Archive for 2022
June 18, 2022
FASTER, PLEASE: SpaceX President Targets Producing One Starship Rocket Per Day.
NINA JANKOWICZ 2.0: Kamala Harris’ Online Harassment Task Force Is a Bad Idea.
Kamala the cop is back!
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Stanford’s War On Social Life.
JP’s favorite college story is the night he built an island. In the fall of 1993, JP was a junior in Stanford’s chapter of Kappa Alpha. The brothers were winding down from Kappa Alpha’s annual Cabo-themed party on the house lawn. “KAbo” was a Stanford institution, a day-to-night extravaganza that would start sometime in the morning and continue long after midnight. The girls wore bikini tops and plastic flower leis, and the boys wore their best Hawaiian shirts.
That year, the brothers had filled the entire main level of Kappa Alpha’s house with a layer of sand six inches deep. The night was almost over; the guests were leaving and the local surf rock band had been paid their customary hundred dollars in beer. The only question was what to do with all the sand.
No one remembers who had the idea to build the island. A group of five or six brothers managed the project. One rented a bulldozer; another shoveled the sand off the floor. Their house was not far from Lake Lagunita, the mile-wide lake on Stanford’s campus. The only holdup was the strip of university-owned land between the house and the lake.
It was JP who talked to Stanford’s head groundskeeper and convinced him to let the bulldozer pass. In the end, the groundskeeper admired their spirit. “If anybody asks you about it,” he said, “just send them to me.”
Later that year, the brothers installed a zipline from the roof of their house to the center of the island. They also built a barge, which they would paddle around the lake on weekends and between classes.
The Winds of Freedom
It is hard to imagine someone at Stanford building an island anymore. In fact, it is hard to imagine them building anything. The campus culture has changed.
Today, most of the organizations JP remembers from Stanford are gone. The Kappa Alpha boys have been kicked out of their old house. Lake Lagunita was closed to student activities in 2001, ostensibly to protect an endangered salamander that had taken up residence in the artificial waters. Eventually, Stanford let the lake go dry. JP claims you can still see his island though, now a patch of elevated ground in a dry, dusty basin.
Stanford’s new social order offers a peek into the bureaucrat’s vision for America. It is a world without risk, genuine difference, or the kind of group connection that makes teenage boys want to rent bulldozers and build islands. It is a world largely without unencumbered joy; without the kind of cultural specificity that makes college, or the rest of life, particularly interesting.
I’m so old, I can remember when Dean Wormer was supposed to be the bad guy in Animal House, not a role model for killjoy college bureaucrats.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Not just bureaucrats! These days, he’s a role model for students.
EVERYTHING IS PROCEEDING AS HAYEK FORETOLD: How the West Accidentally Became Free and Rich — And Why It Might Not Stay That Way. Joseph Henrich accepts the Manhattan Institute’s $50,000 Hayek Book Prize for 2022 and gives a brief lecture summarizing the book that won the prize, The WEIRDest People in the World.
The lecture, like the book, is a brilliant synthesis of historical analysis and behavioral-science experiments around the world showing how Europeans and Americans became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous — what Henrich calls WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic). His research, showing the influence of institutions like the Catholic Church and medieval market towns, guilds and universities, illuminates the economist F.A. Hayek’s long-neglected theory for the rise of the West, which Hayek attributed not to the Enlightenment but rather to a long and unplanned process of cultural evolution. (Full disclosure: I was the chair of the Hayek Prize jury that selected the book.)
CREEPY JOE BIDEN IS BACK; TUCKER CARLSON REVEALS SHOCKING ALLEGATIONS FROM ASHLEY BIDEN’S DIARY:
Fox News host Tucker Carlson attacked President Joe Biden over his daughter Ashley Biden’s diary admissions.
In Ashley Biden’s writings, she claims that the president took showers with her when she was young, fueling her sex-addiction.
Carlson described the disturbing details as “sick” and “horrifying,” saying “if that’s not child molestation, it is definitely close enough to justify a police visit.”
Inside a January 2019 diary entry, she wrote “I remember having sex with friends @ a young age; showers w/ my dad.”
Carlson then asked the audience, “if you are the father of daughters, ask yourself, is there any explanation for that behavior that is justifiable?”
Ashley Biden’s diary was found by a woman named Aimee Harris who sold it after finding it at a halfway house that Biden’s daughter stayed at while receiving treatment.
The Fox News host then slammed the FBI for probing the woman over an incident that is not a federal crime and for not going after Biden.
Flashback: “This week Anthony Weiner got a lengthy profile in the NYT. Today Jeffrey Toobin got his old job back at CNN. And of course, Bill Clinton is welcome anywhere at any time. Is there a sex pest the libs won’t welcome back for telling them what they want to hear?” Jim Treacher asks.
See also, Bad Touch Biden:
In 2020 voters evidently* decided that voting out #OrangeManBad was more important than #metoo:
* Or not: The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.
WE’RE SEEING THE USUAL TUT-TUTTING ABOUT HOW AIR CONDITIONING IS TOO GOOD FOR THE PROLES. I say, start out a pilot project among our betters first: Ban A/C for DC! “We won two world wars without air conditioning our federal employees. Nothing in their performance over the last 50 or 60 years suggests that A/C has improved things. Besides, The Washington Post informs us that A/C is sexist, and that Europeans think it’s stupid.”
