The Lindsay Clancy Case

This woman was, in reality, amazingly coddled and spoiled. She was an RN with an even higher-earning husband, who got her a nanny (!) and was down to run family errands. Quack doctor friends wrote her costly prescriptions for everything imaginable, including some pretty hard and… https://t.co/xwbaqiuWlU

— Wilfred Reilly (@wil_da_beast630) September 13, 2026

I've tried to stay away from the Lindsay Clancy case, but some of what's been coming out lately is completely new. It's as though nobody who was paid to follow the case and report on it actually ever built a coherent picture of what her life leading up to the execution of her children was like. Let's just follow up on tne allegations in the post above. Yes, she had a nanny:

[Elaine] Rossi was hired in September 2022, a few months after Callan was born. She was let go in December after Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse, decided not to return to work. Rossi said she wasn't told why Clancy chose to remain at home.

At other links below, Rossi was paid to work 12 hours a week, and Lindsay in fact nevfer worked after the birth of the daughter, having had her maternity leave extended. At least according to the PBS story, both the prosecution and defense seem to have concentrated on whether Rossi thought mom could have willingly killed the kids, but wouldn't that have been asking the witness to draw a conclusion? Heck, I learned that from watching Perry Mason on TV as a kid. It seems to me that Rossi's value as a witness would primarily have been to testify on the dates she was employed -- but in fact, she was presumably there to care for the newborn part-time in the mom's incapacity. What good were her observations of the mom?

According to Newsweek, Lindsey's ex-husband, Patrick, was a sales executive with Microsoft. His testimony at the trial covers Lindsay's "spiral" downward over the autumn of 2022. From what we see farther below, she was also focused on not having to go back to work, which she was coincidentally scheduled to do just as her mental problems suddenly appeared.:

By 2022, the couple had three children, and Patrick described that summer as "a good one," filled with family trips and time at home. But by fall, Lindsay's mental health had begun to deteriorate, he testified. She cycled through multiple providers, struggled with insomnia, and was prescribed 13 psychiatric medications over four months.

Patrick's testimony has been one of the emotional anchors of Week 1 of the trial. He recounted Lindsay's "big spiral," her intrusive thoughts, and the moment he returned home on January 24 to find the house silent, the bedroom door locked, blood on the floor, and Lindsay injured outside. He then discovered all three children in the basement with exercise bands around their necks.

. . . Photos displayed to jurors showed a home filled with toys, stickers, and homemade art. Prosecutors use these images to underscore the normalcy of the household before January 24, while the defense highlights Lindsay's devotion to her children as evidence she had "no motive" and acted during a severe psychiatric break.

On the matter of psychotropic drugs, this New York Post story goes into only slight detail:

Lindsay Clancy was prescribed at least six different depression, anxiety and sleep meds, including several at the same time when she killed her three children — and told her husband she was on the antidepressant Zoloft four months before the murders, according to testimony on Monday.

Patrick Clancy, Lindsay’s ex-husband who is standing by her during the trial, said that the root of her anxiety was the idea of returning to work and leaving her children after her 18 weeks of maternity leave expired.

. . . Still, Clancy “kept getting worse and worse,” Patrick recalled about that time period — despite the family employing a nanny to help care for the children throughout the week.

The family had hired a nanny who worked about 12 hours a week and helped with childcare and household chores, he testified.

Patrick struggled to recall which drug was which when prosecutor Jennifer Sprague went through the list of meds his wife was prescribed at the time, and asked what he knew about her consumption of the medications.

“I wasn’t keeping track of the number of pills taken out of each bottle,” he said.

“It’s possible that not a lot were taken,” Patrick responded.

It seems pretty clear that Patrick wasn't monitoring his wife's meds very closely at all, but neither was anyone else:

Thirteen medications across 30 different prescriptions. Five clinicians. Two hospitals.

In the four months before killing her three children and attempting to kill herself, Lindsay Clancy desperately sought help for her deteriorating mental condition. But as her murder trial has made clear, the help she got was scattered across multiple providers who gave conflicting advice and, crucially, didn’t talk to one another.

One incongruity I see here is that Lindsay, an RN, should have been more aware than anyone else of the problems caused by drug interactions:

Medication reconciliation (MR) is the process of comparing a patient’s medication orders to all of the medications that the patient has been taking in order to identify and resolve medication discrepancies. It is an effective means of risk management to avoid medication errors (eg, omissions, duplication, dosage errors, or drug interactions). . . . The nurses’ main roles in MR involve chasing, checking, and education.

but I'm wonddring if we might actually be seeing a whole different problem:

The term “doctor shopping” is defined as “obtaining controlled substances from multiple healthcare practitioners without the prescriber’s knowledge of other prescriptions.”

