Back To The Foreign Students At MIT

I've already posted on MIT backing down on its threat to suspend the foreign students who violate policy during their pro-Hamas or anti-Semitic demonstrations. This story at the Washington Free Beacon adds only one new tidbit:

At elite institutions like MIT, nearly a quarter of all students hail from another country.

The story goes on to make the already recognized point that administrators want to keep them on campus; suspending them would threaten their visas, and since foreign students pay the published full fees, it would badly hurt the school's revenue. The only new point here is the size of the foreign-student contingent at ostensibly highly selective schools like MIT.

Nobody so far is putting two and two together. As writers like Jerome Karabel have pointed out in The Chosen, universities have separate admissions categories for high-profit markets like the children of alumni and other major donors, as well as the children of politicians, celebrities, and other public figures. These simply bypass the ordinary high requirements for SAT scores, GPA, and extracurriculars to which ordinary middle-class applicants are subject.

To these high-profit markets, we may also add foreign students -- except the Beacon is now telling us this category of exceptions to the ordinary admissions standards alone at highly selective elite schools is nearly one quarter of each entering class. (If I were arguing on behalf of the Ivies, I'd question where the Beacon got this information, as the size of the admissions bypass categories at each institution is highly confidential, but we'll accept this figure for now.)

But if we accept the Beacon's estimate of nearly 25% for just one admissions bypass category, how big are the others, for instance for major donors, alumni, preppies, and the rest? Joe Biden's son Beau, his daughter Ashley, and his granddaughter Naomi all got into Penn; Hunter's laptop carries details of at least one personal meeting between Joe and Penn's president to facilitate Naomi's admission. Presumably similar influence was applied in each of the other Biden cases -- but let's consider that when the elite schools also give this consideration in each entering class to the families of members of Congress, cabinet secretaries, and the like, this is not a small number of exceptions.

Is this bypass category, adding the offspring of politicians and celebrities to the children of major donors and alumni, as big as the nearly 25% just of foreign students in each entering class? It's not beyond the realm of possiblity, which is one reason these figures are highly confidential. And let's recognize they stay confidential because the president, vice president, members of Congress, cabinet secretaries, and the like whose children benefit from such preferential treatment will quietly assure that issues like the size of elite-school endowments or the preferences in elite-school admission that benefit their families never come under serious legislative threat.

I do think it's reasonable to estimate that as a rule of thumb, as much as half of each entering elite-school class is admitted under relaxed standards that are below the SAT and GPA ranges that are published for the high school guidance counselors for the US middle-class students who are making their good-faith applications each year. Yet the prestige of Harvard, MIT, Chicago, and Stanford is based entirely on their selectivity from the ranks of the ordinary middle-class applicants. (It's worth noting that the foreign students who pay full freight are also from wealthy and influential families in their home countries, who use their US elite-school degrees to reinforce their prestige.)

This is certainly one reasonable explanation for how someone like Sam Bankman-Fried could be admitted to MIT. I suspect there's a "professional courtesy" category for bypassing admissions standards as well. Isn't it odd that the unpromising Caroline Ellison, daughter of MIT faculty, should get into Stanford just as the unpromising Sam, son of Stanford faculty, should get into MIT?

There's another conclusion we might draw from the MIT vignette and its reluctance to enforce policy on high-profit-margin students: the graduation rate from elite schools, already remarkably high, is bolstered by a general willingness to coddle those students. I recall an instance in my own time as an elite-school undergraduate in which the Dean of the College was called away from his normal schedule to address a family rift among the highly prominent ___________s, because a scion of that family, currently enrolled at my alma mater, had decided he no longer wished to attend. (Come to think of it, this was the man who served as the model for Dean Wormer.)

I don't recall the upshot, but poor Dean Wormer spent the better part of a week putting out that fire. If it had been me, it would have been half an hour in the dean's office to tender my withdrawal, if that. Sorry to see you go, John, good luck! The same influence that creates widespread exceptions to elite-school admissions standards seems to ensure that the students who get in on privilege stay in.

For the middle-class families who are caught in the college admissions rat race, if only half the applicants are admitted via the published criteria, no matter, that just means those who get in that way have acquired even more merit. The families of those who win that lottery aren't going to complain, any controversy will simply diminish the value of what they've worked so hard to get. The families of those who can bypass the middle class standards are just going to keep quiet, and when they can, they'll also work to keep things quiet.

