The Simmering Battle Over Public Space

In Sunday's post, I began to think about the role of public space in a well-ordered society, and it brought me back to what I've recognized for several years: there's an ongoing battle over who controls it. Remarks in 2021 by former LA County Sheriff Alex Villanueva brought the issue into focus:

“Public space belongs to the entire public, not to one individual. And that is the fundamental responsibility of government. That’s the fundamental failure of the Board of Supervisors, L.A. City Council and the mayor of L.A. — they have refused to regulate public space,” Villanueva said Monday. “And that is why the problem is growing exponentially year after year.”

The particular problem was that the Venice boardwalk, a feature of a city beach area, had become a space for homeless encampments, which due to filth and antisocial behavior had driven out ordinary citizens who had expected to visit for recreation. In effect, the local authorities had abdicated their responsibility to regulate public space on behalf of the community. Villanueva, for a time at least, unilaterally stepped in, using his overall authority over LA County law enforcement to override the city's LAPD and use sheriff's deputies to clean up the boardwalk.

On one hand, this so irritated nearly every other local official that they coordinated an effort to vote Villanueva out as sheriff in the next election. On the other, city voters in the Venice council district also voted out the incumbent councilman who'd enabled the homeless problem there. Villanueva is attempting a comeback in next year's election. But so far, I think he's made the single most succinct articulation of the issue surrounding public space.

This is also related to what might be called the Starbucks Dilemma. I think Starbucks's problem began with an incident nobody remembers from 2018: two African-American men intended to hold a business meeting with a potential associate in a Philadelphia Starbucks. They seated themselves at a table as they waited for the other associate.

Neither placed an order; their intent was simply to hold the meeting in the Starbucks's comfortable public space. However, when one asked to use the restroom, he was told it was for paying customers only, and he was asked to leave. When he refused, the store manager called police and requested that the men be removed for trespassing. The two men, Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, were arrested for trespassing and taken to jail, but they were released several hours later without charges.

A major controversy then ensued.

“We were there for a real reason, a real deal that we were working on,” Robinson explained. “We put in a lot of time, energy, effort … We were at a moment that could have a positive impact on a whole ladder of people, lives, families. So I was like, ‘No, you’re not stopping that right now.”’

The Democratic mayor, Jim Kenney, who is white, said what happened at the Starbucks “appears to exemplify what racial discrimination looks like in 2018”. The police commissioner, Richard Ross, who is black, said in a Facebook post that arresting officers “did absolutely nothing wrong”, and added that Nelson and Robinson were disrespectful to officers.

. . . Over the weekend, attention and outrage over [a viral] video grew, prompting a protest at the local Starbucks restaurant and a national boycott. By Monday, the men were set to meet with Starbucks’ CEO, Kevin Johnson, to discuss what happened.

Johnson has responded quickly to public outcry around the arrests, calling them “reprehensible”, apologizing and ordering stores closed for mandatory training to tackle unconscious bias.

Starbucks's original business model was to create a "third place" between home and work equivalent to a local pub or European coffee house. The problem is that it's a sorta-kinda public space, theoretically like a park or museum, but the users must pay to use it, indirectly in this case. The cost to the store of the pleasant, welcoming, community-like environment is offset by the premium price of the coffee drinks and snacks the customers buy. Nelson and Robinson were in effect subverting the business model by refusing to pay for the store's comfortable environment, which they nevertheless used for their own business purpose.

There's a certain elitist insincerity here: Starbucks's whole concept was invented by a middle-class American who was captivated by the atmosphere of the European coffee houses he saw as a tourist, and his target market from the start was bourgeois kids who'd seen the same coffee houses on their junior year abroad. Everything was going to be entre nous, African-Americans who wanted to use the restroom without buying expensive lattes were just never in the picture. The Philadelphia incident was effectively a system error.

But soon enough the COVID panic made that whole business model moot. The intent iof the lockdowns was to shut down all public space, airports, churches, parks, schools, museums, barber shops, restaurants. Chi-chi coffee houses were just incidental casualties. Starbucks closed many stores and changed others to take-out only. The expense of cleaning all the "third place" furniture and facilities made them uneconomic, and this business strategy continued after the lockdowns were lifted.

