Shiloh Hendrix: Nothing Is As It Seems

Decarlos Brown murdered Iryna.

Shiloh Hedrix said the N-word.

Guess who faced trial first? pic.twitter.com/tJHo5o717P

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) July 24, 2026

The more I look at the Shiloh Hendrix case, the more I'm left scratching my head. Here's the plain vanilla version:

A Minnesota jury has delivered a split verdict in the disorderly conduct trial of Shiloh Hendrix, finding the 37-year-old mother not guilty on the count related to her words directed at the eight-year-old Somali boy who was stealing from her, but guilty on the count stemming from her comments to the man who filmed and confronted her at a Rochester playground.

The incident took place on April 28, 2025, at Roy Sutherland Playground in Soldiers Field Memorial Park.

Hendrix was at the park with her toddler when the boy reached into her diaper bag and took an applesauce pouch. She confronted the child and allegedly used a racial slur.

A Somali man named Sharmake Beyle Omar, who was not the child’s father, began recording the scene, became extremely confrontational with Hendrix as she was holding her toddler, and continued filming as he demanded and provoked her to repeat the slur.

The roughly 49-second video was posted online and quickly amassed millions of views, triggering intense online backlash against Hendrix.

But it goes way beyond that. First, the man who filmed and provoked Hendrix, Sharmake Beyle Omar, had previously been charged with a sex crime:

The Olmsted County Attorney’s Office dismissed charges against Mohamed Hussein Omer and Sharmake Beyle Omar in March of 2025.

Court documents state that the case was dismissed “in the interest of justice.”

Mohamed Hussein Omer, 42, and Sharmake Beyle Omar, 30, may receive a joint trial for their identical charges of 3rd-degree criminal sexual conduct–penetration of person under 18 years old–uses coercion and 5th-degree criminal sexual conduct–nonconsensual penetration dating back to January 20, 2022, according to Olmsted County court records.

On one hand, people on X have commented, "What was this guy doing in a park?" but I think a more pertinent question would be, "What was a 37-year-old blonde woman doing taking her toddler to that park?" The mere fact that an alleged sex criminal was hanging around there says to me this was not a safe environment. I would note that all the Somalis involved in the trial required translators. The prudent thing for Ms Hendrix to do was simply to stay awsy from that park.

Second, farther down at the first link, we learn,

In the aftermath, a GiveSendGo campaign was launched to raise money for Hendrix. The campaign is still active.

In the description, Hendrix explained that a child had stolen from her 18-month-old son’s diaper bag, that she had “called the kid out for what he was,” and that the viral video and subsequent doxxing had placed her family in danger.

The fundraiser ultimately raised more than $846,000.

Hendrix later stated that the donations helped her family purchase a home with land in a safer area, pay for security, and cover legal expenses.

So the whole kerfuffle enabled her to do what she should have done in the first place, move the heck out of that neighborhood. This was a fortunate fall indeed. But that's not the end of the story:

The Rochester Branch of the NAACP has launched its own crowdfunding campaign with multiple goals, including legal support and social justice efforts in support of the child [who stole from the diaper bag] and anti-racism work in Rochester.

. . . “Let’s turn outrage into impact. Stand with us. Stand for this child. Justice must be served,” the NAACP shared with the fundraising campaign.

According to Wikipedia, "they ended the campaign at the request of the family after the fundraiser surpassed its goal, raising US$341,504." Apparently this money will go into a trust for the family, supervised by the child's parents. According to an NAACP press release, the family claims,

It will take years for our family, especially our children, to recover from the painful event and experience.

Except that the jury found Hendrix not guilty for saying the n-word to the child -- but the family still gets over $300,000 to help them recover. Hendrix's sentence was relatively light:

Hendrix was sentenced to a $1,000 fine, 200 hours of community service and a stayed 90-day jail sentence, meaning she will not serve jail time unless she violates the terms of her sentence, according to KAAL.

If she got close to a million bucks in her fundrasing campaign, she can probably spare $1000. Her attorney plans to appeal:

Hendrix’s defense attorney Brian Karalus was not pleased with the verdict, saying he plans to file an appeal. He made a number of allegations, arguing the trial proceedings were not handled correctly or lawfully. He even went on to accuse the judge of repeatedly interrupting him, limiting evidence and mishandling the proceedings.

