Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds

PRIVATEERS TAKE YOUR STATIONS! CDR Salamander: The Sanctioned/Stateless Tanker Nabbing Gives…if we are Willing to Take …the commerce raiding hint screaming from on high. “So, from the GUIK Gap to the Indian Ocean, the US Navy (and her USCG sidekick) are, in essence, conducting entry-level commerce raiding.”

Plus: “Be ready, because at least in the opening months of the next Great Pacific War, if we are smart and ready, we will be commerce raiding from Tierra del Fuego to Svalbard.”

IT’S ONLY “CONTROVERSIAL DOMESTICALLY” BECAUSE IT HURTS DEMOCRATS, WHO DEPEND ON ILLEGALS FOR VOTES:

ROLL ON, COLUMBIA: She Was Dismissed From a Leadership Post at Harvard. Now She’s a Candidate for Columbia’s Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies. With Rosie Bsheer at the helm, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies brought speakers to campus who ‘appeared to justify’ October 7, according to Harvard’s anti-Semitism report. “A professor removed from her leadership post at Harvard University after bringing in a raft of anti-Israel guest speakers and panelists and few, if any, dissenting voices is among four finalists to become the Edward Said chair in Arab Studies at Columbia University, internal communications reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon show.”

ANALYSIS: TRUE. The end of college racial quotas is already making America more just. “What exactly is the mismatch now being unwound? Essentially, as colleges made having more black and Latino students a vital measure of their (supposed) virtue, they quietly adopted extreme admissions preferences in the name of fueling ‘campus diversity.'”

BUT OF COURSE:

OLYMPIC PERSPECTIVE:

DON’T MESS WITH SPACEX:

OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.

JOHN HINDERAKER: The Vapidity of Jeffrey Epstein’s Friends.

The idea that Epstein had a “client list” and ran some kind of international pedophile ring was always, I think, a myth. And this seems to be confirmed by the absence of any such evidence in the releases of Epstein documents to date. Although, to be fair, if Epstein supplied underage girls to anyone, Prince Andrew seems to be first on the suspect list.

So what do the Epstein documents show? The vapidity of the world’s supposed elite, I think. Epstein was a minor player in the world of finance, but he was regarded as an intellectual–a thinker!–with strong connections at both Harvard and MIT. Intellectuals like Larry Summers, former President of Harvard, were in his orbit, along with numerous members of the business elite.

James Marriott takes up this theme in the London Times: “Jeffrey Epstein circle’s ‘big ideas’ were vacuous guff.” . . .

You have to be good at something to make money, or to become a university president. But the idea that this something, whatever it may be, makes you a member of a global elite who should tell the rest of us how to live, is a malignant fantasy. We saw this in, among many other instances, the covid fiasco.

So it is entirely fitting that Jeffrey Epstein hated Donald Trump. Trump, more than anyone else in recent times, has been willing to expose the hollowness of the elite to which he once belonged.

Read the whole thing.

AT LEAST THE AIPOCALYPSE IS AMUSING: Lawyer sets new standard for abuse of AI; judge tosses case. “rustrated by fake citations and flowery prose packed with ‘out-of-left-field’ references to ancient libraries and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a New York federal judge took the rare step of terminating a case this week due to a lawyer’s repeated misuse of AI when drafting filings. In an order on Thursday, district judge Katherine Polk Failla ruled that the extraordinary sanctions were warranted after an attorney, Steven Feldman, kept responding to requests to correct his filings with documents containing fake citations.”