DEAL OF THE DAY: Paxba Professional Knee Brace. #CommissionEarned
KEEP THE SMART POORS IN THEIR PLACE: The ABA Proposes Eliminating Standardized Tests For Law School Admissions.
FASTER, PLEASE: Will Los Angeles DA George Gascón Be the Next Radical Prosector Recalled?
As New York Times owner Tom Cotton wrote in December: Recall, Remove & Replace Every Last Soros Prosecutor.
OFT EVIL WILL SHALL EVIL MAR: Success: Biden Gets the High Gas Prices He Promised.
CHANGE: Iowa Supreme court overturns state constitutional right to abortion. “Iowa’s Supreme Court Friday ruled there is no state constitutional right to an abortion. The decision reverses a 2018 state Supreme Court decision that affirmed a state constitutional right to abortion.”
UPDATE: Much more on this case from Eugene Volokh: Iowa S. Ct. Overrules Decision Subjecting Abortion Restrictions to Strict Scrutiny Under Iowa Constitution: The Court doesn’t decide whether that means they are subject to an “undue burden” test (as under Planned Parenthood v. Casey) or whether there is no right to abortion under the state constitution.
From the opinion: “In addition, we are not blind to the fact that an important abortion case is now pending in the United States Supreme Court. See Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org . . . . While we zealously guard our ability to interpret the Iowa Constitution independently of the Supreme Court’s interpretations of the Federal Constitution, the opinion (or opinions) in that case may provide insights that we are currently lacking. Hence, all we hold today is that the Iowa Constitution is not the source of a fundamental right to an abortion necessitating a strict scrutiny standard of review for regulations affecting that right. For now, this means that the Casey undue burden test we applied in PPH I remains the governing standard. On remand, the parties should marshal and present evidence under that test, although the legal standard may also be litigated further.”
NO THANKS, I DON’T EVEN WANT TO DATE IT: How to have sex with monkeypox: Bizarre CDC guide revealed.
HOW DO YOU SAY “ANCHORS AWEIGH” IN MANDARIN? “China’s just launched the Fujian, which is an entirely domestically-designed carrier rather than a rehash of the Russian Kuznetsov-class, like the last Chinese-built carrier was. Also unlike the Kuzentsov-derived Shandong, the Fujian is a real grownup CATOBAR ship, with electromagnetic catapults and everything. The only other big CATOBAR bird farm that isn’t in the USN is the French Charles de Gaulle, but the Fujian is much larger than the French carrier.”
HAPPY 80th BIRTHDAY, PAUL MCCARTNEY: “No one was saved:” Paul McCartney out-harshed Lennon’s Critique with 4 words.
Well, Happy Birthday to James Paul McCartney, who was born this day in 1942 and grew up to be one half of what became arguably the greatest songwriting partnership in popular music.
What a gift he had, to seemingly exhale melodies. What a remarkable, innovative bass player, to boot. What unforgettable harmonies (so tightly wound, so perfectly matched) he and John Lennon (and George Harrison) brought to us out of their scrappy Liverpudlian backgrounds, all grounded by Ringo’s perfectly-honed fills and metronomic backbeats.
But the thing about Paul McCartney in his youth is this: he was a much tougher dude (and a better lyricist) than we remember. He was very much a driving backbeat himself — an original “lead from behind” sort — who acted like he was giddy to be along for a ride when in fact, he often had control of the wheel.
He was the one who taught Lennon how to tune a guitar, how to play actual guitar chords, not banjo chords, how to find chords on a piano and grow from there, and even how to write a song. He was the one who brought George Harrison in as lead guitarist. He was the one who argued vociferously against Stu Sutcliff — a talented artist but no bass player — remaining in the early band, to the point of physically brawling with him in the middle of one of their roustabout, amphetamine-fueled all-nighters in Hamburg, while the band played on. He’s the one who made bold to replace Pete Best with Ringo. He was the one, ultimately, who decided the Beatles would tour no more.
Read the whole thing.
A LESS-THAN-SHOCKING CLAIM: Diabetes, heart disease in combination create higher dementia risk, study shows.
YEP. Police militarization gave us Uvalde.
But in our ill-conceived attempt to refashion police into a cadet branch of the military, we have somehow managed to get the worst of both worlds. We have trained a generation of officers that being casually brutal in everyday encounters is acceptable, but these same officers show a disturbing tendency to fall back on jargon about “battlespace management” and “encounter tempo” to explain a slow reaction in the rare circumstance that really does require a rapid, all-out response. Especially in poor communities, the result has been the strange dynamic of “over-policing and under-protection” described by the criminologist David Kennedy, in which police are hypervigilant about petty offenses but unresponsive to more serious criminal activity.
Police militarization, it turns out, is largely swagger, and short on substance.
Police make lousy soldiers and soldiers make lousy police. Though in truth, the U.S. military deals more sensitively with conquered populations than most urban police deal with the people they protect and serve.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Busted: Teacher Arrested for Having Sex with a 13-Year-Old at Lunchtime.