Jacob Rees-Mogg Gets The US Wrong

I've noted before that I've recently discovered the UK Thatcherite toff Jacob Rees-Mogg, who gets things wrong in an entertainingly stuffy way. In the video above, he congratulates the US for having what he implies is a copy of the UK constitultional system. This is the sort of comfortable patter that Winston Churchill used to ingratiate himself with Roosevelt, and the sort of thing King Charles said to the US congress not long ago in a similar effort to get the US to continue to spend money on the UK's defense.

Of the events in 1776, Rees-Mogg says, at 1:40:

[T]he Americans said they were English gentlemen who just happened to live in another place, and they wanted the rights of Englishmen. They wanted taxation with representation. . . . Edmund Burke pointed out that there was a precedent for people living abroad being able to to send MPs. That is to say, up until the reign of Mary Tudor, Mary I, people living in Calais had sent members to Parliament, to the House of Commons.

A little earlier, he says,

The Americans blamed poor old George III, harmless old, mad in the end, George III for what happened and their departure.

On one hand, he's correct in that the Declaration of Independence is in part a list of specific grievances against poor old King George, but Jefferson, the lawyer who wrote it, was certainly aware that on one hand, even as of 1776, the king had little or no power to do the things the Declaration accuses him of doing, such as:

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

In the UK, parliamentary supremacy had been codified almost a century earlier, first in practice during the civil war, and then via the Bil of Rights 1689. But on the other hand, Jefferson didn't assert any legal right for the colonists; the complaint wasn't that the king via parliament hadn't given the colonists legal rights; the complaint in the Declaration of Independence was based on natural law, not any sort of UK legal precedent, Edmund Burke notwithstanding:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. . . . But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.

The list of grievances is formally against the nominal sovereign, King George, but practically it's against the system by which parliament embodies the sovereign power. The king as a practical matter couldn't do of his own volition any of the things alleged against him in the Declaration.

Rees-Mogg then goes on to list the guarantees provided in the US Bill of Rights and suggests that these are traditionally also establised in the UK, but then he defeats his own argtument by saying those guarantees have been eroded in recent years in the UK -- but it's parliamentary supremacy that's allowed this; it was allowed in 1776 just as much as it's allowed now. Parliament can abridge freedom of speech in any way it chooses. There's no wording in UK law equivalent to "Congress shall make no law" in the US First Amendment.

In fact, a little over a decade later, the Constitutional Convention moved to circumscribe the power of congress and establish an executive that could act independently, something the UK monarchy hadn't been able to do for 100 years. Clearly this was done with the experience of the UK in mind.

Rees-Mogg concludes,

My goodness, how well our two constitutions have done in making the world rich, successful, and safe.

Wait a moment. It's been roughly 100 years since the UK had much of anything at all to do with making the world rich, successful, or safe. UK policies had a great deal to do with bringing about the Great Depression and then World War II. The US, on the other hand, has had everything to do with making the world rich, successful, and safe; the UK has just been along for the ride but seems eager to convince itself it's somehow responsible.

European Shortfall As A Historic Constant

For some resson, the Wall Street Journal put up a link on Facebooki to a piece they ran last April, What Happens When Europeans Find Out How Poor They Are?. Coming back to it today, I find they've tucked it back behind a paywall. But the first paragraphs give up the gravamen:

Do Europeans understand how poor they are? And what will happen when they find out? Those are the Continent’s big political-economy questions for the next few years—perhaps decades.

The widening gap between American and European prosperity is among the most important facts of the global economy. The clearest manifestation is the chasm in per capita gross domestic product: $94,400 in the U.S., according to the International Monetary Fund, compared with $65,300 in Germany, $61,000 in the U.K. and $52,000 in France.

I don't know what history books this fellow has been smoking -- I've gradually come to recognize I did well by not taking any undergraduate history courses -- but European and UK underproduction vis-a-vis the US is a basic fact that underlies the whole 20th century. It's simply nothing new. To show what an elementary issue this is, I asked Chrome AI mode, "Is it possible to compare the difference in per capita GDP between the US and Germany as of 1900?" It answesred,

Yes, it is entirely possible to compare the differences in per capita GDP between the United States and Germany as of 1900, thanks to extensive reconstructions by economic historians. The most authoritative source for this data is the Maddison Project Database at the University of Groningen. This database standardizes historical economic output across time and borders using Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) adjusted to "International Dollars" to account for local cost of living and inflation.

