Maybe They Have A Point

In a post last week, I said I was skeptical of reports that some Democrats are trying to find a younger candidate who can replace Joe Biden as their 2024 nominee because, as I said at that time, Joe Biden is their only hope of claiming to maintain the nearly expired New Deal coalition. In fact, it seems to me that if they want a viable national candidate who could actually do this, they have a perfectly good one in Robert Kennedy Jr, whom they currently abjure.

This isn't to say that they don't see a legitimate problem in Biden, although yet again, I don't think a medical diagnosis is needed to point it out. Take his meeting with Israel's President Herzog at the White House Tuesday, where he's reported to have said,

“The Israelis and the Palestinians… uh… on a political level… They uh, and… uh… They uh… And, I… Agwai endhole and whole shegwam… And uh…” said Biden.

The fact-checkers insisted that the big guy wasn't asleep, he was just reading from notes in his lap, but that didn't excuse his detached, offhand, garbled delivery.

Or take his Philadelphia speech yesterday:

“How many times you read in inflat—that a recession’s comin’?” Biden said in garbled fashion. “They’ven wall street today said no you’ll don’t say resheck comin’ now!”

I’m just going to take a wild guess and say that isn’t what it said on the teleprompter. . . . I tip my hat to the folks at the Townhall Twitter account for that translation because that certainly had to be a bit of a challenge.

The commentator goes on to wonder if Biden might even be having a stroke, but again, this needs a medical diagnosis that neither he nor I is qualified to give. I think a more likely explanation is suggested by this story from Politico on Tuesday:

President Joe Biden will make his longtime residence of Wilmington, Del., the headquarters of his 2024 campaign, he announced Tuesday.

“My family’s values, my eternal optimism and my unwavering belief in the American middle class as our nation’s backbone comes from my home — from Delaware,” Biden said in a statement.

Insofar as there's been comment about this at all, it's taken as an indication he expects to run the same sort of "front porch" campaign he ran in 2020, although even then, his actual campaign headquarters was in Philadelphia. It seems to me that given his character -- he's lazy, grandiose, and entitled (I don't need to be a medical professional to say this) -- this is a fully consistent strategy for him to take, and it's consistent with the attitude we saw in the recent public appearances I cited above.

As for his photo op with Isaac Herzog, it's indisputable that Herzog was there as a supplicant, and Biden's delivery and overall demeanor brutally reinforced this. Biden, after all, is the most powerful man in the world, he's fully aware of it, and dealing with supplicants, especially an Isreali supplicant, is an annoyance. His handlers have already made all the policy decisions, he's already signed whatever they've told him to sign, and his presence in the Oval Office is entirely pro forma. Get it over with, it's a big waste of time.

He reinforces this with a heavy-lidded lack of affect as he ostentatiusly gives a garbled reading from notes in his lap. He's neither sick nor senile, he's just incredibly bored. At his Philadelphia appearance, according to RedState,

After the story that broke over the past day about his staff having to make “accommodations” for his issues, Biden came trotting out, trying to look vigorous. But then he kind of blew that immediately, by then stopping suddenly, throwing his arms up, and telling someone up in one of the seats, “Don’t jump!” — that weird thing that he keeps doing.

As I've been saying all along, Biden sees himself as a skilled Machiavellian manipulator, operating in a behind-the-scenes dimension of Realpolitik beyond conventional expectations. With moves like that, he's simply flipping the bird to his own staff, who apparently urge him not to say all those dumb things. He'll say what he pleases, he'll do what he pleases, and he'll wander off the stage as he pleases, godammit. He'd just as soon be home in Wilmingon; this other stuff is a waste of his valuable time.

What may be bothering the Democrats who're trying to find a better candidate most isn't a possible medical condition, it's that Joe is conscious, aware of his environment, and making fully informed decisions based on his own appraisal, however cynical, of the political circumstances. As far as I can see, he doesn't think much has effectively changed since 2020, and he's simply going to repeat his 2020 stategy. I have a feeling that the Dunning-Kruger effect will be validated here, probably sooner than later.

I suppose if I were a Democrat strategist, I'd be nervous, too -- but what can they change?

Here's My Puzzle Over The White House Cocaine

I certainly agree that the unanswered question of who brought the baggie into the cubby outside the Sit Room is important, but I'm less and less convinced the answer has much to do with Hunter. Let's take the latest theory from Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent who's been serving as the vehicle for unnamed colleagues still on the force who are expressing their skepticism about the investigation. As of Tuesday, he was saying:

“Let’s just say a friend called me up and said, ‘Don’t preclude the possibility that the cocaine found in the White House there was not accidentally left behind.’ In other words, it was left there deliberately for someone to find, and let you say someone else may have found it. So that’s the story I kind of heard from someone who may know a little something about something. We’ll see what happens, but they know who it is. I’m sure of it.”

As best I can translate this, he seems to be saying that the baggie was something like a dead drop, a dealer or some intermediary left the baggie in a place where its intended recipient could find it, and the drop somehow went awry until the uniformed officers found it on a routine search that Sunday night.

But that theory goes only so far. According to ABC News reporting on the Secret Service briefing to Congress, Rep. Tim Burchett said the bag contained less than a gram of cocaine. But every indication we have is that Hunter has been a longtime addict, and he failed a drug test in the Navy as of October 2014.

Much more recent photos that I covered in this post appear to show Hunter snorting at public White House events. Both his long history with drugs and the apparent frequency of his use suggests he's a confirmed addict, and this means he needs much more than just a small bag containing less than a gram to get through the day. According to this site, "Though people use Cocaine at different rates depending on their addiction and tolerance to its effects, consistent users usually use up to 5 grams per day."

So a random dead drop of a single baggie doesn't seem reasonable for someone who likely needs as many as five of those baggies a day, or 35 a week. But if, as is generally speculated, Hunter is currently living at the White House, or at least is there pretty frequently, he would need a delivery system that's much more reliable and capable of supplying a much more significant amount. So on one hand, I don't think the baggie outside the Sit Room had anything to do with Hunter. On the other, we've got the question of how a much larger quantity must in fact be finding its way to him.

I'm surprised that nobody is probing Dan Bongino over this question. He can't be that naive about how much cocaine an addict like Hunter uses and how a single baggie in a dead drop won't suit the purpose. But at the same time, every indication we have is that Hunter indulges all his vices on an industrial scale, to the point that his Secret Service bodyguards must be fully aware of what he's up to, and that's got to be well beyond a baggie in a cubby now and then.

In fact, I don't see how the Secret Service Biden family detail can't be directly enabling Hunter's vices. But nobody's passing the word about this to Bongino? That just doesn't fit. Either Bongino is completely out of the loop, or he isn't telling the full story.

This brings me to yesterday's hearing at the House Oversight Committee, in which Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene discussed evidence showing Hunter purchased an airplane ticket for a supposed "paralegal" to travel to Los Angeles and back to have sex with him, paid for with law firm funds. (I believe this is the series of episodes from late 2018 and early 2019 covered in this story at the UK Daily Mail.)

This level of vice becomes an ingrained habit. The semi-official line is that once Hunter married Melissa Cohen in the spring of 2019, he got clean, changed his ways, and has become a model of filial respectability, but this is hard to believe, especially since he's so seldom seen with Melissa these days, especially in the White House, and this brings up the question of how he satisfies his other industrial-level vices and how this relates to his status as a Secret Service protectee.

According to the Secret Service website, protectees include the President and Vice President of the United States and their immediate families, which includes Hunter.

Permanent protectees, such as the president and vice president, have special agents permanently assigned to them. . . . Protection for the President and Vice President of the United States is mandatory. All other individuals entitled to our protection may decline security if they choose.

The protection of an individual is comprehensive and goes well beyond surrounding the individual with well-armed agents. As part of our mission of preventing an incident before it occurs, we rely on meticulous advance work and threat assessments to identify potential risks to protectees.

It isn't entirely clear whether Hunter can selectively decline security, but especially if he's in residence at the White House, we've got to assume the Secret Service is fully aware of whom he's seeing, where he's going, who's visiting, and what they're all up to. At least in 2018 and 2019, this included violation of federal law, the Mann Act. Whether or not Hunter was an official protectee at a given time, we know there appears to have been a Secret Service network throughout this period that was doing cleanup work over things like his wrecked rental car in Arizona (fall 2016) and the firearm in the Wilmington dumpster (October 2018). There's never been a satisfactory explanation for either of these episodes.

As far as I can see, the Secret Service has been aware of Hunter violating federal law while Joe was vice president, in the interregnum when Joe was out of office between 2017 and 2021, and as best we can infer, while he's president now -- and beyond that, not just aware of it, but enabling it. Somebody needs to get real and tell Bongino to put up or shut up.

