Russ Vaughn met Hal Moore in Vietnam and penned a nice tribute to a great combat officer.
We had no idea who this tall, strapping, lean colonel was who blew through the flaps of our forward Tactical Operations Center tent like a whirling dervish with questions, orders and possible salvation, but even more possible menace. I had been a paratrooper for five years at that point, a combat infantryman in a rifle company for several months prior to coming to battalion headquarters, and an NCO for a few of those years. I must confess I had never seen anything quite like Colonel Moore in my previous years of service. The man exuded that essential quality of leadership that all officers so desire: command presence. Hal Moore had it in spades. In my six years of Army service, I never saw another officer so confidently, completely in command.
The soloist at FED Cup 2017 in Hawaii honors the German team by singing the German National Anthem. Whoops! The wrong one. He actually sings the long-banned pre-1945 German National Anthem.
Fox News personality Geraldo Rivera says he resigned from a voluntary position at Yale University after the school decided to change the name of a residential college that honors a slavery supporter.
Rivera said Sunday on Twitter that he resigned as an associate fellow of Calhoun College. He said the position was an honor “but intolerant insistence on political correctness is lame.”
Calhoun College was named after 19th century alumnus and former Vice President John C. Calhoun, an ardent supporter of slavery. After years of debate, Yale announced Saturday it is renaming the college after trailblazing computer scientist Grace Murray Hopper.
Yale said in a statement Sunday that it respected Rivera’s decision, but said its choice to rename the college was based on principle, not political correctness.
We might have saved John Calhoun’s college for him if we had just managed to convince Peter Salovey that Calhoun was actually a Muslim.
Detail, statue of John C. Calhoun in U.S. Capitol.
The little bolsheviks at the Oldest College Daily gleefully report that the inevitable has happened.
Yale President Peter Salovey and the other invertebrates making up the Yale Corporation on Saturday acted upon the recommendation of Salovey’s hand-picked committee of SJWs and re-named Calhoun College. In future, the Yale residential college formerly bearing the name of the 19th century statesman holding the highest rank in American Government of any deceased Yale graduate at the time the original ten colleges were named will be renamed in favor of Grace Hopper, a black* female who attended Yale Graduate School, taught Mathematics at Vassar, and then served in the Navy Reserve.
Yale’s traditional primary emphasis on the undergraduate college, in 1930, would have excluded any mere Graduate School alumn from consideration for such an honor, but Peter Salovey himself went to Stanford and only attended Yale grad school. Under Salovey, two newly-built residential colleges were recently named for Ben Franklin, whose only connection to Yale was his receipt of an honorary degree, and for some black lesbian (whom nobody not a communist had ever heard of) who went to Yale Law School.
Poor old John Calhoun has been singled out as an exceptional advocate of Slavery by today’s Radical Activist Left based on their hyper-simplified Howard-Zinn-comic-book view of American history. They haven’t, so far, figured out that Elihu Yale traded slaves, that Reverend Davenport owned slaves, that Samuel F.B. Morse was a keener defender of Slavery than John Calhoun, that Benjamin Silliman‘s Yale tuition was raised by the sale of some slaves, that Bishop Berkeley has a college because he kindly gave Yale a plantation equipped with slaves, and so on.
What is important about this farce is the tragic fact that both the Yale President and the Yale Corporation have proven themselves both too cowardly and too intellectually nugatory to stand up to the childish demands of the activist campus mob. They feel themselves obliged to follow the lead, and to take moral instruction, from the Radical Left simply, in the final analysis, because the Left has strong moral opinions, and they, “men with empty chests,” as C.S. Lewis put it, have none at all.
God help Yale, God help America, when the highest of places in the national establishment are occupied by such completely useless nonentities and poltroons.
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Correction: Grace Hopper wasn’t black, merely female. I was misled by her photograph in old age. Thanks to Joel Pomerantz.
Mstislav Valerianovich Dobuzhinsky, Stavrogin and Verkhovensky on the Bridge
E.M. Oblomov, in City Journal, discusses the rise, and historical parallels, to America’s current treasonous intellectual clerisy.
The most devastating critique of the Russian intelligentsia was mounted by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in a 1974 essay called Educationdom (Obrazovanshchina). Solzhenitsyn traced the sources of the Bolshevik revolution and its cataclysmic aftermath to the vices of the old intelligentsia, which included “a sectarian, artificial distancing from the national life,†unsuitability for practical work, an obsession with egalitarian social justice that “paralyzes the love of and interest in truth,†and a “trance-like, inadequate sense of reality.†There were other, darker vices, too: “fanaticism, deaf to the voice of everyday lifeâ€; a hypnotic faith in its own ideology and intolerance for any other; and the adoption of “hatred as a passionate ethical impulse.†Worse still for Solzhenitsyn was the intelligentsia’s fervent rejection of Christianity, replaced by faith in scientific progress and a mankind-worshiping idolatry. This atheism was all-embracing and uncritical in its belief that science is competent to dispose of all religious questions, finally and comprehensively. In Solzhenitsyn’s view, the intelligentsia had yielded to the temptation of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor—may the truth rot, if people are the happier for it. …
If only America could be Communist China for just one day, lamented New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. If only we could be ruled by an all-powerful junta of Harvard professors. Or by a plenary committee of nine eminent jurists.