In other words, it’s when patients manipulate the system to get extra drugs. Doctor shoppers visit multiple doctors and provide false information to obtain multiple prescriptions. They may lie about symptoms, deny receiving previous medications, omit information, purposely injure themselves, claim they lost previous prescriptions, or commit other forms of deception. The drugs they’re after are typically narcotics such as Oxycontin, Vicodin, or Xanax.

Isn't there a strong possibility that this is what was happening in Lindsay's case? Her husband was in effect enabling this abuse by turning a blind eye to what she was taking, possibly under the impression that she might have been taking too little. She may have been deliberately visiting different prescribers as well. It appears that prosecutors were aware of this issue, but they don't seem to have stressed it enough:

Earlier in the trial, the jury heard that Clancy had sought treatment for severe mental health problems, including admitting herself to a psychiatric hospital. But witnesses also noted Clancy wouldn’t always take the medications prescribed to help with her insomnia, anxiety and depression, and that she expressed fears she was addicted to some of them.

. . Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague told jurors in her closing argument that Lindsay Clancy misled and jumped between medical providers because "she wanted to get better on her own terms."

Sprague also highlighted Clancy’s work experience as a labor and delivery nurse to argue she should have known better in how to communicate with her postpartum symptoms with her medical providers.

Pushing back on the suggestion that the trial is a referendum on the healthcare system, Sprague argued that Clancy had better-than-average access to medical care but did not properly use it.

One question that comes up for me is Lindsay's overall timeline. Her presumed psychiatric problems began in September 2022 with the expiration of her maternity leave and her need to return to work. According to Wikipedia,

Lindsay said her anxiety returned and worsened after the birth of her third child in May 2022, particularly toward the end of her maternity leave. Patrick testified that she planned to ask for Zoloft to help manage her anxiety and transition back to work.

In September 2022, Lindsay began seeing psychiatrist Jennifer Tufts, virtually via telehealth. Tufts diagnosed her with generalized anxiety disorder, prescribed Zoloft, and completed paperwork to extend Lindsay's maternity leave. Lindsay delayed starting the medication until mid-October, and soon reported adverse effects. Tufts prescribed Ativan for her on October 21. On October 26, Lindsay reported that Ativan reduced her anxiety but not her insomnia and said she was using Benadryl as a sleep aid. Tufts prescribed Buspar, but Lindsay was afraid to try a new medication and did not take it. Tufts warned her that Ativan could be addictive and reduced her dosage on November 2.

But over the ensuing months, Ativan keeps reappearing in the various accounts of what she's taking and what she's not:

On November 20, Lindsay's mother-in-law, a nurse, contacted Julie Paul, a psychiatric nurse practitioner at her hospital's perinatal clinic. Paul called Lindsay later that day. Paul prescribed Prozac but, a few days later, Lindsay said she could not tolerate it. On November 25, Paul asked her to discontinue both Prozac and Ativan, offered a one-time dose of Ambien to help her sleep, and prescribed Remeron and Klonopin.

It's hard not to conclude Lindsay was manipulating successive providers for drugs, all the time forestalling a return to work, having extended her maternity leave. It's also hard not to conclude that a big reason she didn't return to work would have been she didn't want her colleagues to recognize her addiction, when it appears her husband had been enabling it.

Like the OJ trial, to which this one has been compared, a big factor appears to have been a bungled prosecution.

Does Amazon Have A Corporate Crisis Over The Prime Air Crash?

An NPR story on last weekend's crash of an Amazon Prime cargo flight in Miami carries this:

"In my 60 years of flying, I've never seen such a terrible performance from a crew," said Ross Aimer, the CEO of Aero Consulting Experts, and a retired airline captain who worked in the industry for more than 40 years.

. . . "It was a very, very unstable approach from the beginning, from the get go," Aimer told NPR. In that situation, he says, pilots are trained to go around and attempt the landing again. "These fellows should have gone around long before even getting close to that airport."

The cargo plane crash in Miami is raising concerns about the safety culture at 21 Air, the little-known carrier that operated the flight for Amazon. Former pilots were sounding alarms about the company's safety practices long before Sunday's accident, though the company disputes their claims.