Bp Barron's Favorite Television Show

Ever since Bp Robert Barron heartily endorsed this past spring's TV series Mrs Davis, calling it "my favorite show", I've been anxious to watch it. Nevertheless, although he's discussed it in at least two podcasts, and on one, his interlocutor warns viewers that there are content issues and "don't show it to your prayer group", I can agree that it isn't a Catholic film. He says at the link,

Now if you’re looking to Mrs. Davis for theological precision, you will be severely disappointed (and please don’t write me letters reminding me of how weird its theology is; I know), but there is indeed a spiritual motif of supreme importance that stands at the very heart of the show, and it is well worth plowing through all of the intense oddness to grasp it. It has to do with idolatry and, more precisely, with our tendency to create idols.

Wikipeida calls it "an American science fiction comedy drama", which puts it in the same genre as one of my all-time favorites, Fringe, but I think there's one important difference. In Fringe, the FBI has established a special unit to investigate paranormal phenomena, in the course of which it is forced to spirit a disgraced Harvard professor who is a hybrid of Timothy Leary and Ted Kaczynski out of a mental institution to solve the scientific issues involved.

While there are tensions between Dr Walter Bishop and Supervisory Special Agent Phillip Broyles, briliantly played by the late Lance Reddick, Broyles is an experienced operator within the FBI bureaucracy, and he is able, despite Bishop's bizarre eccentricities, to work within the system to accomplish the overall goal of protecting society from paranormal threats. As such, the comedy's happy endings always reinforce the benignity of the established order, including the FBI and its corporate and political contollers.

The imaginative universe in Mrs Davis is of a different sort, much harder to characterize or clearly define. For starters, there is no ontological Satan, which is a product of the show's weird theology, which Bp Barron clearly understands. Sister Simone, the main character, consults with Jay, as well as the Virgin Mary, who is Jay's mother, but even for them, the universe is out of joint -- in one episode, Jay is preoccupied with fixing a leak that's flooding heaven, which he isn't quite able to control, but there doesn't seem to have been a war in heaven that might have caused it, nor an overriding plan that subordinates it in the scheme of things.

This is a fundamental difference between Mrs Davis and Fringe. Beyond science fiction comedy, I would call Mrs Davis neo-noir, which Fringe is not. It has more in common with the Jason Bourne trilogy, in which the CIA and other organs of state security have been deeply compromised, and Jason himself must undertake an inchoate hero's quest to defeat them and discover his own identity. As such, this fits the Wikipedia definition of neo-noir, "blurring of the lines between good and bad and right and wrong, and thematic motifs including revenge, paranoia, and alienation."

Why should something like this appeal to a generally middle-of-the-road, almost popularizing, Roman Catholic bishop, theologian, and evangelist, who indeed points out the major heterodox and syncretistic elements in the film? At the link, he explains, Mrs Davis is "a massively powerful internet algorithm, an artificial intelligence that basically knows all that can be known and that can order and manipulate human beings at will."

But Simone has intuited that Mrs. Davis, in point of fact, robs people of their independence, saps them of their energy and creativity, controls them ruthlessly, and finally dispenses with them when they no longer suit her purpose. She has come to see, to state it bluntly and simply, that the algorithm is an idol, a pathetic simulacrum of the true God, something that we have made that has come, like Frankenstein’s monster, to terrorize us.

There are gems throughout the film. Early on, Wiley, Simone's former boyfriend, realizes that Simone has allowed Mrs Davis to send her on a quest for the Holy Grail, which Simone nevertheless expects to use to destroy the algorithm. Wiley says basically, "She's sending you on a hero's quest. That's a cliche. Algorithms love cliches." In another sequence, a professsor, Dr Arthur Schrodinger, is annoyed by colleagues who keep giving him kitschy cat bric-a-brac. This sort of thing makes the film delicious, just as much as Fringe. There are extensive references to both Moby Dick and Jonah and the Whale, which sent me right back to Melville. What Bp Barron thinks redeems the film is this:

When the monks and hermits of late antiquity took to the hills, escaping from the dying civilization of Rome, respectable people thought they had lost their minds. Most of the denizens of the Mrs. Davis universe feel the same way about Sr. Simone and her community: Why would anyone want to operate outside the ambit of a force so benevolent? Could I make a suggestion? Take a look at your phone and find out how much screen time you put in last week, and then ask yourself honestly how much of your thinking and behavior was determined by that little machine.