Of course, mutual antipathy between intellectuals and democracy dates back at least to classical antiquity, when the Athenian assembly put Socrates on trial for corrupting the youth. The Athenian intelligentsia fought back. When Plato produced his blueprint for the ideal Republic, it looked much more like authoritarian Sparta than democratic Athens.
The United States was bound to be at odds with its intellectual class. Unlike Tsarist Russia, with its rigid system of castes and ranks, the United States was from the beginning an egalitarian republic, with no native intelligentsia. In the nineteenth century, Tocqueville found that, “there is no class . . . in America, in which the taste for intellectual pleasures is transmitted with hereditary fortune and leisure and by which the labors of the intellect are held in honor.†Tocqueville conceived of the intelligentsia in French terms and identified it with aristocracy. But Americans were doers, not navel-gazers. They lacked a “taste for intellectual pleasures†but possessed a huge appetite for acquiring practical knowledge.
For more than a century after Tocqueville, intellectuals remained at the margins of American society. American elites were industrial and financial, and the nation’s rude and boisterous culture reflected their tastes and preferences. But change was inevitable. New universities—notably Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago—were being founded along Germanic lines. These were not social clubs for the scions of railroad barons and banking magnates, but factories of pure knowledge. Then, in the 1930s and 1940s, the intelligentsia received a huge boost from an infusion of large numbers of refugees from Nazi Europe, including Viennese philologists with a taste for Proust and Mahler. But it was only after World War II that the American intelligentsia really came into its own. Economic changes were making possible increasingly large returns on investment in university education. The GI Bill exposed ever-larger numbers of Americans to the world of professional intellectuals. And, with the establishment of the Educational Testing Service, the academic elite created a highly efficient engine for sorting Americans according to intellectual ability and channeling them, by means of the university admission system, into different social strata.
More than 70 years of this social sorting have given us a distinctive, insular, and powerful intellectual elite, shaped by the prejudices, anxieties, and affectations of the faculty lounge; separated from the rest by ever-greater social, economic, and cultural distance; and hardening into a self-perpetuating caste. This ruling intelligentsia—or “educationdom,†in Solzhenitsyn’s biting formulation—more and more resembles the ruling aristocracy of Tocqueville’s day:
In an aristocratic people, among whom letters are cultivated, I suppose that intellectual occupations, as well as the affairs of government, are concentrated in a ruling class. The literary as well as the political career is almost entirely confined to this class, or to those nearest to it in rank. These premises suffice for a key to all the rest.
Sean McCavana, huntsman for the Holestone Farmers Bloodhounds Hunt Club of Counties Antrim & Tyrone, Northern Ireland takes a big one in grand style(Photograph by Marty Jagger Watson.)
[T]he most important dog that didn’t bark here is presidential power. The court’s opinion did not conclude, or even suggest, that Trump lacked the power as president to issue the order. It didn’t resolve that issue in Trump’s favor; it was just assumed it, since it ruled against him on other ground. …
[T]he court found that the government was not likely to win its case – the standard on a preliminary injunction, before all the evidence has been heard – on whether the executive order gave adequate due process protections to “lawful permanent residents and non-immigrant visaholders†who were barred from the country, again ignoring the fact that the Administration has stopped enforcing the order against lawful permanent residents and the fact that the states were also looking to enforce the injunction on behalf of refugees and others who had yet to be granted visas. The Supreme Court, in its 2015 decision in Kerry v. Din, left open the question of whether there is any due process right for foreign nationals to challenge the denial of a visa; Justices Scalia, Thomas and Chief Justice Roberts thought not, and in that case, Justices Kennedy and Alito didn’t take a position on the issue because they found that adequate due process had been provided in that case. But the Ninth Circuit never addressed why people without an existing visa might have due process rights. …
[T]he court rejected the government’s argument that a refugee ban was urgent, given the lack of any evidence submitted thus far in the case to support urgency. That’s a bit of a Catch-22, since any evidence of imminent national security threats is likely classified and not properly offered to judges and litigants without security clearance, but the Administration should reconsider whether it has evidence of a more broad-based nature to support the breadth of its travel bans. Much of the opinion’s coda deals with how early it is in the case, and how little opportunity any judge has had to give real review to any evidence. If the Trump Administration should learn one lesson from this debacle, it’s that courts won’t accept bluster in place of evidence from an administration with which the judges are disinclined to sympathize. The court reached some bad rulings, but as the saying goes, hard cases make bad law. The Administration should try to avoid letting its cases be so hard when they don’t need to be. But it should also be prepared for the fact that the courts are not likely to give it a fair shake.
