Midweek Meh-Ness [DOT 1/5/24]

1/5/24 MegMegMcGee 35

Hope everyone is having a good week so far. OMG, my office was supposed to move to new space on Friday (which we were absolutely not ready for) but today we decided to wait until July 1. This is going to be so much better. They hadn’t even figured out mail, parking, or internet yet! Big sigh of relief over here for sure.

Updates here:

Police don riot gear near Columbia; Brown to vote on divesting
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/04/30/columbia-university-protests-palestine-news

Florida, man.

Florida prepares for one of nation’s strictest abortion bans to take effect
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/04/30/florida-abortion-ban

Right on

The Biden administration is moving to reclassify marijuana. Here’s what that
meanshttps://www.npr.org/2024/04/30/1248205659/marijuana-reclassify-biden-less-restrictions

Stonks!

Dow tumbles 300 points to close out losing April as Fed decision looms: Live updates
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/29/stock-market-today-live-updates.html

He’s lucky that’s all that happened to him

Man arrested at Yellowstone for allegedly kicking bison while drunk
https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2024/04/30/man-kicks-bison-yellowstone

And I still didn’t do it

Have a great day!

avataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravatar

35 Comments

  1. When I was in high school many were the summer nights when my buddies and I got blitzed on Rolling Rock and would kick the local bison. That’s obviously not true. There are no bison nearby, at least as far as I know of. And we drank Miller, the aptly nicknamed “Champagne of Beers.”

  4. The bloodlust over breaking up student protests has been pretty disturbing to watch. Haven’t seen America so horny for violence since … well, about 9/12/01. And that went pretty well for us, if I recall, so this is fine! Fine!

    I’m also sure that THIS time the students are wrong. Even though they were right about Trump, Iraq, apartheid, AIDS, Soviet invasions, Vietnam and civil rights, I’m sure this time they’re definitely wrong!

      • It’s amazing nobody’s been killed yet. The tenor of the coverage has been foaming at the mouth to teach these kids a lesson and that usually only leads in one direction.

        The other fun note is that polls found people were pretty stoked about Kent State after it happened. It’s only over time that public opinion was like “Hey, that was a tragedy, huh?” History, doomed to repeat itself.

    • This kind of policing is taught by consultants. The stupid mushmouthed appeasement by the college preidents when they were hauled before Congress was coached by other consultants. The leadership itself was chosen by search committees run by consultants. Political consultants are driving this as an issue, and the press has relied on those same consultants for their sources and framing.

      What we’re seeing is the glitching of an elite that has outsourced its brains and expertise to consultants, and has lost all ability to think and operate on their own.

      • I mean, I don’t like consultants either but they’re there to tell these people what they want to hear, and I assure you that the college presidents and police would have come up with “Beat kids up” strategy on their own. How do I know? Because that’s always the strategy they use, and used long before the consultant era.

        • For the bulk of the time since protests started last October, colleges were trying to pretend nothing was happening. If it was a simple hardcore motive, the crackdowns would have happened months ago.

          I think they were hoping that they could wait until summer, watch a bunch of the leadership graduate, indoctrinate and distract the incoming student at the start of the fall semester, and have it all melt away.

          But once the leadership went to a law enforcement model, they had no ideas except the same police consultant programs of maximal response of shields, helmets and tear gas that were rolled out so poorly during peaceful BLM protests.

          Leadership had months to think about alternatives to batons and zip ties. They had every reason to believe GOP PR hacks like Chris Rufo were at work to back them into a corner on the press and donor fronts and push them into confrontations like this. They still got caught flatfooted

          • Well they did it now because a) the protests have gotten bigger and b) it got national attention. It’s also graduation season and donors don’t want to see mess — nor do they need to hear Chris Rufo’s take to demand action to protect their real estate investment/prestige.

            But to my point, you can’t just single out consultants as the villain here because I’m not sure that word even existed in the ’50s but damned if they didn’t do the exact same shit then against civil rights protestors and beatniks. The people in power ALWAYS act this way. Always. You can set your watch to it. The idea of waiting for the semester to end is such a simple and obviously good idea, but that’s never how this is done.

            • I don’t think it’s a case of McKinsey types pulling strings of puppets. I think it’s a symptom of a generalized problem, though.