I note via the Wikipedia link that it's been announced there won't be another season for Mrs Davis, so the story arc and the metaphorical structure are complete. It's now possible to order the full season on DVD via eBay, which is what I did. The film is worthwhile fun.

Back To The Center Of Attention

Via The Washington Examiner,

Former University of Pennsylvania swimmer turned transgender activist Lia Thomas is back at the center of attention after the national champion was seen on social media appearing to embrace the "Trantifa" movement.

Thomas, a biological male who identifies as female, was seen on Instagram sporting an all-black outfit that included a BDSM leather harness and shirt reading "Antifa Super Soldier."

The image of Thomas was reportedly shared by the activist's partner Gwen Weiskopf, who purportedly identifies as transgender.

So who is Gwen Weiskopf? A quick web search brought up this photo and a writeup:

At the link:

[D]etails on Lia Thomas and Gwen Weiskopf’s relationship timeline & their dating history still need to be published in the public domain.

However, sources believe the couple is still together despite Lia’s name beginning to trend over the internet after participating in female swinging despite being transgender.

So by the accounts of the female swimmers on the Penn swim team, Lia is an intact biological male who claims to be "transgender", whatever that means, but is also conventionally attracted to women, and Ms Weiskopf appears to be an intact biological female, at least judging by facial features and the proportion of her hands. So I'm wondering if the whole Lia saga has been nothing more than an elaborate windup in the UK sense, an extended joke. If Ms Weiskopf claims to be "transgender" as well, then they amount to a conventionally cisgender couple who are just appropriating trans status for attention and privilege.

But this brought me to another question, now that notionally "trans" figures like Dylan Mulvaney and Sam Brinton have been in the public eye: can you make a career out of being trans? It looks like Lia is trying to rebrand himself as being more generally "transgressive", as opposed to just transsexual, posing as an “Antifa Super Solder” in bondage-style leather gear.

Sam Brinton has also been back in the news:

Sticky-fingered former Department of Energy employee Sam Brinton was on a taxpayer-funded work trip when they snatched a woman’s suitcase from a Las Vegas airport, documents obtained by The Post show.

Federal funds paid for non-binary Brinton, who uses they/them pronouns, to head to the city as a representative for the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy in July 2022, according to internal expense reports provided to The Post by the federal watchdog Functional Government Initiative (FGI).

Although Brinton has a master's degree in the nuclear waste field, he built his working career largely on gay and trans activism within scientific fields, which culminated in his appointment as Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy, which lasted fully six months until his arrests for stealing luggage from airport carousels. During this period, he also had a side gig hosting spanking seminars at kink conferences, and it would appear that if his guilty pleas to misdemeanor charges for two prior thefts won't end his nuclear career, which requires a security clearance, pending felony charges for a third theft almost certainly will, and his future prospects are likely to involve headining kink conferences.

But this brings me to my favorite question: what problem are Lia Thomas, Sam Brinton, and Dylan Mulvaney trying to solve? They present themselves as trans activists, but they also stand for a principle that goes beyond just the problem of sexual preference -- and at least in the case of Lia Thomas, his day-to-day sexual preference is simply irrelevant. He identifies as trans even if he's apparently in a conventional long-term relationship with a woman and dates other women as well. This piece by radical feminist author Angela Saini explains the real issue:

I think the fight for transgender rights and non-binary rights is an anti-patriarchal fight, because gendered oppression flattens people and expects you to follow certain rules, which disadvantages everybody who doesn’t conform to that system. So we have to see it all as intrinsic. The anti-transgender movement in the US mainly is associated with religious conservatives, and that’s true in many other parts of the world, like Eastern Europe for example.

I find it bizarre that, in the UK, it’s associated with a certain section of feminists. I don’t know how that has happened. I really hope that we can reach a point at which we understand and accommodate the fact that we cannot wish people away. What happens at the administrative level and institutional level is a problem we have created because we’ve created our institutions in such a binary way. If we hadn’t created them in such a binary way we wouldn’t be in as much of a mess as we’re in right now. What you have to ultimately accept is that space needs to be made for everyone. We need to make everyone feel comfortable and safe in society – and surely that’s something we can all get behind.

