Remember Yale’s Shrieking Student? Jerelyn Luther is just graduating from Columbia Law this Spring.
Leftie Substacker Freddie de Boer has a cynical prediction about those Woke Stanford Law Students who recently shouted down a conservative judge and prevented him from speaking, and I suspect he’s perfectly right.
[H]ow are we to assume that law students at Stanford Law School are anything other than the next generation’s shock troops of the bourgeoisie, whatever their professed politics?…
(Do people ever do postmortems about, say, the Yale protests from 2015ish and ask whether those students became committed revolutionaries, or whether they just went on to be the busy little meritocrats they were destined to be?)
There’s a lot of different ways to approach the Stanford controversy; it’s a rich text, as an old English professor of mine would say. For one thing… what do people think is going to happen, exactly? That every one of these Stanford Law students is going to go on to be a virtuous public defender? That they’re all going to go do pro bono work for Erin Brockovich? What role do you think the average Stanford Law graduate plays in our nation? This isn’t even an indictment of anyone’s character, either. I try to point this out all the time: becoming functionally a tool of the status quo doesn’t require ideological transformation. I don’t think people become conservatives en masse as they age. I do think that people get busy with life and find themselves increasingly deepening inequality and supporting unjust structures as they just try to get ahead. I’m sure that will happen with a lot of these Stanford law grads. But I’m also sure a lot of them are going to wave the black flag right up until they get a cush $350K/year entry-level job at a major firm and then get busy helping cigarette manufacturers avoid lawsuits. And I’m also sure they’ll never feel bad about any of it.
That’s certainly what happened to most of the bomb-throwing radicals in my Yale Class who shout down the University on May Day of 1970.
William Howard Russell 1827-1907 was perhaps the first modern war correspondent. He reported for the London Times on the Crimean War and later on the American Civil War.
Most European visitors were enthusiastic admirers of the Confederacy, and in particular of its romantic leadership. Russell was different. He viewed both sides skeptically and with cynicism. Mary Boykin Chestnut, in her famous diaries, occasionally expressed indignation over Russell’s published comments.
In Russell’s Diary for August 1, 1861 in The Civil War in America, he summarized South Carolinians’ uncomplimentary perspective on New England, which goes a good way to explain the motivations for secession.
“If that confounded ship had sunk with those —— Pilgrim Fathers on board,” says one, “we never should have been driven to these extremities!” “We could have got on with fanatics if they had been either Christians or gentlemen,” says another; “for in the first case they would have acted with common charity, and in the second they would have fought when they insulted us; but there are neither Christians nor gentlemen among them!” “Anything on the earth!” exclaims a third, “any form of government, any tyranny or despotism you will; but”—and here is an appeal more terrible than the adjuration of all the Gods—“nothing on earth shall ever induce us to submit to any union with the brutal, bigoted blackguards of the New England States, who neither comprehend nor regard the feelings of gentlemen! Man, woman, and child, we’ll die first.” Imagine these and an infinite variety of similar sentiments uttered by courtly, well-educated men, who set great store on a nice observance of the usages of society, and who are only moved to extreme bitterness and anger when they speak of the North, and you will fail to conceive the intensity of the dislike of the South Carolinians for the Free States. There are national antipathies on our side of the Atlantic which are tolerably strong, and have been unfortunately pertinacious and long-lived. The hatred of the Italian for the Tedesco, of the Greek for the Turk, of the Turk for the Russ, is warm and fierce enough to satisfy the Prince of Darkness, not to speak of a few little pet aversions among the allied Powers and the atoms of composite empires; but they are all mere indifference and neutrality of feeling compared to the animosity evinced by the “gentry” of South Carolina for the “rabble of the North.” Read the rest of this entry »
Ex-Marine Daniel Penny is the spitting image of “The Dying Gaul,” one of the most famous statues from Hellenistic Antiquity. The Capitoline Museum has a Third Century B.C. marble copy found in the early 17th Century of a Fourth Century B.C. bronze original by Epigonus.
