We're all learning to navigate uncharted territory.
Saturday, February 12, 2022
So Much Happening, So Little News
It's a holiday weekend in the US on top of the Super Bowl, so naturally Biden's handlers are sending cryptic messages about how Putin may or may not be ready to invade Ukraine. The one person who doesn't seem to be bothered is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“The Ukrainians presented a very hard position,” said Russian envoy Dmitry Kozak, noting that it was impossible to reconcile conflicting interpretations of an accord, known as the Minsk agreements, designed to halt the fighting between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists.
. . . On Thursday, Kozak chided the Europeans for failing to bring Ukraine into compliance.
“My impression was that the Western diplomacy had no impact on the Ukrainian position in the talks,” Kozak said.
“There is a credible prospect that a Russia military action would take place even before the Olympics,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said at the daily briefing.
The Winter Olympic Games are currently underway in Beijing and end on February 20.
Sullivan shared his more alarming assessment of the situation in Ukraine with the press as President Joe Biden prepared to leave for the weekend to the Camp David presidential retreat.
He said he could not pinpoint the day or the hour of a potential invasion and admitted he did not know of the scope of the invasion, either.
“It could be more limited, it could be more expansive, but there are very real possibilities that it will involve the seizure of a significant amount of territory in Ukraine and the seizure of major cities, including the capital city,” he said.
Or maybe not. Doesn't sound like this guy, who's got the latest intelligence, knows any more than anyone else, especially if he doesn't seem to be aware that the Olympics have already started.
Meanwhile, Canadian police may or may not be clearing the truckers' blockade from the Ambassador Bridge, and other police may or may not be crackng down on the demonstrators in Ottawa. The impression I have from Canada is that Trudeau has been largely AWOL throughout the crisis.
We likely won't hear much before the middle of next week. The less anyone does about anything in the meantime, the better.
Ever since Rush Limbaugh's passing, I've been wondering who'll replace him. The most obvious candidate has been Tucker Carlson, but his problem (which Limbaugh himself recognized) is that as a Trinity College alum (to be clear, the "little Ivy" liberal arts school in Hartford, CT), he's too Episcopalian and too prep, and indeed, as the son of a deep state actor and media bigwig, too connected to the existing system.
The current Canadian Freedom Convoy story is beginning to illustrate what Limbaugh alone at his best was able to bring to the party: an out-of-control sense of humor. There's something uniquely Canadian about the response to the Freedom Convoy that resonates with the US picture of Canada, however distorted this may be, but the overwhelming fact is that, as the "occupations" of Ottawa, Windsor, and Coutts continue with Trudeau and other civil authorities making impotent threats, the situation has become hilariously entertaining.
And as Ezra Levant noted, Trudeau's mess is creeping over the bridge. One of the best commentators so far has been a YouTuber, Robert Gouveia, Esq, an attorney with a DUI practice in Arizona. Originally I found him unfocused and prolix, but he's been polishing his game, and his coverage of the Freedom Convoy has the Limbaugh touch that's been missing -- indeed, Limbaugh was missing the Limbaugh touch himself for the last years of his life. Last night's commentary was a tour de force:
He has nicknames for many of the key players as Limbaugh would have had: Ottawa City Councillor Carol Ann Meehan is "Meltdown Meehan"; Michican Gov Whitmer is "Big Gretchen 'Ro". Press Secretary Psaki is "Vice President Psaki". He lingers lovingly over the name of Windsor, ON Mayor Drew Dilkens. And he falls back on his legal expertise to outline the basic strategies available to the truckers to fight the traffic citations the authorities are trying to issue them. It's likely that the citations will cause a backlog in the municipal courts equivalent to the backup of traffic on the Ottawa streets.
Yesterday I cited two of two of Saul Alinsky's rules for radicals, "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon," and "A good tactic is one your people enjoy." This continues to be the case. Coverage from both US and Canadian legacy media continues oblivious to the humor of the situation, while sympathizers in the US can't wait to join the game. It appears that, with the Ambassador Bridge blocked between Detroit and Windsor, truckers have been trying to use bridges in the Buffalo area as an alternate, but demonstrators on the US side are now preparing to block this route as well.
If nothing else, this is superb entertainment. If potential successors to El Rushbo emerge from it, so much the better.
What I hear from Canada via e-mail about the Freedom Convoy suggests to me that the whole story isn't as cut and dried as its supporters, especially in the US, might believe, and I'm not in a position to comment on it directly. On the other hand, the two countries are close whether either likes it or not, and events like the Freedom Convoy inevitably affect both sides of the border -- how much did a 2020 trucker protest in Washington, illustrated above, inspire the Canadian truckers in 2022?
