COVID Fatigue

My wife and I throughout our marriage gave up wine for Lent, at least up until 2020, when along with a considerable slice of the world population, we found that wine was essential therapy for lockdowns, social distancing, masks, and the rest of the COVID madness. The other day we raised the question of whether we were ready to go back to giving it up for Lent this year and almost instantly decided no way. 2022 looks like not the beginning of the end, but at least maybe the end of the beginning.

What we're seeing is widely divergent policies worldwide on how to end the crisis, especially in the face of a general acknowledgement by all but the usual suspects that lockdowns, masks, social distancing, and even vaccine mandates have been either ineffective or counterproductive in combating the pandemic. An essay by Michael Bang Petersen, an adviser to the Danish government in its decision to end all COVID restrictions, makes an important point:

Our research has shown that public trust has taken a hit in many countries, including Denmark. As fatigue, personal costs and miscommunications have accumulated, the public has become wary. Until recently, the people losing the most trust have been those who felt that their governments’ responses were too heavy-handed. However, according to our data, the Omicron wave has also chipped away at the trust of those who have been supportive of their government’s approach up until now. Lifting restrictions while cases are soaring can seem like betrayal after two years of seeking to “flatten the curve.”

The key ingredients of an effective pandemic response — communication, trust and a shared sense of threat — are slowly dwindling. This can lead to social strife and will make it harder for leaders to steer their populations out of the crisis.

For two years people have debated the value of masks, vaccine passports and more, to the point that they are no longer opinions but identities. And when opinions become identities, they warp our understanding and make it harder to change one’s mind as the situation changes. The truth is that we are all biased. For example, research shows that in the United States, Republicans tend to overrate the risks of getting vaccinated, and Democrats tend to overrate the risks from the disease.

. . . Because Covid-19 vaccines are effective in preventing severe disease from the virus but less effective in preventing infections, the continued spread of the coronavirus in highly vaccinated populations will become a Rorschach test: Everyone will see something different. People who remain worried about getting Covid-19 will see high cases during surges, which will justify their concerns and strengthen their own observance of mask-wearing and distancing. Calls for removing restrictions will seem dangerous. People who are less vulnerable to infection will focus on the lessened severity and do the opposite. They may view calls to keep restrictions in place as unnecessary and infringing on their freedoms.

For people who have been highly vigilant about Covid-19, the end of the pandemic could end up feeling like defeat. At some point, it will be time to lift restrictions and lower the guards. The people they’ve been debating about masks or whether the crisis is improving will then be right. It won’t be because this position was always correct, but because the circumstances have changed.

That’s why strong leadership is so critical for ending the pandemic. As the need for restrictions lessens, it’s up to public health and political leaders to explain why restrictions are being lifted, just as they had to explain why they were being imposed in the first place. Authorities must tell the public why they are placing more responsibility on individuals and, ideally, address the concerns of those who may not be ready, as well as those who remain at higher risk, like the immune compromised.

Dr Petersen is very astutely sending the message that it's time for the public health authorities to declare victory and get out. This won't be an easy process. We're going to need our wine for the foreseeable future.

Penn And The NCAA Are Not On The Same Page

There's been a looming problem for Penn, Lia Thomas, and the Ivy League throughout the bizarre trans swimmer saga -- the NCAA, which represents many schools that, unlike the Ivies, rely heavily on their athletic programs for both serious ticket income and alumni donations, isn't quite ready to open women's sports to male competitors on the same basis as the Ivies. Last month, it tried to duck the controversy by changing its policy and deferring decisions on trans competitors to the individual sports' oversight bodies.

The NCAA Board of Governors on Wednesday [January 19] voted in support of a sport-by-sport approach to transgender participation that preserves opportunity for transgender student-athletes while balancing fairness, inclusion and safety for all who compete. The new policy, effective immediately, aligns transgender student-athlete participation for college sports with recent policy changes from the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee and International Olympic Committee.