“There are so many appellate issues,” said Karalus. “This was one of the craziest trials I’ve ever seen.”

I get the feeling this whole business was less about justice on either side than it was about the benjamins.

"The End Of Canada"

I keep thinking back to Trump's remark last year that Justin Trudeau, in his last days as prime minister, told him that "a 25% tariff on the Canadian auto industry would be 'the end of Canada'". Via the AP:

Trump invoked Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 to impose 50% tariffs on Canadian products ranging from hockey sticks to beer.

In proclamations issued Monday, Trump claimed that Canada discriminates against American exports of autos, alcohol and cheese. He is angry over Canada’s retaliation against his own tariffs last year, which were imposed under the pretext that Canada should do more to stop fentanyl smuggling.

. . . Section 338 of the law authorizes the president to impose tariffs of up to 50% on imports from countries that have discriminated against U.S. businesses. No investigation is required. Nor is there any limit on how long the tariffs can stay in place.

Section 338 tariffs have never been imposed. U.S. trade negotiators traditionally have favored another tool, Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 — though the United States used the threat of Section 338 levies as a bargaining chip in trade talks in the 1930s.

Canadian reaction has been massive:

A planned joint ceremony on Friday between the U.S. and Canada marking the opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge has been canceled after President Trump announced a 50 percent tariff on certain Canadian imports, including alcohol and dairy.

The tariffs were in response to what the administration described as “discriminatory” trade measures from Canada, and a senior administration official confirmed to reporters that it impacted products ranging from “wine to hockey sticks to cement.”

Earlier this month, the two countries agreed to open the long-delayed $4.7 billion bridge connecting Detroit to Windsor, Ontario, following a slate of negotiations that Trump said brought a “much better deal” for the U.S. on toll revenue.

“In light of trade action threatened by the United States earlier this week, it would be inappropriate to proceed with a celebratory event between the two countries,” Jenna Ghassabeh, a spokesperson for Canadian Infrastructure Minister Gregor Robertson, said in a statement to the Associated Press.

“We remain committed to opening the bridge on July 27th, and to celebrating this milestone among Canadians on July 24th,” she continued.

. . . The bridge is named after Canadian hockey star Gordie Howe, who spent 25 seasons with the Detroit Red Wings.

Ontario premier Doug Ford is in his usual fettle over Trump:

Ontario Premier Doug Ford says he would like to see his fellow premiers and Prime Minister Mark Carney be "a little more vocal" in the face of U.S. President Donald Trump's latest tariff threat.

As the premiers gathered in Charlottetown this week, Ford was the most aggressive in condemning Trump's move to impose 50 per cent tariffs on dozens of Canadian goods which are set to be enforced next month.

. . . As he has during much of Trump's second term, Ford came out swinging on Tuesday and reiterated calls for Canada to cut off energy exports to the U.S.

"We are an energy powerhouse and we could dismantle the U.S. if we wanted to," he told reporters.

But other premiers didn't go as far as Ford — or rejected the idea altogether.

. . . Alberta's Danielle Smith said point blank that withholding energy is "not going to happen."

Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe also flatly rejected the idea of using potash and energy as a leverage point and Quebec Premier Christine Fréchette said she's "not there."

But the real issue is the renegotiation of the USMCA:

The Trump administration has decided not to renew its trilateral trade pact with Canada and Mexico, instead opting to conduct annual reviews of the treaty that President Donald Trump once called “the best agreement we’ve ever made.”

. . . Trump “chose not to rubber stamp a USMCA renewal without addressing existing issues,” a senior administration official told reporters in a call announcing the move.

“In other words, the United States did not agree to renew the USMCA in its current form,” the official said. “So, as a result, the USMCA is not renewed.”

. . . When the new deal came into effect in July 2020, Trump touted it as “the fairest, most balanced, and beneficial trade agreement we have ever signed into law.”

But Trump’s enthusiasm for USMCA has recently waned, coinciding with mounting strain on the U.S. relationships with its two neighbors.

“I don’t know that I’m going to renew it,” Trump said of USMCA in June. “We don’t need anything that Canada has. We don’t need anything that Mexico has, but they need everything that we have. And they have to treat us better.”

Trump's overall position is that Canada can't survive economically without favorable tariff treatment from the US, and he seems to see little reason for the US to continue on tbat path.

"Who Counts As Working Class?"

