Juneteenth! [DOT 19/6/23]

19/6/23 MegMegMcGee 32

Or, as we also celebrate around here, My Birthday!

Oh this is cool; I should try and go sometime

Thousands queue to see the Emancipation Proclamation and General Order No. 3
https://wapo.st/43NAume

Antony Blinken has started meetings in Beijing, aiming to cool US-China tensions
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/18/1182984020/blinken-has-arrived-in-beijing-on-a-mission-to-cool-rising-us-china-tensions

The Stonk Market is closed today.

Sprots!

Spain take Nations League final glory after shootout drama to beat Croatia
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2023/jun/18/croatia-spain-nations-league-final-match-report

I’m sorry this is insane.

How quickly can you solve a Rubik’s Cube? A 21-year-old set a new world record that will stun you
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/17/us/guinness-world-record-rubiks-cube-trnd/index.html

Today in Turtle Content:

Have a great day!

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32 Comments

  1. Ha! Sheldon does the same thing but in his tank in the water. The filter has an intake and an output hose (as they do) and he’ll put his butt in front of the output hose and wiggle back and forth.

    • Oh no, Tiff is no idiot. She snagged a legitimate multimillionaire, if not billionaire, albeit incredibly shady (monopolistic trading licenses in Nigeria? Get that coin, Sis!) For that matter Ivanka actually married into a successful, albeit ruthless, criminal, and nasty, and New Jersey-based, real estate family, and went through the extremely arduous process of converting to Judaism to do it. Fail son Don Jr.* is shacked up with Gavin Newsom’s ex-wife, and the other son, the one who looks like he suffered a major head injury as a child and never really recovered, is notionally running the Trump Organization and has not been indicted yet, so that’s something.

      *Edit. To confirm that Don Jr. was not yet married to Kimberly Guilfoyle I went to infallible wikipedia, where I learned that Don Jr. went to Buckley. I wonder if they put that in their promotional material. I bet not.

      Better Half has an MBA from Wharton/UPenn, not the undergraduate business degrees that most of the spawn have, and sometimes people ask if he knew any of the Trumps, since he did this as a commuter student while living in New York and working for his company, who paid for all of this. He wouldn’t have, because he was in the MBA program, which is not easy to get into, and it’s why his company did all this, rather than have him do one of those bogus cash-grab “Executive” MBA programs at somewhere like Columbia or NYU.

      • I should have amended this comment to add that there’s a fifth child, Barron, but he’s too young to really have anything to comment on. Plus, I believe he has some kind of issues, and Mel is incredibly devoted to him, so it’s one of the only redeeming things to come out of that American Horror Story.

        • Did you know (and I didn’t) that the legitimate Wharton MBA program is an amazing networking powerhouse? The undergrad program is kind of a joke, and no one takes it seriously. But if a Wharton MBA meets a Harvard MBA the Harvard MBA will feel embarrassed and second class? Imagine a Harvard grad (and I know several) feeling academically outclassed. I outclass them, and especially the Yalies, because I like to read critically and I’ve read the Great American Authors so I can say things like, “What Saul Bellow was trying to say, I think, was…” and they’re kind of stunned into silence, because they kind of know who Saul Bellow was, but not exactly what he wrote. The Harvardians and the Yalies who I know can go on at length about Derrida and Foucault but that’s gibberish and easily disproven. I don’t think they’re even taught anymore. Why they were ever taught in the first place I don’t know.

          • GW Bush is a Harvard MBA….

            All of them have suffered in recent years because their grads tend to be drained off by McKinsey and other consulting firms, or VC funded speculative companies, instead of moving to established corporations like Procter and Gamble or Ford. The complaint is that MBAs never get any in depth experience, just gigs, and companies get starved of the best and the brightest.

            There are arguments that the companies are just fine with supposedly second tier MBAs in their executive development programs, but the crazy skew in salaries definitely distorts the employee market at that level.

            • I went to a party once, at Harvard, at their architectural school. I forget what it is called. For some reason this friend who invited me lived in graduate housing with a lot of MBA students. Oh my God. I wouldn’t have trusted them to give me directions to the apartment’s bathroom. Because Harvard has that weird quota system where “No Asians Need Apply” and the Black students keep to themselves it was a very strange crowd. I mean, I fit right in, although I think a lot of the attendees were Jewish and I’m not, but otherwise we were a pretty homogenous lot. So boring. So HAH-vahd. I don’t know why, but I was up there by myself [oh, I remember, I was up there to attend the wedding of a college friend of mine who Better Half absolutely despises, and this other college friend was at the Harvard architecture school] but, like all my stories, this really has no point.

              • The Ivies admit tons of Asians, but the weirdness of their non-merit based admissions hurts overall numbers. You have the legacy and donor contingent, which has tended to shut out non-whites. Athletes make up about 15% of the student body, and Ivy athletics lean heavily toward sports like squash, swimming and rowing, which lean heavily toward prep schools. And of course rando prestige admissions like Natalie Portman.

                And in recent decades there’s been a huge push by rich right wingers to expand the high school Republican affirmative action pipeline, which is how there are now so many nutjob (and not very smart)  Harvard and Yale grads in Congress and the courts.

                The way the Ivies avoided becoming purely preppie student bodies is by essentially creating a pool of public school which “counted” as prep schools, and they would take a few every year. Bronx Science was an early version, and a few schools like that accounted for most Jewish students.

                But so long as the number of public schools is capped, along with the number of grads per public school, the bigger pool of networked admittees stays safe.

                What’s happening now in terms of affirmative action fights is over which schools are allowed in the subset of acceptable public schools. Basically whether to bump up the number from suburbs with more Asians and drop the number of big city schools which “count.”

                But also there’s an alliance to preserve and maintain the system which mainlines Choate lacrosse players and leads of the Phillips Andover theater productions for admission to Harvard and Yale. Meaning, in the end, those parties are going to stay really weirdly uncomfortable.

                • They’re also dropping objective, meritocratic test measures, like SATs, in favor of…I don’t know what. Compelling life stories on application essays. Who gives a fuck. Did you get a perfect score on the math or verbal portion of the SATs? Fine, we’ll put you in the possible accept pile. You can barely write English but you grew up born to a 15-year-old single mother in a housing project…why are we even considering you? Oh, right.

                  That’s what infuriates Better Half. And most Black people with any real talent. If I had a Wharton MBA people would think, “Oh, wow, he must be pretty smart!” With BH it’s like, “Corporate sponsored, affirmative action, we know what’s going on here.” But it’s not true. He’s very, very smart, and can see through all kinds of clutter and delivers incredible results without catastrophic layoffs or Elon Musk-like blunders, but there’s always this taint of unearned merit that clings to him because of his race.

                  • Strong disagree here with you. The SATs and ACTs are incredibly biased tests and people can be very smart and qualified without testing well. The inverse can also be true.

                    SATs in particular are geared around east coast private school pedagogy. I test exceptionally well because the nuns (and by extension the pedagogy) from my private high school all came out of east coast private schools. And when I say I test well, I have a certificate somewhere in the basement for scoring in the 95% percentile nationwide on a MFT for my undergrad where I only was sure of the answer for 1 fucking question on the entire test. (taking the rest was a Missouri requirement for graduating, but there was no passing score requirement).

                    So yes, I absolutely think using things like SAT scores as key elements for admission based on how dumb people can be (like me!!!).

                    • I’ve often heard that, that somehow standardized testing is exclusionary and somehow racist, like 2 +2 = 4 is a relic of white colonial who-knows-what and to de-colonize we should accept that 2 + 2 = whatever you write down, because who knows.

                      Idiocracy. But not what Mike Judge focused on. Imagine driving over a bridge designed by someone who was taught this garbage. Oh well, I’m on my way out (not too soon I hope), so I’ll leave it to my nieces and nephews and their children to live in a world where we can’t illuminate or heat our homes because all the reliable energy infrastructure has been banned and ripped out, and several species, like cows, have been killed off or died out because they fart and produce methane and we can’t eat beef or drink milk anymore because more Idiocracy, so there’s no need to breed and raise them. If things keep up we, in the industrialized West, are well on our way to regressing to Neolithic times. Which, progress is supposed to go in a straight line upward, not circle around and lead you back to where you were 10,000 years ago.