This effectively made the problem of providing public space for people who wouldn't pay for it or observe decorum disappear -- but only as long as nobody noticed that they were still paying "third place" prices for their lattes. But in 2025, Starbucks has decided it needs to revive the "third place" strategy. In June, company founder and inventor of the "third place" strategy Howard Schultz re-emphasized his vision:

“The third place is not something we need to reinvent — it’s who we are,” Schultz said. “People all over the world are longing for human connection… We are a company that is steeped in humanity. We are steeped in human connection, because of all of you and the people you represent.”

Schultz, who led Starbucks from a small Seattle roastery to a global brand with over 40,000 stores and nearly 500,000 partners, emphasized the need to reclaim Starbucks soul. “We’re not a company that needs AI to do what we do. It’s an enabler. What we need to do, is just be ourselves — be the people that we’ve been,” he said.

But if you restore all the wall hangings, chairs, and tables, you're back to the problem of freeloaders and druggies shooting up in the restrooms. I see more Philadelphia incidents in Starbucks's future, still with no good way to deal with them.

While the COVID lockdowns placed restrictions on public space that had unanticipated business consequences, Trump's crackdown on illegal migrants is having a similar impact:

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors declared a local state of emergency Tuesday in response to ongoing federal immigration enforcement raids, alleging the actions are preventing people from going to work and forcing some businesses to close.

. . . The proclamation approved by the board states that the raids that began around June 6 "have caused residents to be fearful of leaving their homes, to go to work, take public transportation, access county services including medical services, access open public programs and resources and attend appointments with immigration lawyers and legal service providers."

The immigration actions "have created a climate of fear, leading to widespread disruption in daily life and adverse impacts to our regional economy due to decreased attendance at workplaces, the temporary or permanent closure of businesses and restaurants and increased strain on our local institutions such as schools, hospitals and places of worship," according to the proclamation.

Put only a little differently, the ICE raids are having a massive impact on the use of public space. This also reflects the real size of the illegal immigration problem in the area; if illegals have a realistic fear of apprehension if they go out in public, this seems to have a major impact on the economy.

But these are just small pieces of the overall battle over public space. If the civil authorities abdicate their responsibility to control it, or if private enterprise refuses to manage quasi-public space or "third places", then other forces will inevitably claim control, or other factors like a pandemic or immigration crackdowns will intervene and force solutions. Nevertheless, the other factors will only force temporary or unsatisfactory solutions if authorities can't regulate public space themselves.

"Giant Of Jewish History"

On Monday, Israeli Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana called Trump a "giant of Jewish history". Now, I've been though a couple of Old Testament surveys and Fr Schmitz's Bible in a Year, and the only comparable non-Jew I can think of who would get that designation is Cyrus the Great, the Persian king who conquered Babylon and issued a decree permitting the Jewish people to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple, ending the Babylonian exile. In fact, Ohana said this:

Mr. President, you stand before the people of Israel not as another American president, but as a giant of Jewish history — one for whom we must look back, two and a half millennia into the mists of time to find a parallel, in Cyrus the Great.

In other words, I think it's a real mistake to underestimate Trump. And reading analyses of how Trump brought about the Hamas agreement, I keep thinking about the business school article I've mentioned here several times that makes the point that Trump prefers to negotiate with parties that have no alternative. This appears to be what he did with Hamas:

Egypt and Qatar told [Hamas leader Khalil Al-]Hayya the deal was his last chance to end the war, according to the officials. They pressed Hamas to understand that holding the hostages was becoming a strategic liability, giving Israel a source of legitimacy to keep fighting.

The next day, joined by Turkey, they warned him that if Hamas didn’t approve the plan it would be stripped of all political and diplomatic cover; Qatar and Turkey would no longer host the group’s political leadership, and Egypt would stop pressing for Hamas to have a say in Gaza’s postwar governance, the officials said.

It was enough to get Hamas to agree to release all its hostages in Gaza and sign on to the first part of Trump’s peace deal, giving up what had been its most important bargaining chip to keep a seat at the table. While modifying its acceptance with heavy caveats that reflected its concerns about the deal, Hamas had given Trump an opportunity to declare victory and set the stage for a hostage release early this week.

