In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

According to Wikipedia, Felicity Huffman is best known for her role as Lynette Scavo in the ABC comedy-drama Desperate Housewives (2004–2012. But more recently, she's been better known for her role in the Varsity Blues scandal. At the link, Huffman was among dozens charged by the U.S. Attorney's Office on March 12, 2019, in a nationwide college entrance exam cheating scandal. Prosecutors alleged that Huffman's $15,000 donation to the Key Worldwide Foundation, ostensibly a charitable contribution, was in fact payment to someone who posed as Huffman's daughter Sophia to take the SAT, receiving a score that showed significant improvement over Sophia's score on the Preliminary SAT (PSAT). Huffman was arrested at her California home on March 12 by FBI agents and IRS agents and charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services fraud. According to Breitbart News , Actress Felicity Huffman, who spent 11 days in jail after bribing college officia...

Right now, the US is fighting two hot proxy wars, one in Ukraine and one in Gaza, but at the moment, it's running out of money : The military, like the rest of the federal government, is operating under a temporary funding measure that freezes spending at the previous year’s levels. And because the Middle East troop movements weren’t planned, the Pentagon has had to pull money from existing operations and maintenance accounts, DOD spokesperson Chris Sherwood said. President Joe Biden signed the stopgap measure this month to keep the government open until lawmakers can agree on a full-year spending bill. . . . “Current events have revised some of the operational assumptions used to develop the FY 2024 President’s Budget request. Specifically, neither the base budget request nor the FY 2024 supplemental request included funding for U.S. operations related to Israel,” he said. “We’re taking it out of hide,” Sherwood added. This may bear some relation to reports of reduced ...

While researching Wednesday's post on foreign students, I ran into this essay from last July at Forbes by Michael Nietzel, President Emeritus of Missouri State University, How The Admission Practices Of Elite Colleges Perpetuate The Advantages Of The Wealthy . Again, received opinion by writers like David Brooks of the New York Times and The Atlantic has been that the elite colleges are meritocratic, admissions are driven by SATs, grades, and extracurriculars. Nietzel's argument is that the numbers simply don't point in that direction. While only 10% of students scoring at the 99th percentile on the SAT/ACT from middle-class families attend an Ivy-Plus college, 40% of similarly high-scoring students from families in the top 1 percent of the income distribution do so. . . . The authors [of a recent Brown University study] estimate that this higher admissions rate leads to 103 extra students being admitted from the top 1% in a typical Ivy-Plus class (of 1,650 student...

I've put up a post with more information from a former insider at Church Militant on the Cold Case File blog.

I've already posted on MIT backing down on its threat to suspend the foreign students who violate policy during their pro-Hamas or anti-Semitic demonstrations. This story at the Washington Free Beacon adds only one new tidbit: At elite institutions like MIT, nearly a quarter of all students hail from another country. The story goes on to make the already recognized point that administrators want to keep them on campus; suspending them would threaten their visas, and since foreign students pay the published full fees, it would badly hurt the school's revenue. The only new point here is the size of the foreign-student contingent at ostensibly highly selective schools like MIT. Nobody so far is putting two and two together. As writers like Jerome Karabel have pointed out in The Chosen , universities have separate admissions categories for high-profit markets like the children of alumni and other major donors, as well as the children of politicians, celebrities, and other ...

Looking for the current outlook on the Russia-Ukraine War, I found this article at Responsible Statecraft : George Beebe, Director of Grand Strategy at [Quincy Institute], highlighted the perils of extrapolating a “stalemate” from the current lack of significant battlefield movements in Ukraine. “Those who believe this war has settled into a long-term stalemate make the mistake of measuring the relative progress of each side with maps. They see that the frontlines have not moved significantly over the last year and conclude that the sides are stalemated,” Beebe told me. “But other metrics, though, paint a different picture. Ukraine is using up its quite limited supplies of men, weapons, and ammunition, and the West cannot provide what Ukraine needs. That is not a formula for stalemate; it's a formula for Ukraine's eventual collapse or capitulation,” he continued. . . . “Despite everything that’s happened, despite all the stuff we have given, the Bradley’s, the M1 [Abrams]...

From the UK Telegraph via Yahoo Neews : Germany and the US will put pressure on Ukraine to negotiate with Russia by scaling back weapons deliveries in what would be a major blow to Kyiv’s hopes of victory, German media reported on Friday. Bild, a German tabloid, reported what it described as a “secret” German-American plan to force Ukraine’s hand on opening peace talks, citing sources in the German government. Under the plan, Washington and Berlin would supply Ukraine with sufficient weapons and armour to hold the current front line, but not enough to retake occupied territory. . . . “Zelensky should realise that it can’t go on like this,” a German government source told Bild, referring to Ukraine’s stalled counter-offensive against Russian in the east. “He needs to, of his own free will, turn to face his nation and explain that there is a need to negotiate.” German government sources also told Bild that the White House shared Germany’s view on the need to shift the focus from...