It's Not A Stalemate, It's Worse

Looking for the current outlook on the Russia-Ukraine War, I found this article at Responsible Statecraft:

George Beebe, Director of Grand Strategy at [Quincy Institute], highlighted the perils of extrapolating a “stalemate” from the current lack of significant battlefield movements in Ukraine. “Those who believe this war has settled into a long-term stalemate make the mistake of measuring the relative progress of each side with maps. They see that the frontlines have not moved significantly over the last year and conclude that the sides are stalemated,” Beebe told me.

“But other metrics, though, paint a different picture. Ukraine is using up its quite limited supplies of men, weapons, and ammunition, and the West cannot provide what Ukraine needs. That is not a formula for stalemate; it's a formula for Ukraine's eventual collapse or capitulation,” he continued.

. . . “Despite everything that’s happened, despite all the stuff we have given, the Bradley’s, the M1 [Abrams] tanks, Patriot air defense systems, the Challenger tanks, the Leopard [tanks], all those things, nothing changed at all except the casualty count,” said former U.S. Army Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, Senior Fellow and Military Expert at Defense Priorities and host of the Daniel Davis Deep Dive.

“While the lines haven’t changed, I don’t call it a stalemate because I think time is continuing to work against Ukraine,” he said in an interview, noting the stark year-on-year decline in U.S. military aid to Ukraine.

. . . Recent suggestions in the West of a stalemate and looming “frozen conflict,” though a stark change in tone from the kind of rhetoric that characterized the war as late as the summer of 2023, still does [sic] not reflect what experts describe as the severity of challenges facing the Ukrainian war effort.

However, the public US position, supporting Ukraine "as long as it takes", hasn't changed. As of today,

The United States is joining member states from NATO this week in renewing the alliance's "steadfast commitment" to Ukraine in its fight against Russia's aggression, according to a senior State Department official.

Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken heads to Brussels, where foreign ministers from NATO will gather from November 27 to 29.

But this morning, Larry Johnson reported at Gateway Pundit:

In Kiev, the rift between President Zelensky and General Zaluzhny is widening, with rumors swirling that Zelensky will order a full mobilization of Ukraine that will draft 17 to 70 year old civilians, including women.

. . . Ukraine’s reported plan to draft as many as 20,000 prospective candidates for cannon fodder is being condemned by members of Zelensky’s party, who believe this is a meaningless gesture that will not advance Ukraine’s military fortunes.

. . . Zelensky’s efforts to hide the staggering losses of Ukrainian troops took a major hit when Ukrainian TV Channel 1+1 reported that the AFU’s casualties so far were 1,126,652 KIAs and MIAs. Andrei Martyanov noted that Zelensky’s office moved quickly to force Channel 1+1 to retract the story, but the damage was done. The horse left the barn. Closing the barn door does not put the horse back in its stall.

. . . Even if basic training is completed, the new soldiers are not qualified to operate the armored vehicles, mortars, artillery and tanks they would need on the frontlines. And there is one big assumption here — the United States and NATO will continue to flood Ukraine with a billion dollars worth of gear. That ain’t going to happen. Public support in the United States and Europe to continue pouring good money after bad in Ukraine is flagging and the trend line points to growing opposition.

At this point, Joe Biden appears to be preoccupied with the Israel-Hamas war; issues like Ukraine and climate change appear not to be among his top priorities:

President Biden will skip the United Nations climate summit that kicks off Thursday in Dubai amid the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, a report said Sunday.

Biden, who just weeks ago called climate change “the ultimate threat to humanity,” will not be among the leaders of nearly 200 countries who will attend the two-week event, known as COP28, a White House official told the New York Times.

The official who asked to remain anonymous to discuss the president’s plans did not provide a reason for his absence, but senior aides told the publication that Biden has been preoccupied with the deadly conflict across Gaza and Israel.

Up to this fall, Ukraine and "as long as it takes" had been one of his signature issues. Zelensky visited Washington as recently as this past September, just two weeks before October 7, but his prospects were fading even then.

The blue-and-gold flag draped hero worship of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s last Washington trip, which stirred comparisons to Winston Churchill’s wartime stand against Nazism, was a distant memory on Thursday.

Nine months later, Zelensky was back in town and he and his hosts learned some jarring lessons about one another at a moment when a path to ultimate victory in the war against Russia seems increasingly distant.

Zelensky got an abrupt preview of how Donald Trump’s possible return to power after the 2024 election and how the ex-president’s current sway over the ungovernable Republican-led House of Representatives could rupture the multi-billion dollar lifeline on which Ukraine’s survival depends.