The 1900 Economic Comparison

Data from the historical data records show that by the turn of the 20th century, both nations were rapidly emerging as global industrial powerhouses:

United States per capita GDP (1900): ~$4,096

Germany per capita GDP (1900): ~$3,134

The Absolute Gap: The US led Germany by approximately $962 per person.

The Percentage Difference: The average American's economic output was roughly 30.7% higher than the average German's.

I went to my calulator and founnd that thr contemporary numbers for Germany given in the WSJ show Germany's per capita GDP is 69.3% of the US, versus the 1900 numbers from AI showing Germany's per capita GDP as 69.3% of the US. In other words, the difference over more than a century is de minimis. This guy was somehow able to convince the WSJ that he had something important to say. These people presumably took the same history classes that say Winston Churchill was a great man.

I said above that this is a key fact that underlies the history of the 20th century. Let's ask Chrome AI another question: "Did US banks finance the UK and France throughout World War I?" It answered,

Yes. US banks, led by J.P. Morgan & Co., heavily financed the UK and France throughout World War I. Prior to the US entering the war, Wall Street banks provided billions of dollars in loans and credit to purchase essential American munitions, food, and raw materials.

When the Allies exhausted their initial gold and cash reserves in 1915, J.P. Morgan & Co. organized a historic $500 million Anglo-French Loan to prevent the Allied war effort from collapsing. By 1917, after these commercial credit lines were tapped out, the US government stepped in directly, with the Treasury lending roughly $10 billion to the Allies through the end of the war.

Say what the history books will about the Lusitania and the Zimmermann Telegram, it was actually the fear of the UK and France defaulting on their war loans that drove US entry into the war, and the unpaid war loans were a continuing issue that drove international policy in the 1920s and 1930s. I asked Chrome AI mode, "What effect did UK and French postwar debt have on the German reparations issue?" It answered,

The postwar debts that the UK and France owed to the United States directly paralyzed the German reparations issue, creating a vicious, unworkable economic triangle during the 1920s. Here is exactly how these intersecting debts shaped the reparations crisis:

The Debt-Reparations Triangle

US Demand: The United States demanded full repayment of wartime loans from Britain and France.

Allied Stance: Britain and France could only pay the US if Germany paid them reparations.

German Collapse: Germany’s economy was too broken to fund the entire Allied debt burden.

The basic problem was that neither Germany, the UK, Austria-Hungary, France, nor Russia had the wherewithal to finance the war that began in 1914. J P Morgan himself died in 1913 a seriously ill and mentally diminished man. His son Jack doesn't seem to have been able to correct his father's serious misjudgments in the years before his death, and organizing the 1915 Anglo-French loan without demanding a resolution to the war as a condition was a major lapse in itself, as far as I can see.

But let's skip over the miscalculations of the 1920s, for which Winston Churchill bore a great deal of responsibility, and move to the Second World War, in which neither Germany, nor France, nor ther UK, nor the Soviet Union, nor for that matter Japan, had the financial wherewithal for the extended fight. 1941 was simply a replay of 1917, with US money, organizational ability, and production power shifting the balance. (It was also able to push Churchill out of any influence over Allied policy.)

While both the Soviet Union and Germany couid conceal their financial disadvange via extensive use of slave labor, for Germany in particular, US production capacity won out; it could replace airplanes and pilots, when Germany couldn't. But this is just a special case of a historic constant, something only Trump has been able to recognize, and he's been belatedly readjusting policy as a result.

The World Keeps Looking More And More Like The Bourne Franchise

Back in 2020, I posted about my first serious look at the Bourne franchise:

The original Ludlum novels appeared between 1980 and 1990, while the film trilogy we watched appeared between 2002 and 2007, long before Donald Trump was anything but a playboy billionaire and reality TV star. Yet the image of the CIA and its fictional director, Martin Marshall, is the one we have now, the one with the actual CIA director John Brennan, who in the public mind is fully capable of Martin Marshall's misdeeds and fully eligible for Marshall's implied fate, federal indictment for serious whatever.