The problem is that guys wearing lipstick and dresses or swimming on the women's team turn out to be just a totem for the bigger issue, which is the need to eliminate "certain rules" that "flatten people". The rules extend beyond conventional gender roles to questions like traditional respect for the rule of law, the role of logic and grammar in clear expression, or even the use of mathematics as a broad tool for understanding the everyday environment. Eliminating principles like these, which basically comprise "natural law", is the object of "smashing the patriarchy".

My question about people like Lia Thomas, Sam Brinton, and Dylan Mulvaney is how they can support themselves under the general principles of natural law -- they have to live out a normal lifespan and earn a living that will keep them comfortable. Leaving everything else aside, they're going to get old, and they're going to fade quickly from media. Can they cancel out that rule? I'm sure they'd like to. But things like Lia Thomas's phony claims of "trans" privilege are transparent. You can't cancel natural law, and to the extent that "patriarchy" is a reference to millennia of human experience about how the world runs, you can't smash it.

Kamala Goes There

There's been a minor flurry over Vice President Harris's latest blurt:

The shocking gaffe happened as the 58-year-old vice president delivered remarks at Coppin State University in Baltimore, Md., on the need to build a “clean energy economy.”

“When we invest in clean energy and electric vehicles and reduce population, more of our children can breathe clean air and drink clean water,” Harris said, eliciting applause from the audience.

While according to the link, the White House said she meant to say "pollution" instead of "population", it's hard not to think this was more than a Freudian slip, and she could arguably have meant what she said. A web search on "climate change population reduction" produces 185,000,000 hits, including many sites at the most respectable NGOs expressing quite radical proposals in ways that make them seem like bromides. Just this past May, an article in Scientific American by Stephanie Feldstein, the population and sustainability director at the Center for Biological Diversity, argues

While many assume population decline would inevitably harm the economy, researchers found that lower fertility rates would not only result in lower emissions by 2055, but a per capita income increase of 10 percent.

Lower fertility rates also typically signal an increase in gender equality. Better-educated women tend to have fewer children, later in life. This slows population growth and helps reduce carbon emissions. And when women are in leadership roles, they’re more likely than men to advance initiatives to fight climate change and protect nature. These outcomes are side effects of policies that are necessary regardless of their impact on population.

. . . Population decline is only a threat to an economy based on growth. Shifting to a model based on degrowth and equity alongside lower fertility rates will help fight climate change and increase wealth and well-being.

But at least for now, world population is still increasing, not declining. The link suggests it's projected to peak at around 10.4 billion in 2086, but this is just a projection, and people like Ms Feldstein are concerned that we're losing biodiversity now. In addition, this review of the traditional "population control" theory suggests it was originally driven by Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book The Population Bomb. but

Population control finally met its formal end in 1994 at a ­UN-­sponsored conference in Cairo. In what is now called the “Cairo Consensus,” 162 states rejected the use of population targets as well as the incentives and disincentives used to reach them[.]

Nevertheless,

enthusiasm for the old ideas hasn't died. Economist Jeffrey Sachs, a leader of the campaign to “make poverty history” and combat global warming by implementing a crash program to achieve the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, has cited “population control” as a model, calling it “one of the great success stories of modern times.” Sachs says he favors purely voluntary methods, but he and his allies are playing with a dangerous formula. Declaring a “global crisis” can attract media attention and don­ors.

And the link is talking exclusively about the 20th century Malthusian link between population and world poverty; it has nothing to say about the renewed movement that links not just "population control" but "population decline" with new concepts like "biodiversity" and "equity". The Wikipedia link on Sustainable population summarizes current views from this movement on the optimal world population level:

Climate change, excess nutrient loading (particularly nitrogen and phosphorus), increased ocean acidity, rapid biodiversity loss, and other global trends suggest humanity is causing global ecological degradation and threatening ecosystem services that human societies depend on. Because these environmental impacts are all directly related to human numbers, recent estimates of a sustainable human population tend to put forward much lower numbers, between 2 and 4 billion. Paul R. Ehrlich stated in 2018 that the optimum population is between 1.5 and 2 billion. Geographer Chris Tucker estimates that 3 billion is a sustainable number, provided human societies rapidly deploy less harmful technologies and best management practices. Other estimates of a sustainable global population also come in at considerably less than the current population of 8 billion.