According to senior law enforcement officials and documents obtained by Yahoo News, the warning circulated to law enforcement nationwide on Tuesday by DHS states that the agency “has received reports of a convoy of truckers planning to potentially block roads in major metropolitan cities in the United States in protest of, among other things, vaccine mandates for truck drivers.”
My first teactioni is that, in the same way Putin doesn't need actually to invade Ukraine to weaken Biden, US truckers don't need to spend the time and opportunity cost to blockade Washington. The fear they might emulate the Canadians is enough, and the two countries are different enough that what's so far working brilliantly in Canada -- the truckers making monkeys out of the Mounties and Ottawa police -- won't go over in the US, as sheriffs and police chiefs have consistently put politicians here on notice that they do not enforce temporary executive orders, health regulations, and the like.
Imagine what a trucker rebellion would do in the U.S. Supply chain mess. Inflation. Unemployment. Visual proof of Biden's economic failure on TV every night. Alienating working class voters Biden needs so desperately this November.
Trudeau's mess is creeping over the bridge.
But the truckers are already changing the political climate. Half a dozen Democrat states just ended mask mandates. Democrats are looking for a graceful exit for Fauci.
The fear is enough, and the problem for Biden is the parallelism with Trudeau, whose mess, as Levant puts it, is remarkably similar to Biden's: they're both extremely reluctant to cross their hard-line, anti-working class elitist base, while at the same time they and the public health authorities behind them have lost credibility that any of their measures, ranging from lockdowns to mask mandates to vaccines to curfews to boosters, has been effective against the pandemic. But the mandates have primarily hurt the working-class side of their base, while the elites on both sides of the border continue visibly to flout those same mandates in all too many cases.
President Joe Biden’s coronavirus task force on Wednesday side-stepped decisions by Democrat governors to lift mask mandates across the country, recommending most Americans remain masked in public indoor settings.
“At this time we continue to recommend masking in areas of high and substantial transmission,” Centers for Disease Control Dr. Rochelle Walensky stated during a press briefing. “That’s most of the country right now.”
. . . White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeff Zients and include [sic] Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci focused most of their message on the importance of getting vaccine booster shots to increase immunity to the virus.
Fauci hinted at the likelihood of some people requiring a fourth booster shot.
Given the absurdity of the administration's passive-aggressive stance on maintaining mandates that most of the country is already ignoring, I think the US truckers are in Putin's position: why should Putin take on the risk and unquestionable expense of actually invading Ukraine, when the simple fear of it will drive Biden into forcing concessions on Ukraine and Europe himself? Why should the US truckers take on the risk and opportunity cost of a national freedom convoy when the simple fear of a Canada-like episode is driving Democrat politicians here away from Biden without the need for one?
Indeed, US politicians understand what their law enforcement authorities tell them -- two of Saul Alinsky's rules are "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon," and "A good tactic is one your people enjoy." So far, this hasn't filtered through north of the border -- but peoplle like Biden, Fauci, and Walensky are extremely vulnerable to this as well. Indeed, I would guess that it's wiser heads among the Democrats are the ones who'll need to impress this on Biden's handlers.
I haven't commented on the Canadian trucker protests here, because so far, I don't think I've had anything to add beyond what Canadian independent media and other observers worldwide have already said. If they get any of it wrong, that's on them. But as of the middle of last night, one thing has struck me, the dog that isn't barking.
As far as I can see, the Ottawa civil authorities, backed up by the prime minister himself, have issued the following bill of particulars against the truckers:
They are boorish
They are violating traffic laws
They are violating noise ordinances
They are maintaining dangerous stocks of gasoline and propane
They are conducting psychological warfare
They are infiltrated and financed by anti-Canadian Trumpists from across the border
They are destroying Canadian democracy
They are un-Canadian
They are racists, Confederate secessionists, and Nazis.
I may have left some out, but this is the most comprehensive list I can think of as of this writing. I will add others if anyone can suggest more. And I venture no opinion as to the truth or falsity of any allegation; I agree with those Canadians who say that Canada is a sovereign country that is entitled to work out its own political disputes.
The one observation I make is that there's a dog here that isn't barking. Nobody, north or south of the border that I've been able to locate, has said the trucker demonstrations are COVID superspreader events.
As of mid 2020, rightly or wrongly, US public health authorities and legacy media were insisting that Trump rallies be discontinued specifically because they were thought to be superspreader events. Although the same authorities and media tolerated BLM riots, the right at least accused them of hypocrisy by not labeling them as superspreader events. By the same token, throughout 2020 and 2021, even family holiday gatherings were discouraged on the basis that they were potential superspreader events. It took a US Supreme Court order to establish that religious services were not superspreader events.
