Felicity Huffman Speaks Out!

According to Wikipedia, Felicity Huffman

is best known for her role as Lynette Scavo in the ABC comedy-drama Desperate Housewives (2004–2012.

But more recently, she's been better known for her role in the Varsity Blues scandal. At the link,

Huffman was among dozens charged by the U.S. Attorney's Office on March 12, 2019, in a nationwide college entrance exam cheating scandal. Prosecutors alleged that Huffman's $15,000 donation to the Key Worldwide Foundation, ostensibly a charitable contribution, was in fact payment to someone who posed as Huffman's daughter Sophia to take the SAT, receiving a score that showed significant improvement over Sophia's score on the Preliminary SAT (PSAT). Huffman was arrested at her California home on March 12 by FBI agents and IRS agents and charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services fraud.

According to Breitbart News,

Actress Felicity Huffman, who spent 11 days in jail after bribing college officials $15,000 to fudge her daughter’s SAT scores in what was part of the infamous college admissions scandal, said she felt she had “no option” but to break the law in order to give her daughter “a future.”

“People assume that I went into this looking for a way to cheat the system in making proverbial criminals [sic] deals in back alleys, but that was not the case,” Huffman insisted in a recent interview with ABC, breaking her silence on the matter for the first time since the scandal unfolded.

Nevertheless, the story she tells is muddled.

“I worked with a highly recommended college counselor named Rick Singer,” the Transamerica star continued. “I worked with him for a year and trusted him implicitly. He recommended programs and tutors, and he was the expert.”

“And after a year, he started to say, ‘Your daughter is not going to get into any of the colleges that she wants to,’ and I believed him,” she added.

Here's the first problem. Her daughter was starting the college application rigamarole, so she must have been in her first years in high school, maybe 15 years old. How could she possibly have known what college she wanted to attend? She lived in Hollywood, so maybe USC or UCLA might have come first to mind, but she'd probably be a day student at those schools, or at least home pretty frequently. Might she want to go to college farther from home to become more independent? Was anyone asking her basic questions like that?

We just don't know what schools were on Rick Singer's list, but we do know that none was a school she could get into, because that was what Rick Singer, a convicted con artist, told Felicity Huffman. I'll be that an ordinary guidance counselor at whatever high school Ms Huffman was sending her daughter to could have come up with a list of schools that would indeed accept her daughter. A quick web search shows colleges with good reputations in California alone that will accept just about anyone, including

• Sonoma State University
• Marymount California University
• Mills College
• California State University Stanislaus
• Saint Mary's College
• Mount Saint Mary's College

As it turned out, once the scandal blew over and her daughter actually took the SATs under her own name, she got into Carnegie Mellon University. This says to me that what almost certainly should have happened was that Ms Huffman should have had a serious sitdown with a real school guidance counselor who would tell her that trying to get into Stanford wasn't realistic, but she could certainly consider many second-level schools lilke CMU, which has a perfectly acceptable acceptance rate of 11%.

But beyond that, a real guidance counselor would have put together a list of maybe half a dozen schools, ranging from an aspirational first choice, down through schools where there might be better odds, and ending up with a "safety school" that could assure almost certain admittance. College visits to each of them during the application process would probably make both the applicant and the parents comfortable with any outcome on the list.

So basically Rick Singer was scamming Ms Huffman and putting her into a panic because her daughter wouldn't get into any of the schools she "wanted", even though there doesn't seem to have been a serious effort to identify which those might be. Thus:

“And so, when he slowly started to present the criminal scheme, it seemed like — and I know this seems crazy — that that was my only option to give my daughter a future,” Huffman said. “And I know hindsight is 20/20, but it felt like I would be a mad mother if I didn’t do it.”

Desperate housewife indeed. I've already posted here about Dr Callahan, the principal of my junior high school, who was insightful enough to trace some of my adolescent behavior problems to my parents' panic to get me into the "college of my choice", which of course was the college of their choice -- at age 14 or 15, how could I possibly know anything about college at all, much less which one I wanted to attend? From what I recall, some time around my early adolescence about 1960, there was the first great media frenzy that the Ivies -- "the college of your choice" -- had become selective, and getting in would now be an arduous process.

My parents were among the first to buy into that mass hysteria, which seems to have gripped many levels of society, including even the Hollywood elite, ever since. What puzzles me is that Ms Huffman bought into the idea that her daughter would have "no future" without a highly prestigious degree, and she would somehow be a bad mother if she didn't bribe someone to get her in, when there are dozens of perfectly acceptable upper-middle-level schools that apparently would have accepted her daughter with the SAT scores she had.

In fact, an intensive SAT prep course like the Princeton Review costs $2100, a bargain compared to the $15,000 Ms Huffman gave Rick Singer. I think what this all boils down to is that the Ivies have certainly allowed the impression to continue, if they haven't enabled it, that admission into an entering class is an unsurpassed indication of merit, reflecting as much if not more on the parents as on the applicant. Thus con artists can play on the insecurity and thwarted aspirations of the Felicity Huffman style parents of the world, as well as inflating the value of their own decidedly inferior product.

The Military Money Crunch

Right now, the US is fighting two hot proxy wars, one in Ukraine and one in Gaza, but at the moment, it's running out of money:

The military, like the rest of the federal government, is operating under a temporary funding measure that freezes spending at the previous year’s levels. And because the Middle East troop movements weren’t planned, the Pentagon has had to pull money from existing operations and maintenance accounts, DOD spokesperson Chris Sherwood said. President Joe Biden signed the stopgap measure this month to keep the government open until lawmakers can agree on a full-year spending bill.

. . . “Current events have revised some of the operational assumptions used to develop the FY 2024 President’s Budget request. Specifically, neither the base budget request nor the FY 2024 supplemental request included funding for U.S. operations related to Israel,” he said.

“We’re taking it out of hide,” Sherwood added.

This may bear some relation to reports of reduced enthusiasm for supporting Israel in its current Gaza action:

According to Ch. 12 report, Blinken clashed with Israel’s war cabinet about the next phase in the Gaza operation.

“I don’t think you have the credit for that,” Blinken reportedly told the defense minister about his stated goal to “dismantle Hamas, even if it takes months.” pic.twitter.com/qAFnJ2YvAC

— Jacob N. Kornbluh (@jacobkornbluh) November 30, 2023

At the link, someone writing as Bonchie comments,

Keep in mind, this is the same Biden administration that has repeatedly pledged to back Ukraine for "as long as it takes." I guess Israel, which is in a far better military position to deal with its enemy, doesn't get that same treatment.

Let me briefly digress into the pervasive unseriousness at Consrvative Inc. I suspect writing for Red State isn't Bonchie's day job, and he understandably wants to avoid exposing himself and his family to repercussions if he's outed as a conservative part-time pundit. But of all the pseudonyms he could choose, he picked "Bonchie", which is his byline for discussing the weightiest public policy issues. It's just short of "Muffie".

But back to the matter at hand. According to PBS, as of October 1,

Since the war began, the Biden administration and the U.S. Congress have directed more than $75 billion in assistance to Ukraine, which includes humanitarian, financial, and military support, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German research institute. (This figure does not include all war-related U.S. spending, such as aid to allies.)

It's worth pointing out -- and this is worth serious congressional investigation -- that some significant part of that $75 million has been diverted due to corruption, and the result of the whole boondoggle has been a deteriorating battlefield situation in which Russia appears to be succeeding in an overall strategic plan:

Not - and again we stress this - a war of genocide, but a war which will destroy Ukraine as a strategically potent entity. Already the seeds are sown and the fruit begins to bud - a Ukrainian democide, achieved through battlefield attrition and the mass exodus of prime age civilians, an economy in shambles and a state that is cannibalizing itself as it reaches the limits of its resources.

. . . Putin is not going to leave a geostrategically intact Ukraine which will seek to retake the Donbas and exact revenge, or become a potent forward base for NATO. Instead, he will transform Ukraine into a Trashcanistan that can never wage a war of revanchism.

Compare this to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg's recently recalibrated words:

All Allies agree that in the midst of a war full [NATO] membership [for Ukraine] is not possible. But of course, we will continue to look into to address how we can move Ukraine and NATO even closer together.

What he's saying is, given the battlefield situation, the corrupt current regime in Ukraine, and the likely medium-term outcome, we're just gonna be sorta-kinda about the sweet bye and bye. And no matter to us in Europe, this will all be on the US Visa card.

In contrast to the US $75 billion already down the drain in Ukraine, the current aid package to Israel is $14.5 billion, which in light of other defense priorities will be difficult to sustain. The basic problem is that the idea of turning Ukraine into a NATO country was, in light of Russia's strategic priorities, never realistic, and certainly never achievable at the funding levels assumed in the optimistic early days of the war.

It looks like there was never a serious or comprehensive Ukraine plan, either diplomatic or military, something that's concerned me from the start, and never a serious assessment of the prospects for success. Nor, we're beginning to see, has there been any planning for other contingencies. Without the money to exert leverage on Israel, the US will have a hard time controlling its Gaza campaign, while the appearance of weakening support for Israel will drive US Jews further from the old New Deal coalition.