But given the typical climate-change predictions we see now that claim the polar ice caps will melt and Miami will be under water within the next ten years, how much time do we have to fix things? Will electric cars be enough? The link above suggests the 20th century efforts at population control via voluntary sterilization and mass birth control were ineffective, and here we are at eight billion heading for ten. So how do we get back to ten or 20 percent of that before we all drown? It sounds to me as though even the world envisioned by Kurt Vonnegut would be insufficient to solve this problem: the government runs ethical suicide parlors

and urges people to commit suicide to help keep the population of 17 billion stable. . . . The government also suppresses the population's sexual desire with a drug that numbs them from the waist down (but does not render them infertile, as that is seen as unethical and in violation of the religious principles of many).

In fact, the pioneering efforts of the National Socialists at a point-based Final Solution would be laughably inadequate to reduce the world population to just two or three billion before the planet burns up. But this in turn raises the question of just who needs to be culled if we undertake a project at this scale -- after all, it's white people who got us into this mess. Maybe the National Socialists had a point, huh? But we'd need to take their efforts much farther.

Republicans really need to pursue this, particularly because Ms Harris would be incapable of handling any questions about this issue overall in a debate, or even in an apostrophe from someone like Tucker Carlson. Even a blanket assertion that she'd simply meant to say "pollution" instead of "population" would be damaging enough.

This Explains Elizabeth Holmes, Alissa Heinerscheid, And Stockton Rush

I found this piece via Instapundit, Why Match School And Student Rank? which echoes my own views on Ivy admissions, which were formed by my own experience as an undergraduate and the views of Ferdinand Lundberg in books like The Rich and the Super-Rich, which in my view is up there with Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago and Milton's prose in both style and intent.

His thesis is this:

Elite colleges are machines for laundering privilege.

That is: Harvard accepts (let’s say) 75% smart/talented people, and 25% rich/powerful people. This is a good deal for both sides. The smart people get to network with elites, which is the first step to becoming elite themselves. And the rich people get mixed in so thoroughly with a pool of smart/talented people that everyone assumes they must be smart/talented themselves. After all, they have a degree from Harvard!

. . . People ask why Harvard admissions can still be bribed or influenced by the rich or well-connected. This is the wrong question: the right question is why they ever give spots based on merit at all. The answer is: otherwise the scheme wouldn’t work. The point of a money-laundering operation is to take in both fairly-earned and dirty money, then mix them together so thoroughly that nobody can tell which is which. Likewise, the point of a privilege-laundering operation is to take in both fairly-earned and dirty privilege, then stamp both with a Harvard degree. “Fairly-earned privilege” means all the brilliant talented ambitious youngsters admitted on the basis of their SAT scores and grades and impressive accomplishments; “dirty privilege” means the kids of various old-money aristocrats, foreign potentates, and ordinary super-rich people. Colleges mix them together, with advantages for both groups.

The South African true crime writer Nick van der Leek has recently followed the Titan submersible story on his True Crime Rocket Science YouTube channel, which carries the implication that OceanGate is a true crime story, and Stockton Rush was a crook. How could this be? This story, published after the Titan went missing but before its fate was reported, refers to him in the present tense:

Richard Stockton Rush III, 61, better known as Stockton Rush, is the CEO and founder of submersible company OceanGate Inc. as well as a descendant of both the Rush and Davies families, SFGATE reported. Among his ancestors are Benjamin Rush and Richard Stockton, both of whom signed the Declaration of Independence, according to The New York Times.

He is related to millionaire Ralph K. Davies, who started as a 15-year-old office boy at Standard Oil of California in the 1910s before becoming the company’s youngest-ever director and eventually launching his own oil business, SFGATE and the Times reported.

. . . Stockton Rush's father, also named Stockton Rush, was from Philadelphia and also attended Princeton University.

The prestige of his own aerospace engineering degree from Princeton drove his ultimate success as OceanGate's promoter despite an uneven start to his career, and he was able to use that to counter the questions about the Titan's design and construction that were raised from the start.

But this goes to my own experience as an Ivy undergraduate. Once I arrived, I was surprised at how un-challenging the course work was and how mediocre my classmates generally were. It became almost immediately clear that to flunk out (or as they put it, to be "separated from the College") took real application. I coasted, as did most of my friends. Now and then I've mentioned that within weeks of my arrival as a freshman, I went to the dean of freshmen and told him my admission had been a terrible mistake, although my reasons were inchoate.