But Tump was able to limit Hamas's options though a series of small steps, none of them obvious by themselves:

Trump narrowed Hamas's options by eliminating both their diplomatic wiggle room and military alternatives through decisive American action. His administration launched strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities, completely upending the regional balance that had favored Iran and its proxies. Israel had already done serious damage by taking apart Hezbollah's leadership and financial network, which led to the collapse of Bashar al-Assad's regime and the emergence of a new Syrian government hostile to Iran.

Trump's strikes forced every player in the region to rethink their strategies. He showed he was willing to use military power to protect American interests, something the Biden administration never demonstrated. Joint U.S. and Israeli resolve against terrorism pushed regional stakeholders to their breaking point, leaving Hamas without any meaningful support.

The stereotype of Trump is that he's impulsive and ego-driven, but what we see in cases like the Gaza agreement is that he works from a long-term plan in which he clearly understands the advantages and disadvantages of each side. This ias the same Trump who was defeated in 2020 but fought his way back to re-election in 2024.

So what are we to make of his current domestic opponents? His main domestic issues right now are the shutdown and the anti-ICE protests. It's hard to avoid thinking he has a plan and a strategy for giving his opponents no options. I've go to think we'll see some indications soon.

I'm not sure what league Trump is playing in here. Some people say Reagan, some say FDR, some say Lincoln, but Speaker Ohana is thinking on a different scale, millennia. He may have a point.

Nothing Marxist About This Revolution

For some time, I dismissed the female Archbishop of Canterbury and the near-simultaneous graffiti installation at Canterbury Cathedral as irrelevant -- the Church of England itself probably became irrelevant around the time C S Lewis died (November 22, 1963); the great uncle of the current Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church abdicated over whether he should marry a divorced woman, a religious issue that never remotely disqualified his grandnephew, whose marital situation was identical.

In fact, there was a time when designating a woman bishop of any sort would have been the province of medieval Lords of Misrule. If it's done now with even a faded aura of seriousness is an indication of how things have changed -- but this isn't the world proletarian revolution that loomed over the leisiured class for more than a century. Communist regimes dynamited churches. The 1911 Mexican revolution aimed to destroy the Catholic Church. The current revolution doesn't want to destroy religion as its enemy -- it wants to retain it as something farcical.

Key to this is the use of public space. Let's keep in mind that central to Marxist regimes was the ceremonial public space, in the Soviet Union Red Square, in Beijing Tiananmen Square. Anyhone who defaced either space would be severely punished. Under current Western regimes, there are no such sanctions; homeless people, street thugs, needles, and condoms abound, as well as graffiti, in major public spaces. The deterioration of Washington's Union Station, in many ways an equivalent national space, despite repeated attempts over seven decades to restore it, is a good example.

I think this is behind the deliberate installation of graffiti in Canterbury Cathedral, a major UK public space. In effect, the ruling class is symbolically turning it over to the Lumpenproletariat, Marx's underclass of street criminals, prostitutes, pimps, and vagabonds. It isn't dynamiting it or maybe turning it into a secular museum, which a socialist regime would do -- it's just turning it into a slum alleyway. Meanwhile, the quasi-archbishop whose seat is at that same cathedral is about as close as decorum will currently allow to a drag queen. Under a socialist revolution, that archbishop would face a firing squad.

So what's happening in Anglo-America is not a Marxist-Leninist or socialist revolution. Let's look at what's currently happening in the US. The vanguard cities of the revolution right now are Portland and Chicago. The current mayor of Portland is also head of a family business he inherited. His most recent predecessor, who in many ways turned Portland into what it is now, is a member of a multigenerational rentier family.

The Governor of Illinois, J B Pritzker, is a member of an extremely wealthy rentier family; his sister is the head of the Harvard Corporation. Pritzker is one of the most vocal opponents of Donald Trump. Gavin Newsom, Governor of California, is a member of another wealthy and influential family closely associated with the rentier Getty fortune. He's also one of Trump's most vocal opponents.

Gordon Getty, the son of oil magnate J. Paul Getty, and Newsom's father, William Newsom III, were lifelong friends. The Getty family provided support to Gavin Newsom as a teenager and invested in his business ventures; they also have funded his political career.. William III was an attorney and advisor to the Getty family, delivering the ransom money during the 1973 kidnapping of J. Paul Getty's grandson.