I think the signs are becoming clear that Biden, and in fact NATO, need to come up with an exit strategy. However, the cost will be that it gives Trump an opportunity to say, "I told you so", although so far, he's pressing other issues like the border and the economy. An outright collapse in Ukraine over the winter, which observers are beginning to consider possible, or even a coup there, since Zelensky has canceled elections, would change that quickly.

Ukraine and Just War Doctrine

Somebody Agrees With Me

Is Biden drunk? pic.twitter.com/ex6IjBoZ0J

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) November 24, 2023

Nick Arama responded to the post at Red State:

After the press conference, some on the X platform began asking questions about Biden's condition and how he came into the press conference.

Some of those questions didn't hold back and were blunt.

Unfortunately, farther down, he unintentionally reveals something about the condition of journalism at Conservative Inc:

He has gait problems, in addition to his incoherence and deterioration. I'm not sure that it matters what name you put on it at this point--except to say that he has continuing problems. If it were just that he was drunk, that might be beer, because at least that would goes [sic] away.

"That might be beer"? Wha? What on earth is he trying to say? Maybe he meant to type, "that might be bad enough, but at least that would go away". But then he followed it up "that would goes away". Here's my problem. The people who write at Red State are being paid; they're at least semi-pro. But not only are they not proofreading their own copy, there doesn't seem to be a copy editing function at Red State or nearly any other conservative alternate media. And Red State is owned by Salem Media, which calls itself "the largest community of opinion leaders and Main Street conservatives today". Where have you gone, Bill Buckley?

But back to my point. The video at the link isn't clear; all I can see is a certain hitch in Joe's gait that could stem from several causes -- I'm five years younger than Joe, and it's been a while since I've been really steady on my feet. But what's convinced me that Joe is drunk is that his speech patterns, slurring, hypercorrection, and random pauses, are the sort of thing police officers are trained to recognize are signs of intoxication.

Occam's razor is "the problem-solving principle that recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements". The received explanation for Joe's stumbling speech is that it's an artifact of a childhood stutter, or something like that, but it seems to me that it reaches too far back and adds too many hypothetical factors. A much simpler explanation is that he talks like he's drunk because he's drunk.

But Mr Arama at Red State gets something else wrong -- if Joe is drunk, at least it goes away. The problem I see is that Joe displays intoxicated speech patterns almost all the time, and the "almost" is what gives it away. He was able to avoid the problem during his 2020 debates with Trump, which was a major factor in his November victory -- had his performance been the usual stumbles and gaffes, he woud have taken himself out of the running. He's also able to speak clearly at least for brief public statements after meetings with major world leaders, but only the G8, not the G20.

That suggests his handlers are able to keep him away from alcohol at the most critical times -- but otherwise, he's pickled. All the time, or maybe, as one Kennedy remarked about another, he's sober 20 minutes a day. This may be functionally equivalent to dementia, and it may make little difference in Joe's overall performance, but it's a simpler expanation that doesn't require a medical diagnosis.

How do we reconcile this with his frequent claims, which he's made even to Pope Francis, "I'm the only Irishman you've ever met who's never had a drink." Nevertheless,

Alcoholism, like any other addiction, changes behavior. People who struggle with addiction have undergone changes in their brains that make rational decision-making more difficult. Common behavior changes that many people notice are lying, deception, and avoidance.

Joe tells lies. He tells them all the time. He was arrested trying to see Nelson Mandela in South Africa. He was arrested marching for civil rights in the US. He was raised by Puerto Ricans. He got Strom Thurmond to vote for the Civil Rights Act. He was appointed to the Naval Academy. He used to drive an 18-wheeler. He played varsity football at the University of Delaware. Golda Meir wanted him to be her liaison with the Egyptians. That he's never had a drink has got to be the least of it.

Michael Voris

I've put up a post with my thoughts on the recent developments over Michael Voris over on the Cold Case File blog.

Revisiting Sam Bankman-Fried

I ran into a recent article that points to the same questions I had about Sam Bankman-Fried when I posted on the scandal a year ago:

[T]he received narrative goes on to say that FTX was run by a dozen or so polyamorous hippie-style geniuses who suffered from ADHD, lived communally in a luxury penthouse in the Bahamas, and had their own doctor-therapist who prescribed amphetamines for their ADHD. The only female in the group I'm aware of was Caroline Ellison, so according to that doctor, there wasn't really that much action. Nevertheless, it was the synergy between Beanbag Boy Bankman-Fried and Queen Caroline that drove the whole enterprise, or something like that. But they let Caroline lose $10 billion in unsupervised trading, and John Ray III says he's nver seen anything like it.