This past Tuesday, USA Swimming, the relevant oversight body in this case, issued its own guidelines, which are now effective for NCAA competition. These guidelines as written would prevent Lia Thomas, the six foot-four fully intact male swimmer, from competing in the upcoming NCAA championships:

On Tuesday, USA Swimming announced that competitors in women’s events must have recorded low levels of testosterone for 36 months; the previous rule required only one year. Thomas began “transitioning” in May 2019.

The specific policy "will be implemented by a decision-making panel comprised of three independent medical experts and eligibility criteria will consist of:"

Evidence that the prior physical development of the athlete as a male, as mitigated by any medical intervention, does not give the athlete a competitive advantage over the athlete’s cisgender female competitors.

Evidence that the concentration of testosterone in the athlete’s serum has been less than 5 nmol/L (as measured by liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry) continuously for a period of at least thirty-six (36) months before the date of application.

There were immediate complaints about the policy change, although it isn't completely clear how it would actually affect Thomas's participation in the March NCAA championships.

Some advocates on Twitter argued that USA Swimming targeted Thomas in particular.

“This was a decision SOLELY to eliminate Lia Thomas from the team,” one person said.

Prior to the announcement, Penn was already considering a lawsuit against USA Swimming if its policy prevented Thomas from competing:

The University of Pennsylvania is considering a lawsuit if Lia Thomas is barred from competing in the upcoming NCAA women’s swimming championship, according to a report.

A swimmer on the Penn women’s team, speaking on the condition of anonymity, claimed to Fox News that administrators were considering legal action if Thomas is prohibited from participating in the championship.

“I have a feeling that if USA Swimming changes their rules, they will be filing a lawsuit for Lia to swim, but they wouldn’t do that for us,” she said. “That’s just really upsetting.”

As of this morning, the NCAA is going to get involved again, even if it deferred the decision to USA Swimming last month:

The NCAA will review the transgender policy recently implemented by USA Swimming prior to the women’s NCAA Championships next month, making it possible the new guidelines will be adopted by the organization ahead of the competition which begins on March 16.

. . . The Board of Governors aren’t scheduled to meet again until April, but Dent said they could possibly meet remotely prior to the start of the NCAA Championships.

The need for an updated policy has come to light amidst the ongoing transgender discussion in the sport, sparked by the performances of Lia Thomas, a trans woman, who competes for the University of Pennsylvania in the NCAA.

. . . On Thursday, a group of 16 members on the Penn women’s swim team sent an open letter to the Ivy League and the University of Pennsylvania asking them to follow USA Swimming’s policy and not partake in legal action with the NCAA.

Clearly the situation is fluid, but I have a sense that the NCAA doesn't want new controversies that would threaten the bottom line of big time collegiate sports in the same way that other manifestations of wokeism have hurt the finances of pro football and basketball. The basic problem is that sports fans don't buy this stuff and won't pay to watch it. I would guess the NCAA understands this.

Words Of Wisdom From The Late Rush Limbaugh

Due to the talk radio format he used, you often had to get lucky and hear him on the right hour and the right day to catch his most cogent thinking. (I think as well that he reached his peak eight or ten years ago.) But one set of remarks among several has stuck with me. I believe it was during the 2012 Sandra Fluke controversy, when he railed against

contraceptive mandates which included statements labeling Georgetown University Law Center student Sandra Fluke as a "slut" and "prostitute". Limbaugh was commenting on Fluke's speech the previous week to House Democrats in support of mandating insurance coverage for contraceptives. Despite disapproval from major political figures, Limbaugh made numerous similar statements over the next two days, which led to the loss of several of his national sponsors and Limbaugh apologizing on his show for some of his comments.

Limbaugh recovered from this setback and then some, as he did throughout his career. Remarks on his show during that particular kerfuffle reflected both his confidence and his insight. He said at the time words to the effect that if the media creates you, the media can destroy you. On the other hand, if the media didn't create you -- as he felt was the case with himself -- the media can't destroy you. He ended his career receiving the Medal of Freedom on his deathbed.

