The draft for the 1973 season continues at Pete’s league, and as the informal draft puttered on through the week, I got some more good players.
7. OF Cito Gaston
8. OF Tommie Agee
9. P Blue Moon Odom
10. 1B Frank Howard
11. 2B Glenn Beckert
12. RP Dave Sells
Got some pretty good hitters and a solid pitching staff. I think we might could make the playoffs this year. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.
“A man who is not willing to be slandered by the Left is of no use to the Right. It goes without saying, and can be demonstrated from history, that every successful proponent of the conservative cause becomes a target of the Left’s character assassins.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, “First They Came for Mel Bradford”
Meetings of the Mencken Club are so secretive that attendees usually never mention their attendance, lest it make them targets of “cancelation.” You can’t post about this gathering of Thought Criminals on Facebook, because if the the Left finds out where the meeting is being hosted, there will certainly be protests and quite probably vandalism, and good luck booking a hotel ballroom in such a situation.
So I can’t tell you where I had the pleasure of meeting University of Pennsylvania Law Professor Amy Wax over a cup of coffee. She is a petite dynamo of a woman, full of energy, and photos don’t do her justice. Beyond that, I invoke my Miranda “right to remain silent.”
Amy Wax, the tenured law professor who was disciplined by the University of Pennsylvania for making controversial remarks about race and gender, told Penn on Thursday that she will sue the university for race discrimination if it does not drop the sanctions against her, according to a letter from Wax’s lawyers obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. It’s the latest salvo in a nearly three-year-long battle between Wax and the Ivy League school, which announced in September that it was suspending her at half-pay for one year. Penn has until December 19 to “conclusively disavow” those penalties. “Should you fail to do so,” the letter states, “Professor Wax will file suit against the University.”
Because Penn promises its professors academic freedom, the letter argues that the school breached its contract with Wax by punishing her for protected speech. It notes that Penn took no action against professors who spewed anti-Semitic bile after the October 7 attacks. And it uses Penn’s double standard to make a creative legal argument: By punishing speech that offended racial minorities — but not speech that offended Jews — the university engaged in unlawful race discrimination when it singled Wax out for punishment, the letter says.
“The University’s speech policies … transparently discriminate on the basis of race, including most notably the race of the subject of the speech at issue,” the letter reads. “As such, they violate federal law’s various prohibitions against race-based discrimination.” . . .
You can read the whole thing and see if you can find anywhere that Professor Wax said anything untrue. See, that’s the way it is in 21st-century academia — you can tell any lie, as long as it’s a politically correct lie, but there are some truths that no one is permitted to mention, and that’s why Professor Wax got punished. She has refused to budge an inch and now, thanks to Penn’s tolerance for Jew-hating pro-Hamas protesters, she’s got a solid legal case against the administration.
As for where I met her, well, I can’t tell you, because the first rule of Mencken Club is, nobody talks about Mencken Club.
The United Nations human rights chief said Monday that 184 people were killed over the weekend in the Haitian capital, as Port-au-Prince was rocked by a spike in gang violence that pushed the death toll from Haiti’s spiraling security crisis to at least 5,000.
“Just this past weekend, at least 184 people were killed in violence orchestrated by the leader of a powerful gang in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, in the Cite Soleil area,” Volker Turk told reporters in Geneva. “These latest killings bring the death toll just this year in Haiti to a staggering 5,000 people.”
Volker appeared to be referring to a reported massacre carried out by a gang leader in the impoverished Cite Soleil neighborhood who targeted elderly people he suspected of sickening his own child by witchcraft.
The Reuters news agency quoted the National Human Rights Defense Network (RNDDH) as saying on Sunday that Monel “Mikano” Felix, leader of the Wharf Jeremie gang, had ordered the murders in Cite Soleil, and that all the victims of the attack were over 60 years old.
RNDDH said Felix had sought advice from a voodoo priest who told him elderly people in the area had harmed his child, who died on Saturday, leading to members of his gang killing at least 100 people Friday and Saturday with machetes and knives. . . .