                      Oh God. If my mother ever logged on, and she never did, she mistrusted the interwebs, this is EXACTLY the kind of thing she would have posted.

                      Happy birthday, Mom. You were the best.

                • My US cousins are victims of the “No Asians apply at Havahd (sic)” as my racist aunt (their mom) has bitched endlessly to my mom about.

                  The most successful middle one works for a Middle Eastern sovereign investment fund, the oldest is an ambulance chaser and the youngest is an idiot so the odds were not good to begin with.

                  I laughed at my aunt’s stupid stories as recounted by mom because even I suspected that stupid rich connected white folks (aka legacies) were the real affirmative action at Ivies (confirmed in the mid 2000s by various published studies.) The same country club morons she claimed to be her peers were the same morons who were keeping her precious from their Havahad (sic) destinies like W.

          • I did, in fact, know that. While my own MBA is miles below a Wharton MBA, we are all acutely aware of where we fall in the pecking order.

            And, as I may have mentioned, my firm works exclusively with startups, and educational/social hierarchy is one of the main determining factors in obtaining venture capital, and it’s a key component of moving through the “startup ecosystem,” of which we are a part. It’s literally all about who you know. Again, I do not hold any lofty status, but I watch my bosses work theirs on an ongoing basis. Wharton MBAs command awe and respect.

            • In that case, you will have to visit us in New York, nothing would make me happier, but you will have to bring gold, frankincense, and myrrh, and in return your Wharton MBA god will reward you with drinks, and I, His Humble Servant, will rustle up some sustenance. No Bitcoin.

              • As it happens we are in discussions for a New York visit in December. I’m not sure where to obtain frankincense and myrrh, however. Perhaps they’ll be easier to locate at that time of year.

                • OMG, you should stop by! We’re not really on the tourist track, but we’re in Manhattan and practically on top of a subway station with two Express stops and two Local ones. We’re on the west side, though, so if you’re staying on the east side you might as well swim to Brooklyn, because the public transportation is so shitty. But thank God for Uber.

                    • The way I’m going to sneak you in, is, we went to college together. This actually happens all the time, much to Better Half’s astonishment. People will blow in from anywhere, foreign or domestic, and it’s someone from, I don’t know, I took a sophomore Philosophy class with, so he just throws up his hands and says, “There’s some wine if you want it.”

    • Did somebody say Bundt cake? I’m going to be making one a little later on today, I think an orange one with a chocolate glaze. You’ll see that showing up as an FYCE if I pull it off.

      I’m going a little stir-crazy so I think we’ll have a light dinner, and then I’ll take the Bundt cake up to the roof. That Canadian wildfire haze is still hanging around, but it’s tolerable. No one will be up there, no one ever is anymore, so we can grab some prime seats and look at the midtown skyline while the sun sets and count our blessings.

  6. Many happy returns, Meg!

    June 19th looms large in the Crawley family as well. It was my late mother’s birthday. It was also Father’s Day last year, and the day my oldest brother, who was the father of two, unexpectedly died. Better Half has the day off, which is weird, because his boss is very mercurial and doesn’t really observe national holidays (last year he had people fly in to attend a meeting on Labor Day, which, you know, Labor Day) but he decided to observe Juneteenth. I asked BH how many Black employees work at the company. “One. Me. And I don’t really know what Juneteenth is.”

    On the other hand, the owner/founder/CEO is a foreign-born very devout Muslim, and you would not believe how many holidays he observes. So while the non-Muslim staff doesn’t have those days off, things tend to quiet down, and BH can make his global calls and write up notes at his leisure.

  10. I was going to post this yesterday, but Father’s Day activities got in the way. It’s a long read but tends to confirm something that I’ve suspected for a while now: Casey DeSantis is the brains of the DeSantis operation. I still think Ron goes rogue due to his anger management issues, but generally speaking, she’s calling the shots. She’s very Nancy Reagan-ish. I still don’t think she’s any strategic genius, but I do think that for the most part, she’s in charge.

    Tracing the power of Casey DeSantis

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