This applies in particular to Jeff Zucker, a Harvard alum:

Between January 2013 and February 2022, Zucker was the president of CNN Worldwide. Zucker oversaw CNN, CNN International, HLN, and CNN Digital. He was previously CEO of NBCUniversal. Zucker served as an executive in residence at Columbia Business School.

. . . He was a captain of the North Miami Senior High School tennis team, editor of the school paper, and a teenage freelance reporter ("stringer") for The Miami Herald. Zucker also was president of his sophomore, junior, and senior classes, running on the slogan "The little man with the big ideas." He graduated from North Miami Senior High School in 1982. Before college, he took part in Northwestern University's National High School Institute program for journalism. Zucker went on to Harvard University. He was president of the school newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, during his senior year. As such, he encouraged the Crimson's decades-old prank rivalry with the Harvard Lampoon, then headed by future NBC employee Conan O'Brien, which culminated in Zucker having O’Brien arrested. Zucker graduated from Harvard in 1986 with a Bachelor of Arts in American history.

In 1989, he was a field producer for Today, and at 26 he became its executive producer in 1992. He introduced the program's trademark outdoor rock concert series and was in charge as Today moved to the "window on the world" Studio 1A in Rockefeller Plaza in 1994. He is credited with managing the show during its most successful years and launching it into its 16 years of ratings dominance.

. . . In 2000, he was named NBC Entertainment's president. A 2004 BusinessWeek Profile stated that "During that time he oversaw NBC's entire entertainment schedule. He kept the network ahead of the pack by airing the gross out show Fear Factor, negotiating for the cast of the hit series Friends to take the series up to a tenth season, and signing Donald Trump for the reality show The Apprentice. He is credited with the idea to extend Friends episodes by 10 minutes and convinced the cast to extend their contracts by two years. The Friends era was one of the most profitable ever for NBC. The Zucker era produced a spike in operating earnings for NBC, from $532 million the year he took over to $870 million in 2003."

. . . In 2010, in response to a public controversy over the network's reported rescheduling of late-night hosts Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien, Los Angeles Times reporters Meg James and Matea Gold wrote that Zucker's tenure had led to "a spectacular fall by the country's premier television network" and dubbed the intra-network feud and subsequent public relations fallout "one of the biggest debacles in television history". Under Zucker NBC fell from being the number one rated network to the lowest rated of the four broadcast networks and was occasionally being beaten in the ratings by programming on some of the more popular cable channels.

Days later, The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote that in Hollywood "there has been a single topic of discussion: How does Jeff Zucker keep rising and rising while the fortunes of NBC keep falling and falling? ...many in the Hollywood community have always regarded him as ...a network Napoleon who never bothered to learn about developing shows and managing talent." She explained that Zucker "is a master at managing up with bosses and calculating cost-per-hour benefits, but even though he made money on cable shows, he could not program the network to save his life."

After he moved to CNN, things peaked and then began a decline. A data point nobody has mentioned in discussing yesterday's ouster is this one in the Wikipedia entry:

On February 2, 2021, Zucker announced he would step down [as president orf CNN Worldwide] at the end of the year. In August 2021, however, it was reported that he did not plan to leave until the completion of the merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery, Inc.

So let's get real. He was already on his way out at CNN, was theoretically going to leave at the end of last year, and effectively extended his tenure by all of a month, except that by resigning under allegations of sexual harassment, he probably will lose at least some part of what would have been a generous golden handshake if he'd just left a month ago the way he was supposed to.

What strikes me, though, is how applicable Rush Limbaugh's insight is here: the media created Zucker, and the media destroyed him. Zucker was what Bp Barron would call a contingent being; he owed his existence to someone else. Speculation this morning is that Zucker's departure so far is being attributed to what one observer called an "HR technicality"; viz, an undisclosed "consensual relationship" with a colleague. My guess is that someone in the new management over CNN already had Zucker's number, and the wheels were in motion even before the Cuomo crises raised any questions about hanky pank.