So why, in Canada which up to now has had among the more stringent COVID regimes in the world, are no public health authorities denouncing the trucker protests as superspreader events? As far as I can tell, Nova Scotia forbade roadside gatherings in support of truckers traveling to Ottawa on a broad "safety" basis, possibly implying that people could get sick that way, or maybe just get hit by a runaway 18-wheeler, but even if there was an underlying public health justification, this was a distant event in a small province.
And there are, as far as I can tell, noise Karens in Ottawa itself, but no mask Karens. I made a quick survey of photos from Ottawa and found that by and large, nobody but police are wearing masks, but of the arrests that have been made, none appears to be for mask violations, nor indeed for singing the national anthem unmasked in a crowd, which would normally be a superspeader event, every bit as dangerous as chanting Let's Go Brandon in a stadium.
I take this as an acknowledgement, both tacit and universal, that the policy dispute over COVID has become exclusively political. The public health jusification has been effectively abandoned, even as political -- not public health -- authorities in even blue US states, the heretofore curfew-loving Canadian province of Quebec, and several European countries are announcing the phaseout of COVID restrictions. In California, Gov Newsom has announced the phaseout of its mask mandate -- he faces reelection this year -- while LA County public health authorities -- not politically accountable -- insist masks will remain.
I make no predictions and make no judgments. I simply observe that even Canada has acknowledged that the debate has become political, not scientific. Prime Minister Trudeau himself has declared the threat is now Nazis and US Trumpists, not a virus. I do, however, agree with the characterization from US observers that the prime minister looks like an elite cupcake.
My thinking abouit trhe Penn women's swim team has inevitably brought me back to the selection scene at the beginning of the whole Men in Black franchise. For those who aren't familiar with it, the premise of the series is that the space aliens have already arrived, but the government has worked out a super-secret agreement with the aliens to let them stay on the planet if they're careful to stay out of sight. The job of the Men in Black, an ultra-secret, ultra-elite cadre, is on one hand to enforce the agreement with the space aliens, while on the other to act as a cleanup crew in cases where the aliens have inadvertently revealed themselves to ordinary people.
It goes without saying that anyone tasked with making sure the space aliens stay quiet and out of sight, as well as cleaning up situations where they don't, must have extraordinary tact, intellect, skill, and initiative. At the start of the first Men in Black film, Agent J, played by Will Smith, has unknowingly applied to be a member of this team. How he's selected gives an indication of how merit ought to be selected, even if the real world falls far short of this ideal.
Agent J arrives late to the selection session, in which it's explained that the government is looking for "the best of the best of the best". His fellow applicants are clearly the cream of the government's best, Navy SEALs, honors graduates of the academies, Marines, and the like. Agent J, in contrast, performs a series of gaucheries. His first test is to find a way to fill out his application when no desk or table is available to any of the elite applicants. Agent J is the only one to see the coffee table in the middle of the group and noisily pull it to himself, the only possible way to accomplish the task.
At the conclusion of the test, Agent Zed, who's conducting it, announces to the military meritocrats who feel they've made all the right moves, "Gentlemen, congratulations. You're everything we've come to expect from years of government training." Expecting one of their group to be selected, they're instead led off to an "eye test", which Men in Black savants will recognize is a device that wipes their memories of all recent events. Agent J is selected.
Over the past several days, I've thought and thought about this episode vis-a-vis the Penn women's swim team. I would go so far as to say that for them, this is a test very much equivalent to Agent J's selection process, but in their case, there's no Agent J. Or if there is one, the winner is Lia Thomas. The Penn women's swim team is, after all, everything we've come to expect from the Ivy selection process, the best of the best of the best. And their potential employers, or perhaps the Olympic teams they might hope to join, are fully entitled to expect the same. The top-tier law firms will happily recruit them as associates down the road given their flawless records. They will never commit the remotest gaucherie.
Except that, confronted with what must be in at least some cases, the ony serious challenge they may have had in the successful progress of their lives in the form of a wild-card competitor, a male impersonating a female, none has come up with an effective counter strategy -- not even, as our Roman Catholic parish clergy might advise if asked, to pray, seek out a Plan B, and leave the team if that's the path that presents itself. I hear a number like 36 as the total women's team membership presumably including Thomas, the guy.
