”

What is true of high-stress spelling bees is true of workplaces and investments and college applications and entertainment: People do not randomly sort themselves out by color, background, and sex. Group disparities are not, as a rule, evil. They are normal, the result of a myriad of human choices, preferences, interests, and motivations.

The Scripps “octo-champs” are amazing spellers who worked fantastically hard to achieve something wonderful. True, they aren’t a diverse amalgam of races, colors, and ethnicities. Who cares?"

Such disparities are not like the random, hard to fathom "clustering" phenomena that you see in sampling--like the "Love Canal" disease rates. They are, in fact, not disparities at all. They are the norm. They are the expression of what we are like. 

That said, the article stimulated this letter:

I was offended by Jeff Jacoby’s column on the seven young spelling champions of Indian descent (“Diversity and the spelling ‘octo-champs,’ ” Opinion, June 4). He twisted their success into a weapon to tout “meritocracy” and bash affirmative action and diversity-promoting programs. If I were one of those young champions, I would resent his co-opting my achievement to advance his mean-spirited social theories. In fact I am a former champion, and I do resent it.

Henry Feldman

Newton

The writer was the 1960 Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee champion.

 "I would resent his co-opting my achievement to advance his mean-spirited social theories." I must admit, I do not know what to make of that.