Haiti has been gripped by political chaos for years, leaving room for heavily-armed criminal gangs to seize huge swaths of territory in Port-au-Prince and elsewhere. Much of the capital remains lawless despite hundreds of police from Kenya being sent in to help reassert law and order.
International airlines have largely stopped flying in and out of Haiti amid the chaos and bloodshed, with several U.S. carriers halting flights entirely after planes were hit by gunfire in November.
The headline is your “tl:dr” summary of what might otherwise seem mysterious: Why would the handsome young scion of a prominent Maryland family decide to murder the CEO of a health insurance company? Meanwhile, here’s the New York Times story:
Luigi Mangione, the online version of him, was an Ivy League tech enthusiast who flaunted his tanned, chiseled looks in beach photos and party pictures with blue-blazered frat buddies.
He was the valedictorian of a prestigious Baltimore prep school who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Pennsylvania and served as a head counselor at a pre-college program at Stanford University.
With his credentials and connections, he could have ended up one day as an entrepreneur or the chief executive of one of his family’s thriving businesses. Instead, investigators suspect, he took a different path.
The police now believe that Mr. Mangione, 26, is the masked gunman who calmly took out a pistol equipped with a suppressor on a Midtown Manhattan street last week and assassinated Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare. He was arrested in Altoona, Pa., on Monday after an employee at a McDonald’s recognized him and called the police. Officers said they found him with fake identification, a weapon similar to the one seen in video of the killing and a manifesto decrying the health care industry.
Mangione’s grandfather was a successful real estate developer in the suburbs of Baltimore and, apparently, a devout Catholic who sired 10 children and had 37 grandchildren at the time of his death in 2008.
Luigi Mangione was the valedictorian of “the prestigious Gilman School in Baltimore,” an all-boys prep school where the annual tuition is nearly $40,000 and Luigi played several sports including (as the Free Beacon comically notes) soccer. Mangione then studied computer engineering at the University of Pennsylvania (Donald Trump’s alma mater, coincidentally) and after graduating in 2020, “worked as a software engineer at TrueCar,” but was apparently laid off last year when the company cut about 100 employees as part of “restructuring.”
After being laid off, Mangione seemed to start drifting into isolation. He was dealing with a persistent back injury that led to him undergo surgery. While recuperating from that ordeal, Mangione posted a review of Ted Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and Its Future — the manifesto of the Unabomber. “It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless[ly] write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies,” wrote Mangione. “But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.” Mangione said Kaczynski’s “actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary.”
Well, to-may-to, to-mah-to, eh? Is it so difficult to conclude that the “extreme political revolutionary” was also a lunatic? And isn’t it true that most such would-be revolutionaries are lunatics? Not to wander too far afield here, but I am personally acquainted with Richard Spencer, the poster boy for every Antifa “punch-a-Nazi” meme, and it has long been my contention that what went wrong with Spencer basically is that he read Nietzsche at too young an age and took it too seriously. Young men should never read Nietzsche; they should know him only by reputation as a madman who died of brain syphilis. If it’s philosophy they crave, let young men read Aristotle or Marcus Aurelius or Edmund Burke, but never Nietzsche. Once the young man has gotten older, achieved some sort of stable adult life — wife, kids, mortgage, etc. — then it’s safe for him to skim through Nietzsche, so long as he keeps in mind that Nietzsche was crazy. Being quite the autodidact myself, I recognize the basic danger of do-it-yourself education, namely that the untutored student may go off on some bizarre tangent — young man reads Nietzsche, next thing you know, he’s leading a latter-day Nuremberg march — and it seems that some similar process is what happened with Luigi Mangione.
Law enforcement officials that arrested Mangione also discovered a handwritten, three-page document that shed details on his mindset and motivations behind the fatal shooting. “These parasites had it coming,” reportedly read the note, per CNN . “I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done.”
Maybe I should write my own “manifesto.” I’ve already got the title: Crazy People Are Dangerous. Might be a bestseller.