Somewhere El Rushbo is laughing.

Nobody's Keeping Score On Ukraine

Every time I see Ukraine news, I have to force myself to remember that we had one presidential impeachment over a Ukraine phone call and another instance where Joe Biden bragged about his influence there. During Joe's vice presidency, his son Hunter served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma. And throughout this period, Russia has had annexation of parts or all of Ukraine on its agenda, which also affects US policy.

But I find very little anywhnere tht tries to parse this out, especially Hunter's role, since e-mails from the Hunter laptop strongly suggest that Hunter's and Joe's financial interests are closely intertwined. Here's the most complete account of Hunter's Ukraine career I can find and its connection to Joe's political influence as vice president:

Back in 2014 after a change of regime in Ukraine, Hunter Biden joined the board of a scandal-plagued Ukrainian natural gas company named Burisma. Hunter had no apparent qualifications for the job except that his father was the vice president and involved in the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy.

He got paid up to $50,000 per month for the job and the situation constituted the kind of conflict of interest that was normally considered inappropriate in Washington until the Trump era.

The story then detours into how this is all Trump's fault, but I don't see how Trump could have anything to do with 2014, well before he even announced his campaign. But it goes on,

The Obama administration probably should have done something about this at the time, but the White House couldn’t literally force Hunter not to accept the job. And given the larger family context, you can see why Joe might have been reluctant to confront his son about it.

This would all be a small footnote in history except that by 2016, officials throughout the Obama administration and in Western Europe had come to a consensus that Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, wasn’t doing enough to crack down on corruption. Biden, as he later colorfully recounted, delivered the message that the West wanted Shokin gone or else loan guarantees would be held up, and Shokin was, in turn, fired.

There was nothing remotely controversial about this at the time. No congressional Republicans complained about it, and the European Union hailed the decision to fire Shokin. The reason there is video footage of Biden touting his personal role in this is it was considered a foreign policy triumph that Biden wanted to claim credit for, not anything sordid or embarrassing.

But Shokin, of course, didn’t want to go down on the theory that he was corrupt or incompetent. So he started offering another theory: he was fired for going after Burisma by Joe Biden operating on behalf of Hunter Biden.

The question of whether Shokin was actually investigating Burisma at all is a matter of dispute (the relevant Ukrainian players have told inconsistent stories), but this is clearly not the reason he was fired. The desire to push him out was fully bipartisan in the United States and reflected a consensus across European governments, not anything idiosyncratic to Biden.

The notion that firing Shokin was somehow problematic was not in the air until the New York Times ran a story co-bylined by Ken Vogel and a Ukrainian journalist named Iuliia Mendel (who a few weeks later would become Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s official spokesperson) highlighting Rudy Giuliani’s efforts at muckraking.

I have a sense that this story is doing everything it can to whitewash Joe's involvement, but no matter what, it concludes that Shokin's role is subject to dispute. But the account, while mentioning the current president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, omits that the president of Ukraine throughout the Bidens' involvement when Joe was VP after 2014 was Petro Poroshenko, whom Zelensky defeated in a landslide vote in the 2019 Ukraine presidential election. Poroshenko's account of his dealings with the Bidens in a 2020 interview is at best equivocal:

Former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko denied Sunday that former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden ever approached him about Burisma Holdings, a gas company Biden’s son Hunter was a board member of.

“My absolutely clear answer: no, never,” Poroshenko told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on “Fareed Zakaria GPS.” “But I also cannot accept that, neither President Obama nor President Biden — Vice President Biden, nor President Trump, nor Vice President Pence never press[ed] me.”

Poroshenko became president of Ukraine in 2014, the same year that Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma, a gas company based in Kyiv. At the time, Vice President Biden was working with the others in the Obama administration to help reform policy and root out corruption in Ukraine. Hunter Biden served on the board until early 2019.

