The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

In The Mailbox: 03.15.23 (Morning Edition)

Posted on | March 15, 2023 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 03.15.23 (Morning Edition)

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Happy Pi Day! Not too late to run out and grab a slice. Delayed until this morning thanks to carb overload on Pi Day.
Silicon Valley delenda est.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: 3.14 = Pi Day, Also Albert Einstein’s Birthday
EBL: Next Exit, Gavin Strangelove Bombs The US Economy, and Donald J. Trump & The J6 Prison Choir
Twitchy: Tucker Carlson Masterfully Trolls The Left With New Twitter Bio, Rep. Anna Eskamani (D-FL) – “You’re Killing Our Trans Babies!”, and Here’s A Clip Of A Bison Calf Coming Out As Nonbinary In A Cartoon For Preschoolers
Louder With Crowder: ‘I’ll f*** a b*** up’: Avril Lavigne chucks topless protester off stage at award show, Whoopi Goldberg lashes out at her own audience for laughing at a joke about Pete Buttigieg, and Legend pranks school Board with explicit fake names, clueless official doesn’t realize what he’s saying
Vox Popoli: The SVB Death List, Systemic Risk Exception, The Internet is Forever, Shut Down Those Free Markets, and Anacyclosis in Action
Stoic Observations: The Washington Outsider

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: It’s got all the Fruit
American Conservative: The Gathering Storm
American Greatness: A ‘Spill’ of FBI Secrets, also, Silicon Valley Bank Doubled Down on Far-Left Policies Despite Hundreds of Millions in Losses
American Thinker: Failing Accountability Leads to Chaos, The Looming Reckoning for COVID Tyrants, and Where Is the American Church in All This?
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily 2024 News
Babalu Blog: Venezuela sends 1.53 million barrels of oil to Cuba on tanker blacklisted by the U.S., Scientist who investigated ‘Havana Syndrome’ says U.S. intelligence report is ‘bullsh*t’, Inflation in Cuba more about hunger than economics, and Gay anti-communist activists in Spain put a skirt and lipstick on Che Guevara bust in Madrid
BattleSwarm: Oopsie! Russian Su-27 Crashes into U.S. Drone over Black Sea, also, Huge Brawl At Social Justice Warrior Middle School
Behind The Black: Space startups get their SVB assets back when Feds move in, SpaceX launches cargo Dragon to ISS, A Martian crater, ice, and dust devil tracks, and Today’s blacklisted American: Eventbrite routinely blacklists conservative events
Cafe Hayek: Trade Is Amazing: It Empowers Us to Turn Almost Anything Into Almost Anything Else
CDR Salamander: The Three Wounds of our Amphibious Navy
Da Tech Guy: I Declare March 18th “Hurray We’re Not Dead Day” Since Greta doesn’t want to celebrate our Unexpected Survival, The bailout hustle, and As the Banks Come Tumbling Down
Don Surber: Biden Killed SVB – We’re Next
First Street Journal: Trying too hard?
Gates Of Vienna: Presearching COVID-19, Giorgia Meloni Cracks Down on Migrant Traffickers, Culture-Enriching Doctor-Killer Walks Free in Emmendingen, and Belgium Throws Wide the Gates for Palestinian “Refugees”
The Geller Report: HARDER! FASTER! Facebook Fires 10,000 Employees as Woke Goes Broke, also, BUSTED AND BANKRUPT – WOKE Signature Bank Called For Trump’s Resignation, Closed His Accounts
Glenn Reynolds: Losing My Religion?
Hogewash: A Jellyfish in a Monster, Math is Hard, and Team Kimberlin Post of the Day
Hollywood In Toto: Will Upcoming Orwell Doc Miss Entire Point of 1984?, Is Paramount Feuding with William Shatner?, and Did the Oscars FINALLY Get the Message?
The Lid: Calm Down! There Was No ‘Noose’ – Another Fake ‘Hate Crime’ Busted in California
Legal Insurrection: The Stanford Law School Culture, Not The Diversity Dean, Is The Problem (but I repeat myself), Diversity Director Claims College Fired Her for Questioning Anti-Racism Policies, Kamala Harris Reportedly Snubbing Elizabeth Warren Over Recent Comments Questioning Her as VP in 2024, North Korean Defector Yeonmi Park Says “Universities Must Change Course ‘While Time Remains’”, and Straining Credulity, Dr. Fauci Asserts Covid Lab Leak Could Still be Considered a ‘Natural Occurrence’
Nebraska Energy Observer: Ephesians 6:12, also, A Few Things
Outkick: ESPN’s Mike Greenberg Is Acting Like A Desperate Fanboy Waiting On An Aaron Rodgers To The Jets Announcement, Andrew Bogut Asks Girl Dads ‘Where Are You’ As A Transgender Player Is Expected To Be Allowed Into Australian Women’s Basketball League, Lamar Jackson Calls Out ESPN’s Adam Schefter, Says Ravens Offered Him $133 Million Guaranteed For Three Years, Tee Higgins, Ja’Marr Chase Party On Boat with Bikini-Clad Women, and NBA Veteran Blames Rap Music, Bad Parenting For Ja Morant’s Behavior
Power Line: Feeding Our Future fraud goes to the laundromat, Carve ‘Em Up? Voters Say No Way, and Trump Is Rattled
Shark Tank:  DeSantis Administration Files Complaint Against Hotel For Hosting Sexualized Drag Show With Minors Present
Shot In The Dark: Unsafe Space, also, Contempt
The Political Hat: Sensitivity Readers And The Memory Holing Of Ghost Stories and Fairy Tales
This Ain’t Hell: Encouraging news from Islam, Soldier Accounted For From Korean War, and Tuesday with the Libs of Tik Tok
Transterrestrial Musings: Who Is Running America?
Victory Girls: Stanford Student Tantrums Continue
Volokh Conspiracy: Beauty Pageants Have First Amendment Right to Limit Contestants to “Natural Born Females”: No Rehearing En Banc
Watts Up With That: Power Transformer Shortage is Wreaking Havoc in the U.S.
Weasel Zippers: Pelosi: We Must Work With China “To Save The Planet From Climate Change”, also, Biden: It’s “Close To Sinful” For States To Stand Between Kids And Trans-Activist Doctors 
The Federalist: Why NewsGuard Is Just As Bad As The Pro-Censorship Global Disinformation Index, Biden Is Trying To Have It Both Ways On Arctic Drilling, ‘Christian Nationalism’ Isn’t Cultural Coercion, It’s A Moral Imperative, What The Media Did To America Is Far Worse Than The Pandemic Ever Was, and Why The Woke Mob Came For Final Fantasy
Mark Steyn: Britain, Brexit and Betrayal, also, The Mark Steyn Show – live Monday to Thur…okay, Wednesday, at least