Vox writer Eric Levitz asks the perennial question: "Who counts as 'working class'"? He gets things partly right:

This conception of the “working class” has deep roots on the left. As Jacobin’s Ben Burgis explains, orthodox socialists subscribe to a “two-class map of capitalist society,” in which “Some people are capitalists who own their own ‘means of production’ (like factories, farms, offices, or grocery stores) and other people work for the capitalists.”

Many contemporary socialists (including Burgis) find this dichotomy reductive, and endorse more nuanced portraits of America’s class structure. But the orthodox, “two-class” model informs a great deal of the modern left’s rhetoric, among both socialists and progressives. And the notion that lawyers and day laborers both belong to the “working class” is widely held among anti-capitalists.

There’s something to be said for this idea. Educated professionals and manual workers surely do have some shared interests, due to their common status as laborers. For example, both benefit from the existence of a well-funded unemployment insurance system, in a way that the Elon Musks of the world do not.

For the most part though, orthodox socialism’s “map” is badly out of date. And its expansive conception of “the working class” does less to illuminate modern America’s economic divisions than to obscure them.

But then he wanders into irrelevance:

In any event, whichever factors one emphasizes, it’s clear that a person’s class privilege increases continuously as their income, net worth, familial wealth, and “human capital” rises. There is no single point on any of these scales past which a person’s class position is abruptly transformed. The gap between “the 99 percent” and the billionaire class matters — but so does that between the top 15 percent and the working poor.

. . . But a taxonomy of classes with several subcategories (such as “the poor,” “the working class,” “the middle class,” “the upper-middle class,” “the rich,” and “the superrich”) will capture a bit more of reality than a taxonomy with only two.

He spends a lot of time trying to parse out whether a $600,000 a year surgeon is "working class", but he ignores the most obvious and easy-to-answer question about "the poor": which ones are "the working poor", and which ones are Marx's and Engels's Lumpenproletariat?

Engels’s 1850 The Peasant War in Germany distinguishes different classes, and after the implicit theory identifying the interests of each class and its political behavior, evaluates the potential strength of the alliance sought. Analyzing the “plebeian opposition … of a mixed nature” to the urban patricians at the end of the Middle Ages, he distinguishes déclassé bourgeoisie and day-laboring journeymen without civic rights from the “lumpenproletariat, this scum of the decaying elements of all classes, which establishes headquarters in all the big cities” and the embryonic elements of bourgeois society, of which the “proletarian elements have not yet developed.”  Engels specifies that the lumpenproletariat comes out of “the decay of feudalism” following the decline of traditional professional protections, enlarging the mass of urban vagabonds, beggars, and day laborers working in misery in the gaps left by the corporations.  This is why, in the 1874 preface, he warns the German socialists:

The lumpenproletariat, this scum of the decaying elements of all classes, which establishes headquarters in all the big cities, is the worst of all possible allies. It is an absolutely venal, an absolutely brazen crew. Every leader of the workers who utilizes these gutter proletarians as guards or supports, proves himself by this action alone a traitor to the movement.

The Lumpenproletariat are the urban underclass, which Marx and Engels feel is imperfectly separate from the working class, defined as of the mid-19th century as "urban vagabonds, beggars, and day laborers". But as of the early 21st century, this class has vastly increased in numbers and importance, augmented especially by migrants, addicts, and the deinstitutionalized mentally ill. This is a critical distinction Levitz misses:

Some of the DSA’s own activities lend credence to this theory: Despite its largely white-collar membership, the organization advocates for many policies that would principally benefit America’s most disadvantaged. More broadly, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, many college-educated millennials came to identify with “the 99 percent.” And as this cohort has grown more influential in Blue America, the Democratic Party has embraced more ambitious anti-poverty policies, such as a guaranteed monthly income for working-class families.

But when we looked at the official DSA agenda in this post on Tuesday, we saw that two of its seven agenda items are amnesty for immigrants and ending deportations, which are aimed at this enormous new component of tbe Lumpenproletariat. These are not "anti-poverty policies". They're policies aimed at expanding the urban underclass by importing new members from third-world countries. They don't "benefit the disadvantaged", they increase their number.