Of the 36, or maybe 35 women, 16 have gone so far as to enlist a spokesperson to write a letter on their behalf, allowing them to keep quiet and out of sight, a little like the space aliens have been told to behave. This has been met with silence from Penn; they needn't have bothered. Several others, just as anonymous, have written the administration to say that they're tickled pink that Lia has had such a wonderful opportunity, and they're copacetic with the whole program.
Of the 35 women, I have the impression that none is going to find a solution that will be remotely satisfactory for herself, sacrificing a sense of justice or even plain common sense to an illusory idea of a future career that's likely to be just as unsatisfactory. None seems willing to come out of the shadows and identify herself by asking for simple justice, either reporting the indecent exposure to law enforcement or reporting the sexual harassment to the designated campus authority. That way, I have a feeling, leads to issues like ulcers, cancer, or alcoholism down the road. Just sayin'.
The real elites here are the people who are running the show, the ones who must certainly have put Lia Thomas up to the stunt and paved the way for it over a period of years. Remember that Thomas began transitioning nearly three years ago and must certainly have done it with the assurance they'd have a place on the women's team. But even to start nearly three years ago means the assurance had to have been in place well before that. The game was well and truly rigged before most of the women swimmers arrived on campus their first year.
The people who set that plan in motion are the real elites, the ones who control the hazing. The Penn women swimmers are just the best of the best of the best, the hazees. They don't have the remotest idea who the real elites are, nor the remotest idea of how to counter them. They'll spend their lives doing as they're told, which is the point.
Unfortunately, while the acounts I've linked of the Penn women swimmers' dilemma outline their near-impossible choices very clearly, my sympathy extends only so far. The conventional wisdom is that the swimmers are being denied the chance to compete fairly in women's competitions by allowing a male swimmer to skew the results, and on top of that, they're being subjected to sexual harassment when the male exposes his genitals in the women's locker room. But if they complain -- indeed, if they go even so far as to report the indecent exposure to law enforcement or follow policy and complain to the campus sexual harassment coordinator -- they face loss of scholarship, dismissal from the team, and loss of future career prospects.
But this is simply a microcosm of the larger Ivy dilemma, which has been around since the late 1940s when the Ivies became selective and at least in theory "meritocratic". At least, David Brooks thinks that way. The more or less direct effect of this was to create a rat race for the suburban middle class and their children; the media stirred up a need for families to have their children attend "the college of their choice", which was just a way of saying an Ivy. The route to this was felt to be via SAT scores, grades, and extracurriculars, an intense and consuming effort that began during the elementary grades.
I recall during my own early teens I was beginning to display behavioral problems in school that caused Dr Callahan, the middle school principal, to call my parents in for a conference. I'm not entirely sure if my parents even told me about this before they went in. Indeed, the odd thing was that the person who said the most to me about it was Dr Callahan, who called me in the next day, shaking his head.
"You need to understand something," he told me. "Your parents are . . . panicking. They're focused completely on how you can get into the college of your choice. They're ignoring everything else." The impression I have in hindsight is that whatever issues in my behavior may have caused Dr Callahan to call my parents in for a chat, it appears my parents' attitude must have struck him as some cause of the problem itself, and any attempt to reason with them was impossible.
The "college of my choice" was Dartmouth, about which I knew nothing. As it happens, the day I was born, my father called them to see if he could enroll me at Dartmouth right then. Trust me, I know from college admissions rat race.
Several aspects of the Ivy experience have stayed with me. I remember an odd discussion in our dorm lounge one night in which several Dartmouth faculty turned up to lead a discussion on "cognitive dissonance". They cited psychological experiments in which subjects were told that they were about to have a "meaningful" or "valuable" experience, but then were subjected to various levels of meaningless and progressively unpleasant activity. The result was the more unpleasant the meaningless activity, the more "meaningful" and "valuable" the subjects rated it.
The professors went so far as to compare these results to the Ivy admissions process -- that the meaningless and unpleasant activity of compiling a successful admissions dossier enhanced the perceived value of the Ivy experience. (They didn't day so, but my own view has been that the Ivy undergraduate experience is itself a meaningless and unpleasant hazing -- I need point only to the Penn women swimmers forced to tolerate a man exposing his genitals. Penn's position appears to be that this is a meaningful and valuable experience as well.)
But what about those professors who conducted the dorm lounge discussion? They were telling us right out that we'd been manipulated into thinking we'd successfully negotiated a difficult, but meaningful and valuable gauntlet, and that this said something good about us. Didn't this say something about those professors as well, that they themselves were complicit in a cynical and manipulative process? Apparently the subtext of the whole discussion was that you're being screwed, relax and enjoy it.