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Category: Linkagery

Antifa State University: Charlie Kirk Sparks ‘Mostly Peaceful’ Riot at UC-Davis

Posted on | March 15, 2023 | 1 Comment

I just met you and this is crazy:
Charlie Kirk is a proponent of hate.
Call me maybe.

Or something like that. Could anything be more insane than the belief that Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk is some sort of right-wing extremist? He’s basically an Eisenhower Republican, definitely less conservative than, say, Ace of Spades, but reality doesn’t matter to California kids who have been taught that disagreement is “hate”:

Left-wing and LGBTQ activists at UC Davis were arrested after vandalizing university property on Tuesday during an event featuring Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. The incident came just hours after UC Davis chancellor Gary S. May declared Kirk a “proponent of hate” and encouraged students to “neutralize and negate” TPUSA’s influence on campus.
Protestors carrying banners that read, “Queers Bash Back,” and, “Bash Fash,” were seen on video smashing glass windows while police officers tried to fend them off.
Additional footage showed police outside taking down masked protesters who appeared to be carrying spray paint cans.
Police also clashed with banner-wielding protesters who were chanting, “fight back!” as they tried to advance toward the building where the Turning Point USA event was being held.
A UC Davis campus police spokesperson told Breitbart News that “two people were arrested after spray painting the outside of the building.”
“I’m not sure what the exact charges are, but that’s what they were doing,” the spokesperson said.
The police spokesperson added that he did not have information on the identities of the individuals who were arrested and that, so far, no arrests have been made in connection to the smashed glass windows on the university’s campus doors.
The left-wing and LGBTQ activists were also seen carrying banners that read, “Protect Trans Kids,” and, “Fascists Off Campus.”

What a bizarre worldview: Men can be women, and vice-versa, and if you don’t agree, that makes you a “fascist.” And the chancellor of the university evidently shares these beliefs!

“Under UC policy, campuses may not prohibit student organizations, such as TPUSA, from inviting these speakers, even if the speaker’s intended speech is as loathsome and hurtful to me and to others in our campus community,” May said.
The chancellor also addressed alleged concerns related to “violence,” adding that while US Davis is allowed to deny a speaker if they “present a clear and present danger to the campus,” the school “carries a heavy burden in justifying such a denial under these circumstances.”
“While I abhor the inflammatory speech of this speaker, UC policy permits the student organization to invite the speaker,” May said, adding that university officials are “monitoring the event closely to determine if a threat or incitement develops that meets that threshold or violates other campus policies.”
“We can’t control how these groups operate, but we can work together to neutralize and negate their influence,” the chancellor added.

Once you start kowtowing to these precious darlings with their pronouns and whatnot, you’re basically inviting anarchy and chaos because their entire existence is based on being offended by everything.