In the quote above, Engels warns the proletariat that the Lumpenproletariat are unreliable allies; they're venal and brazen, out to grab what they can. As soon as they see an opportunity, they'll turn against the working class. If we look at one of the key features in the de facto architecture of the 21st century urban economy, it's the dual use of public transit, on one hand a means of transportation for the working poor to get to their jobs, but on the other a shelter for addicts and vagabonds and a close-quarters venue for robbery and violence against the workers traveling to work.

In other words, the social benefits promoted by the upper-class DSA turn out to be a way to facilitate the victimization of the working class by the criminal underclass. The unspoken political alliance of our time is betqween the bourgeoisie and the Lumpenproletariat against the working class. Levitz grasps this only vaguely:

And yet, socialists’ expansive conception of “the working class” can be put to more dubious uses. Specifically, it can help relatively well-off professionals disguise their class’s particular interests as those of all working people.

The left’s push to cancel all graduate student debt is arguably a case in point. During Joe Biden’s presidency, the DSA criticized the White House for attempting to forgive only $10,000 of most borrowers’ student loans (a plan that was ultimately blocked by the Supreme Court). Instead, the socialists called on Biden to cancel all student debt, including the balances accrued by the graduates of elite medical schools and MBA programs.

In contrast, the murder of the productive immigrant Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte, NC tram, which she was forced to ride in close quarters with a deranged member of the Lumpenproletariat. resonates as an example of the war between the Lumpenproletariat and the real working class, which plays out every day on urban transit systems across the developed world.

The DSA is a major promoter of a war between the urban underclass, allied with the bourgeoisie, broadly defined, and the working class, broadly defined. I think socialists tend to miss this simply because Marx and Engels didn't represent the Lumpenproletariat as a separate class from the working class, even though they insisted that the working class should absolutely never trust them.

More UK Shenanigans

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It looks more and more like the UK government, with complicit media, is working to creatre an overall public impression that terrorism is a far-right phenomenon, and migrants and leftists aren't responsible for it at all. Last week, I posted on a peculiar story that counterterrorism police had thwarted a right-wing plot against a Muslim gathering, but because police sent the Muslims home early, nobody was harmed. Twelve people were arrested.

I was puzzled, as some UK observers also were, that the police offered so few details, in contrast to what US agencies like the FBI would release in any similar case. It turns out that the story is steadily shrinking, although the most complete version I've found is behind a paywall at the BBC. But via the Metropolitan Police:

Counter Terrorism Policing (CTP) previously opened an investigation into a suspected threat against the UK Ijtima event held at Shrubland Hall, Suffolk from 9-12 July.

Twelve people [A-L] were arrested in connection with the investigation on Sunday 12 and Monday 13 July. Four people [I-L] were previously released on bail pending further enquiries. Eight others [A-H] were detained by police under section 41 of the Terrorism Act, meaning they could be detained up to seven days from their arrest.

. . . On Saturday, 18 July seven men [A, B, C, D, F, G, H] were released from custody without charge. Another man [M] has been released on bail with strict conditions pending further enquiries.

Following the recovery of certain items during searches carried out as part of the investigation, a 42-year-old man [E] has been charged with two offences linked to possession of offensive weapons – namely extendable batons – as well as possession of a stun gun. He has been remanded in custody to appear at Reading Magistrates’ Court on Monday, 20 July.

It is important to note that the items and the offences he has been charged with are not believed to be connected to the alleged threat being investigated.

So of the original 12, seven have been released without charge, while the other five are out on bail, presumably not a danger to the community despite having allegedly plotted a terrorist attack. Oh, and we caught another guy,, but he didn't have anything to do with the plot. Just thought you'd like to know we're on the job.

Commander Helen Flanagan, Head of CTP London said: “This has been a fast-moving investigation after we became aware of information to indicate there was a potential threat towards the Islamic event over the course of last weekend.

“Since then, we have made extensive enquiries, but at this time, we have found no evidence to support anyone being charged with any offences linked to the alleged threat. . ."

In other words, never mind, there wasn't any plot to blow up any Muslims, or anything like that. One question that pops up for me is who reported the "plot" to police? Were Muslims involved at all? Sounds a little ike what we see over here, when folks graffiti their own cars or plant nooses on their own office doors. Right now, the UK police and press seem to be falling for those tricks, no questions asked.

