Here’s an ecoweenie and climate change believer on why renewables can’t provide enough energy to save the earth.
Nuclear is the only way to meet demand.
Why Renewables Can’t Save The Planet
March 20th, 2019Betopalooza
March 19th, 2019So many Beto O’Rourke links popping up that they can’t wait for the Clown Car update:
(Hat tip: Julie Hardy.)
“You do realize that every bit of O’Rourke’s persona, image, and message is designed to get you to write glowing profile pieces like this one, right?” the political consultant, an irredeemable cynic, tells me. “It’s as if he had been grown in a lab to make middle-aged magazine journalists feel they’re youthful rebels again, that they’re sticking it to The Man like they’re teenagers, so you can avoid the thought that you’ve become The Man and are in fact at least partially responsible for a political culture and electorate that evaluates presidential candidates on shallow charisma and appearances instead of their policy agendas and records of accomplishment. The man wants to be commander in chief, but you’re covering him like he’s the leading man of the next big Hollywood blockbuster. He’s the Aaron Sorkin protagonist right out of your dreams.”
Nothing like some Penn State dairy to start off the morning in the Happy Valley. pic.twitter.com/Ps1Exbj2zq
— Beto O'Rourke (@BetoORourke) March 19, 2019
Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for March 18, 2019
March 18th, 2019It’s Betomania time among certain media outlets after Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke announced he was running last week. So there’s a ton of Beto news below. Also, two names I had pegged as Out are now making noises about (possibly) getting In.
National Review‘s Dan Maclaughlin offers up a lengthy essay on the five lanes of the Democratic Presidential race. There’s lots of interesting analysis to chew on in terms of demographic and age trends and preferences among Democratic voters. I don’t agree with all his conclusions, but it’s well worth reading the whole thing. His summary:
My own ranking, for now, of the likeliest nominee:
- Kamala Harris
- Beto O’Rourke
- Joe Biden
- Amy Klobuchar
- Cory Booker
- Bernie Sanders
- Elizabeth Warren
- [Field]
- Kirsten Gillibrand
Democratic Party presidential primary schedule.
Now on to the clown car itself:
“Middle-Class Joe” Biden has a $2.7 million vacation home. He charges more than $100,000 per speaking gig and has inked a book deal likely worth seven figures.
Since leaving office in 2017, the 76-year-old former vice president has watched his bank account swell as he continues to cultivate the image of a regular, Amtrak-riding guy. He’s repeatedly referred to himself as “Middle-Class Joe” on the campaign trail and in speaking engagements as he publicly mulls whether to run for president.
- After O’Rourke’s announcement, Reuters dropped the news of “Beto O’Rourke’s secret membership in America’s oldest hacking group,” The Cult of the Dead Cow. Having been part of the Austin BBS scene way back in the pre-Internet days, I can tell you that all of this amounts to a whole lot less than meets the eye. The Cult of the Dead Cow were no Legion of Doom, and O’Rourke’s “hacking” seemed to consist mainly of trading warez (copied computer programs, sometimes hacked to remove the copy protection). Illegal, but just about everyone in the BBS scene did it; think of it as a very low-bandwidth version of Napster back when programs fit on a single floppy disk and had to been downloaded on 2400 baud modems. Though the fact this is coming out now does suggest lapses on both the media and Ted Cruz’s opposition research department.
- Related: Tripmaster Beto, Psychedelic Warlord.
- O’Rourke raised $6.1 million in his first 24 hours, edging out Bernie Sanders’ haul.
- Matt Welch at Reason wonders if phony Betomania has already bitten the dust. He also digs up this preemptive Club for Growth video hitpiece:
The problem, of course, is that it believes Democrats actually care about the ideas Democrats claim they care about.
- David French roots for Beto against the Social Justice Warriors.
- Beto O’Rourke, Weirdo:
The former El Paso congressman’s spastic “Hey, I’m still figuring out these new hands” presidential-kickoff video, in which his upper limbs appeared to be subject to mad random yanks by an angry puppeteer, was merely the latest odd detail in the saga of Weirdo O’Rourke. It was even weirder than Elizabeth Warren’s “Greetings fellow earthlings, I too enjoy fermented malt beverages!” video. Robert/Beto is a man so apart from other human beings that he recently thought nothing of ditching his wife and three kids so he could drive around the country, alone, accosting unsuspecting dentists to help him apply Novocaine to his aching soul. He might be the first person ever to run for the White House on a platform of asking the nation to help him figure out who he is.
