Posted on 03/16/2019 10:27:20 AM PDT by Rummyfan
Every element of the college admissions scandal, aka "Operation Varsity Blues," is fascinating.
There are the players: the Yale dad who, implicated in a securities fraud case, tipped the feds off to the caper; a shady high school counselor turned admissions consultant; the 36-year-old Harvard grad who sold his talents for standardized testing to the highest bidder; the comely actresses from Full House and Desperate Housewives; the fashion designer; the casino magnate. Who would have thought that one of the major headlines of 2019 would be "Lori Loughlin released on bond"?
There are the children: the social media influencer (yes this is a thing) who was told of her parents' arrest while vacationing on the yacht of a USC trustee; the mom who submitted doctored photographs to USC to portray her son as a championship pole-vaulter; the place kicker for a high school with no football team; and the rap artist from the Upper East Side who defended his mom and dad to the press while smoking a blunt.
There are the means: paying tens of thousands of dollars to Rick Singer, Trinity '86, who bribed athletic directors and coaches, doctored student résumés, and arranged for clients to take college admittance exams alongside a "proctor" who answered the questions for them. The icing on the cake: Some payments were made to a charitable foundation so the parents could get the tax write-off. What a country.
(Excerpt) Read more at freebeacon.com ...
Proud to never have heard of any of these people and have never watched their crappy shows.
Celebrity worship may never end, but a reminder that they are really nothing special is always good.
The point to take from the college admissions story is that President Trump and the DOJ WILL investigate and prosecute rich, white people.
He doesn’t favor white people over other races.
Obama wouldn’t prosecute the rich, white Clintons.
I was startled to learn that there is/was a show called “Fuller House”. Are they just completely out of ideas?
I spent an evening last week watching what I call “normie television”, meaning that we left it on a network channel from 7:30 until 10:00. I expected to be constantly infected with eye-AIDS. Maybe I was, but it was mostly just boring. The NPC programming is actually more obvious in the commercials than in the shows. Then to learn that a sequel series to Full House was a real thing ... It all needs to fail. These untalented frauds need to fail. Remember, at any given moment Harvey Weinstein might be sexually assaulting an innocent ficus.
We need to set up a large penal colony on a remote island where all the Hollyweirds can be sent to live out their days together, in isolation from humanity. Then they can be doing to each other what they’ve been doing to us....
But perhaps within 5 years we will be treated to: "Fullerer House".
I love you for this post
I think you mean “Fuller Big House.”
Our colleges are controlled and operated by the Intellectual Yet Idiots, who have been controlling our lives for decades.
Nassim Taleb Exposes The World’s “Intellectual-Yet-Idiot” Class!
What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.
But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligenzia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence and fall into circularities?—?, but their main skills is ability to pass exams written by people like them.
With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3th of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.
What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.
But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligenzia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence and fall into circularities?—?but their main skills is capacity to pass exams written by people like them.
With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3th of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.
Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats wanting to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. They can’t tell science from scientism?—?in fact in their eyes scientism looks more scientific than real science. (For instance it is trivial to show the following: much of what the Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types?—?those who want to “nudge” us into some behavior?—?much of what they call “rational” or “irrational” comes from their misunderstanding of probability theory and cosmetic use of first-order models.) They are prone to mistake the ensemble for the linear aggregation of its components as we saw in the chapter extending the minority rule.
The Intellectual Yet Idiot is a production of modernity hence has been accelerating since the mid twentieth century, to reach its local premium today, along with the broad category of people without skin-in-the-game who have been invading many walks of life. Why? Simply, in many countries, the government’s role is ten times what it was a century ago (expressed in percentage of GDP).
The IYI seems ubiquitous in our lives but is still a small minority and rarely seen outside specialized outlets, social media, and or the IYI.
Beware the semi-erudite who thinks he is an erudite.
The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited. He thinks people should act according to their best interests and he knows their interests, particularly if they are “red necks” or English non-crisp-vowel class who voted for Brexit. When Plebeians do something that makes sense to them, but not to him, the IYI uses the term “uneducated”.