When I was in college, my entire existence was based on getting drunk and trying to get laid. Life made more sense then, and nobody ever rioted.



 

 

Category: Education, Gays

Walrus Hunters Rescued in Canada

Posted on | March 15, 2023 | Comments Off on Walrus Hunters Rescued in Canada

Not all heroes wear capes

When my wife told me this story, which sounds like it was written by Jack London, I could scarcely believe it, but now I’ve seen the pictures and watched the video — screencap above — and can confirm that it actually happened. Three hunters from the Inuit village of Igloolik had gone out Saturday in a small boat to hunt walrus. The temperature was four below zero — excellent walrus-hunting weather, if you’re an Inuit, I reckon.

So they found a walrus and shot it three times, and were preparing to harpoon it, when the wounded beast rammed their boat, tipping it over. The three hunters managed to climb on top of the capsized boat, but their prospects for survival were not good. Did I mention it was four degrees below zero? “The only thing I thought was, we’re going to die,” hunter Joey Sarpinak told CBC News. They were able to transmit a distress signal, and a volunteer rescue team was mobilized.

It so happened (because of the “truth is stranger than Jack London fiction” nature of this story) that a Canadian military team was nearby, engaged in an arctic survival training exercise, and these soldiers joined the rescue operation. Among the Canadians, for some reason, was an American whose parents have been sternly warned not to say anything about where their son has been for the past several weeks, because “operational security” or whatever. Anyway . . .

To reach the rescue team, the three hunters had to crawl across a moving ice floe to the place where the rescuers were waiting to throw them a rope. There is a video clip of the rescue operation and, 27 seconds into the video, you might notice one member of the rescue team strip off his parka and gloves. As he later explained to his mother, he was prepared to dive into the freezing water, to swim out to the ice floe, if necessary to save the hunters. Did I mention it was four below zero?

Fortunately, the hunters were able to reach the rope and were rescued without any further Jack London-scripted heroics, thank God.

After the walrus hunters had been treated and released from the hospital, a celebration event was held in the town of Sanirajak (Hall Beach), where the hunters posed with the troops who helped rescue them.

One of these soldiers is not Canadian

From the story of the rescue in Nunatsiaq News:

The search and rescue members who helped the three hunters are currently training on the land and could not be reached for comment, said Maj. Trevor Reid, a public affairs officer at the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre in Trenton, Ont.

“Could not be reached for comment,” indeed.

But you could quote this comment: Rangers Lead the Way.



 

 

Category: Family, Military

In The Mailbox: 03.13.23

Posted on | March 14, 2023 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 03.13.23

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.

Marcellus Wallace has thoughts about the current state of affairs.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: The NYPD Exodus Continues
EBL: Depraved Hollywood: Brendan Fraser Accused Hollywood Executive Philip Berk of Rape, Biden Bank Runs: Biden Isn’t Jimmy Stewart and Yellen Isn’t Donna Reed, Banks Go Bust, but Barney is there for Biden, and Gertrude Bell and the 1921 Cairo Confrence
Twitchy: News Anchor Calls Out Mayoral Candidate For Calling 911 On Homeless Addict Pooping In Park, also, State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-CA) Opposes Teachers Ratting Out “Trans” Kids To “Violent” Parents
Louder With Crowder: Gov. Whitmer (D-MI) Admits  Banning Gardening to Fight Covid Didn’t Make Any Sense – Three Years Later, Dad turns himself in for murder after “finishing off” sex offender with moose antlers, and Trolling dad identifies as “Female Julius Caesar” at a school board meeting and hilarity ensues
Vox Popoli: Bösenschadenfreude, Onward to Valhalla, Knock-On Effects, The Persecution of Ricky Vaughn, and It Was Never About the Trinity
Gab News: The Christian Nationalist Counteroffensive Has Begun