The source of the angst is evident: Beto is a brainless rich kid who yearned to be cool and wasn’t very good at it. He flunked out of punk. He failed as a fiction writer. He belly-flopped as an alternative-newspaper publisher. And he’s so clueless that his apartment was once robbed while he was sitting in it. At his pricey Virginia prep school (Woodberry Forest School these days carries a sticker price of $48,000 a year), he thought he “just stuck out so badly” because of the “monoculture” there, which the Dallas Morning News called “white, wealthy and southern.” O’Rourke was and is white, wealthy, and southern, so he couldn’t have stuck out much more than Miracle Whip at the mayonnaise convention, yet he was wounded and alienated. Or maybe not. He put this in his high school yearbook: “I’m the angry son. I’m the angry son.” Below that: “I owe you everything, Mom, Dad . . .” You have to pick one, though, don’t you? You can’t be a seething rebel and a dutiful child. You can’t be Kurt Cobain and Kenny G. One pose nullifies the other. Or maybe O’Rourke was even then trying to position himself as acceptable to all constituencies.
Snip.
What’s the deal with his net worth, which is estimated at $9 million? I came across this line, on Heavy.com: “Peppertree Square Ltd. Imperial Arms is a real estate company, and Peppertree Square is a shopping center in El Paso, which was a gift from his mother.” Jeez, I remember when I thought my mom was sweet for buying me a blazer. I want Beto’s mom. When Beto’s dad died, he left the boy an apartment complex worth $5 million. Also his father-in-law William D. Sanders is worth a packet. Bloomberg once estimated he was worth $20 billion.
So far, then, O’Rourke’s life story does not look like a fable about rising to meet fate’s challenge, but more like privilege and dilettantism.
- Over at the New York Times, Gail “Team Kamala” Collins offers up a takedown of O’Rourke. Now I’m no O’Rourke fan, I’m happy to cheer on blue-on-blue attacks, and that Vanity Fair piece is eminently mockworthy, but this is a thuddingly bad piece of writing. It’s one long, smug, graceless sneer. You could have thrown a rock into a random crowd at CPAC and likely found someone capable of writing a better takedown of O’Rourke.
- Scott Adams on the Beto dance.
- “Beto O’Rourke Announces He Starting Obama Cover Campaign.”
- Finally, an observation: In addition to the contact harvesting splash screen, O’Rourke’s website only has four links: Shop, Jobs, Donate, Contact. No room for such trivia as “issues” or even a candidate biography. I guess the figure a three-term congressman is such a “rock star” that he doesn’t need to be introduced…
Tim Ryan is a man containing multitudes. He is, as his contortions would suggest, a dedicated practitioner of hot power yoga and a meditation evangelist, but he sells himself as a champion of the American worker, and he speaks with the plain, sometimes brusque language of his mostly blue-collar constituents. In Congress, he has endorsed tax cuts for corporations, but he also supports progressive goals such as Medicare for all. And he’s a congressional backbencher—a relatively unknown Democrat from a rapidly reddening state. But he says he’s “very much looking” at running for president.
Bernie campaign announces that it is unionizing – first major party presidential campaign to have a unionized staff pic.twitter.com/eLG8eCGYjQ
— Amanda Terkel (@aterkel) March 15, 2019
I’m now imagining a an 80s teen comedy in which teenage jock Swalwell beats up teenage nerd O’Rourke…
Historic Floods Hit Nebraska, Midwest
March 16th, 2019This is a big story that doesn’t seem to be getting the news coverage it deserves: Nebraska and other parts of the Midwest are suffering through their worst floods in half a century. Multiple levees have breached, and the city of Freemont, the sixth largest in the state, is is completely cut off by floodwater. The Cooper Nuclear Power Station near Brownville is preparing for a possible shutdown if the floodwaters overtop a levee on the Missouri river.
The flooding even got so bad that “the National Weather Service office in Omaha, Nebraska, was forced to evacuate due to river flooding.”
Given it’s still winter in much of the Midwest, a lot of those floodwaters carried along bolder-sized icebergs, making the damage that much more extensive.