But the single issue right now that's driving the revolution that wealthy Oregonians, the Pritzkers, and the Gettys via the Newsoms support is illegal migrants. In Portland, Chicago, and California, they're difficult to distinguish from the homeless and street criminals, simply because so many illegals are also homeless and street criminals. There's a natural alliance among them; we can probably update Marx's definition of the Lumpenproletariat to include illegal migrants, especially since this is a worldwide phenomenon.

So what we're in effect seeing, as I've been saying here for a while, is an alliance between the upper bourgeoisie, the wealthy rentier class and the closely associated upper managerial class, with the Lumpenproletariat, which in the 21st century includes illegal migrants, and also, if we give the matter some thought, sexual deviants. This is why we see so many trans people associated with violence against the lower bourgeoisie -- Tesla dealers, churchgoers, conservative activists.

Where is this headed? It's certainly an uneasy coalition and hardly a natural alliance. On the other hand, what's also developing is that the traditional working class, hourly laborers, is being forced into a natural alliance with the lower bourgeoisie, IT workers, small business people, clerical workers, and the like.

I think this is the tendency that links what we're seeing in the US with what we're seeing in the Church of England -- the alliance of the upper bourgeoisie with the Lumpenproletariat seems to have as its goal, whether or not its final goal, a simple increase in overall disorder. How this benefits anyone is beyond me.

Ninth Circuit Hears Arguments On Portland Guard Deployment

Judge Immergut's temporary restraining order a week ago prohibiting Trump from deploying the National Guard to protect the ICE facility in Portland has disappeared from the news, probably because the issues are complex, but they mostly favor Trump. On Wednesday, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals placed an administrative hold on the case prior to hearing arguments on Thursday. Via the Oregon Capital Chronicle,

U.S. District Court Judge Karin Immergut. . . granted the restraining order against Oregon Guard deployment on Saturday, saying the Trump administration had not made the case that a “rebellion” was taking place at the protests outside the ICE facility.

A stay would prevent Immergut’s order from taking effect, but because of a second, broader restraining order she issued Sunday that has not yet been appealed, federal troops still couldn’t be deployed.

Via Oregon Public Broadcasting,

Federal law allows the president to deploy Guard members if there’s an invasion from a foreign nation, a rebellion or if the president cannot carry out federal laws with “regular forces.”

Immergut, who was nominated by Trump, found the administration did not clearly prove those were the conditions taking place in Portland. She said the White House, therefore, could not send in troops to deal with protests at Portland’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building.

“The President’s determination was simply untethered to the facts,” Immergut wrote in her initial ruling.

"The facts" appear to differ widely depending on whether you're a Portland-area resident or you live almost anywhere else.

Portland is in full gaslight mode over the Antifa assaults on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers on a near-nightly basis. Legacy media is helping in the deception by ignoring the story for the most part since June and then committing resources to the story only after they fashioned it into a Trump's Picking on Portland narrative, covering the facility during the daytime when there are generally no attacks on ICE officers in the driveway of the facility, and highlighting the costumed protesters wearing fuzzy furry suits.

Back to the Oregon Public Broadcasting link:

The appeals court panel indicated in its [Thursday] questioning that the president has sweeping authorities when it comes to law enforcement. The panel was made up of Judges Ryan Nelson, Bridget Bade and Susan Graber. Nelson and Bade were appointed by Trump during his first term, while Graber — a former Oregon Supreme Court justice — was appointed by President Clinton.

The judges also used Thursday’s hearing to question whether the judiciary has the authority to put limitations on National Guard deployments if the president believes it is necessary.

“I am sort of trying to figure out how a district court of any nature is supposed to get in and question whether the president’s assessment of executing the laws is right or wrong,” Nelson stated.

. . . The judges from the 9th Circuit did not immediately issue a ruling, but said that they would offer their opinion as quickly as possible.

All the furries that turn up in photos of the Portland demonstrations have me scratching my head. Several of them appear in almost any given photo, both of the tamer daytime protests and the more violent episodes after dark. And we've begun to encunter furries outside Portland, too -- Charlie Kirk assassin Tyler Robinson's trans partner had a sidline kink as a furry, for instance. Back then, I noted that YouTube pop psychologist Dr Todd Grande felt the need to reassure us that only a small subset of furries have sex with each other while dressed in animal suits.

