13 December—Everyone needs a pathologist pal.

Bad news first. But not unexpected. Gov. Ned Lamont has just—by executive order, although his General Assembly would surely back him on it—created the Connecticut Office of Equity and Opportunity. What Ned means, of course, is the Connecticut Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. That’s the latest fashionable iteration of affirmative action.

You’ll recall that the U.S. Supreme Court quite rightly struck down affirmative action in universities last year and that more and more states are legislating against that insidious form of racist discrimination that’s supposed to assuage the innate guilt of white liberals and that major corporations are cutting their DEI bureaucracies because they’re useless and wasteful.

Last year Elon Musk put it succinctly: “DEI must DIE.” He called diversity, equity, and inclusion “propaganda words for racism, sexism, and other -isms.” When Musk is right, he’s right.

But Ned Lamont is paying the person he’s hired to run his Office of Racism, Sexism, and Other -Isms a starting salary of $175,000 of taxpayer money. And who knows how much of our tax money will be wasted to staff that farcical bureaucracy?

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Now for the good news. Today is National Violin Day. So here’s a particularly beautiful violin selection (with piano accompaniment). It’s part of the Romance from Dmitri Shostakovich’s score for the very popular 1955 Russian movie Овод” (“Ovod”), better known to us as “The Gadfly,” about an English spy in 1840s Italy.

Some readers may recall it as the haunting theme music from the 80s miniseries “Sidney Reilly, Ace of Spies,” about a Russian-born spy working for the Brits in Soviet Russia. A little trivia: It’s possible that Sidney Reilly, who may have been born Gyorgy or George Rosenblum, in 1895 had it off with Ethel Voynich, the Irish novelist who wrote “The Gadfly” in 1897.

Sidney Reilly was liquidated by the reds in 1925 at 51 and Ethel Voynich died of natural causes in New York in 1960 at 96.

Here’s Shostakovich’s beautiful Romance: