Home » Open thread 11/8/21

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Open thread 11/8/21 — 37 Comments

  1. I left my post as president of St. John’s College in Annapolis to build a university in Austin dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth.

    Pano Kanelos
    ______________________________________

    Rufus:

    I’m curious about this. St. John’s is a Great Books school, which is to say they teach most of their courses out of the Great Books. See its Summer Reading List for Freshman:

    https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/classes/seminar/annapolis-undergraduate-readings/freshman-seminar-readings

    Homer. Thucydides. Plato. More “modern” books later.

    It wouldn’t seem St. John’s is in much danger of becoming woke. Though who knows?

    I guess the idea is to recreate a more modern university as it was, say, in 1950.

  2. Which pope is that?
    He blesses funny…looks like the mark of Zorro…or a big “?”.

  3. The new university is very much need, and has some serious & talented people associated with it, but….from their ‘Programs’ section of the website:

    “In this 12-month program, UATX will recruit elite students from top schools, teach them the classical principles of leadership and market foundations, and then embed them into a network of successful technologists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and public-policy reformers. Students will then actively apply their learning to the most urgent and seemingly intractable problems facing our society, both in the private and public sectors.”

    Not happy with that ‘top schools’ part, tends to reinforce the credentialism that is already a plague. Peter Drucker wrote 50 years ago that a major strength of America as opposed to Europe was that we did *not* have a small number of ‘elite’ schools that acted as a gateway to the key positions in society. Much of this strength has already been lost, and we need to push back against losing any more of it.

  4. He reminds me of Saul Bellow, born about a hundred years later

    More F. Murray Abraham as Salieri.

  5. huxley,

    Fairly familiar with the Great Books Colleges. I’m a fan. One of the Little Fireflies very much wanted to attend one, and I might have agreed to finance it, but he found a more mainstream option that met a lot of his desired goals regarding Classical instruction.

    There’s no question it’s an effective system, but all the ones I know of have a strong, Catholic component. Maybe Kanelos’ et alia want to make it more mainstream?

  6. Barry Meislin,

    I agree it’s an incredible moment (the photos of the prosecuting attorney’s after the cross examination are a joy to behold), but I don’t see how testimony of when and why Rittenhouse fired on a survivor ends a trial on when and why Rittenhouse fired on the two decedents?

  7. david foster,

    I’m guessing here, but it may be to show that their program is as effective as programs currently considered the pinnacle. It’s probably not too hard to start a school and get some recruits to pay to attend (even Donald Trump tried to get in on that grift), but if you can attract prominent High Schoolers who have their pick of the top choices it reflects well on your institution if they choose yours.

    And I can personally vouch that there are some very bright, non-woke kids with great GPAs and test scores attending Woke Universities because that’s the only way to get to a career on the other side.

  8. Rufus, I guess we’ll have to see.

    But taking a (wild) stab at it, if three members of a violent group are hunting you down, with one of them trying to bash your head in with a skateboard and another raising a gun with intent—with all three threatening either in word or deed—then maybe they should not be judged as individuals but as a gang?

    (Of course I keep forgetting that “antifa is a myth”…)

  9. Barry Meislin,

    From what I know of the evidence, I don’t think the D.A. should have charged Rittenhouse or brought the case to trial, but based on the case he brought I don’t think today’s testimony, as favorable to the defense as it is, negates the D.A.’s case. Along with the injured testifier there are two bodies in the morgue who haven’t testiied.

  10. I’ve just learned that there’s a Civil War museum in Kenosha that might make a worthwhile destination sometime. It focuses on the role of the Upper Midwest in the war. To see what that place has to offer in its collection would interest me a great deal.

  11. “Looks like some academics are building Galt’s Gulch in Austin, TX.”

    Austin, TX isn’t exactly Monte Cassino.

    Still… can’t sell Aristotle to the kids without Kombucha, IPAs, and tattoo artists handy to ease the burden.

    Had a look at the Board. What an eclectic mix of the Usual Suspects and folks who have presided all grave and statesmanlike over the continuing fall all their professional lives, plus magically came out of nowhere for absolutely no reason at all shifty-looking thinking person’s big brain stamp of approval MIT Bugman YouTube Algo hard coded special case interviewer and owner of precisely one single suit and tie: Lex Fridman.

    Peter Thiel must be in need of some tax credits this year.

    Thought Experiment: How many members of this Board have gone or would go on the record stating that the Election was stolen, that January 6 was a fit-up, or that Derek Chauvin was railroaded. I mean, Truth Being All… and all that.

    Milquetoast College.

    Thought you’d want that happy optimistic Zaphod Take.. so there you go 🙂

  12. that we did *not* have a small number of ‘elite’ schools that acted as a gateway to the key positions in society. Much of this strength has already been lost,

    Have a gander at the capsule biographies of the Fortune 500 CEOs. The Ivies are there, but so are the broader array of private research universities, state schools, selective private colleges, and miscellaneous. IIRC, the Ivies issue about 22,000 baccalaureate degrees a year, or a tad in excess of 1% of all baccalaureate degrees issued. A great many of their graduates go on to have common-and-garden bourgeois employment and or professional-managerial employment in provincial settings. One place where the Ivies might be abnormally thick on the ground would be the federal appellate judiciary and another might be the cabinet in Democratic administrations.

  13. Along with the injured testifier there are two bodies in the morgue who haven’t testiied.

    Not needed. Eyewitness testimony and video is available.

  14. ^—

    A wider issue than the career trajectories and power wielded by Ivies Graduates is this:

    Harvard and the NYT drive virtually all public policy in the USA. It might take 1, 5, 10, or 20 years for some brain fart emanating from Harvard or one of the other Ivies to make it to NYT’s propaganda putsch of the season, but invariably that’s where they germinate.

    Together these two institutions have more power than USGov. It’s obvious. Nothing USGov has done in last 50 years has changed the opinions and emanations of either. Can you flip that around and claim the opposite?

  15. Harvard and the NYT drive virtually all public policy in the USA.

    I’ve never figured out the source of your penchant for giving everyone evidence of your oodles of unwarranted self-confidence.

  16. I think it comes of never having had a hefty almanac dropped on my head when a toddler. Doubtless there are other theories floating around out there.

  17. Meanwhile, back at the ranch. Seven day moving average of COVID cases detected on 7 November 2020 v. 7 November 2021.

    Iceland: 28 v. 115
    Norway: 559 v. 1,368
    Finland: 182 v. 706
    Denmark: 1,126 v. 2,111

    Sweden: 3,515 v. 495

    Note, Sweden’s population exceeds that of Denmark by 1.8x, that of Finland by 1.8x, that of Norway by 1.8x, and that of Iceland by 25x.

    For countries with a certain physical geography, you can radically inhibit the spread of the virus through border enforcement if you act before it is well established. The trouble is, you need an exit strategy. I suppose it helps some if you’re infested with the less virulent variants which appear in later cycles and if you delay sufficiently for advances in treatment protocols to emerge.

    In the U.S., comparing 7 November 2020 to 7 November 2021 among our northern tier states you see

    South Dakota: 1,140 v. 291
    North Dakota: 1,327 v. 492
    Wisconsin: 5,612 v. 1,967
    Minnesota: 3,797 v. 2,702
    Montana: 878 v. 658
    Michigan: 4,514 v. 4,903

    Hypotheses?

  18. Plowing ahead heedlessly and blissfully, some more joy for all you closet Z Man Aficionados out there… and I know who some you are! The Eye of Zauron Sees All.

    https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=25620

    “…A similar question can be asked about the collapse of accountability. Can a society survive when the people in charge of it are no longer responsible for it? The climax of the Enlightenment project appears to be a world in which the people at the top have finally been insulated from all accountabilities. Oddly, they are the Eloi ruling over the Morlocks, feckless children oppressing what they view as the lesser beasts. Is this the apex of Western civilization or the end of it?”

  19. Nice timing Neo. I am currently reading John Julius Norwich’ magnificent book “The Popes”. It was not easy to be a Pope in the 1800’s – sometimes even dangerous. Napoleon actually had 2 Popes kidnapped for not giving in to his bullying. Pius VI was treated abominably by Napoleon’s surrogates. His Fisherman’s Ring was forcibly torn from his finger. He was carried off to Sienna, the crowds kneeling in the rain to watch him pass. Nearly Paralyzed he was carried over the frozen mountain passes to France where he died age 80, a short time later.

    Pius VII fared a little better. Like his predecessor Pius VII was mercilessly humiliated by Napoleon. The painting by Jacques-Louis David of the coronation of Napoleon in Notre Dame as Emperor whereby Napoleon crowns himself with the hapless Pope sitting to the side.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coronation_of_Napoleon.

    Pius was kidnapped after returning to Rome in the dead of night and spirited back to France where he was detained for a number of years until Napoleon’s fortunes turned and he could return to a triumphant entry into Rome.

    Life did not become easier for the Popes as time passed. During the many revolutions and counter revolutions of the 1800’s the Popes were continually caught in the crossfire of events. At various times Italy (during the reign of Pius IX) France ( Paris Commune) and Germany ( Bismark’s Kulturkampf) all tried to sweep the Church into the dustbin of history.

    Leo XIII was the first after temporal power was taken away from the Popes. He was respected and revered throughout the world but was not loved. No temporal monarch had ever surrounded himself with more ceremony. Leo insisted that all should kneel throughout the audience, members of his entourage were obliged to remain standing in his presence and not once in 25 years ( it is said) did he address a word to his coachman. Something of his imperial nature comes through in the film.

    Cardinal Ercole Consalvi, Secretary of State to the newly elected Pius VII to Napoleon Bonaparte, after he had threatened to crush the Roman Catholic Church stated: “If in 1,800 years we clergy have failed to destroy the Church, do you really think that you’ll be able to do it?”.

    This statement leaves me with hope that the church will survive the current keeper of the keys.

  20. “…Can a society survive when the people in charge of it are no longer responsible for it?…”

    Not entirely convinced that that’s the question at hand, so I’ll rephrase it, um, ever so slightly:
    “…Can a society survive when the people in charge of it are actively trying to subvert it?…”

    Exhibit A: “Biden”-land.
    Exhibit B: Little “Biden”-land (to “Biden”-land’s north).

    – – – – – –
    Aiii, that poor almanac…

  21. Forget about Steele and Igor Danchenko. Go for Andrew Weissman, Mueller, et al!

    That’s the message from Sundance at Conservative Treehouse, drawing out implications from the lawyer TechnoFog who concludes with this question: why was the DOJ/FBI covering up for Danchanko?

    “Why would the same DOJ/FBI officials who knew the [Steele] dossier was junk in early 2017 lie to the FISA court in 2018?

    “ANSWER: Because they were not protecting Danchenko, they were protecting Robert Mueller [or more precisely, his Special Counsel investigative team that was practically running the top level of DOJ through DAG Rod Rosenstein’s rubber stamp]….

    “By July 2018, the DOJ clearly knew the dossier was full of fabrications, yet they withheld that information from the [FISA] court and said the predicate was still valid. Why?

    “It doesn’t take a deep-weeds-walker to identify the DOJ motive. In July 2018 Robert Mueller’s investigation was at its apex.

    “This [July 2018] letter justifying the application and claiming that current information would still be a valid predicate therein, speaks to the 2018 DOJ needing to retain the validity of the FISA warrant. The the DOJ needed to protect evidence Mueller/Weissmann had already extracted from the fraudulently obtained FISA authority. Protect the ‘fruit of the poisoned tree’, that’s the motive….

    “If the DOJ had been honest with the court, there’s a strong possibility some, perhaps much, of Mueller evidence gathering would have been invalidated… and cases were pending. The solution: mislead the court, ie. lie, and claim the predication was still valid.”

    Some corrupt Deep State harlotry is coming into clearer focus, now

    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/stop-looking-danchenko-start-looking-andrew-weissmann-robert-mueller

  22. Xylourgos,

    I love that quote from Cardinal Consalvi. I first heard it about a decade ago. There is a lot there. Very clever! Also, I’ve always loved that painting. I read a biography of Napoleon in an attempt to figure out how it all happened, and what the point was. After reading all the details it still didn’t make any sense to me. Quite an incredible thing.

  23. Indeed,
    “…By July 2018, the DOJ clearly knew the dossier was full of fabrications….”

    But the mid-term elections were four months later, so they HAD TO MAKE SURE that the “investigation” continued in order for those elections to bear fruit for the Democrats. Which is what happened.

    And so the impeachment circus could ramp up in earnest….

    IOW, the “investigation” could not be stopped even though they knew they had NOTHING.

    It’s “Get Trump” from the get-go and all the way down the line.

    Now, under “Biden”, it’s “Get Trump and his supporters”.

    I do

  24. To recap:
    “John Durham Is Getting Close to the Jugular”
    https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/11/08/john_durham_is_getting_close_to_the_jugular_146702.html
    H/T Powerline blog.

    Key graf:
    “…[The Steele Dossier] should be called the ‘Clinton dossier,’…since Hillary commissioned it, paid for it, and had her aides feed it to the media, the State Department, and the FBI. It was a full-scale disinformation campaign — coherent, well-organized, and well-funded. It was rotten to the core….”

    I don’t know for how much longer Garland will allow this to go on. (Unless he’s using it as a hook to put Durham et al. away for good—the old boomerang trick that tyrants love to employ…. Alternatively, “Biden” believes it’s time to hang Clinton out to dry…since a problem with this article is that it makes no mention of either Obama, Brennan or Biden, which ought to raise questions if not eyebrows…)

  25. Rufus,

    Regarding Napoleon I understand your position. Napoleon was certainly a complex guy. A very good podcast that attempts to make sense of the Napoleonic period is the following:

    https://napoleonbonapartepodcast.com/

    J David Markham and Cameron Reilly do a great job of bringing Napoleon and his age to life. There are 60 episodes and over 100 hours of enjoyable listening. When they occasionally dived into modern political themes, I would fast forward as they were both suffering from BDS – yes that’s right, Bush Derangement Syndrome. Seems so long ago now. What would they have to say about Trump? Hard to understand why they considered Bush to be evil when they both adored Napoleon with all the havoc he wrought. Nonetheless, the enthusiasm they have for the period is infectious and you are in store for may hours on enjoyable listening if Napoleonic period is your thing.

  26. not once in 25 years ( it is said) did he address a word to his coachman.

    You mean he kept it to grunts and hand signals?

    I’m remembering an old Time Magazine profile I once read of one of the Presidents of Colgate University. Included in it was the datum that on principle he never wore overcoats, as they interfered with salutary hardship. That’s something that would generate a chuckle from someone familiar with Central New York winters. Do an image search of the man, you turn up this:

    https://library.acadiau.ca/files/sites/archives/special_projects/sporthistory/athletes/male/pics/cutten.jpg

  27. Not at all Art, the Pope had his coterie of Cardinals, Prelates and Swiss Guards to attend to such earthly details 🙂 The Pope had much larger issues to be concerned with.

  28. University of Austin founding scholar explains, and is more optimistic than I am about the chances that the school will remain non-leftist. He also talks about the education model, starting with a few programs, then a single specialize MA (can they still call it a Master’s Degree?), and working up to the 4 year liberal arts model.

    I wish them good luck, but the People’s Republic of Austin is a strange choice.
    And don’t kid yourself that they will be “conservative” in any political sense – just back to being pre-sixties classic liberals.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-11-08/niall-ferguson-america-s-woke-universities-need-to-be-replaced?sref=AzFl8679

  29. ^^— It’s a Think Tank Interns Factory. More of the people who have been so successful at standing athwart history. Yep. Those ones.

    And will invariably end up being staffed by those who like being around, well, Interns Hungry for Advancement.

    I think I’ll just go appoint my horse Consul instead.

    People’s Republic of Austin isn’t a strange choice when you realise that the whole thing is a giant LARP cum grift. You didn’t expect the faculty and students to go slum it in the Desert, did you? 🙂

    For the present, the problem isn’t Woke Universities. The problem is Universities and those attracted to them.

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