It's also prompting questions about the retail giant's practice of contracting with multiple smaller carriers instead of operating its own fleet of planes.

I asked the AI oracle, "Is Amazon acting as if it has a corporate crisis over the Miami Prime crash?" It answered,

Amazon is not publicly treating the Miami Prime Air crash as an internal corporate crisis, opting instead for a standard defensive posture that relies heavily on its outsourced operational model. Following the September 6, 2026, fatal overrun at Miami International Airport that killed five people, Amazon's public strategy has focused on legal and operational insulation rather than treating the disaster as a systemic internal failure.

I'm not sure if AI understands what a corporate crisis is in this context, which is surprising. Corporate crises have a range of causes, not limited to internal factors as the reply suggests. For instance,

Negative publicity due to issues such as scandals, unethical practices, or product failures. For example, social media backlash, bad press, or public outrage over company actions, such as environmental damage or employee mistreatment.

. . . A significant product failure or safety issue that necessitates a product recall, leading to financial loss and reputational damage. This can happen in industries like automotive, food, or consumer goods.

The potential problem for Amazon, as the NPR link suggests, is that it contracted with 21 Air, which apparently has a very poor reputation in the airline industry, for that flight. So far, Amazon's response has been to point the finger at 21 Air and distance itself from the problem:

The cargo plane that careened off a runway on Sunday in Miami, killing five people and injuring five others, was emblazoned with Amazon’s Prime Air logo. But the e-commerce giant wasn’t operating the flight.

While Amazon is cooperating with aviation safety investigators working to determine what led the plane to overrun the runway, crashing through fences and into vehicles, the company made it clear in several statements that the cargo airline, 21 Air, was in charge of the flight.

. . . Joseph Schwieterman, a professor at DePaul University who has studied Amazon Air, said it’s Amazon’s “standard business practice” to contract services as much as possible.

. . . “It allows them to shop for the best deal … also, it hedges their bets,” Schwieterman said. “The downside is that you’re at the whims of your contracts and you can suddenly lose capacity if they jump ship.”

Another downside, to which Prof Schwieterman appears to be entirely oblivious, is that Amazon's Prime brand is written in big letters on the side of a crashed cargo jet. How does Amazon distance itself from that? Clearly it allowed 21 Air to use the Amezon brand, but now it's trying to say it wasn't involved. In the past, airlines have been eager to send PR teams with sray paint cans to blank out their brands from wreckage at the sites of crashes -- not Amazon!

This leaves aside legal liability:

The widow of the driver of the van struck by an Amazon cargo plane at Miami International Airport has filed a wrongful death lawsuit alleging negligence against several companies and the pilots. Yoel Rodriguez Naranjo, 53, was driving a van on Sunday for the cleaning company he worked for when the Boeing 767 ran off the runway and struck his vehicle and another one, killing him and four others.

Yoel Rodriguez Naranjo, 53, was driving a van on Sunday for the cleaning company he worked for when the Boeing 767 ran off the runway and struck his vehicle and another one, killing him and four others.

. . . The lawsuit, filed Wednesday morning in Miami-Dade Circuit Court, lists the defendants as Amazon.com Inc.; Amazon Air Cargo; 21 Air; Avia Acquisition; Avia Investments; Andromeda Leasing II; Atlas Air Worldwide Holdings, Inc.; Titan Aviation Leasing Limited; Joseph Carroll and Jamie Felipe Silva Molina.

. . . The suit alleges pilot error but also “a systemic failure by defendants Amazon and 21 Air to ensure adequate pilot training, fitness, and sound aeronautical decision-making.”

This will be only the first of numerous lawsuits from the families of the other four victims who were killed, from these who were injured, from those whose property was destroyed, and so forth. Amazon will have a potential problem if it tries to claim it wasn't responsible for contracting with 21 Air if it had its brand painted on 21 Air's planes.

Someonke needs to have a serious talk with Jeff Bezos, who strikes me as the least impressive of the current prominent billionaires.

A T Mahan And Current Strategy

It's actually almost commonplace to say that the Battle of Jutland was a counterexample to Mahan's theory of the decisive naval battle, but this gives only a partial view of Mahan's theories. According to Wikipedia, the other half of Mahan's theories covered blockades:

Mahan's works encouraged the development of large capital ships—eventually leading to dreadnought battleships—as he was an advocate of the 'decisive battle' and of naval blockades.