Did Martin Marshall go to Yale? You betcha.

A quick summary of the Bourne story as portrayed in the films is that David Webb, a former member of the US Army Delta Force, is recruited into a double-secret CIA program called Treadstone. This uses drugs, psychological manipulation, and elite-level special forces training to create super-assassins, who take out world political figures to further a secret CIA agenda. In the course of one such assignment, which he undertakes using the alias Jason Bourne, Webb is nearly killed himself, but he loses all memory of his former life, and he must undertake a hero's journey to recover his identity and backstory. The CIA deploys all its resources to eliminate Webb/Bourne to prevent Treadstone's exposure.

This premise was credible from the start due to the CIA's proven involvement in programs like MKUltra. According to Wikipedia,

MKUltra was an illegal human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used in altering human behavior.

. . . Project MKUltra began in 1953 and was halted in 1973. MKUltra used numerous methods to manipulate its subjects' mental states and brain functions, such as the covert administration of high doses of psychoactive drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals without the subjects' consent. Additionally, other methods beyond chemical compounds were used, including electroshocks, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, and other forms of torture.

. . . Project MKUltra was revealed to the public in 1975 by the Church Committee (named after Senator Frank Church) of the United States Congress and Gerald Ford's United States President's Commission on CIA Activities within the United States (the Rockefeller Commission). Investigative efforts were hampered by CIA director Richard Helms's order that all MKUltra files be destroyed in 1973[.]

The problem -- and a reason the Bourne franchise still resonates -- is that nobody can quite say with assurance that MKUltra was in fact halted in 1973. Rep Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) brought matters up to date this past Tuesday (June 30) in a House hearing:

In her opening remarks, Luna called the program “crimes committed by the Central Intelligence Agency against American citizens” and “crimes against humanity.”

“This was a deliberate, systematic governmental operation… authorized by the very top of U.S. intelligence apparatus,” Luna said.

She detailed how CIA Director Richard Helms personally ordered the destruction of MKULTRA records in 1973 as he left office. Sidney Gottlieb and his team spent an entire day burning 152 files.

Gottlieb then had his personal papers destroyed. The head of the CIA’s own records center protested in writing and was overruled.

. . . Luna announced that the CIA is now working to declassify newly discovered documents tied to what she described as a previously unknown “forgery program.”

CIA whistleblower and former officer James Erdman III testified that approximately 40 boxes of sensitive records were removed from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) during declassification review efforts.

. . . Erdman testified that the CIA “took back 40 boxes of JFK files and MKULTRA files being processed for declassification by DNI Tulsi Gabbard” in what he described as “documented efforts to circumvent oversight.”

. . . Adding to the alarm, a former CIA officer testified during the hearing that “I don’t believe that the research stopped” on MKULTRA.

ZeroHedge has more details:

Investigative journalist Tom O'Neill, author of Chaos, told the committee the agency actively misled Congress in 1977. He submitted documents showing the CIA's own earlier claims about LSD experiments contradicted what it later told lawmakers. O'Neill stated flatly: "I believe the agency misled Congress in 1977 when it characterized MK-Ultra as a failure."

He connected dots to figures like psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West and his ties to Charles Manson and Jack Ruby, underscoring how deeply the program reached into real-world events. The message was clear: the full story was buried on purpose.

One of the most disturbing revelations came from historical documents referenced during the hearing. A participant in the original program documented the ability to replace true memories with false ones without the subject's knowledge.

The exact description: "It's feasible to take the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual, and through hypnotic suggestion, bring about the subsequent conscious recall to the effect that this event never actually took place. But that a different fictional event actually did occur."

. . . He then delivered the core warning for today: "There have been enormous advances in cyber technology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. Covert agencies may have access to tools for mind control that Sidney Gottlieb could not have imagined."

O'Neill agreed. The massive investment in time, money, and research made it unlikely the capabilities were simply abandoned. The technology they built was too valuable.