Well, maybe so, but even if there's no kinky connotation here at all, what are we to make of fully-grown adults wearing onesie costumes better suited for toddlers? I did a quick check, and you can certainly get adult animal onesies everywhere from Walmart on up, but they're advertised and sold as bedtime wear, not something meant for going out in public. There's a serious incongruity here. And as Victoria Taft noted in the accounts I've cited here, the media in covering the Portland protests stresses that families with children attend.

Really? I wouldn't want a grown man in a chicken onesie anywhere near a kid of mine. What on earth is the matter with Portland? Nothing to see here, just a bunch of adult furries dressed up in toddler jammies parading in front of kids, completely harmless. Only a small subset of these guys have sex with each other. Whatever you're thinking, it's simply untethered to the facts.

Antifa Ups The Ante

The headline of an Atlantic story on the Portland Antifa protests a week ago was Portland’s ‘War Zone’ Is Like Burning Man for the Terminally Online. The subhead is. "There’s more absurdity than menace on the city’s streets—at least for now." Most of it is behind a paywall, but this much is visible to a non-subscriber:

In the days since Donald Trump directed his “Secretary of War” to marshal troops against “domestic terrorists” in Portland, Oregon, encouraging the use of “full force” in a city he likened to a “war zone,” I have been hanging around the demonstration that the president wants to crush. What I’ve found is an atmosphere that is more like a carnival than combat.

By some accounts, this all started back in June, when a group of friends decided to pitch a tent outside an ICE facility in the city. “I was like, ‘Oh, hell yeah! Occupation against deportation! Let it begin, bitches!’” Andy Siebe, who has cropped, caramel-color hair and thin, rounded stumps for teeth, told me when I got to the encampment site, which consists of a heap of cots and tents and medical supplies.

No worries, just a group of friends with no teeth. In his 2024 debate with Trump, Joe Biden quoted former FBI Director Wray to the effect that Antifa isn't an organization, it's an idea, but accounts of the Portland demonstrations I've cited here strongly suggest, contra The Atlantic, that they're well-funded and well-organized, although media accounts go as far as to call them "family friendly" and minimize the actual danger to casual attendees. As of 2020, Trump was already calling them "well funded ANARCHISTS & THUGS":

...And I look at them as a bunch of well funded ANARCHISTS & THUGS who are protected because the Comey/Mueller inspired FBI is simply unable, or unwilling, to find their funding source, and allows them to get away with “murder”. LAW & ORDER! https://t.co/yHLzB0RQ8e

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 18, 2020

Two weeks ago, Trump signed an order designating them a "domestic terrorist organization". However,

Current law does provide for the designation of some groups as "foreign terrorist organizations," a process that lies with the State Department. It is through this mechanism that al-Qaida and ISIS, for example, have landed on the public list that the department regularly updates. To qualify for this designation, an organization must be based overseas; it must be a cohesive entity engaged in terrorist activity; and it must be a threat to U.S. national security interests.

No similar list or process exists for domestic groups.

That link at NPR perpetuates the myth that Antifa is an idea, not an organization:

"I think it's pretty well-known that antifa is sort of a loosely organized movement rather than a particular organization," Faiza Patel, director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said before the order was released.

The image at the top of this post appeared on the the Portland-focused website “Rose City Counter-Info”. As of the time I post this, it's still there. It encourages mass use of lasers to make it difficult, if not dangerous, for helicopters to fly over Portland monitoring the anti-ICE demonstrations. According to AOL,

Federal prosecutors also charged a man with the crime of aiming a laser pointer at an aircraft in Portland days before the Rose City Counter-Info post, alleging he aimed it at a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) helicopter in September.

“The laser can cause blindness and spotting in vision, making it a challenge to find other aircraft and obstacles, which could lead to a catastrophic event,” an FBI agent said in a criminal complaint. One crew member in the helicopter had to avert his eyes while in flight due to the laser, the complaint said.

Aiming a laser at an aircraft is in fact a federal crime.

The 2012 federal statute makes it illegal for people to “knowingly” point a laser pointer’s beam “at an aircraft”—whether private, commercial, or military—or its flight path. Most importantly, it attaches consequences to this action: A monetary fine of up to $250,000 and/or a federal prison sentence of up to five years. On top of that, the FAA’s website notes that it “can impose civil penalties of up to $11,000” each time someone aims a laser beam at an aircraft.