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: The Great Fast
American Conservative: The Gray Lady Hits the Wall, Why Jacob Chansley Matters, and Das Boot
American Greatness: The March Madness of the President, Joe Biden – Thanks to My Administration ‘the Banking System is Safe’, and So Much for Transparency
American Thinker: If We’re Doing Reparations, Here’s Who Should Pay Them, Pathocracy and the Liberal Mind, and This Great Stage of Fools
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
Babalu Blog: Pope Francis denounces Ortega’s Nicaraguan dictatorship as ‘vile,’ ‘deranged,’ ‘obscene,’ ‘Hitleresque,’ and ‘Bolshevik’, Meet the two Republican sponsors of legislation to allow Cuba to buy American goods on credit, Reports from Cuba: A desperate Cuban regime hopes to soften up the U.S. through Vatican mediation, Ay, Dios mio! Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega severs diplomatic relations with the Vatican, and Florida State Senators call attention to 20 alleged Cuban State Security agents now living in Florida
BattleSwarm: SVB – “An Extinction Event For Startups”, also, Why Silvergate Failed
Behind The Black: Endurance undocks from ISS with four-person crew, Some space startups threatened by Silicon Valley Bank failure, Russia and Red China launch satellites, Curiosity looks ahead: Which way to go?, and The sad state of free speech in America illustrated by three top universities
Cafe Hayek: Taxing An Intelligent Person’s Patience, also, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: “Ford’s pay hike: It wasn’t about [having his workers buy his cars]”
CDR Salamander: Spring Back to the Front of the NATSEC World on Midrats, also, Money Talks: the UK Edition
Chicago Boyz: Traute Lafrenz, Last of the White Rose
Da Tech Guy: Five Depressing one Liners, Family doesn’t cancel you, Review: Van Morrison’s Moving on Skiffle, and Reverse Missionaries in Action
Don Surber: Go Woke, Go Broke, Have The Fed Bail You Out,
First Street Journal: Journolists don’t like real journalism, also, In which the credentialed media unwittingly destroy the transgender ideology
Gates Of Vienna: Requiem for a Culture, Part 5: The Graves of the Ancestors, Getting Soaked to Save the Planet, Nitrogen Crisis + Asylum Crisis = Cabinet Crisis, and Nice Little Country You Got There, Hungary
The Geller Report: Top Democrat On J6 Committee Admits They Actually Didn’t Review Any Of The Surveillance Video, also, Dutch Government Sends in Military to Quash MASSIVE FREEDOM DEMOS Led by Farmers
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of the Day, The Fireworks Galaxy, and The Rumors of My Death
Hollywood In Toto: Shrinking Serves Up Perfectly Woke Storytelling, Tim Pool Threatens Suit Against Bandcamp for Unchecked Censorship, and Rob Schneider Blasts Democrats’ ‘1950s McCarthyism’
The Lid: Dems Soil Their Undies As House GOP Subpoenas Banking Records Of Hunter And Friends, US & Mexican Riot Police Hold Back Thousand Migrants Trying To Bum-Rush El Paso Bridge, and House GOP to Make Major Visit to J6 Defendants
Legal Insurrection: University of Minnesota Wants $97.5 Million From the State Due to Tuition Shortfall, Philadelphia Parents Object to Lottery System Meant to Diversify Top High Schools, Conservative Female Authors Attacked by Protesters at Book Launch Event, Manufacturers, Customers Lash Out at Biden’s ‘Climate Friendly’ Washing Machine Regulations, and LA Times Writer Slammed for Racist Claims that White Drivers are ‘Polluting the Air’ of ‘People of Color’
Nebraska Energy Observer:  Do you? Can you?, also, Saturday – just for you
Outkick: Lilia Schneider Celebrates Her Birthday In A Bikini, Two-Time Best Legs In Golf Winner Sam Stockton Stops By & An All-Time Baseball Mustache, ECHL Netminders Get The Crowd Going With Thrilling Goalie FIght, Tyreek Hill Just Embarrassed The Field At USA Track & Field Indoor Championships With A 6.70 60M, Someone Climbed A Mountain At A Ski Resort In Alaska To Draw A Giant Penis In The Snow, and Umpire Who Went Viral For Awful Strike Three Game-Ending Call Suspended Indefinitely
Power Line: Biden administration’s profligate spending claims another victim, more will follow, A Wake-Up for Woke Banks?, Bud Grant, RIP,  and Judge Duncan comments
Shark Tank: Rep, Cory Mills (R-FL) Says “Not One Dime Of Taxpayer Money For Bailouts”
Shot In The Dark: Things I Dream About, also, Priorities
The Political Hat: Iowa vs. DEI in Higher Education
This Ain’t Hell: Top DoD doc wants gun info, Disabled veteran says Charlotte restaurant didn’t allow service dog inside, No One Cares, and Public nuisance laws as a Trojan Horse against guns
Transterrestrial Musings: The Department Of Homeland Insecurity, It’s Dead, Jim, The Fiasco At Stanford Law, and A Life-Extension Breakthrough
Victory Girls: Fauci Has No Idea Why People Are Mad At Him, “Close To Sinful” Transgender Laws Per Biden, and Anti-Drag Queen NY Councilwoman Vickie Paladino Booted
Volokh Conspiracy: Is The DEI Juice Worth The Squeeze?, also, Stanford President and Stanford Law School Dean Apologize to Judge Kyle Duncan
Watts Up With That: Climate Act Cap and Invest Program Numbers Do Not Add Up, Was the Silicon Valley Bank Collapse Caused by Climate Activism?, Biden’s Secretary of Energy say’s U.S. can “learn” from Red China on Climate Change, and The Economic Case for Net Zero Is Zero
Weasel Zippers: Biden Blames Bank Failure On Trump, Dem Rep. Eric Swalwell: “We Need To Take A Look At How” Fox News Is “Broadcast To Our Troops”, Dem Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee: “Devilish” To Move Away From Prioritizing “Diversity” In Hiring, and Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-FL) Gives Mexican Cartels A Pass, Says Drugs “Mostly Carried In By Americans”
The Federalist: Media Slander GOP States As ‘Conspiracy Theorists’ For Rejecting Voter Database That Compels Pro-Democrat Outreach, Rise Of The Fourth Reich Makes The Case For The Covid Reckoning America Desperately Needs, If The Dutch Government Thought Its Farmers Would Submit To Environmental Statism Easily, It Was Wrong, NewsGuard Claims Not To Be Government-Funded, But A $750K Grant Suggests Otherwise, and WaPo Confused Why It’s Wrong For Catholic Priests To Use Hookup Apps
Mark Steyn: Tal Bachman – Dear Old Testament God, Maybe It’s Time For A Comeback Tour, Begin the Beguine, and The Oscar – Triumph of the Heel