Public suspicion about whether MKULTRA-style techniques ever truly ended is not abstract. In 2024, widespread speculation erupted around the Trump assassination attempt and whether the shooter could have been influenced or programmed through evolved versions of these programs.

The CIA issued a flat denial, calling the claims "utterly false, absurd, and damaging" and insisting MKULTRA ended decades ago.

. . . The question is no longer whether the CIA once crossed every ethical and constitutional line. The question is whether those lines were ever truly redrawn - or simply moved into newer, harder-to-detect territory.

My respect for Ludlum as a writer has increased. It may be that, like Lew Wallace (1827-1905), a fascinating figure who among other things wrote the novel on which the film Ben-Hur is based, Ludlum (1927-2001) had an imagination that uniquely inspired buth the public and Hollywood. According to Wikipedia,

Ludlum's novels typically feature one heroic man, or a small group of crusading individuals, in a struggle against powerful adversaries whose intentions and motivations are evil and who are capable of using political and economic mechanisms in frightening ways. The world in his writings is one where global corporations, shadowy military forces and government organizations all conspired to preserve (if it was evil) or undermine (if it was law-abiding) the status quo.

I'm not sure if Ludlum's novels are as good as the films they were made from; I haven't felt compelled to check. The critical consensus seems to be, though, that the novel Ben-Hur isn't as good as the movie, but according to Wikipedia, after its 1880 publication,

It became a best-selling American novel, surpassing Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) in sales. The book also inspired other novels with biblical settings and was adapted for the stage and motion picture productions.

Ben-Hur remained at the top of the U.S. all-time bestseller list until the 1936 publication of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. The 1959 MGM film adaptation of Ben-Hur is considered one of the greatest films ever made and was seen by tens of millions, going on to win a record 11 Academy Awards in 1960, after which the book's sales increased and it surpassed Gone with the Wind.

I can attest that Ben-Hur the novel is a roaring good read. I may need to look futher into Ludlum; like Lew Wallace and Herman Wouk, he may be an underrated American writer. It's good I didn't become an English prof.

UK Officers Who Responded To Nowak Stabbing Now Face Investigation

I had a lengthy post here giving what was known at the time about the stabbing of Henry Nowak, an 18‑year‑old British university student, by Vickrum Digwa, a 23-year-old British Sikh, in Southampton, UK. At the time, although policy required that the circumstances of the stabbing, Digwa's arrest, and Nowak's treatment by local police be investigated by the Independent Office for Police Conduct, the IOPC was leaking to the UK Guardian that this would be perfunctory:

The Guardian understands the IOPC has found no indication of any disciplinary or criminal offence by the officers involved after six months of inquiries, after it was referred to the watchdog in December. Hampshire police said of four officers involved, three remained on full duties and one has resigned.

But as of yesterday, things seem to have changed:

The two police officers who handcuffed Henry Nowak as he lay dying from stab wounds have been placed under investigation for gross misconduct by the police watchdog.

The Guardian has learned the two officers have been away from work because of threats they have received, which led to fears for their safety.

The officers could face dismissal from the Hampshire force if they are found guilty.

The decision by the Independent Office for Police Conduct to change the nature of their investigation and expand it comes after two meetings with the Nowak family and their lawyer. It also follows public anger about the case after video footage showed the officers disbelieving Nowak’s pleas that he could not breathe.

The IOPC had already been investigating since Nowak’s death in Southampton in December 2025. It had previously assessed that there was no indication police may have breached discipline guidelines and treated the officers as witnesses.

The BBC is more non-committal:

The IOPC said the investigation relates to potential failures by the officers to recognise Henry Nowak needed urgent medical help and the decision to arrest and handcuff him rather than provide first aid.

The watchdog added: "There's also an indication one of the officers may have breached the standard relating to authority, respect and courtesy, for appearing to dismiss Henry saying he had been stabbed."

The BBC revealed last week it took officers eight minutes to discover Henry's fatal stab wound, after arriving at the scene.

. . . "Two officers will now face gross misconduct investigations. There is clear evidence that public confidence in the force may have been seriously harmed by this incident, and that is a factor we must consider when assessing the evidence.