He wrote extensively on blockades, for instance, here. As far as I can see, in Mahan's view, if a decisive naval battle determined control of the sea, control of the sea in turn meant the ability to impose blockades. This is something this critique of post-World War II US strategy neglects:

Mahanian theory was a poor predictor of events in World War I, but it could be argued that Mahan’s theory was vindicated in World War II. In 1945 the United States Navy stood at the height of its power. Relatively new as a capital ship force—the first modern battleships of the great white fleet had sailed in 1907—the US Navy undertook a massive expansion to prepare for war, both materially and philosophically. Pearl Harbor demonstrated how the battleship had been eclipsed by the aircraft carrier. The Navy immediately adapted—taking what it learned at Pearl Harbor, the Navy grew to thirty fleet carriers by 1945, and added hundreds of smaller ships to fight Japan in a distinctly Mahanian fashion. Ultimately the primary tool of victory in the Pacific was carrier power.

. . . But the lessons taken from World War II and the rationale for a battle fleet of capital ships was a selective one that ignored how World War II was a two-ocean war, and how the war in the Pacific had a markedly different character from the war in the Atlantic. The war in the Atlantic was not a carrier war, but rather one in which the primary threat was the German U-boat, a formidable enemy whose potential success threatened the entire Allied war effort. The Atlantic was a small-boy war of destroyers, escorts, and antisubmarine aircraft, with little Mahanian theory influencing the plan. To defeat the undersea U-boat threat, the Navy relied on a unique combination of defensive measures, intelligence, and small-unit actions.

But Mahan's theory embraced both the Atlantic and Pacific wars. In his view, the German strategy in both world wars was "commerce raiding", piecemeal attacks on civilian commerce by both capital ships and submarines.

The great Anglo-American naval theorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the Colomb brothers, Alfred Thayer Mahan, and Julian Corbett—all dismissed it as an indecisive strategy of the weak. Imperial Germany’s turn to unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917 failed to achieve its political purpose, instead bringing the United Sates into the war just as war weariness and revolution threatened to undermine the Etente’s military effectiveness.

In World War II, the German plan to use surface capital ships in commerce raiding failed, while US entry in the Atlantic war effectively reduced the U-boat threat by mid-1943. On the other hand, the UK was able to maintain a blockade against Germany in both world wars, although the one in the 1914 war was much more complete. In fact, the tactical draw in the 1916 Battle of Jutland was a strategic victory for the UK, even though the UK was no more willing to risk its fleet in another decisive battle than Germany, because Germany's hesitancy in venturing its fleet outward allowed the UK to continue its blockade.

The citique of Mahanian strategy above misses an important point:

Aircraft carriers, while impressive, are becoming increasingly vulnerable, not less so. The newer threats of hypersonic missiles, targeting from space, and cyber present unique challenges for the US Navy and the loss of a single carrier will have enormous consequences. Additionally, even if the US Navy achieves command of the sea, it may be irrelevant due to modern strike capabilities. History has shown that the ability to strike an adversary’s mainland from sea is not decisive in war—including examples from North Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Except that in two of the examples he cites, North Vietnam and Iraq, aircraft carriers were used to enforce blockades -- and they've been used as well in the Cuban missile crisis, the blockade of Serbia 1992-96, and the blockades of Iran and Venezuela tnis year. These cases are similar to Mahan's view of the Union blockade of the Confederacy -- the Union had default control of the sea; neither the Confederate navy nor any third power could challenge it, which meant its ability to enforce the blockade was complete, within the technological limits of the period. Post-World War II deployments of US carriers and carrier groups have been effective in part because there's no effective counterbalance to US naval dominance.

It's a misinterpretation of Mahan to say he stresses decisive naval battles with capital ships. These are only tools to achieve naval dominance. The US achieved naval dominance by 1945, and there have been no effective challenges to it since then. The question is what a country can do with naval dominance, and that includes the ability to impose blockades. This is something Trump recognizes, probably better than any recent president.

Do European Navies Traditionally Perform Well?

The USN's ability to thus far repel the Iranian antiship ballistic missile attack should not conceal the fact that virtually no other European navy could do so to the same degree.

Consider the French Charles de Gaulle. A normal CdG group includes at least one Horizon-class…

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) September 10, 2026

The post above raises interesting historical questions. Note its conclusion: "To those steeped in the tradition of European maritime superiority these [that European navies would not fare well against Iranian drone attacks] are surprising results." I've been asking myself for a while whether "the tradition of European maritime superiority" is overrated. This brings us to A T Mahan:

In 1890, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, a lecturer in naval history and the president of the United States Naval War College, published The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, a revolutionary analysis of the importance of naval power as a factor in the rise of the British Empire. Two years later, he completed a supplementary volume, The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793–1812.