He was sympathetic, but he convinced me to see it through, and he and I maintained a friendly ongoing relationship throughout my four years. Unfortunately, a heavy smoker, he died of a heart attack not long after I graduated, or I might have corresponded with him after that as well.

The dean, Albert I Dickerson, had been admissions director there earlier in his career, and in fact, in that role, he claimed that he and his immediate predecessor at Dartmouth had been the ones to invent the Ivy selective admissions formula that the link above outlines. He did this in an article, "Enter Ye in by the Narrow Gate. . .", that appeared in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine for October 1947, reprinted in Albert Inskip Dickerson: Selected Writings (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1974).

Having invented the Ivy system, or at least co-invented it, he explained it in nutshell: it was based on Scholarship, Personality, and Groups to Which Preference Is Given, i.e., the usual suspects, and there you had the deal that's existed since the 1940s: some are admitted on merit, some are admitted because they have preference, and nobody is supposed to know the difference -- except that as a somewhat confused 17-year-old, I seem to have realized from the start that something was hinky. I think this is why the dean and I got along so well, he thought I was a bright kid indeed.

What strikes me is that there's been a change, which I began to outline in this post, whereby famous crooks, con artists, and corporate frauds are starting to come from wealthy backgrounds with Ivy degrees, when they'd previously been middle class at best. Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, an illegal immigrant from Germany, may have pioneered this trend in the 1980s and 1990s, when as a career con artist who incidentally murdered a California couple in 1985, he adopted a succession of upscale aliases until, as "Clark Rockefeller", he married a high-earning McKinsey senior executive and maintained the fiction that he was wealthy and upper-class.

Somehow this presaged the new trend whereby wealthy Ivy legacies can hitchhike on the prestige of their schoolmates who were admitted on merit and build careers in crime, or in the case of Alissa Heinerscheid, disastrous incompetence. The impostor syndrome may play a part in this, where people who are deeply conscious of their own lack of real qualifications nevertheless seem to function effortlessly among the elite. But why are they only now turning to serious white-collar crime?

This is new. I still wish I could have kept up a correspondence with Dean Dickerson about it. He probably understood more than anyone thought.

The Other Suspect

Here's a news flash I picked up from my portal on the dark web that connects with the alternate universe:

WASHINGTON (AP) The FBI announced this morning that C Throckmorton "Buddy" Hollingsworth III, a Washington Post editor, has been identified as the person whose fingerprints were found on the plastic baggie of cocaine that was discovered by the Secret Service near the White House Situation Room on the evening of July 2. Mr Hollingsworth was arrested at his Dupont Circle home before dawn on felony charges of cocaine possession on federal property, as well as. . .

But here's a thought experiment. What if this had hit the news just the other day in our own universe. Do you think there would be one iota less speculation about the identity of the real culprit, and poor Buddy Hollingsworth would just be taking the fall for someone else? I can't speak to whether the FBI or the Secret Service has better credibility over there than over here -- remember that in that universe, the US has the Nixon dollar -- but over here, conspiracy theories would still rage, no matter how ironclad the case against Buddy Hollingsworth.

Thus on Breitbart yesterday morning, we saw:

Officials at the White House know who brought cocaine into the White House and have confirmed that finding via fingerprint analysis, according to a report which contradicts a statement released by the Secret Service.

A security source told Soldier of Fortune magazine, “We know who handled it… We’ve known since last week.”

So far, this hasn't gone anywhere, but the story did make a worthwhile point farther down, which appears to have been deleted from the current version. But per an earlier report from last August:

President Joe Biden on Wednesday named Kim Cheatle, a veteran Secret Service official, to be the agency’s next director as it faces controversy over missing text messages around the time thousands of supporters of then-President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol.

. . . Cheatle had served on Biden’s protective detail when he was vice president. During that time, Biden “came to trust” her judgment and counsel, he said in a statement.

Biden said that her [sic] and first lady Jill Biden “know firsthand Kim’s commitment to her job and to the Secret Service’s people and mission.”

But recall that it was reported at the time when Joe was vice president (and Hunter was also a protectee):

“Agents say that, whether at the vice president’s residence or at his home in Delaware, Biden has a habit of swimming in his pool nude," writes author Ronald Kessler, as quoted by the New York Daily News. "Female Secret Service agents find that offensive.”