"The serving of gross misconduct notices does not necessarily mean that disciplinary proceedings will follow.

"At the end of our investigation we will decide whether any officers should face disciplinary proceedings."

The second Guardian link has more background:

Digwa has been convicted of Nowak’s murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of 21 years. Senior government law officers are appealing against the sentence on the basis it is unduly lenient.

The Hampshire force will not suspend the two officers and said: “The officers are currently away from the workplace. If they return, they will be placed on directed duties that do not involve any contact with the public.”

It declined to comment as to whether the reason the two officers were away from the workplace was because of threats.

On one hand, if the authorities are now appealing the sentence as unduly lenient, sombody's worried about the black eye this case has given them. On the other hand, the officers themselves are being treated very leniently, certainly by US standards. In my earlier post, I cited an AI summary of typical US police department policy:

Under the Fourteenth Amendment, if U.S. officers take a person into custody (by handcuffing them), they assume a legal duty of care for that person’s safety and well-being.

In the U.S., acting with such severe negligence would strip officers of qualified immunity, exposing them and their municipality to catastrophic civil rights lawsuits under 42 U.S. Code § 1983.

Had this specific tragedy occurred under U.S. jurisdiction, standard accountability protocols would immediately trigger:

1. An Internal Affairs (IA) or independent state-level investigation for a critical use-of-force/in-custody death.

2. Immediate termination of the officers for violating the department's mandatory Duty to Intervene and Medical Aid policies.

3. A presentation of the case to a grand jury by local or federal prosecutors for potential charges of reckless endangerment or manslaughter.

As far as I've been able to determine, in the UK, the "legal duty of care" when putting someone in handcuffs is less clear, and the policies (such as the Metropolitan Police) are windy and ambiguous:

Any intentional application of force on another person is an assault. The use of handcuffs, as with any use of force must be justified. Justification is achieved through establishing not only a legal power to use handcuffs, but also clear objective grounds that the officer or member of police staff's actions were reasonable, necessary and proportionate.

Any objective review of the Nowak case would establish pretty quickly that handcuffing Nowak was neither reasonable nor necessary nor proportionate. I suspect, however, that the officers will receive more lenient treatment than they would in the US, and they likely will not face criminal charges. The authorities are going to have to tiptoe very carefully around this issue, especially given the reality on the ground that attacks on white Brits by members of migrant communities are an everyday occurrence.

Confidence In Universities Continues To Fall

Last week, The Atlantic ran a piece, Higher Ed Is Very Sorry: Universities are studying how they lost the public’s trust:

Just 10 years ago, almost 60 percent of Americans said they had a lot of confidence in higher education. By last year, that number had fallen to 42 percent. Seventy percent of Americans told Pew last fall that higher education is moving in the wrong direction. The disdain has become so difficult to ignore that, over the past year, several universities and higher-education organizations set out to study how they lost the public’s trust—and how they might restore it.

The most insightful of theae studies appears to be from Yale:

The report, released in April, is nominally about Yale, but it could just as well be about the Ivy League in general. It identifies three main areas where elite universities have fallen short.

First, according to the report, these schools lost trust because of their convoluted pricing system; many set exorbitant tuition and use revenues from the richest families, who pay full price, to subsidize the cost of attendance for everyone else. The sticker price of attending Yale, for example, is $94,100 in annual tuition and fees. But families making less than $200,000 receive free tuition. The problem is that many Americans—according to one survey, 48 percent—wrongly assume that everyone pays full price. This contributes to the overwhelming, but incorrect, sense that college keeps getting more and more expensive. (On average, Americans are paying less for college than they were a decade ago.)

This is a peculiar observation, and certainly counterfactual. I asked Chrome AI mode, "Has the cost of higher education exceeded the rate of inflation for several generations?" It answered,

Yes, the sticker price of higher education has drastically exceeded the rate of inflation for several generations, stretching from the Baby Boomers through Millennials. Since 1980, undergraduate tuition and fees have surged by roughly 1,200%, whereas the general Consumer Price Index (CPI) grew by only about 300% over the same timeframe.