U.S. President Donald Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani have claimed, without corroborating evidence, that when he was vice president, Joe Biden inappropriately pressured Ukraine to remove a prosecutor who had launched an investigation into Burisma in order to protect his son.

Well, if Hunter waa collecting big baksheesh on the Burisma board, why would Joe ever need to pressure Poroshenko about anything directly? That's not how these things work. Whatever the truth of the matter, Hunter's tenure at Burisma generally coincided with the years of Poroshenko's term as president of Ukraine and ended around the time of Poroshenko's electoral defeat in April 2019.

This morning, a new report on Hunter in Ukraine emerged:

In an email kept from public view for more than five years, a top U.S. State Department official in Kiev wrote to Washington superiors at the end of the Obama-Biden administration that Hunter Biden's business dealings in Ukraine "undercut" U.S. efforts to fight corruption in the former Soviet republic.

. . . Most importantly, the email's stark message directly conflicts with the narrative the mainstream media, State Department witnesses and Democratic congressmen gave the public two years ago, when they insisted Hunter Biden's lucrative job with the allegedly corrupt Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings — while creating the appearance of a conflict of interest — had no impact on U.S. efforts to fight corruption in that country.

"The real issue to my mind was that someone in Washington needed to engage VP Biden quietly and say that his son Hunter's presence on the Burisma board undercut the anti-corruption message the VP and we were advancing in Ukraine," Kent wrote multiple high-ranking officials in the State Department in Washington.

. . . Kent's email described an intense pressure campaign by advocates for Burisma — including a former U.S. ambassador — to rehabilitate the Ukrainian company's corrupt reputation and to get Ukraine prosecutors to drop their criminal investigations of the company.

Kent even relayed to higher-ups that he had confirmed with Ukrainian prosecutors that Burisma officials had paid a $7 million "bribe" to make one of the cases against the company disappear. The bribe was allegedly paid at a time when Hunter Biden was serving on the Burisma board, a job that landed his firm more than $3 million from the Ukrainian energy company.

Kent explained to the officials in Washington that Burisma's long reputation for alleged corruption and anecdotes like the bribe were one of the main reasons Hunter Biden's affiliation with the company proved harmful to U.S. efforts to fight Ukrainian corruption.

If nothing else, it's interesting to me that Hunter's tenure at Burisma seems to have been at least with both Joe's and Poroshenko's tacit consent, even though in the estimate of US diplomats it undercut US interests. The assumption inthe e-mail seems to be that maybe somebody needed to explain this quietly to Joe. Right.

It's also interesting that Joe as president doesn't now seem to be on the same page with Zelensky, the guy who campaigned against and defeated Poroshenko, who effectively enabled Hunter. We'll have to see what develops.

So, Why Is Penn Doing This?

Over the weekend, my wife and I watched a TV special on the Hart family murders, in which a lesbian couple drove an SUV with themselves and six adopted children off a northern California coastal cliff to their deaths in 2018. As more information emerged, it became clear that the couple, who had adopted the children in two groups of siblings in Texas, had received funding -- as much as 50% of their family income -- from the State of Texas for doing this, but had systematically starved, abused, and neglected the children over a period of years but had managed to evade successive complaints about the abuse to child welfare authorities in multiple states.

My wife immediately remarked that there was something eerily reminiscent of the Penn trans swimmer story here. Somehow a group of the less powerful, though part of a "family" were being callously sacrificed to a larger narrative that the more powerful wished to enforce at whatever cost.

In fact, the women seem to have moved frequently to thwart further investigations. The final murder-suicide appears to have been the result of yet another complaint by new neighbors to child welfare authorities. There was consensus among those interviewed for the program that the Hart ladies were able to put up what was effectively an upper-class, altruistic front with minimalist clothing, hair, and makeup styles characteristic of northeastern US elites, although both were from South Dakota, had spotty academic and employment records, and were living in some part on state assistance. The most articulate of the commentators referred to their style as simply "white", but I think it's possible to be much more specific here. It wasn't just "white ladies" taking care of adopted African-American children; it was white ladies affecting an upper class noblesse oblige.