Mahan argued that British control of the seas, combined with a corresponding decline in the naval strength of its major European rivals, paved the way for Great Britain’s emergence as the world’s dominant military, political, and economic power. Mahan and some leading American politicians believed that these lessons could be applied to U.S. foreign policy, particularly in the quest to expand U.S. markets overseas.

If the UK was "the world’s dominant military, political, and economic power", why did it fight itself to exhaustion in the Great War? The one Mahan-style decisive naval engagement of that war, the Battle of Jutland, was essentially a draw, with both sides determining that any such future engagement would result in one side, as Winston Churchill put it, "losing the war in an afternoon". But wasn't this precisely Mahan's point? In effect, Churchill acknowledged that the UK wasn't realistically capable of forcing a Mahan-style decisive victory. So much for the might of the British Empire.

As a long-ago English major, I would point out tbat the American expatriate Henry James had observed the exhaustion of UK society by 1900:

"Mrs. Medwin" is a short story by Henry James, first published in Punch in 1900. The story slyly satirizes fashionable society in fin-de-siècle England. The central characters are an American brother and sister who both entertain and live off this society, which has grown bland and bored and almost exhausted.

Admiral David Beatty, who famously remarked at the Battle of Jutland, "There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today", was definitely part of that bland, bored, almost exhausted society.

But let's move to World War II. Winston Churchill's experience in the Great War seems to have shaped his strategy for the next one: from the start, his aim was to hold out only long enough to get the US into the war. The loss of the HMS Hood -- which had precisely the same thing wrong with it as the British dreadnaughts lost at Jutland -- was a tactical loss for the UK but a potential propaganda disaster if it convinced the US public that the UK couldn't continue the war; this was the reason for Churchill's urgency in sinking the Bismarck.

In fact, the only Mahan-style decisive victory for the Royal Navy in World War II was the Battle of Cape Matapan, where rhe UK defeated the Italian navy in the Mediterranean; the British had radar, the Italians didn't. Much more important was the Mahan-style defeat of the Royal Navy off Malaya on December 10, 1941:

Part of a British naval squadron known as Force Z, the Royal Navy battleship HMS Prince of Wales and battlecruiser HMS Repulse were sunk by land-based bombers and torpedo bombers of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

. . . The objective of Force Z, which consisted of one battleship, one battlecruiser and four destroyers, was to intercept the Japanese invasion fleet in the South China Sea north of Malaya. The task force sailed without air support. Although the British had a close encounter with Japanese heavy surface units, the force failed to find and destroy the main convoy. On their return to Singapore they were attacked in open waters and sunk by long-range torpedo bombers.

. . . The sinking of the two ships severely weakened the British Eastern Fleet in Singapore. . . . Singapore itself fell to the Japanese on 15 February, leading to the largest surrender in British history.

According to Wikipedia,

The deployment of the ships was a decision made by Winston Churchill. He was firmly warned against it by the First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound, and later by his friend, Field Marshal Jan Smuts, Prime Minister of South Africa, who prophesied the fate of the capital ships, when he addressed the crew of HMS Repulse just before she left Durban for Singapore.

. . . The earlier grounding of the carrier HMS Indomitable left the capital ships without naval air cover. [Admiral Sir Tom] Phillips[, who had ingratiated himself with Churchill,] had long held the opinion that aircraft were no threat to surface ships, and so he took Force Z, consisting of HMS Prince of Wales, HMS Repulse, and four destroyers. . . to intercept the Japanese without air cover.

The best thing that can be said about Churchill is that he recognized the war was unwinnable without the US coming in, but the end effect of that was that the US Navy had eclipsed the Royal Navy and all other combatant navies by the end of the war. The only Mahan-style engagements after the Royal Navy's loss at Malaya were US vs Japanese.

It's intriguing that the post embedded above suggests that currently, only the Japanese navy, and possibly South Korea, could do an equivalent job to the US Navy in opposing Iranian drones. But since 1940 -- and maybe since 1916 -- the Royal Navy, as well as the French, German, and Italian navies, haven't potentially done as well against the US Navy as the Japanese.