Then it added a qualifier that may be behind the statement that "Americans are paying less for college than they were a decade ago":

However, looking strictly at the "sticker price" obscures a major recent shift: over the last decade, the actual "net price" (what students pay after accounting for grants and scholarships) has finally stabilized or even declined when adjusted for inflation.

But this simply transfers the cost to other payers, for instance government aid or the increasing proportion of foreign students who pay full freight, it doesn't mean a college education costs less. And this leaves out studenet loans:

The amount of student debt in 2023 totaled $1.6 trillion, more than twice the amount outstanding in 2008 ($600 billion). That growth in debt significantly exceeds changes in the number of students over that period, which the Department of Education estimates has decreased by three percent among undergraduates and increased by 12 percent at the graduate level.

If college costs are decreasing, why has the total for student loans ballooned? This is counterintuitive at best. The piece continues,

Then there’s the opaque and at times seemingly arbitrary way that elite universities determine whom to admit. Although Yale shields most details of how it makes its decisions, the available evidence suggests that the university often privileges wealth, status, and athletic ability over purely academic considerations. Finally, the report argues that Yale has strayed from its focus on rigor and academic excellence. At the college, the median grade is an A. “Grades, like colleges and universities, no longer seem trustworthy,” the committee observes.

These are two completely separate issues. Admissions criteria, particularly in the Ivy League, are a closely guarded secret, but I've occasionally looked at the makeup of Ivy entering classes here, and that data is public and likely reflects admissions criteria closely. Around 25% are foreign students, just for starters -- they pay full freight and must certainly come from elites. Around 25% are legacies, preppies, and children of major donors.

Around 25% are athletes and DEI, leaving only about another 25% admitted on merit, although there are preferences even within this category -- an applicant from Idaho will get in with lower grades and SATs than one from Long Island. The reputation of the Ivies for being meritocratic is entirely undeserved, and it fed a major crisis for me when I couldn't figure out why so many of my Ivy classmates were such dummies.

The question of "academic excellence" is entirely separate, but in some ways it's related to the cost of college: if the price keeps rising, the parents in particular will want to see a benefit, and if their kids aren't getting As, they won't think they're getting what they paid for. But there's also a direct benefit for the professors and their deparments: if they don't give lots of As, the students won't enroll in their classes, and if their classes don't make enrollment, they're out of money.

So Yale senses that the univewrsities are giving away the game, but the game is the game, you can't change the incentives, especially when you keep raising the price. In a related story, Education Department cuts loan eligibility for college degree programs yielding 'low-earning' jobs:

Bachelor’s programs will now be required to prove that their graduates earn higher median annual earnings than the average high school graduate, and masters programs that their graduates earn higher median annual earnings than the average bachelor’s degree recipient.

If a program's graduates do not meet this threshold in two-out-of-any-three consecutive award years, the program is categorized as ‘low-earning’ and loses eligibility for Direct Loans. Bachelor’s programs in Religion/Religious Studies (53.3%) and Graphic Communications (17.7%) most frequently failed the earnings test, according to agency data.

“If a program cannot show that it leaves its graduates financially better off than if they had never enrolled, it should not be underwritten by federal taxpayers,” said Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent.

Oh, no! Those philistines are daring to measure the value of an education by money! But education is far, far more than just money!

[T]he National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, called the new earnings test a “severe regression in consumer protection.”

The union also argued that “an earnings premium alone does not go nearly far enough to ensure that programs lead to true financial stability" and that the rule “abandons advanced degree seekers,” as well as “unfairly penalizes essential but lower-paying public service fields,” which carry non-monetary value.

But if prestige schools charge a premium -- now in the $100,000 per year range -- on the basis of the claim that the're meritocratic, and the degree is an endorsement of the student's merit, then if the claim is hollow, consumers need to be informed and spend their money elsewhere. By the same token, people take out student loans on the expectation that the increased income from their degrees will make it a good economic choice to pay the loans off. Consumers need to be informed if this isn't the case. The Atlantic piece notes that the Yale report notes that "vague and contradictory aims" make it "difficult to judge whether universities are living up to their own standards, and have led to confusion about what universities are even for."