Never underestimate what a beautiful woman can do.

At the time, I was scratching my head: I kept doing web searches on ADHD and came up with discussions like this:

In order for people age 17 and older to be diagnosed with ADHD, 5 or more symptoms of inattention and/or hyperactivity/impulsivity must be present and negatively impacting directly on social and academic/occupational activities.

Among those symptoms listed are:

• Makes careless mistakes/lacks attention to detail
• Difficulty with organization, time management, and deadlines
• Avoids tasks requiring sustained mental effort
• Loses things necessary for tasks or activities
• Easily distracted (including unrelated thoughts)
• Forgetful in daily activities
• Procrastinates and puts off tasks until the last moment possible.

Sam had a degree in math and physics from MIT, while Caroline had a degree from Stanford in math. My degrees are in Eng Lit, but I can still compute that somneone who can't sit still, makes careless mistakes, and has difficulty with time management and deadlines isn't even going to be capable of taking the SATs or any other standardized test at all, much less get through course work in an undergraduate math or physics major.

How did they even get near a multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency exchange? This raises questions that go far beyond Sam and Caroline, but up to now, nobody has been asking them. The piece I discovered at the link at the top, originally in Fortune but behind a paywall there, at least begins to give some insight:

When a jury convicted Sam Bankman-Fried on seven fraud-related charges, it marked a symbolic end to the biggest scandal in crypto history. But for Bankman-Fried's law professor parents, Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried, the legal ordeal is far from over.

Bankman-Fried's bankrupt FTX exchange, now led by a caretaker CEO, is suing Bankman and Fried to recover a $10 million gift from their son that was paid with corporate funds. More seriously, the parents—Bankman in particular—might face the risk that federal prosecutors charge them for abetting their son's criminal enterprise.

What do you mean, "abet"? Sam himself apparently couldn't even sit still behind a computer screen. Somebody else had to be calling the shots -- in fact, somebody had to create Sam from the start. I can't imagine that he could have been admitted to a highly selective university like MIT based on the admissions standards for applicants from the general public. The story continues,

Long before Bankman-Fried launched his ill-fated crypto empire, his parents enjoyed substantial financial security and cultural status. They live in a house on the immaculate campus of Stanford University at which they hosted gatherings of the Bay Area's academic and political elite, and enjoyed access to the very top ranks of the Democratic party thanks, in part, to Fried’s fundraising prowess.

Given that capability, it sounds as though Prof Bankman was already running a scam not much different from Jeffrey Epstein's philanthropic hustle, in which he bundled so-so donations from his marks to Harvard and MIT and parlayed them via smoke and mirrors into favors and prestige for himself. Sam's Wikipedia entry gives some insight into this environment:

Bankman-Fried was born on March 5, 1992, in Stanford, California. He is the son of Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, both professors at Stanford Law School. His aunt Linda P. Fried is the dean of Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. His younger brother, Gabriel Bankman-Fried (b. c. 1995), is a former legislative assistant, Wall Street trader, and the former director of the non-profit Guarding Against Pandemics and its associated political action committee, which came under scrutiny by Federal investigators after it was discovered that much of the $35 million on its books had been stolen by his older brother, Sam, from Alameda Research accounts.

What we're seeing is a preexisting network of connections, nepotism, and money that could not only place Sam in the highly prestigious and upscale Crystal Springs Uplands School, get him into MIT almost certainly via an admissions category that bypassed the ordinary competitive process, and even assure his graduation with a degree in physics and math. (My surmise has always been that if powerful families can ensure the admission of unpromising offspring to prestige schools, they can just as effectively ensure their graduation.) My view continues to be that Sam, essentially a special-needs child, was entirely the creation of his parents, powerful and prosperous people at the top of the academic food chain, and for the whole of his life, he was groomed for his role as their puppet. The Fortune story continues,

Whether or not Bankman’s role at FTX amounted to abetting in the criminal sense, there is evidence he was directly involved in major decisions at the firm. That evidence includes numerous group chats on the messaging app Signal, produced as evidence at Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial, in which Bankman participated during a time frame up to and including the exchange’s collapse.

. . . There is also the balance sheet itself, which listed obscure tokens that had little real-world value and included surreal entries like “Hidden, poorly internally labeled ‘fiat@’ account.” If Bankman had seen it—which seems plausible, given his role as lawyer and close advisor to the firm—it’s hard to fathom how he could accept the validity of such a document, which would have received a failing grade from a high school accounting teacher.

