In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Yesterday we took a closer look at Caroline Ellison's parents, both faculty members at elite-university MIT. This link provides an introduction to Sam Bankman-Fried's parents ; in an odd mirror-image reflection, both are husband-and-wife faculty members at elite Stanford Law School, ranked Number 2 on the US News list , although Stanford recently withdrew from the US News rankings. Both of Sam's parents, Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman , hold endowed chairs at Stanford Law, which places them somewhat higher in David Brooks's new meritocratic American upper class than even the Ellisons, of whom only one holds an endowed chair. This places the family income, I would imagine, at something well north of $250,000 per year. This would be consistent with the private school to which they sent Sam befoere he went to MIT, the main building of which is shown in the photo at the top of this post. According to the first link, [H]e attended local elite private school Cr...

Above is a screen shot from the evaluation of Sara Fisher-Ellison at ratemyprofessors.com . She is the wife of Glenn Ellison, the Gregory K. Palm Professor of Economics at MIT. Although she's listed as a Senior Lecturer in the Economics Department at MIT, as far as I can tell, this is not a tenured or tenure-track position, and in the sort of arrangement I discussed yesterday, she's on the faculty primarily to pad the compensation for her powerful husband. I quote from a student evaluation that dates from June 19, 2021, before the FTX scandal broke: Very nice but can't teach. She makes a lot of mistakes and seems nervous. When she's solving a problem she often has to back peddle because she made a mistake, which leads to a lot of confusion. Biggest critique is that she doesn't show her work for a lot of the problems she works through. She does a lot of solving in her head... sorry not sorry My experience from my brief academic career is that non-tenure track fa...

I left off yesterday wondering if the whole elite-school racket, which earlier fraudsters like Madoff, Lay, and Kozlowski avoided, has anything to do with some of the less familiar features of the FTX scandal. I referred to David Brooks's 2000 Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There , which bases his argument on what might be called the bourgeois-optimistic interpretation of elite-school admissions: after World War II, James B Conant reformed the Ivy admissions process by introducing the Scholastic Aptitude Test, which devalued the role of money and social standing in determining who got into Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Stanford, MIT, and the like, and instead stressed merit and ability. At the same time, the Ivies are thought to have dropped Jewish quotas, which allowed Jews to increase their presence on campus and qualified them in greater numbers for careers at upper levels in business and government. One needed to look no farther for confirmation than Brook...

In the aftermath of the midterms and Trump's presidential announcement, the FTX scandal hasn't been a top story, even though some commentators are calling it worse than Enron. So far, in fact, nobody has noticed an odd coincidence that the scandal emerged within days of Elizabeth Holmes's sentencing for the Theranos hoax -- but both Caroline Ellison, the reputed queen of Sam Bankman-Fried's harem and CEO of Alameda Research, and Elizabeth Holmes were products of Stanford University. I did a quick check; Stanford produced 11 Nobel laureates since Elizabeth Holmes was on campus in 2002, but it's worth noting that Ellison and Holmes must hold ranks equivalent to the Nobel Prize among famous financial hoaxers, up there with Bernie Madoff, Ken Lay and Dennis Kozlowski. Two of them in just a decade! Remember as well that Madoff, Lay, and Kozlowski didn't achieve prominence until they were well into middle age; Holmes and Ellison emerged meteorically when they we...

On Sunday, I mentioned that I'd found an opinion piece that made some productive observations about Trump, COVID, and the disastrous year 2020, but I hadn't been able to locate it again. I finally did, it's by David Srrom at Hot Air, which has greatly improved with the departure of Allahpundit. Strom expands on those insights in this piece from Thursday, Trump's Achilles' heel? Lots of arrows will be fired at his vulnerable heel. Some are likely to hit. The target? Trump’s response to COVID was simply awful. He did exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time, pushed all the worst Establishment folks to the top of the policymaking heap, and actively aided them in destroying his chance to get reelected. Trump was forced to choose between good policy and bad, courageous leaders and bureaucrats, and he chose wrongly. It was his undoing in 2020, and could be his undoing in 2024. He quotes a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Justin Hart: When Mr. Trump annou...

In yesterday's post, I noted that the US has an open-ended commitment to aid Ukraine based not just on a goal of securing its pre-2014 borders, but on a vaguely expressed additional objective that embraces preventing Russia from being able to re-invade in the future -- although this must also imply changing Russia itself in some fundamental way, which Anne Applebaum, an ally of Secretary Blinken, explains. This will inevitably involve remaking the global political and military order in a way comparable to the Congress of Vienna, Versailles, or Yalta/Potsdam. In fact, looking at circumstances from that perspective, it appears that Russia's decline as a major power has already rendered Potsdam and its consequences obsolete. Resolving the dilemma will be expensive, and expensive at a world war level. I assume that Secretaries Blinken and Austin see the problem from specific diplomatic and military perspectives, but I would also guess that if pressed, they would say that evalua...

I've kept returning to Anne Applebaum's Atlantic piece that I linked Tuesday, The Russian Empire Must Die . Let's keep in mind that this wasn't written by a raving right-winger; it was published in almost the most prestigious of establishment outlets (I don't know if she shopped it to Foreign Affairs ) and written by a fully formed, fully vetted member of the liberal Democrat establishment with credentials comparable to, say, Secretary Blinken, who is currently following policies with goals that, while not as clearly expressed, are at least congruent with those Ms Applebaum outlines in her essay. Her argument is clear: Ideas move across time and space, sometimes in unexpected ways. The notion that a country should be different—differently ruled, differently organized—can come from old books, from foreign travel, or just from its citizens’ imaginations. At the height of the Russian empire, in the 19th century, under the rule of some of the most ponderous a...