Back in May, I noted Elon Musk's remarks that “You don’t need college to learn stuff. Everything is available basically for free. You can learn anything you want for free.” Especially with the internet and now AI, this is correct, you can get free web access at a public library. An AI query can certainly point you in the same direction as a sophomore-level college course, and the universities themselves are now terrified that students can turn in AI-generated papers, and no one will be the wiser.

So where's the value added?

BBC's Titanic Sinks Tonight

Over the past two weeks, tne National Geographic Channel ran the four-part BBC series Titanic Sinks Tonight, which has its own Wikipedia entry. This is a peculiar new iteration of the Titanic story from the UK side of the Atlantic; the US version tends to concentrate on the "pride" side of the story in songs like "Down With the Old Canoe", while the UK version tends toward hand-wringing over things like the class system, wealth, and so forth. Per Wikipedia,

The series places emphasis on the social class and sex of the passengers, as well as the perceived mistakes by those in command.

The BBC definitely wrings its hands. It's worth noting that of the six talking heads who offer commentary on the action, four are women. Of the women, one is an apparently mandatory non-white, Somali-born novelist Nadifa Mohamed, whose unsmiling face seems to be there chiefly as buzzkill. That they would need to provide an African perspective on the story is incongruous at best, since the Titanic's passengers and crew, from first class to steerage, appear to have been entirely of European heritage.

The series's strong point is the actors who deliver lines originally spoken by witnesses at the 1912 US Senate inquiry into the disaster, as well as a later UK inquiry. These are direct and authentic, but what detracts from them is the comnmentary of the majority-female talking heads. In addition to Ms Mohamed, there is the particularly annoying Suzannah Lipscom, an upper-class woman with a Gorgon-head hairstyle and a nose stud. Her qualifications for addressing the audience are, according to her Wikipedia entry,

Her research focuses on the sixteenth century, in both English and French history, and covers religious, womens’s history, political, social, and psychological history. She has also written and talked about British and European witch trials.

Between her and Ms Mohamed, we get plenty of perspective on the Titanic from both the African and the sixteenth-century women's viewpoints as a way to understand the first-hand accounts of the survivors. What does this tell us about how the UK upper class, as manifested by the BBC writers, views itself? I can only conclude that it looks in the mirror and cringes, and its reflex is to comfort itself with reassurances over how it's making things up with non-whites and feminists.

The Titanic story that emerges from the witness accounts is a terrible cockup, driven more by complacency than pride, with the upper echelon of ship's officers refusing to recognize the ship is sinking and undertake any sort of organized evacuation. Certainly one can look at the disaster as an omen of the end of the old order, but it's also just a small presage of the much greater world disaster that would follow two years later. The question nobody seems to want to ask is whether what led to the Titanic was the same thing that led to the Marne.

Much of the commentary, for instance, focuses on the interpretation of Captain Smith's order to put the women and children into the lifeboats and whether it meant "women and children first" or "women and children only". Thus many lifeboats were lowered with empty seats, with the final result that 74% of the women and 52% of the children on board were saved, but only 20% of the men. Nobody asks, though, about the equivalent sacrifice of a generation of British men in the First World War.

In fact, too little is made of the controversy over whether, following the US declaration of war against Germany in 1917, US troops would serve under an independent US command, or whether they would be used as replacements in British and French units. The US made it plain that its troops were not to be used, as British and French troops were, as cannon fodder. The peculiar eagerness of the British in particular to sacrifice males to the ideals of chivalry seems to be one basis of both the Titanic and the 1914 world-war disasters.

In fact, the whole subtext of the BBC Titanic special seems to be an attempt to avoid the question of who's sacrificing whom in current British life -- this is clearly a deeply uncomfortable topic. The script briefly mentions the workers in tbe shiip's boiler rooms, who gave their lives to keep the lights on, but it speaks much more of the men in first class who didn't make it to the lifeboats -- while providing little insight into the overall question.