A Business Contrarian's Take On Harvard

The YouTube video embedded above is from Michael Girdley, who is an entrepreneur who speaks frequently on the declining value of an MBA degree and whose videos often cover the rise and fall of well-known brands. In this case, he takes on Harvard. At 12:48, he offers a new take on Harvard and other elite schools' selectivity:

As the 1980s happened, Harvard acceptance rate went from nearly 20% down to 4%. In economics, we refer to this thing as a Veblen good.

I double-checked his selectivity numbers. According to AI,

During the 1970s, Harvard University's undergraduate acceptance rate hovered around 15% to 20%. This is significantly higher than today's hyper-competitive acceptance rates (which currently sit at roughly 3% to 4%), but it still made Harvard one of the most selective institutions in the United States at the time.

Also, according to AI,

A Veblen good is a luxury item for which demand increases as its price rises, defying the standard economic law of supply and demand. Named after American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen, these goods break regular market rules because they serve as status symbols. People buy them not just for practical use, but to display wealth and success—a concept Veblen called conspicuous consumption.

Via AI again,

In 1970, the total annual cost to attend Harvard was $2,600. If Harvard's price hikes had perfectly tracked the U.S. consumer price index, that $2,600 would adjust to roughly $21,000 today. For the 2026–2027 academic year, the total sticker price (including tuition, room, board, and fees) has climbed to approximately $91,600. Ultimately, an undergraduate education at Harvard costs more than four times higher in real, inflation-adjusted dollars today than it did in the 1970s.

Girdley continues,

In a situation like this in 2008, in which they're short, basically, revenue, you would think they would bring in more students, charge them a lot of money, but it turns out they can't. If they did, they would ruin the whole idea of Harvard being exclusive. And also, coming due at the time for the bill here was in 2008-2009 was all the other universities that had seen the Harvard model and totally copied it. If you're a college graduate, especially one from a private liberal arts college like I am [Lafayette}, decent chance they're managing a couple hundred million dollars worth of money donated to the university.

And most importantly, they watched the scarcity game that Harvard played. Despite the United States going from 80 or 90 million residents back 100 something years ago, and now being at 360 million, most of these elite universities have exactly the same enrollment. Harvard had the idea, promoted it all, and it may just in this case be a story of one university doing a rise and fall. But actually, if you look at it, they're emblematic of the entire system coming down and leaving you and me and other folks with $1.7 trillion in student loan debt.

. . . And there's a mental model of college that you should have that is explained by one number, 33%. Remember I told you that the normal admittance rate is low single digits for a place like Harvard? Well, the legacy admittance rate, like if your relative or parent went there, is 33%. If you're a white student, you tend to fall into one of four buckets if you get into the university. And there's a 43% acceptance rate for these people. They're often called ALDC: Athletes, Legacy, Dean's interest kids, meaning a dean sponsored them in, or faculty Children.

. . . Harvard even runs a thing called the Z list, like Zebra. And that is where students who are not qualified to get into the university but have incredibly powerful parents, like a Clinton or a Gates or a Bush, are suddenly accepted to the university, just because they happen to be connected to the very most powerful and the wealthiest.

While actual Ivy admissions criteria, the ones that factor in the ALDC buckets, are a closely guarded secret, the cases I've looked at here suggest ALDC admissions are typically more than 25% -- how much more could well be a shocking surprise. Combine this with tbe percentage of foreign students, currently 15% of Harvard undergraduates. Although there is currently a ban on explicitly DEI or affirmative action admissions, as of fall 2025, 11.5% were black, while 11% were Hispanic. These represent significsnt declines from immediate prior years.

The result suggests that well under half the available admissions slots in each Harvard undergraduate entering class are available to US-born white males applying under merit-based criteria, including grades, SATs,and extracurriculars. Elsewhere I've estimated this proportion at something closer to 25%. One of Girdley's big takeaways in his video is that there's a pretty good chance someone with an elite degree is actually, as he puts it, a "doofus". Others are beginning to notice this as well.

A lot of guys my age and older don’t realize how much the world has changed over the past 20 years. Young, talented white guys have been shut out of every institution in America and told their only hope for a future is clearing toilets for their new female and Third World…

— Dale Stark (@DaleStarkA10) September 9, 2026

But this is actually nothing new. F Scott Fitzgerald, a Princeton dropout, depicted this in The Great Gatsby. I saw it at an Ivy in the 1960s, but at the time, the numbers weren't available to help me understand it. They certainly are now.