But they can't take their eyes off him for a second, so allegedly must watch their boss let it all hang out while he floats to and fro. This "lack of consideration," Kessler writes, means that "being assigned to his detail is considered the second worst assignment in the Secret Service." The least popular detail, he claims, is Hillary Clinton's. (No word on her skinny dipping habits.)

And Kim Cheatle was the Secret Service agent who enabled all this and made it the second worst detail in the agency. So Joe, purely by coincidence, brought her back from the private sector and put her in charge of the whole show, Hunter and all. It would be interesting, though, to hear what the agents on the Kamala Harris detail think of that job, which brings me to the second person of interest in the Sit Room baggie case:

The drugs were actually found in a highly secure area of the White House "near the Situation Room," a place where "average people just can't get in" that also happens to be "where the vice president's vehicle is parked."

The cocaine's proximity to Vice President Kamala Harris's vehicle raises some troubling questions in light of her history prosecuting drug cases as San Francisco district attorney.

. . . Harris has a problematic history when it comes to cocaine. She occasionally cackles like a cokehead. The drugs were found near her vehicle. Coincidence?

But any idea that a cocaine scandal or anything like it wouid push Kamala off the ticket or even bring about an Agnew-style resignation is pure wishful thinking. The Washington Examiner toys with the idea but puts it down again:

“How do you solve a problem like Kamala? The sense is she doesn’t fit in. The sense is she’s not an asset to the administration,” said Democratic pollster John Zogby.

“So what do you do with Vice President Kamala Harris when you’re running a tight reelection race?” he said in an online “riff” with his son and fellow pollster Jeremy Zogby.

Jeremy Zogby, the managing partner of John Zogby Strategies, was even harder on Harris.

“She’s a major problem,” he said. “She’s not a good communicator. She can barely communicate a complicated idea. There’s a lot of cackling, there’s a lot of avoiding answering questions directly, there’s a lot of theatrics,” he added.

The duo suggested that Biden push her into another job, such as United Nations ambassador, to make way for another vice presidential pick that might help him in the reelection campaign — or make it easier for Biden to step aside and let a rising Democratic star such as Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) get the nomination.

But that notion runs into the obstacle I've already been discussing, there are no "rising Democratic stars" who can get the nomination away from Joe, while as the piece puts it, the "first-ever female and black vice president is worth more on the ticket than off". But we're also back to the Barack Obama conundrum: like Obama, Harris has a certain minimal presence of melanin in her skin cells, but she isn't a descendant of African slaves, and she's married, more or less, to a rich white guy. This is the sort of black candidate the Democrats will put up for a national election, and so far, the population authentically descended from African slaves hasn't pushed back on this.

So for now, this isn't an issue and won't be unless the Republicans nominate an actual descendant of African slaves for either spot in 2024. Instead, we have a Secret Service head who has a demonstrated ability to keep potential scandals in the presidential and vice presidential families quiet, and who was almost certainly selected for that reason. Remember that in at least 2015 and 2016, while Joe was vice president and Hunter was a protectee, numerous e-mails on the laptop show Hunter setting up deals to buy cocaine on the street in Wilmington, and in October of that year,

Hunter arranged to go to rehab in Sedona, Arizona. During a layover in Los Angeles, he realized he left his wallet on the plane. While waiting for his wallet in LA, he went to Pershing Square and asked a homeless man where he could buy crack.

He bought crack several times that week, The New Yorker reported. After days of not sleeping, on Oct. 28, Hunter was driving on Interstate 10 near Palm Springs and eventually lost control of the car.

He returned the car to Hertz, where he had rented it under a false name. Nevertheless, according to a contemporary Prescott, AZ police report, the Secret Service got involved and among other things confirmed to Hertz that the renter was Hunter Biden. So basically the Secret Service appears to have been monitoring Hunter throughout this episode, if it wasn't escorting him directly, and as far as we can tell was fully aware that he was buying cocaine on the street, and they worked to keep the whole matter quiet.

All the evidence we have is that the Secret Service has been enabling cocaine use -- and no doubt other illicit activity -- by protectees for quite some time, at least since Joe's vice presidency, and they'll continue to cover it up. That's why Kim Cheatle is director now. If either Hunter or Kamala was responsible for the Sit Room baggie, that fix is in.

I've got to assume Speaker McCarthy, Chairman Comer, and Sen Grassley, among others, are fully aware of this. I'm wondering if they have a case for the Secret Service enabling or covering for protectees as they commit federal felonies. Shouldn't this be an issue?