              It’s similar to what has happened in corporate America. Hyper-rationalization of industrial processes with a heavy focus on economies of scale obviously preceded the rise of the consulting industry. Henry Ford wasn’t hiring Harvard MBAs in 1913.

              But the rise of consulting has worsened the bad impulses of corporate America, and even worse I think it has led to a lockstep mentality among corporate execs that deals with all problems with the same few tools in a single toolbox.

              To a large extent I think this is because big universities have become corporations, and to a large extent university leaders think like CEOs. Which is to say in a lot of ways they don’t really think very much except in very preconditioned ways.

              • Except that most CEOs don’t spend the majority of their workdays shaking down donors and potential donors. In that sense the university CEOs are like the grubbiest members of Congress and every level of elected public office.

                • Corporate CEOs don’t shake down donors but they absolutely spend enormous amounts of time chasing financing for capital projects and trying to manage share prices by sweet talking big funds and VCs. The kinds of logrolling that goes along with that at the corporate level is similar to what university presidents do. A tech firm CEO may well promise to launch an AI-based product in order to keep a funder with a big position in AI happy, just as a university president may promise to hire a couple of supply side economists in order to keep some libertarian billionaire kook happy.

                  There’s the expression (I’m paraphrasing) that Harvard isn’t a university that happens to have a huge pile of money. It’s a huge pile of money that happens to have a university. And for a lot of big universities, that’s also true.

                  • There’s a joke (and of course I can’t remember the specific details; thanks, hospital that gave me Covid) where a university is described as a real estate empire masquerading as an institution of higher learning. It’s not Harvard of Columbia. I used to walk my dog on the Columbia and Barnard campuses. They’re not vast, and it’s not like Morningside Heights is Park Avenue in the 60s. And I don’t think they liked dogs but I’d go super-early on the weekends (like 9 or 10 AM) and the dog was trained not to pee or poop on the grounds and some of the security people roaming around liked the dog.

                    I used to get these amazing flashbacks. I didn’t go to Columbia, God knows, but a lot of my friends did. The weird thing about Columbia is that all its rooms smell like every academic building since the founding of Cambridge University in the Middle Ages. Sometimes we’d walk by a dorm and it was move in/move out day, the front door was open, and I was instantly transported to my freshman year, the body odor, the hundred-year-old structure, the Lemony Pledge, the faint, almost primordial whiff of vomit, but when from? Class of 1923? Class of 1963? Did someone just vomit behind us? No, there was an elderly Asian woman doing tai chi and she didn’t seem to be in distress.

                    I’m going to say the real estate empire passing itself off as some kind of accredited institution of higher education is NYU. But don’t quote me on this.

    • The other thing that gets me with student protests – like you want 18-25 yr olds to want to do something even more? Threaten them and make it a big fucking deal. Literally the police action and general fuckery of university leadership is going to lead to even more protests.

    • The thing I don’t get is why at no point has anyone who supports the protests or Palestine ever said that protesting the Israeli government does not equate to antisemitism. They just keep blowing past it and talking about what they want. I mean that’s important too, but maybe let’s start by not allowing the BS premise to stand unchallenged.

    • Did you guys see the videos of pro-Israel people attacking the pro-Palestine encampment with fireworks, batons, and knives in California? All while the riot police stood on the sidelines letting it happen.

    • What really never made sense was how Mittens’s wife Egg got a perfectly legal $250,000 tax deduction for her dressage horse, Rafalca. I’m sure Rafalca is (or was; this came up during the doomed 2012 Presidential campaign) a lovely dressage horse, but $250,000 is far higher, by many magnitudes, of child-related relief offered to the unwashed (and, needless to say, non-Mormon) hoi polloi.

  8. Buffalo annoyer, dolt smart as pasta

    There was a Buffalo annoyer in the heart of America

    Brains from an outhouse, living in America

    Kicking the animal, lucky for survival

  9. Did you know that Paul Auster just died?

    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/may/01/a-literary-voice-for-the-ages-paul-auster-remembered-by-ian-mcewan-joyce-carol-oates-and-more

    And as you’ll see in this rondelay of literary tributes Joyce Carol Oates is still alive, which also surprised me. She hasn’t released a meditation on boxing any time in the recent past (that I know of) so I just assumed her time had come. But no, as always, she has many insights to share across every topic under the sun.

Leave a Reply