Here are some videos:
Multiple bridges and dams have been washed away:
Some Tweets:
Here's a map, courtesy of the @StarTribune, showing flood-stricken areas: covering half or more of Nebraska, Iowa, and Wisconsin, as well as significant parts of Michigan. Interstates and highways are closed. Cities like Omaha, Des Moines, and Milwaukee are experiencing flooding. pic.twitter.com/rbsfXKPqEJ
— Ted Genoways (@TedGenoways) March 16, 2019
Just spoke w/ @GovRicketts. The people of Nebraska & across the Midwest, especially the Farmers & Ranchers, are feeling the impacts from severe weather. The first responders & emergency response teams have done a great job dealing w/ record flooding, high winds, & road closures.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2019
Ended up with about 50 acres worth of these in the hay meadow. Probably have them till June. Some are 3+ foot thick and big enough you could hold a square dance on. #nebraskaflooding pic.twitter.com/LkSufNbmAU
— Jared Jaixen (@jaredjaixen) March 15, 2019
Nebraska flooding since yesterday……prayers needed, pic.twitter.com/1urxX0wVQc
— Tamara Dahlgren (@princessabm) March 14, 2019
New, incredible aerial imagery of extensive Nebraska flooding.
Full video: https://t.co/wm57WPKyyZ pic.twitter.com/Pw0jl8VeY0
— WeatherNation (@WeatherNation) March 16, 2019
There is all this flooding in Nebraska & Iowa. I had no idea till a fan tweeted me about it.
This is what I hate the most about our American news.
Mon – Trump bad
Tues- Mass shooting
Wens- Trump bad
Thurs- Trump bad
Fri – Mass shooting
Sat – Trump bad
Sun – Trump bad— KEEM 🍿 (@KEEMSTAR) March 16, 2019
It would be nice if our national media could to pay attention to historic flooding…
LinkSwarm for March 15, 2019
March 15th, 2019In one of the more important but confusing stories this week, UK’s Parliament rejected PM Theresa May’s Brexit deal, rejected a no-deal Brexit, and rejected a second referendum, but voted to delay Brexit until June. Whether the EU will consent to this delay or not remains to be seen. Borepatch thinks not, mainly due to EU elections coming up.
Enjoy a complimentary LinkSwarm:
In the Trump era, Democrats are so intent on appealing to immigrants and minority voters they will tolerate insults to Jews, a constituency that voted for Clinton by better than a 3-to-1 margin in 2016. This is not inconsequential, as Jewish conservative Jeff Dunetz pointed out last week: “According to the FBI, almost 60% of the hate crimes in 2017 based on religion were against Jews.” Liberals would like us to believe that Trump supporters are responsible for this, but who is to blame when, for example, Somali immigrant Mohamed Mohamed Abdi is charged with attempted murder for allegedly trying to run over two men outside a Los Angeles synagogue? How can liberals claim Trump is responsible for three black men attacking Jews in Brooklyn? Police are alarmed by increasing anti-Semitic violence in New York City, which probably has a lot more to do with the “progressive” politics of that Democrat-run fiefdom than it does with who’s occupying the White House. Meanwhile, 11 white people were attacked in New York over the weekend, and a black transgender suspect has been arrested in what police say was an apparent hate-crime spree. Such is the toxic racial climate in the city that sends to Congress such Democrats as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who spent her weekend trashing Ronald Reagan for a capacity crowd of liberals in Austin, Texas.
Democrats and their media allies have spent years building this bonfire of racial resentment. CNN devoted hour upon hour of coverage to the “Black Lives Matter” movement that provoked riots in Ferguson, Missouri, and by the time of the 2016 Republican convention in Cleveland, anti-Trump protesters were marching with Communist posters advocating revolution. Barely six weeks before Election Day 2016, a “Black Lives Matter” riot erupted in downtown Charlotte, N.C., and does anyone still wonder why Hillary lost North Carolina, a state that Obama had carried twice? Trump got 63 percent of the white vote in North Carolina, carrying the state by a margin of more than 170,000 votes. Is it likely that Democrats can reverse that verdict by doubling-down on identity politics? Yet liberals continue intensifying their incendiary rhetoric that has sparked incidents like the smearing of the Covington Catholic boys, the Jussie Smollett hoax, and a spree of attacks on Trump supporters across the country. Democrats and their media allies have done everything in their power to demonize the nearly 63 million Americans who voted for Trump in 2016, and what does that foreshadow for November 2020?
Certainly by now, working-class white voters must be tired of deranged Trump-haters getting in their faces and shouting, “RAAAAACIST!” Perhaps that’s why the latest Iowa poll shows Democrat primary voters favoring two old white guys, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. However, the crowded field of Democrats contending for the 2020 presidential nomination, cheered on by their Greek chorus of left-wing journalists, will probably make it easier for Trump to get re-elected. The more white voters become alienated from the Democrats, the more extreme the Democrats become, and the media are so out of touch with voters in places like Iowa that Democrats are caught in a sort of feedback loop of extremism.
The constituent elements of the American left have radicalized and they are tearing the Democratic Party apart. Meanwhile Donald Trump has delivered on a growing economy, deregulation, strong borders, the rule of law, and he is apparently going to leave the cows and their diapers for later.
The radicalized Democrats are now running as socialists. In the middle of a growing economy they are casting their lot with Venezuela. They expect to win in 2020. Call it the left-wing crack-up.
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Less than four years ago, Jeremy Corbyn was an obscure backbencher in the British Parliament. In his 30 years as a member of the Labour Party, his greatest legislative accomplishment was paradoxically the lack of any: From 1997 to 2010, when Labour was last in government, Corbyn was the MP who voted against his own party more than any other. Despite his perpetual insubordinations, successive Labour Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown declined to expel Corbyn from their party. “There was no threat,” a deputy Labour chief whip told the Financial Times about Corbyn and his small band of hard-left rebels in 2016. “These people were tolerated because no one had ever heard of them.”
Today, everyone in British politics has heard of Jeremy Corbyn, who, as leader of Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, has utterly transformed the Labour Party. Once a broad-based movement that could command large parliamentary majorities, today it is a sectarian personality cult, offering meager resistance to a shambolic Conservative government. Once the party whose leaders created NATO and stood stalwart against the threat of international communism, today Labour is led by people who sing the praises of anti-Western despots and terrorists. And once the natural political home of British Jewry, Labour today is mired in an anti-Semitic morass, to the point where 40 percent of Jews say they would “seriously consider” leaving the country were Corbyn to become prime minister. Indeed, Labour has become so toxic that, last month, nine MPs quit the party, calling it “sickeningly, institutionally racist,” “a threat to national security” and “a danger to the cohesion of our society, the safety of our citizens, and the health of our democracy.”
How Labour reached this deplorable condition is one that should seriously concern liberals in the United States, where a similar dynamic is playing out in the Democratic Party. An insurgent progressivism favorably disposed to socialism, hostile to Jews and openly admiring of Jeremy Corbyn and all that he represents is steadily making inroads against an aging, centrist Democratic establishment. Here, a constellation of elected officials, media personalities, and activists are mimicking the tactics of their ideological comrades in Britain to take over and transform the Democratic Party into a vehicle for their extreme agenda.
According to a report by Breitbart, in recently released research by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), analysts discovered that about 63 percent of non-citizen households, those who live legally and illegally in the U.S., use some form of public welfare while only about 35 percent of native-born American households are on welfare.
[Gabriel] Schoenfeld only fuels the popular perception of The Bulwark Never Trumpers as an angry, coastal elite who are anguished that their warnings about Trump were ignored by both hoi polloi and their conservative “grifters and trolls.” In careerist fury, he now damns others for his own self-immolation — as if the country must suffer for the sins of not listening to his own genius, which would probably have given the country a 16-year Obama-Clinton regnum.
That Never Trumpers at The Bulwark were wrong about the Trump nomination, the general election, and the first two years of the Trump administration seems only to have fueled their spitefulness. If Schoenfeld is representative of this rump movement, then they are engaging in projection.
Read the whole thing for a detailed, comprehensive takedown.
The collapse of Venezuela’s electrical grid and public services is due to years of Maduro’s corruption, a refusal to invest in the public sector, and neglect of maintenance. It’s simple: machinery breaks down when you steal all the money intended to buy parts to keep it running.
— John Bolton (@AmbJohnBolton) March 13, 2019
"Excuse me! Did you see a sign on my cave that said 'Dead Messiah Storage?!?'"
— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) March 12, 2019
O’Rourke O’Running
March 14th, 2019Now we know what Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke was waiting for to jump into the Presidential race: a fawning Vanity Fair profile complete with Annie Leibovitz photographs.
How fawning?
Behind the door, in the O’Rourke living room, a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf contains a section for rock memoirs (Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, a favorite) and a stack of LPs (the Clash, Nina Simone) but also a sizable collection of presidential biographies, including Robert Caro’s work on Lyndon B. Johnson. Arranged in historical order, the biographies suggest there’s been some reflection on the gravity of the presidency. But there’s also some political poetry to it, a sense that O’Rourke might be destined for this shelf. He has an aura. Most places he goes in El Paso, he’s dogged by cries of “Beto! Beto!” Oprah Winfrey, who helped anoint Barack Obama in 2008, practically begged him to run at an event in New York City at the beginning of February.
More fawning:
Settling into an armchair in his living room, he tries to make sense of his rise. “I honestly don’t know how much of it was me,” he says. “But there is something abnormal, super-normal, or I don’t know what the hell to call it, that we both experience when we’re out on the campaign trail.”
O’Rourke and his wife, Amy, an educator nine years his junior, both describe the moment they first witnessed the power of O’Rourke’s gift. It was in Houston, the third stop on O’Rourke’s two-year Senate campaign against Ted Cruz. “Every seat was taken, every wall, every space in the room was filled with probably a thousand people,” recalls Amy O’Rourke. “You could feel the floor moving almost. It was not totally clear that Beto was what everybody was looking for, but just like that people were so ready for something. So that was totally shocking. I mean, like, took-my-breath-away shocking.”
For O’Rourke, what followed was a near-mystical experience. “I don’t ever prepare a speech,” he says. “I don’t write out what I’m going to say. I remember driving to that, I was, like, ‘What do I say? Maybe I’ll just introduce myself. I’ll take questions.’ I got in there, and I don’t know if it’s a speech or not, but it felt amazing. Because every word was pulled out of me. Like, by some greater force, which was just the people there. Everything that I said, I was, like, watching myself, being like, How am I saying this stuff? Where is this coming from?
Generational fawning:
At 46, O’Rourke is only a couple of years younger than former rival Ted Cruz. But part of the excitement, and the content of his potential candidacy, is generational. Whereas Obama is from the tail end of the baby boom, Beto O’Rourke is quintessentially Generation X, weaned on Star Wars and punk rock and priding himself on authenticity over showmanship and a healthy skepticism of the mainstream.
The word “honesty” gets thrown around. “O’Rourke came off as free of political calculation, as if his charisma were a mere side effect of Beto just being Beto.”
Tonstant weader fwowed up.
The tone is so hagiographic it’s a mild surprise that by the end of it Beto’s not wandering the streets of El Paso curing the sick with the laying of hands.
They do address the intersectional elephant in the room:
O’Rourke is acutely aware, too, of perhaps his biggest vulnerability—being a white man in a Democratic Party yearning for a woman or a person of color, a Kamala Harris or a Cory Booker. “The government at all levels is overly represented by white men,” he says. “That’s part of the problem, and I’m a white man. So if I were to run, I think it’s just so important that those who would comprise my team looked like this country. If I were to run, if I were to win, that my administration looks like this country. It’s the only way I know to meet that challenge.”
Expect the MSM backers of Kamala Harris to hit these points hard, while Beto backers magically ignore them. Being a rich, privileged white male is a sin, unless you’re a rich, privileged, dreamy white Democratic male with fawning media coverage.
Jim Geraghty thinks we’re in for a repeat of Obamamania:
The insufferable tidal wave of Betomania is coming…
Here we go again.
The magazine covers and posters . . .
. . . the graffiti murals . . .
. . . the gushing media profiles, the adoring interviews with late-night hosts, the hagiographic documentary, the t-shirts, the celebrity endorsements and appearances, the social-media mania, the volunteers creating their own designs for posters and logos and campaign imagery . . . we’ll probably get the flash mobs from 2018 restarted, too.
Except the last time we did this, all of the hype and hoopla was for a once-obscure slender guy in his mid-to-late 40s who had been in the legislature for a while, hadn’t been able to get many pieces of legislation passed whether his party was in the majority or minority, who boasted about his across-the-aisle friendships but who had never really defied his party’s orthodoxy, who had little or no executive experience, who could do mundane tasks such as driving or sweating and have them described by political reporters like he was completing the 12 labors of Hercules, who was full of charisma but vague enough in his answers and agenda to be a blank slate to everyone looking for an ideal candidate. Same script, slightly different leading man.
We’re doing all of the Obamamania stuff again, except this time with a white guy from Texas. It’s all starting up again: the retro hipster t-shirts, the bracelets on Etsy, the votive candles.
Snip.
If Beto O’Rourke had an “R” after his name instead of a “D,” the world would know a lot more about the less-appealing aspects of his life story. Not just the DUI, but his private-sector development career that used eminent domain and gentrified poor Latino neighborhoods, and marrying into a billionaire’s family. The image celebrated in these gushing profiles doesn’t match the reality. He was never in the military but talked about veterans’ issues so much that some people think he was. He’s not Latino, but his “rise fuels hope for Latino Democrats.” He’s the outsider who was in elected office from 2005 to 2018. He’s the modest everyman with a net worth of $9 million. He’s a boarding-school-attending son of a judge who escaped serious consequence for not just the DUI but also burglary charges.
This Obamamania parallel is true, up to a point. But O’Rourke isn’t going to get the huge boost provided by a lifetime of liberal white guilt.
O’Rourke clearly brings strengths to the race, including personal wealth, notable fundraising prowess, and a pretty young-ish face that liberal women seem to swoon over. But the truth is that O’Rourke has never won a race outside his hometown of El Paso, and polls show him in single digits, behind Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. There’s a world of difference between scooping up Democratic dollars when you’re running against Ted Cruz as opposed to running against other high-profile Democrats with their own fan clubs.
Expect more fawning media coverage to boost him, but also strong pushback from Kamala Harris partisans, and possibly Julian Castro, who has to miffed at the fake Texas Hispanic getting ten times the attention of the real one. In addition to Harris and Castro, O’Rourke’s entry in the race probably hurts Biden and John Delaney (same “lane”), Kirsten Gillibrand and Amy Klobuchar (I bet “dreamy” is going to beat out “feminist duty” for a long of 20- and 30-something women), and Pete Buttigieg (“look at me I’m young”). Maybe he doesn’t hurt Warren, whose supporters I think skew older.
You know who he probably doesn’t hurt at all? Bernie Sanders. His fans don’t seem to be into “dreamy” or “young.”
It’s gonna be a hell of a race…
Admissions Scandal Followup
March 13th, 2019The reverberations from yesterday’s admissions scandal continue to sound.
First, it turns out that a major “ethical investment” venture capitalist was caught up in the scandal:
One of Silicon Valley’s most prominent private equity investors — and one of the tech sector’s leading proponents of how to invest ethically and for social impact — has been charged in an explosive college admissions scandal that was revealed Tuesday, March 12.
Prosecutors charged Bill McGlashan, a founder and managing partner at TPG Growth — which has made landmark investments in companies like Uber and Airbnb — on fraud allegations for trying to engineer the admission of his son to the University of Southern California.
What is particularly damaging for TPG is that McGlashan has positioned himself as a leading voice in Silicon Valley for social responsibility. In addition to overseeing TPG’s late-stage growth investing arm, McGlashan has partnered with other conscious leaders like Bono and Laurene Powell Jobs at The Rise Fund, a TPG investing arm that tries to make the world a better place through investments in things like dairy farms in India.
Want to guess what political party McGlashan donates to? That’s right: Democrats. He gave the maximum amount to Obama in 2007, as well as various other Democratic candidates nationwide.
Pretty much the same giving pattern as indicted actress Felicity Huffman:
You know what's funny?
I bet like 90% of the affluent parents indicted in #CollegeGate are liberals.
For example, Felicity Huffman is a very regular Democratic donor. pic.twitter.com/cgQrHLrNyE
— Will Chamberlain 🇺🇸 (@willchamberlain) March 12, 2019
Bill Clinton once said that those who work hard and play by the rules should be able to get ahead. It turns out that there are certain people who, having already gotten ahead, no longer feel a need to play by the rules anymore. These people seem to think that all else is secondary to merely getting their spawn into the strata of the elite by any means necessary.
In 2014, former director of the California labor department Michael Bernick wrote in Time magazine, “whether your degree, for example, is from UCLA or from less prestigious Sonoma State matters far less than your academic performance and the skills you can show employers.”