What could possibly be a more classic heart-warming American story than an occasion in which a dangerous psychopath with a lengthy criminal record, currently wanted for arrest, begins menacing the passengers on a New York City Subway car and is forcibly subdued by a former US Marine who happens to be on hand?
Clearly they don’t make bad guys today the way they used to, since in this case, just like in several other recent cases of low-life scumbags being forcibly restrained, what do you know? the public menace who never will be missed upped and died.
And what could possibly be more infuriating and depressing than today’s government and established media response to the Good Samaritan’s actions?
The older, mentally-normal America I grew up in would have smiled at the Marine’s heroism and shrugged dismissively at the loss of the deceased, the public menace and public nuisance with the huge criminal record, who fell through his own fault in the course of being up to no good.
Today’s crazy-out-of-its-mind Woke elite Establishment looks upon minority psychos and career criminals the way Hindus look upon their sacred cows. They are holy, untouchable beings who must be permitted to go their own way and do their own thing, law-breaking, stealing, looting, assaulting people, because they are officially-designated VICTIMS. Nothing they do, nothing they are can possibly be their own fault. It’s the rest of us, Society as a whole, that is to blame.
Jordan Neely, you see, was crazy and justifiably angry, because he was born poor. He was naturally, just like everybody else, entitled to have been born to an affluent Ivy league background family residing in Greenwich or Chevy Chase or La Jolla. Read the rest of this entry »
In “Gran Torino” (2008), Walter Kowalski (played by Clint Eastwood) scowls when he sees his granddaughter inappropriately dressed, bare midriff and exposed navel piercing, at his wife’s funeral mass.
A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland; the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.
–Edward Gibbon on the Victory of Charles Martel at Poitiers, 732 A.D., in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 52.
Well, Charles Martel smote the Saracens in vain. The knighthood of Europe long ago fought and died to save their homeland and civilization from being overrun by the followers of Mahound. And in our time, the Progressive elite, including its representatives in the government of the Roman Church welcome the paynim in, and even erect their mosques for them, right on the campuses of supposedly Roman Catholic Christian universities.
Georgetown University, which touts itself as the oldest Catholic Jesuit university in the United States, founded in the 1790s, recently completed a major construction project erecting a large mosque on campus.
“On March 18, Georgetown officially opened the Yarrow Mamout Masjid, the first mosque with ablution stations, a spirituality and formation hall and a halal kitchen on a U.S. college campus,” the university stated in a news release.
It opened in 2019 but construction was completed earlier this year to much fanfare, with a dedication ceremony March 18 drawing Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who issued a proclamation recognizing the mosque, the release stated.
Here's @JohnKerry at the coronation on Saturday and whaddaya know? He appears to have found those medals he proudly, flamboyantly threw away in an antiwar protest in 1971. In case you were wondering whether Kerry is still a phony, the answer is yes — yes, he is. pic.twitter.com/AWiD6EkyvQ
Steve McQueen’s 1967 Ferrari 275 GTB/4 by Scaglietti.
At Sotheby’s, Monterey, 18 – 19 August 2023, the Ferrari 275 GTB/4 once owned by the King of Cool. The front-engined grand tourer is expected to fetch serious money due to its provenance. Under the long and shapely hood of the Scaglietti-design is a 3.3-liter Colombo V12 engine good for 300 horsepower. It’s a rather unique car, having been repainted in stunning Chianti Red (over the original gold paint) and then fitted with the wheels and wing mirror from his convertible Ferrari 275 GTB/4 that he had crashed. This very car was restored to perfection by Ferrari Classiche between 2010 and 2013. It sold for $10 million at RM Sotheby’s flagship Monterey sale back in August 2014, and it should fetch an even larger sum when it hits the auction block again this August.
Yuri Bezmonov today shared a little fable that’s been floating around on the Internet for several years.
My favorite fishing story:
An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.
The Mexican replied, “only a little while”. The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs. The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?”
The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I drink cervesas with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.” The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.”
The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”
To which the American replied, “15 – 20 years.”
“But what then?” Asked the Mexican.
The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!”
“Millions – then what?”
The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could drink cervesas with your amigos.”