I asked Chrome AI mode, "Is it a crime to encourage people to violate federal law?" It answered,

Yes, encouraging people to violate federal law is a crime under specific federal statutes, particularly if it meets the criteria for solicitation, aiding and abetting, or conspiracy. Simply advocating for illegal conduct, however, may be protected by the First Amendment if it does not incite immediate lawless action.

. . . It is a federal crime to command, encourage, or request another person to commit a federal offense, particularly a crime of violence. The crime of solicitation is complete when the request is made, regardless of whether the other person agrees to or commits the crime.

. . . Simply encouraging a broad group to violate a law at some unspecified point in the future is likely protected speech. However, telling a specific person to immediately and deliberately break a law would likely meet the criteria for illegal solicitation.

The Rose City Counter-Info post seems at least to be edging close to a line. I assume Homeland Security and the FBI are looking carefully to see exactly who is behind this. Whoever they are, I think at this point, they're tugging on Superman's cape.

The Naval Academy Acts Like An Ivy -- II

Through this link,

The Restoration of America Foundation (ROAF) is a watchdog providing transparency of the nation’s military academies’ oversight boards.

It issued a report on this past September's meeting of the US Naval Academy's Board of Visitors (equivalent to a civilian college or university's board of trustees), which included a presentation by Dean of Admissions Bruce Latta:

Latta has been in the position for over 20 years, including when USNA was sued in 2023 for using race-based admissions practices. Latta told the BOV that race, ethnicity and sex were never considered in determining qualification for admissions. That assertion contradicts Latta’s court deposition and evidence in the Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) case against USNA.

In SFFA Latta said,

"If USNA was prohibited from considering race or ethnicity (across all minority groups) as one of many nondeterminative factors, I expect that USNA's class of admitted midshipmen would become less diverse, as it was before USNA began applying its current policies."

BOV member Earl Ehrhart, a Trump appointee, questioned Latta asking, “You testified under oath that enjoining [prohibiting] race-based admissions practices would harm the Navy. Have you changed your mind?”

Earhart continued his questioning when Latta did not answer, asking, “How do you reconcile the conflict between your sworn testimony in SFFA and what you just presented to this Board?”

Latta still didn’t answer the question.

Further discussion revealed that the Naval Academy's admissions process mirrors that of selective civilian colleges and universities, with the actual weighting of factors determining admission a closely guarded secret:

Latta said the admissions office sets the standards by which USNA candidates are selected and determines who is offered an appointment. When questioned on who determines the formula used for candidate selection—called a Whole Person Multiple—Latta responded that admissions staff determine the weighting of each category. That answer did not please Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-WI), a retired Navy SEAL appointed to the BOV by President Trump. He believes the admissions department had too much power, replying to Latta, “You can set the playing field the way you want.” Van Orden also suggested that the BOV may want to consider putting a member on the admissions board.

Another board member commented, “for way too long we’ve had no visibility into how this process works.” The Superintendent responded that he understood and shared the same concern and that they would have further discussions on the topic in a closed session.

But while the actual factors and their weighting are completely opaque, we do know that SATs were not used as an admissions factor for the classes of 2025-2028:

Latta’s presentation claimed SAT scores were not used for those classes due to limited availability because of COVID. While that may have been a factor for the class of 2025, SAT testing availability was not impacted by COVID for the classes of 2026-2028.

There are lots of arguments for civilian colleges and universities to bypass merit in admissions, for instance,

We think of college admissions as a meritocracy: the students who most deserve it get in. But that’s not actually true at all, according to Tufts University sociologist Natasha Warikoo, who studies college admissions.

. . . But the point Warikoo is making isn’t just that there are more deserving candidates than there are spots— a problem well known in California—it’s that the whole idea of college admissions as a meritocracy is fundamentally wrong.

. . . At most colleges, especially very “select” ones, there are a host of competing internal interests influencing who gets admitted. Sports coaches demand places for their recruits; development offices want places for legacy alumni and people attached to big donors; orchestras and bands need to bring musicians in; different departments want new students who are going to fill their rosters. There’s no single standard for what makes a “worthy” student, and it’s fair to ask: what has any of this got to do with merit?

“When we recognize the diverse goals that universities attempt to address through college admissions, it becomes clear that admission is not a certification of individual merit, or deservingness, nor was it ever meant to be,” she said.