My own reaction to the Ivy undergraduate experience was effectively to tune out. It was just as well; for at least 20 years after I graduated, my main intellectual preoccupation was discovering the need progressively to unlearn all the comfortable certainties I'd been taught there.
The problem for the Penn women's swimmers is that they've been caught in some version of the hazing that makes up the Ivy experience for just about everyone. Hazing is bad and unjust. Colleges generally have anti-hazing policies that they observe about as faithfully as their anti-sex harassment policies; such things notwithstanding, pledges and teammates still routinely pass away from hypothermia or alcohol poisoning from hazings that theoretically don't take place.
The Penn women's swimmers have been convinced that at the end of this process lie successful careers, successful lives. Much as they hate the hazing, they're going to put up with it. Things must certainly get better; they shouldn't rock the boat. The problem is that this isn't an education. Nothing remotely close. The people who might actually benefit from an education there are almost certainly not the ones on the women's swim team. By the time they find themselves in that sort of dilemma, they're already a lost cause.
Thomas’s teammates did not identify themselves in the letter. It was sent by Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a 1984 Olympic swimming gold medalist, lawyer and chief executive of Champion Women, a women’s sports advocacy organization. She said in a telephone interview that she sent the letter on the swimmers’ behalf so they could avoid retaliation; in the letter, the swimmers claim they were told “we would be removed from the team or that we would never get a job offer” if they spoke out against Thomas’s inclusion in women’s competition.
The Breitbart story interviewed a second expert, Natasha Chart, whom they characterize as "a feminist who argues that women’s particular legal rights and social status depend on the public’s recognition that women’s bodies are fundamentally different from men’s bodies", who raised an additional point:
Consider what else is happening here. Lia Thomas is reported as [committing] basically what would be regarded as indecent exposure. He’s fully undressing in their locker rooms, so he’s displaying sexual power. This is endorsed by all of these [pro-transgender] elites, and the women who are being allowed into the elites have to put up with — or endorse — this sexual abuse of other women in order to be accepted.
We are writing to report a potential violation of Pennsylvania Code of Law Section 3127 and of
Title IX and of the University of Pennsylvania’s Sexual Harassment, Sexual Violence,
Relationship Violence and Stalking Policy. . . . It appears from news reports that many, if not most, of the female athletes on
the University’s swim team fear retaliation and are concerned about maintaining their
scholarships and reputation in the community. For this reason, a report such as this one should be
considered an adequate basis requiring law enforcement and the university to conduct an investigation without any female members of the swim team having to make an individual direct
report themselves.
The letter cites Pennsylvania Code §3127 Indecent exposure:
A person commits indecent exposure if that person exposes his or her
genitals in any public place or in any place where there are present other persons under
circumstances in which he or she knows or should know that this conduct is likely to
offend, affront or alarm.
The letter continues,
Based on the news report [linked here in a previous post], Thomas has exposed his genitals in a place where it appears Thomas
knows or should know that this is likely to offend.
Further, based on this news report, a University of Pennsylvania employee, the women’s
swimming coach, has been explicitly informed that the women are offended, affronted or
alarmed by this. Rather than taking steps to further report and address this, according to this report, the female athletes of the University of Pennsylvania have been told that they must accept
this harassment and indecent exposure.
The letter then quotes Penn's own sexual harassment policy, which contains the usual, and concludes,
Should there be any future litigation on this matter, the news reports, including the one cited here
should be sufficient to have put the University of Pennsylvania on notice that there were reports
of multiple female students being subject to harassment and sexual misconduct while engaged in
a sanctioned student activity. According to your own policy, you are obligated to investigate this.
You know the names of these female students. You know there are reports that they fear
retaliation. For this reason, the initiation of any investigation and remedial action should not
require a report directly to you by one of these impacted students.
My wife, a retired attorney, is astonished that nobody on Penn's legal staff appears to have raised these issues even before the February 1 letter. It seems to me that a minimal response to Penn's potential exposure in this case would be either to require that Thomas change in the men's locker room, or to carve out a separate locker room exclusively for transsexual team members, but of course, either solution would undermine the whole message Penn is trying to send, that men and women are interchangeable, gender is just a social construct, and Penn is entitled to enforce this. (Penn's endowment is $20.5 billion, so a few partitions and an extra shower should be affordable and a matter of a weekend's work.)
According to the Post, Penn so far has not responded directly to any of the complaints.
I've got to assume that since this is the Ivy League, there have likely already been quiet attempts by swim team parents and others to resolve this without publicity, but since this is the Ivy League, this is as serious as a Brooks Brothers tie, and Penn will not go quietly. They'll be on the hook for multimillion-dollar settlements, if you ask me. Plus various and sundry resignations.