In the Ann Widdecombe case. Granniopterix in the video embedded above explains the inconsistencies in the photos of the alleged perp that have been released, but neither looks much like the courtroom sketch of the suspect included in the CNN story below:

Ann Widdecombe, the former British lawmaker found dead at her home in southwest England in early July, was hit 21 times with a hammer, a London court heard on Tuesday.

Joshua Kerry, 28, allegedly entered Widdecombe’s house in the village of Haytor Vale on July 8, Prosecutor Kashif Malik told Westminster Magistrates’ Court, according to UK news agency PA Media.

He then allegedly walked into the 78-year-old politician’s kitchen wielding a hammer and repeatedly struck her head while she was eating lunch, the court heard.

He was only in her home for two minutes, the court heard.

Widdecombe’s provisional cause of death was described in court as a “blunt force injury to the head.”

Granniopterix in the video below says at 0:41,

Look, the first thing the police said about Ann Widedecombe's death was that it was most likely a burglary that had gone wrong, and that there was obviously no political or terroristical element in that. This woman, her head must have been practically disintegrated. She was a small woman, and a hammer 21 times is going to destroy most of her skull, isn't it? And the police said a burglary gone wrong.

According to the UK Express,

When Ms Widdecombe’s bloodied body was found on Thursday morning at her £600,000 home in Haytor, Dartmoor, detectives first pursued a theory that she had disturbed a burglar, even though nothing was stolen. Two days later, they arrested a local labourer in error before detaining the Rotherham man on Saturday night.

According to the Mail, items of varying political ideology, including Russian communist material, were found at the suspect’s home and on his electronic devices. Investigators do not believe there is evidence of hostile state involvement. The unnamed British white suspect was not known to the Government’s Prevent deradicalisation programme. Police are inquiring into his mental health.

However, news coverage of the murder has generally made no mention of the political books found in the suspect Kerry's home. It's hard to avoid a preferred narrative that terrorism and assassinations are far-right phenomena in the UK.

The UK Constitution And The DSA Agenda

Lately I'm seeing lots of talk to the effect that the Democratic Socialists of America are communists, but their agenda goes back a lot farther than that. I found the graphic embedded above at Conservative Treehouse, which says it comes from DSA Co-Chair Gustavo Gordillo. I think there's less of Marx in it than England of the 1600s and the subsequent UK.

The first two agenda items are "Eliminate the US Senate" and "Congress [presumably now just the House] chooses Executive & Judiciary". This, with a few small differences, is the system England adopted during its 1642-1651 Civil War and codified in the Bill of Rights 1689 and the Settlement Act of 1701, that "Parliament is supreme".

In the time since then, "Parliament", theoretically the House of Commons and the House of Lords, has come to mean the House of Commons exclusively in normal speech, and somewhere during the reigns of Victoria or Edward VII, the monarch lost all executive authority -- if the monarch were now to refuse assent to any bill passed by parliament, it would cause a "constitutional crisis" that would likely in the modern age result in the abolition of the monarchy.

The extent to which the monarchy is controlled by parliament extends to parliament's ability to override the line of succession. I asked Chrome AI mode, "if the House of Windsor someday runs out of heirs to the throne, does parliament select the next monarch?" It replied,

Yes, the British Parliament holds the ultimate constitutional authority to determine the next monarch if the current line of succession fails. Under the Bill of Rights 1689 and the Act of Settlement 1701, Parliament is the supreme body that regulates and dictates the rules of royal succession.

Running out of heirs is practically impossible, as the legal line of succession includes thousands of living descendants of Electress Sophia of Hanover. However, if that entire lineage became extinct, Parliament would manage the vacancy using specific legal avenues. Parliament would introduce emergency legislation to either expand eligibility parameters or nominate a brand new royal dynasty.

So far, parliament has stayed out of internal royal family management issues in the line of succession, like the question of whether the former Prince Andrew should be formally removed -- since he's number eight, the question is unlikely to come up -- but parliament is the authority that controls it:

U.K. lawmakers are calling for Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor to be removed from the royal family line of succession after his arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office.

“I can tell you the government is looking at options in relation to succession,” British Prime Minister Keir Starmer told reporters Monday. “We are considering what measures could be taken, but that would have to be after a police investigation.”

Trade Minister Chris Bryant echoed Starmer’s remarks in a parliamentary debate, saying: “We are working at pace on this, and we intend to bring forward legislation when we can.”