What we generally call participation in the political process, he calls by two distinct designations: “democracy” when it fits the IYI, and “populism” when the plebeians dare voting in a way that contradicts his preferences. While rich people believe in one tax dollar one vote, more humanistic ones in one man one vote, Monsanto in one lobbyist one vote, the IYI believes in one Ivy League degree one-vote, with some equivalence for foreign elite schools, and PhDs as these are needed in the club.
More socially, the IYI subscribes to The New Yorker. He never curses on twitter. He speaks of “equality of races” and “economic equality” but never went out drinking with a minority cab driver.
Those in the U.K. have been taken for a ride by Tony Blair.
The modern IYI has attended more than one TEDx talks in person or watched more than two TED talks on Youtube. Not only will he vote for Hillary Monsanto-Malmaison because she seems electable and some other such circular reasoning, but holds that anyone who doesn’t do so is mentally ill.
The IYI has a copy of the first hardback edition of The Black Swan on his shelves, but mistakes absence of evidence for evidence of absence. He believes that GMOs are “science”, that the “technology” is not different from conventional breeding as a result of his readiness to confuse science with scientism.
Typically, the IYI get the first order logic right, but not second-order (or higher) effects making him totally incompetent in complex domains. In the comfort of his suburban home with 2-car garage, he advocated the “removal” of Gadhafi because he was “a dictator”, not realizing that removals have consequences (recall that he has no skin in the game and doesn’t pay for results).
The IYI is member of a club to get traveling privileges; if social scientist he uses statistics without knowing how they are derived (like Steven Pinker and psycholophasters in general); when in the UK, he goes to literary festivals; he drinks red wine with steak (never white); he used to believe that fat was harmful and has now completely reversed; he takes statins because his doctor told him so; he fails to understand ergodicity and when explained to him, he forgets about it soon later; he doesn’t use Yiddish words even when talking business; he studies grammar before speaking a language; he has a cousin who worked with someone who knows the Queen; he has never read Frederic Dard, Libanius Antiochus, Michael Oakeshot, John Gray, Amianus Marcellinus, Ibn Battuta, Saadiah Gaon, or Joseph De Maistre; he has never gotten drunk with Russians; he never drank to the point when one starts breaking glasses (or, preferably, chairs); he doesn’t know the difference between Hecate and Hecuba; he doesn’t know that there is no difference between “pseudointellectual” and “intellectual” in the absence of skin in the game; has mentioned quantum mechanics at least twice in the past 5 years in conversations that had nothing to do with physics; he knows at any point in time what his words or actions are doing to his reputation.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-16/nassim-taleb-exposes-worlds-intellectual-yet-idiot-class
Others say this is the latest example of the falsity of meritocracy
Thank you for taking one for the team.
Prime time TV is a near constant stream of commercials that destroy any continuity of the mindless rehashed drivel they displace. Maybe that’s a good thing.
It reminds me of the restaurant critic who complained that the food was terrible, and the servings were too small.
![](https://www.snopes.com/tachyon/2017/09/barack_obama_tw.jpg?resize=865,452")
“... the food was terrible, and the servings were too small.”
That is simply hilarious! Exactly!
Number 4) above should read: “What to think”.
There is so much to unpack here. But lets start with the line, “What a country.”
If you think that this is just an American thing you have not been anywhere else in this world. Try this...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64Z6qh_bOdE
The reality is that America is repetitively naive when it comes to cheating. Those Indian and Chinese students you see all over our universities are not so pure. Yes many of them are smart. But why are our universities taking in Chinese from China while they are limiting the Chinese Americans that actually grew up here? Weird?!
“I love you for this post”
Oh, how many times I have heard that only to wake up the next morning lonely and alone and with cotton balls glued all over my body.
How and what to think both work.
Out of country elites often pay more to get into our Elitist colleges than Americans do.
Desperate Fuller Housewives.
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