Both women lived extensive lives on social media and were able to parlay this into corporate media attention, most notably, according to the link,

Prior to the murders, 12-year-old Devonte came into the national spotlight when he was photographed crying as he embraced a police officer during a 2014 protest in Portland, Oregon, resulting from the Ferguson unrest. The image became known as the "hug felt 'round the world." Jennifer was very active on social media and used Facebook to project an image of a loving, happy family while also sharing her thoughts on race, politics, and trips the family went on. This helped mask some of the problems within the family. One allegation of child abuse from 2013 touched upon Jennifer's use of Facebook, saying that, "... the kids pose and are made to look like one big happy family, but after the photo event, they go back to looking lifeless."

The children were starved, apparently to maintain the appearance that they were much younger than they actually were; they were punished and beaten to make sure they kept up their part of the act. I would guess that Davonte, 16 at the time of the murders but still looking like a preteen, was nevertheless maturing and would, like some of the other older children, soon be beyond the women's control. Thus, faced with the children beginning to escape and approach neighbors themselves, the women had little choice but to end the charade as cleanly as they could before things got completely out of hand.

This brings us to the University of Pennsylvania, Lia Thomas, and the biological women on the women's swim team. The first similarity here is class. The Ivy League -- which as we have seen has officially endorsed Penn's policies as a body -- represents the upper class as few other US institutions. It is putting its prestige on endorsing transgenderism as an act of noblesse oblige. This is beyond mere virtue signaling; it's as serious as a Brooks Brothers tie.

The second similarity is the power divide. It's significant that discussions of sexual harassment in the workplace often raise the issue of a "power divide", where more powerful managers, not always necessarily men, use the prospect of either promotion or termination to force sexual cooperation from subordinates. In the Penn case, the accounts we've seen from the women swimmers make it plan that the administration and the coach are adamant that they tolerate a man posing as a woman to win women's competitions, with the women's only choice being to leave the team or the university.

In fact, it's hard to avoid thinkng this is a case of sexual harassment in itself, displaying a particular form of male privilege that discriminates on the basis of sex.

The third issue, I think, is that the women swimmers are being punished much as the children in the Hart family were, to enforce the mindset that they must be with the overall program and to reinforce their lower status in rhe context of the program. I think this is consistent with Ivy League attitudes that began with James Conant at Harvard, who discontinued specific athletic scholarships, which the Ivies all then emulated. However, athletes could certainly use athletic prowess in support of their admissions applications notwithstanding, and I would assume financial aid could nevertheless could be jiggered as needed to accommodate favored candidates, it's just that nobody got a specific "athletic scholarship".

But this has inevitably lowered the overall status of athletics in the Ivies, and indeed, there was controversy at Dartmouth when the admissions office reduced the size of the quotas available to the coaches for athletic recruitment. I would guess that Penn's move, with the full endorsement of the Ivy League as a body, is just a further step in devaluing athletics and athletes in its programs. The women swimmers are second class citizens now to be sure, but the football team, I suspect, is not far behind. (The late Rush Limbaugh thought football at any level was in the crosshairs of the elites; it was culturally unacceptable for any number of reasons.)

Like the Hart women who abused and eventually murdered their adopted children, enabled by their ability to project noblesse oblige, this is part of a deliberate narrative fostered in the name of the elites. It's a narrative about power, and it isn't pretty.

James B Conant Out The Window

I keep returning to David Brooks and his thesis in Bobos in Paradise that James B Conant's educational reforms, in particular egalitarian merit-based college admissions policies based on standardized testing, created a new, meritocratic elite made up especially of suburban Jews. Other writers like Alan Dershowitz in Chutzpah and Jerome Karabel's The Chosen have sharply challenged this view, arguing that Jewish quotas in particular persist in the Ivy League, and in any case, secretive college admissions policies allow wealthy donors, legacies, influential politicians, and others to bypass putative rules.