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Category: Linkagery

Urgent Breaking News: SNL Is … Funny?

Posted on | March 13, 2023 | Comments Off on Urgent Breaking News: SNL Is … Funny?

Of all the important events happening in the world recently — bank failures, war in Ukraine, whatever — nothing is more shocking than this: Saturday Night Live actually did something funny this week.

What’s it been, 15 years? Just about the time Obama became president, the writers at SNL lost the ability to do satire. This was not a coincidence, of course, if you’ve followed the decline of late-night comedy with Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Fallon and all the other liberal “comedians” who now think they’re MSNBC pundits or something.

But amid the general decline, it’s important to notice when they actually do something funny, and this one’s an instant classic.

“Freebird gotta fly, son.”



 

 

Category: humor

Bailouts and Bulls***: Fed Officials Claim ‘No Cost to Taxpayers’ in SVB Deal

Posted on | March 13, 2023 | Comments Off on Bailouts and Bulls***: Fed Officials Claim ‘No Cost to Taxpayers’ in SVB Deal

Less than 72 hours ago, Janet Yellen was saying there wouldn’t be a bailout of Silicon Valley Bank. Now there is a bailout, which everybody is nevertheless trying to pretend is not a bailout:

U.S. regulators took control of a second bank Sunday and raced to roll out emergency measures to stem potential spillovers from Friday’s swift collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, backstopping both firms’ uninsured depositors and making more funding available to the banking system.
Regulators announced Signature Bank, one of the main banks for cryptocurrency companies, was closed Sunday. The New York bank’s depositors will be made whole, officials said.
Officials took the extraordinary step of designating SVB and Signature Bank as a systemic risk to the financial system, which gives regulators flexibility to guarantee uninsured deposits. The Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department also used emergency lending authorities to establish a new facility to help meet demands for withdrawals.
Regulators announced the action in a joint statement from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Fed Chair Jerome Powell and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chair Martin Gruenberg. The group said that depositors at SVB will have access to all of their money on Monday.
The government’s bank-deposit insurance fund will cover all deposits at the two banks, rather than the standard $250,000. Federal regulators said any losses to the government’s fund would be recovered in a special assessment on banks and that the U.S. taxpayers wouldn’t bear any losses.
In a separate statement Sunday night, the Fed said it “is closely monitoring conditions across the financial system and is prepared to use its full range of tools to support households and businesses, and will take additional steps as appropriate.”
The central bank said it would make additional funding available to banks to ensure they have “the ability to meet the needs of all depositors” through a new “Bank Term Funding Program,” which will offer loans of up to one year to banks that pledge U.S. Treasury securities, mortgage-backed securities and other collateral. Up to $25 billion from the Treasury’s exchange-stabilization fund will backstop the Fed lending program.
Many of those securities have fallen in value as the Fed has raised interest rates, and the Fed said those securities would be valued at their original value.
Sunday evening’s announcement capped a frantic weekend during which regulators were auctioning the failed Silicon Valley Bank, according to people familiar with the matter. Regulators struggled to find a buyer on Sunday and pivoted to backstopping the deposits, according to a senior Treasury official, as they sought to announce a resolution to depositors by Monday morning.
Mr. Powell scrapped plans to attend a regular meeting of central bankers in Basel, Switzerland, on Sunday and instead stayed in Washington to manage the crisis response.
A U.S. plan that soothes nerves about access to uninsured deposits—most of the bank’s deposits are sizable enough that they exceeded limits on FDIC protection—could tamp down the crisis and limit any impact on the economy as the Fed has focused on combating inflation by raising interest rates.
At the same time, heavy-handed federal interventions could amount to an embarrassing coda for a rollback of post-financial-crisis regulations on small and midsize banks undertaken in recent years. Officials on Sunday signaled they were weighing tougher capital requirements and liquidity rules, reversing at least some of the steps taken during the Trump administration to ease restrictions on smaller banks.
Federal regulators are trying to balance their desire to prevent broader financial contagion while avoiding the damaging political optics of bailing out financial institutions at taxpayer expense.
Biden administration officials said repeatedly on Sunday that their moves were aimed at protecting depositors, allowing them to make payroll this week, and would come at no cost to taxpayers.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) Biden officials act like it’s all Monopoly money anyway, so why should anyone else take it seriously? This whole regime of no consequences and no accountability, where the politically connected are protected, obviously cannot go on forever.