Whether or not Bernick’s assessment is accurate, many Americans parents believe otherwise, as demonstrated by yesterday’s terrifically bizarre scandal involving a couple of Hollywood celebrities and a slew of lesser-known wealthy parents who bought their children admission to schools like Yale, Stanford, Wake Forest, Georgetown, and others — Including UCLA, the example of prestige Bernick selected.
As many suspected, just about every part of the college admissions process can be rigged to provide a leg up to those who are wealthy and unethical: bribing athletics coaches, faked learning disabilities, sending students copies of the SAT or ACT ahead of time, proctors correcting answers for students before submitting them for scoring, made-up honors and awards, “staged photographs of their children engaged in athletic activity” and falsifying students’ ethnicities and other biographical details to take advantage of affirmative action. (Elizabeth Warren was just ahead of her time, apparently.) This has been going on since at least 2011. Every single one of these students who had their admission obtained through bribes took away an opportunity that could have gone to better, harder-working student with more honest but poorer parents.
The full description is an epic portrait of graft, corruption, elitism, and sleaze that will leave you wanting to burn down the Ivory Tower. The cherry on top? The whole enterprise was granted tax-exempt nonprofit status by the Internal Revenue Status since 2013. Those Tea Party groups couldn’t get nonprofit status, but these crooks could.
If you wanted to pour gasoline onto the fires of populism, this is how you do it!
Were those parents crazy? Or were they just astute about the risk-reward analysis and long-term benefits of getting into one of the top 25 schools, instead of one of the top 50 or top 100?
We’ve heard all the stories about the “Harvard mafia.” A few years ago, Ross Douthat wrote “elite universities are about connecting more than learning, that the social world matters far more than the classroom to undergraduates, and that rather than an escalator elevating the best and brightest from every walk of life, the meritocracy as we know it mostly works to perpetuate the existing upper class.”
New York Times writer Amy Chozick shared yesterday, “I was literally told early in my career – by a top magazine editor – ‘Your clips are great, but we really want someone who went to Harvard.’” The replies to her indicate her story is not all that rare. Lots of folks have observed that many big-name journalism institutions run unpaid internship programs that are considered “How to get your foot in the door” — which automatically rules out anyone who can’t afford to provide anywhere from 15 to 40 hours of free labor each week.
Said one mom I know: “I’d get pilloried for saying publicly, but my kids are at a serious disadvantage- straight, white males, middle class income. Colleges want ‘diversity.’ Scholarships for everything but us. Admissions for better schools are limited. It’s so frustrating. Admissions scandal really hits home.”
Part of the realignment that helped propel Donald Trump to victory in 2016 had to do with ordinary Americans who felt they were being left behind by a game rigged against them. How do you think this scandal plays among average voters?
Reason‘s Robby Soave suggests that the whole system should be scraped:
The best remedy to this problem might be to admit that college is, to some degree, a scam. Note that these parents were evidently unconcerned that their kids—who were often coached to fake learning disabilities so they could get more time on the ACT and SAT—might struggle with their course loads. It’s because college is a joke, and it’s easy enough for an academically disinclined grifter—an Olivia Jade, if you will—to get by studying nonsense subjects. They’re paying for the experience and the diploma, not the actual education.
This is a point that Bryan Caplan raises in his excellent book The Case Against Education. Caplan argues that most of the value of a college education is signaling rather than skills. Students don’t learn very much that will be useful to them in the job world, and even if they do, they quickly forget it. But a diploma signals to employers that the diploma-holder is competent in some abstract way—they jumped through a bunch of impressive-looking hoops, and are thus more worthy of a job than people who didn’t. The implication of Caplan’s research is that public funding of higher education is therefore a waste: It doesn’t actually benefit society to subsidize a signaling mechanism if there’s little relevant skill-gaining along the way. It just punishes everybody who, for whatever reason, doesn’t have access to the right hoops.
If we are going to continue to publicly fund higher education, taxpayers might rightly ask whether institutions that receive federal dollars should be permitted to privilege the wealthy, the donor class, the athletes (both faux and actual), and certain racial groups (resulting in abject discrimination against Asians) over applicants who might actually be interested in checking a book out of the library. But if higher education is really just about celebrity scions pretending to play water polo in order to gain admittance to an exclusive partying club, maybe it’s long past time to hit the defund button.