My guess is that the 2019 USC admissions scandal, whereby celebrities Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman pled guilty to paying as much as $500,000 in bribes to get their daughters into USC, is just the tip of the iceberg. But USC is not an Ivy; it's second-tier, so the actual cash value of an acceptance letter from Stanford, Chicago, or an Ivy can only be estimated. I would guess the amount is big enough that it can simply be legitimized as a charitable donation, but its effect is precisely the same.

But there's also a significant trend toward eliminating those SATs that David Brooks thought were such an egalitarian measure:

At least 1,785 U.S. colleges and universities will not require ACT or SAT scores from applicants seeking to enroll in fall 2022 according to an updated list released today by the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest). More than 76% of all U.S. bachelor-degree granting institutions now practice test-optional or test-blind admissions, an all-time high.

“The record number of admissions offices waiving testing mandates reflects widespread satisfaction with those policies,” FairTest Executive Director Bob Schaeffer explained. “Schools that did not mandate ACT/SAT submission last year generally received more applicants, better academically qualified applicants, and a more diverse pool of applicants.”

Schaeffer continued, “Evaluating applications without regard to test scores has become the new normal in undergraduate admissions. More than half of all colleges and universities in the nation have already committed to remaining test-optional or test-blind for fall 2023 applicants. We expect the final percentage to be much higher.”

But the groups most clearly affected by such policy revisions are Asians, who are hard working and achievement oriented, but unlike Jews, are more readily identifiable on a racial basis. In addition, the secularization and assimilation of Jews over the last helf century has also made them less distinguishable, especially as WASP culture has also secularized -- though antisemitism has also recently become respectable in the academy, which may limit this trend.

As a practical matter, these shifts amount to a return of quotas and other overt forms of preference. But I'm not sure how much of this represents a real change, since as Dershowitz and Karabel argue, the Conant innovations were never more than partial, admissions criteria have never been transparent at all, and SATs were essentially a beard of respectability meant to distract attention from the nothing new.

Thus I sympathize with the Penn women's swimmer who went through one version of the Ivy admssions rat race only to find the reward snatched away just as she thought she'd gained it. She's had the ear of sympathetic media and has been quoted anonymously in numerous stories, like this one:

["]They’re just proving, once again, that they don’t actually care about their women athletes,” the swimmer said of the University of Pennsylvania. They say that they care and that they’re here for our emotions, but why do we have to be gracious losers? … Who are you to tell me that I shouldn’t want to win because I do want to win. I’m swimming. I’m dedicating more than 20 hours a week to the sport.

Obviously, I want to win. You can’t just tell me I should be happy with second place. I’m not. And these people in Penn’s administrative department who just think that women should just roll over — it’s disturbing, and it’s reminiscent of the 1970s when they were fighting for Title IX and stuff like that. They don’t actually care about women at all.

This actually reminds me of the Latin motto for USC, Palmam qui meruit ferat, "May he who earns the palm carry it", which is contradicted both in its own bribery scandal and in the wider conundrum of the Lia Thomas scandal. If Thomas were subject to an actual handicap that they had to surmount to compete, their victories would be a genuine achievement. But Thomas is a fully intact cisgendered male who functions perfectly well as a male swimmer; they just don't win male competitions. Thus it simply suits Penn to redefine Thomas as a woman for administrative convenience, which effectively abrogates the bargain under which the women swimmers applied for admission to Penn.

My own experience as an Ivy undergraduate was a disturbing sense that I began to have only weeks after arriving that something was seriously wrong. I couldn't define it; I spent some time with the dean of freshmen concerned that the admissions offfice had made a big mistake. He told me to stick with it; I suppose it was the best of various bad alternatives. But my surmise is that what I thought was wrong in 1965 is just as wrong now. I really sympathize with the Penn women's swimmers.