William Devane could not be reached for comment.



 

 

Category: Economics

Late Night With Rule 5 Sunday: Olivia Thirlby

Posted on | March 13, 2023 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

New York native Olivia Thirlby has a fairly extensive filmography and has also appeared on stage as well as in several TV shows, but she is probably best known for her role in the 2012 remake of Dredd, where she plays Judge Cassandra Anderson, a rookie assigned to the title character for evaluation after narrowly failing the examination, since she has telepathic powers the Chief Judge thinks may be useful. In fact, her powers come in very handy as she and Dredd fight their way through a megablock to take down drug lord Ma-Ma (Lena Headley, who as we all know went on to play an even more ruthless character in Game of Thrones). Here we see Judge Anderson in a scene that does NOT appear in the movie.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

Rookie, you’re out of uniform.

NINETY MILES FROM TYRANNY: Hot Pick of the Late Night, The Ninety Miles Mystery Box Episode #2015, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns.

ANIMAL MAGNETISM: Rule 5 Civil War Friday, and the Saturday Gingermageddon. 

EBL: MAGA – Silicon Valley Bank Run, Fiddler On The Roof, Women Talking, Poker Face, Triangle Of Sadness, Tar, M3gan, The Death Of Stalin, and Broken City. 

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: Chiara Ferragni, Fish Pic Friday – Kendal Traiser, When Cougars Attack!, The Megalodon Reel, The Wednesday Wetness, Tuesday Tanlines, Gone Fishin’, The Monday Morning Stimulus, Cache of Assault Weapons Discovered, Palm Sunday, Sure, Take the Last One and Iconoclasts Come for Marilyn Monroe

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious links!

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Category: Rule 5

Freddie deBoer, ‘Elite Overproduction’ and the Inevitability of Competition

Posted on | March 12, 2023 | Comments Off on Freddie deBoer, ‘Elite Overproduction’ and the Inevitability of Competition

Is Freddie deBoer part of the ‘elite’?

One aspect of my personality that most people don’t usually “get” is that I am intensely competitive by nature. The reason this trait is invisible is because, over the years, I found it advantageous to conceal it. “Never let ’em see you sweat” was my philosophy, and I made a point of appearing jocular, happy-go-lucky, a clownish scatterbrain whose success was mysterious because I didn’t even seem to be trying to succeed.

This posture of fake humility (because I am, in point of fact, arrogant as all hell) was modeled after a TV character, Detective Columbo.

With his rumpled overcoat, unkempt hair, ever-present cigar and low-energy vibe, Detective Columbo did not seem like a crime-solving genius. He didn’t seem to be interrogating suspects. He was just asking questions, many of which seemed irrelevant to the murder case under investigation, and the villain would think he was going to get away with his crime up until the point where — at the end of the interview, as Columbo was about to leave — he’d say, “Just one more thing . . .”

This is what’s known in card games as “sandbagging,” underbidding your hand, luring the opponent into error with the illusion of easy victory.

What you learn from watching Detective Columbo is the value of being underestimated in any competitive situation. If you’re really good at what you do, there’s no need to brag and boast in an effort to impress people with how good you are — your work will speak for itself. And your success will be all the more enjoyable because people will be surprised when you succeed: “How did this bumbling slob of a policeman manage to solve the murder?” Meanwhile, amongst the intelligentsia . ..

“Why So Many Elites Feel Like Losers” is the title of a recent essay by Freddie deBoer, who ponders the roots of an odd resentment:

The concept of “elite overproduction” has attracted a lot of attention in the past several years, and it’s not hard to see why. Most associated with Peter Turchin, a researcher who has attempted to develop models that describe and predict the flow of history, elite overproduction refers to periods during which societies generate more members of elite classes than the society can grant elite privileges. Turchin argues that these periods often produce social unrest, as the resentful elites jostle for the advantages to which they believe they’re entitled.