OK, let's grant that Harvard is Harvard; foreign students pay full freight, so we admit them as maybe 40% of an Ivy enterng class, mainly because they're rich and willing to pay. Then they admit maybe 30% as legacies, preppies, and donors, because they donate. Deducting all the other special categories, maybe 20% of an entering class comes in on SATs, grades, and extracurriculars, except everyone's de-emphasizing SATs. Of course, everybody still believes a Harvard degree means you're smart, but that's their problem, not Harvard's.

But the US Military academies aren't Harvard. I asked Chrome AI mode, "if you go to the Naval Academy, is it expected that you will become a Navy or Marine Corps officer?" It answered,

Yes, if you attend the United States Naval Academy (USNA), it is expected that you will be commissioned as an officer in either the U.S. Navy or the U.S. Marine Corps upon graduation. This is a core part of the USNA experience and the service commitment that all midshipmen agree to.

But this mostly eliminates foreign students, a major category of civilian admissions factors. It eliminates most categories of major donor. It ought to be stressing personal qualities that would go to making someone a good officer. But somehow, the Naval Academy admissions office seems to retain DEI as a major category; for instance, as of a 2021 "Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan",

• “Increase the visibility of current midshipmen and alumni from underrepresented populations by including them in recruiting activities and marketing materials.”
• Review processes “for objectivity and influence of bias and unintended disadvantage to underrepresented populations.”
• Increase access to “underrepresented populations.”
• “Identify scoring factors that are directly influenced by school resources and familial obligations such as extracurricular activates [sic] and standardize [sic] test scores and make recommendations for adjustments.”

The big question that remains for me applies to both the Naval Academy and Harvard: why is there so much cheating? If admissions standards have any teeth, they ought to be favoring students for whom the graduation requirements are achievable without cheating. At the Naval Acedemy, it appears that some version of an electrical engineering course is a graduation requirement. Yet in the 1992 cheating scandal, it was widely estimated that 80% of the students saw the course exam before they took it.

According to Newsweek,

Midshipmen are intentionally overworked. Forced to carry heavy academic loads, they also march, train and perform trivial chores, like memorizing obscure facts about the Academy. The idea is to build character through adversity, but often the result is a weary attitude of doing just enough to slide by.

Wouldn't greater attention to factors that would favor an applicant's ability to graduate without cheating or sliding by be much more profitable than randomn social engineering? Nobody seems to want to answer these sorts of quewstions.

Kristi Noem's Visit To Portland

According to KATU,

After meeting with Portland Mayor Keith Wilson on Tuesday during a visit to Portland, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on Fox News that if the mayor did not meet some of her demands for more security at the ICE facility “we were going to send four times the amount of federal officers” to the city.

Noem’s remarks to Fox's host Jesse Watters contrasted with a more muted statement from Wilson on Tuesday evening that did not mention any ultimatum issued by the secretary.

“I continue to maintain that the tactics used by federal agents at the ICE facility are troubling and likely unconstitutional,” Wilson said. “In terms of recent rhetoric, we still do not know what ‘Full Force’ against Portland means, or how the administration plans to use our city as a military ‘training ground.’ Because of these deeply concerning situational unknowns, I intend to explore options to protect our community and our right to free expression.”

Portland Mayor Wilson comes from a very similar background to his predecessor Ted Wheeler, from a wealthy Oregon family, who was mayor from 2017 to early this year. His father was was executive vice president at Willamette Industries, a Fortune 500 lumber company formed in 1967, through merger of other Wheeler family interests. For several years, he presided over both right- and left-wing ptotests and riots. Wilson himself runs his family's trucking business, which he took over from his father, in addition to being mayor. Wilson seems just as unable to deal with Antifa and similar groups.

Of yesterday's meeting, Secretary Noem said on Jesse Watters's show last night,

“Just met with the mayor, and I’m so extremely disappointed. He’s continuing to play politics, did not commit to any of those promises and said that he’d give me an answer by tomorrow, and I’m hopeful that he will,” Noem told Watters. “What I told him is that if he did not follow through on some of these security measures for our officers [that] we were going to cover him up with more federal resources. And that we were going to send four times the amount of federal officers here so that the people of Portland could have some safety.”