Bp Barron, Richard Nixon, And President Brandon

Somewhere in his book The Strangest Way, a Catholic apologetic he wrote while a professor at the Mundelein seminary, Bp Barron notes a remark by Norman Mailer about Richard Nixon, that Nixon always seemed to have a little Nixon on his shoulder whispering in the big Nixon's ear telling him how to behave, advice like, "Now look sympathetic"; "Now smile." Bp Barron said no matter how you feel about Nixon, this was a good illustration of the divided self: there's no room for authenticity; you've always got to be gauging how you're coming off to other people.

(I've kept looking for this in my copy but so far have been unable to find the specific reference. If anyone knows where it is, I'll be delighted to update the post here.) But this brings out other associations for me. Mailer covered Nixon in at least two books, Miami & The Siege of Chicago and St. George and the Godfather, which were about the 1968 and 1972 election campaigns. Mailer was by his own admission strangely drawn to Nixon and even tempted to be something of a closet Republican. I suspect he found something human in Nixon that wasn't in the public personae of his political opponents.

He perceived a basic insecurity in Nixon, a neuroticism that made him attractive -- maybe even a little like what made Humphrey Bogart an attractive figure in the Hollywood of the time; he wasn't conventionally handsome like, say, Clark Gable; he was skinny and slight; he was aware of his demons. (Indeed, Bogart went by his mother's name; Humphrey Bogart was a well-known illustrator in the 1920s.)

I think this is perhaps what drew Bp Barron to Mailer's observation of Nixon: Nixon was human enough to use as an example of the fallen condition. He was no Kennedy, no conventional hero, no movie star. He was visibly flawed, as all of us are, whether secretly or not.

But this brings up a different question. The American psychiatrist Hervey M. Cleckley published The Mask of Sanity in 1941. According to Wikipedia,

The title refers to the normal "mask" that conceals the mental disorder of the psychopathic person in Cleckley's conceptualization.

Cleckley describes the psychopathic person as outwardly a perfect mimic of a normally functioning person, able to mask or disguise the fundamental lack of internal personality structure, an internal chaos that results in repeatedly purposeful destructive behavior, often more self-destructive than destructive to others. Despite the seemingly sincere, intelligent, even charming external presentation, internally the psychopathic person does not have the ability to experience genuine emotions. Cleckley questions whether this mask of sanity is voluntarily assumed to intentionally hide the lack of internal structure, but concludes it hides a serious, but yet imprecisely unidentified, semantic neuropsychiatric defect.

Ted Bundy might be the stereotypical example of this kind of personality, handsome, charming, even apparently vulnerable as he sometimes used a cast or a crutch to lure his victims, impressing even the judge who ultimately sentenced him to death. But even if we accept Mailer's characterization of Nixon as someone who needed constant prompting to maintain a mask, this simply acknowledges that in Nixon's case, the mask was always in danger of falling off. Ted Bundy was the conventional movie star; Nixon was the Humphrey Bogart.

But this brings me to Joe Biden. If we continue with the Norman Mailer model of Nixon's personality, the one thing Biden simply lacks is any sort of little Biden on his shoulder telling him the right thing to say or do. His gaffes, his misstatements, his hot mic moments, his fabulations, his insults, his outbursts are constant and unapologetic. There is simply no neuroticism. On one hand, he's no Nixon. Despite his nerdiness, Nixon defeated McGovern in a historic landslide. But neither is he a Kennedy, with no aristocratic movie-star glamour. The likelihood of Biden prevailing in the 2024 election is not high.

Nor is Biden a Truman, or if he is, a Truman-like strength of character and authenticity are yet to emerge. I briefly considered Warren G Harding, who seems not to have been apologetic about his own flaws, but Harding was nevertheless a more conventional back-slapping, baby-kissing politician whose demise came about in a highly extroverted political tour. Biden is retiring, even secretive, not a barnstormer.

As a type, Biden strikes me as completely new. He isn't neurotic like Nixon or Bogart; he isn't a hero like Kennedy; he isn't a conventional psychopath like Bundy, but there's pretty clearly some pathology there that he isn't making much effort to conceal, no mask. We're simply told to deal with it. I'm not sure what to do with this.