More On Ivy Admissions

While researching Wednesday's post on foreign students, I ran into this essay from last July at Forbes by Michael Nietzel, President Emeritus of Missouri State University, How The Admission Practices Of Elite Colleges Perpetuate The Advantages Of The Wealthy. Again, received opinion by writers like David Brooks of the New York Times and The Atlantic has been that the elite colleges are meritocratic, admissions are driven by SATs, grades, and extracurriculars. Nietzel's argument is that the numbers simply don't point in that direction.

While only 10% of students scoring at the 99th percentile on the SAT/ACT from middle-class families attend an Ivy-Plus college, 40% of similarly high-scoring students from families in the top 1 percent of the income distribution do so.

. . . The authors [of a recent Brown University study] estimate that this higher admissions rate leads to 103 extra students being admitted from the top 1% in a typical Ivy-Plus class (of 1,650 students) relative to a theoretical benchmark where students are admitted at the same rates across the parental income distribution based on their test scores.

The study quantifies the effect of the admissions "baskets" that Jerome Karabel discusses in The Chosen, especially for legacies, applicants from private "feeder schools", and children of major donors.

Legacy admission policies exerted the largest effect, with legacy applicants admitted at higher rates at all levels of parental income. The biggest boost was given to high-income legacy applicants, who are five times more likely to be admitted to an Ivy-Plus college than peers with comparable credentials who are not legacies. Legacies would account for 47 of the 103 extra students admitted from the highest income levels.

The authors also found that while children of alumni at a given Ivy-Plus college are much more likely to be admitted at that college, they are no more likely than non-legacies to gain admission at other Ivy-Plus colleges, suggesting that they do not have stronger academic credentials.

The weight placed on non-academic factors like extracurricular activities, leadership capacity, and personal traits had the next largest effect, accounting for 31 of the 103 extra top 1% students. Among students with similar SAT/ACT scores, those who attend private high schools tend to obtain much higher non-academic ratings (but similar academic ratings) than students attending public high schools.

Tellingly, the preference for private school applicants extends to athletic admissions as well:

The remainder of the high-income admissions advantage was due to athletic recruitment, yielding another 25 extra students from the top 1% because recruited athletes come disproportionately from high-income families.

Karabel explains this, at least in part, by noting that colleges recruit for upscale sports like rowing, skiing, and lacrosse, for which many public high schools do not have programs, but prep schools do. The study concludes that by eliminating legacy preferences, a more egalitarian review of extracurriculars, and a more egalitarian athletic recruitment policy,

those three changes would increase the share of students from the bottom 95% of the parental income distribution attending Ivy- Plus colleges by 8.7 percentage points, equal to about 144 students in a typical Ivy-Plus college class.

This gives at least a hint of the relative sizes of Karabel's "baskets" for legacies, preppies, and recruited athletes: if those were eliminated, 8.7% of the current Ivy-plus student body would be replaced by students not from the top 5% of family incomes. But based on the information I cited in Wednesday's post, this leaves out the nearly 25% of foreign students in typical Ivy-plus student bodies, so, leaving racial preferences and children of celebrities and politicians aside, we're looking at over 30% of Ivy-plus student bodies who've likely been admitted via non-meritocratic applicant categories. And, because these are the ones paying full fees and likely future big donors, they're preferred customers.

I've always had a lurking question in the back of my mind, ever since the president of my Ivy undergraduate instution remarked something to the effect of, "We know that our smartest students always earn grades in the B and C range". He blurted this out, but he never expanded on it, and putting it in perspective, I can see why he wouldn't -- it's a clear effect of admitting something over 30% of the student body on a basis other than grades, test scores, and non-preferential extracurriculars. If your most profitable customers aren't your smartest, you're going to skew the whole program to accommodate them, not just admissions.

This also begins to explain another phenomenon I saw as an Ivy undergraduate: the "hot shot", except in "shot", we substituted the "o"with an "i". The expression would be "Bob Throckmorton is a hot [shot}," which implied basically that he was going to be fast-tracked through whatever program was involved -- it usually had something to do with grandiose social schemes in areas like international relations, energy policy, or urban studies. Somehow, Bob was going to get special treament, though it was also understood that it was less through his own merit than through some sort of patronage; whatever it was, Bob was predestined to be an important guy.

I don't know how you'd conduct a study that gave insight into this, but I'll bet that a lot of hot [shots] wind up in cabinet-level jobs. This is probably one reason we're in the mess we're in.

More On Michael Voris And Church Militant

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

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