UK Authorities Blur The Migrant Issue; BBC Won't Cover It Anyhow

Donna Jones, police and crime commissioner for Hampshire spoke to #BBCBreakfast about Portsmouth.
The BBC later deleted her last 15 seconds.
Listen and see why …. pic.twitter.com/EDmDfCZFW6

— Robert Abel (@rj_abel) September 7, 2026

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse calls attention to this post, but he takes it too seriously:

This is what they call one of those dangerous ‘ah-ha‘ moments. A British Police Commissioner from Hampshire, was discussing the newest illegal migrant influx that has been happening on the eastern coastline of the U.K. During the final 19 seconds of Donna Jones remarks, she identified the core issue that has perplexed many:

”This is a real wake up call to the government, yet again, that the British people are fed up with the lack of control of our borders. Which is why, we really need to be looking as a country about our membership in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), because that’s why we can’t turn the boats around and send them back to France”

That 19-seconds was immediately cut out of the BBC rebroadcast of the interview. However, the moment was caught and shared on the X platform.

But someonme named John Davies replied,

Of course the excuse about ECHR is crap.
UK sovereign law outranks

— John Davies (@MrAlignIT) September 8, 2026

I asked Chrome AI Mode, "Does UK sovereign law outweigh the European Court for Human Rights?" It replied,

Yes, UK domestic law ultimately outweighs the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) within the UK’s own legal system, but the UK remains bound by it under international law. To understand how this works, it helps to look at the relationship through two different lenses: UK constitutional law and international law.

Under the UK's unwritten constitution, the principle of Parliamentary Sovereignty means that the UK Parliament is the supreme legal authority.

The UK Supreme Court and lower domestic courts cannot strike down or invalidate an Act of Parliament just because it conflicts with human rights.

The Human Rights Act 1998 incorporates the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) into domestic law. Under Section 4 of this Act, if a UK law breaches human rights, senior UK judges can only issue a "Declaration of Incompatibility." This is essentially a formal warning to Parliament. It is entirely up to Parliament to decide whether or not to change the law.

While the UK Parliament can legally pass any law it wants domestically, the UK is still a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights.

Under international law, the UK has agreed to abide by the final judgments of the ECtHR in cases to which it is a party. If Parliament passes a law that violates the Convention and ignores a Strasbourg ruling, it is not "breaking UK law," but it is breaching international law. This can damage the UK’s diplomatic standing and create international political friction.

What current UK and international law permit regarding whether migrants can be sent back to France is unclear:

Ahead of the start of the party's conference, Reform UK's MPs have been repeating their claim that migrants who are intercepted while crossing the English Channel can just be taken back to France.

It's part of the party's four point plan to "stop the boats".

Both the party's leader Nigel Farage and deputy leader Richard Tice have claimed that the UK is legally entitled to do this.

But BBC Verify has found no evidence that this is the case.

. . . On 19 September [2024], Nigel Farage told BBC Radio Kent that part of Reform's plan for migrants crossing the Channel in small boats would be to "take them back to France".

In June, he said on Question Time: “We’ll pick them up in the Channel and take them back” to France.

. . . According to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and the International Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue (SAR Convention), states are allowed to pick people up from boats if they are "found at sea in danger of being lost".

But these laws do not allow them to be taken to another state without that country agreeing.

. . . On 3 September, Richard Tice said about his policy of taking people intercepted in small boats straight back to France: "We know it's legal because the Belgian authorities have done it."

BBC Verify spoke to the Belgian police when the claim was first made in May, and they confirmed that they have intercepted small boats, treating them "as a rescue operation".

I suspect that if the UK had a leader with the political will to do this, the mere threat of returning migrants to France would force France to revisit the question of controlling its own borders in much the way Trump forced Mexico to control migrants. Since the boats are launched in France in French territorial waters, it ought to be possible to argue that they already had French permision to be there. One thing that's certain is that current UK leadership doesn't have the political will to do this.

"Unofficial" Population Policies?

The video embedded above raises inchoate questions about unofficial or quasi-official UK and French policies on migrants. On the arrival of the super-dinghy in Portsmouth that spurred anti-migrant demonstrations over the weekend, Grannyopterix says at 4:20,

The important thing for a non-Brit to know, any Brit who has taken a ship between Dover and France knows that this neck of water is where the Atlantic and the North Sea bump into each other. It is notoriously rough and dangerous water. And this dinghy went from here, down here, along here, and up there. That's a long journey, and it's not like the short route, is it? . . . It would have had to have been escorted. Apparently it took ten hours for that dinghy to get from here to there. That requires a certain amount of planning and support, I'd say.