As for Bankman’s precise role at FTX, it was amorphous like everything else at the company his son ran as a personal fiefdom. The only formal documentation about its corporate structure, drawn up by an executive and published on the dust jacket of Michael Lewis’s book about Bankman-Fried, lists Bankman as a direct report to his son.

Well, that's the org chart, which says nothing about who's really calling the shots. Should Profs Bankman and Fried ever stand trial, we may possibly learn more about how that layer of the power elite actually works.

More On The 2024 Dilemma

I ran into a piece by Walter Shapiro at The New Republic, The Real Reason Why Biden Shouldn’t Drop Out:

Panicked Democrats, vibrating with anxiety over the polls, continue to nurture an unlikely fantasy: Joe Biden looks at his family across the Thanksgiving table on Nantucket and says with a weary sigh, “I can’t do this for another five years. I’ve tried my best. But I just don’t have the stamina to keep going through 2028.”

Nothing in the president’s makeup suggests that he would abruptly jettison his reelection campaign. . . . Every sign emanating from his inner circle and reelection campaign suggests a stubborn refusal to even acknowledge his growing legion of Democratic doubters. But even if Biden were to accept the truth embedded in the polls, as Harry Truman did when he bowed out in 1952, the subsequent multicandidate scramble for the Democratic nomination would create as many (if not more) political problems as it would solve.

This echoes David Axelrod, who says, "It's very late to change horses; a lot will happen in the next year that no one can predict & Biden's team says his resolve to run is firm." But Shapiro goes into detail on the downside for anyone who thinks about stepping in if, as seems unlikely, Biden will withdraw even this early in the cycle:

If Biden announced on the Monday after Thanksgiving that he would be retiring, it would give 2024 presidential contenders fewer than 100 days to declare their candidacies and define their image before 14 states pick delegates on Super Tuesday, March 5. And 11 other states will be holding Democratic primaries later in March.

Organizing a campaign and raising the money at that pace would be gruelling enough. But candidates would also face high-intensity scrutiny from the media and the voters without any benefit from a learning curve. It would be the equivalent of opening a musical on Broadway without a single tryout and just three days of rehearsals.

. . . Those who have been watching the Republican debates (not necessarily a recommended activity) probably will have noticed that, in a technical sense, both Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis have grown more adept over the last three months. That is the learning curve at work.

. . . Even a globe-trotting governor like Newsom, who visited China last month, would be ill prepared for the full range of queries that would be immediately hurled at him as a presidential candidate—hourly questions about a cease-fire based on the latest glimmers of news from Gaza, repeated inquiries about the best Democratic strategy on Capitol Hill to keep the government open, and never-ending queries about how to finance proposed new government programs.

But he also raises an issue that I haven't seen from anyone else, the extent to which the McGovern wing of the Democrats has gained effective veto power over the past 50 years:

As president, Biden has papered over many of the ideological fissures in the party by being far more ambitious in his legislative agenda than his prior moderate reputation might have suggested.

This is a polite way of saying that the Democrat center, in the persons of Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, has been forced to cave to the far left, in the form of the Squad and similar constituencies. They aren't papering over fissures so much as they're adopting the agenda, and the problem is that the putatively centrist leadership, Biden and Pelosi, have aged out, leaving no centrist equivalent to Bill Clinton to take over in their place. But there's no credible leftist to replace them, either:

But if the 81 year-old (as of today) Biden opted out of a second term based on age, presumably that would also leave Bernie Sanders (82) and maybe Elizabeth Warren (74) on the sidelines. An unanswered question under such a scenario: Who, if anyone, would emerge as the left-wing favorite in the primaries? There is no natural successor to Sanders or Warren being bandied about as a break-in-case-of-emergency option should Biden withdraw.

He thinks the major problem now confronting the Democrats is that among the current possibilities, none will have had the time to build a credible public profile as a candidate as the prinmary season gets under way. But I think this evades the reality of 2024: the primaries are going to be irrelevant to both parties. Trump's overwhelming polling lead will make Repulblican primary victories a formality. If Joe Biden withdraws, it won't be during the primary season; it will be either just before or just after the Democrat convention, avoiding any primary battle, which would simply expose the rift between the Democrat far left and shrinking center.

My scenario continues to be that Joe withdraws sometime next summer, and the party insiders under something like Rule F designate Newsom as Joe's successor but keep Kamala as vice presidential nominee. I'm not sure this will work at all, but it's probably the only possible strategy -- put someone new and young and arguably not quite such a rabid leftist at the top of the ticket and hope keeping Kamala will satisfy the rabid left, but this is a charade, and it leaves open the possibility for a third party challenge from the far left as well.