The key word here is “entitled.” What is involved in such an attitude of entitlement has to do with background, ambition and expectations. Most students at elite universities come from affluent backgrounds. Their parents are usually college-educated professionals, and the offspring of such families are expected to follow a similar career trajectory,  to emulate and hopefully exceed their own parents’ success. Highly intelligent, they are recognized as top students at an early age, chosen for “gifted” classes in elementary school, put onto the academic fast-track of honors classes in high school, and steered toward highly selective universities — the Ivy League, Northwestern, Stanford, etc. — where merely being admitted to the freshman class is a prestigious honor.

These youth are repeatedly told by their parents and teachers, like the chorus in Greek tragedy, that there is no limit to their future achievements. Nothing is beyond their reach, they are assured, and their experience of scholastic achievement — valedictorian, admitted to a very selective university — gives them no reason to doubt this prophesy of success. Their ambition is boundless. They expect to win.

Well, the freshman class at Harvard is nearly 2,000 kids, and the freshman class at Yale is over 1,500, and there simply aren’t enough chairs at the table of Ivy League greatness to accommodate every clever freshman who wants a seat. It is proverbial that the hardest part of graduating from Harvard is getting admitted to Harvard — well over 95% of freshmen eventually get their diploma — but then what? Harvard, Yale, Duke, NYU — go on down the list of elite universities, total up their graduating classes, and you realize that the top 20 schools are cranking out something over 30,000 “elite” graduates every year. Some of them are trained in fields like engineering or banking where their degrees will automatically qualify them for lucrative employment, but what will become of the liberal arts majors? A degree in English literature from Yale is a more prestigious credential than a similar diploma from a second-tier state university, but it’s still not a coupon that can be automatically redeemed for a big house and a new car.

Elite graduates have won a series of academic competitions — for top grades in high school, then for admission to top universities — which are supposed to qualify them for success, but the competition that actually matters doesn’t begin until after you get your diploma and go out into that terra incognita that undergrads call “the Real World.”

This is where the problem of “elite overproduction” becomes apparent. Every competition produces winners and losers, and many of the people we may think of as winners in the game of life are actually haunted by feelings of disappointment. They haven’t achieved as much as they hoped to achieve in their youth, or their success has been overshadowed by the even greater achievements of their former classmates, or their own success just isn’t as emotionally satisfying as they might wish.

Let’s grab some more from Freddie deBoer:

Elite overproduction has been on my mind because of a condition that, I find, grows more acute over time: the sense that many people, particularly the college-educated and the financially secure, are deeply unsatisfied with their status in society. It’s impossible to quantify these feelings, but I think many would agree with me about a pervasive sense of discontent among people who have elite aspirations and who feel that their years toiling in our meritocratic systems entitles them to fulfill those aspirations. Recent political upheaval has given voice to this unhappiness. I personally am a supporter of a new economic system and the socialist movements that began with Occupy Wall Street. But I also recognize the influence of elite overproduction in those movements; an essential part of their genesis was when graduates of top colleges found themselves unable to get the jobs they thought they deserved after the financial crisis. That anger has only spread and intensified since.

My son Jim was a teenager working construction jobs in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, and found his services in demand, as banks had repossessed a lot of houses that they wanted to re-sell. Jim worked for a contractor whose specialty was doing the kind of renovations that helped make these houses more marketable — upgrading the kitchen and bathrooms, installing new floors, etc. So while “graduates of top colleges” were rioting because they couldn’t “get the jobs they thought they deserved,” my son with a high school diploma was getting overtime hours rehabbing the houses that those college graduates couldn’t afford to buy. The irony is delicious, but the key point is about expectations — people with prestigious degrees expect certain things, and believe they deserve to have what they expect, and this is the source of the “discontent” to which deBoer refers. His observations about the political influence of such discontent are related to what Eric Hoffer observed in The True Believer in the section about “potential converts” to mass movements:

The permanent misfits are those who because of a lack of talent or some irreparable defect in mind or body cannot do the one thing for which their whole being craves. No achievement, however spectacular, in other fields can give them a sense of fulfillment. . . .
The most incurably frustrated — and, therefore, the most vehement — among the permanent misfits are those with an unfulfilled craving for creative work.

This is precisely the group upon which deBoer focuses in his essay:

Creative employment is uniquely valued in our culture, and I have noted an ambient anger about who gets to be a part of it. As someone who’s able to make a comfortable living as a writer, I often come into contact with people who are resentful that they haven’t been afforded the same opportunity. (I try to remind them that, under capitalism, success does not spring simplistically from talent and work ethic.) This resentment also exists in film, television, music… There have never been more people trying to make it professionally through the creation of art and culture, but success remains as elusive as ever.
On one hand, the 21st century would seem to be a strange time for people to feel artistically unfulfilled. After all, never in the history of the world has the capacity to create and reach an audience been more readily or cheaply available. The tools and platforms available for creative expression are vast, varied, and largely free to use. Many of those platforms are home to large audiences. . . .