OK, so, they went from Gravelines to Portsmouth, and started off by the French police. Now, after that, when they landed in Portsmouth, there was this entire line of buses waiting to ship them out. That again, logistics, planning, you could see this was a well-coordinated operation. I have also read that there were tents there full of new clothes, pajamas, shoes, other necesssary equipment for people who'd jst come and were probably rather damp by that time.

OK, so these buses were waiting for them, the buses left Portsmouth with apparently a police escort, as you can see, and this was all done very late at night. . . and then they arrived at this hotel in London and unloaded. Apparently there were about ten or 15 women in that crew, but as you can see, most of the people coming off there appear to be, well, fighting-age young men.

At least officially, according to the House of Commons Library,

The UK and France deploy resources to detect and disrupt movements of migrants, boats and engine parts, and to prevent them from coming together at the coastline. Law enforcement tactics include conducting checks at road and transport connections, using roadblocks and buoys in waterways, destroying boats near crossing points, and carrying out beach and coastal patrols. Law enforcement extensively uses surveillance technology including drones and thermal imaging cameras.

Actions to deter unauthorised migrants from travelling to coastal areas or staying in northern France include measures to prevent informal living areas being established, rolling eviction operations and a significant police presence in the area.

Nevertheless, in practice, the embarkation into this particular mega-dinghy at Gravelines appears to have been facilitated by Franch police. News reports say 140 migrants were in the dinghy, which reflects the recent change in strategy by traffickers to increase the size of the boats. Buit it's difficult not to surmise that that change in trafickers' strategy is accompanied by much geater tacit cooperation by official and quasi-official actors in the UK and France; the dinghy was escorted over its full voyage across the channel:

FRENCH rescue boats and two helicopters helped a mega-dinghy carrying 140 migrants cross the Channel to a UK beach yesterday.

Five rescue boats escorted the inflatable as it completed the unprecedented 70-mile English Channel crossing on Sunday.

The “safety operation” involved handing out lifejackets to everyone on board, including 20 women and eight “very young children”.

The flimsy inflatable reached Eastney beach, in Portsmouth, intact on Sunday afternoon, with nobody being injured after 14 hours at sea.

This parallels another question that's come up in the Canadian trade dispute: Prime Minister Carney insists he was protecting Francophone Canada by rejecting the recent trade agreement -- but observers have made the point that Canadian immigration policy, which involves widespread immigration from India, threatens to flood out Francophone Canada. The Century Initiative, a project with widespread support from the Laurentian Elite, aims to increase the population of Canada, currently 41 million, to, 100 million by 2100. While it has not been passed by the Canadian parliament, current immigration policy there seems generally consistent with it.

In effect, with the native birth rate stable but current residents leaving, this would add 60 millon migrants from India to the current population of 41 million, with roughly 9 million whose first language is French. This would create a far larger language group whose primary language is Hindi or Punjabi, although Canadian Charter Rights (a weaker version of the US Bill of Rights) currently recognize only English and French as official languages.

If the Century Intiative is implemented, oficially or not, it would simply redefine Canada -- population of Indian heritage would be 60% of the country, certainly overwhelming the French and at least out-voting English speakers. At least in theory, it would require Ottawa to rewrite the Charter Rights, equivalent to a US constitutional amendment, but it would require only a majority in parliament. What's behind this? What's behind the quasi-official encouragement of illegal migration in the UK? Prime Minister Burnham is officially against it:

Andy Burnham will begin the process of courting European leaders when he welcomes Emmanuel Macron as the first foreign head of state to visit him in Downing Street.

The prime minister will meet the French president at No 10 on Thursday as he looks to make inroads on a number of foreign policy objectives, including curbing irregular migration and sealing a new deal with the EU.

. . . Burnham said in a statement on Wednesday: “The progress we have seen this summer [in bringing down the number of small boat crossings] shows what can be achieved when the UK and France work together.

“But I am clear that we cannot be complacent. Smuggling gangs are constantly adapting their tactics, and the UK and France need to respond quickly and stay one step ahead of the criminals facilitating the dangerous crossings.

“The small boats crisis is a shared European challenge, and no country can solve it alone. Working with France and our international partners, we will restore order and control to our borders and prevent smugglers exploiting vulnerable migrants.”

But on the ground, UK and French authorities appear to be not just facilitating, but working fully hand-in-glove with, migrant traffickers and their new policy of using mega-dinghies to regularize migration across the Channel. But neither the UK nor the Canadian parliament is willing to go on record making this level of migration official policy. Why not?