On that basis, I don't see any reason why parliament, if it disagreed with Prince William and his children being next in the line of succession, could instead designate Prince Harry, although it would have to get the other countries in the British Commonwealth to agree -- but neither the monarch nor the royal family would have a say in the matter.

The only area where the UK constitution differs from the DSA agenda is that in the UK currently, judges are selected by an independent board, although before 2005, they were in fact appointed by the Lord Chancellor, a cabinet minister within the government.

Pretty much all the other DSA agenda items have in fact already been implemented in the UK, at least de facto. These include amnesty for immigrants, abolition of deportations, and elimination of the military. Labour is in the process of extending existing UK wealth taxes:

Andy Burnham has declined to rule out introducing a wealth tax and suggested the government "might be having to ask for a little more" at some point to balance Britain's books.

The incoming UK prime minister said he needed time to look at the state of the public finances before committing to policy changes but argued that the UK needed a "greater sense of fairness".

. . . He added: "So, you know, decisions to be taken in time, they're going to be difficult. I'm not going to shy away from that. You know, we are going to have to work quite hard to make sure, you know, we can pay our way.

"And at some point that might be having to ask for a little more. But, you know, those decisions are not for now. They're for another day."

Burnham has committed himself to Labour's fiscal rules but indicated he thinks there is room for movement on tax within the confines of the party's manifesto, which rules out raising VAT, income tax or national insurance.

The hole the UK has dug for itself has taken centuries of digging.

The Brown University Cheating Scandal

There's been a story out over the past week or so about a cheating scandal at Brown University. It's behind a paywall at the incongruously named Free Press, but the gist of it is at USA Today.

There's a new morality emerging in the corridors of America's finest universities: If you're not cheating, you're a sucker.

Look no further than Brown University, where an artificial intelligence cheating scandal has rattled longtime economics professor Roberto Serrano. This spring, after three decades of teaching at Brown, Serrano let his students take their midterm exam at home, upping the difficulty to compensate for the unlimited time. The average score, which had historically run between 65% and 80%, jumped to 96%.

Was that a particularly studious class? Maybe. But Serrano suspected a simpler explanation: AI.

He announced that the final would be given in person, causing 18 students to drop the class. Nine more didn't bother showing up for the exam.

The problem I see here is that if people are relying on AI to get ahead, they're going to be replaced by AI. This reminds me of a line from anti-woke comedienne Arynne Wexler, who says that her job -- anti-woke comic -- won't be replaced by AI, because AI isn't racist. The USA Today piece continues,

A recent survey of more than 95,000 undergraduates at 20 American public research universities estimated that 9% used generative AI to cheat.

Among daily AI users, that rate jumped to 26%.

Amy Clukey, an associate professor at the University of Louisville, estimated that more than half her students in one online course had committed AI-facilitated plagiarism.

I don't know where people are getting these numbers. When I was teaching freshman comp as a graduate assistant at USC 50 years ago, the consensus among all of us was that plagiarism was much closer to 100%, and this was without AI. Cheating was nothing new. Although it's not online, I clearly remember an op-ed by Gerald Seib at the Wall Street Journal in the 1970s asking, "Why Are They Cheating?" giving a very similar estimate. In other words, this is much ado about nothing new.

And Prof Serrano just gives a new example of the old economic incentive for professors to tolerate cheating: any serious effort to control it will result in a drop in class enrollment. The USC English Department was fully aware of this 50 years ago and simply turned a deaf ear to the graduate assistants' complaints. Nothing has changed here; if Prof Serrano continues his efforts, his department chair will notice the enrollment drop, and things won't go well for him. USA Today claims this is a new development:

Amanda Gregg, an associate professor at Middlebury College, told The Chronicle that her students "acknowledge that there is not a culture of social sanctions against cheating." Gregg recalled that when she was a student, cheaters faced “major social sanctions.” When she mentioned this to her own students, she said, they were “shocked.”

. . . We're witnessing a move away from a culture that valued honor and integrity (think of the social conditions that once made “a man of his word” mean something) toward one where ambition and prestige are the only markers of worth. Call it “striver culture.” To a striver, the ends always justify the means.

To be a striver is to be concerned with the appearance of prestige above all else. It means attending the high-status school, getting the high-status job, being friends with high-status people.