Think about this. If you’re a musician, there are so many tools available now to help you produce quality recordings at home, and it is so easy to upload your music to Spotify, to create videos and upload them to YouTube, that there can be no excuse for your lack of success. You can no longer say, as frustrated musicians used to do, that you got mishandled by management or screwed over by your recording label. In the 21st-century music world, success is entirely up to you, and this fact only adds to the resentment felt by people who end up as losers in the competition.

What accounts for the self-inflicted misery of the “elites” is their sense of entitlement, the belief that they deserve success and happiness, the expectation that they should win every game they choose to play, which in turn leads them into an envious resentment of anyone who possesses anything that they covet. Think of the absurdity in the fact that Freddie deBoer is an object of envy to his would-be “writer” acquaintances.

It’s not like Freddie is sitting in the lap of luxury, feted at cocktail soirees, flying off to Aspen or Paris to speak at swanky conferences. He has merely found a niche that affords him what he considers a “comfortable living” as an essayist and — as I’m sure he is aware, although his envious acquaintances might not have figured it out — it took him years of patient toil to reach that level of comfort. Fifteen years ago, his living was not nearly so “comfortable,” as he was a mere spare-time blogger with a day job teaching school, but he stuck with it long enough to accumulate a substantial readership, which he was then able to monetize when Substack became a thing. He is the Detective Columbo of political/culture essayists, you might say, a rumpled-coat writer who “won” the competition by dogged determination. “Just one more thing . . .”

What accounts for the spoiled-child tantrums of so many of these “elite” types? The shouting-down of Judge Kyle Duncan at Stanford Law School — what caused that? You can say that “woke” ideology is to blame, but why are law students at Stanford so vulnerable to “wokeness”? Why was it so easy to persuade these elite students that they are victims of oppression, merely because someone disagrees with them?

Most obviously, (a) they weren’t spanked as children, but also (b) they weren’t taught proper sportsmanship. A tough-minded attitude — the ability to maintain one’s poise when suffering the pain of defeat — used to be drilled into the minds of boys: Nobody cares about your hurt feelings.

Our coaches were generally men who had lived through the Depression, and who had fought in World War II or Korea, and they understood what real suffering was. They also understood that the games we were playing were about preparing us for the duties of manhood, which require the ability to endure hardship. Certainly they did not tolerate any boohooing over mere hurt feelings and, indeed, we were taught to sustain physical injury without complaint. “Walk it off” was the general instruction to any player who twisted an ankle or whatever, and I’m sure many of my teammates kept playing despite injuries that nowadays would have had them rushed off to the emergency room for an ultrasound.

Never will I forget the time my nose got busted in a youth football game and I ran to the sidelines with the blood pouring down my face, signaling Coach Chuck Starnes to send in a substitute. Coach Starnes grabbed my jersey, pulled it up and roughly rubbed the blood off my face with it, then yelled: “Now, get back in there!” And so I did, without complaint.

Nearly all adults had that kind of attitude when I was kid. Parents, teachers, coaches — all of them came from hard times, and when they dished out the punishment, we had no choice but to accept it. You couldn’t treat kids that way nowadays without being investigated by the Department of Family Services, but the current regime of mandatory mollycoddling hasn’t improved the lives of young people; on the contrary, the abandonment of corporal punishment has rendered many young people incapable of coping with the unavoidable reality of adulthood, namely that life is a competition, and it takes mental toughness to succeed in any competitive endeavor. The whiny brats at Stanford, who claimed to be suffering “harm” merely because Judge Duncan had been invited to speak on campus, are symptomatic of this lack of mental toughness. Any emotionally healthy young adult ought to be able to tolerate disagreement, but the Stanford Law students who disrupted the judge’s speech are not emotionally healthy. They are sick — warped by privilege, accustomed to having their whims indulged — and unfit for the responsibilities of adult life. What they need is the rough hand of a Coach Starnes to teach them: Nobody cares about your hurt feelings.

In any properly ordered educational institution, the students should never be guaranteed success. The possibility of failure or expulsion is necessary to prevent the sort of puerile misbehavior that the spoiled “elite” students at Stanford Law demonstrated last week. You want to be part of the “elite”? By God, boy, you’d better act the part, then, or else you’re going to get kicked out to make your way in the world without that “elite” diploma to which you think you’re entitled.

After all, if “elite overproduction” is a problem, these whiny brats are not really such precious human commodities. We have a surplus of these emotionally vulnerable young whiners, and universities ought not hesitate to expel them if they can’t behave themselves. Sometimes the solution is so obvious, the intelligentsia can’t see it.



 

 

Category: Education, Intellectuals
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