Now some related tweets:
White privilege? Here are some names of people arrested for allegedly giving bribes: Gamal Abdelaziz, Manuel Henriquez, Agustin Huneeus, I-Hin Chen, Homayoun Zadeh. I don't think those people are white. But they are rich. This is rich privilege, not white privilege. https://t.co/pyC3e4CvxE
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) March 13, 2019
Been thinking about the role of grade inflation in the college admissions scandal. I suspect parents might not be as motivated to bribe little Petunia’s way into Harvard if she might fail out or risk a transcript riddled with C’s and D’s.
— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) March 13, 2019
Literally no one in NYC is surprised by the college scandal, the same thing goes on here but with Kindergarten admissions. Not joking at all.
— DJ Hesta Prynn (@hestaprynnmusic) March 13, 2019
Finally, Rolling Stone offers nine WTF details about the scandal. My favorite:
The fake profiles were so extreme that CW-1 would literally alter applicants’ height. In one case, CW-1 asked an employee to create a basketball profile for a boy who wanted to be admitted to USC. Although the boy was 5’5″ (a fact he referenced in an original draft of his personal statement), his final athletic profile stated that he was 6’1″. Though it’s unclear how, exactly, the young man was expected to justify the discrepancy between his stated height and his actual height when he arrived on campus, he was admitted to USC nonetheless.
Breaking: May’s Brexit Deal Voted Down Again
March 12th, 2019Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Theresa May’s latest Brexit deal has been defeated, this time by a resounding 149 vote margin, 391-242. “There will be a vote tomorrow on a no-deal Brexit and a vote on Thursday on delaying Brexit.”
My guess is that will result in either a narrow victory for a no-deal Brexit, of that both of those votes could fail, as the result of ass-covering.
Stay tuned…
BREAKING: Another University Admissions Scandal, UT Coach Implicated
March 12th, 2019The feds just busted a huge university admissions scandal today.
Actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin were among more than four dozen people charged in a nationwide college admissions cheating scandal that involved wealthy individuals paying up to $6.5 million to place their children into elite universities, according to court records revealed Tuesday.
The alleged scam — which involved students being placed into top colleges such as Yale, Georgetown, Stanford, University of Southern California, UCLA and the University of Texas — was run by a man in California, William Rick Singer, who helped parents get their children into the schools through bribes, court documents unsealed in Boston showed.
Singer, who authorities said will plead guilty to racketeering, ran the charity, Key Worldwide Foundation, which received $25 million in total to guarantee the admissions, U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling said during a Tuesday news conference.
Most of the students did not know their admission to the school was due to a bribe, authorities said.
The children’s parents would pay a specified amount of money fully aware it would be used to gain college admission. The money would then go toward an SAT or ACT administrator or a college athletic coach who would fake a profile for the prospective student — regardless of their athletic ability, according to the charging documents.
There was a live broadcast covering more details, including the fact that one of the crooked SAT sites was in Houston.
The list of those indicted. The names include a Michael Center in the Western District of Texas and a John Wilson of the Southern District of Texas. According to KXAN, that Michael Center is UT’s tennis coach. Wilson may be the person involved in the Houston SAT cheating portion.
This comes right after the death of former UT President Bill Powers, who was up to his ears in a completely different UT admissions scandal, but one that also involved admitting unqualified students with wealthy, well-connected parents.
Developing…
Update: This is the longest video I could find of the FBI press conference:
Update 2: Implicating UT tennis coach Michael Center has been placed on administrative leave:
Center, who is in his 19th year at UT, has an annual salary of $232,338. He agreed to accept $100,000 as a bribe in exchange for designating a student as a Longhorn tennis recruit, according to investigators. The applicant, according to the FBI affidavit, “did not play competitive tennis.” Center has been arrested and will appear before a federal magistrate judge at 2 p.m. Tuesday.
(Hat tip: Dwight.)
Three more people in Houston also arrested in the case:
At least three Houstonians were indicted in the scheme: Martin Fox, who is the president of a private tennis academy in Houston; Niki Williams, an assistant teacher at a Houston high school and test administrator for the College Board and ACT; and John Wilson, a founder and CEO of a private equity and real estate development firm.
Williams, Fox, and Wilson were taken into custody and later released on bond. Williams was released on a $20,000 unsecured bond, while Fox was freed on a $50,000 secured bond. Fox was also restricted travel outside of the Southern District of Texas other than court appearance in Massachusetts.
Wilson was later released on $100,000 bond.