Sinclair Lewis's George F Babbitt advised his son in the 1920s:

"I'll tell you why you have to study Shakespeare and those. It's because they're required for college entrance, and that's all there is to it! Personally, I don't see myself why they stuck 'em into an up–to–date high–school system like we have in this state. Be a good deal better if you took Business English, and learned how to write an ad, or letters that would pull. But there it is, and there's no tall, argument, or discussion about it! Trouble with you, Ted, is you always want to do something different! If you're going to law–school—and you are!—I never had a chance to, but I'll see that you do—why, you'll want to lay in all the English and Latin you can get."

Oddly, I just don't see the most effective line that could be given by professors against using AI to cheat: if you have to use AI to get by, you're going to be replaced by AI. But if a professor actually designed a course that incentivized not using AI, he would, like Prof Serrano, see an enrollment drop. Sinclair Lewis, who went to Yale, seems to have had a pretty good grasp of what college has always been for.

As I've noted here, I've restarted a fiction writing career, and what I'm noticing is that all the little lit zines have severe anti-AI policies -- they don't accept submissions that have been written by AI, except that all AI really does is take the formulas that are taught in creative writing class and follow them. The little lit zines by and large want stories written the way they teach in creative writing class. Just last week, I had to deal with an editor who wanted to adjust my story to better match a creative writing prof's idea of "story arc".

All AI is doing in this case is giving people what they want, but doing it more cheaply. In college, students are using AI to give the professors what they want, but doing it more cheaply. What's wrong with that?

More On The Canadian Fires

The more I look into the Canadian fires, which seem to have become an annual event that sends enormous amounts of pollution accross the border to the US, the more I'm convinced that Canada has a vast world resource in its boreal forests over which it's incapable of exercisng stewardship. Even more so than in the US, most of its wild territory is publicly owned, 89% to 40%, but in the US, this territory is almost entirely under federal control, via the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management. Fire prevention and control are managed at the federal level, under consistent national policies.

The only equivalent national agency in Canada is Canada Parks, which manages fire prevention and control within national parks. Based on my research, Canada Parks actually has enlightened forest management policies, including controlled burning, but these apply only within national parks. The rest of the wild boreal forest areas are under individual provincial control, with policies differing across provinces, but the provinces generally have discouraged controlled burning and stress fire suppression.

The picture I'm beginning to see is that Canada is seeing the results of Fabian socialist policies it inherited from the mother country, and these policies overall have inhibited economic development to the point that the country can't afford some basic activities of a fully functioning nation-state, including a military and a national wilderness management system. This is especially concerning considering most of developed Canada is within a hundred-mile-wide zone along the US border, with the rest of the immense country a vast empty quarter that itself affects world climate, but the Ottawa government is neither willing nor able to exercise effective stewardship over it.

The Canadian response to Trump's criticisms has been to blame climate change:

Prime Minister Mark Carney was asked about the U.S. government position, and he immediately hit back by saying [in French] the cause of Canada’s wildfires is ‘climate change’ and President Trump’s unwillingness to support the Paris Climate Treaty has created the problem that Canada is now dealing with.

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse says at the link,

Prime Minister Mark Carney makes his “climate change” blame argument in French because he doesn’t want to be put on blast by an American alternative media system who have caught on to his duplicity and will make his insanely insufferable arguments go viral.

Let's acknowledge that at least in recent years, extreme wildfires in the Canadian boreal forests have become annual events.Of the 2023 wildfires alone, Nature says,

The 2023 Canadian forest fires have been extreme in scale and intensity with more than seven times the average annual area burned compared to the previous four decades. Here, we quantify the carbon emissions from these fires from May to September 2023 on the basis of inverse modelling of satellite carbon monoxide observations. We find that the magnitude of the carbon emissions is 647 TgC (570–727 TgC), comparable to the annual fossil fuel emissions of large nations, with only India, China and the USA releasing more carbon per year. . . . Such conditions are likely to drive increased fire activity and suppress carbon uptake by Canadian forests, adding to concerns about the long-term durability of these forests as a carbon sink.

Overall, the annual Canadian wildfires have placed Canada, hardly an industrial power, as the fourth-largest carbon emitter, above countries like Germany and Japan. But the official position of Canadian government leaders is that this is someone else's fault. This was the New York City skyline as of yesterday:

It's hard to think of these annual pollution events that overflow into the neighboring country as anything but a profound national embarrassment, but this is Canada.