On the other hand, it's clearly important to the producers to give women with no particular background in the subject the opportunity to talk at length about it, eapecially an African woman, who's qualified to speak on it only by dint of being an African woman. Men, especially men of the lower classes, aren't given that chance; they're represented only by actors not of their class speaking lines from the inquests, probably with the help of a dialect coach.

I'm not sure if I like the UK at all right now, to tell the truth.

One More Time: Ohio Gov DeWine And The Haitians

Back in 2024, I had several posts on the problems that Haitians on temporary protected status were causing in Springfield, OH, including one on Gov DeWine's support for the program. In this post, I outlined how the mayor profited by renting apartments he owned to Haitians, and that he and DeWine appeared together in a press conference demanding that then-candidate Trump stop making "false allegations" against them. However, at least so far, there's no evidence that DeWine has profited personally from the program.

Nevertheless, in the wake of Thursday's Supreme Court ruling that allows Trump to end temporary protected status for Haitians, DeWine prominently disagreed, although he simply repeated the same 2024 talking points in the CNN interview embedded above:

It is not in the United States's interest, certainly not in Ohio's interest, to have people who are working every single day, who are supporting a family, who are buying houses, starting businesses, and then put deep roots in this country, and really are contributing, and yank them out. I mean, look at what the mayor of Springfield says, Mayor says that is a huge mistake.

Reporting from Springfield cited in the post says that the local Republican establishment benefited from the universal effect of migration: as in the UK and Canada, it drives down wages and drives up rents. In Springfield, it enabled sweatshop amployers and slumlords. NPR's Weekend Edition said as much:

SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: . . . Haitians have become an important part of the U.S. workforce. About 30% work in nursing homes as home health aides or delivering other kinds of care to seniors. Katie Smith Sloan, who represents thousands of senior care organizations, says it will leave a huge hole if those workers are forced to leave the country.

KATIE SMITH SLOAN: They are the backbone. And they are wonderful, wonderful workers that have developed deep, deep relationships with residents. It's just horrifying to think about what the world is going to be like for our members and for older adults and families without these workers.

HORSLEY: Smith Sloan says there have never been enough native-born workers willing to provide that kind of care, at least not at the existing wages. If foreign-born workers are sent away, she says more of the caregiving responsibility will fall to family members or, in some cases, more costly hospital stays.

SMITH SLOAN: We'll see nursing homes closing beds, maybe closing down wings, maybe closing altogether, that just won't be able to accommodate as many people as they could in the past if they don't have a workforce.

That is, a workforce "willing to provide that kind of care, at least not at the existing wages."

Another question is Gov DeWine's apparent charitable ties to Haiti:

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine's ties to Haiti stretch back 30 years to his first visit to the island nation while serving in the U.S. Senate.

The stop-over visit in 1995 spurred the Cedarville Republican to become an authority on Haiti and to make more than 20 return visits.

On a 1998 trip to Cite Soleil, a slum of Port-au-Prince, Mike and Fran DeWine met Tom Hagan, a Catholic priest who operated a free school.

The DeWines began underwriting Hagan's mission and in 1999 the schools were named in honor of Becky DeWine, their daughter who was killed in a 1993 auto accident at age 22. Becky, who had just graduated college, had planned a career in journalism.

In the past five years, the DeWine Family Foundation Inc. has donated more than $2 million to Hands Together, the non-profit that operates the free schools in Haiti.

Hands Together grew its operations from four classrooms in 1998 to 34 schools on seven campuses across six neighborhoods, serving nearly 6,000 students.

What's puzzling is that, with all the aid and NGO money that goes into Haiti, nothing has changed there, something DeWine himself understands clearly:

"The situation in Haiti is as bad as it's ever been, probably worse than it usually has been," DeWine told the statehouse news bureau. "You have gangs that run most of the country. You have a dysfunctional police, you have a dysfunctional government. The economy is in dire straits. It's a very dangerous country."

So why just do the same-old-same-old? There seems to be some DeWine connection with wealth and traditional philanthropy: his net worth is estimated at $37 million, most of it from inheriting the family business, The DeWine Seeds & Ohio Twine Co. The misplaced benevolence of the very wealthy seems often to increase the net misery in the world -- we need to learn more about how these figures operate.