A good remedy would be to break up the 9th Circuit. Fox News reports.
As judges on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals weigh the legality of President Trump’s immigration executive order, a Republican push to split up the controversial court — and shrink its clout — is gaining steam on Capitol Hill.
Republican Sens. Jeff Flake and John McCain of Arizona introduced legislation last month to carve six states out of the San Francisco-based court circuit and create a brand new 12th Circuit.
They argue that the 9th is too big, too liberal and too slow resolving cases. If they succeed, only California, Oregon, Hawaii and two island districts would remain in the 9th’s judicial fiefdom.
Right now, Flake said, the circuit is far too sprawling.
“It represents 20 percent of the population — and 40 percent of the land mass is in that jurisdiction. It’s just too big,†Flake told Fox News on Wednesday. “We have a bedrock principle of swift justice and if you live in Arizona or anywhere in the 9th Circuit, you just don’t have it.â€
Flake says it typically takes the court 15 months to hand down a decision.
“It’s far too long,†he added.
Conservatives have mocked the 9th Circuit for years, often calling it the “Nutty 9th†or the “9th Circus,†in part because so many of its rulings have been overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The court has a reputation as one of the most liberal in the country, in large part because of its makeup. Eighteen of the court’s 25 active judges have been appointed by Democrats.
[A]s the first look walked out, a man to my right said out loud in pure exhilaration: “Gender! So last season!â€
What would result lived up to and, in fact, beyond the hype—and it was a privilege to witness. Not a moment too soon, and somehow fitting for the final day of the menswear loop, Palomo sent out a lavish and over-the-top collection that, at its core, gave a bejeweled and feather-trimmed middle finger to the unaccepting and the regressive. How fabulously timely.
The 24 year-old, who told Vogue in an interview last month that he works with “materials that are usually used for womenswear”, founded the label less than a year ago and has since been doing the most to shatter the traditional gender binary that has long ruled men’s fashion.
Alejandro’s Spring ’17 collection is so goddamn regal it hurts. Think Elizabethan ruffles meets Studio 54 with thigh-high boots (held up by garters no less!), pleated schoolgirl skirts and of course, a lot of skin.
Adios forever heteronormativity, one corset at a time.
[T]he Palomo Spain fall 2017 collection looked like what would happen if a young Spanish prince got into his mother, the queen’s, wardrobe. Or if a matador was feeling a bit kinky. (It also owed a major debt to the in-your-face hauteur of the the bad boys of the so-called Movida Madrileña of post-Franco Spain, like Pedro Almodovar.) The show opened with a feminine take on suiting, with ruffles, bell sleeves, and exposed shoulders. And closed with virginal boys in all white gowns and garters, plus one latex suit that resembled a bridegroom’s condom.
“It’s all the boys in the club,” said Palomo of his collection the following day. “You’ve got the dandies, the very serious, masculine guys, and then you’ve got the slutty boys in high boots.”
For his first two collections, Palomo had a much more romantic, poetic approach, but for this season he wanted to be less “beautiful” and more naughty. “It’s not this naive thing anymore,” he added of his relationship to fashion. “I wanted to go a little further to a more sexual place. It’s about trying to find your sexual self inside and exploring it. What’s the role of sex in our lives?”
Before he could answer, the tall and slender model named Pol Roig waltzed over wearing a bedazzled sequin houndstooth blazer, knee-high sliver go-go boots, and nothing else. He reached his hand into the pocket of Polomo’s pants and pulled out his iPhone. “See! This is what I’m talking about,†said Polomo, with a laugh. “We thought about putting trousers on him, but he looks better without.” And it’s true, he did. He just lacked pockets of his own.
“When you feel attracted to something, you can’t control your body,” said Polomo, who nervously stroked a rose flower while he spoke, eventually breaking its stem.
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It seems odd that at least one major industry is dominated by the mentally disordered and psychologically defective. That sexual perversity is able to strut openly as an identity is symptomatic of Liberal Egalitarianism’s inability to resist any grievance-bearing constituency.
This sort of thing went on, as well, in Ancient Rome, and, then as now, was recognized as gravely symptomatic of that Empire and Society’s imminent downfall.
Apart from celebrating our culture’s impending Apocalyptic collapse into supine decadence, I personally find it impossible to understand the point of all of this. How do you make money by producing a clothing line of grotesque statements of perversity that not even a West Village Queer could possibly wear anywhere outside a Gay Pride Parade?
Macy’s will not be purchasing this stuff for its Men’s Department. There must be some unfathomable-to-straight-guys connection between these kinds of costume statements and clothing for women that women actually buy. There is a profound mystery there.