The YouTube report from The National Desk embedded at the top of this post suggests that there seem to have been changes, however reluctant and minimal, since Noem's visit. Reporter Victor Park said,

There are at least a dozen Portland police officers who have the one-block area surrounding the ICE facility blocked off. We are also seeing far less protesters than we have seen in months. Earlier tonight, Police Chief Bob Day met with Secretary Noem, and Chief Day says that the envioronment and behavior outside the ICE facility needs to change.

Just this morning, I found a lengthy and detailed report from Victoria Taft on actual conditions in the several-block area surrounding the ICE headquarters. It makes plain that Portland politicians, abetted by media, have been seriously minimizing what's been taking place. She embeds this X video documenting her experience trying to film the encampment there:

Besides the filth of the "mutual aid" station, which is illegally blocking the sidewalk (resupplied from their nearby storage unit) and then laughably being told I couldn't film there, here's my biggest shock at the #Portland #ICE facility. When confronted by some umbrella… pic.twitter.com/JDT08NaydW

— Victoria Taft, The Adult in the Room, FITF Squad (@VictoriaTaft) October 7, 2025

She notes in particular that the area controlled by the protesters is much larger than the one block surrounding the ICE building normally cited, and the protesters are much better organized:

My friend HunnyBadgerMom (her X handle), C.K. Bouferrache, tells me that Antifa works in shifts. They go back to their safe house nearby, which is well known, and get a little R&R before they start their next shift at night, where the violence takes place. I caught the shift change in a photo.

So that makes block number three overtaken by this group.

. . . Since Antifa marches to their daily activities from their assembly spot at a nearby park, that makes at least four blocks they have taken over. And then there's the ICE facility itself. It is a fortress, but easily surrounded. Antifa has taken positions in front of it, across the street from it, and down the block. This makes the zone at least a five-block takeover at times.

. . . How many blocks can a terrorist group take over before the city begins to send the police to keep the peace? Trick question. The answer is: When President Donald Trump orders the National Guard to protect ICE agents, forcing the local cops to show up.

The crazies out on the streets in the middle of the day provide one of the multi-pronged Antifa distractions. The people in this bunch looked like they were mentally ill, on drugs, or under the influence of some other mind-altering belief system. Nighttime is when this place gets more dangerous.

For years, the Portland Police ignored the Antifa threats and assaults, and complaints by Portland independent media. Antifa chooses reporters to target because they want to rule the streets without being unmasked.

At least up to Noem's visit, there seems to have been a tacit agreement between Antifa and the police to pretend the takeover wasn't really happening:

Craig Dobson, an assistant chief with the Portland Police Bureau, stated the protests have been persistent, though never so out-of-control that local officers couldn’t respond.

“Portland is not under siege, war-ravaged, or otherwise a particularly violent or unruly major city,” Dobson wrote in a Sept. 28 signed declaration. “In fact, on any given weekend, the nightlife in Portland’s entertainment district has warranted greater PPB resources than the small, nightly protests in front of the ICE facility.”

The police bureau set up a dedicated team when the protests against Trump’s deportation plans started appearing regularly outside the ICE offices on South Macadam Avenue. The bureau made 25 arrests from June 11 to June 25, Dobson wrote. The protests receded enough, Dobson wrote, that police deactivated the dedicated team and made no further arrests until late September. The latest arrests by Portland police occurred when protests flared the same day Trump called-up the Oregon guard.

But the protests are neither small nor nightly. As Victoria Taft put it, there's a clown show in the daytime, with curious tourists and Trump supporters part of the crowd, but things turn dangerous at night. The whole routine is organized and scripted, with gathering points and safe houses. But the official line continues to be that the problems all took place last June, and since then, things have been peaceful. After Noem's visit,

[PPB Chief Bob] Day acknowledged the past "disturbances" at the ICE facility, singling out events in June for a "significant amount of damage committed against the building and variety of assaults," but said over the past few months, there has been a "significant decrease in violent activity." He and Noem did not discuss troop deployments, he said.

Day alluded to briefly discussing with Noem "the need for a change in the environment and a change in behavior down there," with the "energy level going up over the past 10 days."

What nobody in Oregon seema to acknowledge so far is that the protests are well-organized and well-funded, they're here to stay, and it's almost as though there's a tacit agreement with the wealthy, old-money politicians that they can operate at will as long as they leave the bourgeoisie alone. This really needs serious investigating. Maybe Noem's visit will raise visibility.