December 13, 2024

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Great — Biden Just Let All of Hunter’s Friends Out of Jail. “Biden is cranky and vindictive, but the people who have been running his brain for the last four years have their downright evil moments. They’re the ones who drew up the list for Biden’s clemency frenzy. There were bound to be some unsavory characters on it.”

Posted at 9:09 am by Stephen Green

CHINA IS ASSHOE, EXHIBIT #1,000,006:

Bullies push until they’re pushed back.

Posted at 8:38 am by Stephen Green

YES:

Related: “Once they’re on the run, keep ’em running.”

Posted at 8:28 am by Glenn Reynolds

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT [VIP]: Gray Swans, Regime Collapse, and the Kremlin.

Last week, 50-plus years of the Assad family’s Ba’ath Party rule ended after an 11-day lightning campaign by rebel forces that nobody saw coming. Could Vladimir Putin’s regime suffer a similar fate? Authoritarian regimes appear strong, invincible even, right up until the moment they disappear in a gray swan event.

In a Substack essay this week, Charles Hugh Smith defined a gray swan event as “an event that is known and possible to happen, but which is assumed to be unlikely to occur.” The most recent example is the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria last weekend. People are right to marvel at how quickly it came undone but only after nearly 14 years of civil war. And there had been very little movement since March 2020.

Nevertheless, a gray swan appeared from nowhere two weeks ago, and 11 days later, Assad was history.

VIP members asked for longer essays and I’ve been happy to oblige.

Posted at 8:07 am by Stephen Green

SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER:

Posted at 7:57 am by Glenn Reynolds

PERSONALLY, I’D ABOLISH THE FBI. WE DON’T NEED A DOMESTIC SECRET POLICE.

Posted at 7:45 am by Glenn Reynolds

MICHAEL LIND: The Re-Skilling of America.

What explains the large-scale miscredentialing of the American workforce? The endless greed of tuition-hungry universities is one factor. But the main cause is the insistence of many American employers, including federal, state, and local government, that new hires have college diplomas—even for jobs that are currently filled by workers without four-year degrees.

Like other forms of inflation, degree inflation reduces the inflated unit of currency. Today a worker earning between $40,000 and $60,000 in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars is as likely to have a bachelor’s degree as a worker in 2006 who earned between $60,000 and $80,000, when there were fewer college graduates as a share of the workforce. According to the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP): “Between 1990 and 2021, all occupational categories except one—teachers and librarians—experienced degree inflation, meaning the proportion of prime-age workers with a bachelor’s degree increased.”

There is no reason to believe that receptionists and bank tellers with B.A.s in popular majors like communications or business, to say nothing of gender studies, are more productive and skilled than their non-college-educated predecessors who had high school educations plus on-the-job training. According to a survey of employers by Bloomberg, college diplomas are most often used as a screening device for entry-level job applicants, rather than as evidence that the potential hires have job-relevant skills: “For more than half of employers surveyed (60 percent), a college diploma was seen as a stand-in for work ethic, personal skills and mental capacity, as opposed to the actual skills associated with the job.”

I think Glenn might have had a thing or two to say about this topic a while back.

Posted at 7:36 am by Stephen Green

HEH:

Related:

Plus:

Posted at 7:36 am by Glenn Reynolds

HMM: Governors push back on federal proposal to move National Guard units. “In a notable move of unity, governors of all 55 states and territories have joined together to urge Congress to reject Legislative Proposal 480, which would allow specified Air National Guard units to be reassigned to the U.S. Space Force without legally required approval from governors.” I’m really not clear on what this is about.

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Crystal Mangum admits to fabricating 2006 Duke lacrosse scandal accusations.

Crystal Mangum, the woman who falsely accused three Duke men’s lacrosse players of rape in 2006, admitted she lied about the allegations and asked for David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann’s forgiveness.

Mangum made her confession in an interview published Wednesday on “Let’s Talk with Kat,” hosted by Katerena DePasquale, at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women. Unrelated to the lacrosse case, Mangum is currently in prison after being convicted of second-degree murder of her then-boyfriend in 2013.

“I testified falsely against them by saying that they raped me when they didn’t, and that was wrong, and I betrayed the trust of a lot of other people who believed in me,” Mangum said in the interview. “[I] made up a story that wasn’t true because I wanted validation from people and not from God.”

Then-N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper did not prosecute Mangum for perjury after the case was dismissed, saying at the time that the investigators thought “she may have actually believed the many different stories that she has been telling.” The statute of limitations on perjury charges typically lasts two years in North Carolina law, meaning that Mangum can no longer be prosecuted for lying under oath.

Duke Athletics declined The Chronicle’s request for comment on Mangum’s statement. University administration, former University President Richard Brodhead, then-head men’s lacrosse coach Mike Pressler and Seligmann did not respond to The Chronicle’s request for comment in time for publication.

Mangum’s statement comes nearly two decades after she asserted that she was raped by the lacrosse players. Until now, she had never publicly stated that it was not true.

Flashback to Mary Katharine Ham in 2006, who gave us a video tour of the non-crime scene:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll

SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE WAS LAST SEEN WITH A BOTTLE OF XANAX: The FBI Paid People to Go to the J6 Riot. “The corporate media is ballyhooing one of the highlighted findings of the Inspector General (IG) as being proof that the FBI had nothing to do with the riot on Jan. 6, 2021. Nothing could be further from the truth. There were scores of federal and local assets from not only the FBI at the protest and riot that day but plenty of other three-letter federal and local agencies. Metropolitan Police had active agents provocateur on the ground. DHS, ATF, and other Beltway three letter agencies were on site that day.”

Posted at 7:05 am by Stephen Green

REMINDER:

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds